Fwd: 30 Years Ago: First Shuttle Night Launch, First African-American Astronaut, Oldest Man in Space

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: September 2, 2013 11:16:44 AM GMT-06:00
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Subject: FW: 30 Years Ago: First Shuttle Night Launch, First African-American Astronaut, Oldest Man in Space

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
August 31st, 2013

30 Years Ago: First Shuttle Night Launch, First African-American Astronaut, Oldest Man in Space (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

 

"Dan, how do the engines look?" As Gardner worried, and Bluford chuckled, Challenger roared into the history books on the morning of 30 August 1983. Photo Credit: NASA

At about midnight on the rainy evening of 30 August 1983, the adventure began for Guy Bluford, NASA's first African-American astronaut. Together with his four STS-8 crewmates—Dick Truly, Dan Brandenstein, Dale Gardner, and Bill Thornton—he left the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., bound for Pad 39A and a ride into space aboard Challenger. For Bluford, the 8.5-minute climb to orbit, and the six days in space that would follow, proved to be one of the highlights of his life … so much so that he found himself laughing, chuckling, and giggling almost uncontrollably throughout the ascent.

Tucked into the shuttle's payload bay for STS-8 was an Indian communications satellite, Insat-1B, which had netted NASA $4 million in fees and which Bluford and Gardner were scheduled to deploy a few hours into the mission. Unfortunately, another payload—the second Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-B), whose descendents remain in operational service today—had been deleted from the STS-8 roster as a result of an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster failure soon after the TDRS-A launch on STS-6 in April 1983.

Had TDRS-B remained aboard Challenger, alongside Insat-1B, for the STS-8 mission, it would have been the heaviest cargo complement yet ferried into orbit at over 63,000 pounds. "There was very little weight-growth margin," Bluford later told the NASA oral historian. "During the training, Dale and I made several trips to Boeing Aircraft Corporation in Seattle, Wash., to learn about the IUS. We were becoming well versed in the operation of the IUS when it malfunctioned on STS-6 and, because of that, NASA decided not to fly the TDRS on our flight until after the mishap was investigated."

Seated in the flight engineer's position in the simulator, Guy Bluford's prime task during ascent was to assist the pilots with monitoring Challenger's systems. Photo Credit: NASA

The presence of two of these communications and data relay platforms in geostationary orbit—one at 171 degrees West longitude, above the central Pacific Ocean to the south of Hawaii, and another just off the Atlantic coast of Brazil, at 41 degrees West—was highly desirable to support the first Spacelab research flight in late 1983. A third orbital "spare" (TDRS-C) was then to be launched on STS-12 in March 1984 and placed over the equator at 79 degrees West. However, by the end of May 1983, as investigators got to grips with finding out why the IUS had failed to inject TDRS-A into its 22,600-mile operational orbit, NASA opted not to risk launching another one until the problems were resolved. Efforts were already underway to raise TDRS-A into its correct "slot," at the expense of using two thirds of its valuable hydrazine fuel. As late as mid-July 1983, Flight International noted that NASA was hopeful that TDRS-A could be recovered in time to support the first Spacelab mission and the second satellite, TDRS-B, was provisionally remanifested onto STS-12.

In place of TDRS-B would fly an unusual contraption called the Payload Flight Test Article (PFTA). According to NASA's shuttle manifest of April 1982, this had been scheduled to fly aboard STS-16 in June 1984, but within a month of the return of STS-6 it had been moved forward to STS-8. Weighing 8,500 pounds, it looked like a giant dumb bell structure—a pair of "wheels," connected by a central axle—to evaluate the performance and handling characteristics of the shuttle's Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System (RMS) mechanical arm. The PFTA was constructed from aluminum and stainless steel and equipped with four grapple fixtures; two of which would be used on STS-8. Its aim was to acquire "real world" data and develop crew expertise on RMS elbow, wrist, and shoulder joint reactions.

Yet it was the deployment and tracking requirements of their other payload—the Indian National Satellite, Insat-1B—that brought about one of the most historic features of the mission: the first shuttle night launch, 30 years ago this week. "One of the neat things about it was that it was going to be a night launch and a night landing," recalled Dan Brandenstein in his NASA oral history. "What drove that was we were launching Insat and, to get it in the proper place, we worked the problem backwards. They wanted the satellite 'here,' so then we had to go back down our orbital mechanics and it meant we had to launch at night. The fact we launched at night meant that we would end up landing at night. Dick and I had both done night carrier landings and, judging from the way the shuttle flies and doing that at night, we both looked at each other and said, 'Oooh. This is going to be interesting!' We got very much involved in developing a lighting system to enable us to safely land at night."

