Fwd: The Voyage of STS-26

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: October 6, 2013 9:32:41 PM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: The Voyage of STS-26

 

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
October 5th, 2013

'Americans Return to Space': The Voyage of STS-26 (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

Twenty-five years have now passed since STS-26, the mission which laid the ghosts of Challenger to rest and opened the gates for a second Golden Age of shuttle operations. Photo Credit: NASA

Twenty-five years have now passed since the voice of launch commentator Hugh Harris exulted "Americans return to space" on the morning of 29 September 1988, as Space Shuttle Discovery broke the shackles of Earth and took flight. Her seventh voyage into orbit would last for four days, carry few secondary experiments, and deploy a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) … but its overall significance was profound: for STS-26 was the first shuttle flight to take place in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. Harris' words echo with a particularly saddening resonance today, more than two years since the final shuttle flight; for although Americans are in space at this precise moment in time, the date upon which they will return to space, from American soil and aboard an American spacecraft, remains unclear.

A quarter of a century ago, NASA endured one of the darkest and most difficult periods of its history. On 28 January 1986, the agency was rudely awakened to the reality that the shuttle—which it had touted as the spacegoing equivalent of a airliner, capable of delivering commercial and other payloads into orbit and even ferrying ordinary civilians aloft—was actually very experimental, both in terms of its complexity and unforgiving fragility. Challenger exploded nine miles above the Kennedy Space Center, torn apart by a known problem with her Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), which enabled hot gases to bypass two sets of O-ring seals. In the two years that followed, an extensive redesign and recertification of the boosters was undertaken by contractor Morton Thiokol.

Thiokol created a pair of full-scale, short-duration "simulators" to evaluate the changes. The first was the joint environment simulator, which was test-fired on seven occasions between August 1986 and July 1988 and evaluated the field joint hardware, insulation, and the performance of the O-ring seals. The second was the nozzle joint environment simulator, tested between February 1987 and August 1988, whose purpose was to test the integrity of the joints between the nozzle and the SRB casing. An engineering test motor was fired in May 1987 to evaluate the performance of heaters, an additional (third) O-ring, and the ability of external graphite composite stiffener rings to prevent joint rotation. Two demonstration SRBs were fired in August and December to qualify the redesign features, and in April 1988 the process of recertification for flight got underway with Qualification Motor Six.

During the post-Challenger down time, Morton Thiokol's Solid Rocket Boosters were subjected to a rigorous redesign process and underwent several test firings to recertify them for the shuttle. Photo Credit: NASA

In addition to the booster modifications, the enforced down time was spent attending to other critical areas on the orbiter itself: main engines, brakes and tyres, the need for partial-pressure suits for hypobaric protection, and the implementation of an escape system. It was obvious that the shuttle was too mature in design for any kind of "escape pod" or ejection seats for the whole crew, but two concepts which were explored were a tractor rocket and a curved, telescoping pole to extract astronauts from the cabin in an emergency. Both methods were useful only below speeds of about 200 mph and below altitudes of some four miles, whilst the vehicle was in controlled, gliding flight. Ultimately, the pole won.

In an emergency, an astronaut would remove the pole from the middeck ceiling, pyrotechnically jettison the side hatch, extend the pole, affix a lanyard hook on his or her suit, and essentially slide out, parachuting to safety. The pole was meant to "guide" the astronauts for 10-12 feet, propelling them "underneath" the shuttle's port-side wing. Tested extensively in February and March 1988 by U.S. Navy jumpers from a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter, it was predicted that around 90 seconds would be required for a crew to evacuate the vehicle. The development of the pole was closely watched by veteran astronaut Steve Nagel. "The charter from the Rogers Commission," said Nagel in his NASA oral history, "was to provide a controlled, gliding flight escape system, and this does it. I think you're better off having a pressure suit and a parachute and some survival gear. Even if it's out of control, somebody might have a chance of climbing out the hatch. There's plenty of evidence in World War II of crew members getting out of bombers with wings off, if they happen to be close to an opening or a hatch."

