Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (35 page)

Two days later Allen and Gardner used the exact same procedure to recover the second satellite. Allen recalled,

We were
LOS
, loss of signal, and Rick, Anna, and Dave all were very pleased for us and said, “Congratulations,” and Rick, as the commander, said, “Joe and Dale, when we come
AOS
, I want you to report that both satellites are locked safely aboard.” We looked at each other and kind of shook our heads outside, and almost together, we said, “Rick, that’s the commander’s job. When we come
AOS
, you report that we have two satellites safely aboard, and you can also use the words ‘fucking miracle.’” We came
AOS
, and Rick, in his Chuck Yeager–type relaxed drawl, said, “Houston, Roger.
Discovery
here. We have two satellites safely aboard.” You could hear the Mission Control people cheering through the microphone of the CapCom. It was really quite fun.

Once both satellites were successfully retrieved and stowed in the payload bay, Allen took a photo of Gardner holding a For Sale sign in front of the satellites. “We had prepared in advance of the flight [a sign] that said ‘For Sale,’ because the satellites would be returned and would then be in the ownership and the possession of insurance companies, which had every intention of selling them as brand-new satellites,” Allen explained.

It’s a terrific photo, and one of the only photos I’ve ever taken that shows me as well, because I’m reflected in Dale’s helmet, holding my camera, and the photo shows part of the Earth, the blackness of space, Dale Gardner, the For Sale sign, and my likeness reflected in his helmet; a favorite photo of mine to this day.

When we returned, the For Sale photographs—and Rick and Anna and David had taken many from the flight deck as well—were an important part of the press package that went out, and they showed up in a number of magazines. I might say that the Lloyd’s of London and the International Technology Underwriters were very, very pleased with these photographs.
NASA
was not as pleased, and we were given somewhat curt—“reprimands” is the wrong word—curt discussions from our headquarters bosses over what did we have in mind in doing that.

25.
Dale Gardner holding a For Sale sign after retrieving two malfunctioning satellites during
STS
-51
A
. Courtesy
NASA
.

After a nearly eight-day mission, the crew landed with both satellites on board at Kennedy Space Center. Allen said two individuals from the U.S. Customs Department met them in crew quarters.

We were surprised by this, and they said they had forms for us to fill out, because we were bringing into the United States approximately $250 million worth of technical hardware, and there was a certain duty now due on this, because anything that’s imported into the United States over a certain value must be taxed, and the tax would be 10 percent of $250 million. How did we plan to pay for that? Fortunately, they also had an agreement between Customs and the
NASA
Office of General Counsel that waived this import duty, that the chief
NASA
lawyer, Neil Hosenball, had foreseen as a complication and had organized the waiver prior to the success of the mission. But we were to sign the Customs form, and for that they gave each of us a United States Customs hat.

9.

Science on the Shuttle

As the nation’s Space Transportation System, the primary goal of the Space Shuttle was just that—to transport people and cargo back and forth between the surface of Earth and orbit around the planet. However, it was quickly obvious that the shuttle had even greater potential.

In 1973 and ’74, the Skylab space station had demonstrated the value of conducting scientific research in Earth orbit. From the beginnings of the Space Shuttle program, plans had been that the vehicle would support a space station that would continue, and build further upon, the work done on Skylab. However, the realities of budgetary constraints meant that the two could not be developed at the same time and that the space station would have to wait.

In the meantime, though, the Space Shuttle itself would provide a stopgap measure— a pressurized module placed inside the orbiter’s cargo bay could be roomy enough to serve as an effective orbital science laboratory.

STS
-9

Crew: Commander John Young, Pilot Brewster Shaw, Mission Specialists Owen Garriott and Bob Parker, Payload Specialists Ulf Merbold (Germany) and Byron K. Lichtenberg

Orbiter:
Columbia

Launched: 28 November 1983

Landed: 8 December 1983

Mission: First flight of the Spacelab laboratory module

Launched in November 1983,
STS
-9 marked a new step forward for the Space Shuttle program, while also hearkening back to the first four missions. The first mission to fly the Spacelab science module,
STS
-9 was both a demonstration and an operational flight. The primary purpose was to make sure that the Spacelab module worked properly, but that was achieved
by conducting a full complement of scientific experiments. According to
STS
-9 mission specialist Owen Garriott, who was a member of
NASA
’s first group of scientist-astronauts and of the second crew of Skylab, the mission of Spacelab I included experiments in biomedicine, astronomy, fluid physics, materials processing, and atmospheric sciences.

A rack of fluid physics equipment enabled the crew to inject liquids, shake them and rotate them, combine them and stretch them, in order to study the small forces associated with the surface tension and the even smaller forces that are associated with fluids that cannot be as easily demonstrated or measured in a one-g environment. An adjacent double rack was dedicated to materials science. The racks included furnaces in which material samples could be heated and resolidified. Other equipment focused light on a crystal, melted it, and then allowed it to solidify more carefully. Spectrometers flown on the mission allowed the crew to conduct stellar astronomy and air-glow research through the orbiter’s windows.

