STS-40: Postflight Press Conference

Good afternoon and welcome to the STS40 post-flight crew press conference. I would like to introduce once again our commander of the flight uh Brian D. Oconor and turn it over to him. Brian, thanks Barbara. Uh this is really great. Uh we finally got our whole crew back to be able to talk to the American public. Uh this is a interesting flight in that only three of us got to come back here to Houston right after the flight. Uh the four payload crew members had to stay at Dryen for a lot of medical tests and experimentation on their bodies uh for another week and so they just got back a few days ago. Uh we've been doing some debriefings and now we get to sit together and talk to you about what we did on this great mission. Uh I'm going to introduce the crew here. To my immediate right is Sid Gutierrez, the pilot, and Tammy Jernigan, who is uh MS2 mission specialist number two. She was the flight engineer for asset and entry. We are the orbiter crew members. And then we have the four payload crew members, Jim Bean and Ray Seden, who are the NASA members of the payload crew. And then we have Drew Gaffne and Millie Hughes Fulford, who are the payload specialist members of the payload crew. Without further ado, we'd like to show you what we did on this mission with a movie. And uh as we go through the movie, we'll talk through it. This is the crew patch. It shows SLS1, Space Lab Life Sciences One, as the logo. And this is what it looked like on the 5th of June that morning before we uh suited up. This is the crew in the suit room. We'd been through this once before about four days prior where we had gone out to the launch pad and had an abort uh due to an IMU problem. So by now we were getting kind of used to this routine. And as you see the various crew members uh loading their pockets with the emergency equipment, putting the suits on. Uh it may not show here, but we were really ready to go. After several scrubs, it was time to fly. On launch day, Colombia performed flawlessly. Initially, you may recall, the weather was no go due to some low clouds, thunderstorms, and fog in the area. But after about an hour and a half of hold, a blue speck formed to the west. It moved over the pad, uh, grew in size, and eventually we were cleared to launch. The SSMES throttled to 100%, but when the SRBs lit, that's when we really knew we were going into orbit. We rolled to a 39 degree inclination to set us up for our flight. In first stage, we really knew we were flying a rocket. It was a solid E ticket. Despite the hole in the sky, we did penetrate a cloud layer at about 14 to 16,000 ft. It was well within launch commit criterion. It creates some beautiful imagery. You'll see a shadow formed by the sun falling on the rocket plume. You can see the shadow going off to the left there. We open the payload bay doors about 2 hours after launch to reveal just a spectacular view of the Earth. Um, we also have a clear view of the space lab in the payload bay. Uh the space lab was affectionately deemed slave quarters about halfway through the mission. After we had configured the orbiter for space activities, we got to work uh activating the space lab. We spent about 2 hours setting up checking out uh the environmental control system, the computers, and the communication systems. You'll see Sid as he heads back across the tunnel that we had to open to get back into Space Lab. Uh after we uh performed the activation, we got to work on setting up all of the uh experiment hardware itself. Here you get to see the first view of the first uh working laboratory in space dedicated to the life sciences. You'll see the experiment hardware in racks along the sidewalls. We have overhead stowage containers and several pieces of equipment down the center aisle. This is Jim uh performing an exercise test. You can see him breathing on a bag. That system with a gas analyzer allowed us to measure how much the body consumed in terms of oxygen, how much carbon dioxide it produced, and how exercise was affected during zerog and then compare that with pre and postflight. This was done in conjunction with the State University of New York at Buffalo and UT Southwestern in Dallas. This was the first time that we've actually measured maximal exercise capacity. This is uh you see uh Rey and me uh doing an echo cardiogram. This is an ultrasound test that allows us to image the heart and with that we can see how much the how much fluid shift has occurred, how the heart is expanded and how well it's functioning in zerog. One of the other core experiments we had was the pulmonary function test experiment and that was uh sponsored by the University of California at San Diego. And what we're measuring here is differences in the way the lungs function in weightlessness and how gases exchanged in weightlessness versus on 1G here on Earth. The uh all the crew participated in that experiment. Here's Drew doing uh the barrel reflex experiment. What this does is it puts various various amounts of pressure on your neck at the pressure receptors that govern help govern your