Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (24 page)

While Fullerton was largely confident in the vehicle despite the problems, his only concern was the fact that the simulators were programmed assuming that the orbiter was working nominally. If a failure occurred in a system with a “program note,” resolving it wouldn’t necessarily look quite like it did in simulation.

It’s really a complex vehicle. It really is. . . . If everything works like normal, it’s all a piece of cake. It’s when something breaks that you worry about, and the big challenge is to get to a point where you feel like you’ve got a handle on it. So was I ready to not show up on the launch date? No, not at all. Was I quaking in my boots? No. Was I intense about the whole thing? Yes, mostly because I am worried about my part of this. Especially for pilots, it’s the launch phase [you worry about], because while it’s short and concentrated, if anything goes wrong, the orbiter only takes care of the first failure. The second failure is pretty much left to the crew, generally, and so you worry about being ready to recognize a problem and do the right thing. You feel like the whole world’s watching you when that failure occurs because of the manual action you’ve got to take to save the day. So it’s that kind of pressure, pressure of performance, rather than fear or anything.

Lousma and Fullerton’s flight built on the accomplishments of
STS
-2 in further testing the capabilities of the shuttle’s Canadarm remote manipulator system. On
STS
-2, Truly had run the arm through a series of maneuvers without any added loads. On
STS
-3, Fullerton would take the next step by using the arm to grapple an object, lift it, move it, and then return it to place. Fullerton and Lousma paid particular attention to their physical condition during the mission, after the problems suffered by the
STS
-2 crew. “Jack and I worried about it a lot,” Fullerton admitted. “One thing that we did do, that I don’t think they did, is we had a g-suit, like they wear in the
F
-18, except that for entry you could pump up the g-suit and just keep it that way, and so that helped you keep your blood flow up near your head. . . . There was some controversy about whether you ought to pump them up or not, among individuals. We said, ‘We’re going to pump them up.’”

Another physical concern the crew worked to mitigate was orbital motion sickness. Fullerton noted that they looked into whether they could use
NASA
’s
T
-38 astronaut jets to decrease problems with nausea in space.

We’re not sure there’s a direct correlation to flying airplanes and sickness. I know if you go up and do a lot of aerobatics day after day, you get to be much more tolerant of it. So Jack and I, we scheduled
T
-38s every chance we got in the last couple of weeks before we went down there, and I flew literally hundreds of aileron rolls. . . . If I did roll after roll after roll, I could make myself sick, and I did that, and I got to the point where it took hundreds of them to make me sick. But I did that figuring, I don’t know if this helps, but I have the opportunity, I’ll do it.

The results were pretty much the same on both of Fullerton’s flights.

For the first day or so, I didn’t ever throw up or anything. I never got disoriented, but I felt kind of fifty-fifty, you know. You’re pretty happy to just float around and relax rather than keep charging. And into the second day, this is really fun and great, and you feel 100 percent. So whether the aileron rolls helped or not, I’m not sure, but it was relatively easy. Of course, everybody has their acclimation problems. That’s pretty consistent through the population. It takes about twenty-four hours to get to feel normal, at varying levels of discomfort. Most everybody can hang in there and do their stuff, even though they don’t feel good. A few are pretty well debilitated.

Pinky Nelson, who was a CapCom for
STS
-3, found it fascinating to observe a two-man team doing all the tasks necessary to fly the vehicle and also conduct mission objectives. “Flying the Space Shuttle with two people was a nontrivial job. It was a full-time job to keep that thing going with just two people and carry out some kind of a mission. I don’t know how they did it, actually. I don’t think I’d want to fly in the shuttle with just one other person.”

Working as CapCom during that time was a challenge, Nelson explained, because the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System didn’t exist yet and the only opportunity to communicate with the astronauts was when the shuttle was over ground communications stations.

The time that you could communicate was very limited. You’d get a three-minute pass over Hawaii and a two-minute pass over Botswana or something, so you had to plan. Unlike now, when you can talk pretty much anytime, you had to plan very carefully and prioritize what you were going to say. The data came down in spurts, so the folks in the back rooms had to really plan for looking at their data and analyzing it and being able to make decisions based on spurts of data rather than continuous data. So it was kind of a different way to operate.

According to Nelson, there were some particular tricks to the art of being a good CapCom. One had to learn to speak succinctly and precisely and to stick to language that the astronauts were used to hearing from simulations. Another vital skill was listening to the tone of voice of the crew.

When you went
AOS
, acquisition of signal, over a site, you would call up and say, “
Columbia
, Houston through Hawaii for two and a half,” or something like that, and then you could just tell by the tone of their voice in the answer whether they were up to their ears or whether they were ready to listen. So there was a lot of judgment that had to be made, just in terms of, you always have a pile of stuff to get up. How much of this should I attempt to get up? What has to go up? Do I need to listen instead of talk? I found that to be just an interesting experience, a challenging job, and I really liked it. There were a few run-ins. I remember Neil Hutchinson, the flight director, was trying to get me to get a message up and I just wouldn’t do it, because I knew that they just weren’t ready to act on it, and it was important but wasn’t critical or anything. And Neil was ready to kill me, and I just kind of sat there and just said, “No. They’re busy. They don’t need to do this now.” So that was fun.

Unlike
STS
-2, which was shortened by the fuel cell problem, Lousma and Fullerton’s mission was actually lengthened by a day because of adverse weather at the landing site, Fullerton recalled.

“Wow!” We cheered. “Great!” because we really had a busy time with just two people. This was an engineering test flight, and we had a flight plan full of stuff . . . so there was always something that you were watching the clock on. . . . We did have sleep periods, which we would use for window gazing, . . . because you don’t need as much sleep as they were scheduling. But when they said, “Wave off,” I remembered getting in the recycle book, going through the pages, shutting down some of the computers, opening the doors again, and I got all the way down, all of the sudden, I turned the page, and there was nothing on it, and there was this realization, hey, this is free time, and it was terrific. We got out of the suits, and then we got something to eat and watched the world, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way, if it had been my choice.

