STS-42: Postflight Press Conference (1992)

[Music] good afternoon and welcome to the STS 42 postflight press conference and the crew is going to be telling you about the international microgravity laboratory mission that they were just on I'm going to turn over the program to the commander Ron gravy thank you Barbara on behalf of the crew I'd like to welcome everyone to the press conference for STS 42 the first International microgravity laboratory uh from the crew standpoint this was an immensely rewarding flight on which to fly both from the standpoint of personal enjoyment and also the satisfaction that we derived from a mission that was very very productive and the productivity of of the mission just what all we were able to accomplish is a ATT tribute not so much to ourselves but to the tremendous support team that we had that got us ready to go fly and then assisted US during the conduct of the flight without that team uh obviously we wouldn't be able to accomplish nearly the things that we are able to do in space and we'd sure like to acknowledge that support and thank that support team at this time uh let me just go down briefly uh down the line and introduce the crew members I think everybody's pretty familiar with our faces by now seems like we spent a lot of time in front of TVs not only before the flight but during the flight as well on my immediate left is the pilot Steve Oswald on Steve's left is Bill Rey who flew in the center seat position or the flight engineer position the Bill's immediate left is Norm thard uh Norm served as the payload commander on this flight as he had the overall responsibility for the conduct and the return of this on the scientific side of the mission on Norm's left is Dave helmer's Dave was the other NASA Mission specialist assigned to specific duties with the payload itself on days left we have Roberto bondor who came with to us from the Canadian space agency and uh on Roberto's left is Dr ol marold and Ulf came to us from the European Space Agency the format that we'd like to share with you today is we show you a 16 mm movie showing highlights of the film which we'll showing highlights of the mission which we'll narrate as it plays and then after that we'll share some 35mm slides with you so I think we're ready to roll the film well we pick up here with the mission patch for STS 42 here we are in the suitup room this is myself Steve Bill [Music] Norm Roberta Dave and last but not least of course UL all of us going through the suitup in parallel here we are walking out of the onc building we had a beautiful day to go launch and we certainly took advantage of that we were really ready to go fly I get to talk through Asin and I guess after um after being assigned to the flight for two or three years uh some of the crew members were and after sitting on the pad for several hours we were certainly uh glad to get down to this part of the count and finally lift off uh I guess there there are no amount of words that can really describe this phase of the flight uh the vibration and the and the raw power that's that's being exerted on a vehicle during this first two minutes of the flight is truly awesome um I guess we uh we all felt well prepared but uh but the view that I was getting out the out the right side of the uh of the vehicle during accident was was truly spectacular looking out on the East Coast booster separation as you see in the film right now is um something like an automobile accident I guess I was I was a little bit unprepared for that there's an awful lot going on big bright flash of fire across the windshield there um and and like everybody else on the ground I guess we were we were glad to get get the boosters gone and be on our way way uphill with the main engines let me pass it over to Mr Bill to talk about the tank well you see the tank floating by there it was a really terrific job of photography by norm and Dave who managed to get the camera all put together and up on the uh overhead windows it's a view of what we had out the window as soon as we got the payload bay doors open you can see the IML patch on one side and the International Space lab patch on the other now the space lab Ingress had about 3 hours into the flight uh norm and Bobby headed on back into the lab after opening the hatches and uh and did the initial space lab activation you see Norman Bobby and then Mr Bill floating back into the lab um for this uh for the initial power up of the lab and the initial activation of various experiments there was an awful lot of logistics going on here's Norm is uh is opening up the um the vents in the uh in the panel in the forward part of the module but we had 11 lockers worth of late access materials that we had to transport back to the lab during the early part of the flight red shift Bill ol and I came on about 9 hours into the mission after trying to take a nap of about 6 hours right after liftoff which is pretty hard I was back there uh working the cells experiment I spent about 3 hours on that day uh day one working cells while Olf was in the back uh setting up the uh microgravity vestibular investigation experiment the chair another experiment that we performed was a sled experiment the space adaptation syndrome experiments were a suite of seven Canadian experiments that looked at various effects microgravity on human physiology the sled had to be rotated twice once for the Z Direction once for the X Direction and it investigated the effects of the oolith and zogog on vestibular responses quite a fun experiment to work [Music] with we're getting a series of shocks electric shocks during that time I think everyone who's had any interest in the mission at all is familiar by now with the as Dave told you the microgravity vestibular investigation or in the ey chair that you see here every one of the P crew all four of us rode the chair at least a couple times during the course of the mission you can see the eye response there the idea is that each of the semicircular canals or each of the axes three axes can be invest investigated independently you can place this chair in different positions you saw