blood pressure. And by understanding how we change our ability to regulate blood pressure in orbit versus here, it gives us a better handle on the kind of problems we see during entry with uh blood pressure regulation. Uh this experiment was designed to look at changes in blood flow and the compliance uh of blood vessels in the lower extremity in zero G. It's also from the University of Texas in Dallas. Blood pressure cuff is pumped up on the thigh and then we measure changes in size of the calf. Um, here I am spinning Jim in the uh rotating chair. Uh, we're testing his vestibular response in zero gravity. This, uh, was sponsored by MIT. Um, it's much like going in a merrygoround. When you stop suddenly and throw your head down, we're testing to see how quickly we get rid of that opposite reversal spin that we feel. In uh this experiment, we uh instead of our rotating, we put our head into a dome that's rotating and then we measure the response by looking at how the eye responds to the fueling of vection. And we compare this to our responses on the ground. The orbiter crew members volunteered to participate in a number of space lab experiments. We renamed them for simplicity. This particular experiment is officially called BMMD or body mass measuring device. We called it weighing yourself. Uh several other experiments, the one you recall with the collar, we renamed that one suck on your neck. It was officially the barrel reflex. And the pulmonary function test we called blow in the pipe. One of the advantages to working in space is the short drive time between uh your work and your home. Here you see it's about 15 to 20 seconds to get from the space lab back to the orbiter. This is Jim and Tammy transiting the tunnel. In addition to the primary experiments, we conducted many secondary experiments including 12 getaway special or gas cans. They were activated from the flight deck, but they were actually located back behind the space lab. They included investigations of material science, plant biology, and cosmic radiation. One of the other things that we and the orbiter crew spent a lot of time doing during the mission was measuring the uh air quality. This is one of several experiments that uh gathered in air samples and looked for things like microbes and uh particles. We also checked the uh the sound levels in the vehicle. This is Sid. Looks like he's looking for water, but he's not. What he's doing is measuring the sound levels. And we did this on the flight deck, the mid deck, and also back in the space lab. On day seven, we conducted the orbital acceleration research experiment. We flew a number of maneuvers, including a loop, aileron roll, and a 360°ree flat turn. I'll challenge some of the pilots on Earth to match that last maneuver. We were studying the performance of a miniature electrostatic accelerometer device. We also installed an improved uh filter to uh help the performance of the humidity separator. It was located under the mid deck or down in the pit as we called it. And this yielded some surprising information about fluid flow in a zerog environment. Brian and Sid are here preparing to do some Earth observations. We photograph the land, the water, and the clouds, not just for aesthetic reasons, but for the wealth of scientific data the photographs contain. Here we're passing through the straight of Gibralar. Um, we're going obviously west to east and on the left hand side you see Spain and the right hand side uh is Morocco. The Mediterranean Sea is in the in the distance. Here we have a very nice view of southern Italy, including the island of Sicily. Next, we'll be approaching Kuwait. Um, and soon you'll have an unmistakable view of the oil fires that still persist in the Kuwaiti oil field since the war. Since I live in San Francisco, the California coastline was one of my favorite views out the window. And UC Berkeley was also another favorite view for all of us since many of us went to UC Berkeley. Down the peninsula, we can see NASA as Research Center that had a lot of the research animals on board. And coming up in the distance, uh you can see just about center of the screen to the right is the dry lake beds and the Edwards complex there, which we were going to land at about uh four days from the time we took this photo. Here's the east coast coming up and we're there's the Appalachian just going by the edge of the Po Bay. You can see the Chesapeake Bay near the center right at the bottom and the Delm Marva Peninsula above that you can see New Jersey, Delaware Bay and up to the Philadelphia area, Manhattan Island, Long Island and all the way up in fact to Cape Cod and that was a pretty nice site. One of the hardware test objectives that we flew on this flight for the Ames Research Center was to see if particullet and liquids could be contained within this general purpose workstation. Uh here you see me squirting strawberry uh punch out of a drink container. And you can see that the fluid tended to stick want to stick on the walls. The particulates that we released from this uh balloon uh were entrained a little bit in the