Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (45 page)

STS
-51
G

Crew: Commander Dan Brandenstein, Pilot John Creighton, Mission Specialists Shannon Lucid, John Fabian, and Steven Nagel, Payload Specialists Patrick Baudry (France) and Prince Sultan Salman Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia)

Orbiter:
Discovery

Launched: 17 June 1985

Landed: 24 June 1985

Mission: Deployment of three communications satellites, test of
SPARTAN
-1

Like so many missions before it, 51
G
succumbed to mission, crew, and payload shuffling. Commander Dan Brandenstein said shuffling like that was just how things were at this point in the shuttle program. There was a lot of scrambling around with missions for a variety of reasons, and the program was still relatively new, Brandenstein said.

That was early ’85. We had only been flying four years. The vehicle hadn’t matured as you see it today. So they were flying technical problems on a vehicle and they’d have to pull one off the pad. That affected shuffling and payloads didn’t come along quite like they figured, and that affected shuffling. So it was sort of a variety of things. . . . Then we got canceled and picked up these four satellites. We had one for Mexico, one for the Arab Sat Consortium, one for
AT
&
T
, and then we had
SPARTAN
, which was run out of Goddard. It was one that we deployed and then came back and recovered two days later. So it was a lot of mission planning changed and we had a couple new crew people that we had to integrate into the crew and all that.

With three satellites to deploy into orbit, the 51
G
crew deployed one satellite a day for the first three days on orbit. “Shannon and I had the lead
on those deployments and J. O. Creighton was flying the orbiter, so he was pointing it in the right directions and so forth,” recalled Mission Specialist John Fabian. “Brandenstein was making sure that everybody was doing the right things. That’s what a commander is supposed to do. And Sultan was taking pictures for his satellite. I mean, it was a fairly routine operation.”

The
SPARTAN
proved to be a little more challenging. The
SPARTAN
spacecraft were a series of experiments carried up by the Space Shuttle. The program was based on the idea of a simple, low-cost platform that could be deployed from the Space Shuttle for a two- to three-day flight. The satellite would then be recovered and returned to Earth.

“It was a much simpler satellite,” Fabian said, “from the crew’s perspective, than the
SPAS
-01 [a German satellite that Fabian released and recaptured using the robotic arm on
STS
-7] because the
SPAS
-01, we could maneuver it. It had experiments on it that we could operate, had cameras on it that we could run. The
SPARTAN
, which was a navy satellite, we simply released it, let it go about its business, and then later went back and got it.”

Shannon Lucid did the release, and two days later Fabian did the recapture. Deployment was routine, Fabian said. “At least it appeared to be,” explained Fabian. “When we left it, it was in the proper attitude. It was an x-ray astronomy telescope, and while we were gone, it took images of a black hole, which is kind of cool stuff. That’s kind of sexy.”

But when the orbiter came back to retrieve it, Fabian said, the satellite was out of attitude. The grapple fixture was in the wrong position for the shuttle’s arm to be able to easily grab it.

One idea was to fly an out-of-plane maneuver, flying the shuttle around the satellite, but the crew hadn’t practiced anything like that. Fabian noted,

Dan’s a very capable pilot, and I’m sure that he could have done that, but it turns out that perhaps an easier way would be to fly the satellite in much closer to the shuttle, get it essentially down almost into the cargo bay, and then reach over the top with the arm and grab it from the top, and that’s what we elected to do.

Of course, we told the ground what was going on, that it was out of attitude, and they worried, but there wasn’t much they could do—they couldn’t put it in attitude—so they concurred with the plan, and that’s what we executed.

Fabian said it felt good to benefit from all of the time spent in the simulators with the robotic arm. Training for contingency situations contribut
ed greatly to the crew’s knowledge of the arm’s capabilities and to the successful retrieval, he said.

The seven-person crew for this mission, including two payload specialists and representing three different nationalities, had a unique set of challenges because of those factors, said Fabian, but in general the crew got along well and had a positive experience.

We were told not to tell any camel jokes when Sultan showed up, and the first thing he did when he walked through the door was to say, “I left my camel outside.” So much for the public affairs part of the thing. These just were not issues. They really were not issues. Patrick flew a little bit of French food and didn’t eat the same diet that we ate. Sultan did. Patrick flew some small bottles of wine that were never opened, but the press worried about whether or not they had been. Patrick flew as a Frenchman and enjoyed it, I think.

Fabian and Nagel were assigned to support Baudry and Sultan with any help they needed on their experiments. “Patrick was doing echocardiographs,” Fabian said, “and he did those on himself, and he did them on Sultan, and I think he did them on one or two of the
NASA
crew members, and frankly, I’ve forgotten whether he did one on me or not. But he was using a French instrument with a French protocol, and it was the principal thing that he was doing in flight, was to do these French medical experiments.”

Sultan’s primary role was to observe, Fabian explained.

We were flying $130 million worth of satellites for the Arab League. But he also had some experiments, and he was tasked to take pictures, particularly over Saudi Arabia, which of course would be very valuable when he got home. People would be very interested in seeing that. But they didn’t need a lot of support. They didn’t need a lot of help. We had to worry a bit about making sure that they were fed and making sure that they knew how to use the toilet and making sure that they understood the safety precautions that were there and so forth. And, you know, probably more than half of what our role and responsibility was with regard to the two. Other than that, it was to make sure they had film when they needed it in the cameras and help them for setup if they needed some setup for video or something of that type and to participate in their experiments to the degree that it was deemed necessary.

