Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (47 page)

30.
Jerry Ross on a spacewalk demonstrating the first construction of large structures in weightlessness. Courtesy
NASA
.

The idea of a space station was an old one, and
NASA
had already built and flown one space station, Skylab. When the Space Shuttle was proposed in the late 1960s,
NASA
’s desire was to build both the shuttle and a space station as the first steps in developing an infrastructure for interplanetary exploration. The administration of President Richard Nixon approved funding only for the Space Shuttle, however. By 1984, Reagan believed that the Space Shuttle program was sufficiently mature to move ahead with a space station, and the Space Station
Freedom
project was born. The station had ambitious goals, with plans calling for it to be a microgravity science lab, a repair shop for satellites, an assembly port for deep-space vehicles, and a commercial microgravity factory. Unlike Skylab, which was launched fully assembled atop a powerful Saturn V rocket, plans were for
Freedom
to be launched in multiple modules aboard the shuttle and assembled in orbit. The 61
B
spacewalks to test
EASE
and
ACCESS
were part of the prepara
tions, designed to study how best to build components so that they could be flown compactly and easily assembled by astronauts in space.

“The second spacewalk, we worked off the end of the mechanical arm for a lot of the work,” Ross explained.

We did the assembly, the top bay of the
ACCESS
truss off the end of the arm. We simulated the running of the electrical cable. We did the simulation of doing a repair of the truss by taking out and reinserting an element there. We removed the trusses off of the fixture and maneuvered them around to see how that would be in terms of assembling a larger structure. We also mounted a U.S. flag that we had modified onto the truss and took some great pictures of us saluting the flag on the end of the arm up there. We also made a flag that we took outside. We called ourselves the Ace Construction Company. There’s a series of Ace signs that were taken outside on various spacewalks. . . . Somehow we’ve lost some of that fun over the years. I’m not sure why.

For the
ACCESS
work, the
RMS
arm, with the spacewalkers at its end, was operated by Mary Cleave, whose height, or lack thereof, required special accommodation for her to be able to perform the task, according to Commander Shaw.

In order for her to get up and be able to look out the window and operate the controls on the
RMS
, we’d strung a bungee across the panel and she’d stick her legs in front of that bungee and it would hold her against the panel . . . so she could be high enough and see and be in the right position to operate the
RMS
. I remember coming up behind Mary once when she was operating the
RMS
and there was somebody on the end of the arm. I put my hand on her shoulder, and her whole body was quivering, because she was so intent on doing this job right and not hurting anybody, and so focused and so conscientious, not wanting to do anything wrong, because she knew she had somebody out there on the end of this arm, and she was just quivering, and that just impressed the hell out of me, because I thought, you know, what a challenge, what a task for her to buy into doing when it obviously stressed her so.

All in all, Ross said, the two experiments were successful in their goal of producing data about in-space construction. “It gave us quite a bit of understanding and knowledge of what it would be like to assemble things in space,” Ross noted.

Ultimately, that’s not the way that we chose to build the station, because when you think about having to integrate all the electrical and fluid lines and everything else into the structure once you’ve assembled this open network of truss, it becomes harder to figure out how you’re going to do that and properly connect everything together and make sure it’s tested and works properly. But we did learn a lot about assembling things in space and proved that they are valid things that you could anticipate doing, even on the current station, at some point, if you needed to add a new antenna or something like that.

One advancement that came out of the
ACCESS
and
EASE
experiments wasn’t even in space but had a big impact down the road.
NASA
realized through training for the space assembly tests that the Weightless Environmental Training Facility, or
WET
-
F
, water tank where astronauts were training for
EVA
was not going to be large enough to train for construction of a large space station. “[In] the facility we had when we built the
ACCESS
truss, we could only build like one and a half bays before it started sticking out of the surface of the water,” recalled Ross. “And the
EASE
experiment, when we did it, basically our backpacks of our suits when we were at the top of the structure were right at the surface of the water. So if you’re going to build anything that’s anywhere close to being big on orbit, that wasn’t going to get it.”

For the next ten years, Ross helped
NASA
campaign to Congress for funds for a new facility. Ross helped design the requirements for the facility and led the Operational Readiness Inspection Team that eventually certified the new Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the Sonny Carter Training Facility.

During one of the two
ACCESS
/
EASE
spacewalks, Ross recalled saying to Spring, “Let’s go build a space station.” Ross would later have the opportunity to repeat that same phrase on his final spacewalk, on
STS
-110 during actual assembly of the International Space Station in 2002.

The crew of 61
B
was the first to be on the shuttle in orbit on Thanksgiving Day, which meant, of course, that the astronauts needed a space-compatible Thanksgiving feast. Payload Specialist Charlie Walker recalled that the crew worked with
JSC
foods manager Rita Rapp on planning a special meal for the holiday. Rapp had been involved in space food development and astronaut menus since the early Mercury missions. Walker said the crew specifically requested pumpkin pie.

Of course, the menu had to be approved by
NASA
to withstand launch, and pumpkin pie didn’t make the cut. “Apparently somebody did the jiggle test, the vibration test, on the pumpkin pie, and what we were told later was, ‘Well, pumpkin pie does not make it to orbit. The center of the pumpkin pie turns back to liquid, so you won’t have pumpkin pie, you’ll have pumpkin slop in orbit, and you really don’t want that, so sorry, no pumpkin pie.’ So Rita said, ‘All right, how about pumpkin bread? We can do that, and that will work, we know.’ So we had pumpkin bread on orbit for Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving was not the only interesting part of the mission from a culinary perspective. Being from Mexico, Payload Specialist Rodolfo Vela brought into space with him foods from home, one of which significantly changed the way astronauts would eat from that point forward. “Rodolfo had, of course, the desire, and probably the need, as it was perceived back home from Mexico, to be seen to be flying with some local Mexican cultural things, and so food was one of those,” Walker said.

