Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (15 page)

Brandenstein said that he was very grateful that the format of the classes was just to absorb as much as possible from the barrage of information; there were no written tests. “Everything was pretty much that way. It was
just dump data on you faster than you could imagine. A common joke was that training as an astronaut candidate was kind of like drinking water out of a fire hose; it just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. Probably the good point of it was you weren’t given written tests, so they could just heap as much on you, and you captured what you could. What rolled off your back, you knew where to go recover it.”

Everybody in the class had their strengths at some point in the training, and Brandenstein said the pilots enjoyed when the training was on their home turf. The pilots in the group, he said, liked to take the mission specialists up for what they referred to as “turn and burn”—loops, rolls, and other aerobatics. “We’d go out and do simulated combat and show them what it’s like to have a dogfight and all those sorts of things. So that was [as] fascinating to them as me sitting down with an astronomer or a doctor and finding out about the types of things they did.”

Brewster Shaw said he came into the corps with very few expectations of what the job entailed, beyond eventually flying on the Space Shuttle. “I soon learned that the percentage of the time you got to fly the Space Shuttle was pretty miniscule, relative to the percentage of the time that you were here working for the agency, and that there was a lot of other things you were going to do that would take up all your time, and that was made clear to us pretty soon.”

4.

Getting Ready to Fly

One downside of creating something from scratch is that it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. As shuttle hardware development was winding down, astronauts began facing the next challenge—how do you teach people to fly a vehicle that no one has ever flown? Step one was figuring out how exactly the thing would fly and then developing procedures for flying it. That would be followed by step two, developing procedures for training people to follow the procedures for flying.

As the people who would have the job of actually flying the as-yet-unflown vehicle, the astronaut corps was tasked with providing operator input on the creation of both operating and training procedures. Since a large percentage of the corps at the time was rookie astronauts, in many cases procedures for flying a vehicle that had never been in space were being developed by astronauts who had also never been in space.

For example, the team of astronauts representing the Astronaut Office in figuring out how to use the shuttle’s robot arm, the remote manipulator system, was composed of astronauts John Fabian, Bill Lenoir, Bo Bobko, Sally Ride, and Norm Thagard. “One of the things that we worked on early,” recalled Fabian, “was the failure modes of the robotic arm and how to protect the orbiter and the crew in the event one of these failure modes occurred. At the same time, we tried to figure out ways that we could continue on and do the job and do the mission at hand in the face of certain failures of the robotic arm.”

To tackle these issues, the team ran many simulations in Canada, where the arm was made, to work through procedures for nominal and off-nominal operations. Fabian recalled staying in Toronto quite a bit, around four hundred nights.

I used to try to change hotels about every one hundred nights up there because it got kind of old, staying in the same motel. And by far, I spent the most time
up there of the people that were working on it, because I was there in some very, very long simulations, trying to figure out the various workarounds. Some days were very long. Some days were seven o’clock in the morning until nine or ten at night, and we would take a break and go out and have dinner and then maybe go back to the plant. This wasn’t common. Usually it was close to an eight-to-five job, or a nine-to-six job or whatever. But if you were in the middle of a long simulation, then you would work longer hours.

Fabian recalled that it was Sally Ride who wrote the procedures for the first flight of the arm on
STS
-2. The procedures, Ride said, came directly out of the simulations.

Until you actually start using something, it’s very difficult to make predictions on how well it’s going to work, what it’s used for, and how to accomplish the tasks that it’s designed to accomplish.

We did a lot of development of the visual cues. The astronaut controlling the arm looks at it out the window and also monitors its motion using several cameras. Often critical parts of the view are blocked, or the arm is a long ways from the window, or the work is delicate. In those cases, the astronaut needs reference points to help guide the direction he or she moves the arm. How do you know exactly that you’re lifting a satellite cleanly out of the payload bay and not bumping it into the structure? We also helped determine how you move the arm. What limits should be put on the use of the arm to make sure that it’s kept well within its design constraints? We did a lot of work on that. It was rewarding work, because it was at a time when the system was just being developed, and nobody had paid attention to those things yet.

Despite challenges like limited visibility, Fabian said that the work developing the interface and procedures resulted in the manipulator being “quite easy to use.” But, he noted, “it’s also a little bit intimidating, because you’ve got this thing which is fifty feet long out there in the cargo bay, and if you’re not careful, you could punch a hole in the wing or do something really stupid with it.”

Fabian views his contributions to
RMS
development as one of his most significant accomplishments at
NASA
.

The
RMS
has worked wonders on all of the flights. It’s really a great piece of equipment. The Canadians have gone on to design an arm now for the Inter
national Space Station, so they have gotten a big return out of their early investment in developing these electromechanical systems. We really had an opportunity with the
RMS
to work on the human interface, to make it something which is straightforward and easy to use and intuitive in its application. That’s now followed over into the Space Station, and potentially it will go on to other applications. I think it’s the most significant thing that I did in my time, and I think it’s the thing I’m proudest of.

Fabian, along with astronaut Judy Resnik, was also involved in establishing how crew duty assignments would work during the Space Shuttle program. Previous
NASA
missions had carried crews no larger than three astronauts, and each astronaut had his own title and assignment. With the larger shuttle crews, there would be multiple mission specialists, and
NASA
had to decide how crew duties would be allocated and assigned. The system that was developed assigned mission specialist (
MS
) 1 overall responsibility for payloads and experiments in orbit. Mission specialist 2 was given primary responsibility for flight engineering, helping the pilot and commander during ascent and entry, and serving as backup for payloads. Mission specialist 3 had responsibilities for independent experiments and extravehicular activity, or
EVA
.

