People and Payloads

In 1983 a new classification of astronauts had emerged, joining pilots and mission specialists: payload specialists. Until this point, being an astronaut was a full-time job, a career choice that people committed to for years. They were given broad training, which prepared them to carry out any variety of mission they might be assigned. Payload specialists, on the other hand, had other careers; flying in space, for them, was not their job, but a job duty. Payload specialists were just that—specialists from organizations, includ­ing universities, companies, and nations, responsible for a shuttle payload, who accompanied that payload during flight and helped with its operation.

On 28 November 1983 the sTs-9 mission, also known as Spacelab I, had launched into space the first payload specialists: Byron Lichtenberg, a biomedical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, and Ulf Merbold, a West German physicist representing the European Space Agency. Lichtenberg was the first American who was not a career astro­naut to fly in an orbiting U. S. spacecraft, carrying out an experiment in space that he helped design and that he would help analyze and interpret as a member of a research team. Before that, scientists had instructed and trained astronauts on how to do their experiments and astronauts did the work for them.

sts-41D

Crew: Commander Hank Hartsfield, Pilot Michael Coats, Mission Specialists Judy Resnik, Steven Hawley, and Mike Mullane,

Payload Specialist Charles Walker Orbiter: Discovery Launched: 30 August 1984 Landed: 5 September 1984 Mission: Deployment of three satellites

The year after Lichtenberg and Merbold’s flight, the first commercial payload specialist, Charlie Walker, flew as a member of the 41D crew. Com­manded by Hank Hartsfield, 41D deployed three satellites and tested the use of a giant solar wing. Walker was assigned to the flight to run the Con­tinuous Flow Electrophoresis System (cfes), an apparatus from the Mc­Donnell Douglas Corporation, for which Walker was a test engineer. The system used electrophoresis, which is the process of separating and purify­ing biological cells and proteins.

“What they were producing with that was erythropoietin,” Hartsfield recalled. “It’s a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells. Ortho Pharmaceuticals was the primary contractor with MacDac to build this thing. And cfes was kind of a test version of it. . . . The idea was, which was a good one, say you were going to have planned surgery, they could inject that hormone into you prior to the surgery, some time peri­od, I don’t know how long it would take, but your body would produce more red blood cells, and then you wouldn’t need transfusions. So it was a good idea.”

Prior to being assigned a flight of his own, Walker was responsible for training NASA astronaut crews in the operation of the cfes payload on the STS-4, sts-6, STS-7, and sts-8 shuttle flights during 1982 and 1983. He flew with the cfes equipment as a crew member on 41D, 51D, and 61B.

The initial agreement between McDonnell Douglas and NASA called for six proof-of-concept flights of the cfes device, which was originally to be flown aboard Spacelab. But according to Walker, slips in the launch of Spacelab caused McDonnell Douglas and NASA to renegotiate for six flights on board the Space Shuttle mid-deck.

The agreement was that NASA would provide the launch and McDon­nell Douglas would provide the equipment and testing processes. “nasa, in the body of the Marshall Space Flight Center Materials Lab folks, had the opportunity, at no expense to them other than the preparation of samples and then the collection and the analysis of it later in their own laboratories upon return home, to use a device produced at the expense of the private sector for private-sector research, but, again, allowing NASA the right to use it for up to a third of the time in orbit in exchange for the opportunity to have it there in orbit aboard shuttle,” Walker explained.

After the first flight of the cfes device, on STS-4, Walker said McDon­nell Douglas felt that it had demonstrated enough success in the proof of concept test to ask to fly its own astronaut to run its device. “From our standpoint, we had proven that we could predict adequately for produc­tion processing what we needed to know,” Walker said.

We briefed on that, and we advised the Space Shuttle program management what we wanted to do for the next flight; got that approved through appropri­ate processes, and at the same time—I can remember, I was in a meeting in which Jim Rose [McDonnell Douglas manager] and I briefed Glynn Lunney [shuttleprogram manager] in Glynn’s office in Building 1 [at jsc], and Jim told me, going down, he said, “I just want to tell you, as we walk into this meeting if I get an indication from Glynn that he’s happy with the results, too, from the NASA side, I’m going to ask for a payload specialist opportunity. ” He said, ”Are you okay with that?” And I said, “You know I’m okay with that. ”

That was exactly what happened, Walker recalled. Lunney indicated that nasa was pleased with the results, so Rose pressed ahead.

Jim Rose said, “We want to ask for the opportunity to negotiate for one more thing.” And basically it went something like, “You know, Glynn, the astro­nauts that were training, Hank’s a great individual, obviously a great test pi­lot, a good engineer, but Hank doesn’t know this electrophoresis stuff and the other astronauts, mission specialists that we’re going to train, they’re going to be able just to spend a little bit of their time working with our device. They’ve got lots of other things to do. That’s the mandate for the mission specialist. We really would learn the most we possibly can and more than we can do with a mission specialist if we get the opportunity to have a payload specialist devoted specifically to the electrophoresis device and its research and development activ­ities during a flight. ”

As I remember it, Glynn chewed on his cigar a little bit—that’s when you [could] smoke in the office—chewed on his cigar a little bit and said something like, “Well, we’ve been wanting to move into this payload specialist thing, so if you’ve got somebody that is qualified, can meet all the astronaut selection crite­ria, put in the application. Let’s do it. ”. . . I think Glynn said something like, “Do you have somebody in mind?” Jim turned to me and looked at me, and Jim said something like, “You’re looking at him.” Glynn said, “You, huh?” And I said, “Yes, it’s me. I’ll be the man. ”

Walker was added to the crew for 41D in late May 1983. Within a few days of being added, Walker, who was residing in St. Louis at the time, went down to Johnson Space Center to officially meet the crew, some of whom he knew from the training he had provided for previous missions, and to begin working out a training schedule. The training syllabus was based loosely on the training developed for science payload specialists on Spacelab missions and was to be a foundation for future commercial pay­load specialists. The training syllabus was the result of ongoing negotiations between Walker, his employers, and various stakeholders at nasa. Walk­er enjoyed the training and felt it was important. Unlike other astronauts, however, for whom mission training was their job, training took Walker away from his day-job duties in St. Louis, so while his employers wanted him trained, they also wanted him available there when it wasn’t necessary for him to be in Houston. NASA also wanted to make sure he received all the training needed to fly safely but didn’t want to invest unnecessary time and resources that were needed for career astronauts.

