Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (30 page)

To fill the time the astronauts held the first-ever Olympics in space. According to Hauck, the crew was looking for ideas to kill time. “I forget which one of us said it—because this was near the Olympics—‘Let’s have a Space Olympics.’ Crip was a little wary of this, but he said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do?’”

The rules were set. Each astronaut would start on the mid-deck, go through the portside access to the flight deck, across the flight deck to the starboard entryway, down and across the mid-deck, and back up to the top rung of the ladder to the flight deck. Speed was the goal.

“We gave out five awards,” Hauck said. “Sally won the fastest woman. John Fabian won the competitor that caused the most injuries. No one got hurt, but I think his leg hit Crip coming around at one point. I think Norm Thagard was the fastest man. Crip was the most injured, and I was the most something. I don’t know what it was.”

The next day it was time to try the landing again. Crippen’s promotion from pilot to commander meant that this time, as commander, he actually got to pilot, but his opportunity to make the first shuttle landing at Kennedy wasn’t to be—bad weather in Florida continued that day as well, and the landing was moved to Edwards. The shift scuttled some planned encounters—not only the astronauts’ reunions with family members waiting in Florida, but also a chance to meet President Ronald Reagan, who had planned to be on hand to welcome the crew home.

After landing, Crippen said, came the satisfaction of a job well done. “Anytime you work hard to do something and it comes out well, you can’t
help but feel good, and that’s the way I felt with this. I felt my crew had done a superb job. We had accomplished all the mission objectives. We’d made the proximity operations look good. We had deployed a couple of communication satellites, and everything worked. So that gives you a nice high.”

After the flight, the attention returned to America’s first flown female astronaut. “I think that’s when all the attention really hit me,” Ride said.

While I was in training, I had been protected from it all. I had the world’s best excuse: “I’ve got to train, because I have this job to do.”
NASA
was very, very supportive of that. So my training wasn’t affected at all. But the moment we landed, that protective shield was gone. I came face-to-face with a flurry of media activity. There was a lot more attention on us than there was on previous crews, probably even more than the
STS
-1 crew. I’d done my share of public appearances and speeches before I’d gone into training, so I knew how to talk to the press and I knew how to go and show my slides and give a good speech. But just the sheer volume of it was something that was completely different for me, and people reacted much differently to me after my flight than they did before my flight. Everybody wanted a piece of me after the flight.

As commander of the mission, Crippen said he felt a responsibility to shield Ride from any unwanted attention. “She was a big hero as we went around, and everybody wanted to meet Sally. There were so many people trying to get after her or get to her, for whatever reason, that part of the commander’s job was to make sure that she was protected from that, without being overprotective; just whatever she wanted to make sure that she didn’t get overwhelmed by it.”

STS
-8

Crew: Commander Dick Truly, Pilot Dan Brandenstein, Mission Specialists Dale Gardner, Guion Bluford, and Bill Thornton

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 30 August 1983

Landed: 5 September 1983

Mission: Launch of Indian satellite, microgravity research

While
STS
-7 marked the first flight of a female American astronaut,
STS
-8 broadened the diversity of the astronaut corps further, with the launch of Guy Bluford,
NASA
’s first African American astronaut to fly. As with Ride’s flight, there was interest from the media and the public in the first African
American in space. Bluford became a role model for young African Americans. On the twentieth anniversary of his first flight, Bluford said in a
NASA
interview that it had never been his goal to be the first African American in space. “I recognized the importance of it, but I didn’t want to be a distraction for my crew. We were all contributing to history and to our continued exploration of space. I felt I had to do the best job I could for people like the Tuskegee Airmen, who paved the way for me, but also to give other people the opportunity to follow in my footsteps.”

Again, as with Ride,
NASA
protected Bluford from too much media attention before the flight so he could focus on preparing for the mission. He was also spared somewhat because there was a lot of attention still on Ride, whose historic flight had occurred just two months prior.

The crew started out as a crew of four, but approximately five months before the flight Bill Thornton joined the crew to continue studies on space adaptation syndrome, just as Thagard had done on
STS
-7.

The primary task of the mission was the launch of the Indian
INSAT
-1
B
communications and weather satellite. “We were launching a satellite for India,” explained mission pilot Dan Brandenstein, “and to get it in the proper place, you kind of worked the problem backwards. Okay, they want the satellite up here, so then you’ve got to back down all your orbital mechanics and everything, and basically it meant we had to launch at night. The fact we launched at night meant that we would end up landing at night.”

This would be first time the shuttle would launch and land in the dark. Bluford said the crew trained for the nighttime launch and landing by turning out the lights in the Space Shuttle simulator. “We learned to set our light levels low enough in the cockpit so that we could maintain our night vision, and I had a special lamp mounted on the back of my seat so that I could read the checklist in the dark,” recalled Bluford. “The only thing that wasn’t simulated in our launch simulations was the lighting associated with the solid rocket boosters’ ignition and the lighting associated with the firing of the pyros for
SRB
and external tank separation. No one seemed to notice this omission until after we flew.”