STS-8 begins its slow roll from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to Pad 39A on 1 August 1983. Photo Credit: NASA

This nocturnal launch had been simulated on the ground. "We concentrated on flying night launches and night landings in a darkened simulator," Bluford recalled. "We learned to set our light levels low enough in the cockpit 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. The only thing that wasn't simulated was the lighting associated with the Solid Rocket Booster ignition and the firing of the pyros for SRB and External Tank separation."

When Truly, Brandenstein, Gardner, and Bluford were assigned to STS-8 in April 1982, it was intended for them to remain a four-man crew. Then, in December 1982, the decision was taken to add a pair of physician-astronauts to STS-7 and STS-8, and Truly's crew wound up gaining Dr. Bill Thornton, who secured his own place of history by becoming the oldest human being yet to fly into space, aged 54. After 16 years as an astronaut, it was a joy for him to receive his first flight assignment. His wife, Jennifer, described Christmas 1982 as his happiest since joining NASA … and as the astronaut office's foremost expert on "space sickness" Thornton recalled that STS-8 "was the first and probably only flight that an investigator was ever allowed to make his own selection of experiments … and fly with it."

On a lighter note, Thornton's assignment had actually led to the creation of an extra, unofficial crew patch. Historically, astronauts avoided doctors like the plague, remarking that there were only two ways a pilot could emerge from a consultation: either "fine" or "grounded." None of the STS-8 astronauts was at risk of being grounded by Thornton, but his experiments, which included a series of blood tests on himself, resulted in a mission patch featuring his bespectacled eyes peering at a cluster of four pairs of frightened eyes in Challenger's flight deck. This good-natured "fear" of the good doctor continued into space during a telecast in which Thornton explained the purpose of his medical tests to his terrestrial audience. At the end of the telecast, Dick Truly quipped that the rest of the crew were now fed up with this "chamber of horrors" and picked up a hammer, floated across the middeck, and revealed Thornton being restrained to a bulkhead with grey tape. "His three colleagues," wrote space historians Dave Shayler and Colin Burgess in their book NASA's Scientist-Astronauts, "each wielded knives, wrenches, pliers, and hammers and, as the screen faded, a muffled scream from the good doctor was heard to close the telecast … "

Humor aside, it was with an air of trepidation that Truly led his men into a bewildering glare of media lights in the opening minutes of 30 August 1983. In the final week before launch, it became necessary for them to shift their sleep patterns into the daytime hours. "It took us about a week to get comfortable with that," recalled Bluford. "Some of us slept at home, while others slept in the crew quarters … in Houston. We ate food prepared at the center and practiced in the simulators at night. About three to four days before launch, we flew to the Cape for the final launch countdown. On 29 August, we were awakened at 10 p.m. We had breakfast and suited up for the mission, then headed downstairs for the van ride to the launch pad. I noticed it was raining. There was lightning in the area and there was some concern expressed by the launch control center about our safety as we proceeded out to the pad. Finally, they left it up to Dick to decide if it was safe for the crew to go to the pad. He made the decision for us to proceed and went out to Challenger.

"As we climbed into the vehicle and completed our pre-flight checks," Bluford continued, "the rain began to subside and the clouds began to clear away. The ride into orbit was really exciting! We had darkened the cockpit to prepare for liftoff; however, when the [Solid Rocket Boosters] ignited, they turned night into day inside! Whatever night vision we hoped to maintain, we lost right away at liftoff." Launch occurred at 2:32 a.m., about 17 minutes into a half-hour "window," due to the thunderstorms in the area.

The STS-8 liftoff eerily illuminates the marshy expanse of the Kennedy Space Center. The giant Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is clearly visible in the foreground. Photo Credit: NASA

Seated behind and between Truly and Brandenstein, as STS-8's flight engineer, it was Bluford's task to check off each stage of the violent climb to orbit. Next to him on the flight deck, literally shoulder to shoulder, and directly behind Brandenstein, was Dale Gardner. Bill Thornton sat alone in the darkened, locker-studded middeck. From his vantage point, the doctor had little to see: the only window was a small circular one in the side hatch, although, craning his neck, he could see "upwards" into the flight deck and through the overhead windows. At the instant of liftoff, Thornton recalled, the sensation was like "taking a fast ride on the London Underground." From his perspective, all was dark during the first two minutes of ascent, but as soon as Challenger shed her twin Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), the entire cockpit was eerily lit up.