air flow which goes from the top of the cabinet down to the bottom. We we showed that we can handle the cages and keep the rats healthy, but we also wanted to be sure that that the animals could be handled and and uh taken care of and worked with as they are on Earth. And it turns out it's exactly the same. The the rats are very comfortable being held like this. This is what you do in a laboratory on Earth. Works the same in space. Both rats and human beings lose both bone and muscle during space flight. And during our flight, we took many samples of blood in order to test the changes in the hormones in in our blood systems during flight. And we believe that that perhaps is part of the reason we're losing the bone and the u muscle during flight. And that was a nice exchange of tubes. Um it took uh at least two to three of us to do the blood draws because it was complicated. This experiment uses lymphosytes or white blood cells to investigate changes in our immune system that occur when we leave the 1G environment of Earth for the zerog environment of space. Here we're injecting the cultures with a midogen that promotes cell division. And by comparing our 1G control cultures in our centrifuge with our zerog cultures, we can determine if lymphosy proliferation is decreased when you go to orbit and thereby may adversely affect our immune system. Um, as many of you know, we had some trouble with the refrigerator and freezers during our flight. And and here's a picture of um Jim and Sid cleaning the filters in order to help the refrigerators and the freezers work more efficiently. Uh, this is where we put our blood samples. So, it was a very important event to keep them running. Here we're preparing to take some camcorder footage of our jellyfish crew members. Um, jellyfish contain gravity receptors that are analogous to the odelith organs in the inner ear. And by taking a look at the behavior of the jellyfish whose gravity sensing organs have developed in zerog, we can compare that swimming behavior um to their 1g counterparts. Um, one thing that you'll notice here is that the jellyfish tend to swim in circles and arcs, whereas on the ground they simply swim to the top of the flask and float down. This is a test of the medical restraint system um for possible use on space station. My brave patient Sid here is allowing his astrophysicist to test his reflexes. I told Sid if he didn't move his knee, I'd just have to hit him harder the next time. So, he became more cooperative. And this is simply a demonstration of uh performing CPR in zero G. It is quite feasible. Um this is recessa Annie that I'm performing the CPR procedure on and she is uh strapped to the mid deck lockers. The breaking of bread in space took on added meaning on this flight since we were keeping track of all of our liquid and fluid intake uh for the metabolic studies that uh uh we were doing. We've kept track of everything that we've taken in from a few weeks before flight up until the present time. Uh we're looking at changes in nutrient metabolism and in probably in food preferences, too. Here we are uh at a typical dinner beginning to chase our food around. And of course, it was always a challenge even to try and stay clean on a 9-day flight without a good shower. here. Drew is uh shampooing his hair with a waterless shampoo that we had on board and it worked pretty well, at least for people with short hair or no hair. They all bounce for that. They uh they had warned us, you know, that we know that various orbiters have slightly different sounds to them. And uh about midway in the mission, uh we noticed a sound emanating, it seemed like from we weren't sure where in the mid deck and trying to discover what it was. And Brian and Tammy were looking around. and they seem to finally locate it down in the LIO storage area there. But it turned out that for some reason Sid was down there. But once we had solved that problem about what was causing the noise, um we really weren't too worried about it. So time we just buttoned it back up, went back to work. Uh about the sixth day, everybody was uh ready for a little bit of recreation and we uh knocked the bike back down in the stove position and everybody kind of went back for a little bit of gym time back in the space lab. And here you'll see what we think is probably the the world's record and probably for the solar system too. The number of people on someone's back doing a push-up. Uh Sid's on the bottom. Uh and Drew's on the top. And you can see Sid really pumping these push-ups out. But we think was probably tougher on the people near top like Drew and myself as we were slamming into the lockers on overhead. And uh we did not stop because of Sid's lack of stamina, but rather Drew's pain threshold of my own probably. The day before landing, we fired up one of the auxiliary power units and ran through a checkout of the orbiter flight control system and the RCS jets. Since brushing your teeth in zerog is difficult at best, we made liberal use of chewing gum to facilitate working in close quarters. We closed the port pay door about 3 