Employees, customers, and business associates joined SPACEHAB, Inc. in commemorating the company's twenty successful years of commercial space development. August 22, 1984 marked the official date of SPACEHAB's beginning, which started with an idea, sketched out on a cocktail napkin by its founders, for increasing the capabilities of the space shuttle, while opening the doors for space commercialization and tourism. Today, at its Houston, Florida, and California locations, the company has supported 18 space shuttle missions and helped process over 200 spacecraft.

Photo Caption 1 : Sam Gunderson from Boeing, Mark Gittleman, Vice President and General Manager of Oceaneering Space Systems, and Dan Bland, Sr. Vice President, SPACEHAB, Inc. enjoy a photo opportunity at the Marker 1 Marina on Clear Lake.

Photo Caption 2: Astronaut Jim Reilly joins SPACEHAB's Eva deCardenas and Hernandez Engineering CEO, Tery Hernandez, in a celebratory toast.

Joining the "Toast to Twenty" festivities were Astronauts and 'past SPACEHAB module passengers', Terry Wilcutt and Jim Reilly, to name a few. Boeing Director and former SPACEHAB executive, Mike Lounge, Hernandez Engineering's Mike and Tery Hernandez, and Anadarko President and the former President of SPACEHAB's Johnson Engineering subsidiary, Tom Short, also helped SPACEHAB celebrate the milestone. SPACEHAB President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Kearney, addressed the group with a toast to the company's and industry's future stating that, "May the next twenty years be filled with more celebratory triumphs, greater accomplishments in human space flight, and the further development of long-lasting relationships within this exciting industry." He mentioned that as a provider of manned and unmanned payload processing services, a developer of flight hardware assets, and an entrepreneurial force in space access applications, SPACEHAB serves as a bridge from the current age of government space exploration to the future of private space utilization.

Recently, SPACEHAB Houston and Florida locations completed the transition of its engineering and operations functions from its Boeing subcontractor to an in-house capability, further supporting the company's pursuit of new opportunities that arise from the Nation's new Vision for Space Exploration announced by President Bush earlier this year. The results are showing success as SPACEHAB recently announced that it was awarded a six-month NASA study contract valued at approximately $1.0 million to support the space agency's new exploration initiatives. Additionally, through its Government Services business unit, SPACEHAB is supporting the International Space Station through the Program Integration and Control contract on-site at the Johnson Space Center.

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