The pole modifications were completed on Discovery by April 1988. A return to pressure suits aided the astronauts' chances of survival … and Dick Covey, the pilot of STS-26, would claim some credit for having contributed to the choice of colour. "As they developed this idea of bailout," he told the NASA oral historian, "the first suits they got were dark blue and the life rafts were black of dark blue." The astronauts reasoned that, after bailing out of a crippled orbiter and floating in the ocean hundreds of miles offshore, they would never be seen, so it was decided to use orange rafts instead. "Well, if we're going to do that," was Covey's line of thought, "why are we going to have blue suits? Why don't we have orange suits?" Many of the blue suits had already been developed for training, and there are several images of early post-Challenger crews wearing them.

Political eyewash was STS-26 Mission Specialist Mike Lounge's opinion of the suits. "And I really feel bad," he said in his NASA oral history, "because it's an extra … weight in the crew cabin that takes away from the payload-carrying capability of the space shuttle and it is just no value added. It's value subtracted. What little could you do in the event something went wrong, you could do less of it when you're burdened by these suits. I was totally against it and still am. They offer no value." Yet the suits were here to stay. Safety was the new byword for NASA. A new Office of Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance was established, reporting directly to NASA Administrator James Fletcher, and Chief Astronaut John Young had proven highly critical of shuttle management's appalling attitude toward operational safety.

Pictured during a 56-hour simulation in late August 1988, astronauts Pierre Thuot and Mark Lee—both members of the STS-26 Capcom team—monitor their displays and notes. Photo Credit: NASA

By the end of 1986, it was clear that the return to flight would take longer than expected and a provisional launch date for "STS-26″—the first post-Challenger mission—in February 1988 was held in serious doubt. NASA Associate Administrator for Space Flight Dick Truly had already stated that the mission would be accorded all of the caution which had accompanied the maiden flight. Discovery's ascent trajectory was to be designed to minimise the risks of a Transoceanic Abort Landing, it would launch in warm weather and in the hours of daylight, it would land on the wide-expanse runways at Edwards Air Force Base in California … and its crew would all be veteran astronauts. For a time, the most likely contender to command STS-26 was Bob Crippen, although in November 1986 he accepted a new position as deputy head of Shuttle Operations at NASA Headquarters. Yet with Truly and George Abbey, the head of Flight Crew Operations, Crippen did play a role in choosing the man who would command the flight and instinctively knew that it would receive much scrutiny.

Rick Hauck seemed an obvious choice, having flown two shuttle missions, including the dramatic retrieval of the stranded Palapa and Westar satellites in November 1984. Much has been written about the level of "fairness" or "unfairness" associated with crew selections at this time, but Hauck's team actually made perfect sense, since for the most part it comprised the men who would have flown on Mission 61F in May 1986 to deploy the Ulysses solar probe. Pilot Roy Bridges had returned to the Air Force in May 1986 and was replaced by Dick Covey, whilst Mission Specialists Mike Lounge and Dave Hilmers remained. "Rick … hinted that we might fly soon," said Lounge, "or we might be on the crew that flew the return." The name of the third Mission Specialist, George "Pinky" Nelson, caused some consternation within the astronaut corps, for he had only recently flown and in the wake of Challenger had returned to academia. "Pinky was well-liked," fellow astronaut Mike Mullane wrote in his memoir Riding Rockets, but admitted that a sabbatical to the University of Washington highlighted in many minds that he had not paid his dues to the recovery effort. "He had the additional plum," Mullane continued, "of flying back-to-back missions."

Nelson, for his part, was simply thrilled to be flying again … although his wife and daughters burst into tears when they first heard the news. As for the politics of crew selections, his belief was that NASA assigned most of the original Ulysses crew to STS-26, and Nelson's previous EVA experience made him an obvious choice. Yet the negative sentiment in some quarters of the astronaut office continued for a time. It was sour grapes, perhaps, but others were equally vocal that the selection process was neither fair nor rational at this time. Hauck had been permitted to select Covey as his co-pilot—an extremely rare practice. "He figured out that he was going to fly the first flight," Covey told the NASA oral historian, "and I think at that point started lobbying to get me on." For his part, Covey was tickled by the irony that he had been the last of his class to fly and was already in line for a second mission, but his selection as Hauck's pilot was unsurprising. Before Challenger, he worked as the ascent Capcom for Hauck's 61F mission and participated with the crew on abort scenarios. In July 1986, Covey was already working with Hauck, Lounge, and Hilmers in the Shuttle Mission Simulator. He was part of the team.

