The Farthest Shore – Chapter Three Space Stories
From The Space Library
Chapter Three Space Stories
Rusty Schweickart, Jeffrey Hoffman, Eric Choi, Eric Dahlstrom, Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, Joseph Pelton, Robert Thirsk and Lawrence DeLuca
“Humanity visualized the Earth ... ‘as it truly is, bright and
blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats’…”
-- Archibald MacLeish
Only about 500 people have flown into space since the space age started a half century ago. Although the advent of space tourism may change those numbers dramatically in coming years, going into space today is still a truly special and rare event. Most of this book is organized to explain and inform. In particular we have sought to explain how we can use space to explore, to help Planet Earth, or to discover the amazing physics of the Universe. We also have also sought to cover the incredible ways that space systems can help people to communicate, to navigate, to farm, to fish, to combat climate change, or to protect ourselves against hostile weather or natural disasters. We even spend a good deal of time examining how to design and build satellites and launcher systems. But this chapter is different.
This chapter contains a series of stories about astronauts who have gone into space or about “space-consumed” people, who have either designed systems that have successfully gone into space or about those planning totally new ways of going into space, including the pioneers planning and creating the fantastic new space tourism industry. These are stories about special people who have done, or are doing, amazing things. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart tells us about how remarkable his Apollo 9 experiences were. Astronaut and MIT Professor Jeffrey Hoffman relates to us the thrills and challenges of repairing the Hubble Telescope the first time around. We hear from International Space University graduates from Canada, the U.S.A. and Finland who worked on the Phoenix robot explorer, that amazing device which helped us reveal the latest new information about Mars. They tell us what working on this program was like. They also tell us not only of their part in the “Mars Adventure”, but also how important international cooperation in space is to achieving success in complex missions such as Phoenix. We also hear about space tourism and the “space billionaires” who are redefining what space travel might mean in future decades. In time, the successful pursuit of new space tourism ventures could transform not only our planet, but help us to unlock a whole new future for humanity. We start with the space story of astronaut Rusty Schweickart.
Space Story One: No Frames, No Boundaries--The Apollo 9 Flight in 1969
Apollo Astronaut Russell L. Schweickart
In early 1969 I flew on Apollo 9. I’d like now to take all of you on that trip with me, through that experience, because the experience itself has very little meaning if, in fact, it is an experience only for an individual or a small group of individuals isolated from the rest of humanity. As Neil Armstrong said, the Apollo Program represented a key step forward for all of humankind.
Apollo 9 was to be the first flight of the lunar module, the first time we would take that spacecraft off the ground and expose it to that strange environment to see whether it was ready to do the job. The setting was interesting. In December of 1968, just three months before our mission, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders had circled the moon on Christmas Eve and had read from Genesis and other parts of the Bible, in a sense to sacramentalize that experience and to transmit somehow what they were experiencing to everyone back on Earth, “the good, green Earth,” as Frank called it. And then the next day after Borman and company’s readings, came one of those incredible insights. In the New York Times Magazine, Archibald MacLeish wrote an essay about the step that humanity had now taken. He wrote that somehow things rather suddenly have changed, and man no longer perceived himself in the same way that he had seen himself before. Humanity visualized “the Earth now as it truly is, bright and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” and “men as riders on the Earth together, on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold, brothers who know now they are truly brothers.” To read those moving words as you’re preparing to go up into space yourself you are gripped by these thoughts. It’s a heavy trip, you realize that it’s not just a physical thing you’re doing. You realize there’s a good deal more to it. So in all the other preparations you make you somehow incorporate these thoughts as well.
All this formed the background against a very, very busy foreground. The foreground involved simulation after simulation. –As Apollo astronauts you were force fed all those millions of procedures. These were the essential procedures we were required to learn. Procedures that could save your life and the lives of your fellows if you run into this problem or that problem.
You attended an incredible number of meetings, going over procedures and detailed checklists and techniques. You learned to, think of everything that could happen or go wrong, and then decided in an instant what you will do in each case. Hour after hour in classrooms, you struggled to keep awake so that you could understand all those systems that go into the spacecraft. You learned the “foreground procedures” that would keep you alive or would kill you if you didn’t know what you’re doing.
You then take part in testing the spacecraft--not a simulated one now but the real one. And those tests go on and on, until you feel the spacecraft is going to be worn out before it ever gets a chance to perform up there where it was designed to work.
And then finally comes the morning when you get up before dawn. Some people are just starting to come to work. You look out the window, and in the distance to the north there is this brilliant, white object standing on its tail with search lights playing on it -and it somehow becomes a bright symbol sitting there on the beach ready for its trip into space. It’s the most awe-inspiring thing you’ve ever seen -beautiful. And you go down the hall and have the last of what seems like an infinite series of physical examinations and you eat breakfast—so much of being an Astronaut seems to revolve around calorie consumption. Then, you go down the hall in the other direction and you put on your suit with the help of all those technicians. You’ve done it a hundred times before and it’s exactly the same, except” somehow this morning is a little bit different. And you go down the elevator with your two friends and you get in a transfer van and you go over to the pad and you go up that tower and you look out across that countryside, the sea in one direction and the rest of the country in the other direction. And you realize that all, those years and years of hard work -five years, six years, seven years --condense into this moment. And you are deeply moved.
And then you get into the spacecraft and you jostle around and you joke –around in the White Room as you’re getting in. You put signs on the back of the guy who’s helping you get in, so that everybody watching on TV sees these ridiculous signs. It is a montage of all those things large and small. Then you lie there on your back and they close the door and you’re right back in a simulator -you’ve done it a hundred times. And you lie there. During the countdown you may doze off and catch some sleep, waking up when you’re called on to take a reading or something. Then they count backwards down to zero and off you go.
Somehow it’s anti-climactic. It’s much more exciting from the beach, watching it and seeing all that smoke and fire and feeling the power and the concentration of energy that’s taking those three people up into space. From the beach you feel that, and it causes your whole soul to oscillate with the throb of that incredibly powerful sound. But you’re inside now, you’re going up, and everything looks very much like it does in a simulation and you’ve done this a hundred times. The only difference, at least in most cases, is that it’s all working correctly. I mean things aren’t going wrong now. The dials read what they should read instead of what some joker outside the simulator throws in as a problem.
And so you go into space. You’re lying on your back, and you can’t really see out until the launch escape tower gets jettisoned part way up. Then your window is clear, and as you pitch over, getting near horizontal, you catch the first glimpse out the window of the Earth from space. And it’s a beautiful sight. So you make some comment -everybody has to make a comment when he sees the Earth for the first time -and you make your comment and it’s duly noted. And then it’s to work, because you don’t have time to lollygag. The work schedule doesn’t include time to look out the window and sightsee. You’re up there in March of 1969 and the goal is to put a human on the moon and return safety to Earth before the end of the decade. That deadline looms large. So, on with the job.
You get up there in orbit, you separate from the booster, and you turn around to dock with the lunar module. And you have a little problem docking, because a couple of thrusters got shut off inadvertently during launch. You can’t understand why you can’t control the vehicle. So there’s a moment of panic. You go madly around checking switches, throwing switches with increasing urgency. You are trying everything and anything. Then somebody notices a little flag that’s the wrong way. You then throw the right switches and you dock. You extract the lunar module and now you have to change orbit, so you go through all those procedures. You take out the checklist. You read down the list. You leave nothing to memory. And you’ve done it. You’ve change the orbit. You then light the main engine of the command module with the lunar module now connected on its nose for the first time. For moment you wonder whether maybe it’ll break apart, but it doesn’t. You were part of the design process. You knew by the technical design it wouldn’t, but now you really know. And that first night in orbit you eat. Always you need to ear—to consume those calories. You doff your pressure suits and stow them under the couches. Then you climb into the sleeping bag and go to sleep.
Up the next morning on a timetable the insistent schedule demands. You eat breakfast and sip your Tang. Then you don the suits. And now you’ve got a full day of checkout again. You’re testing the system that held together the first time you lit the engine, but now you’re not just going to light the engine; you’re going to wiggle it, test it. Your job is to stress and strain that tunnel between the command module and the lunar module. It is critical to make sure it will really hold together. And again you know it will, but after you’ve done it for real you have proved it. This is no simulation.
So you’ve had a busy day there, and again it’s eat, doff the suit (you had put on the suit because the spacecraft might have broken apart and it’s hard to live in a vacuum.) So, just in case, you do it that way. And you go to bed.
And the next morning it’s the same process all over again. It is like the movie Groundhog Day where this guy gets to live the same day over and over again. You haven’t quite gotten enough sleep, but it’s up--and hurry up-because you’re late. You eat while you get into the suits. Then you open up that tunnel and go into the lunar module for the first time. It’s an amazing sight out those windows because they’re much bigger windows. But again don’t stop. You don’t have time for that. And so out comes the checklist and follow it relentlessly down through that day. You are checking out all those same systems that you know so well from paper--but now you’re there and you’re throwing the switch for real rather than pretend. And you check out the guidance and control system and the navigation system and the communication system and the environmental control system and on and on and on. By the end of the day you’re ready for the grand finale -you’re going to light up the main engine on the bottom of the lunar module, the engine that will take two of your friends down to the surface of the moon if everything goes right. And you have to demonstrate that that engine will work and that it can also push both the lunar module and the command module around, in case one day that has to be done -little knowing that only the next year that will have to be done to save the lives of three of your friends on the Apollo 13 mission. And you light off that engine and it works, just the way it did in the simulator. It’s amazing. So you go back into the command module and you’re a little behind again and you hurry up and eat (NASA controllers are really into eating and it really does take the edge off of really high adrenaline stuff you have been doing. Then you take off the suits and get to sleep, because, again, the next day is a big day. .
It is up the next day and back through the cycle. Today is the day you check out the portable life support system, the backpack that will be used to walk around on the surface of the moon. This is the critical equipment that will allow people to live and operate and work and observe--to be human in that hostile environment. So you put on the suit that morning knowing that you’re going to go outside. And you get over in the lunar module and you go through all of those procedures. You check out the portable life support system and everything seems to work, and you strap it on your back and you hook all the hoses and connections and wires and cables and antennae and all those things to your body. And you sever the connection with the spacecraft. Next you switch on this pack you’re carrying on your back. You let all of that precious oxygen flow out the door of the lunar module. Now you’re living in your own spaceship and you go out the door. And outside on the front porch of the lunar module, you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight--a beautiful, beautiful sight. But you don’t look at it, because you really don’t have time. You’ve really got to get moving. That ever challenging and demanding flight plan says you’re behind again and you’ve only got forty -five minutes out there to do all those things you have to do. And so you collect the thermal samples and you start taking the pho-tographs–. It is then you have a stroke of luck. Across the way in the command module where your friend is standing, also in his space suit, taking pictures of you while you take pictures of him, his camera jams. It is going to take a while to fix that camera. So you have just a moment to think about what it is you’re doing. You have some time to take in the grandeur of it all. But then he gets it fixed and off you go again. It seems like a flash and you’re back inside the spacecraft. You know you really need to get moving and get everything back together and taken care of and put away and get the food eaten and the suits off and stowed and get to sleep, because the next day is the biggest test of.
The next day you have to prove that you can rendezvous. This means separating the two spacecraft by a couple of hundred miles (over three hundred kilometers apart) and then bringing them back together again. We had been given just four to five hours to accomplish something that had not been done before. One of the craft—the LEM--doesn’t have a heat shield. This has a very precise meaning for us. Two of you can’t come back home unless you get back together. So you get into the lunar excursion module. This vehicle has now become a friend. You go through all the preparation for that rendezvous and you separate. Except when you get to the end of the stroke on the docking mechanism, it goes clunk. You say very perceptively: “What was that? That wasn’t in the simulation.” About the time you’re wondering what it was and if maybe discretion is the better part of valor. In short should we go back, start over. Your friend goes clunk and opens up the fingers. And you say, “Well, we’ll find out in five hours whether it’s all okay.”
So off you go. And five hours later everything has worked right again. It’s been a long five hours and you’ve gone through a lot of tests, but everything has worked and here you come. You’re coming back together again. There’s no reunion like this reunion -not only because it’s your heat shield out there--the only way to get back home--but because that’s your friend over there. Dave Scott is your next -door neighbor, but he was never a neighbor like he’s a neighbor now. And so you dock. You get back together, and you open the tunnel. Believe me there’s a reunion that can’t be topped. And you get everything done and get back into the command module. And you’re tired. You’re absolutely exhausted. You haven’t had enough sleep. You haven’t had a good meal. In fact, you probably haven’t eaten that day. And you sit there and you take off your suit.