Walker explained that the payload specialist training was a shorter, con­densed version of the career astronaut training. Initially, he said, that con­densed training still involved at least an overview of a wide variety of sys­tems. “Hank Hartsfield had me operating the remote manipulator system, the rms, in the trainer, and that went on for a few weeks. I was training with the crew. I was working the rms in the simulator, and I knew the sys­tem, I knew how to work it, even though I was not in the flight plan to de­ploy any of the satellites or to have to use the rms, as might conditionally be the case. I don’t think on [41D] we had any required use of the rms, but we had as a contingent the operation of it.”

Later, however, management came back and decided that Walker didn’t need to be trained on equipment he wasn’t going to use. There was no need, they argued, to invest valuable time and resources training payload specialists on things they wouldn’t be doing. Walker said that regardless of the actual need for the additional training, he felt like it had substan­tial benefits for the mission. “My comments were that I think this is a good thing,” he said. “Let the payload specialist do some of this, too. He or she is going to feel like more of a cohesive part of the crew. It’s just a good psychological thing, even though you don’t need their hands to es­pecially do that.”

The most important and most time-consuming part of preparing for a mission was for payload specialists to gel with the crew, Walker said. “In other words, the crew’s getting to know me, and me getting to know my fellow crewmates for each flight, so that we knew, at least to a significant degree, each other’s characteristics, and we could work together and feel good working together and flying together as a team.”

Walker spent, on average, about two weeks each month training at jsc during the nine months leading up to the flight. He said Hartsfield wanted to integrate him with the crew as closely possible, and in addition to offi­cial training sessions, the commander included him in the occasional social event as well. “I was invited to more than one dinner or activity at Hank’s house and some of the other homes of the astronauts—the crew as well as others—but it wasn’t as close a relationship as was the case between the career astronauts and families down there that were obviously living and working at each other’s elbows day in and day out.”

Hartsfield said he felt so strongly that Walker should be an integral part of the crew that he requested Walker’s name be on the patch circle with the rest of the crew. “[Payload specialists’] flight assignments changed a lot,” Hartsfield said. “Some of the flights had as many as three different peo­ple assigned at one time or another, and they had to keep changing their patches. So to save money, they put a ribbon at the bottom with the pay­load specialist on it, so they wouldn’t have to change the whole patch. But when Charlie flew, I had sold George Abbey on this. ‘He’s part of the crew, you know. Put his name on the patch with the rest of us.’”

Admittedly prejudiced, Hartsfield described the 41D crew as one of the best crews ever put together. “As the commander, I just sort of had to stay out of their way,” he said. “I was reminded of that two-billed hat, you know, that says, ‘I’m their leader. Which way did they go?’”

The addition of payload specialists brought a new dynamic to space­flight and the astronaut corps. Walker’s crewmate Mike Mullane said sev­eral astronauts, including himself, had viewed payload specialists as out­siders and as competitors for flight assignments. “There was some friction there, I think, that we felt like, ‘Hey, why isn’t a mission specialist doing this experiment,’” said Mullane. “But I’m mature enough now, and par­ticularly after you get your one mission under the belt, you become a little more tolerant of the outsiders.”

28. The crew of STS-4ID. Courtesy NASA.

Walker said there were only a few individuals in the agency from whom he got the impression that he and the other payload specialists were con­sidered outsiders. “I was there as a working passenger. I wasn’t a full-fledged crew member, and I knew that going in, and I took no real exception to that,” Walker said. “Occasionally there were circumstances in which it was made clear to me that ‘You’re not one of us. You’re along for the ride, and you’ve got a job to do.’ But it was only a few individuals, some in the As­tronaut Office, others outside the Astronaut Office, from whom I got that impression.”

One clear distinction between the career astronauts and the payload spe­cialists was the locations of their offices. At Johnson Space Center, the payload specialist office was in Building 39, and the Astronaut Office was in Build­ing 4. According to Walker, “It was made clear to us from the beginning that they didn’t expect to see us over on the fourth floor in Building 4 except for scheduled meetings. We were just outsiders who would become crew mem­bers for a short period of time and would train mostly on our own, but when there was necessary crew combined training, certainly we would be there.”

Walker said he was fine with that arrangement and was just grateful for the opportunity, both professionally and personally. “There was no belliger­ence, really, expressed openly, and no offense on my part taken,” Walker said.

I really saw my role and my place in this, this was a great adventure, and more than an adventure, it’s a great challenge, both to people as well as to technical systems. I think I know my limitations, and I know that I’m not nearly as quali­fied to make critical and rapid decisions in some of these flight environment cir­cumstances, as the men and women that have been selected by the agency through grueling processes, to do just exactly that. . . . I was getting a great opportunity, I felt, both for the company that was my employer, for the commercial as well as the prospective societal benefits from the work that we were proposing to do through and with the Space Shuttle. And certainly, certainly a tremendous per­sonal opportunity for me, and I was just happy to be there.

The crew went out to launch on 26 June 1984, and everything was going smoothly until the clock reached four seconds. “The engines had already start­ed to come up, and then they just shut down,” Hartsfield said. “We looked at the countdown clock on the onboard computer display, and it was stopped at four seconds. We were really checking to see if there was anything out of

the ordinary. We were going to make sure that things were still okay. There was a good moment of tension there, and Hawley broke the tension. As soon as we looked at everything and everything was okay, Steve said, ‘Gee, I kind of thought we’d be a little higher at meco [main engine cutoff].’”

As the Launch Control Center was trying to figure out the problem, a hy­drogen fire was noticed on the pad. “The trouble with a hydrogen fire is you can’t see it,” said Hartsfield. “Hydrogen and oxygen burn clear, and you can just see some heat ripples when you’re looking through it, but you can’t see the flame. I think one of the sensors picked it up, a uv sensor, which can see it.” When the fire was discovered, there was talk about having the crew leave the shuttle via the slide wire Emergency Egress System. No one had ever ridden the slide wire, Hartsfield said, and flight controllers were afraid to tell the crew to do it. “That bothered a lot of us in that they were concerned enough about the fire that they really wanted us to do an emergency egress from the pad area, but since the slide wire had never been ridden by a real live person—they’d thrown sandbags in it and let it go down—they were afraid to use it, which was a bad situation, really.”

Hawley remembered the crew members talking about whether or not they should get out of the orbiter and use the Emergency Egress System baskets. “I remember thinking, well, fire’s not too bad because then you’re sitting inside this structure that’s designed to take several thousand degrees during reentry. It’s well insulated. Then I got to thinking, on the other hand, it’s attached to millions of gallons of rocket fuel, so maybe that’s not so good. But eventually they came and got us.”

As a result of the pad abort, NASA revamped and tested the procedures for the Emergency Egress System and implemented new training for abort­ing and recycling launches.

