STS-41: Postflight Press Conference

[Applause] well good afternoon glad to have you folks here glad to be able to be here to do something we haven't been able to do at the center for a little while I think due to the efforts of all the folks and the whole shuttle team is we got one in the air so without further Ado I'm going to turn it over to the commander of this mission Captain Vick Richards thank you [Applause] PJ can you hear me in the back yes okay well thanks for uh showing your support and interest uh by coming out here this afternoon we put together about a 20-minute videotape which are highlights of the things that we all did on uh SDS 41 uh I'd like to introduce uh my crewman I was very fortunate and uh to have a great set of people on this particular flight uh we've been asked to comment about what makes a successful flight and uh if you put uh good people like we have in this room and at this Center together with good Hardware it really gets easy and it's it's a it's a great uh great thing that we do here we we launched on time we've done that before in the past I knew we could do it and uh we did it and we're going to continue doing those sort of things but let me introduce my crew immediately to my left um a uh one of our firsttime flyers and my pilot very fortunate to have in this flight Marine lieutenant colonel Robert [Music] Cabana and they keep uh changing the order of sequence here to see if I mess this up here but uh in the middle uh another firsttime flyer uh just reported here in 1987 uh and uh spent three years here and got an opportunity to fly in space uh the first US Coast guardman ever to fly in space uh Commander Bruce Melnick [Applause] next to him uh our other experienced ad Mission specialist he was the bosen made on our flight if for those of you who are not in the Navy that don't know what a bosen mate is the boson m is the one that that keeps good order in the ship and uh Bill Shepard did that a Navy Captain flew on STS 27 and I can't tell you how invaluable he was uh not only to me but to the other rookies uh providing us uh with the right words at the right time on what to do and during those four days Captain Bill Shepard and lastly all the way to the end uh but certainly not least uh Bill Shephard referred to him uh in our welcome home ceremony at Ellington as our secret weapon and that's uh and I I'll second that Tom Acres real quiet individual but I assigned him the responsibility of getting ulses out on time and he did that uh those of you worked with him know that uh tremendous individual and really was a contributor and was absolutely essential to making the success of STS 41 happen for is not a bad job for your first flight Major Tom [Applause] [Music] Acres and uh without any further Ado here if we can get the lights down and we'll roll this video tape we'll try to narate you through some of the highlights for STS 41 well uh here we are uh we were pretty happy at this point because no flight crew had made it this far at least being able to walk out to the astrovan in about six months so we felt pretty good I had left word overnight uh that if uh if we had had anything to wake me up and I had a nice sound sleep so I was optimistic when we got up particularly when we got out the launch pad and saw the weather Bob will describe a little bit about what it's like to fly in the shuttle for the first time and have an asent well as pretty as a day as we had for everyone watching uh and As Nice a view as it was let me tell you it was from a firsttime flyers point of view it was even more spectacular inside uh the cape provided us with a uh a super vehicle in Discovery and she performed flawlessly it was a an extremely smooth ride uphill especially once we got off the solid rocket Motors it was just a nice uh steady acceleration out to Mo and uh really surprised me how smooth the ride was as you can see from our our smoke Trail uh going uphill here there a very little windsh it was just an absolutely super day and uh a super day to start an absolutely great Mission during the launch count uh it was uh absolutely almost identical to the one I had about a year ago the everything was nominal the all the calls were as expected and we had a real clean vehicle the only thing we were concerned with the last few minutes was a couple of unplanned holes that uh we were we could tell would probably be we'd be able to get uh get past those and uh the launch count proceeded then we had one cloud in the Aira that held us and I think we were I think we were about 5 to 10 minutes late uh from our plan takeoff time but well before the end of our launch [Music] period about an hour and a half uh after launch Bruce opened the payload bay doors as you see here and he and I began the uh checkout of the uh upper stage booster system that was going to put ulses on its way to Jupiter and then ultimately the Sun as you can see in that picture we have an extremely clean payload Bay and that was true also in the crew compartment the folks down at uh KSC did a great job on this vehicle the checkout uh comprised the next 3 or 4 hours looking for about a 6-hour deploy of ulses and in that