following the challenger disaster, the shuttle fleet was grounded until 1988. even after shuttle missions resumed, civilian payload specialists like cenker were excluded until the payload specialist program was reinstated on december 2, 1990 when samuel t. durrance, an applied physics laboratory astrophysicist and ronald a. parise, a computer sciences corporation astronomer, flew aboard sts-35. by that time, rca had been purchased by general electric, and rca astro-electronics became part of ge. following two additional ownership transitions, the facility was closed in 1998. as a result, cenker was the only rca astro-electronics employee, and only employee in the history of the facility under all of its subsequent names, to ever fly in space.