And now you’ve got a piece of that lunar module left sticking on the nose of the command module, and you throw a switch and then it’s gone. There’s a piece of you that just floats off. It’s a machine; but so are we. And it goes away. It just floats off into the distance after doing its job faultlessly. And now your thoughts turn to things like a shower and a bed to sleep in. You think of all those things that you realize you haven’t been thinking of for those five hectic days that you’ve just been through. But there are still five days to go, because the flight plan says you are to go for ten days. They want you to show you can do the whole mission, the endurance part. So for the next five days, while you’re thinking about a steak and a shower and a bed and all those things, you float around the Earth doing other tests. And now, for the first time, you have a chance to look out that window. And you look out at that incredibly beautiful Earth down below. You reach down into the cabinet alongside the seat and you pull out a world map and. play tour guide. You set up the little overlay which has your orbit traces on it on top of the map, and you look ahead to where you’re going, what countries you’re going to pass over, what sights you’re going to see. And while the other guys are busy you say, “Hey, in ten minutes we’re going to be over the Mediterranean again and you might want to look out.” So you look forward to that. And you go around the world, around and around and around, performing these tests. Every hour and a half you go around the Earth and you look down at it. And finally, after ten days, 151 times around the world, 151 sunrises and sunsets, you turn around and you light the main engine again for the last time, and you slow down just enough to graze that womb of the Earth, the atmosphere.
And down you come into the atmosphere. As you come back in you experience deceleration and it seems as though you’re under an incredible pressure. You know that you’re experiencing at least four g’s, four times the force of gravity, and you say, “Jim, what is it now?” And he says, “Two tenths of a g.” You just can’t believe it this is only one fifth of what is human’s experience on Earth.
By the time you reach four or five g’s you begin to realize the burden that man has lived under for millions of years. As you look out the window you see your heat shield trailing out behind you in little bright particles. The heat shield is flaking off, and glowing. In fact, the whole atmosphere behind you is now aglow. We see as glowing sheath that is sort of cork-screwing back up toward space. And finally you slow down enough so that all of the bright lights outside the window, the fireball that you’ve been encapsulated in, has now dissipated. And you cross your fingers because all through the flight you’ve been throwing switches. These have activated various pyrotechnic devices. Explosive mechanisms have sealed one fluid from another and one portion of the spacecraft from another. These have been going pop or bang or whatever for days now. And you’ve a couple more of those to: go, the ones that control your parachutes. So you throw the -next to last switch and it goes pop and the drag chutes come out. And you slow down to a couple of hundred miles an hour, and then you throw one more switch and pop, out go the main chutes. They all work. And you realize that the last explosive device, the last switch that you’ve had to throw, the last surge of electrons through all the wiring has worked. Now that whole thing is behind you. Splash! You’re on the surface of the Atlantic. There are people circling around in helicopters and ships. You’re back in humanity again. It’s an incredible feeling.
And what’s it all meant? You know it means success. It means humans will be able to set foot on the moon and return to Earth by 1970? Yes. All of those things that had to work and to be proven have worked. You’re that much nearer to that incredible goal of putting man on another planet. Have you opened the door to the future? Have you changed the nature of exploration? Yeah. You’ve done that.
We will not step back through that door and close it, except perhaps for short periods of time. Are there any practical benefits from it? Yeah. Lots of practical benefits, ad infinitum. After a while you get tired of talking about them, but they’re there. And they make a big difference in the world; in fact, you’re dedicated to them because they will make that difference.
But I think that in some ways there are other benefits that are more significant. I think that you’ve played a part in changing the concept of humans and the nature of life, by redefining a relationship that you have assumed all these years. Humanity, the whole of history has assumed –we have a relationship to a single planet. But that is now changed. And you now know that, because it’s a part of your gut, not a part of your head. And you wonder, you marvel that an Archibald MacLeish somehow knew that. How did he know that? That’s a miracle.
But up there you go around every hour and a half, time after time after time. And you wake up usually in the mornings, just the way the track of your orbit goes, over the Middle East and over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window as you’re going past, and there’s the Mediterranean area, Greece and Rome and North Africa and the Sinai, that whole area. And you realize that in one glance what you’re seeing is what was the whole history of man for thousands of years--the cradle of Western Civilization. And you go down across North Africa and out over the Indian Ocean and look up at that great subcontinent of India pointed down toward you as you go past it, Sri Lanka off to the side, then Burma, Southeast Asia and China, out over the, Philippines. You marvel at the expanse of Asia where the bulk of humanity lives. And this it is up across that monstrous Pacific Ocean, that vast body of water–. You’ve never realized how big that is before. And you finally come up across the coast of California, and you look for those friendly things, Los Angeles and Phoenix and on across to El Paso. And there’s Houston, there’s home, you know, and you look and sure enough there’s the Astrodome. You identify with that, it’s an attachment. And on across New Orleans and then you look down to the south and there’s the whole peninsula of Florida laid out. And all the hundreds of hours you’ve spent flying across that route down in the atmosphere, all that is friendly again. And you go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa, and you do it again and again and again.
And you identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans. And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you’re identifying with North Africa and other parts of the world. You look forward to that, you anticipate it, and there it is. And that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. And that changes you.
You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are observing what you can’t see. You know there are hundreds of people in the Mid-East killing each other over some imaginary line- a line that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, “Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s really important?”
And a little later on we did the impossible. One of your friends accomplished the goal set by President Kennedy. , One of those same neighbors, the person next to you, went out to the moon. And now he looks back arid he sees the Earth not as something big, where he can see the beautiful details, but now he sees the Earth as a small thing out there. And the contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and the black sky, that infinite universe, really comes through. The size of it on a cosmic scale, the insignificance of it forces itself on you. It is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing is everything that means anything to you. On that tiny spot is all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it on that little spot out there—a spot that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you’ve changed, that there’s something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was.
And then you look back on the time you were outside on that EVA. You treasure those few moments that you could take, because a camera malfunctioned. You savor that flash of time when you could think about what was happening. And you recall staring out there at the spectacle that went before your eyes, because now you’re no longer inside something with a window looking out at a picture. Now you’re out there and there are no frames, there are no limits, there are no boundaries. You’re really out there, going at unimaginable speeds, ripping through space in a vacuum. And there’s not a sound. There’s a silence the depth of which you’ve never experienced before. That very elegant silence contrasts so markedly with the scenery you’re seeing and with the speed with which you know you’re moving.
And you think about what you’re experiencing and why. Do you deserve this, this fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you worthy to be separated out to be touched by God, to have some special experience that others cannot have? And you know the answer to that is no. There’s nothing that you’ve done to deserve that to earn that extraordinary privilege. Then you recognize it’s not a special thing for YOU.
You know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully, that you’re the sensing element for all of humanity. You look down and see the surface of that globe that you’ve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down there and they are like you, they are you–. Somehow you represent them. You are up there as the sensing element and that’s a humbling feeling. It’s a feeling that says you have a responsibility. It’s not for yourself. The eye that doesn’t see doesn’t do justice to the body. That’s why it’s there; that’s why you are out there. And somehow you recognize that you’re a piece of this total life. And you’re out there on that forefront and you have to bring that back somehow. And that becomes a rather special responsibility and it tells you something about your relationship with this thing we call “life.” So that’s a fundamental change. That’s something new. And when you come back there’s a difference in that world for you now. There’s a difference in that relationship between you and that planet and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you’ve had that kind of experience. It’s a difference and it’s so precious.
All through this narrative I’ve used the word “you” because it’s not me, it’s not Dave Scott, it’s not Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad, or even John Glenn -it’s you, it’s we. It’s life that’s had that experience. I’d like to share with you in closing a poem by e. e. cummings. It’s just become a part of me somehow out of all this and I’m not really sure how. He says:
i thank you God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is ye
Editorial Note: Rusty Schweickart presented a version of this “story” at the 1974 Lindisfarne Conference. Printed with the permission of Rusty Schweickart.)
Space Story Two: Rescuing and Repairing the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
MIT Professor and Astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman
I had the good fortune to be one of the crewmembers on Space Shuttle mission STS-61 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Our mission lasted from 2 to 13 December 1993, and it managed to restore this remarkable tool to its full operational and scientific capability. In fact, our efforts to install a set of “eyeglasses” on the telescope finally allowed it to probe the depths of space as never before.
Given the incredible scientific success and enormous public popularity that Hubble has achieved since our rescue mission, it is hard to remember the sense of despair that pervaded NASA and the astronomical community following the discovery, after its 1990 launch, that Hubble suffered from a “spherical aberration” in its primary telescopic mirror. This distor-tion destroyed the razor-sharp focus (better than 1/10 arc second) necessary to achieve its ambitious goals.
Once the cause of the problem was discovered, optical engineers, astronomers and astronauts came up with an ingenious method of inserting corrective optics to fix the problem. This was often referred to as “putting contact lenses, or glasses, on Hubble”. In fact, we really installed extra mirrors rather than lenses. In any case, our mission was the most ambitious repair mission ever planned by NASA. In addition to fixing the optics, we had to replace Hubble’s two solar panels, two of its gyroscope modules, two electronic control units, four fuses, and two magnetometers, and install an additional memory module in the main computer and a repair kit on one of the scientific instruments.
In all, we would need five EVAs (or spacewalks) to accomplish all our tasks. Six EVAs were the absolute maximum that could be accomplished in the limited time a Shuttle can stay in space, and we had to hold one in reserve in case of contingencies, so our schedule was packed to the limit.
The repair and upgrade of the HST was the main reason for this mission. It turned out that our efforts also demonstrated the capability and level of maturity of our orbital operations. This was an important secondary objective for NASA. After all, the Hubble Space Telescope was conceived with the idea that the Space Shuttle would allow us to maintain it as a long-term astronomical observatory facility, like ground-based observatories. At the outset we planned to revisit it, as necessary, to make repairs and to replace older scientific instruments with new, state-of-the-art technology.
This was the dream and the promise of Hubble. Now we had to show that we could do it! Both as a former professional astronomer and as an astronaut, I could not imagine a more exciting space flight. I had many astronomer friends who had invested years of their lives with the Hubble Space Telescope, so our rescue mission had not only scientific and institu-tional significance, but also quite personal interests.
So what was it like preparing for and carrying out this mission? By the time our crew went into medical quarantine one week before launch, we had spent hundreds of hours in flight simulators, practicing both flying skills (ascent and entry) and orbital operations. Our commander and pilot made hundreds of simulated Shuttle approaches and landings in our special Shuttle Training Aircraft. Our robotic manipulator arm operators worked both with electronic simulators and with a full-size mechanical arm, which moved around an HST-shaped helium balloon. The four EVA crewmembers, myself included, spent almost 400 hours underwater, practicing every step of the procedures we were planning to perform.
We looked at these precise activities and motions as “choreography”. Useful time outside the spacecraft was the limiting consumable on this flight, and we did not want to make any mistakes. This could cost us valuable time or, even worse, damage the telescope. We also made extensive use of a virtual reality (VR) simulator, where we did a lot of initial mission planning. (Time on the VR computer is a lot less expensive than underwater training time.) We had several mission dress rehearsals, some of which lasted as long as 54 hours. These efforts were carried out in our Shuttle Mission Simulator, which was electronically tied together with both the Mission Control Center in Houston and the Space Telescope Operations Control Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The objective was to practice coordination between the crew, Shuttle controllers and HST controllers and to get it as close to perfect as possible.
All this was behind us when we entered quarantine. In addition to protecting us from germs, this was a nice time to “decompress” from our grueling training schedule and relax a little before the flight. Three days before launch we traveled to Florida for our final briefings on late-developing problems and changes to the Shuttle or payload. Then there were our final equipment checks and a little time with our families (although children under eighteen were not allowed into quarantine, which annoyed my youngest son no end, since his older brother had just turned eighteen!) We had already made several trips to the Kennedy Space Center during the four months before launch. The purpose of these trips was to watch the HST replacement parts being installed into the Shuttle, to check the payload bay for sharp edges that might hurt our spacesuits, and for a dress rehearsal countdown. Each of these trips ended with our flying West, back to Houston. Now, we were finally ready to leave towards the East! Our excitement was very high.
NASA had done everything possible to reduce the risk that our mission would not succeed. For this reason, all seven crewmembers on STS-61 had flown in space before. Among us, we had sixteen flights worth of experience, a record for space flight. Nevertheless, none of us was blasé about the actual launch. Riding a rocket into space is always an overwhelming experience, no matter how many times you have done it! Our original launch date was 1 December 1993. The previous night there had been a total eclipse of the Moon, and I had enjoyed a lovely bicycle ride on the beach watching the Moon disappear and then reappear. However, the weather on December 1st did not cooperate. Strong crosswinds across the Kennedy Space Center runway exceeded limits, and we had to scrub.
December 2 was a much better day for launch, and for me it had a special significance, since my second space flight had launched on 2 December 1990. That mission was also devoted to astronomy, so the date seemed propitious. We had a perfect launch! Once in orbit, we spent a few hours reconfiguring the Shuttle cabin from its launch to its orbit configuration. Unlike many crews with seven people, we were all on the same shift, so we all went to sleep several hours after getting into space. Our commander was strict about our getting enough sleep every night, so we covered our windows with shades and, unlike on most of my other flights, I did not stay up late watching the Earth drift by beneath me!