Steve Hawley said Mullane was very concerned after the fire that the flight was going to be canceled. “I really didn’t think they would do that, but I remember him being very concerned about that, probably more con­cerned than [about] the incident itself. He was concerned about the effect it would have on his flight assignment.”

While the flight did get delayed for two months and its payloads were changed as a result, the mission did not get canceled entirely. Mullane said he found scrubs personally and emotionally draining. “There is nothing that is more exhausting than being pulled out of that cockpit and knowing you have to do it tomorrow,” he said. “It is the most emotionally draining expe­rience I ever had in my life of actually flying on the shuttle. I will admit that it is terrifying to launch. Once you get up there, it’s relaxing, but launch, it’s terrifying. And people assume that it gets easier. I tell people, no, it doesn’t. I was terrified my first launch. I was terrified my second launch. I was terri­fied my third launch. And if I flew a hundred, I’d be terrified on a hundred.”

Mullane said that before every launch he felt like he faced the possibil­ity of death, as if he were preparing to die. “I know it’s ridiculous to think you can predict your death,” Mullane said.

You could get in an auto accident driving out to get in the T-38, and that’s your death, and here you are thinking it’s going to be on a shuttle. But I certainly pre­pared for death in ways, in a formal way. I served in Vietnam, and there was certainly a sense of you might not come back from that. And I said my goodbyes to my parents and to my wife and young kids when I did that, but this time it was different because it’s such a discrete event. It’s not like in combat where in some missions you go off and fly and never see any enemy antiaircraft fire or anything. But this one you knew that it was going to be a very dangerous thing. And as a result, twenty-four hours before launch, you go to that beach house and you say goodbye to your family, to the wife, at least. That is incredibly emotion­al and draining, because the wife knows that it could be the last time she’s ever going to see you, and you know it’s the last time you might ever see her.

Weeks before launch, crew members and their families choose a fam­ily escort to help families with launch details and to be with them during launch. The family escort stands next to the family on top of the Launch Control Center during launch. Part of that role is simply helping the fam­ily get to where they need to be, making sure everything goes smoothly. However, in addition, the family escorts serve as casualty assistance officers in the event something unexpected happens.

Mullane recalled that his wife commented to him, “‘What I’m picking isn’t a family escort; it’s an escort into widowhood.’ You have this buildup, this incredible emotional investment in these launches that just ticks with that clock. Picking the astronaut escort. The goodbye on the beach house, at the beach house, that lonely beach out there. And now to go and get into the cockpit. Like I said, I thought a lot about death. I mean, I felt this was the most dangerous thing I would ever do in my life was ride this shuttle.”

Mullane opined that it was a mistake on NASA’s part to build the shuttle without an escape system. “I don’t know what the thought process was to think that we could build this rocket and not need an escape system, but it was the first high-performance vehicle I was ever going to fly on with no escape system,” said the three-time mission specialist.

If something went wrong, you were dead. So that was the sense of death that kind of rode along with you as you’re driving, preparing for this mission and driving out to the launchpad. You know it’s the most dangerous thing that you’ve ever done in your life. And to get strapped in and be waiting for that launch, and man, I’ll tell you, your heart is in your throat. I mean, after a launch abort, I swear, you could take a gun and point it right at somebody’s forehead, and they’re not even going to blink, because they don’t have any adrenaline left in them; it’s all been used up. To be strapped in out there and then to be told, “Oh, the weather’s bad. We got a mechanical problem, ” and to be pulled out of the cockpit, and now it’s all going to start over. Twenty-four hours you go back, you’re exhausted, you go back, have a shower, meet your wife, say goodbye again, and then start the process all over the next day. And you do that two or three times in a row, and you’re ready for the funny farm. It really is a very emotionally draining thing.

The 41D mission had a total of three scrubs—two in June and one more in August—and finally lifted off on 30 August 1984.

Once the crew was finally in orbit, Steve Hawley, for whom 41D was his first flight, said it took several days to adjust to microgravity, but the team didn’t have several days before starting to work. “It’s interesting because what we’ve always done. . . is plan the mission so that the most important things happen first,” Hawley said.

That goes back to the days when we’d not flown the shuttle before and every­body was concerned that it was going to fall out of the sky, and so if you got up there, you needed to get rid of the satellite or whatever it was right away, so that when a problem happened, you’d have the mission accomplished. But the shut­tle is very reliable, and so what you end up doing is doing the most important, most challenging, most difficult tasks when the crew is the least prepared to do it, because they’re inefficient and they haven’t adapted yet. . . . Back in those days, we were launching satellites five hours after we got on orbit, and we were still trying to figure out how to stay right side up.

The 41D mission deployed three satellites: two Payload Assist Modules and a syncom for the navy. It was the first time three satellites were launched on one flight. The mission also performed a demonstration of the Office ofApplication and Space Technology solar wing, referred to as oast-1. The 102-foot-tall, 13-foot-wide wing carried different types of solar cells. It dem­onstrated the use of large, lightweight solar arrays for future use in build­ing large facilities in space, such as a space station.

As part of the demonstration, oast-1 was extended to its full height several times, stretching out of a canister mounted on a truss in the pay­load bay. “When fully extended, it was 102 feet tall, and really spectacular to look at,” Hartsfield said.

The array did not have very many actual solar cells; instead, it was pri­marily a test structure to see how well the truss would extend. It featured three linear rods with cross-rods and cables, such that the rods were in com­pression and the cables were in tension. The structure collapsed into a cy­lindrical canister for launch. NASA engineers had predicted how rigid the structure would be based on models, and the orbital experiment would give them the opportunity to validate those predictions and models.

“Surprisingly, once the thing is deployed, it’s fairly rigid,” Hartsfield said. “What was interesting was the array was an order of magnitude stiffer than the engineers had predicted, which was a big surprise to them. In fact, by the time we got ready to fire the second set of firings, which was supposed to in­crease the motion, the thing had almost stopped completely, it was so stiff.” Walker’s Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System worked as planned, but postflight analysis showed that the samples had some biological con­tamination. “In other words, a little bit of bacteria had gotten into some of the fluids during preparation before flight, and the bacteria had grown dur­ing flight and contaminated what we intended to have as . . . biologically pure, uncontaminated by extraneous bacteria,” Walker said. “So the work that I had done had been, so to speak, technically productive. We learned new procedures. We validated the procedures. But the veracity of the bio­logical sample itself for the medical testing that we were going to do post­flight turned out to be a problem, turned out to be bad. So we were not a complete success in terms of our mission accomplishment because of that.” One of the more memorable episodes on the flight was the infamous “peecicle.” During flight, the crew had a problem with an icicle forming around the nozzle where they dumped wastewater, primarily urine and con­densation from the orbiter’s humidity control. There was a lot of concern about the icicle because when the orbiter started reentry the frozen water was in just about the right place to break off and hit the Orbital Maneuver­ing System, Hartsfield said. “If you hit the oms pod and broke those tiles, that’s a real high-heat area right on the front of that pod, you could burn through. And if you burned through, that’s where the propellant is for the oms engines, and that’s not a good thing to have happen.”

