Vance DeVoe Brand

Vance DeVoe Brand, born in 1931, American astronaut. He piloted the United States half of the first international manned mission in 1975, known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), and in 1982 commanded the first fully-operational space shuttle flight.

Born in Longmont, Colorado, Brand attended the University of Colorado and received a B.S. degree in business in 1953. After flight training as a Marine Corps officer from 1953 to 1955, he was designated as a naval aviator and served a 15-month tour of duty in Japan as a jet fighter pilot. In 1960 he received a second B.S. degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Colorado. From 1960 to 1966 he worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a flight test engineer for United States Navy planes. In 1963 he graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School and in 1964 received his master's degree in business administration from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1966 when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) selected him to be an astronaut, he was a test pilot in France.

Before the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, Brand served in support roles for Apollo 8 in 1968 and the troublesome Apollo 13 mission in 1970. He was backup pilot for Apollo 15 in 1971 (see Apollo program) and backup commander for Skylab 3 and 4 in 1973. As pilot on the ASTP mission, he successfully rendezvoused and docked his Apollo 18 capsule with the Soviet Soyuz 19 craft in orbit around earth. He conducted 44 hours of joint activities with his fellow astronauts Thomas Stafford and Deke Slayton and cosmonauts Aleksey Leonov and Valeriy Kubasov. The activities included four crew transfers between the two spacecraft and 28 experiments.

During Brand's first space shuttle flight aboard Columbia in 1982, his crew performed the first deployment of two commercial communications satellites from the shuttle's payload bay, the huge cargo area in the shuttle orbiter. This mission also marked the first four-person crew on an American spacecraft. His next shuttle flight, in 1984 aboard Challenger, featured the U.S. space program's first untethered space walk with the manned maneuvering unit (MMU), a chair-shaped backpack powered by small rockets, with which an astronaut can move about in space.

During his final flight, in 1990 aboard Columbia, Brand participated in the operation of a $150 million observatory, with which the crew studied the ultraviolet and X-ray emissions from stars, galaxies, supernovas, and a bright comet. Despite the failure of two computer terminals that were to point the telescopes and lock them on their targets, the crew's astronaut-astronomers performed the complex tasks by using a joystick and keyboard. Though only 135 of 250 planned targets were studied, the mission gathered a wealth of data unavailable otherwise.

In 1990 Brand became director of plans for the National Aerospace Plane Program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He became assistant chief of the Flight Operations Division at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Lancaster, California, in 1994.