On the second day, our main tasks were to check out our four space suits and the Shuttle’s remote manipulator system (RMS), which would grab and berth Hubble and move EVA crewmembers and equipment around the Shuttle’s payload bay. Our lead RMS operator was European Space Agency astronaut Claude Nicollier, backed up by Pilot Ken Bower-sox. Several times during flight day two, Ken and Commander Dick Covey fired the Shuttle’s engines to make slight corrections to our orbit as we carried out our chase of the Hubble Space Telescope. Finally, halfway through our third day in orbit, we got close enough to catch our first glimpse of the HST. It was just a bright dot, but this was an emotional moment for all of us onboard. Every orbit we got closer and closer, and Hubble got bigger and bigger. Eventually, I could make out the solar arrays through my binoculars and reported to the ground that one of the two arrays was badly deformed. We knew that thermal stresses on the metallic array extenders had been causing the arrays to flex. This flexing caused oscillations lasting several minutes every time the telescope went from night to day or day to night. We were concerned that damage to the arrays might prevent them from being rolled up and brought home, which in fact turned out to be the case.
Once we closed within twenty-five meters of the telescope we switched our Ku-band system from rendezvous radar to communications mode, allowing TV pictures to be sent to the ground, so that the thousands of people who have worked on the HST and on this repair mission could share the excitement of seeing Hubble close up for the first time since its 1990 deployment. As we approached the HST, Claude had the arm ready in grapple position. Dick slowed the Shuttle’s closing rate until the HST was hovering motionless over our payload bay (even thought we were both moving around the Earth at 5 miles per second). Claude then maneuvered the arm’s end-effector onto one of the two grapple fixtures on the HST, closed the snares to capture the telescope, and Dick announced to the world that “We have a firm handshake with Mr. Hubble’s telescope.” It was a great feeling! Claude then lowered the telescope onto the Flight Servicing Structure (FSS) at the back end of the payload bay until three hooks on the bottom of the telescope were within capture range of the FSS latches.
I sent a command to close the latches, and Claude released the arm from the HST. I then sent another command to attach an orbiter umbilical to Hubble so that it could be powered by the Shuttle rather than by its own batteries during the week of repairs. It was a long day, but as we went to sleep that night we knew that the first critical part of our mission had been a success. Tomorrow we would carry out our first spacewalk!
The unprecedented number of spacewalks planned for this mission led to the selection of four EVA-trained crewmembers. Each of us had actually done at least one spacewalk on a previous mission. We were divided into two teams, Story Musgrave and I were on one team and Tom Akers and Kathy Thornton were on the other. The plan was for each team to go out on alternate days, to prevent anyone from getting too tired. We cross-trained, so that we all knew how to perform each other’s tasks just in case one team could not go outside for some reason or tasks had to be rescheduled. Each day, the team staying inside would read procedures to the outside team and help make sure that all the goals of that EVA were accomplished correctly. Quality control was critical, since we did not want to break anything that was not already broken! Story and I had the initial EVA, and there was a certain amount of overhead the first time we went outside the Shuttle. These basic tasks included getting tools in place, putting the foot restraint platform onto the manipulator arm, attaching tools to it, and extending translation aids that allowed us to move from the payload bay up to the bottom of the telescope. The first thing we did was to put protective covers over the low gain antenna and two umbilical plugs on the bottom of the telescope. After all these preliminaries we were ready to begin the repair work.
Our EVA timeline had changed frequently during the past year. We tried to organize the repair tasks roughly according to their priority. Another critical factor that influenced our timeline was the length of time estimated to do the various tasks. Also, we wanted to finish every spacewalk with the telescope in a configuration such that, if we had to come home early, the telescope could be redeployed in working condition. For example, changing out the solar arrays was at the top of our priority list, but we had determined that there was probably not enough time to complete this on the first day. Therefore, we left this for the second day and replaced two gyroscope packages on the first. We also had to allow for the possibility that some of our planned repair tasks would not succeed, so we designed each task and wrote our procedures to be modular. This modularity, plus our crew cross-training, allowed the order of tasks to be changed relatively easily in response to unexpected problems.
Changing out the gyros required one EVA crewmember to go inside the telescope and squeeze under the star tracker light shades in order to reach the electrical connectors. This is a delicate task to accomplish in a bulky space suit. In most EVA tasks, being tall and having a long reach is a plus, but in this case Story could fit into this tight space much easier than me. Thus I rode on the manipulator arm and used a long socket wrench to undo the bolts on the old gyros. Story could then install them as I tightened the new bolts while he held the new gyros in place.
Story reconnected the electrical connectors and extricated himself from his working position, without damaging either the star tracker shades or the scientific instruments that were directly behind him. The original plan given to us when we started training had required us to remove the star tracker light shades to clear the work area before replacing the gyros, but this took a lot of time. We came up with the idea of sliding in under the shades and tried it out in the water. This was the plan finally agreed by all those involved in planning the mission. This team included people from Goddard Space Flight Center, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Lockheed Corporation, which was the HST prime contractor, and the EVA flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center. All of these team members had a role in planning and executing our mission. We had to convince a lot of people that our plan would not only save valuable time, but also that it did not pose a risk to the telescope. After much practice, we staged a “final exam” to prove to everyone we could do it. We passed!
Our working plan was typical of how we organized ourselves for most of our EVA tasks. One crew member was a “free floater”, moving hand over hand around the payload bay and doing most tasks with one hand while holding on to some support with the other or, if two hands were necessary, with both feet locked into a foot restraint, which provided stability. The other crewmember rode on the robotic manipulator arm. This person transported most of the large equipment around the payload bay, since it is difficult to move yourself around hand over hand carrying large pieces of equipment without bumping into things. We practiced our EVA tasks without the robot manipulator, just to be prepared in case it should break, but it is not clear we could have accomplished the whole mission without this valuable robotic tool. Certainly our tasks were accomplished much more easily, quickly and with far less risk. This was an excellent example of how human and robotic systems can work together symbiotically to accomplish tasks better than either could do independently.
The heavy workload for this mission gave rise to a mantra “Keep doing useful work.” Useful EVA time was our limiting consumable. Thus, if one person could do a job, we decided that the other person should not wait around for it to be completed. Instead he should go off and start to work on something else. Therefore, after the gyros were replaced, Story went off to get a head start on some of the work that Tom and Kathy would have to do the next day as part of the solar array replacement, leaving me to close the large doors to the gyroscope/star tracker compartment, a simple task we had done many times in the simulators. Like most of the telescope, the door latches were specially designed to be “EVA friendly”, meaning “easy to do” when wearing bulky EVA gloves. All I had to do was turn a handle to engage latches on the top and bottom of the door, then flip a few levers and tighten a few bolts with my electric socket wrench. I turned the handle and saw the upper latch engage, but when I looked down at the lower latch, I saw that the bottom of the door was still open by an inch or so and that the latch had not engaged. I opened the door and tried again, with the same result. While we had anticipated that we would encounter problems in the course of our mission, I had hoped that they would at least wait until after the very first task! Was this the first of many? Could it really be that we might not be able to complete our mission? Those were the first thoughts that ran through my mind, but I couldn’t let myself get distracted, so I started to analyze the cause of the problem and see if I could fix it.
I asked Claude to lower the arm so that I could push on the lower part of the door while I closed the handle yet again. I was happy to see that this time the lower latch closed properly, but then I saw that the upper latch had not engaged! The door was warped, and the normal closing procedure did not work. I reported the problem on my radio so that the crew inside the Shuttle and the flight controllers and Hubble team on the ground could also start thinking about possible solutions. I eventually came to the realization that the warped shape of the door had turned this from a one-man to a two-man task, so I called Story to come over to help.
If I could push on the top and he could push on the bottom, we might be able to get the latches to close. There was a problem, though. I had my feet fixed to the robotic manipulator and could therefore use both my arms to push and manipulate the door and the latches. Story was free-floating and had to use one arm to stabilize himself and pull himself towards the door while pushing the door in with the other arm. However, pushing was not enough. He also had to flip a lever over a bolt to get the latch to hold. I could push the door with one hand and flip the lever with the other, but with one hand required for stabilization, Story didn’t have enough hands!
This led to a lot of discussion with ground personnel. They gave us several suggested techniques, which we tried. None of these worked. Finally, we came up with the idea of using one of our standard Shuttle tools in a unique way. It was a ratcheting strapping device, similar to what truckers use to hold down heavy objects. We envisioned wrapping it around a knob on the door and another attachment point on the telescope. Story could use one hand to stabilize himself and the other hand to tighten the strap. The ratchet would then keep the door closed, and he could move his hand to flip the lever. We felt confident that the technique would work, but ground personnel were concerned that we might exert too much force with the ratchet and damage the telescope. This led to a lot of discussion, which was finally ended when Milt Heflin, our Flight Director, made a command decision, saying “We trained these guys and sent them up to do the job, and they can see the problem better than we can. They’ll be careful with the telescope, so let’s let them get on with it.” And, sure enough, it worked!
The entire EVA had been extended from its original plan by over an hour, and one or two jobs we had originally planned for the first day would have to be rescheduled, but after slightly over eight hours, we finished cleaning up the payload bay and came back in the airlock, having accomplished our main task for the day. An EVA colleague inside the Shuttle helped us to make an inventory of all the tools we had used, to make sure we did not leave anything in the payload bay or (heaven forbid!) inside the telescope. This was typical of the extreme quality control we tried to impose on ourselves during the entire mission. After each spacewalk there were many things we brought back inside with us: our EVA cameras, to reload film, and all our power tools, to prevent their batteries from becoming too cold. Once inside, we got out of our suits, cleaned them up for storage, and reviewed what had happened during the day’s activities that might require changes in the next day’s plans. This was important work, but I have to admit that what I was looking forward to more than anything else after a full day in a space suit with nothing to drink but a bag of water and nothing to eat but a fruit bar was a nice, big dinner!
We always knew that our spacewalks would result in long workdays. It takes several hours after getting up in the morning and having breakfast before we finished preparing and checking out our space suits and got into them. Once in the suits, we needed to spend forty minutes breathing pure oxygen before depressurizing the airlock, to prevent nitrogen bubbles from forming in our blood (and thus giving us “the bends”). Our spacewalks themselves were scheduled to last about six and a half hours (although our suit consumables allowed us to stay outside for several hours more. Clearly this turned out to be necessary for our first EVA). Cleanup, dinner, and getting the Shuttle ready for us to sleep took another few hours. If we only had to do one spacewalk on the mission, we could perhaps afford to squeeze this schedule and perhaps skimp on sleep; but on such a long flight, with so many spacewalks, we could not afford to let ourselves become fatigued. Before the end of the first EVA day, however, we had one more task, to roll up the old solar arrays in preparation for their replacement the next day. The first one rolled up just fine, but the second, which we could already see was deformed, could only be partially rolled up. This meant that we would not be able to pack it in the payload bay to bring home. Instead, it would have to be jettisoned and left in orbit.
The next day was Tom and Kathy’s first spacewalk, and we had spent considerable time going over the revised procedures they would need to use given the problem with the solar array. As planned, Kathy would ride on the robot arm and attach a handle to the array while Tom, the free floater, would disconnect the electrical and mechanical connectors joining it to the telescope. Holding on to the handle, Kathy was now in complete control of the five-meter (16.5 ft.) long solar array. The handle was near the center of mass of the array, so pushing and pulling to translate it did not induce too much rotation. Claude would now move the arm to place her and the array as far above the Shuttle as the arm could reach. From this point she could release the array into orbit. The secret of handling large objects like this in space is not to get them moving too fast. This is one area where you can get fooled by underwater training. The water’s viscosity forces you to push hard to get a large object moving, but objects stop on their own as soon as you stop pushing them. In space, if you use the same amount of force to get an object moving it will end up going much too fast, and in a vacuum there is no viscosity to help stop it! To help prepare us for this, we had all spent several days dressed in space suits pushing large masses around on Johnson Space Center’s precision air-bearing floor. This was sort of like a giant air hockey game with frictionless pucks weighing hundreds of pounds.
This training had its limitations, since the objects we moved around were not free to move along all six axes as they are in space. This is typical of training for spaceflight: there is no one simulation that can duplicate all aspects of being in space. We use many techniques, each of which gives us partial training, and then we have to integrate the experiences inside our heads, carrying the total training experience into the flight. Having all done spacewalks before, we had experience with this and could appreciate the limitations of our many excellent simulators and take advantage of what each had to offer.
