STS-26: Postflight Press Conference

welcome to the Johnson Space Center for the STS 26 postflight crew press conference very pleased to introduce Discovery crew led by Captain Rick Halal thanks for coming here today we sure enjoyed that mission and we were very pleased to see from the smiles on people's faces when we got back here that just about everybody did I think it was a great shot in the arm for the agency and as best second can determine it was also a good one for the country we're sure pleased to be the most uh I guess the most visible part of that great team effort that involved tens of thousands of people and uh to start we'd like to acknowledge publicly how much we appreciated uh all the work that went into making this Mission such a success and uh they're just many many many thousands of people out there that that put their hearts into it and it's very gratifying to come back with uh being able to say that the mission was successful as it was of course uh my crew here with me at the table today had dick coving Dave hmmer Mike lounge and Pinky Nelson uh we'd like to get right into the uh to the movie so Jeff we can turn down the house lights we'll go into the movie this is what I really was all about um here is the ending of a of a beautiful Mission and bringing the United States back into the man space flight program and we are very proud to represent the country and to to be part of the team here we are at suup the morning before we launch we really didn't think we were going to go we knew that the winds were such that our pre-program profile might cause some problems with the structure but we said well we'll suit up anyhow and who knows maybe the winds will get better uh the there were a large number of folks down there at the cape here are some of them uh we certainly appreciated and I think we could almost palpably feel the support that we had took a great effort on the part of the mission management team to come to all the right decisions which allowed us to uh launch on this day and then some very excellent execution of the uh flow and the count by the launch control team to get us off uh on the day that we said we were going to and and not too long after the time we said we were going to go no matter how many times uh you ride this rocket you're always a bit taken back by the ignition of the solid rocket Motors it's quite a ride uh as you can expect uh this is shown in half speed which makes it take a lot longer than what it really did but maybe that's kind of what was going through our minds as we rode through first stage it seemed like it took a lot longer than it ever did in training uh we understand there were a lot of very excited people on the ground when the we got off the pad uh and then they reemphasized their excitement once we got to the two-minute point and the solid rocket boosters uh separated obviously the first uh part of the flight the the ride on the solid rocket Motors was a very critical one for this Mission uh much of the redesign effort that had gone into the space shuttle program had been centered around those boosters and all indications are to date that those boosters performed exceptionally well we're interested in uh the followup tear down of the boosters to find out if indeed there are any other uh deficiencies that we need to look at here you see one of the 65 sunrises that we saw during the 4-day mission here we have the payload bay doors open and that's the first thing we did uh once safely in orbit and got busy preparing the uh tdrs satellite uh for its deployment uh from the payload Bay there's Rick at the Commander's uh seat reading a check list talking to the ground there on the handheld microphone dick going through his checklist making sure the Orbiter is uh go for deployment making sure everything was ready Dave helmer's back at the uh payload station uh checking the CRT making sure all the parameters are okay and uh and controlling the switches that released the uh mechanisms that hold the payload in the payload Bay it's tilted up here at about 50° uh prior to deployment from the payload Bay uh the tdrs tracking and data realiz satellite there the black shape with the booster rocket underneath it uh here I am at the panel on the a flight deck uh that had all the switch controls for the Tilt up mechanism the ordinance arming functions and the actual switch that you throw to phro pyro fire pyrotechnic devices that cause the payload to separate from its structure uh support structure when you do that when I did that pushup push off Springs activate and push that whole 20 ton stack slowly out of the payload Bay at about a half a foot per second the whole sequence worked as it was advertised that had two solid rocket Burns that got it to geosynchronous Al altitude which was its Target within a very precise uh window here's pinky taking a documentation of the deploy and Rick performing the maneuver to back away from the satellite about 1 minute after deployment we've heard that the checkout of the satellite is going extremely well it's about onethird of the way into the checkout right now in fact this afternoon it's maneuver is going to be uh completed to stop the drift to the west and there there it will be checked out some more uh all the systems seem to be go right now including the Ku band antenna a marvelously complex machine that requires coordination of a lot of different organizations to make it work uh from the booster through the uh the tedris upper stage and the flight controllers uh well with the satellite out we got busy on the number of mid deck experiments we had this is the protein crystal growth where uh we're growing crystals for biome medical samples uh research ring ranging from uh aids to uh cancer research and a lot in between a pretty complex experiment another experiment we carried was a student experiment uh sponsored by Mr Bruce Lloyd the idea here was to heat up some titanium wires that are encapsulated in these vacuum tubes uh beyond their uh phase transition point to see if on resolidifying the crystal structure is different than might be obtained on Earth uh the goal being to develop stronger and more pure samples of that titanium we carried two different student