One of the things that Rodolfo wanted to fly with, of course, was flour tortillas. In retrospect, I think that this amounted to something of a minor revolution in the U.S. manned space program, in that up to that time, of course, when crews wanted to have sandwiches in orbit, well, you went into the pantry, and you took out the sliced bread, sliced leavened bread that had been flown, for your sandwiches. Well, sliced bread, of course, always results in some degree of crumbs, and the crumbs don’t fall to the floor in the cabin in space. They are all around you, in your eyes, in your hair, and so it’s messy and just not that attractive. The crew saw Rodolfo flying with these flour tortillas and immediately thought, “Ooh, this may be real good,” and it was real good. It was tasty, after all, but when you took spread or anything that you wanted to make into a rolled sandwich and devoured it that way, but it was just no-muss, no-fuss kind of thing. I remember taking some sliced bread, but there may have been some sliced bread that even made it home, because we just found that the flour tortilla thing was well in advance of sliced bread, crumbly bread, for the preparation of sandwiches or just as a bread to go with your meal. The flour tortillas worked well, much better than that.

Pilot Bryan O’Connor played a prank on Mission Specialist Spring. Spring was in the army—a West Point grad—and O’Connor was from the
Naval Academy. During the mission the two armed forces faced off in the annual Army-Navy Game. O’Connor’s prank centered around the rivalry between the two forces.

Each person was allowed to carry six audios, and
NASA
would help you record records or whatever you wanted onto these space-qualified audiotapes. Then we would carry them and a tape player on board with our equipment. Usually what would happen is people would break those out when it was time for bed and listen to their favorite music at bedtime. . . . It was on day three that we turned off the lights and, I don’t know, it was about ten minutes after the lights were off, and I was borderline asleep, and I hear this loud cry from the other side of the mid-deck, where Woody [Spring] was hanging off the wall in his bed. He yells out, “O’Connor, you S.O.B.!” It woke me up with a start, and I had no idea what he was talking about. “What is it? What is it?” He says, “You know what it is.”

And all of a sudden, it clicked with me. About a month before flight, when we were having the people transcribe music onto our tapes, I went over to the guy that was working on Woody’s tapes and I gave him a record with the Naval Academy fight song on it and I said, “I want you to go right in the middle of his tape somewhere, just right in the middle, and superimpose the navy fight song somewhere on his tape.” Well, it turned out it was his Peter, Paul, and Mary album, and it was right in the middle of “I’ve Got a Hammer.” He’s listening to “I’ve Got a Hammer” on his way to sleep and suddenly up comes this really loud navy fight song thing right in the middle of it. We still joke about that to this day. In fact, sometimes we go to one or the other house and watch the Army-Navy Game together, and we always remember that night on the
Atlantis
in the mid-deck.

The mission ended and the crew came in for landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Weather brought the crew in one orbit sooner than was originally planned. “We came to wheels stop, and everybody unbuckles, and they’re trying to get their land legs again,” said Walker.

Jerry [Ross] is over at the hatch real quickly and wants to pop the hatch open so that we’ve got that part of the job done. Well, Jerry pops the hatch open, but it literally pops open, because whomever had planned these things had forgotten about the altitude, pressure altitude difference, between sea level at the Cape
and the probably three-thousand-, four-thousand-foot elevation at Edwards Air Force Base. So it’s a little bit less air pressure outside. Well, we’re still at sea-level pressure inside the ship. So he turns the crank on the side hatch, and the hatch goes, “Pow!” It flops down, and right away, I think Jerry said something about, “Oh, my God, I’m going to have to pay for a new hatch.”

STS
-61
C

Crew: Commander Hoot Gibson, Pilot Charles Bolden, Mission Specialists Franklin Chang-Diaz, Steven Hawley, and Pinky Nelson, Payload Specialists Robert Cenker and Congressman Bill Nelson

Orbiter:
Columbia

Launched: 12 January 1986

Landed: 18 January 1986

Mission: Deployment of the
RCA
satellite
SATCOM
KU
-
I
, various other experiments

The payload specialists on 61
C
were Robert Cenker of
RCA
, who during the mission observed the deployment of the
RCA
satellite, performed a variety of physiological tests, and operated an infrared imaging camera; and the second member of the U.S. Congress to fly, Bill Nelson, a member of the House of Representatives, representing Florida and its Space Coast, and chairman of the Space Subcommittee of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Pinky Nelson recalled that the payload specialists assigned to the mission changed several times leading up to flight. “Our original payload specialists were Bob Cenker and Greg Jarvis, so they were training with us,” Pinky said.

It was after Jake Garn flew, and then they decided they had to offer a flight to his counterpart in the House. Don Fuqua couldn’t fly for some reason, and so it filtered down to the chair of the subcommittee, Bill Nelson, and he jumped at the chance. Who could blame him? This was just months before the flight, in the fall or late fall, even. The flight was scheduled in December. So they bumped Greg and his little payload off the mission over onto Dick Scobee’s [51
L
Challenger
] crew and added Bill to our crew. I think our attitude generally at that point was, “Well, that’s just the way the program’s going. We’re flying payload specialists. We’ll make the best of it.”

Pinky Nelson described Representative Nelson as a model payload specialist, working very hard to contribute to the mission. “He had no experience either in aviation or anything technical. He was a lawyer, so he had a huge learning curve, but that didn’t stop him from trying, and I think he knew where his limitations were,” Pinky said. “He wanted to jump in and help a lot of times, but just didn’t have the wherewithal to do it, but worked very hard and was incredibly enthusiastic.”