time we checked out the upper stage booster system the crew interfaces with that prepared to uh activate the tilt table that would raise it to 60 degrees for deploy Bob our pilot maneuvered the Orbiter to several different attitudes to provide the ground with the corrections they needed to give the upper stage system a precise attitude correction here you see the deploy and as the upper stage and ulses are pushed out of the payload Bay at about 45 Ines per second you'll see in a moment uh in the background there things that look like particles or Stars flying back behind the vehicle and those were just ice particles that continued to uh come off of the Orbiter for the first several hours that first day and was really a spectacular show at about a minute after deploy here which again occurred at uh 6 hours and about a minute Mission elapse time after one minute uh dick did a minus X or a back off maneuver where we backed away from the uh spacecraft which gave us about 2 and 1/2 ft per second separation as you can see we deployed in darkness and you'll see in a minute when the spacecraft comes into the sunlight it was really a again a very spectacular [Music] show after 15 minutes from deploy we did an OHM separation maneuver that ultimately placed us uh above and behind the spacecraft at about 40 Mi separation [Music] you'll see here in a moment uh the curved object you've probably heard about that uh appeared in the the screen the first time we had noticed it and they're still investigating as to what that possibly is they think it's ice of some sort that came from the rear of the vehicle and don't think it came from anything associated with the spacecraft or with the deploy and there you see that object coming into view this was essentially my view uh looking out through the overhead window and U during the deploy sequence uh I didn't even see this subject and it was wasn't until after we uh replayed the videotape that uh we finally picked it up and then again as I mentioned at about 65 minutes after deploy we went into a window protect attitude so we could no longer see the the spacecraft and of course it was a long ways off by then also and the first uh solid rocket burn of the upper stage occurred and uh was exactly as they expected it to be and then the second stage and then finally the third stage uh the Pam s solid rocket motor burn and after about uh 16 or 17 minutes after that first burn the folks on the ground started looking for Ulisses data and founded the ulses exactly where they expected expected it to be so it was a almost as precise in fact a little more precise than anybody on the ground had expected the three Burns to be and as of today uh ulses is over 6 and5 million miles away and doing much better than expected Tom and I uh cranked up the remote arm on the first part of day two and put it in this Ram position you see here uh in part to support the uh Space Station but mainly to provide some data on the Intel set solar aray erosion that uh has been estimated this is a shot of the activation of the ssbv or the shuttle solar back scatter ultraviolet experiment it's a a major secondary payload that we carried in the payload Bay uh here it is it flies in a gas can to get away special and the ssbv is going to be used to calibrate the NASA uh Nimbus satellites and the Noah Tyro satellites which are presently orbiting the Earth measuring the ozone layer it does this by comparing the radiation that's emitted from the Sun with the radiation that's back scattered from the earth the ozone absorbs the radiation and therefore they can measure how much of the radiation is being absorbed and can get a grasp on how much ozone there is in the atmosphere this is a a shot of us uh getting ready to activate the ssce or the solid surface combustion experiment which you've probably heard about our fire in Space the uh data from this fire and this enclosed container was recorded on with two cameras a 16 mm uh film and as a backup Shep came up with the neat idea of using our fibers scope to put down in front of the one of the windows and record it on board our uh one of our onboard cameras and TV and the vehicle and this is a a recording of that that we downlink subsequently of one of the two views of the flame of course the intent of the experiment is to evaluate the characteristics of flame spread uh in the absence of buoyant convection or in microgravity we did this by igniting a small piece of paper in this container and then just letting it burn and photographing what happened with those cameras experiment's going to fly seven more times uh with varying fuels uh oxygen concentration and pressure in the container and of course the application is going to hopefully improve our fire safety aspects of space flight this is a shot of activating the ipmp or the investigations into pober membrane uh processing SDS 41 was although it was a short flight only 4 days in length was the uh first flight to start uh medical uh uh tests for future extended duration Orbiter flights uh when we when we attempt to fly for uh in the 15 to 20-day time frame and even though we had such a short flight there was of course they