STS-8

Flight Crew

TRULY, Richard Harrison, 45, USN, commander, 2nd mission Previous mission: STS-2 (1981)

BRANDENSTEIN, Daniel Charles, 40, USN, pilot GARDNER, Dale Allan, 34, USN, mission specialist 1 BLUFORD, Guion Stewart, 40, USAF, mission specialist 2 THORNTON, William Edgar, 54, civilian, mission specialist 3

Flight Log

An awe-inspiring lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center at 02: 32 hrs local time, the first night launch in the Shuttle programme and only the second in US manned space flight history, was seen within a radius of 720 km (447 miles), but was lucky to have been given the go-ahead. Lightning had struck the launch tower hours before the launch and rain swept conditions delayed it for 17 minutes until mission controllers felt that they had found a hole in the weather and that conditions would be good enough for Challenger to actually make it back to the KSC in one piece following any return to launch site abort.

Already delayed from 4 August due to technical problems including an in-orbit check of TDRS-1, Challenger headed through the clouds as a fuzzy orange halo while the moisture-laden air reflected and amplified the sound, making it the noisiest affair. Inside the Shuttle, the visual effects were both spectacular and a bit frightening. During the SRB burn, unbeknown to NASA at the time, ablative material on one of the SRB nozzles, designed to burn through to 4cm (1jin) in the 3,200°C tem­peratures, actually burned through to just 1.3 cm (2- in). Complete burn through, NASA discovered later, could have caused side-thrusting exhaust to put Challenger out of control. The problem delayed the next mission, STS-9, which had its SRBs replaced as a precautionary measure.

Once on orbit, with an inclination of 28.4° and a maximum altitude of 265 km (165 miles), the commercial objectives of STS-8 were achieved quickly when India’s Insat 1A was deployed from the payload bay, with a slight clinking sound which may have been the result of it knocking against a Shuttle fixture. This probably caused the damage to the satellite that was discovered later when one of the solar panels would not deploy properly at first. Challenger was originally to have carried TDRS-2 but this was replaced by Insat and a 3,383 kg (7,458 lb) Payload Test Article, brought forward from STS-11 and shaped like a giant dumb-bell. This was unberthed and held in various positions to evaluate the performance of the RMS in handling heavy payloads.

Challenger appraised the use of the TDRS-1 satellite to communicate with mission control and the new link enabled the first in-flight press conference since ASTP to be staged and excellent TV coverage to be beamed to Earth. Communica­tions during re-entry via TDRS were not possible, however, due to a computer fault. Commander Truly concentrated on a programme of the most detailed Earth photography since Skylab, while the other astronauts concentrated on their special­ities, including Bluford’s operation of the McDonnell Douglas electrophoresis machine to process living cells for the first time. Meanwhile, the oldest man in space, Dr. Bill Thornton, aged 54 – who was only added to STS-8 at a late stage to study space motion sickness – operated “Dr. Bill’s Clinic’’, learning more in an hour than all the previous years he had put in on the Earth, he said.

After a smooth re-entry, during which Truly performed a series of hypersonic turns and banks, the crew got their first site of Edwards at Mach 2 and 22,860 m (75,000 ft), illuminated by the six xenon lights of runway 22, which greeted Challenger’s first US night landing in manned space flight history, at T + 6 days 1 hour 8 minutes 43 seconds.

Milestones

93rd manned space flight

39th US manned space flight

8th Shuttle mission

3rd flight of Challenger

1st US manned space flight to end at night

1st African American space traveller

Oldest first time space traveller (Thornton), aged 54

In between the flights of STS-8 and STS-9, the Soviet Union attempted to launch Soyuz T10. The mission was aborted following a launch pad fire and is covered in detail in the chapter Quest for Space.