it initially in the ya position here it is in the pitch position and it actually will induce then in the subject a pitch motion and I must say that even though this was z g and we'd always imagine that it wouldn't make much difference on the orientation of the chair in Zer G it still to me seemed like it was a chair on its side here in the pitch position so you've seen the yaw and the pitch I'm not sure if we have the roll position but it also would go into the roll position and you can see us uh I'm assisting Roberta to get into the chair and after she's in the chair then I'll go over to the computer which is off to the right there and a little out of view and actually command the runs in sequence as a research tool for basic Research into the vestibular and the relationship between the vestibular and the optic system it's an excellent tool and to really separate out the influence of oolith which is a linear detector a linear acceleration detector and the uh semicircular canals which detect angular motions you almost have to take something like this to z g and you see here now a sinusoidal run in the pitch plane and this uh we thought we'd include this just because it shows you that uh it's very easy to change the chair from position to position it would be sort of an operational hit to have folks get out of that chair and reposition it in zero g that's not necessary and so after we finished the uh pitch run then Roberta just lifts the whole chair and uh places it in the off position and here I proceeded after MBI to go to the glove box and uh do some experiments on Bak this is the uh facility that the European experiments were set up to look at uh certain aspects of microgravity and Cosmic radiation and their interaction on various types of tissue including bacteria fruit flies um we had experiments looking at at U bone and cells to see uh how cartilage and Bone are affected by that type of environment the the glove box itself had a cooler refrigerator cooler freezer a freezer on top a cooler and then three incubators uh you can see me going into uh the cooler here uh previously I was going into the incubator where you could see centrifuges moving around around we had over 160 of these black containers in which we performed the experiments um most of the experiments performed inside the glove box which you can uh see in front of me this is one of the biak experiments that has come out of there was black containers they're actually uh uh seeds that were looking at how the roots were affected by microgravity and also by putting them on a cuge and how they change I am taking the uh the individual specimens and putting them into a photo box there's a camera inside this box which fired off photographs at specific times and here we can see the red shift as well they would carry on experiments when we were finished we had two exercise devices on uh on this flight we had a bicycle ergometer which you see Steve uh Steve exercising on right now the idea of these two exercise devices was to minimize the impact on the uh microgravity environment uh you've probably seen the treadmill in use before and the pounding uh through the Orbiter structure of the treadmill is something that disturbs the microgravity environment so we're looking at alternative exercise devices one of the other things for a laboratory flight you need some kind of eyewash protection in case you have a toxic agent or something loose in the lab and this is a prototype eyewash device it does wash your eyes out pretty effectively among other things the payload crew was too valuable to experiment on by the way well guess we're real valuable here we've got the pilot and we're trying to refresh him on his scientific knowledge here this is really a trans cranial trans cranial Doppler is the name of this particular experiment I'm doing in the mid deck and we're really looking at blood flow disturbances or blood flow changes in microgravity using ultrasound and now we're going to go back into the space lab this is a nice view going down through the tunnel and uh as you come down through it you can see that there's not a lot of room if you have a whole bunch of people going back and forth and I made the mistake of coming down at this precise point when Steve was coming up with the camera so but it was very easy to uh backtrack in fact it was kind of fun to do a somersault back into the lab where you can see everybody is hard at work of course I've got a drink bag that I'm flying around with one of the things we told him is we needed a traffic light so that you could tell when it was clear to go down the tunnel or not bill and I are working here on the uh on the IMAX camera we had uh the camera which weighed about 100 PB or so in 1G uh much easier to manipulate in zerog G we had 13 rolls of film and our objective was to shoot 30 plus interior scenes uh and three rolls of exterior scenes and we uh we got most of that done and the initial impression from the IMAX folks is that that uh material turned out to be very good we hope to see that here on uh on Wednesday night for the first time the scenes were shot in preparation for their next movie which will be put together with some film that was shot on STS 31 and a couple of subsequent flights uh I guess the preliminary title for that movie is Destiny and space well here's the first U material science experiment it is the TGs experiment we had all kinds of um single crystal experiment to be grown under zero gravity and interestingly enough we never we did not have one that was grown from the milk most of them were grown from solution like that one you see still some raw material crystalite sitting there in the cell that is Trine sulfate or whatever you pronounce it and here's another material um that is ammonium chloride and it is called cast uh that is a model experiment to understand the growth of tendres you see these needles dendros is a Greek word means tree and many metals grow exactly that way if they solidify from the Melt here is another interesting material Mercury iodide which is a promising detector material for X-ray and gamar Ray detectors uh that experiment