The procedure worked perfectly. Just after sunrise, Kathy released the array, which continued to float motionless over the payload bay. Then, our pilots fired the Shuttle’s maneuvering rockets to move us away from the array. The rocket exhaust hit the array, causing it to start tumbling as it slowly moved away from us. This was a breathtaking sight, with the array’s two halves flapping like the wings of a giant, prehistoric flying reptile. We were mesmerized, almost forgetting for a few minutes that we still had a busy spacewalk waiting to be completed. But we soon got back to work. The robotic arm took Kathy over to a carrier in the front of the payload bay, where she and Tom removed one of the new arrays, which Kathy carried over to the empty spot on the telescope. Tom moved hand-over-hand to get back to the telescope foot restraint, ready to help gently fit the array into place and close the primary latch. Now they had to connect the three electrical connectors from the new array to the telescope. This was a critical task, because if the attachment bolt went in cross-threaded and the receptacle socket was damaged, we would not have be able to connect the new solar array, and the telescope would not have enough power to operate. Rather than use a power tool for this task, Kathy used a manual wrench, giving her fingertip control and a good feel for any possible binding as the bolt went in.
Tom dropped out of his foot restraint and was floating with his eyes at the level of the union between the plugs and sockets, so that he could make sure that the connector bracket was coming down evenly. With Tom’s eyes and Kathy’s fingers, we were confident that we could catch any misalignment before it did harm. We had installed mockups of these brackets many times underwater and had installed the real brackets into high fidelity sockets in clean rooms and in a thermal vacuum chamber, always successfully. This would be the first time the brackets had ever seen the real telescope, however, so we all breathed a sigh of relief once they were successfully attached. Now, Tom and Kathy had to pull back while the telescope was rotated 180 degrees to give access to the other solar array. This array was properly rolled up, so Kathy was able to carry it over to the payload bay carrier after she and Tom removed it from the telescope. After that, they installed the second new array, packed away the old array for return to Earth, and the task was complete! Following the solar array replacement, Tom and Kathy returned to the airlock, their first spacewalk successfully accomplished. Luckily for us all, this EVA was completed in good time, allowing us to get back on schedule after the time crunch caused by our problems with the recalcitrant door the day before.
Day three was the dedicated to fixing Hubble’s optics, to allow it to peer accurately into the depths of space. The first step was to remove the original Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WF/PC I) and replace it with a new camera, called in NASA-speak WF/PC II. Corrective optics had been installed inside this unit to correct Hubble’s vision. We installed handholds on both WF/PCs, to protect the delicate radiator surface on the instruments, which might release contaminating dust if touched. Avoiding contamination was a critical concern throughout our entire mission, but nowhere was it as important as when we handled the telescope’s optics. At issue was not just dirt, but any sort of organic material, since even monolayers of organic molecules can poison the ultraviolet reflectivity of Hubble’s mirrors. Extraordinary measures had been taken to ensure cleanliness during instrument manufacture and checkout, and we had to continue to preserve this cleanliness in orbit. Almost everything coming near the telescope had been subjected to vacuum bakeout, even the rubberized material on the boot soles and fingertips of our space suits. To remove the unit, we attached the handhold, removed a grounding strap, undid the electrical connectors and opened the latch that held it in place. With Story in a foot restraint at the side of the new unit to assist, I stood on the end of the manipulator arm and gently slid the old unit out of its enclosure. It was roughly the size and shape of a grand piano, so I had to be extremely careful when moving it around not to bump anything.
When it was completely clear, Story looked inside the enclosure to make sure that no insulation had torn loose. Having to repair torn insulation is an example of the sort of surprise that could have added a lot of time to our EVA task. Next, we reinserted WF/PC I part way, as a rehearsal for the critical installation of the new camera and optics. We had inserted WF/PC II many times in training: under water, on the air-bearing floor, and in our virtual reality simulator. But no Earth-based simulators totally duplicate the reality of spaceflight. Here was a great chance for one final simulation, this time in space!
After this rehearsal, I hung WF/PC I on a temporary restraining bracket out over the port side of the shuttle. Meanwhile, Story opened the WF/PC II protective enclosure, and I moved over and attached the handhold, released the latch and pulled out WF/PC II. Story now moved up to a foot restraint on the telescope, ready for what was perhaps the most critical move of the entire repair mission. WF/PC has a pickoff mirror, about the size of a human hand, which sticks out into the main light path of the telescope and diverts some of the light into the WF/PC. WF/PC II was launched with a protective cover over this pickoff mirror, which had to be removed before the instrument could be installed. I swung WF/PC II up towards Story, held it as tightly as possible, and Story gently removed the mirror cover. As with so many of our activities, this was not intrinsically difficult, but it was absolutely critical. One slight touch on the mirror could push it out of alignment beyond the capability of its tilt motors to correct. We moved extremely slowly and deliberately at this point. We had never had trouble removing the mirror during practice sessions, but this was for real!
Once the mirror cover was removed, Story stowed it safely out of the way. Claude moved the arm to position me and WF/PC II in front of the opening from which we had removed WF/PC I. Story positioned himself so that he could help guide WF/PC II into the enclosure rails as I slowly pushed it in. These rails are what allow us to position the instrument to the sub-millimeter alignment accuracy required for successful operation. Initial rail engagement requires a placement accuracy of only a centimeter, but as the track gradually narrows, the tolerance tightens until the instrument engages in latches, which provide the ultimate accuracy. As soon as WF/PC II was fully inserted, I closed the latch, attached the electrical connectors and ground strap, and removed the handhold. At this point, ground controllers carried out a short aliveness test on WF/PC II. If there had been any problem, we would have re-extracted the instrument, checked the connectors, and tried again. In case of a total instrument failure, we could have reinstalled WF/PCI. Luckily, WF/PC II checked out fine. My next step was thus to remove WF/ PC I from its temporary stowage bracket, install it into the protective enclosure, latch it down and close the enclosure door. WF/PC I was now ready for its trip back to Earth, where it would be put on display in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We re-stowed both of the temporary handholds we used during the instrument transfers, and the job was complete. Whew!
We had enough time after the WF/PC replacement to unlatch two replacement magnetometers from the payload bay and carry them all the way up to the top of the telescope to install them on top of the old magnetometers. These original magnetometers were never expected to fail and were not designed for replacement. However, both of them failed, so we had to install the new ones right on top of the old ones. This was a fairly straightforward task, but it was easier with two people, so Story “hitched a ride” with me on the end of our trusty robot arm. The arm was working at the limit of its reach, since the magnetometers are near the front (aperture end) of the telescope. Riding fifteen meters above the payload bay gave us an absolutely spectacular view. Sometimes I had to work hard to ignore the magnificence of the environment I was in and concentrate on the job at hand. While attaching the new magnetometers, I noticed that some paint was peeling off the old ones and reported this to the ground. The concern was that paint chips might float into the telescope and contaminate the optics. Ground controllers started coming up with a plan to deal with this unexpected problem while Story and I returned to the airlock, our EVA once again successfully completed.
The fourth EVA day started with the installation of what we called COSTAR (Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement). This was an incredibly clever system that deployed mirrors inside the telescope to intercept the aberrated light beam, correct the focus, and then redirect it into the other instruments. To make room for the COSTAR, Tom and Kathy would have to remove the High Speed Photometer (HSP) instrument, which was the most expendable and least used of the first-generation of HST instruments. After Kathy opened the doors on the HSP enclosure, she disconnected the HSP electrical connectors and opened its latches. She grabbed the handles and, with Tom closely monitoring the motion, slid the HSP along its rails and out of the shroud. HSP, like COSTAR, was the size and shape of an old-fashioned telephone booth (the kind you could get into). Although the geometry was different from WF/PC, the flow of activities in the change-out was similar. This meant that first you stowed the old instrument in a temporary fixture. Then you opened the protective enclosure in the payload bay and extracted the new instrument. The next step was to remove the protective cover over the critical optics and then install the new instrument. Finally, you closed the latches, attached the electrical connectors, closed the doors, and installed the old instrument into the protective enclosure for its trip back to Earth. Meanwhile the ground controllers carried out aliveness checks. The main problem in this procedure was that COSTAR almost completely blocked Kathy’s view of the enclosure. There was only about one centimeter clearance for COSTAR to engage with its alignment rails, so Tom had to actually get inside the telescope to ensure that COSTAR was properly positioned.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s optics were now, at least in principal, capable of performing as originally planned. The astronomical community let out a collective sigh of relief, as did the whole NASA/HST team, but our tasks in orbit were not yet complete. There was enough time left on the fourth EVA day for Tom and Kathy to install some additional memory into the HST computer. (For the record, this upgraded it from the capability of an old 286 processor to that of a 386! Computers in space have to be radiation hardened, which takes years of development, so computers in space are usually at least a generation or so behind those on the ground.) Tom also cut some thermal insulation from one of the instrument carriers inside the payload bay. Ground personnel had come up with a plan for us to fashion from this insulation a cover for the magnetometers to prevent paint chips from floating away. This would be a job for Claude and Ken that evening.
Some of the tasks we planned to do on our fifth day were not particularly designed with EVA repairs in mind. Thus they were quite tricky. While most of the HST is extremely EVA friendly, budget constraints forced some equipment to be built along more traditional lines. For example, our first job on the fifth EVA day, replacing one of the solar array drive electronics (SADE) modules, was the least EVA-friendly of all our tasks. “EVA friendly” electrical connectors have large wing tabs for us to hold, but the seven connectors on the back of the SADE were just like the long, flat connectors on the back of older generations of computers, whose removal requires unscrewing several tiny, two-millimeter screws. The workspace was tightly confined, making this an awkward task to perform wearing spacesuit gloves. As with all our other tasks, we had practiced this many times successfully under water. However, the water tended to damp out motion of the connector cables, and gravity held the screws in place in the connectors after we had unscrewed them. In orbit, the cables bounced around, making the screws spin around inside the threads. Half the screws spun clockwise, staying put, but half rotated counter-clockwise and gradually worked their way out of their holes, a behavior we had not anticipated. We soon started to see little screws floating around in front of us.
Fortunately we carried trash bags on the tool caddy mounted on our chests, so Story started grabbing the screws as they floated by and stuffed them into the trash bag. Eventually, however, there were so many screws floating around inside the bag that when he opened it to insert another one, screws started to float out. The trash bags have since been redesigned, but that didn’t help us on that day. Perched up against the telescope, we had little room to maneuver. In an attempt to capture a screw floating out of the bag, Story accidentally bumped it, and it started floating down towards the payload bay. It’s not a good idea to have floating debris in the bay, since it might jam up some critical mechanism. Story was standing on the arm that day, and I was free floating, so I had more mobility, and I lunged for the screw, just missing it. I heard Claude on the radio telling me to hold on, and he would drive the arm so that I could get the screw. So I held onto the arm with one hand and strained with my other to grab the screw as the arm started moving. I felt like I was a child again, riding a merry-go-round, reaching out for the brass ring! Unfortunately, the maximum speed of the arm was the same as the speed of the screw, so it remained tantalizingly just out of my reach. It turns out that the maximum speed of the arm is greater when it is moving free than when it is carrying a load, so Ken, the backup arm operator, floated over to the computer and changed a critical parameter. This tricked the arm into thinking that it was not carrying any load. Immediately it speeded up, and I was able to grab the wayward screw. The whole episode became known as “the great screw chase” and was a fine demonstration of how good training allowed us all to work as a team and rapidly improvise a solution to a problem.
The rest of the EVA seemed tame by comparison, but we accomplished several tasks, including installing a repair kit on the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph in order to provide a redundant power path in case of future failures. When our tasks were complete, it was time to start preparing the telescope to be put back into orbit the next day. The solar arrays had to be lowered and extended. The motor on the first one for some reason did not work properly, and Story had to push the array into place by hand, another example of EVA crewmembers backing up automated systems. The ground personnel asked us to remain outside until all the telescope systems were deployed.
There were no more problems, but this gave me some precious extra time to float lazily above the payload bay and watch the Earth go by. We were now finished with all twelve of our original repair tasks plus an extra one to put our improvised covers on the old magnetometers! The only thing left to do was to remove the protective antenna cover from the HST, put away all our tools, return the payload bay to its reentry configuration, and come back inside. We were a happy crew when Story and I floated out of the airlock into the Shuttle Middeck for the final time.
The next day, Claude grappled the HST with the arm, Kathy commanded the latches and umbilicals to release, Claude lifted the HST out of the payload bay, and as soon as the controllers gave the word that the telescope was “go for release” Claude commanded the arm to let go. Dick and Ken eased the Shuttle away from the HST, taking care that our maneuvering rockets did not contaminate the telescope, and we bade farewell to this magnificent astronomical instrument that had been the center of our lives for the past week. Hubble drifted away towards the West, getting a little farther away from us every orbit. As the Sun rose in the East every ninety-five minutes, we could see Hubble lit up towards our West, a magnificent “morning star” visible for the rest of our flight right up to our final deorbit burn a couple of days later.