hours and 20 minutes prior to the de-orbit burn. Um soon you'll see evidence of possible interference of the environmental seal with the door closure and also you can see the loose thermal blankets that Jim's going to talk more about later. Then came entry day and or entry time. We all got dressed in our orange suits. This is Jim who was rotating back and forth between mid deck and flight deck helping uh people get in their suits and so on. And here you see our uh two stalward payload specialists in their suits ready for entry on the mid deck. This is a shot taken out the top of the window and you can see that uh fantasm that other people have reported where the ions are recombining behind the vehicle as you come down through the atmosphere and you can see the reflection off of Sid's back there. We came down through entry did several aerodynamic uh test inputs. The winds were nice and we were scheduled to land on runway 22, the concrete runway at Edwards. One of the things that we had to do on this landing was to land a little faster than normal because we were a heavyweight vehicle. And also we did a high-speed nose wheel steering test uh to open up the envelope for the nose wheel steering system on the uh shuttle. As the nose comes down, you can see the big speed brakes out there on the top of the shuttle to help slow it down. One of the things you probably saw on this flight different from all the other shuttle flights is that we didn't walk down the stairs out of the vehicle. This uh crew transport vehicle, which is an airport transfer bus, was outfitted u so that we can get the crews out very quickly, get them changed and start doing medical tests and look at the condition of the of the crew immediately on landing instead of the 45 to 90 minutes that it usually takes. This is really going to help us in the future to get the crews out quickly and get the medical studies that we need for planning our longer duration flights. Plank was not [Laughter] used. Well, we're hearing from the scientists that we had a very successful mission scientifically. This is our crew when we posed for our picture uh months before the launch. The smiles reflect how we feel today about this flight and all the people that helped support it and make it go. our second launch attempt. Uh getting ready to go for our mission. And uh again, as you saw there by that little bit of a lead in u a lot of things go on leading up to a flight and a lot of training. And that was a little bit of a summary of it just to try to encapsulate that time frame of the flight. This is about uh 7 a.m. Uh we're getting our launch and entry suits on and uh getting them all checked out before we go out to the vehicle. It's going out to the crew van. I think if I could remember the time about, I'd say 7:50 in the morning out on the pad. And about this time during the count, you really start uh putting your thinking hat on uh because you got to go to work. And uh main engines start running and we run them for about six seconds. The computers make sure they're good and all the smart people figured out how to make all that work. And that's amazing to me that we have people in our country know how to do that. And bang, boosters light up. Uh boy, those people at Thiaol have been doing a great job as far as I'm concerned with all their new processing techniques and all our new safety inspections. In fact, I think the first 2 minutes 10 seconds of this ride is the safest time during that time frame. It doesn't bother me at all. I've watched those people with thallol. Really proud of them. And we sure had a good ride here. Mike, right now it's probably about a minute and a half into uh ascent getting ready for the solid rocket motors to separate. It's kind of a nice shot here. You can see the shock waves on the orbiter and on the external tank. We we pushed the limits this time a little bit more of the envelope. Went to a higher dynamic pressure than we've been to before. At this point, it's probably about 2 G's, two to 2 and 1/2 G's. The ride is a little bit rough on the solids. It smooths out uh quite a bit once you get rid of the solid rocket motors. There they go. It's another close-up shot of the SRB sub. That makes your front windows in front of Bakes and I go opaque. They literally just go opaque. Very uh bright flash when they uh come off. And they're the of course the rocketine engines keep on running and uh boy those motors are complex and uh I see all those people and they do a great job making those engines run. Our major activity on the first flight day besides the launch was to launch the Tedrris IUS complex. Here we are. We're up at 58 degrees and getting ready for uh uh the deploy. Inside the cockpit, there's a lot of activity. It takes all five crew people working together to launch uh something like this. Jim and I were the primary uh people that were involved in checking the U IUS systems, making sure everything was uh ready for deploy. And um Mike's job was to make sure that the um shuttle was in the proper attitude for the deploy. David was the person that did all the fine photography