experiments on board this is the second one that grew some crystals of lead acetate crystals that grow to a fairly large size in a short time uh was activated by mixing uh two fluids together and then right before our eyes we could watch these huge crystals grow they will be analyzed once they got back on the ground to see if there are any differences between those and and Earthbound ones here I'm setting up a phase partitioning experiment phase partitioning is a method for separating biomedical cells uh by using two different types of liquids we had a container with 18 chambers that we uh documented the demixing characteristics of the different types of of uh liquids another engineering evaluation or test that we did was taking pictures of the Earth's limb at Sun sunrise and sunset to uh measure exactly what the brightness was so that sensors could be built for future Satellites after the primary payload had been deployed and we uh spent much of our time uh accomplishing Earth observation photography now during the course of our mission we took over 18800 uh 70 mm photographs of the earth we also had about 4,000 ft of 16 mm film that we took much of which was out the window as you see here coming across the Middle East U this is always a very important part of our flights to the crew members because we not only get to look out the window but we get to document what we see turns out that during the course of our flight it was an unusually uh clear period across the Northern Hemisphere according to those people that are used to looking at space photography and they're very excited about the photographs that we took uh and they've even said that there are things that we've taken pictures of that they haven't seen before or it's been a long time since they've had a good photograph of them this data that comes the data that comes from these photographs is used by a wide spectrum of people uh geologists uh oceanographers people who study agricultural Trends such as uh the uh burning of the the uh equatorial jungles uh and people who look at our atmosphere and try to ascertain changes in the atmosphere uh those people are quite excited about what we what we've seen on these photographs as they have been on previous space flights this is a an exceptionally good Passover the uh Hawaiian Islands we had many opportunities to photograph Hawaii uh primarily because uh of the lighting and and the time of day that we launched uh we probably saw more of it than we did of the other parts of the United States the equipment that we use is primarily for Earth observations is a Hasselblad 70 mm camera which you saw Mike there with 50 100 and 250 mm lenses uh volcanology is one of the areas that we're always interested in uh photographing from space this is a pass over to Canary Islands off of the west coast of Africa uh they happen to be very clear many of the days that we passed over them we also had several different attitudes that we had the Orbiter in which led us get uh this particular uh one of those attitudes let's get this pass over the Himalayan Mountains looking up into China uh this was when the Orbiter nose was pointed to the South here's a shot of meal time uh meals are always enjoyable uh as a social event uh we play with our food a little bit like we're supposed to uh and just get a chance to discuss what's gone on that day and what's planned for the next day here's a target practice with an M&M that's out there in the middle and uh I think it's a bullseye it must have been a fluke because uh the next shot misses by 3 in here we do carry up with us some photographs of our families you see them on the lockers to the left we also during a period during one day take some pictures next to some stickers from our almaa and so on but you can see we keep a pretty clean cabin in the back you can see the sleep stations that bike and I use had our own fish bowl here we had eaten most of the fish by this time yes sometimes you've got to unwind the commander a little bit this was entry day you see us wearing the gray uh underwear that goes under the orange suits uh we were inspired I was inspired to try a little pommel horse routine uh using the treadmill there I didn't find this so hard at all I don't know why why it's such a wasn't that pretty either Mike however the judges did vote and gave they were fairly generous the zero g Olympics we did want to communicate particularly to the youth uh of the country that we we really this space is a fun place and even though we went through a terrible tragedy several years ago we still want to communicate that there are some things up there that are unique we want to to Really Inspire the youngsters toh take an interest now prior to entry you've got to get the suits uh back on again and the seats set up and and strapped in after the luxury of being in a shirt sleeve environment for 4 days it's uh kind of hard for us to get back crawl back into these things it hurts just to watch it and uh but these are the the suits that we wore then both during the launch and during the entry turns out to be not much much different getting into them on the ground you can see the pole strapped to the ceiling well this is a sunset taken out the window before we close the payload bay doors just to transition into the deorbit and Landing phase it's always beautiful as we fade from bright sunlight to Darkness this is real time we cross the western coast between in Santa Barbara was a beautiful day at Edwards and as we have done many times before uh came in overhead the Edwards Lake Bed and made our 300 mph descent to a flare at about 2,000 ft above the Earth and then dick cvy the pilot did what every good pilot should do and that is lower the landing gear when we asked and came down to a touchdown at around 190 knots about 200 mil an hour the machine was absolutely superb in performance cleanliness we had a few uh system problems that U we had backups to but uh at touchdown wheel stop we could look back on a flight that was as far as I'm concerned P picture perfect and could not have been better for the country and getting us back into man space flight business our patch that we love uh love so much that symbolizes so many things to us