Upstairs, Gardner's main view was through the overhead windows, and what he saw worried him sufficiently to call Brandenstein over the intercom. As the pilot, one of Brandenstein's key roles during ascent was to monitor the performance of main engines. "Obviously, Dick Truly and I were up front, watching the instruments," recalled Brandenstein, "and Dale was looking back over his head out the [overhead] window and back at the ground. At night, he could see how it lit everything up. During the first stage, it was really bright, because we had the boosters going. In fact, from the front cockpit, looking out, it was like we were inside a fire, because we didn't really see the flame, but we did see the reflection and the light."

They were not far into the ascent when Gardner piped up.

"Dan, how do the engines look?"

"Fine, they look fine," came Brandenstein's reply.

Thirty seconds later, Gardner repeated the question. Again, the response was the same.

"I don't know how many times this happened going uphill," Brandenstein recalled years later. After entering orbit, he asked Gardner why he had been so concerned. To Gardner's eyes, the behavior of the main engine exhaust in the rarefied atmosphere had appeared to "flutter," and this had brought back unpleasant memories of shuttle main engines malfunctioning or exploding on test stands in the late 1970s. "You have a different perspective as you get higher," Brandenstein told the oral historian. "The air pressure goes way down and you get into a vacuum, so basically what holds your flame real tight is the atmospheric pressure factors in that. When you get outside atmospheric pressure, they expand and flutter a little bit more."

After STS-8, as the astronauts listened back on their cockpit intercom tapes from ascent, they were puzzled to hear someone laughing all the way into orbit. It was Bluford. Years later, he remembered being so excited by the whole event that his only feeling at the time was not fear, but sheer elation. That elation would be multiplied by the events of the next six days in space, which tomorrow's history article will continue.

 

 

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
September 1st, 2013

 

30 Years Ago: First Shuttle Night Launch, First African-American Astronaut, Oldest Man in Space (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

 

Photo Credit: NASA

Thirty years ago this week, the first African-American astronaut, Guy Bluford, rode into orbit aboard Challenger on the space shuttle's first-ever night launch as a member of the STS-8 crew. He was joined by crewmates Dick Truly, Dan Brandenstein, Dale Gardner, and the then-oldest man in space, 54-year-old Bill Thornton. After a bone-rattling ride to orbit, which turned night into day across a sleeping Kennedy Space Center, Fla., the five astronauts safely reached orbit and set to work preparing their ship for its six-day mission.

Bluford's desire to blend in with the rest of the crew, and thereby avoid allegations of "positive" discrimination, helped to shield NASA from accusations of creating a racially motivated stunt, but no one at the space agency was unaware of the significance of the event. In Mike Mullane's autobiography, Riding Rockets, he made insightful reference to the issue of race and the fact that it never created a problem in the astronaut office. Having said that, Mullane related a story from January 1983, when he had to sit in for Bluford one day in the Shuttle Mission Simulator at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. During the course of the day, the Simulation Supervisor ("Sim Sup") asked the crew to invent a medical emergency for the flight surgeon to deal with. In the cockpit, the ideas flowed—Brandenstein had stomach pains, Truly had flu symptons, Gardner had a toothache—until one of them came up with the perfect idea: Bluford had turned white! Outrageous, indeed. When Dick Truly heard the conversation, he warned them that if they made the call, the closest they would get to space would be the office of JSC Director Chris Kraft … to be fired.

Upon reaching orbit in the early hours of 30 August 1983, Dan Brandenstein discovered that, despite having been sick during the ground tests, he adapted to microgravity exceptionally well. "I'm one of the lucky ones in that I did a back flip out of my seat and never looked back," he later told the NASA oral historian, "and never had a hiccup in any of my missions. It certainly makes your mission more enjoyable if you don't have to deal with that, but NASA was trying to decide what made people sick and how to prevent it, and it turned out, after a while, they quit trying and there was no correlation. Some guys could ride the spinning chair until the motor burned up and didn't get sick and then got into orbit and, within ten minutes, they were as sick as could be. Ultimately, they found Phenegren worked on almost everybody. Doctors use it on people that have had chemotherapy. So as soon as somebody would start getting a symptom of space sickness, you'd give them a shot and, in about 15 minutes, they'd be as good as new for the rest of the flight." Bluford, too, did not recall any problems. "We had little sandwiches tied to our seats," he said later, "and when we got on orbit, a couple of crew members weren't feeling well as they adapted to space, so they 'passed' on lunch. I felt fine. I not only ate my lunch, but part of theirs, too!"