and it's his work that we're looking at right this minute. And then um John's job was just to make sure all the rest of us were doing our jobs. And when we actually did the deploy, it looks like it's coming out sort of in slow motion. It's not. That's uh real time. And the thing that always surprises you is how close it gets to the vehicle. and we were all looking out and commenting on how close it was to the vehicle. And then John puts in some impulses to move the shuttle away from the IUS. You can see this in just a minute as we begin to uh uh move away. Now to do a deploy involves not only the crew people inside the shuttle, but involves all the people mission control that are uh monitoring systems. It also involves people out at Sunnyville u who are monitoring the IUS systems. Involves people at Boone. involves the people up at GDDARD who are looking at the uh TEDRA systems. So you can see it's a huge teamwork of people a big network of people all across the United States that are involved in launching something like this uh uh satellite. Now, our job in the as a shuttle crew ended as soon as we got the um uh satellite out of the bay and then uh a little bit later as we backed away from it. But then people had to continue to monitor as the IUS was bringing the uh Tedrris on up to geocynchronous orbit. Now, after we got rid of our major payload, then the activity sort of focused down in the mid deck. We sort of looked at the mid deck is the place where we do our eating and our sleeping. It's also our laboratory that we have u on orbit. And here I am working with um uh a biomed manufacturing uh module. And this module has flown before and it's going to fly several more times. And it has uh uh several syringes uh and then you can put in different samples. In the uh samples that we had, we were growing different types of uh cells and cell culture to see if they would manufacture uh different amounts of enzymes that would be of use and later type of manufacturing process. And the mid deck is a very very valuable asset that we as a country have to do all these types of uh experiments. As Shannon has indicated, we've the we turned the shuttle into a laboratory, flying laboratory after we deployed the IUS Tedrris satellite. And here you're you're seeing us perform Shannon and I are performing one of about a dozen physical science type experiments. We had about an equal number of medical uh supplementary objectives or experiments on board. This particular one is a setup for uh an optical coupler that that actually transmit transmits video and audio signals through fiber optics uh and through through uh video couplers in the windows that you see here. Uh this is really a test to find out if uh if it's practical to use uh fiber optic technology to transmit uh audio and and video type signals uh in and out of the cargo bay from the uh crew compartment of the shuttle. You're uh seeing a a whole maze of fiber optic cables here that I'm manipulating there and uh and also the audio and video signals that come from the TV monitors and go to the video tapes that we have on board the shuttle. Uh Shannon and I did a series of experiments using this equipment and uh took about uh an equivalent of about three hours of data uh on videotapes to bring back for analysis to find out how good a quality we could maintain and what the practicality is of doing this in the shuttle. This is another experiment where we uh undertook to analyze the uh uh the propagation of flame fronts in solid materials. In this case, a an ashless filter paper that's inside a containment. Uh I'm igniting it here with my push button. You see the flashing light. In a moment, you'll see the flame. Uh you'll notice that the flame is round. It doesn't point up like a candle flame. In zero gravity, a flame uh forms a sort of a ball flame front as the paper burns. Uh we've got a series of thermal couples attached to the filter paper uh above and on the paper to determine what the nature of flame propagation is in zero gravity. Okay, this is a view of the payload bay and uh on the right side you can see share. Share was the uh uh space station heat pipe advanced radiator element. It's a mouthful but uh we took that up. It consists of two heat pipes which you can see here that uh we tested uh for use on space station. These uh would reject heat on space station. You could use uh many of these elements in in a row basically. And uh the advantage is that there's no moving parts, no pumps involved. Um if they were to take a meteorite hit, uh the whole system would still work uh unlike uh the systems that we now use on the shuttle for instance. Uh the results of the test were excellent. It worked just as uh expected. One of the experiments that we did for the space station was evaluating different kinds of cursor control devices for use on board um the data management system on space station. Um we used a Macintosh computer and four different kinds of cursor control devices. Um Jim Adamson, Shannon Lucid, and myself evaluated those uh throughout the mission. Uh one of the uh privileges that we had on