About Robert F. Overmyer
Robert Franklyn Overmyer was an American test pilot, naval aviator, aeronautical engineer, physicist, United States Marine Corps officer, and USAF/NASA astronaut. Overmyer was selected by the Air Force as an astronaut for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory in 1966. Upon cancellation of the program in 1969, he became a NASA astronaut and served support crew duties for the Apollo program, Skylab program, and Apollo–Soyuz Test Project. In 1976, he was assigned to the Space Shuttle program and flew as pilot on STS-5 in 1982 and as commander on STS-51-B in 1985. He was selected as a lead investigator into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, retiring from NASA that same year. A decade later, Overmyer died while testing the Cirrus VK-30 homebuilt aircraft. Overmyer was active in the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of First Class. The MOL program was canceled in 1969 and Overmyer was selected as part of NASA Astronaut Group 7, where his first assignment was engineering development on the Skylab Program from 1969 to 1971. Overmyer was the pilot for STS-5, the first fully operational flight of the shuttle program, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on November 11, 1982.
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