Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (37 page)

The reason the first one shut down was it was on fire . . . and it automatically shut itself down. . . . The next one didn’t shut down until we actually shut it down. But there were two of them that were burning. . . . So we had a fire outside the
APU
s that when we shut them down and shut the ammonia off to them, the fires went out. So we had some damage back there, but the fires stopped.
But we didn’t know anything about that till the next day. I got this call and John says, “Hey, did you know that the
APU
s were burning?” “No, I sure didn’t.”

The flight also had two of the general-purpose computers (
GPC
s) fail. “That was an interesting thing, too,” Shaw recalled.

John and I were in the de-orbit prep, . . . and we were reconfiguring the
GPC
s and the flight control systems and the
RCS
[reaction control system] jets and stuff. . . . About the time that we were reconfiguring the computers, we had a couple of thruster firings, and the big jets in the front fired and it’s like these big cannons—boom! boom!—and it shocks the vehicle. You know, you really can feel it if you’re touching the structure. So we had one of these firings and we got the big “X pole fail” on the
CRT
, meaning the computer had failed. This is the first computer failure we had on the program. Our eyes got about that big. So I get out the emergency procedure checklist and . . . we started going through the steps and everything. And in just a couple of minutes we had another one fail the same way. . . . So now we were really interested in what was going on. We ended up waiving off our de-orbit at that time. . . . The ground decided, no, we’re going to wait and try to figure out what’s going on with these computers.

When Young’s shift ended, with nothing more he could do to address the problem and wanting to be rested for the landing, he went down to the mid-deck to take a nap, leaving Shaw “babysitting” on the flight deck.

Well, during that time frame, all of a sudden there starts this noise, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The next thing, one of our three
IMU
s [inertial measurement units] . . . failed and we couldn’t recover it. It turned out its gimbal was failing and it was beating itself to death against the gimbal stop, and that was the banging noise. After a few hours, John comes back upstairs and says, “You know, I really appreciate you guys making all that banging noise when I’m trying to sleep down there.” I said, “Jeez, John, I’ve got some bad news. Man, we lost an
IMU
.” And John’s eyes get this big again, because we’ve had two
GPC
failures and now an
IMU
failure. Anyhow, we got through all that and we entered and landed, and when the nose gear slapped down, one of the
GPC
s that had recovered failed again. One of them didn’t recover and we flew down with one less computer, but that computer failed again, and that’s why I reconfigured flight control systems, as I remember now, because of that computer failure.

Despite the drama of the landing, once
Columbia
was successfully and safely on the ground, Shaw and the agency were pleased with the results of the shuttle’s first dedicated scientific flight. “We learned a lot from that flight, a tremendous amount. Seventy-seven different investigations, as I recall, on that mission. It was a tremendous success.”

STS
-51
B

Crew: Commander Bob Overmyer, Pilot Fred Gregory, Mission Specialists Don Lind, Norm Thagard, and Bill Thornton, Payload Specialists Lodewijk van den Berg and Taylor Wang

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 29 April 1985

Landed: 6 May 1985

Mission: Second Spacelab flight

The next Spacelab flight, 51
B
, came in April 1985. And there may have been no one more excited about it than astronaut Don Lind, who had been selected in
NASA
’s fifth group of astronauts in 1966. “I set a record. No one has waited for a spaceflight longer than I have,” Lind said. “I hope nobody ever has to do that. But with the six and a half years I spent in training for two flights that didn’t fly, and then the delays in getting the shuttle program going, and with the [
Apollo 1
] fire, there were long delays, and so it was nineteen years before I got to fly.”

For Fred Gregory, the pilot of the mission and one of the astronauts selected in the class of ’78, the wait wasn’t nearly so long, but it was nonetheless a huge honor to finally be selected for a crew. “There was shifting of launch times, because we were on Spacelab III and I know we launched before Spacelab II and after Spacelab I. I think they had some payloads that they wanted to deploy quickly, and so the laboratory missions were kind of put in a kind of a second category for priority. But, you know, the date wasn’t important at the time.”

Gregory found it interesting that the overwhelming majority of his training was for a very small part of the mission. Over three-fourths of his training focused on the eight and a half minutes of launch and hour of entry, out of a week-long mission. While the proportions may have seemed odd, it was necessary to make sure the flight deck crew was ready to perfectly execute the tasks required of it no matter what happened.

It’s like a ballet, you know, without music: individual but coordinated activities that resulted in the successful accomplishments of each of these phases, regardless of the type of failure or series of failures that this training team would impose on you. So that’s what we trained for. There were two thousand or so switches and gauges and circuit breakers, any number of which we would involve ourselves with during these two phases, ascent and entry. So the intent was for us to learn this so well, understand the system so well, that we could brush through a failure scenario and safe the orbiter in the ascent such that we could get on orbit and then have time to discuss what the real problem was and then allow you to correct it.

Eventually, it was time to move from the simulations to the real thing. As with
STS
-9, two shifts worked around the clock. “While each shift worked, the other shift slept,” Gregory said.

We had enclosed bunks on the mid-deck of the orbiter, and that’s where the off shift would sleep, so we never saw them really. . . . Each shift had its own area of interest, so there was really no competition between the two of them. . . . There were really about four hours a day there was an interaction between the two. It would be the two-hour postsleep transition, when one is just waking up. A shift is waking up, and they are picking up the ball, so to speak, from the other shift. The other shift then prepares to go to bed.