this mission was to fly some new software uh and some new computers. The first time that the combination had ever flown together on the space shuttle. uh we've upgraded both systems and among the software changes that we've made is a new digital autopilot for flying on orbit called an al alternate uh digital autopilot. And in this particular uh scene, I'm working with John to uh do a series of 22 flight tests on the digital autopilot to find out what kind of responses it provides for the vehicle. This is just a little view up on the uh flight deck that I put in just uh to show you three really great people working on orbit. Uh this was in between while I had different clocks running on different things they're doing. Uh I catch them like this every now and then. So I thought I'd capture this once on film. But it's really a neat thing to see uh all these uh human beings working in space so well with the ground trying to get everything accomplished. And uh I just think a lot of that and think a lot of that capability that we have in the country. This is another demonstration of some physical principles in zero gravity. You can see a pair of longnose pliers there that are very stable in that mode. When you open them up a little bit, you can see that they've got two stable modes. You can see them flipping back and forth between those two. I saw David do this once, so I told him I had to get that on film. This is uh Jim working on the AF flight deck for SSBUV, the space shuttle solar back scatter UV experiment, our data collector. Actually, uh it took both of us essentially to to work this uh uh secondary payload that's in a gas can out in the payload bay. Uh I would maneuver the orbiter to either a a earth viewing attitude or a solar viewing attitude and Jim would operate the APC to open and close the lid and start uh different modes of the SSBUV. Experiment was housed in what what we call a gas can which stands for getaway special. And you can see the uh mechanical lid that we act actually uh activated from inside the crew compartment using a a little computer and uh entering inputs. uh very fascinating experiment not exact not designed to measure the ozone layer but actually to calibrate other satellites and instruments that do measure the ozone layer. What we would do is is actually measure the back scatter ultraviolet rays uh directly emitted from the sun and also then back scattered off the earth. So we would actually look at the sun with the experiment and then turn around and look at the earth. This was the Battel materials for commercial development of space investigation of polymer membrane processing. The bottom line is microgravity. they can get some idea of the physical and uh characteristics of materials and as a result uh develop u improved uh membranes here on the planet to be used for uh to help uh better filters for liquids and solids. I think this is a uh that was a sunrise and this is up on the flight deck. It's just a nice picture of the flight deck in space. Uh me looking at the flight plan there and uh and it was something I did a lot and so somebody took this picture of me once. Yeah, we thought we needed a picture of John being the commander keeping track of all of us doing our thing and making sure we stayed on the timeline. Great great man to work for. This is down in the mid deck. Um again, you'd see this a lot. different people trying to get uh different types of work done all in parallel and um so it's just busy place on the midback. Shannon in the medical kit here, I asked her to get me some sleeping pills and while she was getting them, I thought I'd take a picture of her getting them for me. You can ask her about several of the experiments that we the medical experiments that we did had to do with assessing the cardiovascular systems. Um this particular one um was called blood pressure variability in which we uh dawned an automatic blood pressure cuff and a halter monitor. Um you can see we were wired for sound right there and for 24 hours um three different times during the flight um we had our heart rates and our blood pressures um ticking constantly. um Bakes, John and I uh all did that. In fact, we had to do that pre-flight several two or three times and we all we've also done that post-flight two or three times. John's giving us sign language there to say that that's his it's measuring his heart rate there. Now, another one of the uh cardiovascular medical experiments that we did was running on the treadmill. Um John and I did that virtually every day for about 30 minutes per day. When we did this, we dawned a heart rate monitor that went around our chest. We also had a watch on our wrist there that uh um contained a readout of what our heart rate was as well as a time. Um and during this 30 minutes, every 10 minutes, we would um attempt to step our heart rate up uh um to a different higher level there. Again, John and I both did that on orbit. Jim was a control subject. He did it on the ground. And so, we've got some uh some good data of all three of us pre and postflight. You're going to see David enter the