John Fabian obit

John Fabian, NASA astronaut who was first to catch a satellite, dies 

He was not on the list.

 

May 22, 2026 — Former NASA astronaut John Fabian, who in 1983 became the first person to deploy and then retrieve a free-flying satellite, has died at 87.

Fabian's death on Thursday (May 21) was reported by the Association of Space Explorers, the professional society for international astronauts and cosmonauts, which counted him among their distinguished members.

Selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 1978 in the same 35-member group as the first female and minority trainees, Fabian flew twice into space. On his first mission, he launched on June 18, 1983 aboard the space shuttle Challenger as a fellow mission specialist with Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman to enter space.

Fabian's other crewmates on STS-7 included commander Bob Crippen, pilot Rick Hauck and mission specialist Norm Thagard. Prior to being assigned to the mission, Fabian, Thagard and Ride worked together on the development of the Canadarm, the shuttle's remote manipulator system contributed by the Canadian Space Agency.

"The manipulator is an intuitive thing. It really is quite easy to use, but it's also a little bit intimidating, because you've got this thing which is 50 feet long out there in the cargo bay, and if you're not careful, you could punch a hole in the wing or do something really stupid with it," said Fabian in a 2006 NASA oral history interview. "So learning how to operate it and learning what constraints need to be applied to that operation was kind of a part of the job that we set out to do."

He put his training to use on Challenger, when he used the robotic arm to let free the first shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS-1) as built by the West German aerospace firm MBB (Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm). The platform carried material science and remote sensing experiments as well as a mass spectrometer to confirm the presence of gases in the orbiter's cargo hold.

"The most fun was using the robot arm to put the German satellite, the SPAS-01, out and then fly around it, practicing formation flying, and ultimately retrieval," said Fabian. "I did the retrieval and the deployment in the morning, and Sally did the one in the afternoon, so we split that."

Before being retrieved, SPAS-01 was also used to capture the first-ever photo in full of a winged spacecraft in orbit. The Canadarm was also posed to resemble the number "7" in reference to their mission designation.

"We worked hard on that. We really worked hard on that," said Fabian. "And we didn't tell anybody about this, of course. We had this on kind of a back-of-our-hand type of procedure, what angles each joint had to be in order for it to look like that."

"I was real proud of that," Fabian said. "It gave you a really strong indication that this is a spaceship we're talking about here."

The scene, from a different viewpoint, was repeated on their mission patch.

Fabian and his STS-7 crewmates also became the first astronauts to eat jelly beans in space, courtesy of the then-President of the United States Ronald Reagan. A noted fan of the candy, Reagan gifted them each with a jar during a pre-flight visit to the White House.

Challenger landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on June 24, 1983, six days after it left the ground.

Close approaches

"I will tell you that I flew twice in space, and this is by far my favorite of the two flights. It's not only because it was the first. It was because of the people that I flew with," Fabian told his NASA interviewer, historian Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.

"Clearly, the vehicle is much more comfortable, much more fun, with five people in the front cockpit instead of seven in the front cockpit," he said. "On my second flight, we did a lot of the same kinds of things that we did on the first flight, letting a satellite out and going out and getting it so some of the uniqueness of the experience was gone on the second flight. But, this [STS-7] was just a joy, and I think at least 60 or 70 percent of that joy was working with this group of people."

Fabian's STS-51G crewmates included commander Dan Brandenstein, pilot John Creighton, mission specialists Shannon Lucid and Steven Nagel and payload specialists Patrick Baudry and Sultan Salman Al-Saud. Baudry, flying on behalf of CNES, was the second French citizen in space. Al-Saud was the first Arab, first Muslim and the first member of a royal family to fly into space.

Together, they lifted off aboard space shuttle Discovery on June 17, 1985.

"There were certain things, because of the seven-person crew and because of having two payload specialists and having three nationalities represented, which made it substantially different in terms of operation and tone than the first flight, but most of those were positive. Most of those differences were positive, not all, but most of them were," said Fabian.

STS-51G deployed three communications satellites into Earth orbit and temporarily released a free-flyer supporting astronomy studies (SPARTAN-1 or Shuttle Pointed Autonomous Research Tool for AstroNomy-1).

"The deployment was routine, at least it appeared to be," said Fabian. "But when we came back in to retrieve it, it was out of attitude. It was supposed to be in an attitude which would be easy for us to just fly up to and grab, and it turned out that the grapple fixture, instead of being out of plane to the two vehicles so that we could just go in and get it, was on top. So we were faced with a problem of trying to figure out just exactly what to do."

Relying on the training he received in the ground simulators (which he had helped develop), Fabian used the robotic arm to reach over the top of the SPARTAN and grab it from the top, just after Brandenstein flew the shuttle on a close approach so the arm was able to reach.

Fabian landed for his second time at Edwards exactly two years after his first return from space, on June 24, 1985. Over the course of his two shuttle missions, he logged 13 days, 4 hours and 3 minutes off the planet.

Two-flight limit

John McCreary Fabian was born on Jan. 28, 1939, in Goose Creek, Texas, but considered Pullman, Washington to be his hometown. He received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Washington State University in 1962; a master of science degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology in 1964; and a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington in 1974.

An Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps student while at Washington State, he was commissioned after graduating. He attended flight training at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, and spent five years flying KC-135 refueling tankers as co-pilot, aircraft commander and instructor at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan.

Fabian flew 90 combat missions during the Vietnam War. Following additional graduate work at the University of Washington, he served four years on the faculty of the Aeronautics Department at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, where he was a tenured associate professor and was it was there when he was accepted by NASA as member of the agency's eighth group of astronauts.

In total, Fabian had 4,000 hours flying time, including 3,400 hours in jet aircraft.

After STS-51G, Fabian had been scheduled to fly on STS-61G in May 1986, and was also in training for space shuttle life science mission SLS-1. Instead, 27 days prior to the Challenger tragedy (and his 47th birthday), he left NASA to become the director of space and deputy chief of staff, plans and operations for the U.S. Air Force.

"My wife told me that my marriage had a two-flight limit, and I believed her," Fabian said. "It wasn't that I was looking for a job or wanted to go do something else. I was going to go do something because I couldn't continue to do this."

When Challenger was lost, Fabian found a position on the accident board, studying what had caused the vehicle to break apart. He retired from the Air Force with the rank of colonel in June 1987 and joined Analytic Services, a non-profit aerospace public service research institute, from which he retired as president and chief executive officer in 1998.

Fabian then became a public speaker and frequent participant in the "Astronaut Encounter" events at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

For his service to the U.S. space program, Fabian was awarded the NASA Space Flight and Exceptional Public Service medals, among other honors.

Fabian is preceded in death by his brother, Bill, who was killed while flying as a forward air controller during the Vietnam War, and three of his shuttle crewmates, Rick Hauck, Sally Ride and Steve Nagel. He is survived by his wife, Donna, two children, Michael and Amy, and three three grandchildren.