Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (46 page)

Sultan Al-Saud was assigned to our crew initially, when one of our payload satellites was the
ARABSAT
. [Al-Saud flew as part of the 51
G
crew.] He was assigned as a mission specialist on our crew, and when he eventually did fly, I think he said it better than anybody has. He said, “The first day or two in space, we were looking for our countries. Then the next day or two, we were looking at our continents. By about the fourth or fifth day, we were all looking at our world.” Boy, it’s one of those things that I said, “God, I wish I’d have thought of that. I wish I’d have said that.”

The crew made several launch attempts before finally getting off the ground on 27 August 1985. The first launch attempt, on 24 August, was scrubbed at T minus five minutes due to thunderstorms in the vicinity.

“When we got back in the crew quarters after that first scrub for weather,” recalled Covey,

[there was] John Young, who was the chief of the Astronaut Office at the time and also served as the airborne weather caller in the Shuttle Training Aircraft. . . . I was making some comments about, “I can’t believe we scrubbed for those two little showers out there. Anybody with half a lick of sense would have said, ‘Let’s go. This could be a lot worse.’” John Young came over and looked at me and he says, “The crew cannot make the call on the weather. They do not
know what’s going on. All they can see is out the window. That’s other people’s job.” I said, “Yes, sir. Okay.”

Launch was pushed to the next day, 25 August. Engle’s birthday was 26 August, and on board the shuttle was a cake that the crew was taking into orbit to celebrate. The launch scrubbed again on the twenty-fifth, this time because of a failure with one of the orbiter’s on-board computers, and was pushed to the twenty-seventh. Said Covey, “They wound up unstowing the birthday cake and taking it back to crew quarters, and we had it there instead of on orbit.”

Initially, things weren’t looking good for the third launch attempt, either, Engle said. It was raining so hard the crew wore big yellow rain slickers from the crew quarters to the Astrovan and up the elevator to the white room. Engle admitted that as the crew boarded, the astronauts “didn’t think there was a prayer” of actually flying that day. But they had only one more delay before they would have to detank and refuel the shuttle, which would delay the mission an additional two days, so the decision was made to get ready and see what happened.

We got in the bird and we strapped in and we started countdown. Ox van Hoften was in the number-four seat, over on the right-hand side aft, and Mike Lounge was in the center seat aft, and we were sitting there waiting, and launch control had called several holds. Ox was so big that he hung out over the seats as he sat back, and he was very uncomfortable, and he talked Mike into unstrapping and going down to the mid-deck so that he could stretch across both those seats in the back of the flight deck. We were lying there waiting, and it was raining, and raining fairly good.

As the countdown clock ticked down nearer and nearer to the scheduled launch time, the crew continued to believe that there was essentially no chance of a launch that day.

We got down to five minutes or six minutes, and . . . we got the call from launch control to start the
APU
s. Dick Covey and I looked at each other kind of incredulously and asked them to repeat. And they said, “Start the
APU
s. We don’t have much time in the window here.” So he started going through the procedures to start the
APU
s, and they make kind of a whining noise as they come up to speed. The rest of the crew was asleep down in the mid-deck.

I think it was Fish [Bill Fisher] woke up and said, “What’s that noise? What’s going on?” We said, “We’re cranking
APU
s. Let’s go,” or something like that. Dick was into the second
APU
, and they looked up and saw the rain coming down and they said, “Yeah, sure, we’re not going anywhere today. Why [are] you starting
APU
s?” We didn’t have time to explain to them, because the sequence gets pretty rushed then. So we yelled to them, “Damn it, we’re going. We’re going to launch. Get back in your seats and get strapped in.” They woke up Ox and Mike, and they got back in their seats, and they had to strap themselves in. Normally you have a crew strap you in; they had to strap each other in. And Dick and I were busy getting systems up to speed and running, and all we could hear was Mike and Ox back there yelling at each other to, “Get that strap for me. Where’s my comm lead?” “Get it yourself. I can’t find mine.” And they were trying to strap themselves in, and we were counting down to launch. They really didn’t believe we were going to launch because it was, in fact, raining, but they counted right down to the launch and we did go. It went right through a light rain, but it was raining.

Engle said that after the crew returned to Earth at the end of the mission he asked about the decision to launch through the rain. It turns out that the weather spotters were flying at the Shuttle Launch Facility at launch time, and it was clear there. “[They asked,] ‘Why didn’t you tell us it was raining [at the pad]?’ We used their rationale then. We said, ‘Our job is to be ready to fly. You guys tell us when the weather’s okay.’”

In addition to capturing and repairing the
SYNCOM
that malfunctioned on 51
D
, the mission was to deploy three other satellites. One of those was another
SYNCOM
, known as
SYNCOM
IV
-4 or
LEASAT
-4; the other two were
ASC
-1, launched for American Satellite Company, and the Australian communications satellite
AUSSAT
-1.

“We were supposed to do one the first day, one the second day, one the third day, and then the fourth and fifth days were repair days, and there was a day in between,” explained Lounge. But first, the crew was tasked with using the camera to look at the payload bay and the sun shield to make sure everything was intact after launch. Lounge did just that.

Then I commanded the sun shield open, and I had failed to stow the camera. If it had been day two instead of day one, I’d have been more aware of it. On day one you’re just kind of overwhelmed and you’re just down doing the steps, and it’s not a good defense, but that was an example of why you don’t change things
at the last minute and why you don’t do things you haven’t simulated, because we’d never simulated that. That was some engineer or program manager said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to add this camera task.” Now I had a camera out of position, opened the sun shield against the camera, and it bent the sun shield and it got hung up on the top of the shuttle.