scene here. Uh while I was running down there, I looked around once and saw this and I thought that was quite amazing. He was trying to beat me running around the world. I think this was our hamster experiment. It's much easier to run on that without these straps. Um probably the biggest medical experiment that we had was called lower body negative pressure. Um and in this experiment um Bakes and I would would slide inside that can there if you will which had a waist seal that would come up um and and seal around our waist and we could lower the pressure inside that bag to um about minus 50 millimeters of mercury which um is equivalent stress on your heart of standing up in 1g. Um again this took uh took place during four separate days on orbit. Um and as you can see here with the uh lower body negative pressure device there it took three people took up virtually the entire mid deck whenever we did this. Um you can see Shannon Lucid um was taking some uh ultrasonic images of of our hearts while we were in that. Um she's got a an American Flight echo cardiograph machine that uh is actually recording that data there. Um you've got the subject in the bag and then you've got another person that is operating the controls down on the lower end there um and entering the data the um heart rate and blood pressure data on board a uh Macintosh computer. And again this took up uh the major portion of our days for four separate days while we were on orbit. As I'm looking at this, I'm just thinking I'll comment. The space shuttle is an absolutely incredible machine. I mean, it has tremendous flexibility and uh so uh you know, as as you've seen here, we deployed a satellite on the first day and then a tremendous amount of scientific and medical research uh for the rest of the the mission and uh a real national treasure. In fact, the only thing in the world that that has this kind of capability. So, um, boy, Americans ought to be very proud of this system. I might add also that I flew this on SDS32 and they've made some uh some great improvements both in the comfort of the device as well as the uh the hardware itself. It's it's more automated and easier to use. Yeah, this is a picture on the flight deck. Uh in between experiments, uh you'd catch uh different people with different cameras. Here Bakes has a telephoto Hasselblad lens uh camera and Jim had an IR filter on different people trying to take different pictures for oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists all around the world. There are different requirements. Uh, this is a beautiful scene of our planet. It's just a big blue white bulb. Basically, blue planet's a good description from the IMAX movie. This a little sequence where I caught Mike taking some pictures uh out of the pilot's window. Uh, this is looking into North Africa. You can see the Earth limb there at the top. U, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, uh, the Mediterranean Sea. really quite beautiful our planet and of course these pictures don't do it any justice but um they're the best we can return to you um absolutely beautiful this planet makes you realize there are no international boundaries because I don't see the boundaries of any of those countries there and um but a real nice place we need to take care of it there's the Sinai Red Sea down into the Nile river delta there. Really beautiful coming out of Cairo. Headed down south towards the towards the Oswan Dam, Lake Nasser. Come into the scene here in a second. Real reason I'm showing you that is I had flown on two other missions and I never saw the Oswan. This time I did. As John has insinuated, Earth observation is one of the favorite pastimes on orbit for astronauts flying in space. And I think uh one of the things that that impresses me the most about it is that since I was a a young man going to high school, the geology books as a result of the space program have been almost totally rewritten. And the whole concept of plate tectonics and shifting continental shelves have has really been totally uh rethought as a result of observations made in space. This scene you're seeing right here is one of the bad scenes. That's all the Kuwaiti oil fires burning running south down into Saudi Arabia. And uh boy, I saw that and as murky as it looks there, that's just was the contrast that we saw on orbit. I mean the planet's beautiful. when you got to that area and uh boy, it looked like the planet was out of focus. Uh there's no question the Kuwaiti oil fires are putting a lot of stuff into the environment, affecting the lives of 5 billion people and billions of animals and plants all over this planet. And uh hope we get those fires out soon. You're not seeing this real good. Uh but um uh you're looking into the velocity vector. People always say, "What does it look like on orbit?" as if you're on a space vehicle. Well, you're looking right down the velocity vector here uh approaching the northwest uh portion of Australia. Um they're quite beautiful. You're moving at 17,500 miles an hour and uh that's what it looks like. Um, one morning, um, I was up