John H Glenn Jr.

STS-95 Payload Specialist John H. Glenn Jr., senator from Ohio, gives a thumbs up on his arrival at Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility aboard a T-38 jet. He and other crewmembers will be making final preparations for launch, targeted for liftoff at 2 p.m. on Oct. 29. The STS-95 mission includes research payloads such as the Spartan solar-observing deployable spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, the International Extreme Ultraviolet Hitchhiker, as well as the SPACEHAB single module with experiments on space flight and the aging process. The mission is expected to last 8 days, 21 hours and 49 minutes, and return to KSC on Nov. 7. The other STS-95 crew members are Mission Commander Curtis L. Brown Jr., Pilot Steven W. Lindsey, Mission Specialist Scott E. Parazynski, Mission Specialist Stephen K. Robinson, Mission Specialist Pedro Duque, with the European Space Agency (ESA), and Payload Specialist Chiaki Mukai, with the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA).