STS-44: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon and welcome to Johnson Space Center and the STS 44 postflight crew press conference I would like to turn over the press conference to our commander uh Colonel Frederick Gregory Fred thanks Barbara well welcome again uh we we have a pre we had an on orbit and this is uh the followup to everything that we did up there I was disappointed and I for got to say that that we didn't land in Florida because IID promised so many people we'd come back but the appropriate place to go was to Edwards out on the lake bed um just in case uh by some reason we would have had another problem the approach was outstanding it was a daylight approach and I love those I didn't get to see Hawaii this time as I did on 33 the touchdown was on the lake bed on Runway 05 I guess that was the first time any Orbiter had landed there but from my point of view they all look the same I'd like to introduce the 44 crew to you one more time good afternoon I'm Tom Henrik the pilot and I'm Jim Voss I was mission specialist one on the flight hi I'm story Musgrave was mission specialist [Music] 2 good afternoon I'm Mario runko Mission specialist 3 hi and I'm Tom Henn and I was the payload specialist on the flight and so with that could we go ahead and start the film please I thought this was a pretty good opening it uh kind of gave you an idea as we emerged from from the darkness to the the bright Sun STS 44 and our mission patch getting ready for ignition here I'm in the center seat and I'm holding up a mirror on my wrist like this so I can look out the back window to see what's going on below see what you see going on here and also I can look out the front window at liftoff uh looking on this little mirror I have my wrist it's just like a great big flash bulb's going off you can look backwards from this point here you look right into the flame trench where everything is going on then you pick up a broader perspective you see the entire pad and eventually when you roll over the way it is here you see the beach and the waves go by and so you see the shrinking image on your wrist As you move away from Earth it's an incredibly nice picture most of the time when you're in very hot drag stairs you're not looking out the back window but in this case it's quite a scene and here at Main engine throttle up you can feel the acceleration as the main engines come back to 104% every time I fly on this thing I think that it's a piece of cake but I'll tell you every time I fly in it I learn something new like the main engines do rattle a little bit I used to say they felt like an electric engine down there I was really enjoying the ride and then I looked over at story about this time in the flight and I said story how you doing he said I'm scared to death the older I get the more scared I get I was down in the mid deck and when the srbs separated as you see here uh there were loud exclamations of all the flame coming into the window from the separation Motors that uh FL at the time solid fire across those front windows looks like a furnace when you look through the window at and after we got uh in the second stage we didn't have the solids anymore through this mirror I head out the back window you can see the pulsations the plume even grew the main engines and uh it's a orange yellow flame and uh you could also see that light perturbated out to the front windows we're kind of looking out of the the AFT Windows over the the payload you can see the sparkly activity in the back that's those are ice crystals that are emerging from and around the the main engines back there after about 2 hours on orbit we uh after finishing opening the payload bay doors we were ready to start deploying our payload which was the defense support program satellite which you can see coming into the light right now uh it's an early warning satellite it's consists of basically an infrared telescope plus some other nuclear detection sensors and and it's used for early warning of missile launches it was used extensively during the Iraqi War to warn us when scud missiles were launched here you see the uh payload cover removal system uh in action it's kind of a fishing line type of arrangement uh a motor pulls on the string and removes those uh cloth or canvas covers off of the uh nuclear detection sensors at the bottom of the payload uh there uh they were real concerned about debris or contamination the dust that floats around after you get up on orbit uh getting on on the lenses of of the sensors and contaminating them so that's the reason they had the covers in place it worked flawlessly and there were a lot of jokes going about uh fishing lines and so on with this and they get tucked into the cone here and uh then we shut it down it was a one-time use and uh I don't think we'll we'll get to see this again uh so uh enjoy yeah here we are raising the satellite up to 29 degrees we tilt it up at an angle so that when we deploy it it doesn't run into the orbit or structure uh we do some checkout while we're in orbit with it and the ground also does extensive checkout to make sure that all the communications are working and everything's functioning here you see the panel that we used for the deploy and checking off some of the many steps that we do in preparing it for the uh the deploy of the satellite here it is at 58° the final angle before deploy those are the solar panels that you see reflecting the blue light and here's the deploy it separates from us at a very slow rate drifts up away from us the dark area is the satellite itself the white and then the gold orange nozzle below it is the inertial upper stage which boosts it into its final orbit of around 22,000 miles the IUS which is built by Boeing and a program run by the air force uh performed flawlessly it was the best one they've seen to date worked very well got it into its orbit and the DSP is right now undergoing its on orbit checkout uh and apparently is functioning very well the satellite will continue to be a sentinel for us for many years up there uh ready to watch for any missile launches that we may need to know about in the future I think we informally dubbed at Liberty yes and story was very happy when we got the deploy off he looked over mine and Mario's shoulders to make sure we did everything correctly here's a satellite about 5 miles away uh we moved away from it after we deployed it Fred moved the shuttle uh up and away from it some distance and we were able to watch it uh in the sunlight when the sun came up here's the arm taking the uh the ultimate High Ground Jim and I are shown here on the a flight deck with teras Scout Hardware Mount mounted in the overhead window teras Scout's a program with with this first experiment designed to Baseline the characterization of human observation techniques from Earth orbit the results of this and future teras Scout experimentation will be used to design more human quality into Future remote sensing systems this is one of the targets we passed uh this is Cape canaval the skid strip at the cape at this particular point was was Cloud covered so we didn't get it here you see uh myself installing the m881 one uh radio antenna this antenna was used with our direct com system that was uh to talk directly with people on the ground the m881 experiment was uh a military experiment designed to uh get a get a quantification or handle on just how well the Observer from space can uh see detail on the ground and if that's needed in the future uh we might be assigned to uh help in time of Crisis uh here you see the camera that I used uh the long barrel on that and over my uh left shoulder there in the background you see the Monitor and there's some of the radio equipment we used and on top of in the image that you see is the uh storage device for the digital images and here's a picture of the first image I took from 195 miles that's the payload support team that uh was posing on the ground as we flew over this is a quick shot of three radiation monitor experiments we carried Sam K cre and Remy and they're Gathering data to better map the radiation environment around the Earth in low atmosphere low orbit this is uh what we call lower body negative pressure it's exposing the body to subatmospheric pressure at minus 50 mm of mercury it sucks the same amount of blood into the lower extremities as occurs when you're standing here in uh 1G and that is able to simulate return to uh to 1G on Earth here it's also uh proposed as a mechanism for adapting us to Earth before we come home and here is Jim who is a during a 4H hour soak what we call four hours of exposure to that has shown that he could work very effectively undergoing lower body negative [Music] pressure and here's the commander uh obviously running myself one of the principal difference between this and previous lower body negative pressure experiments was to see how one would readapt to Earth here's uh intraocular pressure to measure the pressure in the eyeball as it changes in space flight it's not as painful as it looks this is a microbial air sampler it has a fan at the front that collects a sample of air on a sticky strip like a piece of fly paper and once a sample was taken it was more fun just to see what the spinning fan would do in microgravity Mario was on the treadmill at the time it seized up and you'll see it seize here fairly soon we were exercising and to support a DSO and to have some uh improved capability on entry and that's the last we saw the treadmill and this does look like the Atlantis gymnasium space gym we quickly converted the treadmill to a rowing machine uh we used that for one exercise session and the ground came up with another maneuver called the D maneuver which we used until the mission was terminated and zero gravity the normal relationship between the visual system and the vestibular system of the inner ear is has changed is really Chang dramatically and this investigation studies how the brain learns to compensate for the changes in sensory system information about gravity both during flight and after flight in this particular task tested eye reflexes while Vision was uded by the goggles that I was wearing this what we call the bioreactor it's a chamber that whose cylinders an outer cylinder and inner cylinder rotate at different velocities and there's also different flows through it we're studying the hydrodynamics of three different sized spheres that run in there the hypothesis is that we will be able to grow clumps of tissue cultures in space much more effectively than the monolayer of tissue cultures that we have down here on Earth which will contribute to things like uh the study of cancer and also uh production of vaccines we had to fix a humidity separator on orbit it's one of the devices that take the water out of our air and give us a comfortable relative humidity this is a kind of bad shot showing the repair on it but there's not much room down below the floor of the Orbiter down in the bges we had to go in and dry up all the water and then put a plastic bag over the outlet to the humidity separator in case it leaked again uh we'd be able to contain the water and it wouldn't damage our equipment this will be the space station mirrors that came into view out our a window now you can see it in the overhead window as it approaches the moon which will come into view shortly the ground had called this uh near Miss up to us and actually wasn't near we were 25 Mi away but it was spectacular to see another vehicle coming so close to us on our next event was a convergence with a cosmos spent booster and this is a scene in the mid deck as we made the 7sec burn to open that distance from 3 mil to about 35 miles and this just shows you the forces during a after RCS jet [Music] burn we uh spent a lot of time at these overhead Windows um looking down at the Earth both at the meteorology the oceanography and the and the dirt or land mass down there one of the first things we saw was Yuri a tremendous uh Super Tornado uh hurricane Cyclone or whatever we'll we'll talk about more about that during the slides in the eye of Yuri that was one of the tallest eyes I'd ever seen it looked like about 40 50,000 ft tall and at one time it had very very sharp walls to it most impressive uh weather phenomenon I've ever seen from space here we are over Central America now Panama Canal down there we're going to zoom in and look at it it's very difficult to get pictures of uh of Panama because it is so cloudy most of the time my zoom technique is not as good as it might be there here is a dual camera mount in which you can fire off two uh cameras simultaneously and that's a way of testing a different way of taking pictures so you take the same picture and you can evaluate things like different kinds of films and different camera techniques you get a feel for the work environment there you see Tom henen alongside story uh viewing out the window both uh work going on simultaneously here you see some clouds uh and these are over the uh Pacific and uh and uh it depicts a jet stream uh the initial reason we took the cloud was a picture of it was for its beauty and uh and there's some scientific information in there also this is coming from the Atlantic over Morocco over some uh desert area story was taking this and he found some really interesting sand dunes to photograph with the area since those show up so well from space we expect that they are very large sand dunes like two or 300 feet tall yeah spending time at the window was one of the recreational activities on board you here you see Tom henon using a large pair of binoculars and myself taking some Earth Hobs photos and uh in this image you see some thunderstorms uh that we see at night as we go over the dark side of the earth uh they show up quite dramatically in uh and really show up well in our imagery U story love shrimp and and he had all of it and I wanted some of it and I was you don't see the whole sequence but I actually begged for it and I was so happy when he gave it to me it wasn't unusual for him to have five or six of these things aligned waiting for him to eat but I didn't get to eat all of it we all shared story shrimp this was our Thanksgiving dinner and we hope we enjoyed it at about the same time you did it's always story said it's always great to be in space in Thanksgiving but he's always happy to be in space all the time this is the only time we got to sit down together everyone knows that the US Army probably does more Before Sunrise than most people do all day and with 16 sunrises a day it has to be obvious how much work Jim BOS and I did on this flight well our day was only about half over at this point while the rest of the crew was probably ready for a snooze after that hearty Thanksgiving dinner I was compacting dinner as well as probably six M days of trash at this point um the compactor shown here proved invaluable in the management of trash on our flight and I believe it'll become a necessity for longer duration flights we also carried a new food packaging uh product on this flight and that in and uh uh together with the compactor really enabled us to manage our our waste and our trash here we pulling it out and again this is about a little over six Mand dayss worth of trash and um we uh we have a supply of water either Supply water created by the fuel cells or liquid water from from our from our waist system and we did a dump over Houston maybe you saw it on Thanksgiving evening my four-year-old sent up a message where'd you get the fuzzy tail when he saw us go by with a dump in progress we're kind of floating up onto the flight deck and this is we're preparing for deorbit and they we've put in the rear seats all of the wires and all the hoses and uh I'm over here in the commander seat getting ready for some of the activities that will occur the next day and it includes a lot of inputs onto the through the keyboard onto the computer and obviously I must like it CU I gave you a thumbs up on it this was a realtime sunset in the payo bay but this glow afterwards was Moonglow here we are getting ready for our deorbit we had several of us uh five in fact do medical experiments on the way down during entry this one involves looking at our orthostatic function during entry and post Landing it involved putting the mentation on during our deorbit prep uh in in our suit and through the suit and then measuring our heart rate and our blood pressure during entry then after putting our instrumentation on we had to put our suits on we show you just a little bit of the struggle of working in Zerg trying to get in this case story into his suit he's braced against the seat there and I'm struggling with him and most of the time it took time holding him in place to get the other part of his suit on now you've seen some of the activities that we do do pre-landing we get up 7 hours before we do our deorbit burn and during that 7 hours we're extremely busy uh generally getting the Orbiter ready to enter getting ourselves suited up changing our computer mode from orbit to entry and then the actual entry this is a shot looking out the Commander's window we're about 240,000 ft going across Hawaii at this point the islands were Cloud covered but you can get sensation of how fast we're going across the surface of the Earth on the hack we're above the desert at Edwards this is just a big uh cylinder above U The Landing Runway you see how the orbitor is shaking every now and then you can see the back seat of the Pilot's uh seat shaking I don't think we're aware of that vibration though inside I was that camera that I was holding taking these pictures weighed about 50 lbs at this point okay that's looking down at Edwards the complex right at the bottom of the picture and then the lake bed that you'll see out of the upper portion of the picture uh we are about uh 400 ft above the ground we push the button to deploy the gear at 400 ft and the gear should be down about 300 ft above the ground then it's just a matter of coasting this kind of brick into a landing Fred makes it sound easy but it was great to sit there and watch him complete this task this is one of the best Landings we've had in the shutle program and this was to a Runway that we practic very few approaches to you can see the dust coming from the lake bed nose gear comes down it touches down about 140 knots and then one of our objectives was to look at the hardness of the runway there and you do that by just letting the Orbiter land on it and then roll out we didn't apply any brakes at all and this is a view from inside as we're still coasting I saw the end of the runway come up and I asked Houston if we could put the brakes on we did that at 15 mil hour that's a welcoming committee I didn't even know they were there