We had successfully completed the most complex spacewalking mission in NASA’s history, but we would not have proof that Hubble had been restored to its full operating potential until scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute turned on the new instruments and took some pictures. A couple of weeks were needed while engineers waited for atmospheric gases to escape from sensitive electronics. Sparks could damage the sensitive equipment we had installed if high voltage was turned on too soon. I well remember getting a phone call during the wee small hours of 1 January 1994. An astronomer friend working at the Institute asked me if we had any champagne left over from New Year’s Eve. I told him that I still had half a bottle in the refrigerator, and he said, “Well open it and drink a toast, because we just got the first pictures back, and Hubble works!”
The rest, as they say, is history. I will never forget the standing ovation given by the American Astronomical Society after a presentation on our mission. To me this represented one of the most gratifying parts of the entire Hubble enterprise: uniting the unmanned world of space astronomy with the world of human spaceflight. Since our initial rescue mission, astronauts have revisited Hubble several times. They have continued the tradition we started of making repairs to HST systems that were not originally designed for on-orbit servicing, showing over and over the adaptability of humans to deal with unanticipated problems in complex systems. What is even more important about Hubble servicing is that not only did each crew fix the existing problems with HST equipment, but also they installed new, state-of-the-art detectors into Hubble’s focal plane. Essentially, every time a crew visited Hubble, they left it as a new, up-to-date telescope, far more sensitive than its predecessor. Hubble has become one of NASA’s most popular missions. Its discoveries have rewritten astronomy textbooks, and many of its images have become public icons. I have had many extraordinary experiences during my five space flights, but fixing Hubble surely had the most lasting long-term significance, and, every time I look at one of the magnificent images of the Universe taken by Hubble, I still get a warm feeling thinking back on how our crew played a pivotal role in making that possible.
Space Story Three: The Phoenix Mission
Eric Choi and His Friends From the Phoenix Mission
In the summer of 2003, I was the teaching associate for the Space Systems Engineering Department at the Space Studies Program (SSP) in Strasbourg, France. There was a celebration at the Holiday Inn next to the ISU Central Campus building for the birthday of Professor Mikhail Marov on July 27th . One of the well-wishers was George Tahu (SSP 1994, USA) from NASA Headquarters. At the time, NASA was considering four proposed missions for its new Mars Scout program. I was a team member of the Phoenix mission proposal, so I asked George if a decision had been made. George smiled, and said neutrally that all four finalists were still under consideration.
About a week later, I got an email from George. “Be careful what you wish for,” it said. The Phoenix mission had been selected to go to Mars.
In the mythology of many cultures, the phoenix was a fabulous bird that was consumed in fire and later reborn from its ashes. It was an appropriate name for the Phoenix mission to Mars, because this program would reuse the 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander that had been grounded following the loss of the Mars Polar Lander in 1999.
The reborn Phoenix would carry an impressive suite of scientific instruments to the unexplored northern polar regions of Mars: a robotic arm, a stereo camera, a mass spectrometer, a wet chemistry laboratory, optical and atomic force microscopes, a conductivity probe, and a meteorology station. Lead by the United States, the Phoenix mission included instrument and science team contributions from Canada, Finland, Den-mark, Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Just four years after the go-ahead, the Phoenix spacecraft was atop a Delta II rocket that would send it to Mars. At Cape Canaveral to watch the launch was Isabelle Tremblay (SSP 1998, Canada) of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). As the CSA’s lead systems engineer for Phoenix, Isabelle played a crucial role in the development of the meteorology station. But in an example of ISU’s interdisciplinary spirit, Isabelle is also an accomplished artist who created the official logo of the Phoenix mission.
“Creating a logo was a perfect opportunity to express and share how I felt about the mission,” says Isabelle. Her unique design juxtaposed the scientific search for water on Mars with the mythology of the Phoenix bird. In the background was an image of Mars highlighting the northern polar regions where Phoenix would land. “Focusing on the science allowed me to create something more artistic and abstract,” Isabelle explains.
At 09:26 UTC on August 4th , 2007, the Delta II rocket carrying Phoenix soared into the heavens on a column of fire. The rising Sun was just nearing the horizon, and its emerging light illuminated the rocket’s exhaust plume against the still dark sky. As Isabelle and the other spectators watched, the winds began to twist the plume into a shape resembling wings and a long tail, looking very much like the majestic bird in her logo. It was a wonderful omen – the Phoenix had risen.
After a nine month, 679 million-km voyage, Phoenix arrived at Mars and began the perilous entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of the mission. Monitoring the landing from his console at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was Rob Grover (SSP 1997, USA). Rob knew the spacecraft well. His first job after graduating from the University of Washington was working on the mothballed 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander that would be reborn as Phoenix. He then worked as an attitude control engineer on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and later as an EDL systems engineer for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. For the Phoenix mission, he was one of the EDL leads.
Over five years of work by hundreds of engineers and scientists from seven nations came to fruition when Rob and the operations team at JPL received confirmation of a successful landing at 23:53 UTC on May 25th , 2008. Phoenix had arrived at the unexplored northern plains of Vastitas Borealis.
“Having rehearsed and gone over it for years, it was terrific that everything could go so perfectly,” says Rob. “At the moment of touchdown there was a lot of joy and excitement, but some caution as well. You always think of the little things that could still go wrong, but when we got confirmation that everything was fully deployed and operational it was truly an exciting moment.”
The first pictures from Phoenix were received later that evening. “It was spectacular,” says Rob. “It was at that point that the mission became a very real thing. In the engineering world, a lot of the mission exists as numbers and models and such. But once the first pictures came down there was the excitement of seeing a new place on Mars and discovering what it looks like. At that point, it became real that you have a spacecraft sitting on another planet.”
(Courtesy of NASA/JPL).
Following the successful landing, control of the Phoenix mission was transferred to the Science Operations Centre (SOC) at the University of Arizona. In the SOC, the international science teams prepared and uplinked commands to their instruments aboard Phoenix, and then received and analysed the downlinked data.
Jouni Polkko (SSP 1991, Finland, see Figure 3.8) of the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) was one of the scientists at the SOC. FMI provided the pressure sensor element of the Phoenix meteorological station, which Jouni had been working on since 2004. The Phoenix pressure sensor was actually the fourth that FMI had built for Mars missions. Three earlier units were lost due to the failures of the Mars 96, Mars Polar Lander and Beagle 2 missions. In January 2005, an FMI sensor recorded the pressure profile of Titan’s atmosphere during the descent of the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe. Three years later, FMI would enjoy success again with Phoenix on Mars.
“The first scientific data arrived in the afternoon of May 26th,” recalls Jouni. “Our instrument worked perfectly, measuring a pressure on Mars at the landing site of 8.55 hPA. In the following days, the first dust devils were observed by the pressure instrument.”
Isabelle Tremblay was at the SOC as well, providing engineering support for the operation of the meteorology station. She remembers the experience with great fondness. “The community and team spirit were so strong, to see people from all over the world working together for common goals. You wish the world would be more like that in other areas.”
Originally designed for a surface mission of 90 Martian sols (92 Earth days), Phoenix far exceeded its planned lifetime, returning data for months before succumbing to the onset of Martian winter in late 2008. Its legacy is the wealth of scientific data returned, and the path it has blazed for further robotic and eventual human missions to Mars. For all the ISU alums that were privileged to be involved, it was the journey of a lifetime.
Acknowledgement
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Dr. Leslie K. Tamppari, Phoenix project scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the preparation of this article.
Space Story Four: The Rise of Space Tourism--Up Close and Personal
Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom and Eric Dahlstrom
When SpaceShipOne (SS1) touched down on the dusty Mojave desert on 4 October 2004 it was greeted by thousands of people lining and cheering the runway. This remarkable vehicle had just broken the X-15 high altitude flight record held since 1963. It became the first fully reusable spacecraft in history by flying into “outer space” and then doing so again a second time within days of the initial launch. This commercial spaceship had also broken the invisible “wall”, that space was the sole domain of governments and their contractors. A handmade sign proclaimed this new era as follows: “SpaceShip One - NASA Zero.”
A new era had finally begun where dreams of going into space seem to be much more possible. It is a new age where a handful of young and brilliant engineers can develop a reusable rocket and fly multiple flights. Perhaps most impressively they will do so at a cost of less than a tiny fraction of a single launch of the Space Shuttle. In a year when NASA was still reeling from Columbia’s accident, which effectively grounded its whole Shuttle fleet, the only other human spaceflights launched in 2004 were from two Soyuz vehicles. Three of the five human spaceflight launches in 2008 were commercial – thanks to SS1. It gave the average person the hope to dream and indeed to begin to believe that space tourism may not be too far in the future after all. Suddenly the idea began to spread that this generation may have the chance to see spaceflight become a mass-market commodity.
Burt Rutan, world famous master designer and aerospace engineer, started developing SS1 back in 2001. His company Scaled Composites was financed by Microsoft co-founder billionaire Paul Allen. He had designed and built dozens of innovative airplanes, including the Voyager that flew around the world nonstop. But he had never taken on a spacecraft project before. Scaled Composites at the time was just one of twenty-six spacecraft teams that were competing for the Ansari X Prize. This was a $10 million dollar purse conceived and engineered by Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of the International Space University. That was to be awarded to the first of the registered teams to build a successful space plane that could fly into space (i.e. to an altitude of over 100 kilometers) and then repeat the feat within eight days.
The X-Prize competition was co-sponsored by the Ansari family, First USA Bank and partly financed through a clever “hole-in-one” insurance deal. Peter Diamandis’ initial purpose, of course, was much more than to have an exciting competition. His aim was to help accelerate development of the human spaceflight industry through the commercial competitive process. Teams registered from around the world using both off-the-shelf and innovative technologies with different launch and landing configurations. A number of developers like Rocketplane and Armadillo Aerospace in the U.S. and the Da Vinci Project in Canada gave Burt Rutan a run for his money. Eventually, their lack of financing and the tight schedules took them out of the running. But, as Peter Diamandis had predicted, the competition ignited the birth of the suborbital space industry and encouraged hundreds of people to put down deposits for a chance to fly in space - hardware sight unseen. Now, the regular X Cup event held in Las Cruces, Mexico, showcases every known commercial space vehicle developer around the globe and attended is by thousands of space enthusiasts, further affirming that the industry is about to go mainstream.
Brian Binnie, the pilot of SS1, successfully flew a flawless flight that day - giving confidence to SS1’s investors and would-be passengers that the design and technology could be safe enough to carry commercial passengers. He carried enough ballast for two more passengers inside the spacecraft, a requirement to win the X Prize. The implications of those two empty seats played out as multi-billionaire Sir Richard Branson took a gamble on the potential of the market and announced that his newly formed company Virgin Galactic would order five more second generation, bigger capacity spaceships from Scaled Composites for commercial use. Not shy to market his brand, Virgin’s logo took center stage at Branson’s command. Thus the logo was prominently placed right in the middle of both of SS1’s tail booms for the world media to see. The event’s webcast broke records, sandwiched between Victoria Secret’s fashion show and Britney Spear’s concert.
The event was fully licensed as an “experimental launch” by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the office of Commercial Space Transportation, under the leadership of Patricia Grace Smith, awarding civilian astronaut wings to Brian Binnie and pilot Mike Melvill who flew the two preceding SS1 missions. Later that year, the U.S. Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act, effectively giving the green light to commercial space tourism by laying out the mechanism to fly private citizens at their own risk. The terms also restricted FAA regulations to third party liability and public interest for eight years, giving the equivalent leeway to vehicle developers and tour operators during the “barn storming” years of general aviation. Congress is expected to con-sider during 2009 whether it will change the regulatory structure for space tourism safety regulation in the post-2012 period.
The success of the X Prize launches got the small town of Mojave, California, and its airport a spot on the world map. Now lauded as the first truly commercial spaceport, other aspiring ports were determined to follow suit. In 2007, Spaceport America in New Mexico, backed by Virgin Galactic, unveiled its plans for an ultramodern spaceport facility and entertain-ment center – the future homeport for Virgin’s commercial flights. Other current and future airports like Kennedy Space Center, Oklahoma and Wallops in the U.S., and Dubai, Singapore, and Kiruna abroad were determined to follow suit. These spaceports are essential elements to the growth of the industry and to the future possibility of point-to-point suborbital flights, extending spaceflights for pleasure into the realm of rapid business transit and package delivery worldwide.
Now as Scaled Composites continues to build its second generation mother ship White Knight Two and SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic continues to sign up would be passengers at U.S.$200,000 a ticket. It has set up a network of informed space agents recruiting space cadets around the world with deep pockets. Celebrities, pilots, adventurers, and millionaire space enthusiasts are high on the list. Training of the first 100 founding flyers and agents has commenced at the U.S. NASTAR Training Center, and interior spaceship and spacesuit designs are in progress. Nor is Virgin Galactic alone; others are signing up potential space tourists as well. On a variation on the theme Jeff Gleason of XCOR has promised to develop a very high altitude two-person jet that would fly to an altitude of 37 miles (or 60 kilometers). That would take a pilot and a co-pilot passenger on a ride into the “dark sky”, or high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. This would not be a ride into space (since outer space is defined as beginning at an altitude of 100 kilometers), but the offering would be at a “bargain basement” fare of $100,000. It might even be offered $99,995 for the thrifty minded thrill seeker. Indeed the true budget-constrained would-be pseudo-space tourist can sign up through Space Adventures for a ride on a supersonic Russian Foxbat for under $20,000. For years we have worked in this incipient “industry” and remain truly optimistic that space for the masses is now a reasonable prospect in the not too distant future.