Even at this point, the payload specialist classification was still very new and crew members were still figuring out exactly how to act toward each other, and that resulted in a change being made to the orbiter. “People weren’t really sure how these folks were going to react,” Fabian recalled. “We put a lock on the door of the side hatch. It was installed when we got into orbit so that the door could not be opened from the inside and commit hari-kari, kill the whole crew. That was not because of anybody we had on our flight but because of a concern about someone who had flown before.”

Fabian expressed concern over how the agency handled safety during this era of the shuttle program. On this flight, for example, Fabian said the
ARABSAT
never passed a safety review. “It failed every one of its safety reviews,” Fabian said.

The crew recommended that it not be flown, the flight controllers recommended that it not be flown, and the safety office recommended that it not be flown, but
NASA
management decided to fly it. This was an unhealthy environment within the agency. We were taking risks that we shouldn’t have been taking. We were shoving people onto the crews late in the process so they were never fully integrated into the operation of the shuttle. And there was a mentality that we were simply filling another 747 with people and having it take off from Chicago to Los Angeles, and this is not that kind of vehicle. But that’s the way it was being treated at that time.

It was very disappointing to a lot of people, a lot of people at the agency, to see management decide to fly this satellite. But if they hadn’t flown the satellite, you see, political embarrassment, what are we going to do with the Saudi prince, what about the French astronaut, what’s the French government going to have to say about us saying that we can’t fly their satellite on the shuttle, what will be the impact downstream of other commercial ventures that we want to do with the shuttle? Well, of course, after
Challenger
, the commercial all went away, and it was a dead-end street anyhow, but we didn’t know it at the time.

12.

The Golden Age

How different it was in those early years of shuttle, when we were going to fly once a month at least. That was going to be routine, and we were going to revolutionize space and discover these amazing things, and we still will, but we were just naive, thinking it was going to happen the next year, and not the next decade or the next generation. So there was a lot of naiveté, and maybe it was just us or maybe it was just me, but that was the big change. It’s a little sad that that had to happen, but that’s just maturing the industry, I guess.

—Astronaut Mike Lounge

STS
-51
I

Crew: Commander Joe Engle, Pilot Dick Covey, Mission Specialists Ox van Hoften, Mike Lounge, and Bill Fisher

Orbiter:
Discovery

Launched: 27 August 1985

Landed: 3 September 1985

Mission: Deployment of three satellites; retrieval, repair, and redeployment of
SYNCOM
IV
-3

Like the 51
A
mission, which recovered two satellites that had previously failed to deploy, 51
I
included the repair of a malfunctioning satellite from a previous mission, 51
D
. The satellite,
SYNCOM
IV
-3, had failed to activate properly after deployment. Mike Lounge recalled that he and fellow 51
I
mission specialist Ox van Hoften were together when they heard about the
SYNCOM
failure. The satellite was fine; the failure was a power switch on the computer. “We, essentially
on the back of an envelope, said, well, what’s the mass properties of this thing? Could it be handled by some sort of handling device by hand? Attached to the robot arm? And then if we had to push it away, what kind of forces would we have to push on it to make it stable, and is that a reasonable thing to do? So we calculated a twenty- or thirty-pound push would be enough.”

The calculations were right on. Lounge said computer simulations calculated a push of 27.36 pounds would be needed. Then the question was whether the rescue mission was even feasible. After looking into the challenges further, Lounge and van Hoften believed it was and encouraged their commander to seek approval for his crew to do the job. Joe Engle shepherded the request through center management and up to
NASA
headquarters and got the go-ahead for the recovery. Explained Lounge, “The key to the success of that mission and being able to do that was
NASA
was so busy flying shuttle missions that year that nobody was paying attention. If we’d had more attention, there’d have been a hundred people telling us why it wouldn’t work and it’s too much risk. But fortunately, there was a twelve-month period we flew ten missions; we were one of those.”

Discussions about the feasibility of the
SYNCOM
recovery naturally led to comparisons with an earlier flight. One of the questions, recalled 51
I
pilot Dick Covey, was, would the astronauts be able to stop the rotation of the spacecraft? Covey said crewmate Ox van Hoften drew the solution on the back of a piece of paper.

He says, “It’s only going to take this much force to stop the rotation, so that’s not an issue.” Then [they] said, “Well, you know, does anybody think that we could have a person stop the rotation and do that?” Ox says, “Well, here. Here’s me,” and he draws this big guy, and he says, “Here’s the
SYNCOM
.” He draws a little guy, and he says, “Here’s Joe Allen, and there’s a
PALAPA
[satellite]. So if he can grab that one, then I can grab this one.” We said, “Okay, yes.” It was the “big astronaut, little astronaut” approach to things.

For Commander Engle, this mission would be very different from
STS
-2, on which he also served as commander. Engle described his second shuttle flight as less demanding than his first; the biggest difference between the two flights, he said, was that on his second mission—and
NASA
’s twentieth—there were more people there to help out.

We had only a crew of two on
STS
-2, and one of the lessons we learned from those first four orbital flight tests was that the shuttle—the orbiter itself—probably represents more of a workload than should be put onto a crew of two. It’s just too demanding as far as configuring all of the systems and switches, circuit breakers. There are over fifteen hundred switches and circuit breakers that potentially have to be configured during flight, and some of those are in fairly time-critical times. . . . Some of them are on the mid-deck and some are on the flight deck, so you’re going back and forth and around. Having more people on board really reduces the workload of actually flying the vehicle.

In flight, Engle discovered that having more crew to do the work meant more time personally to look out the window at Earth. “It’s a very, very inspiring experience to see how thin, how delicate the atmosphere is, how beautiful the Earth is, really, what a beautiful piece of work it is, and to see the features go by,” Engle described.