“
MS
3 would be typically the most junior and the lowest training requirement but heavy on
EVA
,” Fabian recalled. “
MS
1 would have the largest overall responsibility and, in principle, ought to be the most experienced member of the astronaut mission specialist crew. And
MS
2 had the most simulation time and spent an enormous amount of time in the simulator. . . . We split it that way in order to recognize the fact that the flight engineering role was the dominant training requirement for one of the mission specialists, and therefore that person shouldn’t be burdened with overall responsibility for the satellites.”

Astronaut input was also crucial in the development of the Shuttle Motion Simulator, or
SMS
, which would become the primary system for training Space Shuttle crews. The
SMS
was the only high-fidelity simulator capable of training crews for all phases of a mission, beginning at T minus thirty minutes and including simulated launch, ascent, abort, orbit, rendezvous, docking, payload handling, undocking, deorbit, entry, approach, landing, and rollout. The simulator could tilt up to ninety degrees, to the vertical position the orbiter would be in during launch, and could simulate the vibrations and noises of ascent.

Bryan O’Connor, who was selected as an astronaut in 1980 and assigned to
SMS
development, described what it was like to see the more veteran Apollo-era astronauts apply their experience to the project.

All these guys had quite a history back through the Apollo program, and it was difficult not to pick up some of that climate and the cultural aspects of that, the pride that they had in that program, the frustrations they were having as we went forward, and things not being the same as they had been before, where it seemed like there was plenty of money. Now the environment we were in was a little different, but a lot of the cultural aspects that had made the Apollo program great were interesting to me to jump into and start learning about.

Since the Space Shuttle had yet to fly at the time, the development of the
SMS
was based on analysis and ground-test data. “Part of what they were doing was to try to make things like the visual cues and the oral cues that they have for the crew as accurate as they could so that the environment in that trainer would be as close to real as they could get it,” O’Connor recalled.

I would be in the third seat taking notes and we would have two Apollo guys like John Young and T. K. Mattingly . . . trying to remember what it sounded like when the reaction control jets fired. The engineers would be outside the simulation putting in these models and turning up the volume and changing the pitch and the frequencies of these noises in the cockpit to make them sound space-like. Nobody knew what it would sound like on shuttle, but if they could make it sound something like what Apollo sounded like, they thought that was a good start. So it was fun to hear these guys arguing about whether some noise that was in there was accurate to the Apollo sounds when neither one of the two guys in the front had actually flown on the Apollo system for some years.

Determining how to calibrate the vibrations in the
SMS
was another instance where O’Connor recalled the Apollo veterans really having a good time.

There was a fellow named Roger Burke, who was the head engineer in charge of developing the Shuttle Mission Simulator, and Roger had a little bit of a diabolical streak in him. One day we were trying to simulate what the vibrations might feel like during launch. Roger was asking these pros—and I think John Young was in the commander’s seat on this one—for advice on how much vibration seemed right. So we did several launches in a row and each time John
would say, “No, you need some more. It’s going to vibrate more than that.” So you can picture Roger Burke out there, turning this potentiometer up to get more vibration in there. Then we would fly another launch and John would say, “Nope, nope. That old Saturn, that had a lot more vibration than that. You’re going to have to tweak it up a little more, Roger.”

So after about three or four of these things, Roger decided he was going turn it all the way to the max, and he did, and that was one hellacious ride. John and I both knew what he had done, and all we could do was just hold on. We were strapped in, but you still felt like you needed to hold on. You couldn’t see any of the displays at all. It was just a big blur, and we were bouncing around like it must have been the case in the old days, when people were going down the rutted dirt highways in buckboard wagons or something. Roger actually broke the system on that particular run.

O’Connor said that his role in the development of the
SMS
taught him a valuable lesson that stayed with him throughout his time at
NASA
. “As I look back on it, I realize that what I thought was going to be a terrible job and not very much fun and out of the mainstream was just as important as any other job anybody else was doing. It was kind of an early learning event for me, because I realized then, and it came back to me many times later on, . . . that everybody’s important, no matter what their job is in the space program. There aren’t any nonimportant jobs.”

In regard to simulators like the
SMS
,
STS
-1 pilot Bob Crippen noted that after the shuttle started flying, astronauts brought their experience back to the simulators to make them more accurate. “I know on the first flight we learned that the reaction control jets, which are used to maneuver the vehicle while you’re on orbit, really are loud,” Crippen said. “It sounds like a Howitzer going off outside the window. . . . I knew they’d be loud, but it was louder than I expected. It was a good thing to at least try to simulate that a little bit better in the simulator so that people weren’t really surprised by it.”

While ground-based simulators were used to train astronauts on the launch experience, a modified Gulfstream jet was used to re-create the experience of landing. The exterior of the Shuttle Training Aircraft (
STA
) was modified to better withstand the stresses of replicating the shuttle’s reentry profile. Changes to the cockpit echoed the layout of the shuttle’s flight deck and the view that astronauts would have while landing the shuttle.
Engine thrust reversers reproduced the “flying brick” aerodynamics of a gliding shuttle.

“The Gulfstream was extremely valuable,” said astronaut Joe Engle. “It was a very, very good simulation, a very accurate simulation of what the orbiter would do. The response was tuned as data would come back from the orbiter flights, but it was a very, very good training airplane and still considered by pilots as the very best single training tool that they have to land the shuttle.”