Hawley recalled that the ground called up and had the crew test the wastewater dump. “I think we didn’t know anything was unusual initial­ly,” Hawley said.

I think maybe the ground called us and told us to terminate the supply water dump because they had seen some temperature funnies. So we did, and then sometime later, I guess they got curious enough to use the cameras on the robot arm to see what was there. So we set the arm up, and yes, you could see this ici­cle there. For whatever reason subsequent to that, they decided that we ought to try a waste dump and watch it with the camera on the arm, and the icicle was still there. I remember, as we were doing it, watching the second icicle form. So we ended up stopping that dump, and now here we are with this icicle.

The ground crew started working to find possible solutions, one of which was to turn that side of the orbiter toward the sun and let the icicle melt. “After about three days we were convinced that the ice was not going to sublime off the orbiter,” Hartsfield said. “It reduced in size somewhat, but it was still there. I had people ask me, ‘Gee whiz, you got it right in the sun, why didn’t it melt?’ I said, ‘The same reason snow and ice don’t melt on a mountain. It’s in direct sunlight, but it doesn’t absorb much heat. It reflects most of it.’ That was the same thing as this icicle. It wasn’t going anywhere.”

The next option was to send astronauts on a spacewalk to break off the ice. Hawley and Mullane had trained as contingency eva crew members and were selected for the eva, if there was to be one. “I remember Mike was thrilled,” Hawley said,

because he was going to get to do a spacewalk, and I’m sitting there going, “This is not a good idea. I don’t know how in the world were going to get to it. ” I mean, it’s down on the side of the orbiter aft of the hatch, and there’s no trans­lation path down there. I guess they were talking about taking the cfes unit apart, using some of the poles that the cfes was constructed with to maybe grab one of us by the boots and hang him over the side and have him knock it off. That all sounded like a bad plan to me.

It was decided not to try an eva but to use the robotic arm to knock the ice off instead. “I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s a good plan,’” Hawley re­called, “and Mike was thinking, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to get to do an eva.’”

While mission controllers were trying to resolve how to get rid of the icicle, the crew faced another, more immediate issue inside the orbiter. To avoid making the icicle larger, the decision was made that the crew would not be able to dump the waste tank again. While there was still some room in the tank, calculations revealed that the condensation that would be col­lected during the rest of the mission would fill that volume. “What that meant practically to us,” Hawley explained, “was that we couldn’t use the toilet anymore, because there was no room in the waste tank for the liq­uid waste.”

The crew members collected their waste in plastic bags and stored the waste-filled bags on board. Walker said some of the bags were left over from the Apollo program. “I’m kind of an amateur historian,” Walker said, “so I felt a little bad at peeing in these historic bags, but we had to do what we had to do.”

In retrospect, Hartsfield said, the incident is funny, but it wasn’t funny at the time. “The problem was that in zero g, Newton’s third law is very apparent to you. If you just try to use a bag, when the urine hit the bot­tom of the bag, it turned around and came right back out, because there’s no gravity to keep it there. Didn’t take long to figure that wasn’t going to work.” The astronauts stuffed the bags with dirty underwear, socks, towels, and washcloths to absorb the urine.

Hartsfield decreed that the only female on the crew would continue to use the shuttle bathroom. “Judy, as you can imagine, had a hard time with the bag, so we had a little room in there. I said, ‘I don’t care what the ground says, you use the bathroom. The rest of us will do the bag trick.’”

The situation was messy, with all of the bags being stored in the waste stor­age tank under the floor. Hartsfield said there was at least one instance where a crew member was stuffing a urine bag into the tank and the bag ruptured.

Twice, Hartsfield said, Flight Director Randy Stone asked management if the crew could convert a water tank to a waste tank. It would have been an easy conversion, Hartsfield said, but at the time there was great concern about turning the orbiters around quickly for the next flights and the re­sponse was that using the water tank as a waste tank would add a week to the process of getting the orbiter ready to fly again.

“I sometimes think I made a mistake,” said Hartsfield.

I probably should have called for a private med conference and told Flight, “Hey, we’ve got a real problem up here.". . . I talked to the guy that headed that room up when we got back, and he apologized. They later found that it wouldn’t have impacted the flow at all. I said, “Joe, you just don’t know what we’re going through up there. " “Well, you should have told somebody. " “I don’t want to put that on the loop. " I mean, in fact, Gerry Griffin, the center direc­tor, when we got back, he expressed his thanks for not putting that on the open. The media would have had a ball with that.

[Initially] we were hoping to stay another day on orbit, because we had enough fuel to do it, but this was not a very good situation. By the time day six came, we were ready to come home.

For the second time, on board the shuttle was an imax camera. Haw­ley recalled that the imax camera pulled film so fast that in zero g it would torque the user like a gyroscope. The camera had a belt drive with a belt guard, but for this flight, it was decided the belt guard wasn’t needed. “I don’t know if we were trying to save weight or what, but we decided we didn’t need this belt guard.” Hawley said. “I’m up there doing something, and all of a sudden I hear this blood-curdling scream. I go floating upstairs to see what had happened, and Judy had gotten her hair caught in this belt for this imax camera, and there was film and hair all over the orbiter. It jammed the camera and the camera blew the circuit breaker that it was plugged into.”

Mullane said he, Resnik, and Hawley were filming the syncom launch when the incident happened. Mullane and Mike Coats cut Resnik’s hair to free her from the camera, and Coats then spent hours picking hair out of the camera gears in order to get the camera working again. The crew dealt with the problem on their own, without reporting it to the ground, con­cerned that if the public found out, the incident would provide fodder for those critical of NASA’s flying female astronauts.

29. Judy Resnik with several cameras floating around her, including the imax camera in which her hair got tangled. Courtesy nasa.

Throughout the mission, each crew member went about his or her as­signed tasks with very few coordinated crew activities, Hartsfield said. As a result, he made sure that they ate dinner together every night. “You get a quick breakfast snack, and the first thing you know, you’re off on your daily do list,” Hartsfield said, describing a typical day during the mission. “You eat lunch, normally, on the run where you’ve got a lull in your activ­ities. But I had decreed that the evening meal we were all going to eat to­gether. I want one time for the crew to just get together and just chat and have a little fun and say, ‘Okay, where are we? What have we got to do to­morrow?’ and talk about things.”