When the time for landing came the next day, the plan called for an early morning touchdown, meaning that the main part of the reentry would be at night. “We could see this glow from the ionization really bright out there,” Fullerton said.

In fact, we had lost a couple of tiles on launch. We knew that because we’d looked out and had seen the holes in front of the windshield, and we looked at it with an arm camera. They said, “Not to worry. It’s cool up on top there.” We didn’t know how many we’d lost from the bottom, but wasn’t any use worrying about that. And then to see all this glow right there where the missing tiles were gave us pause to think about it. Again, there was no point in worrying about it, nothing you can do. [There was] the spectacular light show through entry. Then the sun came up, which washes all that out, as it’s dying out anyway.

They were pushing at that time to go full-auto land, and so . . . we stayed in automatic all the way down through the pullout of the dive, and then [Lousma] only got the feel of the airplane the last couple of seconds before touchdown, which, in retrospect, everybody agreed was dumb, and now people fly from the time they go to subsonic at a minimum to get the feel of the airplane all the way down. He only got the last second, and then we landed a bit fast and . . . there was a kind of a wheelie that Jack did. Again, it pointed out another flaw or room for improvement in the software. The gains between the stick and the
elevons that were good for flying up in the air were not good when the main wheels were on the ground, and he thought he had ballooned. He kind of planted it down but then came back on the stick, and the nose came up. So what? It didn’t take off again, and we came down and rolled to a stop. A lot of people thought this was a terrible thing.

The landing at White Sands would leave a lasting mark on
Columbia
. According to astronaut Charlie Bolden, “I flew it several flights later, on my first flight, and when we got on orbit there was still gypsum coming out of everything. . . . It was just unreal what it had done.” Astronaut Mike Lounge noted, “I’m told that many years later, picking up pieces from East Texas of
Columbia
[after the loss of the vehicle on the
STS
-107 mission], they were finding gypsum from White Sands.”

STS
-4

Crew: Commander T. K. Mattingly, Pilot Hank Hartsfield

Orbiter:
Columbia

Launched: 27 June 1982

Landed: 4 July 1982

Mission: Test of orbiter systems

When the crews were chosen for each of the planned demonstration flights, Hank Hartsfield recalled, the astronauts were assigned originally not to a particular mission, but only to crews designated with a letter, A through F. “Ken [Mattingly] and I were in E crew. . . . No one knew exactly how this was going to work. All we knew was that Young and Crippen were A, and Engle and Truly were B. We knew John was first, and they were being backed up by Engle and Truly. But after that, we weren’t quite sure what was happening. . . . Ken and I wondered, ‘What are we going to fly?’ . . . It was kind of a strange thing. Lousma and Fullerton were training. Eventually we figured out they were going to be [
STS
-3].”

Eager to figure out who was doing what, the astronauts in the remaining crews began paying close attention to what sort of training each was doing, looking for subtle clues. “We got this call . . . that we should go to St. Louis or wherever [the
STS
-3 crew members] were training; that Ken and I should go up there and start getting this training. It was kind of funny, because it scared them. Lousma made a panicked call back to Houston, said,
‘What’s going on? Are we being replaced?’ Because nobody bothered to tell anybody what was going on.”

As it turned out, Hartsfield explained, he and Mattingly were sent to train alongside the
STS
-3 crew so that they could be trained as a backup for the
STS
-2 crew while Lousma and Fullerton were preparing for their own mission. Hartsfield and Mattingly served as a backup for the third flight as well.

Then we flew [
STS
-]4. It was kind of a funny way the crews were labeled. . . . The D crew flew five, and we flew four, . . . the last of the two-person flights. It was a little bit confusing as to the way the crews were announced, . . . but it all sorted out, and I think sorted out fairly. Everybody got to fly, and nobody got kicked off a flight, you know. For some of us who had waited so many years—the seven of us that came from the
MOL
program, from the time we were picked for the space program till the time we flew was around sixteen years with the air force and a long time at Houston—it was a long wait. At that point, you didn’t want to see anything get in your way. When the crew confusion started going on, “Well, I hope I’m not losing my place, I’ve waited too long.” But everybody got to fly, so it was a good deal.

STS
-4 commander Ken Mattingly recalled talking with Deke Slayton after the
Apollo 16
flight about what he wanted to do next. The two shared a relatively unique fascination with the shuttle program from a flight engineering perspective. “We both recognized that I enjoyed the engineering side of the flying, perhaps more than a lot of the guys. So the idea of trying to get in on an early flight test was what every pilot wants to do anyhow. The idea of being in a group that was going to be downsized and have an opportunity to participate in the first flights and maybe even compete for the first flight, that was all the motivation anybody could ever want.”

While Mattingly was not surprised when the first flight went to his
Apollo 16
commander and the corps’ senior flight-status astronaut, John Young, he was disappointed that he had to wait until the last development mission to get to fly. The rationale, he explained, was that his expertise was needed in different ways—because his flight opportunity was delayed, Mattingly was available to back up the second and third crews should something go wrong, and then, on the fourth flight, he could complete any tasks that hadn’t been accomplished by the first three crews. “That was the logic. It was kind of
fun to be part of those missions, but . . . Hank and I were kind of hoping we could [fly] earlier. But it really did turn out to have a lot of benefits for us, because we did pick up a lot of experience we would not have had and were able to do some other activities that [we] wouldn’t have had time to go do if we’d been scrambling just to get up and down.”