Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (41 page)

STS
-41
D

Crew: Commander Hank Hartsfield, Pilot Michael Coats, Mission Specialists Judy Resnik, Steven Hawley, and Mike Mullane, Payload Specialist Charles Walker

Orbiter:
Discovery

Launched: 30 August 1984

Landed: 5 September 1984

Mission: Deployment of three satellites

The year after Lichtenberg and Merbold’s flight, the first commercial payload specialist, Charlie Walker, flew as a member of the 41
D
crew. Commanded by Hank Hartsfield, 41
D
deployed three satellites and tested the use of a giant solar wing. Walker was assigned to the flight to run the Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System (
CFES
), an apparatus from the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, for which Walker was a test engineer. The system used electrophoresis, which is the process of separating and purifying biological cells and proteins.

“What they were producing with that was erythropoietin,” Hartsfield recalled. “It’s a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells. Ortho Pharmaceuticals was the primary contractor with MacDac to build this thing. And
CFES
was kind of a test version of it. . . . The idea was, which was a good one, say you were going to have planned surgery, they could inject that hormone into you prior to the surgery, some time period, I don’t know how long it would take, but your body would produce more red blood cells, and then you wouldn’t need transfusions. So it was a good idea.”

Prior to being assigned a flight of his own, Walker was responsible for training
NASA
astronaut crews in the operation of the
CFES
payload on the
STS
-4,
STS
-6,
STS
-7, and
STS
-8 shuttle flights during 1982 and 1983. He flew with the
CFES
equipment as a crew member on 41
D
, 51
D
, and 61
B
.

The initial agreement between McDonnell Douglas and
NASA
called for six proof-of-concept flights of the
CFES
device, which was originally to be flown aboard Spacelab. But according to Walker, slips in the launch of Spacelab caused McDonnell Douglas and
NASA
to renegotiate for six flights on board the Space Shuttle mid-deck.

The agreement was that
NASA
would provide the launch and McDonnell Douglas would provide the equipment and testing processes. “
NASA
, in the body of the Marshall Space Flight Center Materials Lab folks, had the opportunity, at no expense to them other than the preparation of samples and then the collection and the analysis of it later in their own laboratories upon return home, to use a device produced at the expense of the private sector for private-sector research, but, again, allowing
NASA
the right to use it for up to a third of the time in orbit in exchange for the opportunity to have it there in orbit aboard shuttle,” Walker explained.

After the first flight of the
CFES
device, on
STS
-4, Walker said McDonnell Douglas felt that it had demonstrated enough success in the proof of concept test to ask to fly its own astronaut to run its device. “From our standpoint, we had proven that we could predict adequately for production processing what we needed to know,” Walker said.

We briefed on that, and we advised the Space Shuttle program management what we wanted to do for the next flight; got that approved through appropriate processes, and at the same time—I can remember, I was in a meeting in which Jim Rose [McDonnell Douglas manager] and I briefed Glynn Lunney [shuttle program manager] in Glynn’s office in Building 1 [at
JSC
], and Jim told me, going down, he said, “I just want to tell you, as we walk into this meeting if I get an indication from Glynn that he’s happy with the results, too, from the
NASA
side, I’m going to ask for a payload specialist opportunity.” He said, ”Are you okay with that?” And I said, “You know I’m okay with that.”

That was exactly what happened, Walker recalled. Lunney indicated that
NASA
was pleased with the results, so Rose pressed ahead.

Jim Rose said, “We want to ask for the opportunity to negotiate for one more thing.” And basically it went something like, “You know, Glynn, the astronauts that we’re training, Hank’s a great individual, obviously a great test pilot, a good engineer, but Hank doesn’t know this electrophoresis stuff, and the other astronauts, mission specialists that we’re going to train, they’re going to be able just to spend a little bit of their time working with our device. They’ve got lots of other things to do. That’s the mandate for the mission specialist. We really would learn the most we possibly can and more than we can do with a mission specialist if we get the opportunity to have a payload specialist devoted specifically to the electrophoresis device and its research and development activities during a flight.”

As I remember it, Glynn chewed on his cigar a little bit—that’s when you [could] smoke in the office—chewed on his cigar a little bit and said something like, “Well, we’ve been wanting to move into this payload specialist thing, so if you’ve got somebody that is qualified, can meet all the astronaut selection criteria, put in the application. Let’s do it.” . . . I think Glynn said something like, “Do you have somebody in mind?” Jim turned to me and looked at me, and Jim said something like, “You’re looking at him.” Glynn said, “You, huh?” And I said, “Yes, it’s me. I’ll be the man.”

Walker was added to the crew for 41
D
in late May 1983. Within a few days of being added, Walker, who was residing in St. Louis at the time, went down to Johnson Space Center to officially meet the crew, some of whom he knew from the training he had provided for previous missions, and to begin working out a training schedule. The training syllabus was based loosely on the training developed for science payload specialists on Spacelab missions and was to be a foundation for future commercial payload specialists. The training syllabus was the result of ongoing negotiations between Walker, his employers, and various stakeholders at
NASA
. Walker enjoyed the training and felt it was important. Unlike other astronauts, however, for whom mission training was their job, training took Walker away from his day-job duties in St. Louis, so while his employers wanted him trained, they also wanted him available there when it wasn’t necessary for him to be in Houston.
NASA
also wanted to make sure he received all the training needed to fly safely but didn’t want to invest unnecessary time and resources that were needed for career astronauts.