Guy Bluford at work aboard Challenger's middeck during STS-8. Photo Credit: NASA

Despite concerns about space sickness and the fact that Dale Gardner—as lead crew member for both the deployment of India's Insat-1B communications satellite and operations with the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System (RMS) mechanical arm—suffered from the ailment, all five astronauts were able to conduct their prescribed tasks without problems. Releasing the $50 million satellite and its attached Payload Assist Module (PAM-D) booster went according to plan. Insat-1B was the second in a series of multi-purpose geostationary platforms to provide telecommunications, television broadcasting, meteorology, and search and rescue services to most of the Indian subcontinent and Indian Ocean. Its predecessor, Insat-1A, was launched atop a Delta rocket in April 1982. However, despite reaching its 22,600-mile orbit, successfully deploying a jammed C-band antenna and returning valuable meteorological imagery, it failed to deploy its solar sail—which provided a "counterbalance" for its single solar array—and later lost its "lock" on Earth, began to tumble, and inadvertently exhausted its entire supply of attitude control propellant. The satellite was abandoned that September, far short of its advertised seven-year life span, but India's Department of Space received a $70 million insurance payout from the debacle.

In the wake of the Insat-1A loss, Ford Aerospace introduced an automatic switching mechanism for the antenna to prevent any future loss of "lock" on Earth, made alterations to the attitude control propellant valves, and modified the design to ensure that the solar sail deployed properly. Like its predecessor, Insat-1B was cube-shaped and carried a dozen C-band and three S-band transponders for its communications and television services. Its meteorological payload consisted of a Very High Resolution Radiometer (VHRR), capable of acquiring visible and infrared images of Earth every 30 minutes, and a system for taking environmental data from unattended land-based and ocean-based stations. Between 1982 and 1990, four Insat-1s surveyed India's natural resources. Their data provided estimates of major crops, conducted drought monitoring, assessed the condition of vegetation, mapped areas at risk of flooding, and identified new underground water supplies.

The deployment of Insat-1B was timed to occur during Challenger's 18th orbit, a little over a day into the mission, and, precisely on time at 3:48:54 a.m. EDT on 31 August, Gardner and Bluford flipped switches on the aft flight deck instrument panel to send the satellite on its way. Fifteen minutes later, Truly and Brandenstein performed a now-customary separation burn in readiness for the PAM-D ignition. Deployment from the shuttle was so precise (within a tenth of a degree) that it saved Insat some 500 pounds of station-keeping propellant which might otherwise have been needed had it been launched aboard an expendable rocket. At 4:34 a.m., the PAM-D fired to lift Insat to geostationary transfer orbit with a 22,600-mile apogee. Later, ground controllers used the satellite's own hypergolic motor to circularize the orbit.

Insat-1B undergoes final checkout, ahead of launch. Photo Credit: NASA

However, during its first few days of operations, it came close to suffering the same fate as Insat-1A. Unconfirmed video recordings from the crew suggested that it may have been hit by debris just 19.5 seconds after leaving the payload bay, and, indeed, it was not until mid-September 1983 that ground operators at the Master Control Facility in Hassan, India, succeeded in unfurling its single, five-panel solar array. By this stage, Insat-1B was on station at 74 degrees East longitude—replacing its failed predecessor—and commenced full operations in October. The debris, meanwhile, appeared to have originated from the orbiter's payload bay and a detailed, six-hour television scan was conducted after STS-8 landed. Nothing on the satellite's sunshade or deployment mechanism appeared to be either missing or damaged and, upon inspecting still and video camera footage, no evidence of a direct strike on the satellite was confirmed.

It seemed more likely, NASA's post-flight anomaly report concluded, that a stray particle had been spotted by the astronauts as it drifted between themselves and the satellite. For almost seven years, Insat-1B provided satisfactory services, returning 36,000 images of Earth and providing communications and direct nationwide television services to thousands of remote Indian villages. Insat-1B operated until July 1990, after which it served in a "standby" capacity until it was replaced at 93.5 degrees East by Insat-2B in August 1993.

Despite the astronauts' intense focus on their mission, memories of simply being in space were aplenty. "The first impression," said Brandenstein, "is still the biggest. We were crossing Africa when I saw my first sunrise in orbit and, to this day, that is the 'wow' of my space flight career. Sunrises and sunsets from orbit are just phenomenal and the first one knocked my socks off! It happens relatively quickly because you're going so fast and you get this vivid spectrum forming at the horizon. When the Sun finally pops up, it's so bright; not attenuated by smog or clouds."