want to Anchor their database with h with a low end as well as the high end this is uh I'm hanging on top of the Escape pole there and uh and Tom is wiring me up with a blood pressure cuff device which we wore Tom and I wore for about 48 Hours uh on the ship and slept with it as well too and um and hopefully give them some good data about how the heart adjusts uh to uh the sudden onset of zero gravity this is a plug for my uh Alma Mo they sent me at the last minute sent me a sweatshirt which turned out to work pretty good to uh contain all of this uh extraneous Hardware on this particular medical experiment here Shep and I are uh participating in DSO 472 and 474 it's a retinal photog graphy and also measuring his interocular pressure we did this three times on orbit to uh document fluid shift in the body and see if there was any correlation to SAS we all got a chance on board to work with three different types of laptops and we also had the first orbital floppy disc here and we're looking at various kinds of displays and also uh cursor control devices here's one called Felix that will take the place of a track ball and may have some application uh down the road in space station that previous sequence there was the one a lot of us a lot of times we get accused of uh doing this in a hanger someplace in Texas and so that last sequence with the disc was our proof that this was on board the Orbiter in in a micro G environment no uh no flight uh Crew movie can be complete without uh somebody being filmed playing with their food and then in this case uh it was me who got caught by Chef up their uh set of uh canned peaches that I had a lot of good time with Tom mentioned that uh the Kate provided us with a with a very clean vehicle I thought Colombia was clean on my previous flight but this one was even better we found very few uh extraneous objects a total maybe of three that we put in our things found in discovery bag and uh we we worked uh we worked very hard hard to uh to try to maintain uh maintain the cleanliness of the Orbiter and you can see Tom tucking away his drink container and also gave him an opportunity to plug this place in Missouri and he can talk about that yeah this is an advertisement for my hometown Eminence Missouri and of course the Red Wings as the uh High School athletic mascot another uh important aspect of the flight was the time that we spent observing the Earth beneath us uh as you know we use a variety of cameras to document changes in the Earth's environment uh we saw a number of them here we are coming up over the testi mountains in Northern Chad in Africa this is a an active volcanic region on the earth uh we noticed a lot of fires throughout Africa in South America uh and changes in the uh levels of lakes and also different volcanic areas well being in the Coast Guard the only time they let me take pictures of the ocean was when we're over shallow water and uh here we are over the Arabian Sea just off Somali and if you look close in the middle you'll see a ships wake in the suint we also observed several other oceanographic phenomena that are really only visible from Earth orbit such as as uh the suo the the ocean waves and also some spiral edes and we got to get a good look at some of those things while we're up there looking at the ocean in the sunlen also took some other Earth OBS photos and other land masses we crossed Central America and South America quite often up there and a lot during our awake cycle and also we covered Australia quite a few times here's a view going over Shark Bay and looking into the Shark Bay on Western Australia and then we jump to a a scene in the central area of Australia in the lake a area the lake a area is very important to observe from space because of the different amounts of rainfall it gets really determines how much uh water there are in a different Watershed areas as we've already talked about we have very many cameras that we use in the Orbiter and the next clip coming up is a demonstration of how we might be able to more automate how we use the cameras on the space shuttle in specific the TV cameras the last days in space and we thought you'd like to see how it's been working for us George Salazar and his crew down there at the Johnson Space Center have put together a system that allows us to control the cameras without using our hands we can just use voice commands to talk to the cameras so here's a quick demonstration on how they work voice command activate select a monitor and a camera TV1 Delta action action right stop tilt up left stop right stop change rate tilt down stop change rate tilt down stop right stop too much too much too much zoom in as you can see it's a great system and we really like it at the end on day four uh one of the one of the things you have to do is get ready to come home and uh we uh Bob and I started off uh the process by doing uh the uh FCS checkout a flight control system the Orbiter AP Bob cranked up one of our three uh auxiliary power units to provide hydraulic pressure out to our control surfaces and uh just like any airplane uh youd have out at Ellington or hobby one things the pilots do before