Walker explained that the payload specialist training was a shorter, condensed version of the career astronaut training. Initially, he said, that condensed training still involved at least an overview of a wide variety of systems. “Hank Hartsfield had me operating the remote manipulator system, the
RMS
, in the trainer, and that went on for a few weeks. I was training with the crew. I was working the
RMS
in the simulator, and I knew the system, I knew how to work it, even though I was not in the flight plan to deploy any of the satellites or to have to use the
RMS
, as might conditionally be the case. I don’t think on [41
D
] we had any required use of the
RMS
, but we had as a contingent the operation of it.”

Later, however, management came back and decided that Walker didn’t need to be trained on equipment he wasn’t going to use. There was no need, they argued, to invest valuable time and resources training payload specialists on things they wouldn’t be doing. Walker said that regardless of the actual need for the additional training, he felt like it had substantial benefits for the mission. “My comments were that I think this is a good thing,” he said. “Let the payload specialist do some of this, too. He or she is going to feel like more of a cohesive part of the crew. It’s just a good psychological thing, even though you don’t need their hands to especially do that.”

The most important and most time-consuming part of preparing for a mission was for payload specialists to gel with the crew, Walker said. “In other words, the crew’s getting to know me, and me getting to know my fellow crewmates for each flight, so that we knew, at least to a significant degree, each other’s characteristics, and we could work together and feel good working together and flying together as a team.”

Walker spent, on average, about two weeks each month training at
JSC
during the nine months leading up to the flight. He said Hartsfield wanted to integrate him with the crew as closely possible, and in addition to official training sessions, the commander included him in the occasional social event as well. “I was invited to more than one dinner or activity at Hank’s house and some of the other homes of the astronauts—the crew as well as others—but it wasn’t as close a relationship as was the case between the career astronauts and families down there that were obviously living and working at each other’s elbows day in and day out.”

Hartsfield said he felt so strongly that Walker should be an integral part of the crew that he requested Walker’s name be on the patch circle with the rest of the crew. “[Payload specialists’] flight assignments changed a lot,” Hartsfield said. “Some of the flights had as many as three different people assigned at one time or another, and they had to keep changing their patches. So to save money, they put a ribbon at the bottom with the payload specialist on it, so they wouldn’t have to change the whole patch. But when Charlie flew, I had sold George Abbey on this. ‘He’s part of the crew, you know. Put his name on the patch with the rest of us.’”

Admittedly prejudiced, Hartsfield described the 41
D
crew as one of the best crews ever put together. “As the commander, I just sort of had to stay out of their way,” he said. “I was reminded of that two-billed hat, you know, that says, ‘I’m their leader. Which way did they go?’”

The addition of payload specialists brought a new dynamic to spaceflight and the astronaut corps. Walker’s crewmate Mike Mullane said several astronauts, including himself, had viewed payload specialists as outsiders and as competitors for flight assignments. “There was some friction there, I think, that we felt like, ‘Hey, why isn’t a mission specialist doing this experiment,’” said Mullane. “But I’m mature enough now, and particularly after you get your one mission under the belt, you become a little more tolerant of the outsiders.”

28.
The crew of
STS
-41
D
. Courtesy
NASA
.

Walker said there were only a few individuals in the agency from whom he got the impression that he and the other payload specialists were considered outsiders. “I was there as a working passenger. I wasn’t a full-fledged crew member, and I knew that going in, and I took no real exception to that,” Walker said. “Occasionally there were circumstances in which it was made clear to me that ‘You’re not one of us. You’re along for the ride, and you’ve got a job to do.’ But it was only a few individuals, some in the Astronaut Office, others outside the Astronaut Office, from whom I got that impression.”

One clear distinction between the career astronauts and the payload specialists was the locations of their offices. At Johnson Space Center, the payload specialist office was in Building 39, and the Astronaut Office was in Building 4. According to Walker, “It was made clear to us from the beginning that they didn’t expect to see us over on the fourth floor in Building 4 except for scheduled meetings. We were just outsiders who would become crew members for a short period of time and would train mostly on our own, but when there was necessary crew combined training, certainly we would be there.”

Walker said he was fine with that arrangement and was just grateful for the opportunity, both professionally and personally. “There was no belligerence, really, expressed openly, and no offense on my part taken,” Walker said.

I really saw my role and my place in this, this was a great adventure, and more than an adventure, it’s a great challenge, both to people as well as to technical systems. I think I know my limitations, and I know that I’m not nearly as qualified to make critical and rapid decisions in some of these flight environment circumstances, as the men and women that have been selected by the agency through grueling processes, to do just exactly that. . . . I was getting a great opportunity, I felt, both for the company that was my employer, for the commercial as well as the prospective societal benefits from the work that we were proposing to do through and with the Space Shuttle. And certainly, certainly a tremendous personal opportunity for me, and I was just happy to be there.

The crew went out to launch on 26 June 1984, and everything was going smoothly until the clock reached four seconds. “The engines had already started to come up, and then they just shut down,” Hartsfield said. “We looked at the countdown clock on the onboard computer display, and it was stopped at four seconds. We were really checking to see if there was anything out of
the ordinary. We were going to make sure that things were still okay. There was a good moment of tension there, and Hawley broke the tension. As soon as we looked at everything and everything was okay, Steve said, ‘Gee, I kind of thought we’d be a little higher at
MECO
[main engine cutoff].’”