That omission set the astronauts up for quite the surprise during the actual launch. “We had darkened the cockpit to prepare for liftoff; however, when the
SRB
s ignited, they turned night into day inside the cockpit. Whatever night vision we had hoped to maintain we lost right away at liftoff,” said Bluford.

22.
Guion Bluford exercises on the treadmill during
STS
-8. Courtesy
NASA
.

Space Shuttle
Challenger
launched in the wee hours of the morning on 30 August 1983. “We were crossing Africa when I saw my first sunrise on orbit,” Brandenstein reflected, “and to this day, that is the ‘Wow!’ of my spaceflight career. Sunrises and sunsets from orbit are just phenomenal, and obviously the first one just knocked my socks off. It’s just so different. It happens relatively quickly because you’re going so fast, and you just get this vivid spectrum forming at the horizon. When the sun finally pops up, it’s just so bright. It’s not attenuated by smog, clouds, or anything. It’s really quite something.”

Bluford also had fond memories of that first sunrise in space. “I still remember seeing the African coast and the Sahara Desert coming up over the horizon. It was a beautiful sight. Once we completed our
OMS
burns, I unstrapped from my seat and started floating on the top of the cockpit. I remember saying to myself, ‘Oh, my goodness, zero g.’ And like all the other astronauts before me, I fumbled around in zero g for quite a while before I got my space legs.”

It proved to be a good thing the sunrise was quick because the astronauts didn’t have time to enjoy the scenery. “After you’re on orbit, you’re floating around and that’s neat, and you’re getting to see the view and that’s neat,
but after you get up, you’ve got an awful lot to do in a very short time, getting the vehicle prepared to operate on orbit,” Brandenstein said. “There are checkpoints. If you don’t get things done or something doesn’t work right, you have to turn right around and come back, so you’re pretty much focused for about the first four hours up there, of getting that all done. Once that was done, well, then you look out the window a little bit more. I remember when the real work of the day was pretty much over and it was time to go to sleep, you didn’t. You looked out the window.”

8.

The Next Steps

With each mission, the Space Transportation System continued to expand its operational functionality. The first four flights had demonstrated the system’s basic capabilities, and the next four had revealed its capabilities as a launch vehicle. After a brief change of pace on
STS
-9, during which the orbiter served as a space-based science laboratory, the shuttle resumed the expansion of its capabilities as a payload launch system.

STS
-41
B

Crew: Commander Vance Brand, Pilot Robert “Hoot” Gibson, Mission Specialists Bruce McCandless, Ron McNair, and Bob Stewart

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 3 February 1984

Landed: 11 February 1984

Mission: Launch of two communication satellites, first flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit

The first nine Space Shuttle missions received relatively straightforward designations. Each was given a number, and that number was the order in which they flew. But beginning with
STS
-10 (which was cancelled and later flew as
STS
-51
C
) and
STS
-13, the agency decided there were problems with naming missions this way.

Bob Crippen was commander of the mission that would have been
STS
-13. “My friend Jim Beggs, who was the administrator of
NASA
, had triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), and he said, ‘There’s not going to be [another disaster like]
Apollo 13
, or a Shuttle 13, so come up with a new numbering system.’”

Astronaut Rick Hauck had a similar recollection, though he remembered the decision also being partly inspired by a desire to avoid confusion down the road. “It’s my sense that there was someone that decided, ‘We are not going to fly a mission called
STS
-13.’ Thirteen-phobic. So at some point,
they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to rename these missions.’ And [it was] also because you’d plan a mission, you’d get everybody started on it, and then something would cause that mission to slip past another mission, so that, in itself, was causing confusion. ‘We’re going to fly
STS
-12 before we fly
STS
-11.’ So it’s easier if you don’t number them sequentially.”

The new system combined the last number of the fiscal year in which the mission was scheduled plus either a 1 or a 2 for the launch location—1 for Kennedy Space Center and 2 for the planned launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base—plus a letter to designate the planned order. This meant that the tenth Space Shuttle mission became 41
B
: 4 for 1984, 1 because it was launching from Kennedy, and B because it would be the second mission that year.

Continuing the series of incremental firsts in the early shuttle program, 41
B
would mark the first use of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (
MMU
) “backpack” developed by the Martin Marietta Corporation. “It was supposed to be an early-day Buck Rogers flying belt, if you know what I mean, except it didn’t have the person zooming real fast,” recalled 41
B
commander Vance Brand. “It was a huge device on your back that was very well designed and redundant so that it was very safe, but it moved along at about one to two or three miles per hour. It used cold nitrogen gas coming out in spurts to thrust you around. The trick was not to let the
EVA
crewmen get too far out such that orbital mechanics would take over and separate us. We didn’t want them lost in space. We didn’t want to come back and face their wives if we lost either one of them up there.”

When McCandless first began using the
MMU
, he encountered a couple of problems. First was a slight offset in his center of mass. For the
MMU
to work properly, the thrust had to be delivered based on the center of mass of the
MMU
, its wearer, and the spacesuit. As long as those were properly aligned, it would move properly. However, after McCandless found the
MMU
was not maneuvering quite the way he expected, it was discovered that in the microgravity environment a small offset, such as additional equipment being worn on one side that wasn’t factored in, could cause the
MMU
to move in unanticipated ways.