SB SPACE @ ARL $ARLS027
ARLS027 SAREX team wins award

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Space Bulletin 027  ARLS027
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington, CT  August 14, 1997
To all radio amateurs

SB SPACE ARL ARLS027
ARLS027 SAREX team wins award

The Shuttle Amateur Radio EXperiment, or SAREX, program has won a
NASA Group Achievement Award based on SAREX activities during the
recent STS-94 shuttle Columbia mission. SAREX Principal Investigator
Matt Bordelon, KC5BTL, received the award on behalf of the SAREX
Working Group and others who supported the SAREX payload during the
mission. These include AMSAT school mentors, ham volunteers who
staffed the Johnson Space Center Customer Support Room during the
mission (Will Marchant, KC6ROL, and Charles Sufana, AJ9N), the ARRL
Educational Activities Department staff and other HQ staff members
(Jennifer Gagne, N1TDY, and Rick Lindquist, N1RL), and ham
volunteers from Johnson Space Center and the Johnson Space Center
Amateur Radio Club.

JSC Director George Abbey presented the award during the STS-94
mission debriefing session at Johnson Space Center on August 12.
Individual members of the SAREX team and those who helped support
the SAREX mission will receive certificates for their role in the
flight activity.

Three hams were among the members of the Columbia crew for STS-94:
Jim Halsell, KC5RNI, the mission commander, Janice Voss, KC5BTK, and
Donald Thomas, KC5FVF. The crew nominated the SAREX team for the
award in recognition of ''all the planning, preparation, and
execution required to perform these missions'' and ''to thank the
people who made it happen,'' Bordelon said.

The citation reads: ''For your outstanding support during STS-94
that allowed us to contact 17 schools around the world and make
multiple contacts with Mike Foale aboard the space station Mir.''

All 17 scheduled SAREX school contacts were successful, including
the first-ever SAREX contact with students in the People's Republic
of China. In addition to contacting Foale aboard Mir, the hams
aboard Columbia also made several random contacts with earthbound
hams.

STS-94, the 24th SAREX mission, flew from July 1 until July 17. It
was a ''refly'' of the aborted STS-83 mission in April.
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