As pilot, Gregory’s responsibilities in orbit mainly focused on the support systems that kept the orbiter functioning. He was technically in charge of one shift, but since the scientists were largely capable of carrying out their duties on their own, his support of them centered around maintaining the vehicle. “During that mission there were very few problems, and those that we had were very minor. So not only did I monitor the shuttle, but I also had a great deal of time to learn about the Earth, and then spent a lot of time looking into deep space. We were in a high-inclination orbit, 571/2 degrees, and so it gave us an excellent view of a great part of the Earth.”

The crew was joined by some rather unusual travel mates, recalled Don Lind:

We had the first laboratory animals in space, and Bill Thornton had to worry about them on one shift, and Norm would worry about them on the other shift. . . . We had two cute little squirrel monkeys and twenty-four less-than-cute laboratory rats.

The squirrel monkeys adapted very quickly. They had been on centrifuges. They had been on vibration tables. So they knew what the roar and the feeling of space was going to be like. Squirrel monkeys have a very long tail, and if they get excited, they wrap the tail around themselves and hang on to the tip of the tail. If they get really excited, they chew on the end of their own tail. By the time we . . . activated the laboratory, which was about three hours after liftoff, they were now adjusted. They had, during liftoff, apparently chewed off about a quarter of an inch of the end of their tails, but they were adjusted and just having a ball. I kept saying, “Let’s let one of them out.” “No, no, can’t do that. We’d never catch him again.”

27.
The Spacelab in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. Courtesy
NASA
.

While the monkeys adapted quickly, the laboratory rats were somewhat slower. “The laboratory rats were not quite as savvy as the monkeys,” Lind said. “They had also been on vibration tables and acoustical chambers and that sort of thing, but they hadn’t learned that this was going to last awhile, and when
we got into the laboratory, they were hanging on to the edge of the cage and looking very apprehensive. After about the second day, they finally found out if they’d let go of the screen, they wouldn’t fall, and they probably enjoyed the rest of the mission. But they were slower in adapting. No big problem.”

Gregory noted that he and Overmyer had the “privilege” of helping with the monkeys at one point, doing cleanup work capturing debris from the food and waste escape in the holding facility.

These rhesus monkeys that we had were extremely spoiled. I think that the environment that they had come from before they came on the orbiter was a place where they received a lot of attention from the caregivers there. Norm and I would look back into the Spacelab, and we would see Bill Thornton attempting to get these monkeys to do things, like touch the little trigger that would release the food pellets. And I could tell . . . watching them that they expected Bill to do that for them. So we looked back there one time, and we could see that kind of the roles were reversed, that Bill was actually doing antics on the outside of the cage and the monkeys were watching. We almost joked sometimes that they started laughing, and they went back and ate. It was an interesting dynamic to watch Bill Thornton wrestle with or react with the monkeys. It was quite an act back there.

Lind recalled that the substantial amount of automation involved in the Spacelab experiments provided him with a unique opportunity to do an experiment of his own. When he realized that a good bit of his duties would consist of regularly checking on automated equipment, he and a partner proposed an experiment to look at the aurora from space. Prior to his mission, the aurora had been photographed from space by slow-scan photometers, which give a blurred picture. On Skylab, Owen Garriott had taken a limited number of photographs of the aurora on the horizon.

“There were a few pictures, but not many,” Lind explained.

So Tom and I started thinking about how we could do this. The first thing we wanted were high-time-resolution pictures of the aurora made with a
TV
camera. So we started looking around. What
TV
system could we get that would be sensitive enough in such a low light level? It turned out that the
TV
camera that was already on the Space Shuttle was as good as any
TV
camera we could have bought in the world. But we had to take off the color wheel and photograph in black and white instead of color. So we asked and got one of the
TV
s modi
fied. Because [we would be doing that only] in black and white, you want to take some still photographs in color to document what color the auroral light is, since that will identify what particles are emitting the light. So we started to look around for an appropriate camera and camera lens. It turned out that the camera that we already had on board and the lens we already had on board were, again, as good as we could have gotten anywhere.
NASA
only had to buy three rolls of film, special, sensitive color film. So this experiment cost
NASA
thirty-six dollars, and it’s the cheapest experiment that has ever gone into space. It was very satisfying to us that we made some discoveries on thirty-six dollars. We claimed that we could do more science per dollar per pound than anybody else in the space program.

The experiment proved to be not only cheap, but also effective, revealing a new component of aurora formation.

Despite the busy shift schedule and the additional experiment Lind had proposed to fill the extra time, he eventually found some time to appreciate the view from the orbiter’s flight deck windows.

It was like a Cinerama presentation. Both my wife and I are amateur oil painters. . . . I thought, “Could I ever paint that?” The answer is absolutely not. Grumbacher [art materials company] doesn’t make a blue that’s deep enough for the great ocean trenches. You look out tangentially through the Earth’s horizon, and you see—I was quite surprised—many different layers of intense blue colors, about twenty to twenty-two different layers of cobalt and cerulean and ultramarine and other shades, and then the blackest, blackest space you can imagine. When you go over the archipelagoes and the atolls and islands in the Pacific and down in the Bermudas, you see the water coming up toward the shore from the deep trenches, and it appears as hundreds of shades of blue and blue green up to a little white line, which is the surf, and another little brown line, which is the beach. Nobody will ever paint that. It’s magnificent.