To address the problem, the crew did an earlier than planned checkout of the robotic arm and then used the arm to essentially bang against the sunshade, Lounge said. “[The sunshade was a] very flimsy structure with [an] aluminum tube frame and Mylar fabric, so not a lot to it, but it had to get out of the way.”

Lounge maneuvered the arm, but it wasn’t working right either.

The elbow joint had a problem that wouldn’t let the automatic control system operate the arm, so I had to command the arm single-joint mode, which means instead of some coordinated motion, command the tip to move in a certain trajectory, you just had to say, all right, elbow, move like this; wrist, move like this, rotate like this. So, a little awkward and took awhile, but I got the arm down there and banged on the solar array and got it down, and then we deployed that one [satellite]. . . . We deployed both of them on the same day, five or six hours after launch. So that was exciting, more exciting than it needed to be.

After the satellite deployments came the
SYNCOM
repair attempt. The shuttle rendezvoused with the failed satellite, and robot arm operator Mike Lounge helped Bill Fisher and Ox van Hoften get ready for their
EVA
. Once the
EVA
began, van Hoften installed a foot platform on the end of the arm, and Lounge moved him toward the satellite so that he could grab it, just like in his napkin drawings months earlier.

The satellite, though, was in a tumble, so there were concerns about whether the capture could go as planned. As on earlier missions, the astronauts took advantage of the long periods of loss of signal and worked out a solution in real time.

“When we got up there and it was tumbling,” said Covey,

we were trying to relay back to the ground what was going on. . . . We were trying to figure out stuff. They were trying to figure out stuff. Finally we went
LOS
and Ox said, “Fly me up to it,” and he went up and he just grabbed it. If the ground would have been watching, we wouldn’t have done that, I’m sure, like
that. But he grabs it and spins it, just with his hands on the edge, where they say, “Watch out for the sharp edges.” And he spins it a little bit so that the fixtures come around to him, and then he rotates it a little bit, and he gets that tool on, screws it down. We maneuver it down. We come
AOS
. We say, “Well, we got it, Houston.” They didn’t ask why. They didn’t ask how.

STS
-61
B

Crew: Commander Brewster Shaw, Pilot Bryan O’Connor, Mission Specialists Mary Cleave, Jerry Ross, and Sherwood Spring, Payload Specialists Rodolfo Neri Vela (Mexico) and Charlie Walker

Orbiter:
Atlantis

Launched: 26 November 1985

Landed: 3 December 1985

Mission: Deployment of three satellites, demonstration of space assembly techniques

As
NASA
worked to create a healthy manifest of shuttle flights, glitches with satellites’ inertial upper stages and with payloads themselves made for an ever-shifting manifest. “Continuously, we were juggling the manifest,” said astronaut Jerry Ross. “Crews were getting shifted from flight to flight. The payloads were getting shifted from flight to flight. And basically, throughout 1985, our crew trained for every mission that flew that year except for military or Spacelab missions.”

At one point, Ross said, the 61
B
crew was even assigned to 51
L
, the ill-fated final launch of the Space Shuttle
Challenger
. After bouncing around to several different mission possibilities, the crew settled in on 61
B
.

The mission included two payload specialists, Charlie Walker and Rodolfo Neri Vela of Mexico. Ross remembered that the agency was being pressured to fly civilians—teachers, politicians, and the like. “We were giving away seats, is the way we kind of saw it, to nonprofessional astronauts, when we thought that the astronauts could do the jobs if properly trained,” Ross said.

The flight was Walker’s third flight in fifteen months and it was the first flight for a payload specialist from Mexico. “The guys did a great job on orbit,” Ross praised the mission’s two payload specialists. “They were always very helpful. They knew that if the operations on the flight deck were very hectic, they stayed out of the way, which is the right thing to do, frankly.
But at other times they would come up onto the flight deck and enjoy the view as well as any of the rest of the crew.”

The mission deployed three more communications satellites: one for Mexico, one for Australia, and one for
RCA
Americom. All three satellites were deployed using Payload Assist Modules. Ross and Mission Specialist Sherwood Spring worked together on the deployments. The two also journeyed outside the shuttle on two spacewalks to experiment further with assembling erectable structures in space. The two experiments were the Experimental Assembly of Structures in Extravehicular Activity (
EASE
) and the Assembly Concept for Construction of Erectable Space Structure (
ACCESS
).

“I’ll remember the day forever, when I got to go do my first spacewalk,” recalled Ross, who throughout his career ventured out of his spacecraft for a total of nine
EVA
s. That first venture outside was something he had been looking forward to for quite some time.

I got a chance to do a lot of [support for] spacewalks as a CapCom on the ground, and I got a little bit more green with envy every time I did that, thinking about what those guys were doing, how much fun they were having. So when I ultimately got a chance to go outside for my first time, I was worried, because I was worried that the orbiter was going to have a problem, we were going to have to go home early, or one of the spacesuits wouldn’t check out and we wouldn’t be able to go out, and all those things.

I’ll never forget opening up the hatch and poking my head out the first time, and I literally had this very strong desire to let out this war whoop of glee and excitement. But I figured that if I did that, they’d say, “Okay, Ross has finally lost it. Let’s get his butt back inside,” and that would have been it. But it felt totally natural, just totally natural to be outside in your own little cocoon, your own little spacecraft, and I felt basically instantly at home in terms of going to work.

EASE
and
ACCESS
were designed to test how easily—or not—astronauts could assemble or deploy components in orbit. The idea was to study the feasibility of packing space structure truss components in a low-volume manner for transport to orbit so that they could then be expanded by astronauts in space. The question was more than just hypothetical; planning was already underway to construct a space station.