In the same year as the Ansari X Prize was won, Robert Bigelow, Budget Suite’s multi-billionaire and CEO of Bigelow Aerospace, announced the $50 million American Prize. Bigelow ups the ante by soliciting competition for a space vehicle that could transport seven passengers to an orbital station by 2010. This would provide the transport mechanism for his fleet of inflatable space modules, dubbed “space hotels”, which he has been progressively building to a human-rated private space station. At the moment, Elon Musk’s Space X is the only private company potentially capable of building such a transportation system to fit Bigelow’s needs. Elon Musk is working on his Falcon series of launch vehicles intending to service the future orbital business with an ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars and beyond. And then, of course, there is the ever-reliable Russian Soyuz vehicle that, since 2001, has been sending private citizens to the International Space Station via the U.S. company Space Adventures. But the unpredictable and potentially volatile political climate in Russia and the apparent cost increase per ticket since it started could eliminate this opportunity at any time. Without a transportation system, the space hotel business has no future.
So, as space tourism continue its journey from science fiction to reality, the essential pieces for making spaceflight for the masses possible begin to fall into place. But we are still a long way from evolving into the grand vision of a space faring species. The industry needs more mainstream investors to fund the research and development of these transportation systems. It needs more young and enthusiastic engineers and designers to come up with innovative solutions or use existing technologies to build the vehicles. It needs the support of policy makers and legislators who will create the laws and regulations in a timely manner in conjunction with the industry’s timeline and schedule. It needs entrepreneurs to grow the business and marketers to sell the spaceflight programs to the general public. Each component is interrelated and needs each other’s support to thrive. There is still a lot to be done, but the future belongs to those who have the vision, the resources, and the drive to make it happen. As Peter Diamandis says: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”
Space Story Five: The Visionary Space Billionaire
Joseph N. Pelton
One of the most special clubs in the world is the Private Spaceflight Federation. This group, now well over a decade old, promotes the new personal commercial space industry. It’s a rather special club with a rather special mission. Its typically super wealthy members are the people who believe that space commercialization can really happen. This is because they are also the people who are actually in the process of “making it so”. These new “space billionaires” grew up watching Star Trek. They actually believe that someday humans can explore other worlds and escape the bonds of Earth’s gravity well. This is a short story that augments the Dahlstroms’ recollections about the birth of the space tourism industry, and profiles some of the key people who are trying to change the world.
This time the story is told with the focus, not on space scientists and engineers, but on the “world changing billionaires” who know in their very being that yesterday’s constraints did not represent the boundaries of tomorrow. They are people who, like Peter Diamandis, believe that if you want to see a new reality you start by doing something about it yourself.
When I, along with Jeff Hoffman and some colleagues from the Aerospace Corporation, participated in 2008 on a study on commercial space safety for the FAA as commissioned by Congress, I got to know several of the key participants and their top executives a little. Then, when I wrote a book entitled License to Orbit: The Future of Commercial Spaceflight I got to meet a few more of this remarkable group of billionaire world changers and their very bright minions. Here are a few of my impressions.
First of all: “What makes many of the members of this exclusive club so special?” For one thing, they have already conquered other worlds and are looking for a fresh and tougher fight.
Who, exactly, are these people? The current batch of space billionaires includes the Sir Richard Branson who heads the Virgin empire. He owns his own island, his own airline, his own entertainment company and much, much more. In his usual, rather brash way of doing things, he calculates that the best way to get into space - other than by riding a balloon into the stratosphere – something which he has done, with some very scary results -is to start his own space tourism business and fly there himself. Others of this strange new breed of billionaire spacefarers include Elon Musk, who made his first bundle by starting PayPal and now is not only building rockets but is also Chairman of his own all-electric sports car company as well. Then there is Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, and we must not leave out John Carmack, who designed video shooter games like Doom and Quake to make his own multi-millions. Then, as the Dahlstroms have mentioned, there is Las Vegas-based Robert Bigelow, who owns Budget Suite Hotels and wants to open a new chain of habitats in space. We also mustn’t forget Jeff Bezos, who created Amazon.com and who now has his own private spaceport in the most remote parts of Texas, not too far from the border with New Mexico. These guys - not to overstate the case - are real risk takers. Not only do they have Type A+ personalities but they also have enough money to have super triple platinum credit cards that can buy into advanced space technology in a serious way.
Perhaps the most famous, headline grabbing, financially committed of the visionary space billionaire gang is Sir Richard Branson. Having made his estimated $6 to $7 billion dollars in music, transportation, and other ventures, he has now moved into “dream fulfillment mode”. His Virgin Galactic company will begin flying SpaceShipTwo vehicles on sub-orbital flights via Virgin Galactic in 2018. Some people ask: will Virgin Galactic flights be safe? Sir Richard’s answer is that he will be going up himself. Richard Branson is clearly not one to do things by halves!
Jeff Bezos is another guy in the club who is not averse to taking some big risks. He founded Amazon.com on a dream and the thought that an Internet-based world could redefine retailing. His enterprise survived the “dot com bubble” when it burst and, today, he is willing to take an even bigger gamble with his Blue Origin space tourism business. That flies its experimental New Shepherd launcher out of a remote West Texas location. He figures that, if anyone can beat the odds in Internet retailing, he can do it again in the commercial space business.
Elon Musk made over a billion dollars by the time he was reaching “cruising altitude” in his thirties, when he sold his PayPal enterprise. Rather than taking the cash to live on a tropical isle for the rest of his life, he challenged himself to make money out of the spaceflight industry. He said: “Oh yes, maybe I will also show conventional aerospace companies and NASA what they are doing wrong along the way”. Thus, he founded Space X (full name—Space Exploration Technologies). He started to design and build his Falcon class launch vehicles with just a few dozen employees. He rather quickly convinced the U.S. Air Force to buy one of his cut-rate launchers (for under $10 million). Then not too much later he landed a NASA R& D contract, valued at over $200 million, to build a vehicle that could shuttle astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station on a commercial basis. After four tries he has finally manage to get it up - I mean, the Falcon 1, of course. We can only imagine what Elon Musk plans to do in his forties. Perhaps he will start a “time travel” business.
When Elon testified before the U.S. Congress, this is what he had to say:
“The past few decades have been a dark age for development of a new human space transportation system. One multi-billion-dollar Government program after another has failed… … When America landed on the Moon, I believe we made a promise and gave people a dream. It seemed then that… someone who was not a billionaire, not an astronaut made of “The Right Stuff”, but just a normal person, might one day see Earth from space. That dream is nothing but broken disappointment today. If we do not now take action different from the past, it will remain that way.” (Elon Musk, giving evidence to the U.S. Senate Hearing on Space Shuttle and the Future of Space Launch Vehicles, in April 2004.)
Paul Allen is the old guy in the space billionaires’ club. He is the fellow who made his fortune way back in the 1980s and early 1990s by cofounding Microsoft. He has since bankrolled professional sports teams, a science fiction museum and given boatloads of money to charity. He still has his entrepreneurial juices flowing, and believes in the future of commercial space as well. He was the fellow that bankrolled Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites when he built the White Knight carrier aircraft and SpaceShipOne that successfully claimed the X-Prize in 2004.
After Paul Allen claimed the X-Prize, he formed a partnership with Burt Rutan, Richard Branson to start the SpaceShip Corporation. So far, this enterprise is building spaceplanes for Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s own Blue Origin’s space tourism venture. The business plan for the Space-Ship Corporation is to build dozens of the new SpaceShipTwo craft. Paul Allen has now sold out his holdings to Virgin Galactic and formed his Vulcan Corporation that is developing the giant high-altitude rocket launching system Stratolaunch that is powered by six 747 aircraft engines.
And let’s not forget the incredible vision of Robert Bigelow, the hotel czar, who had the “crazy” idea that people would someday like to travel to hotels in space -not just to show in sci-fi movies, but for real. Budget Suites’ magnate Robert Bigelow has gone after this goal with the only speed he knows - full steam ahead. Bigelow Aerospace launched a 33%scale model prototype of his inflatable Genesis I habitat on 12 July 2006. The final version of this habitat is designed to be some 27 times larger in volume (i.e. 3x3x3). The second flight of Genesis II took place in June 2007; it, like Genesis 1, was launched on a Russian Dnepr rocket. And Robert Bigelow, who does not do things in a small way, offered a $50 million prize, but with no successful takers, for a commercial space transportation company that can demonstrate safe transport to, and back down from, his space habitats. A successful return of his hotel guests to Earth seems to be a key part of his business plan.
Finally, we come to John Carmack. He, like Elon Musk, became a billionaire when in his thirties. He also has the space bug. His Armadillo Aerospace company has already designed a number of launch vehicles and computer-optimized craft that have shown amazing versatility as a “lander” vehicle for the Moon or Mars. In Carmack’s case, after he collected prizes from NASA for his lunar lander vehicles he decided to pack it in and fold his company. Who knows when the cosmic bug will bite again and he will re-launch his space ventures.
If anyone tries to look at this disparate group of space billionaires and find some common ground it is far from being immediately clear. They vary in age, height, weight, handsomeness and ancestry. Despite their differences and the diverse paths they have followed to arrive at this new commercial space industry, their aims are common. This new breed of space leaders represents the future. Their commitment to finding “new ways forward” is vital to a new surge in space innovation. We can only hope they can indeed deliver new ways for humanity to travel “to The Farthest Shore ”, or at least to low Earth orbit.
Space Story Six: Soyuz Re-entry
Astronaut Robert B. Thirsk
Simply stated, the goal of Soyuz reentry is to safely return the spacecraft and its crew from space back to Earth. In practice, however, reentry is a daunting and complex operational undertaking. The Soyuz vehicle returns from an altitude of 350 kilometers and with an orbital velocity of 28,000 kilometers per hour. This enormous amount of potential and kinetic energy must be completely dissipated before the vehicle touches down at a designated landing site with near-zero velocity.
In December 2009, I had the opportunity to return to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Nothing that I have experienced in life can compare to that memorable flight. It was action-packed. This is the story of my voyage home from space:
Following completion of our expedition aboard the International Space Station (ISS), my two crewmates and I entered our Soyuz TMA spacecraft and closed the hatches between our vehicle and the Station. Roman Romanenko (from Russia), Frank De Winne (from Belgium) and I (from Canada) donned our Sokol suits and ingressed our seats. As our Soyuz commander, Roman took the center seat. Frank (flight engineer one) sat in the left seat and I (flight engineer two) sat in the right. The crew compartment of the Soyuz vehicle is only two meters in diameter so three pressure-suited crew members lying shoulder-to-shoulder (along with 100 kilograms of returning cargo) is a tight fit. Once strapped in, we activated the vehicle systems and initiated the undocking process.
Undocking occurred precisely on time. The recoiling springs of the docking mechanism provided the impulse that backed us off the berthing port. Frank and I had window seats. Through the porthole at my right shoulder, I saw the truss work, solar arrays and habitation modules slowly pass by. This was my wistful last view of the remarkable Station that had been our home and workplace for the past half year.
Since we didn’t wish to “plume” the Station’s solar arrays and other structures with exhaust gasses, we waited a few minutes before firing our thrusters. The short separation burn increased our relative velocity and backed us a safe distance above and away from the Station.
Throughout the first orbit, we verified proper functioning of the spacecraft systems and loaded the deorbit burn parameters into the onboard computer. Descent is a critical phase of flight. All crew actions must be executed correctly and on time to ensure that our capsule intercepts the atmosphere at the right location and with the right velocity and orientation. Vigilance and accurate performance are paramount.
At the start of the second orbit, the automated descent timeline was initiated. We had been flying around the Earth in “airplane mode”, i.e. with the vehicle’s fuselage and solar arrays parallel to the Earth’s surface below. As we approached the southern tip of South America and while on the dark side of the orbit, we spun our vehicle around so that its aft end was facing the direction of flight. We then fired the main engine for four-and-a-half minutes. Any anomalies with this important burn could seriously impact our return to Earth. Accordingly, we closely monitored the progress of the burn and were ready to take corrective action if it stopped prematurely or if the engine did not shut down on time.
Happily, the burn was completely nominal. There was now no turning back -we were committed to a descent trajectory and would be on the ground in less than an hour.