One night during dinner as a crew, a rather strange thing happened. “We’d prepared our meals, and we were all floating around, holding down on the mid-deck, and all of sudden we heard this knocking noise, like somebody wanted in,” Hartsfield recalled.

It sounded like knocking. Holy crap, what is that? And then we had a traffic jam trying to get through the bulkhead to get up to the flight deck, because it was coming from up that way somewhere. So we got up there, and we were on the night side of the Earth, it was pitch black out there. Steve flipped on the pay­load bay lights. You know those housings take like five minutes. And we said,

“God, what is that!?" We could hear it, whatever it was, was on the starboard side. Steve was the first one to see it. He looked at the gimbal angles on the Ku- Band antenna, and it was banging back and forth. It was something where it was oscillating back and forth. He hit the power switch and turned it off and that did it. And we went, whew. And we told the ground later what had hap­pened, and it never did it anymore, whatever it did. Apparently it got into a range where it kept trying to swap or do something. I never did find out exactly what caused it, but it sure got our attention. Some alien wants in.

The mission lasted six days, and then it was time to come home. Walker said the reentry and landing on 41D was an emotional experience, drawing to a close what he thought at the time was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

At that point I didn’t know I was going to have any further flights. I thought that was probably it, and it was such an extraordinary experience, and now it was, for sure, over with. I came to sense a real defining moment, a physically and emotionally defining moment. This experience, this great thing called space­flight, . . . probably above everything else, it’s based upon velocity. It’s putting people and machinery at high speed at the right velocity, the right altitude, the right speed, around the Earth till you keep going, and you’re working in this high-velocity environment that we call orbital flight. When you want to come home, you just take out some of that velocity with some rocket energy again, and use the Earth’s atmosphere to slow you down the rest of the way until you come gliding in and lose the last part of the velocity by applying brakes on the runway until you come to a stop.

So I noted in my own mind two definitive points here that really, without debate, start and end this great experience. One is the high-energy event that we call launch, straight up when the rockets start; to the landing and wheels stop on the runway horizontal, and the brakes have taken hold, and the energy is gone, and the spaceship literally rolls to a stop.

With the end of the mission came the completion of the first flight of a commercial payload specialist and an opportunity to evaluate how the idea actually worked in reality. Hawley commented on how well the crew worked together and how well the crew got along with Walker. “It’s more impor­tant who you fly with than what your mission is, and we really had a good time,” Hawley said. “We all got along well. I thought we all had respect

for each other’s capabilities, and it was just a good mix. . . . Charlie was a good guy. He fit in very well. We enjoyed having him as part of the crew.” The flight marked the beginning of the process, over time, of the soft­ening of hard lines between the career astronauts and the payload special­ists. A major milestone, Walker said, was the decision to move the payload specialists into office space with the career astronauts. “Even while I was training for 61В, I had office space. It was, oh, by the way, catch it as you can, but you got office space over on the fourth floor, Building 4. You need a place to sit and work when you’re in town, come on over. Finally they moved the ps Office out of Building 39 over to Building 4 in that time pe­riod just before Challenger was lost.”

The integration of noncareer astronauts became even more complicated as nasa implemented plans to fly even more types of people on the Space Shuttle—academic and industrial payload specialists, U. S. politicians, in­ternational payload specialists, and the first “Teacher in Space” and “Jour­nalist in Space.”

“I think the clearest example as an indicator of how things transformed was to follow the Teacher in Space activity, because originally the Teacher in Space was to be a spaceflight participant/payload specialist, and I wit­nessed a lot of slicing and dicing of just what do you call Christa McAu – liffe,” Walker recalled. “Is she an astronaut? Well, most people at the time at jsc and certainly in the Astronaut Office were, ‘No, she is not an as­tronaut. We were selected by nasa to be astronauts. We’re the astronauts. She’s a payload specialist.’”

STS-51D

Crew: Commander Bo Bobko, Pilot Don Williams, Mission Specialists Rhea Seddon, Jeffrey Hoffman, and David Griggs, Payload Special­ists Charlie Walker and Senator Jake Garn Orbiter: Discovery Launched: 12 April 1985 Landed: 19 April 1985 Mission: Deployment of two satellites

Despite feeling like his first flight would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, eight months later Charlie Walker was back in space, this time on 51D. The mission deployed two satellites and carried into space several science experi­

ments and yet another payload specialist. This time, in addition to Walker, on the crew was Jake Garn, a U. S. senator from Utah and the first elected official to fly aboard the Space Shuttle.

Garn was added to the crew about two to three months before launch, recalled Commander Bo Bobko. “George Abbey said to me one day, he said, ‘What sort of training program would you have if you had a new pas­senger that was only going to have eight or twelve weeks?’” Bobko recalled. “I said, ‘Why are you asking me that question?’ He said, ‘Because you’ve got a new passenger, and you’ve only got—,’ I don’t know, ten or twelve weeks to flight.”

Walker said Garn had been lobbying for some time with the NASA ad­ministrator to get a chance to make a flight on the Space Shuttle. Garn was chairman of a NASA oversight body within the Appropriations Committee of the U. S. Senate. “Just part of his job; he needed to do it,” Walker said.

Of course, you look at Senator Garns history, and at that point he had some ten thousand hours logged in I don’t know how many different kinds ofaircraft, having learned to fly as a naval aviator, and had gone to the airforce when the navy tried to take his ticket away from him and wouldn’t let him fly again. . .. Jake was very aviation oriented and certainly enamored with the agency’s activi­ties and just wanted to take the opportunity if one could be found. So his lobby­ing paid off and he got the chance to fly. He was still in the Senate and would take the opportunity on weekends to come train down here; would take congres­sional recesses, and instead of going back to his home state, to Utah, he’d come down here to jsc. So he worked his training in and around Senate schedules.

Walker recalled hearing some negative talk around the Astronaut Office after Garn was added to the crew. “I do remember that there was at least hall talk around the Astronaut Office of, ‘Oh, my gosh, now what’s hap­pening here to us? What have we got to put up with now?’” Walker said.

But Jake, from my experience, and here is an outsider talking about another outsider, but I think Jake accommodated himself extraordinarily well in the circumstances. . . . What I saw was a Jake Garn that literally opened himself up to, “Hey, I know my place. I’m just a participant. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll be there when I need to be there, and I’ll do what I’ll [need to] do, and I’ll shut up when I need to shut up, ” And he did, so I think he worked out ex­traordinarily well, and quite frankly, I think the U. S. space program, NASA, has benefited a lot from both his experience and his firsthand relation of NASA and the program back on Capitol Hill. As a firsthand participant in the program, he brought tremendous credibility back to Capitol Hill, and that’s helped a lot. He’s always been a friend of the agency and its programs.

