- Children: David Christopher Allen (born in September 1968) and Elizabeth Darling Allen (born in May 1972).
- Earned a Fulbright Scholarship to Germany, 1959-1960.
- Dr. Allen was a mission specialist on STS 51-A, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on November 8, 1984. In the first space salvage attempt in history, the crew successfully retrieved the Palapa B-2 and Westar VI communications satellites and returned them to Earth.
- Dr. Allen served as mission specialist on STS-5, the first fully operational flight of the Shuttle Transportation System, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on November 11, 1982.
- From August 1975 to 1978, Dr. Allen served as NASA Assistant Administrator for Legislative Affairs in Washington, D.C. Returning to the Johnson Space Center in 1978, as a senior scientist astronaut, Allen was assigned to the Operations Mission Development Group. He served as a support crew member for the first orbital flight test of the Space Transportation System.
- He served as mission scientist while a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 15 and served as a staff consultant on science and technology to the President's Council on International Economic Policy.
- He logged more than 3,000 hours flying time in jet aircraft and a total of 314 hours in space.
- Dr. Allen was selected as a scientist-astronaut by NASA in August, 1967.
- Dr. Allen was a research associate in the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington prior to his selection as an astronaut. He was a staff physicist at the Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale University in 1965 and 1966, and during the period 1963 to 1967, served as a guest researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
- Graduated from Crawfordsville High School in Indiana; received a bachelor of arts degree in math-physics from DePauw University in 1959, a master of science degree (1961) and a doctor of philosophy degree in physics from Yale University (1965).
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