Milestones Icon: Vance Brand

Vance Brand, born and raised in Longmont, logged 746 hours in space and commanded three space shuttle missions during a 41-year career with NASA.

The former astronaut was born in 1931 in Longmont and graduated from Longmont High School.

His first space flight was in 1975, as Apollo command module pilot on the Apollo-Soyuz test project mission, the historic meeting in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.

“When we went to Russia for the first time in the early 1970s, it was the peak of the Cold War,” Brand recalled. “We were a bit apprehensive, but we didn’t want to show it.…