Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (38 page)

Lind was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the view that it brought tears to his eyes, which he discovered was also a very different experience in orbit.

In space, tears don’t trickle down your cheeks; that’s caused by gravity. In space the tears stay in the eye socket and get deeper and deeper, and after a minute or two I was looking through a half inch of salt water. I thought, “Ooh, this is like a guppy trying to see out of the top of the aquarium.” Simultaneously with
this, there’s this sense of incredible beauty. But then I had a spiritual feeling, because several scriptures popped into my mind. You know, the nineteenth Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” One of the unique Mormon scriptures is, “If you’ve seen the corner of heaven, you’ve seen God moving in his majesty and power.” In the book of Romans, it says that the righteous will be coinheritors with Jesus Christ of all this. I thought, you know, “This must be the way the Lord looks down at the Earth.” Because from space, you can’t see any garbage along the highway. You can’t hear any family fights. You see just the beauty of how the Lord created this Earth, and that was a very spiritual, moving experience, along with the aesthetics, the physical beauty. I’ll always remember that special feeling, besides the technical satisfaction of a successful mission.

STS
-51
F

Crew: Commander Gordon Fullerton, Pilot Roy Bridges, Mission Specialists Story Musgrave, Tony England, and Karl Henize, Payload Specialists Loren Acton and John-David Bartoe

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 29 July 1985

Landed: 6 August 1985

Mission: Third flight of the Spacelab laboratory module

The third Spacelab flight, 51
F
, was commanded by Gordon Fullerton, marking his return to space after serving as pilot of the final demonstration flight,
STS
-4. “It was a great mission,” Fullerton commented.

It really was. Some of the missions were just going up and punching out a satellite, and then they had three days with nothing to do and came back. We had a payload bay absolutely stuffed with telescopes and instruments. We had the instrument-pointing system that had never been flown. We had the idea of letting a satellite go and then flying this precise orbit around it and then going back and getting it. So, all kinds of new things, which took a lot of work to write the checklists for, write the flight plan, and so we spent a year and a half doing that.

After all the preparation, the mission had a rather inauspicious beginning. All three Space Shuttle main engines lit properly on schedule seconds before the scheduled launch, but then one failed before the solid rocket motors were ignited, leading to a launchpad abort.

“Karl Henize was pounding on his leg, really mad because he didn’t get to go,” Fullerton recalled.

I turned around to Karl and said, “We don’t want to go, Karl. There’s something wrong out there, you know.” We were worried then: is this going to . . . mess everything up? It did to some extent, but the ground worked overtime, because everything was sequenced by time because it’s an astronomy thing. Whether we’re on the dark side or the light side, all that had to be rewritten. And it all worked out great. We even made up for the fuel we’d had to dump because of the engine failure on the way up [on our second attempt] and eked out an extra day on it. We were scheduled for seven and made it eight.

Once on orbit, the crew followed the established Spacelab pattern of working twenty-four hours a day, in two, twelve-hour shifts. “I anchored my schedule to overlap transitions, so if something came up on one shift, I could learn about it and carry it over to the next shift, hopefully,” Fullerton recalled.

But I also had to stagger things so I got on the right shift for entry, so I was in some kind of reasonable shape at the end of the mission. At the beginning, too, we had the red team sleeping right up till launch time so that once we got on orbit, the red team was the first one up, and they’d go for it for twelve hours. So it was all that kind of thing, juggling around so that the right people that had to be alert for launch and entry were. We got into that circadian cycle prior to launch. So the last week they didn’t see the other team; I only saw part of one and part of the other myself.

Compared to his first mission on a two-person demonstration flight, the presence of a larger, seven-member crew this time around had downsides as well as benefits.

The pressure is higher when you’re commander—the pressure of making sure that not only you, but somebody else, doesn’t throw the wrong switch. With Jack and I, it was just the two of us. He only had to worry about me, and I him. We could double-check each other. With seven people, there are many opportunities for somebody to blow it, not to say instant disaster, but to use too much fuel or to overheat some system or not have the right ones on and blow the chance to get this data. . . . That’s a lot of other people throwing switches, too.

In addition to the responsibility of supervising the crew’s actions, Fullerton found many other pressures involved in the role of commander.

During the entry, there was the pressure, [of] it’s your fault if this doesn’t come out right. When you’re in the [pilot’s] right seat, it’s not all your fault. The commander bears culpability even if you make a mistake. I’m dwelling on this pressure thing because that really is a strong part of the challenge. I mean, you’re really tired after spaceflight. I think you’re tired mostly because you elevate yourself to this mental high level of awareness that you’re maintaining. Even when you’re trying to sleep, you’re worried about this and that. So it’s not like you’re just lollygagging around and having a good time. You’re always thinking about what’s next and mostly clock watching. Flying in orbit is watching a clock. Everything’s keyed to time, and so you’re worried about missing something, being late.

The mission featured another historic footnote. In the mid-1980s the “Cola Wars” between competing soda brands Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were in full swing, and on this mission the competition moved into space. Each company attempted to find a way to dispense its beverages in microgravity so that astronauts could drink them on the shuttle. Gravity plays an important role in the proper mix of carbonated sodas, and in microgravity the carbonation separates. The goal was to create a device that would ensure the beverages were properly mixed as they were consumed. Ultimately, however, the unique factors of the near-weightless environment limited the success of both attempts.

Astronaut Don Peterson, who had already left the astronaut corps at the time, recalled an incident during the 51
F
flight that demonstrated just how many people it took to make the shuttle successful, including a large number of people who never receive any recognition. “I remember, this . . . was one of the flights that Story Musgrave was on, because he and I were friends and I was kind of watching. During launch, they got an indication from instrumentation that one of the engines on the orbiter was overheating; . . . it was overpressure or overheat, something, and they shut it down,” Peterson remembered.