they go flying is Wipe Out the flight control system and move the control surfaces around and uh we do that just by letting the computers do that everything was extremely nominal and uh told us that we probably could expect a smooth entry the evening before we deorbited uh Tom Bruce and I stowed the arm after having the Intel Satur out in the flow for a little over a day and a half and all the arm Ops were completely nominal uh we couldn't resist putting in at least one orbit or sunset uh that we saw of the 60 or so that we did see here we are with one of our long- range tracking cameras uh coming in uh we had a calm beautiful day out there at Edwards just like we expected and uh for myself the first time I've ever flown this vehicle for Real uh it matched very close mostly with our shuttle training airplanes that we have out here at Ellington Field and the fact that I had done this about a thousand times prior in our shuttle turning airplane it felt very at ease with the Orbiter coming into Edwards uh Air Force Base landing on the concrete Runway out there uh Runway 22 this uh test uh we did have a test of the uh the carbon brake system on this particular flight uh for those most some of you may know we've got a new braking system here uh and this was a second flight of it and our objective was to uh put a moderate amount of energy into the brakes and this is a series of three flight tests uh of which after the third one the carbon brake system will be cleared for nomal intermission usage and appropriately having the sun go through with the Y seats project there The Landing roll out we thought that was an appropriate thing to conclude also the braking system very very smooth to me and the orbitary responded just like it did in Flight exactly to my expectations it was a 15,000 ft Runway and we landed about 2,300 ft down the runway with about a 9,000 ft roll up and uh as I turned to my crew just before we walked out of the white room they had performed perfectly in my opinion for 4 days and I said this is the last time you guys can mess up and fall down the stairs and as you can see they uh did uh did that just as equally well as they did everything else uh for the previous 4 days and the previous 9 months here that we've been together a great [Applause] good afternoon welcome to the STS 35 postflight crew press conference I'd like to introduce to you the commander Vance brand and turn the program over to him thank you Barbara well it's a pleasure to be back here uh after a mission that uh we certainly enjoyed I'd like to introduce uh my crew guy Garder pilot we have Jeff Hoffman ms1 Mike Lounge MS2 Bob Parker ms3 Sam Durant uh PS1 Ron pice at the end there PS2 we had a big crew this uh flight more than many demonstrated the uh value of man in space as a as a flexible element as the person who's able to uh uh do uh troubleshooting to uh continue on with manual control after automatic systems uh have failed to perform like we thought they would so I I was just very pleased uh that uh we had those capabilities onard board uh to uh use man as a flexible element finally and uh most important I think our mission really demonstrated teamwork people on the ground uh here really got with it after uh we had some uh space lab failures and uh they came up with ways for us to continue and in the end uh through uh manual pointing I think our astronomers were uh approaching if not equaling the uh capabilities of the automatic systems that would have controlled the pointing of the telescopes much of the teamwork between the Marshall Space Center the Johnson Space Center and us and uh the the crew in orbit uh came about uh in a short 12-h hour period everything was pulled together here on the ground in that short of time to uh allow us to continue and uh bring in quite a lot of uh scientific information so with that we'd like to show you our film and uh I'll start out with the narration and uh then others will chime in our patch in Columbia and Orion is the Starfield you see there a very prominent constellation in the northern hemisphere seven crew members Astro Mission this is what our ship looked like as it sat on the pad and we were having breakfast actually late in the evening here we uh after having uh received weather information we're in the suit room getting suited myself we have guy we have Mike Sam Jeff Ron and somebody in there there he is Bob Bob was helping a manager adjust his time seven crewman going out to the van you know we had a uh a late night or early morning launch whichever you'd like to call it so it was a little before midnight as we were going out there here come the main engine ignition which of course light up about 7 seconds before our lift off so we can check them out they stabilize we pull the umbilical light the srbs and we're off here you can see Vance waving to us as you go by the tower and just a spectacular night launch I've never seen one they say they're spectacular to watch but it certainly is spectacular to watch from inside as well we managed to launch with almost a full moon and here's a beautiful shot of us going right by the moon there was a cloud deck at about 7,000 ft