Space Shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in the year after the "Columbia" disaster that had taken the life of Indian-American astronaut KC Chawla. On television, the 1996 drama "The Cape" portrays the lives of a group of NASA astronauts as they prepare for and fly Shuttle missions. "Odyssey 5" was a short-lived sci-fi series that features the crew of a Space Shuttle as the last survivors of a disaster that destroys Earth. The 1997–2007 sci-fi series "Stargate SG-1" has a shuttle rescue written into an episode. The 2013 film "Gravity" features the fictional Space Shuttle "Explorer" during STS-157, whose crew are killed
Space flight participant same level of training as career NASA astronauts and were not employed by NASA, so they were essentially private astronauts. In the early days of the Shuttle program, NASA was also eager to prove its capability to Congressional sponsors, and Senator Jake Garn and (then-Representative, now Senator) Bill Nelson were both given opportunities to fly on a Shuttle mission. As the Shuttle program expanded, NASA developed the Space Flight Participant Program, where civilians, with an emphasis on creative people, would be sent into space to increase public awareness of NASA's mission. The initial goal was that two or three shuttle