They were far enough along in launch that they could still get to orbit. Well, then they got the same indication on the second engine. Now, if you shut down a second engine, you’re into an abort, and that’s a pretty messy operation. There was a young woman [who] looked at that. She was the booster control in the
Mission Control Center and this is happening in real time. You’ve [got] to realize, this sucker’s up there burning away and you’ve got people, human beings, on board and all that. She looked at that and said, “I don’t believe we’ve got two engine failures on the same flight. That’s highly improbable. I believe we’ve got an instrumentation failure. Don’t shut the engine down.” Now, in hindsight, that was a wonderful decision, but had she been wrong, the back end of the vehicle would have blown out and killed everybody on board and lost a shuttle.

While the woman’s decision saved the mission, she received little recognition for her split-second call, outside of
NASA
insiders closest to the situation.

Of course, the flight crew and all us people thanked her profusely, and she was recognized, but I don’t think she ever really got any public recognition for that at all. But, I mean, that’s a life-or-death decision under tremendous pressure with . . . human beings and a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar vehicle. And you can’t get under much more pressure than that, and she called it right. What I did to her was terrible. I called her up later. I waited about a month and called her up and said, “I’m Robert Smith, and I’m a reporter with
Life
magazine. I understand that you’re the woman that saved Story Musgrave’s life.” And there was this long, long silence. And finally she said, “Who the hell is this?” Story has a reputation as a lady’s man. So she kind of got a kick out of that, I think.

STS
-61
A

Crew: Commander Hank Hartsfield, Pilot Steven Nagel, Mission Specialists Bonnie Dunbar, James Buchli, and Guion Bluford, Payload Specialists Reinhard Furrer, Ernst Messerschmid, and Wubbo Ockels

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 30 October 1985

Landed: 6 November 1985

Mission: German Spacelab laboratory flight

The fourth Spacelab flight, 61
A
, was yet another mission that introduced new elements to the shuttle program by building on its predecessors, particularly the first Spacelab flight.
STS
-9 had been distinguished from previous shuttle missions in part for carrying the first European crew member, West German astronaut Ulf Merbold. If
STS
-9 had been a further step to
ward international spaceflight, 61
A
was a leap—a mission purchased by and dedicated to the work of a foreign country, West Germany.

Commander Hank Hartsfield recalled explaining to a West German reporter the circumstances of Germany paying to use the German-built Spacelab module. “He said he wants to know how much Germany has to pay the United States to use their Spacelab, because Spacelab was built in Germany. It was built in Bremen. They were very sensitive about it. I think Germany had paid eighty million dollars for that flight. But this reporter was taking a very nationalistic look at it: ‘We built it and now we have to pay to use it.’” Hartsfield explained that what the reporter failed to understand was that, while West Germany had built the modules, it did not own them. The first Spacelab module West Germany built,
LM
1, was given to the United States in exchange for flying Payload Specialist Ulf Merbold and experiments, and the second,
LM
2, was purchased by
NASA
.

According to Hartsfield, working with the Germans in planning the mission was an interesting process, filled with “delicate” negotiations. While he explained that he would stop short of describing
NASA
’s West German partners as “demanding,” they definitely had expectations for what they wanted out of the mission. “They pushed hard to get what they wanted out of the contract that they had signed with the U.S., and they took an approach where they would hang up on words, on what a word meant, in the agreement.”

For example, one of the biggest controversies Hartsfield remembered is what language would be used on the mission.

They wanted to use the German language and talk to the ground crews in Germany and speak German. I opposed that for safety reasons. We can’t have things going on in which my part of the payload crew can’t understand what they’re getting ready to do. It was clearly up front, the operational language will be English. We fought that one hard. We finally cut a deal that in special cases, where there was real urgencies, that we could have another language used, but before any action is taken, it has to be translated into English so that the commander or my other shift operator lead and the payload crew can understand it. . . . There were several times we did use the language during the flight, they asked for German, and it all worked real well. In fact, one case, I think it was national pride. Somebody wanted to talk to Wubbo [Ockels]—he was from the Netherlands—and they wanted to speak Dutch. Somebody insisted they
had this urgent thing, and a friend of mine that spoke Dutch said, “You know what the guy wanted to do? He wanted to say, ‘Hello, Wubbo, how’s it going?’”

Hartsfield recalled a conversation with West German mission manager Hansulrich Steimle, whom he described as “a very interesting fellow” who “liked to philosophize.” During preparation for the mission, the two became friends and would discuss cultural differences between the two countries. “He says, ‘You know, in the United States, when a new policy comes down, the Americans, they look at this and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’ve got to do,’ and they salute and go do it. He says, ‘In Germany, when a new policy comes down, we study it very carefully, and decide how we can continue to do what we’re doing under this new policy.’ I thought, ‘Boy, is that ever true.’ I know some people in the United States that do that, too, you know. I worked with some of them.”

The multinational nature of the crew popped up in various and interesting ways, from the larger issues that led to the “delicate negotiations” to more trivial and potentially amusing incidents, Hartsfield recalled.

We were training in Building 5 [at Johnson Space Center], and once we went into quarantine, . . . we had to use the back door, and they issued keys to us. The keys had two letters and a number on it that identified that particular key. . . . Well, when we issued the keys, Ernst [Messerschmid, one of the German astronauts] came to me, and he was pulling my chain, because he’s a wonderful personality, he said, “Is there any significance to the fact that I got a key with
SS
on it?” [“
SS
” was the abbreviation for the Schutzstaffel, an official Nazi paramilitary organization during World War II.] So we got a big laugh out of it. He did. “No,” I said, “it’s the luck of the draw.”