SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA STS-4

[Music] flight uh four is the last of our flight test programs this shot of the underside of the vehicle stacked on the pad one of the most significant things at this point is that we turn this vehicle around from one flight to the next in something on the order of 3 months that kind of a turnaround rate was done in spite of the fact that we had all of the scrutiny and all of the thoroughness of a flight test program and yet that same rate will carry us through the Ops era for the next couple of years you see a couple of cats in a pressure suit this is also the last time that you'll see anybody wearing a pressure suit or using ejection seats from now on we're going to be going in church s environments come out to the Launchpad one of the things we did here was to as Hank mentions we get ignition on time much less than a second off the plan trajectory here you see the engines coming up to speed the engines are controlled in the final count by the onboard computers we verify that we have good main engines prior to ignition of the solids which commits you to flight just prior to this we had uh loaded the payload load on the pad which is another first for this part of our our mission and that's going to be one of the ways we streamline the turnaround time for future operations what you're watching now are pictures that show the umbilicals coming away from the tanks these are the ones that are used to keep the tanks topped off keep them full and as a way of controlling the vening here the spacecraft is lifting off going past the tower throughout this part of the ride from this point on you're looking out uh Hank window as we do our roll down range this is the vehicle turning it launches with its tail to the South and then we roll to pick up whatever launch esouth we need in our case a 28 and 1 half degree inclination orbit throughout this part of the mission I was very impressed that the ride on the shuttle is much like it was in the Saturn one of the major advantages or or differences I would say is that you have more acceleration getting away from in the pad and the vibration levels are reduced we see the vehicle here going through approximately March one you'll notice that the shock waves start to build up around the nose of the vehicle and the tanks you can see that quite vividly we're somewhere over 20,000 ft now and uh speeds building very rapidly this is the region of Maximum Dynamic pressure here's a view taken from the Pilot's window as we pop through the atmosphere it's very dramatic as you get out of the atmosphere and the sky begins to turn dark very rapidly 8 and 1/2 minutes from liftoff we're some 58 nautical miles high and uh traveling at just under 26,000 ft per second here's a view taken in orbit as we do one of the MS Burns that I described to you earlier we did two of these Burns to get into the 130 M orbit two more to Jack the altitude up 160 then a fifth one to adjust the entry roll phasing here's a brief look at the operation of the continuous flow electroforesis system this is a prime example of an experiment or an operation that can only be performed in Zerg efficiently it must have the space environment the principle of operation is that biological materials assume their own inherent charge in the presence of an electric field and that serves as a basis for separating these materials this can only be done now in the laboratory and only very small quantities of of biological materials that can be used in the treatment of disease can be separated in this fashion it could be done with a static device but to increase the yields you need Continuous Flow the principle being to put the biological materials in solution pass them between the electrodes of an electric field the the molecules with a larger charge would then have the largest lateral displace displacement in the field as the flow proceeded now the big enemy of doing this on Earth is gravity gravity limits how much or how concentrated the solution is with the materials you're trying to separate because the solution must keep it in must hold it up and in gravity uh you get the concentration too high won't hold it gravity also plays a part in convection as the fluid is heated by the electric field convection current set up which destroy the purity of the sample being gathered and also affects the quantity that you can uh separate in the space environment you can increase the yield several hundred times over what you can do on Earth and this is is extremely important because then this allows us to to generate clinical quantities rather than just experimental quantities the big factor here is the cost to produce the same amount of material on Earth as we can produce in orbit under a comparable period of time would cost a fortune so space use of this type of device is going to reduce the cost and make the materials available this is the first of six flights flying this device under a joint agreement between NASA and the contractor our first results show that this device worked very well and the results are very promising in the future we may very well have factories producing biological materials using this same technique and again I say the importance is that it can only be done in a space environment where there's no gravity or very little gravity device is run little micro computer here we see the pilot uh making an input into that computer here's a shot of an upfire in Jet and side firing Jets this is the kind of firing we took the data on as I told you with a plume survey there's one of the small verer Jets firing we took that picture from the elbow camera on the RMS the RMS was utilized in in two days of our flight the RMS is a sophisticated device it works very much like your own arm in which the brain computes the drive rates for the different joints to make the arm do what you want it to do in the same fashion the computer computes the rates with which to drive the arm here we see an example of how you can roll a payload about its own longitudinal axis yet not make it translate you can do the same thing in similar fashion by causing the payload to go up and down with respect to the Orbiter or we can make the payload go back and forth parallel to the own axis as you see here without rotating the payload so it's a very versal and useful too this is a an example of dawning the lower torso of a space suit I'm wearing a liquid cooled garment that provides Cooling when you're outside the pictures are taken inside an airlock that's in the back of the of the spacecraft cabin on the mid deck the airlock is something we've never had before it allows you to go inside and the hatch you're looking at is an exit into the payload Bay where you have the vacuum of space inside you can go in in a shirt sleeve environment Dawn the suit check it out and then translate outside without having to depress the major part of the cabin the purpose