had been done before on Space La 3 we grew a crystal about twice as big as that one grown on Space La 3 we had several hundreds different proteins that were also grown from solution and this one is called the cryostat um in this case it was grown by liquid [Music] diffusion now we have ol showing its talents over the life science side he's planting um oat seeds an experiment of part of the gravitational plant physiology set called GBF this particular subset is called GES looking at the effects of gravity on plants and he's actually doing infl implant uh inflight planning and also assessing the height of the seeds right now I'm over here at the gpp facility uh there's a keypad on there and we had to uh put in various types of uh data to organize the cuses inside the facility and this shots over the glove box uh this was uh the plant experiment again but we're utilizing the bag glove box to contain the uh the fixative inside the bags the glove box was very handy for doing this type of experimentation we have small gloves on board which I used and mediumsized gloves for everyone else uh and you can see stuff can float freely around in there if you don't have it tied down and quite often we had to go in and put double-sided tape uh or Loops of tape inside the glove box when we finished the individual experiments we could take them out through the glove box door close it up which is real important otherwise things would float out and then go back and put things back where they belonged well this is a a refrigerator called the Leslie freezer we used it to put biological biological specimens in it in order to preserve and conserve them for postflight analysis um it was also to some extent an engineering test that particular refrigerator may fly again on later flights here you see a general view of the space lab interior as an EA man I take the Liberty to remind everyone that that is the ISA contribution to the shuttle program and whenever it has flown it worked out without major problems so I think it's a pretty powerful instrument for all kinds of scientific investigations as you can see it's pretty wide and nice well I think you get the flavor that we were pretty busy when we did look outside we were often treated to some pretty dramatic views of snow and ice here's Lake Manaka wagen in Northern Canada here we are coming across the northern Sea of Japan across sakan Island that's the land mass coming into view beneath the tail now as we continue on Eastward uh we'll pick up the Sea of aut and you'll see some very dramatic ice flows forming here just off the eastern coast of sucin it was primarily daytime in the northern hemisphere so our views were at the northern latitudes and this is the sort of uh inh inhospitable sort of territory that we were generally viewing uh but the views were were very dramatic okay here we are around Filmore Utah on a descending pass you could see the United States is pretty spectacular for the mountain uh train that we have as well uh crossing over the wasach plateau and coming into the lower left corner here pretty soon you'll start to pick up the uh the Green River Colorado river flowing into Lake Powell and the Canyonlands National Park you see Lake Powell coming in and as the color of the terrain changes you'll be seeing Monument Valley Utah and finally we're coming up on the Four Corners which is kind of a unique part of the United States where Utah Colorado Arizona and New Mexico all join in one uh in one point I'm afraid the pictures in the movies just can't uh do justice to the view out the window now here we are in the last uh last part of the flight we had an awful lot of of sunsets we were flying right along the Terminator for most of the flight well it took a lot of work to uh get the module cleaned up after all the things that we had unstowed as you saw the picture picture that UL was talking to showed all the various pieces of equipment that we had out from lights to payload equipment experiments and it took a lot of work to perform that metamorphosis to actually deactivate the payload coming down the tunnel for the last time was kind of nostalgic uh you kind of like saying goodbye to an old friend the space lab that performed flawlessly throughout the whole mission and finally we uh go through the the hatch and close it up into the tunnel adapter it's amazing 50% of your volume is is taken away when you close that hatch and suddenly things for seven people become much more crowded as we found out in deorbit prep we're lucky enough to get an extra day on orbit an eighth day thanks to some ingenious power saving by the folks on the ground um but all good things I guess need to come to an end and here we are on the flight deck uh some camcorder video of of Bill uh we tried to drink as much fluid as we could prior to re-entry to help us once we got on the ground it's a view out my window there looking at the Horizon uh a view out the overhead Windows during re-entry as the um uh as the hot gases pass over the overhead Windows they tend to flash like that some rather dramatic video uh it was truly a beautiful site re-entering and a spectacular view of the West Coast just a perfect day for a uh for an entry and landing at Edwards Air Force Base this clip picks up with the Orbiter on Final it was absolutely a perfect day for landing we should all have the uh the Good Fortune to return on on such a pretty day uh Landing the Orbiter turned out to be something we were exceptionally well prepared for we have some outstanding training tools namely the shuttle training aircraft which really does an excellent job of simulating the approach and Landing handling characteristics of the Orbiter we're landing at Edwards Air Force Base because we had extensive post-flight Baseline data collection to augment the physiological data that we acquired on orbit there's touchdown on Edwards Runway 22 and D rotation of course the best part of a space flight particularly one that you're really well pleased with the results is when you actually get to come home U we sure enjoyed our time in orbit but it's always the best part is arrival back on Earth