Bobko lauded Garn for knowing what it meant to be part of a crew. “I’d call him up and I’d say, ‘Jake, we need you down here.’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he’d be down the next day for the sim,” Bobko said.

Garn’s only problem, added Bobko, was that he got very sick on orbit.

He was doing some of these medical experiments, and they find that one of the things that happens is that on orbit, if you get sick, your alimentary canal, your digestive system, seems to close down. So what they had were little microphones on a belt that Jake had strapped to him to see if they could detect the bowel sounds. So the story is—and I haven’t heard it myself-—they had me on the mi­crophone saying to Jake, “Jake, you’ve got to get upstairs and let them see you on TV. Otherwise, they’ll think you died and I threw you overboard. ”

According to Walker, he and Garn were the guinea pigs for quite a few of the experiments on the flight. One of the experiments was the first flight of a U. S. echocardiograph device. “Rhea [Seddon] was going to do echo­cardiography of the hearts of I think at least three of the crew members, and of course, Jake and I were the obvious subjects,” said Walker. “We re­ally didn’t have much of a choice in whether we were going to be subjects or not. ‘You’re a payload specialist; you’re going to be a subject.’”

While in the crew quarters prior to launch, Walker said, Garn was ask­ing him the typical rookie questions about what it’s going to be like and what to expect.

He says, “You’ve done this before. Tell me. Give me the real inside scoop. What’s this going to feel like? What’s it going to be like?” “It’s going to be great, Jake. It’s just going to be great. Just stay calm and enjoy it. ”. . . We got into orbit, and I can remember there was the usual over-the-intercom exuberant pronounce­ments, “Yee-ha, were in space, ” yadda, yadda, yadda.

I can remember shaking hands, my right hand probably with Jake’s left, gloves on, and “We’re here, ” and then Jake and I both kind of look at each other, and we’re both beginning to feel weightlessness.

The crew was originally assigned as 51E, but that mission was canceled and the payloads were remanifested as 51D. The mission deployed a commu­nications satellite and syncom iv-3 (also called leasat-3). But the space­craft sequencer on the syncom iv-3 failed to initiate after deployment. The mission was extended two days to make certain the sequencer start lever was in the proper position. Griggs and Hoffman performed a spacewalk to attach flyswatter-like devices to the remote manipulator system. Rhea Sed – don then used the shuttle’s remote manipulator system to engage the satel­lite lever, but the postdeployment sequence still did not start.

“Once it became clear that there was a problem, we got a little depressed,” Walker said. “You train for these things to happen. You know they’re real­ly important. Here’s hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of satellite out there. Your flight’s not that inexpensive, of course, to send people into space. So a lot of effort has gone into getting this thing up there and to launch­ing it and to turning it on and having it operate, in this case, for the Unit­ed States Navy. And here it didn’t happen, so you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’” The crew immediately began to think in terms of contingencies. Walker recalled a strong awareness of the nearness of the satellite. Despite the fact that it had failed, it was still there, floating not that far away. It was still reachable and could potentially be repaired or recovered.

Within a few days the ground came up with the suspected culprit—a mechanical switch, about the size of a finger, on the side of the satellite was supposed to have switched the timer on. The thought was that maybe that switch just needed to be flipped into the right position. If the shut­tle could rendezvous with the satellite, all that would be needed would be some way to flip the switch.

The ground crew instructed the flight crew to fashion two tools that Walker referred to as the “flyswatter” and the “lacrosse stick.” “The ground had faxed up to us some sketchy designs for these tools, and I think there were two tools that were made up. I can remember cutting up some plastic covers of some procedures books. We went around the cabin, all trying to find the piece parts, and the ground was helping us.”

Working together, the ground and the crew in space began an Apollo 13— like effort to improvise, using available materials to fashion a solution to the problem, Walker said. “The in-flight maintenance folks on the ground were, of course, very aware of what tools were on board, and they looked down the long list of everything that was manifest and tried to come up with a scheme of what pieces could be taken from here, there, and anywhere else on board, put together, and to make up these tools for swatting the satellite.”

The shuttle rendezvoused with the satellite, and Hoffman and Griggs exited the shuttle for the eva.

These guys go outside, and they’re oohing and aahing about the whole experience and doing great. . . . Rhea commands the remote manipulator system over to the side of the cargo bay. Literally with more duct tape and some cinching straps, they strap the flyswatter and the lacrosse stick on the end ofthe remote manipulator arm. Then they come back inside, and we make sure they’re okay, and they secure the suits. Bo and Don finish rendezvousing with the satellite, and Rhea very carefully moves the two tools on the end ofthe RMS right up against the edge ofthe satellite.

Walker noted that none of these procedures had been rehearsed on the ground; it was all improvised using the various skills the crew had picked up during their training. “This was all done just with the skills that the crew had been trained with generically, the generic operation of the remote manipulator system, the generic eva skills, and the generic piloting skills to rendezvous with another spacecraft,” Walker said. “And yet we pulled it off; the crew pulled it off expertly, did everything, including throwing the switch.”

Bobko said the crew had not done a rendezvous simulation or any ren­dezvous training in several months, and the books with rendezvous instruc­tions weren’t even on board. “So they sent us up this long teleprinted mes­sage, and I’ve got a picture of me at the teleprinter with just paper wound all around me floating there in orbit,” Bobko said. “It turned out to be a rather different mission. But, luckily, in training for the missions that had been scheduled before, we had learned all the skills that were required to do this. If we had just trained for this mission, we probably wouldn’t have ever trained to do a rendezvous or the other things that were required.”

Unfortunately, flipping the switch didn’t take care of the problem and there was nothing else the crew could do at that point. However, the ground was able to determine that the problem was with the electronics and the sat­ellite would need to be fixed on a subsequent flight. (It ultimately was re­paired on the 511 mission.) “We felt a little dismayed that the satellite failed on our watch and that we weren’t able to fix it on the same flight, but we felt gratified that we took one big step to finding out what the problem was, that eventually did lead to its successful deployment,” Walker said.

While the problems with the primary payload weren’t discovered un­til they got into the mission, another payload—Walker’s electrophoresis experiment—had encountered difficulties much earlier. About three days before launch, while the orbiter team was preparing Discovery for flight, Walker and several McDonnell Douglas folks were working with the cfes equipment when it started to leak. “My project folks were out there fill­ing it full of fluid, sterilizing it with a liquid sterilant, and then loading on board the sample material and then the several tens of liters of carrier fluid,” Walker said. “That electrophoresis device started leaking. Inside the orbiter, on the launchpad, it started leaking. Drip, drip, drip. Well, of course, that didn’t go over very well with anybody, and our folks diligently worked to resolve that. Right down to like twenty-four hours before flight or so, that thing was leaking out on the pad.”

