STS-34

Flight Crew

WILLIAMS, Donald Edward, 47, USN, commander, 2nd mission Previous mission: STS 51-D (1985)

MCCULLEY, Michael James, 46, USN, pilot

LUCID, Shannon Wells, 46, civilian, mission specialist 1, 2nd mission Previous mission: STS 51-G (1985)

CHANG-DIAZ, Franklin Ramon, 39, civilian, mission specialist 2, 2nd mission Previous mission: STS 61-C (1986)

BAKER, Ellen Schulman, 36, civilian, mission specialist 3

Flight Log

During an extraordinary week in May 1986, two Space Shuttles were to have taken off from both launch pads at the KSC, carrying their Ulysses and Galileo deep space probes, both atop liquid-fuelled Centaur G Prime upper stages. The prospect caused such concern among the astronauts, even before the Challenger disaster, that the flights were dubbed the “Death Star” missions after the Star Wars films. The Challenger accident put paid to such ambitious NASA flight rate plans and resulted in the elimination of the Centaur stage from Shuttles. Galileo and Ulysses were to fly the less powerful solid-propellant IUS upper stages and, instead of taking off six days apart, were to be launched in October 1989 and October 1990 respectively.

Galileo was assigned to the orbiter Atlantis and mission STS-34 with a launch window starting on 12 October and extending well into November if necessary. NASA aimed hopefully for 12 October, having successfully avoided returning Atlantis to the VAB to escape Hurricane Hugo by a whisker. The astronaut crew, including Shannon Lucid and Ellen Baker, the first two-female crew to be launched since October 1984, arrived in good spirits at the KSC on 9 October. They were not in such good spirits flying back to Houston the following day after the launch was cancelled due to a fault in SSME No.2’s main events controller, which had to be replaced.

Atlantis was rescheduled for 17 October and a tight 24 minute planetary launch window. While the crew stared into blue skies, the RTLS Shuttle runway was threatened by a thundercloud and the transatlantic abort sites were also suffering inclement weather. Commander Don Williams took his crew back to their quarters and an attempt the following day seemed destined for more of the same, such were the forecasts. A launch hold was ordered because the orbiter computers had to be reprogrammed for a potential TAL landing at a secondary site due to bad weather at the first, while at the KSC, the weather was perfect for the launch at 12:53 hrs local time, boosted by the first SRBs to use components from previous Shuttle missions since the Challenger disaster.

Once Atlantis had reached its unique 34.30° inclination, with a maximum altitude of 286 km (178 miles), Pad 39B was almost obliterated by thunderstorms. At T + 6 hours 21 minutes, Galileo began its journey to Jupiter, leaving the payload bay on its IUS. It would go backwards to Jupiter via Venus and two Earth fly-bys, one as close as 900 km (559 miles) in December 1990, taking six years to reach its destination.

The flawless departure from the Shuttle, like Magellan’s the previous April, did much to boost NASA’s morale, particularly in light of the criticism of flying these payloads on the Shuttle rather than an ELV and the particular storm in a teacup which brewed over the fact that environmentalists had been concerned about Galileo’s radioactive RTG power system. Such was the ridiculous media hype that local residents near the Cape were led to believe that, had Atlantis gone the same way as Challenger, the effect would have been a nuclear explosion. Adding to the drama was the fact that the IUS control room at a US Air Force facility in Sunnyvale, California was hit by an earthquake just before launch and personnel, some of whom had lost their houses and belongings, were controlling the IUS amid dust and more than a little rubble.

The crew then got to work with film-making using the IMAX camera, medical experiments under the watchful eyes of Dr. Baker, and remote-sensing photography from the unique orbit. Atlantis made a picture perfect touchdown on the dry lake bed runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base at T + 4 days 23 hours 39 minutes 24 seconds. By the time Galileo soared past Venus in February 1990, two Shuttle flights later, STS-34 was but a statistic on the flight manifest.

Galileo had a long and troubled journey to Jupiter and at times it looked as though the spacecraft might not succeed at all thanks to difficulties with unfurling the antenna. Finally, on 7 December 1995, the probe entered Jovian orbit. The probe had flown past Venus on 10 February 1990, Earth and the Moon on 8 December 1990, and the asteroid Gaspra on 29 October 1991, before returning to the vicinity of Earth and the Moon for a second time on 8 December 1992, passing the asteroid Ida on 28 August 1993, and taking historic images of Comet Shoemaker-Levy striking Jupiter during July 1994. The probe was released on 13 July 1995 and entered the upper atmospheric cloud layers of the planet on 7 December 1995, the same day that the main spacecraft entered orbit. The primary mission (orbits 1-11) ran from January 1996 through December 1997. This was followed by the Europa phase between December 1997 and December 1999 (orbits 12-25), and finally an extended mission phase. A decade after leaving Earth, the Galileo mission continued to rewrite the text books on the largest planet in our solar system. Mostly forgotten was the short mission of STS-34, another mission that blended unmanned and manned space exploration into one programme.

Milestones

128th manned space flight 61st US manned space flight 31st Shuttle mission 5th flight of Atlantis

2nd Shuttle planetary deployment mission