Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (29 page)

20.
Sally Ride on the flight deck during
STS
-7. Courtesy
NASA
.

Ride’s inclusion on
STS
-7 created learning opportunities for ground support teams accustomed to all-male astronaut crews. By that point, the
JSC
team had already been through any number of big-picture changes, such as the locker-room question. Now they were discovering all the little changes that went along with integrating shuttle crews. For example, every item astronauts would use in space had to be chosen and reviewed before flight. “The engineers at
NASA
, in their infinite wisdom, decided that women astronauts would want makeup,” Ride recalled.

So they designed a makeup kit. A makeup kit brought to you by
NASA
engineers. You can just imagine the discussions amongst the predominantly male engineers about what should go in a makeup kit. So they came to me, figuring that I could give them advice. It was about the last thing in the world that I wanted to be spending my time in training on. So I didn’t spend much time on it at all. But there were a couple of other female astronauts who were given the job of determining what should go in the makeup kit and how many tampons should fly as part of a flight kit. I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight. They asked, “Is one hundred the right number?” “No. That would not be the right number.” They said, “Well, we want to be safe.” I said, “Well, you can cut that in half with no problem at all.” And there were probably some other, similar sorts of issues, just because they had never thought about what just kind of personal equipment a female astronaut would take. They knew that a man might want a shaving kit, but they didn’t know what a woman would carry.

Astronaut Rick Hauck recalled that Ride was very professional, very industrious, was always thinking about the objectives for the flight, and was also a good teammate with a good sense of humor. Reporters at press conferences would focus most of their inquiries on the first flight of a U.S. woman, and that was just fine with Hauck. “I remember one press conference just before we flew,” he said. “Someone from
Time
magazine or something said, ‘Sally, do you think you’ll cry when you’re on orbit?’ And of course, she kind of gave him this ‘You got to be kiddin’ me’ kind of look and said, ‘Why doesn’t anyone ever ask Rick those questions?’”

Norm Thagard was a late addition to the crew, chosen in order to address a particular issue that had been plaguing
NASA
crews since
Apollo 9
, and particularly since the Skylab missions in 1973. “
NASA
was concerned about this ‘space adaptation syndrome,’ or upchucking in space, and we wanted to learn more about it,” Crippen said. “We had some physicians in this thirty-five group, and we figured, ‘Well, we’ve only got four of us on board. There’s room for more. Why don’t we pick a doc, and let that individual go through and see if they can figure out this problem a little bit more?’”

Thagard was selected for the mission, and he and other physician-astronauts put together a series of experiments to determine the cause of space adaptation syndrome. “He was wanting some of us to participate in the exper
iments,” said Crippen. “When some of [us] weren’t really occupied with things, then we planned on going down there and seeing whether Norm could make us sick or not, which he worked very hard at.”

Hauck recalled being subjected to one of Thagard’s tests while in space.

As soon as we got on orbit, I got down into the middle deck, and Norm had these visual things that I had to watch, and they’re spinning, and, boy, I felt miserable. I mean, they accomplished their purpose. At one point I said, “Hey, guys, I’ve had it. I’m going to go into the airlock,” which was just a nice place to go hide. And I said, “I’m going to close my eyes, and please don’t bother me until I come out.” I didn’t know whether I was going to throw up. I just felt miserable. And I guess it was about four hours later I started to come out of that and that resolved itself.

While
STS
-7 was best known among the American public for the inclusion of Ride in the crew, the primary mission objectives were a bit more practical.
STS
-7 would be the first shuttle flight to do “proximity operations,” to rendezvous with and capture another object in space. A Shuttle Pallet Satellite in the cargo bay of the shuttle was picked up with the remote manipulator system, taken out of the bay, released into space, and then recaptured.

Ride used the robotic arm to lift the small satellite out of the cargo bay and release it. Crippen then flew the shuttle approximately one thousand feet away from the satellite, circled around it, and rendezvoused, and Ride recaptured it with the robotic arm. “We were to evaluate how easy [or] how hard it was to maintain formation with the satellite,” said Hauck, who piloted the shuttle for the second set of rendezvous tests after Crippen flew the first set. “It was just wonderful to be the new guy on the block and be given this responsibility to do some of the flying around this satellite. It all went well, and we got a lot of good data and wrote up a good report on it.”

The proximity operations led to another historic moment for the Space Shuttle program: the first photo of the orbiter in space. Today, pictures of the orbiter in space are commonplace; the vehicle was imaged extensively during its rendezvous with the International Space Station. At the time of
STS
-7, however, that particular sight had never been seen. “While we were headed out, a guy by the name of Bill Green that works up at headquarters had come up with the idea of putting a camera on board this Shuttle Pallet Satellite,” Crippen said. “So we actually remotely took pictures of the
shuttle from the satellite when it was about a thousand feet away, which gave us some unique shots when we returned back.”

Images of the orbiter in space were scripted into the mission objectives, but what wasn’t officially planned was an iconic shot of the orbiter with the robotic arm in the shape of the number 7. “On our mission patch we had had the orbiter with the arm up in the shape of a seven, so we concluded that, hey, we might as well do that,” recalled Crippen. “We had practiced this on the ground by ourselves, and I think it was Sally who put the arm in that configuration. When we took the picture, it almost looked like the patch. However, Mission Control had not seen the arm go into this particular position before, and they were worried that we were getting it into some limits that it shouldn’t be in. It wasn’t, but it did cause some consternation on the ground, I think.”