eating breakfast and while I was eating breakfast, this is what I was looking at. And I thought, boy, what a lucky person I am to be able to see this scene. Really a very beautiful planet, except when you see a scene like we saw there in Quaid. It's another flight deck picture of uh some people taking um pictures here of the hurricane that we saw. Mike, you may want to talk about that. You saw that a lot. Yeah, we saw uh actually we saw about four hurricanes on on our flight. This was hurricane FIFA and uh we had the opportunity to fly right over the eye which was really quite spectacular. the first uh rev or so that we saw this hurricane, the eye was not really well developed. And then when we uh timing was perfect for us. As soon as we as the eye became developed, we flew right over it. If you keep your eyes on the top left of the screen, you'll see a shooting star just went by. It's kind of interesting to see that from space because you're looking down on it instead of up at it. You saw different stars there. On the bottom is space and the planet of course is dominates the upper 78s of that picture. And this is a bunch of lightning storms going on. People always ask what do they look like from space. So I thought we'd throw a little of that in this time. And I think this is the sunrise here and we're getting ready for entry day. And you're going to see the payload bay doors coming closed. Um, I think David came up with the camcorder and got a pretty good sequence of Jim and Shannon putting that in progress. On the left side there, the payload bay door is starting to close. Every time I see all this, I wonder how how how does it work? So much complexity and u I think it's really uh incredible. It's about two hours before the de-orbit burn roughly about the time they close these doors. This is the entry time frame and uh we're about 250,000 ft here and uh out the front windows you can really see the glow come up with the fire. U it's it's quite an amazing ride. Every time you do it uh you say, "Wow, what an amazing vehicle and what a beautiful ride coming in." Jim took this photography. As John has indicated, you spend most of your time in orbit uh falling around the Earth at about 17,500 uh feet a second. And uh in order to get back to Earth, the the trick is to take some of that velocity out of your orbit and actually slow down, which causes you to fall back into the gravity field of the Earth. And in doing so, you generate an awful lot of heat. And some of the fire that you've seen shooting up over the top of the vehicle is a symbol of that. Here we're going subsonic coming over top the Kennedy Space Center and uh getting ready to turn onto the heading alignment circle. That's about 90 degrees a turn to go. Uh when I looked out the far left window, it was clear blue down there and by the time I got to the front window, I thought I was going into the LA smog. Um that's just what it looked like. Rolled out on final. Uh boy, all our shuttle training aircraft uh training we get uh all of our training in the KC 135 and all that really pays off here. You feel like you're right at home. Bakes put the gear down and uh boy, what a be beautiful flying machine. To me, it's the easiest airplane to fly in the world in this time frame. But again, we get a lot of excellent training that that it makes it easy. It's kind of incredible to think that that vehicle lifts off uh on top of a bunch of rocket engines, pushing it out into space. Uh you do all that stuff and then it comes back in it and lands like this like an airplane. Unbelievable. I don't know where we got all the people that knew how to make that work, but uh we do. quite an amazing uh machine with tremendous flexibility to do many different missions. And of course, we tell you about that u every time you hear about a different mission. A lot of people wonder why it takes the crew so long to get out of the vehicle after we land. And of course, uh going through the re-entry and everything, we need some sort of cooling on board for all the avionics. And once we close the payload bay doors, uh we don't have the radiators anymore. So, one of the things we use to cool the vehicle here is ammonia boilers. And the ammonia being given off by the ammonia boilers creates a kind of a cloud around the vehicle. And in this particular mission, we had to wait a little while to get out because there was a lot of ammonia outside blowing out of the ammonia boilers. And uh so it was it was pretty smelly trying to get out of the vehicle. So, we had to wait a bit for that to clear. This little scene just showing you the crew working on that flight deck after landing. We've got to do a bunch of little things. And uh I don't know if you've seen that before, so we thought we'd throw it in. Coming out of the vehicle here. Again, uh I feel very privileged to have had such a great team of people to work with up in orbit. Um and wish them luck in any of their future endeavors. They're really a super group of people. And here's just a scene of the Kennedy Space Team putting uh the vehicle getting it ready for SDS4 in November.