uh which you'll see us light up here as we go through it it was really spectacular look out the windows and watch that approach after 2 minutes the srbs have consumed their fuel and we jettison them little Rockets fire to push them away from the Orbiter and we continue to burn the main engines for a total of about 8 and a half minutes which gets us up to over 177,000 mph and we're up in orbit around the Earth Here We Are finally an orbit about an hour after launch with a second burn having put us into a circular orbit going into orbit to do astronomy has two benefits one of course is you get you above the clouds but that's not the primary one the primary one is to get above the atmosphere itself you see a series of layers of atmosphere sitting above this rather pretty sunset one of the first things we do on orbit is to begin the opening the payload bay door is this not only exposes the payload so the telescopes can see the stars we came to observe but also the inner surface of the do our radiators and allows us to start cooling the vehicle once that's accomplished we began activating first the space lab itself with its computers that help Us control things in the payload Bay here you can see some of the elements of our payload first of all the X-ray telescope and the far back U from The Goddard Space Center and then here parts of the space lab which was in fact produced uh in concert with us by the Europeans having activated the space lab we proceeded on then to uh activate the IPS itself with its three large telescopes in fact once this uh platform where the telescopes is erected that's about the last we saw of the X-ray telescope which is hidden uh behind this much larger array of telescopes with the uh telescopes erected pointing out the bay um towards space we're now in a position to begin observing uh first with the Orbiter crew positioning the orbitor you can actually see a little jet firing here on on that frame right there once the Orbiter crew gets the orbit pointed in the proper direction um then the uh Mission specialist uh could in our case begin pointing the IPS the pointing system that had the telescopes begin pointing it more precisely sort of fine-tuning towards the exact star or Galaxy we're working on uh we had troubles with the uh with the automatic star trackers doing that and we resorted to what we call the oldfashioned method of hand guiding this was done with a lot of help from the ground which Ron will talk about one of the really great things that happened this mission was to watch within one 12-hour shift of bringing up a whole new way of operating where we had the Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center operating the instrument pointing system commanding it and the experimenters at the payload operations control center in Huntsville commanding the the telescopes and us on board doing the target acquisition and fine guiding towards the end of the mission our efficiency was getting up to the point where we were observing just as many targets if as if we had U had not had the failures so we were we and the scientists also were quite pleased with that we were divided into two teams a red team and a blue team this is the blue team getting out of bed in the morning ready to go to work we tried to maintain a lot of discipline and do everything by the numbers so uh we're going to work by the Numbers here floating out of our sleep stations it was a little crowded down there uh these wide angle views make it seem bigger than it was it's always fun to experiment in weightlessness uh with things like bubbles of water here and and observe the Dynamics of that free floating fluid Jeff was a little thirsty I [Music] [Laughter] guess meal time is very important uh chance to relax and recap the events of the day and uh play with your food a little bit the the school kids we show these to always like those scenes uh some more uh fluid dynamics experiments hygiene is very important we occasionally uh took time to to wash our faces where does that water go just living in the spaceship creates a lot of waste water of course and normally that's held in a storage tank and every day or so we dump that out into space which is really a gorgeous site if you get the sun angle just right it looks like a snowstorm or a blizzard or a heavy uh heavy rainstorm uh really spectacular out the window as you see uh this uh we had a little clog in the line that dump that water overboard so toward the end of the mission we rigged up some tubing and and were able to transfer that waste water into storage bags on the inside of the Orbiter well throughout all this uh problems with the Orbiter Plumbing we kept right on trucking as far as the observations and kept getting good science data throughout and I'd say really all of these problems were no more than a minor [Music] inconvenience we had four people on board who have actually uh at various times in our careers have taught in universities so we uh took this idea of teachers in space and and interest that NASA has in education and we actually uh taught some lessons direct to classrooms uh on the ground with students here's uh Sam talking about