 After the highly successful seventh shuttle mission, featuring America's first woman in space, the first full pictures of the shuttle flying on orbit, and the launch of two commercial satellites, Challenger is ready to fly again. STS-8 will include a night launch and landing with liftoff scheduled for August 30th. Mission 8 will again use a five-member team of astronauts, with Richard Trully of Fayette, Mississippi as commander. Trully was pilot of STS-2, a test flight of orbiters Columbia in November 1981. As for the launch, I think it's going to be a spectacular view, but as far as procedures go, they really don't change with a night launch. The landing was different, however. Dan Brandenstein and I have done a lot of flight tests with a number of other people in developing a night lighting scheme, and we will have it in place at all the landing sites, both at Kennedy, Edwards and at Northern. 40-year-old Dan Brandenstein will serve as pilot on STS-8. He described the photo documentation for the flight. Well, we're taking quite a bit of film along to take pictures, and as in previous flights, we take a lot of pictures of both the ocean and the earth. A night launch drives us to a in the southern hemisphere, we're in daylight essentially all the time, and in the northern hemisphere we're in the dark. So we'll be seeing parts of South America and Australia that haven't been seen by previous crews, and both the oceanographers are interested in the ocean around these areas, and geologists are interested in some of the land. Commission specialist Dale Gardner of Clinton, Iowa, will use the remote-manipulated system with a payload flight test article. He explained one purpose of this simulated satellite. The shape of it is supposed to simulate a payload that's coming along on STS-13 called the Grand Duration Exposure Facility, LDF. That payload is so large that the crew is going to be unable to see from the aft flight back the attached points where the LDF attaches to the orbiter. So one of the tasks is going to be to attempt to unbirth it out of the payload bay, birth it back into the payload bay with those visual restrictions similar to that weather flight. Mission specialist Guyon Blufford of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will be the first black American to fly in space. He's primarily responsible for the deployment of a commercial satellite called INSAT. INSAT is an Indian satellite. It's a communication satellite that's going to be used by the Indian government to broadcast communications throughout the Indian peninsula. It's also going to be used as a weather satellite to map the Indian peninsula with reference to weather and also be able to relay that information to various remote areas of India. Guyon Thorn is a mission specialist and medical doctor who will be continuing research into the effect of weightlessness on astronauts and the sickness that sometimes accompanies the body's adjustment to zero or G. What I'm doing is an in-flight investigation that would be very similar to what someone would get here on earth if you went into a specialist office and said, Dr. I'm a bit busy. Can you tell me why? I have simply translated these ordinary clinical investigations that are done into hardware that the measurements can be made in weightlessness so that we can characterize what's going on. Space Shuttle 8, a night launch and a night landing for Challenger, part of this country's space transportation system.