The deorbit burn decreased our velocity by 115 meters per second – a small ΔV compared to our total orbital velocity of 8,000 meters per second.
The more important effect of the burn was to change the shape of our orbit from circular to elliptical. The low point (perigee) of our new orbit was to occur in about 45 minutes and would intercept the dense layers of the atmosphere below. When it did, aerodynamic drag forces on our vehicle would dramatically increase, decelerate us and allow gravity to pull us toward the ground.
Entering daylight, I noticed that we were flying over the south Atlantic. The ocean surface seemed closer - we were already losing altitude. We crossed the equator over Africa and sped northeast toward our targeted landing zone in central Asia.
The Soyuz vehicle is composed of three segments attached end-to-end. Frank, Roman and I were seated in the center segment called the Descent Module. The other two segments (the Orbital Module and the Instrumentation/Propulsion Module) contained flight systems that had performed vital functions during our ascent, rendezvous and undocking. We no longer needed these systems. Fifteen minutes after the Instrumentation/ Propulsion Module powered the deorbit burn, we closed the visors on our helmets and fired the pyrotechnics that severed the connections between the three modules. The Descent Module, now flying alone, had secondary flight systems (computer, life support, electrical power) that allowed it to operate independently. It also had a thermal protection system designed to withstand the intense heat loads that we were about to encounter. The two jettisoned modules, on the other hand, were not thermally protected. They began to tumble and would soon burn up in the atmosphere.
A few minutes after module separation, the Descent Module reached Entry Interface – a point 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface where the atmosphere begins to thicken. My first indication of atmospheric reentry was the motion of the dust particles floating in the air. They no longer flew randomly about the cabin but now trended downward. The g-force indication displayed on our computer monitor no longer read 0.00, but ticked up slowly to 0.01 … then 0.02 …
An envelope of vapor-like plasma (i.e. charged glowing air particles) soon appeared around our capsule. Looking outward through my porthole was like looking through orange-tinted sunglasses. As the surrounding air became more and more heated, the orange tint darkened to a deep red. Minutes later I noted molten slag streaming by the window. Astonishing!
Our capsule’s kinetic energy was quickly being converted to thermal energy and being dissipated into the surrounding atmosphere. Viewed from the ground, our spacecraft resembled a fireball with a long plasma tail streaking through the sky.
Some of the thermal energy was also heating up the Descent Module. Facing the direction of flight, the bottom of the capsule underwent the most intense heating and encountered high temperatures (1650oC - hot enough to melt iron). As protection, a heat shield covered the rounded bottom of the Module. The composition of the heat shield includes special materials that change from solid to gas upon extreme heating. This change of phase as well as the convecting away of the superheated gas cooled our spacecraft (a process known as ablation).
Our fiery descent through the upper atmosphere was also associated with rapidly increasing g-loads. Lying on our backs (the most comfortable way to return), the g-load vector passed through our chests from front to back and pushed us deeper into our seats. We sustained loads up to 4G’s for several minutes. Breathing became laboured. I performed the anti-G straining maneuver (contracting my leg and abdominal muscles) to retain blood volume and pressure in my chest and head.
Believe it or not but the ungainly Descent Module has maneuvering capability - it does not simply fall like a rock toward Earth. As we descended, the entry control system slowly rolled the capsule alternately to the left and right. This rolling action increased and decreased the aerodynamic lift force acting on the vehicle and modified our down-range and cross-range distances. If this entry system should malfunction, then Roman was prepared to take manual control. Using a hand controller, he would operate thruster jets on the outside of the capsule and steer the vehicle to the targeted landing site. A landing within 10 kilometers of the designated site (where the search-and-rescue crew await us) and while subjecting the crew to no more than 4G’s of loading would be considered a good landing.
With the g-load subsiding, we continued our fall toward Earth. It was now time to activate the parachute system. At 11 km altitude, the parachute cover on the outside of our capsule blew off with a loud bang and a shudder. A drogue chute was deployed and slowed our descent rate from 230 to 80 meters per second. The buffeting noise under chute was impressive. Sixteen seconds later, the drogue extracted the main parachute. This chute is large (1,000 m2) and slowed our rate of descent to seven meters per second. The sequence of chute deployments created some unusual vehicle dynamics. I had the impression that our capsule was bouncing side-to-side like a yo-yo on the end of an enormous cord and had the disturbing sensation that I was tumbling head over heels.
Two days ago, aboard the ISS, my crewmates and I had participated in a procedure review with the reentry specialists at the Moscow Mission Control Centre. As the review session ended, Soyuz veteran Frank De Winne took me aside and said, “Bob, there will be a moment during descent when you will think that we are about to die. The motion dynamics of Soyuz entry can be extreme. But rest assured, all will be okay.” What a curious remark! I had no idea what Frank was talking about but made a mental note to be on the lookout for something unusual that might happen.
Now aboard a yo-yo’ing Soyuz, I turned my head to the left to look at Frank. The motion associated with chute deployment certainly felt extreme. Frank was looking at me with a big grin on his face and giving me the thumbs-up sign. This evidently was that moment of terror that he had pre-briefed a couple days earlier.
Deployment of the main parachute was a major flight milestone signaling that the nail-biting part of descent had passed. We would be on the ground in 15 minutes. Relieved, we all enjoyed the rest of the ride. Roman, particularly, was yeehawing like a cowboy.
The drama continued. Another loud bang announced separation of the heat shield. The shield had served its purpose. Its jettisoning exposed the altimeter, soft landing engines and a radio antenna – systems that were all located on the bottom of the capsule and would be needed for landing.
The outer window panes also fell away. During reentry, the hull of our spaceship, including the window covers, had become charred. Jettisoning the opaque panes allowed Frank and me to once again see outside. Our landing zone on the flat steppes of Kazakhstan was now in sight.
Opening of the BARD (Automatic Pressure Control Unit) depress valve was associated with yet another loud bang. This pyrovalve equalizes the interior cabin pressure with the outside pressure. Ambient pressure at an altitude of 5.5 kilometers is only half that at sea level so our pressure suits immediately inflated in compensation. With the sudden drop in pressure and temperature, a water vapour mist formed and momentarily obscured our view of the cabin interior. This cabin venting is necessary to prevent overstressing of the capsule’s pressure hull and to reduce the risk of fire. Throughout descent, my crewmates and I had been exhaling oxygen-enriched air from our Sokol suits into the cabin. Venting reduces the oxygen saturation and flammability hazard.
Suspended under parachute, our Soyuz capsule had been angled downward at 30 degrees for heat dissipation reasons. Prior to landing, our capsule needed to be repositioned so that it hung straight. “Rehooking” the main chute harnesses re-oriented the capsule to a vertical position but also kicked off another wild yo-yo ride.
Below each of the crew seats, there was a shock absorber. These shock absorbers dampen the landing impact with the ground. Until this moment, the shock absorbers had been compressed, i.e. stowed in a retracted position. To be ready for landing, they must now be extended to their operational position. Accordingly, our three seats moved forward automatically in unison. Following this movement, the glass visors of our helmets were only centimeters away from the control panel. It was a bit comical – I always considered the Soyuz cockpit to be cramped, but now it was ridiculously so.
Even the inner seat liners played a role. Each crewmember had a custom-made seat liner that ensured a tight, form-fit around our bodies to cushion the impact of landing.
The sequencing of these last events seemed surprisingly rapid for a first-time Soyuz flyer like me. Jettisoning of the heat shield, blowing the BARD valve, re-hooking the chute and the forward cocking of our seats all happened within seconds of each other. Quite eventful!
10 minutes before landing, we stowed unnecessary procedure books, tightened our restraint harnesses and powered on the gamma ray altimeter. We had regained air-to-ground communication following a period of radio blackout. For the last few minutes Roman had been talking with the search-and-rescue crew on the ground. The team had spotted our capsule under parachute and were reporting our altitude: 900 meters … 800 meters … 700 meters … As we neared the ground, I tugged one last time on my shoulder and waist straps, positioned my head back in my helmet with my mouth closed and teeth together, and crossed my arms over my chest.
Less than a meter above the ground, six small rockets on the bottom of our capsule fired and slowed us to a final landing speed of three meters per second. Although these rockets somewhat softened the landing, we still hit the ground with a jarring thump - akin to a small car crash.
Roman immediately toggled a switch to detach one of the two parachute risers. This must be done quickly (but not prematurely – ha!) to deflate the parachute. If the wind caught our billowing parachute canopy, it could topple us over and drag us sideways across the steppe. Roman’s timing was perfect - our capsule bobbled a bit after landing but remained upright. Style points for Roman!
I was relieved that my crew had landed safely. But what a wild and busy trip! We removed our gloves, opened our helmet visors and turned on a ventilation fan. Unneeded systems were powered off and a radio locator beacon was turned on. Quite fatigued, the three of us decided to await the help of the ground team rather than egress the capsule on our own.
We had been aware that a low cloud ceiling in the recovery area might not permit the rescue helicopters to fly that day. This meant that we were not being met by the primary search-and-rescue crew, but by backup personnel. The backup crew had to drive overland for several hours on ATVs to reach us.
In retrospect, it was a privilege – and a bit surreal -to have been a Soyuz crewmember. The Soyuz vehicle has been flying to and from space regularly and rather reliably since the late 1960s. In fact, my Soyuz TMA15 flight experiences during ascent, rendezvous and reentry were probably not much different than those for the earliest cosmonauts.
I envision that in a couple of centuries, the space program will have developed teleportation capability. Returning to Earth from space will then be more civilized – simply a matter of “beaming down”. Until that future date, reentry will continue to be a rollicking affair.
Space Story Seven: United States Microgravity Lab-1
Payload Specialist Lawrence J. DeLuca
The payload specialist program was created by NASA to address complicated microgravity experiments that require significant scientific expertise and laboratory skills. Generally, payload specialists are university or company scientists with several years of laboratory research experience. Although the payload specialist may have significant experience in one particular area, the candidates also have broad scientific and engineering knowledge, facilitating their ability to understand and perform the many types of experiments scheduled to fly on their mission.
I, personally, have a broad educational background with five college degrees, including a doctorate in Optometry and a PhD in biochemistry. My particular expertise, however, is in a field known as protein crystallography, a technology that investigates the three-dimensional structure of macromolecules. This technology requires the production of high-quality protein crystals that are grown from an aqueous solution. Protein crystal growth, first performed on a space shuttle mission in 1985, has since led to microgravity protein crystal growth experiments performed by researchers from several different countries on more than 100 missions, including the space shuttle, the Russian space station, Chinese long march rockets and the international space station. Although many experiments have resulted in crystals of superior quality compared to their Earth-grown counterparts, it has become clear that the best solution conditions are different for crystals grown in micro-gravity versus a 1G environment (most likely due to differences in growth kinetics and macromolecular transport rates). As a result, space hardware was developed to optimize crystal quality. The hardware allows experienced crystallographers to observe microgravity crystal results through a microscope following on-orbit utilization of a glovebox to mix new solution conditions.
The payload specialist selection process involves several steps. Initially, each principal investigator that has a flight experiment on a specific space shuttle mission is allowed to nominate two individuals for the payload specialist position. For the United States Microgravity Lab–1 mission (USML1) there were 31 individual flight experiments and an equal number of principal investigators associated with these experiments. The flight experiments included a number of fluid dynamics experiments that utilized a drop physics module, combustion studies, plant growth studies, three types of crystal growth experiments (protein, zeolite and semi-conductor crystallization), plus a variety of medical experiments. Approximately 50 payload specialist candidates were initially nominated for USML-1. The principal investigators (PI’s) and NASA personnel reviewed the resumes for each of these and narrowed the field to the top 12 candidates. The 12 nominees were then subjected to a three-day physical at Johnson Space Center from which 10 nominees were deemed sufficiently healthy to participate in a space mission. The field of 10 candidates (including myself) was then interviewed by the 31 principal investigators. Two candidates were chosen to compete for the flight payload specialist position over the next year.
In that year, we traveled to each principal investigator’s location (the PIs for USML-1 resided at different Universities and two NASA centers, Marshall Space Flight Center and the Glenn Research Center). The principal investigators explained the theory behind their experiments in a classroom setting followed by our participation in laboratory exercises pertaining to their future flight experiment. It was important that we impressed each prin-cipal investigator since at the end of the one-year of training we would each be subjected to an oral exam by the principal investigators. At the end of the exam (mine lasted approximately two hours), the principal investigators and specific NASA personnel discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. The following vote determined who would fly on the mission. The candidate who was not selected was required to continue training as the backup payload specialist.
To say that the training and competition was strenuous would be a gross understatement. During this one year I was constantly reading publications by each of the principal investigators. On weekends, I would often receive tutoring from a close friend, Dr. William Rosenblum, who was a physicist with extensive knowledge in several of the USML-1 research disciplines. Approximately five hours after my oral exam I received a phone call from a NASA official informing me that I had been selected for the flight payload specialist position. Once the stress of the competition was gone, my training became more exciting than anything I have experienced in my lifetime.