Fabian recalled planning the picture with Ride and Crippen.

We really worked hard on that, and we got a lot of help. We worked out the position, the arm in the shape of a seven for the seventh flight. And we didn’t tell anybody about this, of course. We had this on kind of a back-of-our-hand type of procedure, what angles each joint had to be in order for it to look like that. And then we had worked on the timing so that we could catch the Space Shuttle against that black sky with the horizon down below. That was the picture we most wanted. We most wanted the shuttle against the black sky and the Earth’s horizon down below. I was real proud of that. I was real proud of the work that Sally and I and Crip had done on getting that ready to go. Because it gave you a really strong indication that, you know, this is a spaceship we’re talking about here.

The mission also included the deployment of two communications satellites. Once in space, the astronauts opened the cargo bay doors and secured the Payload Assist Modules, which were the boosters used to move the satellites from the shuttle’s orbit to their higher destination orbit. “It was really important work, and we screwed it up a little bit,” Fabian said. “We threw the heater switches out of sequence, which in the simulations that we did would not have meant anything. But it turns out that those switches had been rewired to do a secondary function. It had nothing to do with the heaters. . . . It never got picked up by the trainers. It never got picked up by anyone that was associated with preparing us to go fly that there was something quite different about these switches and that if you throw them at the wrong time, then something unexpected is going to happen.”

21.
Challenger
in orbit on
STS
-7 with the remote manipulator system arm in the shape of the number
7
. Courtesy
NASA
.

Unbeknownst to the astronauts, flipping the switches in the wrong order caused the early extraction of several pins on the rotation table that were keeping the satellites from rotating prior to their deployment. “We didn’t know anything at all was wrong until the ground told us that we had inadvertently pulled the pins and that they were trying to find a work-around,” Fabian said. “They found a way to command from the ground to put the pins back in, fortunately. But this was one of those things; this is a very complex machine, and in spite of everybody’s best intentions, sometimes some things slip through the cracks. We had been through this thing in the simulator dozens, if not hundreds, of times, doing it precisely the way that we did it in orbit without it ever coming to anyone’s attention.”

With his promotion to commander on
STS
-7, Crippen was able to accomplish a goal that he had set for the position during
STS
-1: “I was the commander now, so I was going to get to look out the window more.”

In fact, Crippen encouraged his crew members, on
STS
-7 and all of his flights, to take advantage of the unique opportunities spaceflight offers as much as possible. “Enjoy it,” he said. “Enjoy it. You never know whether you’re going to get a second flight or whatever, so take advantage of when you go up, to really savor it. I had ended up with four flights, and I still remember them today, and every bit of it was enjoyable.”

During the mission, Ride talked to CapCom Mary Cleave, the first time a woman on the ground talked to a woman in space. Ride said it didn’t even cross her mind. “I don’t know whether it occurred to Mary either. I didn’t even think about it until after I landed and somebody pointed it out to me. And apparently the first time we talked we said something totally unmemorable. I don’t know what it was, but it was not particularly historic.”

Cleave’s personal impression of the exchange from the ground was similar to Ride’s orbital experience, but she didn’t have to wait until after the flight to have it pointed out. “I didn’t even notice it. Here’s Sally and I, we didn’t even notice it. But I was on duty, and one female reporter, who will go unnamed, afterwards said, ‘Mary, it was so disappointing.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You and Sally just had a normal conversation.’ ‘Yeah. We were working.’ ‘Well, you should have said something special for this momentous occasion.’ ‘What momentous—?’ ‘First female-to-female communication.’ And I went, ‘Oh, we didn’t notice.’ Sort of like, ‘Well, I’m sorry I disappointed you, but really we didn’t notice it.’”

One memorable event that occurred during the mission made a very literal impact. “We were hit on the windshield by a small fleck of paint, and it made a hole about the size of a lima bean halfway through the outer of two panes of glass,” recalled Fabian.

We found out after the flight that it was one [layer] of paint the size of a pinhead that had hit us. And it hits you with such enormous velocity that the kinetic energy associated with that small fleck of paint is enough to blast out that kind of a crater. Crippen decided not to tell the ground that we’d been hit, and it didn’t come up until after the flight. And his rationale for that, I assume, was that there wasn’t anything that the ground could do to help us. The event
had already occurred. We were perfectly safe. They would worry a lot. And so he elected not to say anything. I think after the flight someone said something about that, but I think it was the right decision.

Finally, the time for landing came, and went, and came again.
STS
-7 was to be the first shuttle flight to land at Kennedy Space Center, but weather was an issue. “John [Young] was the weather checker in our Shuttle Training Aircraft at Kennedy, and he saw some weather, which it can develop very rapidly, which he and I both know,” Crippen recalled. “He properly waved us off on that first time, and we elected to wait another day and try it. . . . But truthfully, that extra day we got on orbit was a free day. There wasn’t any real work to be done, so all of us had an opportunity to sit back and enjoy, and maybe play a little bit while we were on orbit.”