for this exercise in sts4 was to prove that we had good Mobility inside the airlock and you've just seen me put my feet in a set of stirups that are going to Anchor my feet so that I can simulate opening the hatching of the payload Bay this was in preparation for sts5 where two crew members will come inside close off from the cabin depress the air lock and go outside to perform an Eva here's one of the Prime reasons we go into space not to have fun but the presence of zero gravity imagine the applications of this we've already talked about one the seus in which we use the lack of gravity to do something very useful in in technology and production but you could also use this to say process materials in which it's important that the materials not touch a container with which that it's in lack of gravity also Al has some disadvantages in that you must somehow anchor yourself if you want to work in space here the kman puts his toes under the edges of the locker and notice he has quite a bit of fre Freedom then to move about without coming loose and floating around as you saw earlier another device we evaluated was this little foot Loops that he put his foot in just a little Loop hooks his foot under and then he's able to make some movements a third device we looked at are these little sandals with suction cups on the bottom we evaluated this uh for several days during the flight and found them to be uh very useful uh we probably still need to do a little more development on them but the concept concept is sound one of the devices we like the most on flight for improving morale was a treadmill it works just Exercise Works in space just like it does on on Earth clears your thoughts and makes you ready to charge again we had a harness that attached the lower torso and those bung G cords there applied a force equal to the body weight so your legs were seeing the same forces as they would see it in one g on the surface of the Earth we also had a electronic device to run off a battery you could attach to your earlobe was also attach the treadmill you could tell what your heart rate was uh how far you'd gone how long you'd been running this was a a a real morale builder for our flight to be able to use this one of the things we took a look at in our operational evaluation was some revised packaging of the food system in order to save weight and space on the spacecraft we have gone to dehydrating the food putting it in some plastic containers now Hank is on the left side of the picture putting water in to hydrate it uh you mix it up since most food tastes better if it's warm or if it's cold rather than ambient we have this uh aluminum thing looks like a suitcase it's actually a little portable heater put the food that has to be warmed in there and then we'll put it off to the side for uh 15 or 20 minutes and let it warm up at the same time we had a little refrigerator which we carried for the first time in this flight then we could put uh Beverages and things in there that would be Co cooled and uh you put it all together so that you have a hot meal with cool Beverages and it goes a long ways towards making the food a lot more flavorful and just as it does on Earth having a good meal does a lot to bring up morale and when you're working 15 16 hour days that's important this is a picture taken with a television camera in the moonlit night now the little dots you see off on the right side of the picture are stars the white area you see in the center and left is the earth that's a cloud cover and the white line that you see off to the top at first looks like the Earth's Horizon however we noticed some stars that went right through the Horizon and came down on the earth and uh before admitting we lost our marbles we observed it some more and determined that no what we're really seeing is the top of the Earth's atmosphere that's about 90 km up and that's one of the reasons that scientists would like to take their telescopes outside into space so that they can avoid having to look through that layer and you can see two little stars in the top left corner of the picture that are just now about to go down and penetrate and they're hidden by the Earth that shows you that that really is the Earth's limb this is a picture taken at Sunset and as I keep pointing out the pictures that we see are never as Vivid as what you see in the real world we found the the colors to be brilliant Reds and blues and they changed with latitude and longitude as you go around the earth I think it gives you a chance to to observe things I think you can see the amount of aerosol like dust and volcanic ash that's in the atmosphere as it shows up and changes the colors this is a picture taken at Hypersonic speed with a telescope on the California coast and I think that's an illustration of the Precision with which our system both the the space spacecraft and the ground had been able to pull off an entry the entry was uh very similar to what we've had in the past the one difference between this and the ballistic approaches is that now you have time to experience the transition between zg and 1G here's a picture taken out of the Commander's window as he turns left coming around on the lake bed in the center right part of the window is the runway that was used on the lake bed for landing sts1 and two we're turning on around and coming in towards the hard surface Runway at the Edwards Air Force Base I think it's uh rather significant that in spite of the fact that pilot may experience a certain amount of vertigo and the transition to 1G weight effects but in spite of all that the system with its information and the training program we have allows you to make a landing that looks like this which is perfectly routine we've just passed over the aim point we're pulling up the nose and here's where the gear comes comes down now you can see the runway approaching and from this point on you just sort of hold everything steady as you come up check that the gear is down it's always a good plan next thing you do is you come up on the runway and if you look closely I think you can see touchdown as it occurs right about there here's an outside view of the same thing Chase plane over on the left side of the screen the gear is coming down and this thing flies just as solid as a rock approaching the overrun now it'll touch down about 1,000 ft down the runway at about 195 knots about this point Hank calls out that we have 185 and it's time to drop the nose you can see the elevator is wiggling as it controls the rate of the nose coming down speed brakes are open and now we perform a braking test where we try to hold about 9t per second deceleration I think the fact that we can go out and do all of this in public is a real tribute to our entire system and at the end of the day probably the most spectacular part is the flight of Challenger on his way to join a fleet we're no longer going to be a ones ship Airline [Applause]