Program managers began discussing whether the leak could be over­come so that the device could be loaded for operation. If not, the experi­ment could not be conducted during the mission. “The question became, ‘Well, maybe we don’t even fly Walker, if he doesn’t have a reason to fly,’” Walker recalled. “So there was active discussion until about a day before flight—this is all happening within about a twenty-four-hour period up till T minus twenty-four or thereabouts—as to whether I would fly or not, because maybe my device wasn’t going to be operational in flight and so I had nothing to do, so to speak. But it was resolved.”

The leak was fixed, the fluid was loaded, and the equipment—and Walker— were cleared for launch. In flight, the cfes worked well. And, in addition to running the cfes apparatus, during the mission Walker conducted the first protein crystal growth experiment in space, a major milestone in biotech­nology research. “This was the first flight of the U. S. protein crystal growth apparatus,” he said. “Actually, it was a small prototype that Dr. Charlie Bugg from the University of Alabama Birmingham and his then-associate, Larry DeLucas, had designed and had come to NASA, saying, ‘We’ve got this great idea for the rational design of proteins, but we need to crystallize these and bring the crystals back from space. We think they’ll crystallize much bet­ter in space, and we can do things up there we can’t do on Earth, etc., etc., but we need to fly it on board a Space Shuttle flight to see if it will work.’”

The flight was also the first for the NASA Education Toys in Space activ­ities, a study of the behavior of simple toys in a weightless environment. The project provided schoolchildren with a series of experiments they could do in their classrooms using a variety of toys that demonstrate the laws of physics. Astronauts conducted the experiments with the toys in orbit and videotaped their results. Students could then compare their results to what actually happened in space. The toys flown included gyroscopes, balls and jacks, yo-yos, paddle balls, Wheelos, and Hot Wheels cars and tracks. “I still to this day feel a little chagrined that I wasn’t offered a toy or the op­portunity,” Walker said. “Everybody else had a toy, but not me. . . . Even Jake Garn had paper airplanes.”

Walker may not have played with toys, but he played with liquids, con­ducting some fluid physics experiments with supplies on the orbiter.

Jeff Hoffman and I spent one hour preparing, at one point later in the mission, some drinking containers, one with strawberry drink and one with lemonade…. We would each squeeze out a sphere maybe about as big as a golf ball of liquid, floating in the cabin, and we actually played a little game in which we would put the spheres of liquid in free floating, oh, about a foot apart from each other, and Jeff and I would get on either side, and somebody would say, “Go." We’d start blowing at the spheres with our breath, just blowing on them, and we’d try to get them together and get them to merge, because it was really cool when they merged. One big sphere suddenly appears that’s half red and half green, and then the in­ternal fluid forces would start to mix them, and it’s really interesting to watch.

As the astronauts were blowing, their breath would actually move their bodies around. At the same time, the balls of liquid would start going in different directions, and the two together would make it increasingly dif­ficult to keep the liquid under control. “You’ve got to be quick,” Walker said, “and usually there’s got to be somebody with a towel standing by, be­cause either a wall or a floor or a person is going to end up probably get­ting some juice all over them.”

Walker said he felt more comfortable going in to his second flight than his first. “Not to say that I felt blase or ho-hum about it, by no means,” he said.

You just can’t go out and sit on a rocket and go into space and feel ho-hum about it, even after umpteen flights. It just isn’t going to happen. But a person can feel more comfortable. Some of the sharp edges, to put that term on it, of the un­known, of the tension, are just not there. I guess maybe a better way to put it, I would suggest, is now you really know when to be scared.

The second time around you’re not focusing on the same things. You’re now maybe a little less anticipatory of everything. You know [how] some things are going to be, so you can kind of sift those and put those aside in your mind and pay attention to other aspects. There were other things that I paid attention to, like I maybe was more observant of the Earth when I had a chance to look out the windows, more sensitive to the view.

Walker recalled Jeff Hoffman sharing with the crew his interest in as­tronomy, and in particular the crew trying to spot Halley’s Comet. “There was one or more nights, . . . in which we turned off all the lights in the cab­in and night-adapted our eyes. Everything was dark. . . . I can remember us trying to find the Halley’s Comet and never feeling like we succeeded at doing that. But, it was still so far away and so dim that it really probably wasn’t possible. But just looking at the sky along with an astronomer there was a great and tremendously interesting experience.”

Landing was delayed by a day, giving the crew an extra day in space, which Walker said he spent mostly looking out the window observing Earth. “I just never got bored at looking at the ever-changing world below,” Walker said. “You’re traveling over it at five miles per second, so you’re always see­ing a new or different part of the world, and even [as] days go by and you orbit over the same part of the world, the weather would be different, the lighting angles would be different over that part of the world. Just watch­ing the stars come up and set at the edge of the Earth through the atmo­sphere, watching thunderstorms.”

During the landing at Kennedy, Discovery blew a tire, resulting in exten­sive brake damage that prompted the landing of future flights at Edwards Air Force Base until the implementation of nose-wheel steering. Walker said the landing at first was just like the landing on his first mission. “Things were again just as they’d been before and as was planned and programmed, so no big surprises until those final few seconds when you expect to be thrown up against your straps by the end of the braking on the runway and the stop. Well, in our case, we’re rolling along about ready to stop, and then there’s a bang, and I can remember Rhea looking at me, and Jake saying, ‘What’s that?’”

Walker said one of the tires had locked up, skidded, and scuffed off a dozen layers of rubber and insulation and fiber until the tire pressure forced the tire to pop. “It ended up just a little bit off the center line of the run­way because of that, but we were going very slow, so there was no risk of running off the runway at that speed because of the tire blow. But certain­ly we heard it on board, and there was a thump, thump, thump, and we stop. We were going, like, ‘Well, what was that?’ I don’t know; in my own mind, I was thinking, ‘Did we run over an alligator? What happened here?’”

STS-51G

Crew: Commander Dan Brandenstein, Pilot John Creighton, Mission Specialists Shannon Lucid, John Fabian, and Steven Nagel, Payload Specialists Patrick Baudry (France) and Prince Sultan Salman Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia)

Orbiter: Discovery

Launched: 17 June 1985

Landed: 24 June 1985

Mission: Deployment of three communications satellites, test of spartan-i

Like so many missions before it, 51G succumbed to mission, crew, and payload shuffling. Commander Dan Brandenstein said shuffling like that was just how things were at this point in the shuttle program. There was a lot of scrambling around with missions for a variety of reasons, and the program was still relatively new, Brandenstein said.