The variety of the experiments was what drew Garriott to the flight. Garriott, who spent more than fifty-nine days in space as a science pilot astronaut aboard Skylab, explained that for a mission like Skylab or
STS
-9 that is focused on interdisciplinary scientific research, the ideal crew member is a scientific generalist, with interest and ability in multiple areas, rather than someone who specializes in one field. “My interest is interdisciplinary work, so I found [the mission] quite interesting, and I think it does relate to the fact that you need an interdisciplinary background to try to conduct experiments for all of these
PI
s [principal investigators]. You obviously can’t have a representative for each
PI
there, and you need somebody who has got some degree of competency in all of the variety of areas.”

Before the flight assignment, during the period between Skylab and shuttle, Garriott had gone into management, becoming director of science and applications at Johnson Space Center. He was still a member of the astronaut corps but was no longer actively involved with the Astronaut Office.

I had my hands full two buildings away. I think I still talked to the folks in the Astronaut Office all the time. I was still flying airplanes. I might have been going over to those weekly meetings as well. But I did not have any acting role in the Astronaut Office from the standpoint of getting ready for shuttle or anything else. I was expecting to stay in the Science and Applications Directorate until another flight opportunity came along. I’d always intended to return to the Astronaut Office full time as soon as there was the first flight opportunity available.

26.
In the Spacelab on the first Spacelab mission are Robert Parker, Byron Lichtenberg, Owen Garriott, and Ulf Merbold. Courtesy
NASA
.

Garriott started training for the shuttle in 1978, when
NASA
believed the mission was still only about three years away. “We had a lot of training to do,” Garriott recalled, “because there were something like sixty experiments on board, half from Europe, half from the U.S., roughly. And we visited almost every
PI
at their facilities and talked with them about how to operate it and the hardware development.”

During that period the crew was very involved in the development of the Spacelab hardware, particularly the controls and displays the astronauts would use to interface with the equipment. “If you don’t understand how [something] works, if it’s not something that’s human friendly, you can waste a lot of time or make a lot of mistakes,” Garriott said. “That was the one thing that supposedly the crew members were more expert in, the interface between man and machine.”

Delays meant that Garriott did not make his second spaceflight until a full decade after his first, but he said it was worth it. “That ten-year delay is longer than I expected, but it’s a decision that I really made when I went
over to Science and Applications in the first place. I wanted to come back and fly again. And so I was just anxious to get back and fly again.”

The variety of the experiments meant that the crew members had to spend a substantial amount of time learning about the experiments and working on the ground with the principal investigators with whom they would be interacting from orbit. There had been fewer disciplines represented on Skylab, Garriott recalled, so crew members did not have to travel as much or as far to talk with the principal investigators. “In fact, for most of the time, they came to
JSC
for our solar physics training and for our biomedical training.” On Spacelab, the investigators were all over the world, with experiments from around the United States, from countries in Europe, and one from Japan. “We were very international and traveled all over the world in order to talk with the investigators about the conduct of their experiments. I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to work in all of these different disciplines with the real world’s experts and to learn from them.”

Garriott also felt fortunate to work with the other astronauts on
STS
-9, including Commander John Young.

I’ve always gotten along extremely well with my fellow crewmates. John Young, who was the commander of Spacelab I, is not an Alan Bean [commander of Garriott’s Skylab crew]. He’s motivated differently, different personality, [a] standard sort of a prototypical test pilot. I was a little concerned about that, since we were bringing in the first foreign international. How well is that going to work? It turns out it worked extremely well, for which I give John Young a lot of credit. I really enjoyed having John as the commander of our flight. And I think after we came back he had no better friend on board our flight than Ulf Merbold. They still often talk. Whenever Ulf comes back, I think they get together for dinner.

While the commander’s primary responsibility in orbit was the operation of the vehicle and oversight of the crew, Garriott noted that Young made several other contributions to support the scientific portions of the mission. For example, when the mounting apparatus for a camera used for a vestibular experiment broke, rather than allowing thousands of film frames to go to waste, Young took the camera and film to the flight deck and spent time taking Earth-observation photographs.

“John really jumped in and assisted in the conduct of the science,” Garriott commented. “Before flight there was some little concern about that,
that whether or not a standard prototypical test pilot would enjoy and participate. But we all really enjoyed having him on board. He did his share, as did the rest of us.”

STS
-9 was the first
NASA
flight to include payload specialists, astronauts who were not career
NASA
employees. Ulf Merbold, the first international astronaut to fly on the shuttle, was a West German astronaut from the European Space Agency, and Byron Lichtenberg was a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (
MIT
).