Seven crew members flew on STS-61, the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.
Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on December 2, 1993, with commander Richard Covey, pilot Kenneth Bowersox, payload commander F. Story Musgrave, and mission specialists Kathryn Thornton, Claude Nicollier, Jeffrey Hoffman, and Thomas Akers. Nicollier, an astronaut from the European Space Agency, operated the shuttle's robotic arm during the Hubble rendezvous.
The crew faced one of the most demanding shuttle missions to that point. Four astronauts worked in pairs during five consecutive spacewalks, totaling 35 hours and 28 minutes. They installed COSTAR corrective optics, replaced the original Wide Field and Planetary Camera with WFPC2, fitted new solar arrays, and replaced other components.
The mission's importance came from Hubble's flawed primary mirror, discovered after its 1990 launch. STS-61 installed hardware that corrected the telescope's optical problem, restoring its ability to produce sharp images. The seven-person figure refers to the entire flight crew, not the number of astronauts who performed spacewalks.