I moved with my family (wife and three children ages 4, 9 and 11) to Houston where I learned all about the space shuttle propulsion system, different aspects of the flight path for our mission, how to use the mainframe computers, utilization of a variety of photographic devices, several courses in geography, how to eat, sleep, and use of the bathroom. We also learned how to respond to emergencies that might arise on our space shuttle mission. The physical training included repelling off the top of the shuttle, learning how to extinguish different types of combustible material, spinning in a centrifuge at Brooks Air Force Base. Also, a particularly memorable experience with water survival training where we parachuted into the ocean off the coast of Miami, inflated rafts from our backpacks, and floated in open water for several hours, awaiting a rescue helicopter.
We also traveled to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama where we practiced experiments in a mockup of the space lab module and learned how to perform 643 malfunction procedures associated with the scientific flight hardware. In addition, our exercise regimen involved weight training and running 4 to 6 miles each day. We generally began classwork at 8 AM with only short breaks for lunch and dinner, followed by a return to Johnson Space Center to dawn full spacesuits and practice the bailout procedure, repelling off the top of a shuttle mockup, utilization of the communication system and operation of the shuttle’s computers for a variety of specific procedures. Although I averaged five or six hours of sleep during this time, I was so excited about everything I was learning that I cannot recall ever feeling tired or complaining about the heavy workload.
Our Columbia Space Shuttle launch, scheduled for June 25, 1992, ended up lifting off the pad five minutes after the scheduled launch time. There were seven crewmembers: five males and two females. I was certainly nervous prior to the launch. According to NASA the chance of a shuttle explosion on launch was 1 in 78. I tried to focus on the emergency procedures I would need to quickly perform if we experienced an inadvertent loss of power, a fire or an explosion.
My flight took a total of eight minutes and 43 seconds to reach orbit. The most difficult part was the last three minutes when we were accelerating to a final speed of 17,500 mph. Prior to launch we are tightly strapped into our seat and our oxygen bottles are hanging off the side of our spacesuits. As we accelerate and pick up additional G forces it became increasingly difficult to breathe. I went from a period of three or so minutes where I was squished into my seat and struggling to open my chest and breathe to, suddenly, at main engine cut off, feeling light as a feather and wanting to float out of my seat.
The crew worked in two shifts. I, along with the commander, pilot, and payload commander, was part of the day shift. Thus, as soon as I removed my spacesuit, I went to work carrying different tools and cameras from the mid-deck through a 20-foot tunnel connected to the space lab module in the rear of the shuttle. At this point, I was feeling so good that I began spinning myself like a bullet as I traveled through the long tunnel. I remember rapidly spinning when my foot hit something within the tunnel and I simulta-neously heard what sounded like a loud explosion. Of course, I assumed this was my fault.
I was happy to learn from my commander that once the pressurized shuttle reaches orbit it is in a nearly perfect vacuum, causing it to undergo discrete expansions that result in a loud popping sound (with all of my training, this would have been nice to know beforehand). There were many other similar revelations that came to me throughout my journey. For example, as an eye doctor I am familiar with the signs and symptoms of a retinal tear or detachment. Well, at the end of my first full shift in space, I entered my sleep box (we slept strapped into rectangular boxes so we didn’t float off). In the total blackness of the sleep box, I began experiencing scintillations (or flashes of light) similar to what is described in the event of a detached retina. Panicking, I opened the door to my sleep box and informed the commander, Dick Richards, that I had detached my retina. He and some of the other crew members burst out laughing (not the kindest response). Apparently, this experience is common to astronauts. There are millions of subatomic particles (e.g., protons, neutrons) hurtling through space and penetrating the space shuttle. On earth, our atmosphere provides a sufficient shield to keep the majority of these particles from reaching our eyes. However, in space, our eyes are constantly bombarded by these particles, which causes the experience of faint flashing lights.
On the third day of our mission, while I was looking out the bay windows at an endless abyss of stars, I noticed what looked like a planet. An amateur astronomer, myself, I asked the commander which planet it was and he responded, “It’s the moon”. I was fooled by an optical illusion. The earth is only 255 miles below the shuttle while the moon is approximately 240 thousand miles away. Thus, while the Earth appears as a massive ball in space, the moon appears to be much, much smaller than it does on Earth (where you only ever see it contrasted against the horizon). I remember Dick chucking and shaking his head as he floated away.
On the eighth day of our mission, I was on my lunch break looking out the overhead window of the flight deck. I noticed a star-like light that was moving in a different direction from all of the stars. I called the commander on my microphone and asked him to come up to the flight deck. By this point, he probably wasn’t even surprised when I said, “I think there is an alien craft out there”. Dick took one look out the window and smiled. This time it was the Russian space station, MIR. I guess I watched too many star trek movies in my youth.
Since I am also an Optometrist, NASA added some special vision experiments along with optometric flight hardware (including a tonometer to measure intraocular pressure and a funduscopic camera so that I could perform a fundus/retinal exam and downlink photos from each crewmember). I noticed when I examined each crewmember’s retina that there were petite hemorrhages in the central portion of the eye (macula). Just a few days after we landed the petite hemorrhages quickly resorbed and everyone’s retina looked normal again. My research on this was limited by our mission, but there were potential implications about what this could mean for astronauts who remain in space for extended periods of time. Subsequent research has revealed permanent glaucoma-like damage to the peripheral retina in several astronauts who remained on the international space station for six months or more. Today there are various pharmaceutical preventive measures taken for astronauts who participate in space station missions.
Prior to my mission I learned about a condition called space adaptation syndrome (or space sickness). This syndrome is experienced by approximately 50% of astronauts during the first two or three days of a mission as they adapt to weightlessness. It appears to be related to motion sickness as the vestibular system (the fluid-filled canals in your ears that tell you which way is up) adapts to weightlessness. I was lucky in that I did not to suffer from space sickness on my mission. In fact, as soon as I got out of my spacesuit after launch, I ate a pre-prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwich (made with tortillas to avoid producing floating crumbs). My crewmates (some of whom were vomiting) declined to share.
As I thought more about space adaptation syndrome, it occurred to me that this may also be a vision-related problem. The vestibular system in our inner ears contains tiny crystals that influence our sense of balance. This system links to two different nuclei in our brain that are connected neurologically to the extraocular muscles of each eye. In space, the crystals begin floating in different directions, resulting in micro-movements of each eye in different directions (termed disjunctive eye movements). I knew that disjunctive eye movements make most people sick as opposed to conjunctive eye movements (micro-movements of both eyes but in the same direction). This is why most people feel nauseated if they read a book in a car on a bumpy road. The bumping causes the crystals to bounce in different directions which results in disjunctive eye movements.
Before launch, I wondered what would happen if you patched one eye (thereby eliminating the visual conflict of your eyes moving in different directions). I discussed this idea with an optometrist colleague, Dr. Larry Alexander, who was a former teacher of mine. Dr. Alexander informed me that if a person is spun around in a vestibular chair, they tend to feel less nauseated if they keep one eye closed. This intrigued me, so I decided to investigate further. On a trip from Huntsville to Cape Canaveral using a passenger van, I convinced seven NASA engineers to try reading while wearing eye patches. Although these engineers said that they typically do experience nausea if they read in cars, none felt sick after reading for several hours with the eye patch.
Following up on this, I tried the eye patch during our centrifuge training at Brooks Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas. The centrifuge is a swinging bucket-type centrifuge. In essence, there are chairs attached to hinges that allow them to swing out parallel to the centrifuge arm as the machine picks up centrifugal force (putting the increased gravity into your chest as it would be on launch). When the centrifuge stops spinning the chair returns to an upright position. The visual experience when this “ride” ends is that everything is spinning head-over-heal as your eyes try to keep up with the shifting fluid in your inner ears (and if you turn your head then everything spins horizontally). The effect can be nauseating. However, afterwards I tried closing one eye and noticed that the spinning virtually stopped. I instructed my crew to do the same and they had similar results.
Based on these experiences (and several references from the library on vestibular chair studies) I proposed to my commander that we all wear eye patches on launch. The payload commander was concerned that using only one eye would adversely affect our stereo vision and, as a result, my sug-gestion was not approved. However, the NASA medical board did agree to allow the use of an eyepatch for one mission specialist (with a strong history of severe space sickness on previous flights). Well, within hours of reaching orbit in spite of using the eye patch, this astronaut got extremely sick, vomiting often over the first two days of the mission. However, at the end of my flight, as we began to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and gravity, I tried turning my head back and forth while sitting in my seat. As I turned my head, the entire middeck was spinning. Looking down, I experienced the same head over heel motion. But when I closed one eye, all the spinning stopped just as it did in the centrifuge. At one critical point, listening to the communication system in my helmet, I heard our rookie pilot (Ken Bowersox) frantically say to the commander “Dick, when I turn my head the entire instrument panel is spinning”. Although our commander is the person who lands the space shuttle, the pilot has one very critical job, he hits the switch that lowers the landing gear. I was not supposed to talk at this critical time, but I quickly spoke into my microphone “Ken, close one eye”. Well, Ken closed one eye and it completely stopped the spinning.
About one week after our mission I was asked to describe my eye patch idea to the entire astronaut core. One astronaut, Mario Runco, stood up and noted that on his mission everyone experienced vestibular problems on re-entry except him, but his job was to film the re-entry through a camcorder which caused him to close one eye. It is difficult to assess whether the one-eye-closed method could reduce/eliminate space adaptation syndrome (considering the fact that it did not work for the one crewmember who tried it on my flight). However, it may at least be a useful tool for reentry.
Unfortunately for the experiment that I was actually trained to do in space (growing and optimizing crystallization conditions for 31 different proteins), the results were somewhat disappointing. The majority of proteins crystallized so slowly that there wasn’t enough time to microscopically observe initial results, much less prepare new experiments with optimized conditions. In fact, for the first three days of the mission, none of the 31 proteins had even begun to crystallize (on earth all 31 proteins crystallized and grew to their full size within 48 hours). Of course, the main explanation regarding why microgravity is beneficial for protein crystallization is due to the slower growth kinetics compared to a 1g environment. However, there were some positive results. After seven days of our 14-day mission, successful optimization of chemical conditions did, in fact, lead to improved crystal quality and size for several proteins. My experiment was at least a stepping-stone, suggesting that space-based protein crystallization had an untapped potential that needed to be explored. However, clearly subsequent experimentation needed a platform that could support longer duration space missions (i.e. the International Space Station).
Other experiments on our mission led to a better understanding of fluid behavior in microgravity, fundamental principles of the influence of buoyancy-induced fluid flow on semiconductor and zeolite crystal quality, effects of buoyancy-induced convection in combustion processes and investigation of different physical and pharmaceutical countermeasures for adverse physiological/health changes observed on long duration space missions.
The hardest physical aspect of the entire space flight was the re-entry and re-acclimation to gravity after we landed. As we began our reentry, I was subjected to just a moderate amount of gravitational force (~1.5g) and began to feel nauseated for the first time in the entire mission. I remember looking down at a monitor that displayed my heart rate and blood pressure. I was shocked to see a heart rate of 166 bpm and a blood pressure of 176/115 mmHg. About twenty seconds later I looked again and saw my heart rate at only 77 bpm. My heart rate was rapidly alternating from very fast to slow to fast again. This is another experience common to astronauts. It is due to the baroreceptor mechanism that adapts heart rate based on body position with respect to gravity. These baroreceptors had basically stopped functioning as a result of our staying in microgravity for an extended period of time.
After we landed, my heart rate gradually normalized over the next 20 minutes. The nausea and urge to vomit in my space suit continued. After thirty minutes, I stood up and crawled through the hatch. With the help of a NASA technician, I slowly ambled into a module that had been attached to the shuttle hatch. After a three-hour physical I was asked if I would like to eat something for lunch. I responded that I first wanted to take a nice warm shower (I was tired of sponge baths on the shuttle).
NASA continued to monitor our health for the next two weeks (particularly the vestibular system). We were not permitted to drive a car until our vestibular systems were fully functioning again (for me this was a week-long process).
I am often asked what was the most exciting aspect of my space flight and what impressed me most about NASA. There is no doubt that the most exciting aspect of the flight was simply looking out the window at our beautiful Earth and seeing the endless field of stars around it. I wish I were a poet so I could better express the feeling of that sight. Concerning the second question, the most impressive aspect of participating in a NASA space mission was witnessing the teamwork and dedication of hundreds of NASA engineers and technicians who worked tirelessly to insure our safety and success.
At 7:00 on the morning of the launch, as we walked out of crew quarters where we had been quarantined for a week, there were more than a hundred NASA engineers forming a line on each side of us, stretching all the way to the crew van that drove us to the launch pad. I noticed that several of the engineers who had participated in my training over the past two years had tears in their eyes as they cheered us on. It was a moment that I will never forget.
