Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (32 page)

In orbit the
EVA
didn’t go completely smoothly. Nelson was to fly up to the satellite in the
MMU
and hook on to the satellite to stop it from moving. Then
Challenger
could move in closer and Terry Hart would grab it with the robotic arm. “We had also practiced, in case something went wrong with that, having Terry grab it while it was still rotating, which was a little bit of a challenge, but we had practiced it and thought we potentially could do that,” said Crippen.

24.
James van Hoften and George Nelson on a spacewalk to repair the Solar Max satellite. Courtesy
NASA
.

“Turned out,” he continued, “when Pinky flew out about three hundred feet away from the orbiter, and he came up and did his task perfectly to grab this little fixture, it didn’t capture. He sort of bounced off. He tried again and bounced off. I think he hit it in all about three times. The satellite was rotating prior to this around its long axis, but then it started to tumble. So we backed Pinky off, and I was worried that we’d spent all this time training for this, and we were just about to lose it.”

In all the preparations, Crippen said, the crew hadn’t factored in a tumbling satellite, and they did their best to improvise in the unexpected situ
ation. They considered attempting to go ahead and grab it with the robot arm but were concerned the tumbling would cause the satellite to strike the arm and damage something. They tried having Nelson grab one of the solar arrays by hand to try to stabilize it, but that didn’t work either. “We flailed around in there for a while, using up lots of gas, and then finally the ground told us they thought maybe they could stabilize it again with a slow rotation, so they asked us to back away.”

Crippen said those
EVA
s were some of the more worrisome moments of his commanding career: the shuttle was moving to keep a safe distance from the tumbling satellite, while Nelson was floating freely, independently of either.

That’s where I got the headache. We knew that we had the digital autopilot set up [to keep a clear] area up above the payload bay. We weren’t going to impinge a jet on the satellite or anybody else that was in between there, so that really wasn’t that much of a problem. But anytime you’ve got somebody out there free-flying, you don’t want to lose them. So the first thing I wanted to do when we decided we couldn’t do it with the tumbling thing was to get Pinky back.

Truthfully, at that time I thought we’d lost it. I could see myself spending the next six months in Washington explaining why we didn’t grab that satellite. But the ground had a trick up their sleeve that we weren’t aware of, the folks at Goddard did, and they were able to stabilize the satellite.

The next day the orbiter came in for another rendezvous, and it was just like how they’d trained in the simulator, said Crippen. “We went up, and Terry did a neat job of grabbing hold of it, so we captured it. Our fuel had gotten pretty low . . . but we had it. So then Ox and Pinky went out and did their thing of repairing the satellite; worked like champs. They did a couple of
EVA
s, and sure enough, the first day when they came back in and took their gloves off, all the tips of their fingers were bloody from having to go in and do that fine work.”

Once the satellite was in their literal grasp, Nelson said, the repair itself was easy. “It was so much easier to work in space than it is on the ground,” Nelson said. “It was a piece of cake. It was so much fun riding on the end of the arm, and just being out there was tons of fun.”

Hart, who was operating the robotic arm, said it was an incredible moment for him and the crew when they finally successfully grappled the satellite.

It was euphoric. I mean, we really felt that the mission was at risk, which it was, and we were really on a mission that was demonstrating the flexibility and the usefulness of the shuttle to do things like repair. We were afraid that we were disappointing a lot of people—the scientists, of course, wanting to put the science satellite back into service, but all the people at
NASA
that were showing what the shuttle could do. In reality, we demonstrated even more just the flexibility of human spaceflight, that you can adapt to things that are unexpected, like this pin and the problems that it caused us. So it was a good opportunity to show even better what the shuttle could do.

The other mission objective was the release of the Long Duration Exposure Facility. A project for
NASA
’s Langley Research Center, the facility was a twelve-sided cylinder that hosted fifty-seven individual scientific experiments. Hart deployed it using the robotic arm. The satellite was so large that it was a very tight fit in the orbiter’s payload bay, raising concerns that in deployment it could strike the orbiter, damaging the satellite, or worse.

“The concern there was that I was going to get it stuck, then we couldn’t close the payload bay doors, and then we couldn’t come home, so we had to be careful,” said Hart.

It all went pretty well. First I had to lift it out straight, and then the arm did everything it was supposed to do. And then I think I put it back in again just to make sure it would go back in before I lifted it out one more time to deploy it. We left it out on the arm and did some slow maneuvers to verify all the dynamics and all the things that the engineers wanted to understand about lifting heavy objects out of the shuttle. And then we very carefully deployed it. It wasn’t detectable at all when I released it. I mean, it was just totally steady, and we very carefully backed away and got some great photographs of it as we backed away.

The 41
C
mission also carried an
IMAX
movie camera that was used to shoot footage for the movie
The Dream Is Alive
. Even though he liked that
NASA
had partnered with
IMAX
, Crippen said he worried a little about the size of the camera and he didn’t want its use to distract focus from the primary mission objectives. “It was a little bit difficult working some of those things out, but it was a great camera.”

In addition to obtaining all the footage
IMAX
requested of the crew, Hart surprised one of the creators of
IMAX
, Graham Ferguson, with a spe
cial, unplanned thirty-second spot. “We had six film canisters, and we had gone through all of them and we had gotten all the shots that they wanted us to get during the mission,” recalled Hart.