Throughout the flight, they received daily updates from Mission Control on terrestrial events. "They kept me abreast of how Penn State was doing in football," said Bluford, "and how the Philadelphia Phillies were doing in baseball. Each morning, we were awakened by a school song. We were informed about the shooting down of a Korean airliner, Dick Truly told me he was leaving the astronaut office to become Commander of the Naval Space Command, and my wife sent me a message saying we had termites in our house!"

With the Insat-1B deployment behind them, the crew set to work on their next major objective: testing the muscle of their ship's mechanical arm with the Payload Flight Test Article (PFTA). Although it would not be released into space, this giant dumbbell was the largest payload yet manipulated by the RMS. Yet even the PFTA was barely a third of the weight of the enormous Long Duration Exposure Facility, destined to be placed into orbit by another shuttle crew in the spring of 1984. Nonetheless, its forward and aft screens closely mimicked the visibility and maneuverability obstacles that future astronauts deploying large, cylindrical structures might face. In particular, PFTA became the first shuttle-borne cargo with a "five point" attachment to the payload bay—a keel and four longeron fittings—all of which were out of the direct view of the crew.

The dumbbell-shaped Payload Flight Test Article (PFTA) was designed to test the maneuverability and capabilities of the shuttle's Remote Manipulator System (RMS) arm. Photo Credit: NASA

As a result, Gardner and Bluford relied totally upon cameras fitted to the RMS. With Gardner at the controls, the dumbbell was first grappled by one of its two "active" fixtures and subjected to a variety of tests, as Truly pulsed Challenger's thrusters. These tasks helped to satisfy a number of test objectives to verify ground-based simulations, assess visual cues for payload handling, and demonstrate both hardware and computer software. During each activity, the RMS was employed in both manual and automatic modes. The two grapple fixtures on the payload provided different geometries and mass properties for the arm. Much of the payload's mass was situated at its aft end, thanks to a quantity of lead ballast, and Gardner's evaluations helped to verify that the RMS could position a large structure within 1.9 inches and one degree of accuracy in respect to the shuttle's axes.

Having already launched in darkness, STS-8 was scheduled to land in darkness at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., on 5 September 1983. It had been decided to land on Edwards' concrete Runway 22, rather than the dry lakebed, to avoid the risk of kicking up dust and impairing the Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) lights. These lights were designed to keep Truly and Brandenstein on their proper outer glide path of 19 degrees with a beam of half-white, half-red light. The PAPI system was located 1.4 miles from the end of the runway and 1.8 miles from Challenger's point of touchdown. The correct flight path was determined by the shuttle pilots by "centering" the white light onto the band of red lights. With green marker lights signaling the "end" of the runway, and transition and area lighting of 800-million-candlepower xenon floodlights, Runway 22 looked like a Christmas tree.

Early on 5 September, Truly and Brandenstein fired Challenger's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines to begin the irreversible de-orbit "burn" and commit their spacecraft to the hour-long glide to Earth. "As we re-entered the Earth's atmosphere," remembered Bluford, "we began to feel the effects of gravity and saw the fiery plasma of hot air outside the front windows of the orbiter. Dale took pictures of the hot plasma as it enveloped us and he would occasionally hand me the camera. I could feel the camera getting heavier and heavier as we got closer to home." For Truly, whose previous shuttle landing aboard Columbia in November 1981 had been in daylight, STS-8 presented a new series of challenges. "No engines. No moon. No correct dashboard info," he recalled to the NASA oral historian, years later. "The stars were blanked out because the window was frosted over. Then, finally, there were the lights of the California coast and Edwards. On the runway were the lines of red and white lights and that's what brought us in."

Touchdown itself came at 12:40 a.m. PDT (3:40 a.m. EDT), completing a six-day journey which, although demonstrating that space sickness could not be effectively predicted, had helped immeasurably to further certify the RMS arm for the planned repair of the Solar Max satellite in April 1984. That arm would continue to prove invaluable throughout the rest of the shuttle era, supporting as it did the construction of the International Space Station and the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. Night launches and night landings would occur with greater frequency—by the end of the shuttle era, 34 missions would have launched in the hours of darkness and 26 would have landed likewise—which enhanced the reusable spacecraft's flexibility in executing its myriad assignments. And although the age record established by Bill Thornton would be surpassed, and other African-American astronauts would follow Guy Bluford, their achievements remain to inspire us all.

 

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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