That was early ’85. We had only been flying four years. The vehicle hadn’t ma­tured as you see it today. So they were flying technical problems on a vehicle and they’d have to pull one off the pad. That affected shuffling and payloads didn’t come along quite like they figured, and that affected shuffling. So it was sort of a variety of things. .. . Then we got canceled and picked up these four satellites. We had one for Mexico, one for the Arab Sat Consortium, one for AT&T, and then we had spartan, which was run out of Goddard. It was one that we de­ployed and then came back and recovered two days later. So it was a lot of mis­sion planning changed and we had a couple new crew people that we had to integrate into the crew and all that.

With three satellites to deploy into orbit, the 51G crew deployed one sat­ellite a day for the first three days on orbit. “Shannon and I had the lead on those deployments and J. O. Creighton was flying the orbiter, so he was pointing it in the right directions and so forth,” recalled Mission Specialist John Fabian. “Brandenstein was making sure that everybody was doing the right things. That’s what a commander is supposed to do. And Sultan was taking pictures for his satellite. I mean, it was a fairly routine operation.” The spartan proved to be a little more challenging. The spartan space­craft were a series of experiments carried up by the Space Shuttle. The pro­gram was based on the idea of a simple, low-cost platform that could be deployed from the Space Shuttle for a two – to three-day flight. The satel­lite would then be recovered and returned to Earth.

“It was a much simpler satellite,” Fabian said, “from the crew’s perspec­tive, than the SPAS-01 [a German satellite that Fabian released and recap­tured using the robotic arm on STS-7] because the SPAS-01, we could ma­neuver it. It had experiments on it that we could operate, had cameras on it that we could run. The spartan, which was a navy satellite, we simply released it, let it go about its business, and then later went back and got it.” Shannon Lucid did the release, and two days later Fabian did the recap­ture. Deployment was routine, Fabian said. “At least it appeared to be,” ex­plained Fabian. “When we left it, it was in the proper attitude. It was an x – ray astronomy telescope, and while we were gone, it took images of a black hole, which is kind of cool stuff. That’s kind of sexy.”

But when the orbiter came back to retrieve it, Fabian said, the satellite was out of attitude. The grapple fixture was in the wrong position for the shuttle’s arm to be able to easily grab it.

One idea was to fly an out-of-plane maneuver, flying the shuttle around the satellite, but the crew hadn’t practiced anything like that. Fabian noted,

Dan’s a very capable pilot, and I’m sure that he could have done that, but it turns out that perhaps an easier way would be to fly the satellite in much closer to the shuttle, get it essentially down almost into the cargo bay, and then reach over the top with the arm and grab it from the top, and that’s what we elected to do.

Of course, we told the ground what was going on, that it was out of atti­tude, and they worried, but there wasn’t much they could do—they couldn’t put it in attitude—so they concurred with the plan, and that’s what we executed.

Fabian said it felt good to benefit from all of the time spent in the simu­lators with the robotic arm. Training for contingency situations contribut­ed greatly to the crew’s knowledge of the arm’s capabilities and to the suc­cessful retrieval, he said.

The seven-person crew for this mission, including two payload specialists and representing three different nationalities, had a unique set of challeng­es because of those factors, said Fabian, but in general the crew got along well and had a positive experience.

We were told not to tell any camel jokes when Sultan showed up, and the first thing he did when he walked through the door was to say, “I left my camel out­side. ” So much for the public affairs part of the thing. These just were not issues. They really were not issues. Patrick flew a little bit ofFrench food and didn’t eat the same diet that we ate. Sultan did. Patrick flew some small bottles of wine that were never opened, but the press worried about whether or not they had been. Patrick flew as a Frenchman and enjoyed it, I think.

Fabian and Nagel were assigned to support Baudry and Sultan with any help they needed on their experiments. “Patrick was doing echocardio – graphs,” Fabian said, “and he did those on himself, and he did them on Sultan, and I think he did them on one or two of the nasa crew mem­bers, and frankly, I’ve forgotten whether he did one on me or not. But he was using a French instrument with a French protocol, and it was the principal thing that he was doing in flight, was to do these French medi­cal experiments.”

Sultan’s primary role was to observe, Fabian explained.

We were flying $130 million worth of satellites for the Arab League. But he also had some experiments, and he was tasked to take pictures, particularly over Sau­di Arabia, which of course would be very valuable when he got home. People would be very interested in seeing that. But they didn’t need a lot of support. They didn’t need a lot of help. We had to worry a bit about making sure that they were fed and making sure that they knew how to use the toilet and mak­ing sure that they understood the safety precautions that were there and so forth. And, you know, probably more than half of what our role and responsibility was with regard to the two. Other than that, it was to make sure they had film when they needed it in the cameras and help them for setup if they needed some setup for video or something of that type and to participate in their experiments to the degree that it was deemed necessary.

Even at this point, the payload specialist classification was still very new and crew members were still figuring out exactly how to act toward each oth­er, and that resulted in a change being made to the orbiter. “People weren’t really sure how these folks were going to react,” Fabian recalled. “We put a lock on the door of the side hatch. It was installed when we got into orbit so that the door could not be opened from the inside and commit hari-kari, kill the whole crew. That was not because of anybody we had on our flight but because of a concern about someone who had flown before.”

Fabian expressed concern over how the agency handled safety during this era of the shuttle program. On this flight, for example, Fabian said the arabsat never passed a safety review. “It failed every one of its safety re­views,” Fabian said.

The crew recommended that it not be flown, the flight controllers recommend­ed that it not be flown, and the safety office recommended that it not be flown, but NASA management decided to fly it. This was an unhealthy environment within the agency. We were taking risks that we shouldn’t have been taking. We were shoving people onto the crews late in the process so they were never fully integrated into the operation of the shuttle. And there was a mentality that we were simply filling another 747 with people and having it take off from Chica­go to Los Angeles, and this is not that kind of vehicle. But that’s the way it was being treated at that time.

It was very disappointing to a lot of people, a lot of people at the agency, to see management decide to fly this satellite. But if they hadn’t flown the satel­lite, you see, political embarrassment, what are we going to do with the Saudi prince, what about the French astronaut, what’s the French government going to have to say about us saying that we can’tfly their satellite on the shuttle, what will be the impact downstream of other commercial ventures that we want to do with the shuttle? Well, of course, after Challenger, the commercial all went away, and it was a dead-end street anyhow, but we didn’t know it at the time.