I figured I had at least thirty seconds left on the last roll. So I’m kind of, “What can I shoot?’ I just want to shoot some indoor thing. And we were in the night side, and Crippen said, “Well, the sun’s going to come up in about three minutes here.” So I quickly put the camera up and focused on the Earth’s horizon just as the sun was starting to break through the horizon. And just as it started to glow a little bit, I ran the last thirty seconds off, and you could see the Earth’s limb all illuminated and you could see how thin the atmosphere is from that perspective. And just then the sun blossomed on the horizon, and I ran out of film. So in
The Dream Is Alive
, which was the feature they put together from our mission and the two that followed us, there’s that sequence in there of the sunrise, where Walter Cronkite’s saying, “And here’s what an orbital sunrise looks like.” So it never occurred to them or us, for some reason, to shoot that particular kind of thing, but when we were up there, we knew that was a dramatic event. So as soon as it was coming, we captured it, fortunately.

Several weeks after returning home from their mission, crew members watched their
IMAX
footage in a private screening. “The
IMAX
people were there and they were all smiles,” remembered Hart. “They said, ‘You’re not going to believe what you did there.’ And then they showed the raw footage to us, and it was so vivid in our minds, just being five or six weeks from the mission, that it was almost like being there again, because the
IMAX
fills your entire field of view with the sensation of being in space.”

Despite the agency’s best efforts to avoid the number thirteen, the mission didn’t escape it completely. Hart said that at the same time the crew designed its official 41
C
patch, it had also created an underground patch with a black cat and the number 13 on it.

We did our coffee mug with the headquarters-approved
STS
-41
C
patch on the front of the coffee cup, and on the back of the coffee cup we had the unapproved black cat with “
STS
-13” on it. . . . As it turned out, two of the missions in front of us, one mission was canceled, and one mission was delayed. So we ended up being the eleventh flight, as it turned out, anyways. But they also moved the date around. Since it was well before the launch, there was nothing forcing the
date, but they just moved the date to get away from the Friday the thirteenth thing, because then it turned out we were going to go early. We were going to launch on the sixth of April and land on the twelfth, but we had a problem during our mission that delayed us one day. So we ended up landing on Friday the thirteenth. But we made it.

STS
-41
G

Crew: Commander Bob Crippen, Pilot Jon McBride, Mission Specialists Kathy Sullivan, Sally Ride, and David Leestma, Payload Specialists Marc Garneau (Canada) and Paul Scully-Power (Australia)

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 5 October 1984

Landed: 13 October 1984

Mission: Deployment of a satellite, testing of orbital refueling techniques

Just six months later, Bob Crippen once again served as commander, for 41
G
. The assignment was unusual; Abbey named Crippen as commander of his fourth spaceflight while he was still preparing for his third. Crippen was surprised to be given two overlapping assignments while there were so many others ready to fly, so he asked Abbey why it was being done that way. “He said he wanted to see how fast we could actually turn people around, so who am I to turn down a spaceflight? I said, ‘Sure, but, you know, I’m not going to get to spend as much time training with the crew, so I’d like to make sure I’ve got somebody there, especially for the ascent portion, that knows how I like to fly the missions.’”

Crippen requested Sally Ride be added to the crew for just that purpose. While Crippen was fulfilling his duties as commander of 41
C
, Ride and the crew started training for 41
G
. “I was the only one on the crew who had flown before; the rest were first-time flyers,” said Ride.

I was the one that had the experience, and I had also flown with Crip before, so I knew how he liked things done and I knew what his habits were. On launch and reentry I knew what he wanted to do, and what he wanted the pilot to do, and what he wanted the flight engineer to do. . . . Part of my job was to say, “This is the way Crip likes to handle this situation or this sort of problem, and this is how he would want us to work.” During the first couple of months, I tried to give the rest of the crew some indication of the way that Crip liked
to run a flight and run a crew. Then, thankfully, he launched and landed and came and joined us.

While Ride could play the role of commander in terms of planning training activities, she was still a mission specialist astronaut, not a pilot astronaut, meaning she wasn’t trained to front-seat the orbiter during simulations. Jon McBride would sit in his seat as pilot and other astronauts or trainers would fill in as guest commanders.

Originally the crew was scheduled to fly on
Columbia
, which was undergoing modifications after its return from the
STS
-9 science mission. Leestma was the crew’s liaison to follow the progress of the modifications. “It was progressing slowly, and there were a lot of tile modifications that had to be done to
Columbia
. There were a lot of upgrades to make it like the newer vehicles. They weren’t going as fast [as planned]. There’s always money problems. And so my reports coming back were probably a little bit more negative, only because
Columbia
’s not going make our flight time.”

NASA
realized that
Columbia
wasn’t going to be ready in time, so they shuffled orbiters around and 41
G
was given
Challenger
and, with the new orbiter, a new payload, Shuttle Imaging Radar B, or
SIR
-
B
. “That’s when it really got down to training and started getting really serious about it,” recalled Leestma. “It was nice to know that we had a payload and an orbiter that we were probably going to fly. At that time I think that
Discovery
and
Challenger
were just kind of flip-flopping all the way along, so it was pretty much a two-orbiter fleet at the time.”