Astronaut-alumnus Roger Crouch will be the keynote speaker at the first Patron Luncheon of the Upper Cumberland District of the Boy Scouts of America, set for noon, Monday, Feb. 16, in the Roaden University Center.

Hosted by Cookeville Mayor Charles Womack, the program also includes a highlight report by President Bob Bell, district chairman of the Upper Cumberland Boy Scouts.

Crouch, a NASA physicist and a 1962 graduate of Tennessee Tech, served as payload specialist aboard the historic first and second flights of NASA’s Microgravity Science Laboratory mission, which flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1997. MSL-1, a bridge mission between NASA’s Spacelab and International Space Station programs, launched on April 4, but a faulty fuel cell brought the crew home only four days into its scheduled 16-day mission. NASA, with millions of dollars and ties with the international scientific community at stake, announced that for the first time, a shuttle mission with identical crew and payload would fly again. The second MSL mission launched on July 1 and successfully completed the full 16-day mission.

A long-time NASA scientist and administrator, Crouch joined the space agency immediately after graduating with a physics degree from Tennessee Tech. He went on to earn a master’s and Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In 1985, after 22 years as a scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., Crouch moved to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., as the chief scientist of the Office of Microgravity Science and Applications.

The Feb. 16 event is a Friends of Scouting fund-raiser for the local Boy Scout program. Money raised from the event will be used to serve the needs of the hundreds of Scouts in the Putnam County area.

For more information, call Eddy Locke at 528-4298.