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
October 6th, 2013

'To Launch Americans Into Space': The Voyage of STS-26 (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

 

After 32 months of agony and introspection, the Kennedy Space Center was again rocked by the roar of shuttle main engines and Solid Rocket Boosters on the morning of 29 September 1988. It was the dawn of a new era. Photo Credit: NASA

Setting aside the enormity of the fact that STS-26 would be the first shuttle voyage after a major disaster, the mission was relatively straightforward—a "vanilla flight"—since it would be just four days long and feature the deployment of the third Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-C) atop an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster to replace the one lost aboard Challenger. Rick Hauck admitted that it would be "the safest flight we've flown," but this did not prevent the space agency's senior leadership from exaggerating its significance. STS-26 was a hugely important milestone, but for the jokers in the astronaut office, and particularly the crew of STS-27, it offered an opportunity for humour.

One evening, Hauck's crew were present at a fundraising event for a Challenger charity at the Wortham Center in Houston. At its conclusion, the MC brought a young girl onto the stage to sing Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud To Be An American," and the STS-26 crew was introduced. "At this cue," wrote STS-27 Mission Specialist Mike Mullane, "the orchestra pit platform began a slow rise. Artificial smoke swirled about it and the spotlights flashed through the vapour. And there, to the astonishment of every astronaut, were Rick Hauck and Dick Covey. They stood like carvings on Mount Rushmore: chins jutted out, chests puffed up, arms rigidly at their sides, steely eyes straight ahead."

Shortly thereafter, the crew of STS-27—Robert "Hoot" Gibson, Guy Gardner, Mike Mullane, Jerry Ross, and Bill Shepherd—plotted their revenge. Two days later, at the astronaut office's Monday morning meeting, Gibson was asked if he had any STS-27 issues to discuss. At this stage, the plan went into action. Jerry Ross pressed a button on a boom box, triggering Greenwood's track, whereupon Mullane and Shepherd set off a pair of CO₂ fire extinguishers to create a smoky effect, and Gibson and Gardner, who had clipped ties onto their flight suits, slowly rose from their chairs in an outrageous parody of Hauck and Covey. Watching the proceedings was fellow astronaut Kathy Sullivan. "They rise, all the way, until they're standing straight and tall," she said in her NASA oral history. "Then Mullane shuts off the boom box, the fire extinguisher goes out, they sit back down and Hoot says calmly, 'No, we don't have anything!'" The office exploded with laughter.

On Independence Day, 4 July 1988, under the cover of darkness, Discovery begins her slow roll from the Vehicle Assembly Building toward Pad 39B. Photo Credit: NASA

On Independence Day, 4 July 1988, at a darkened Kennedy Space Center, the complete STS-26 stack—Discovery, her External Tank, and twin SRBs—left the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building and made the slow roll to Pad 39B. Dave Hilmers was in attendance and spoke to the assembled crowd of NASA employees who had worked tirelessly for this day to come. "For over two years now," he said, "each one of us here, tonight, has had a dream, that one day a shuttle would once again make its way to the launch pad to launch Americans into space." That launch had already slipped from February to June to August and, now, to September. Shortly before rollout, a tiny leak, deep within Discovery's left-hand Orbital Manoeuvring System pod, was discovered, but was fixed on the pad. Then, on 10 August, after one false start, the orbiter's three main engines were test-fired for 22 seconds, and on the 29th TDRS-C and its attached IUS arrived at the pad and were installed into the payload bay. When STS-26 finally set off on 29 September, no fewer than 32 months would have elapsed since the loss of Challenger.

The day itself was a calm, warm one, which Hauck remembered lucidly, even many years later. Radiosonde balloon soundings had highlighted an upper-level wind shear which might pose a constraint to the launch, and the astronauts left the Operations and Checkout Building for what they assumed would be a fruitless exercise. (Later, Hauck would jokingly thank Bob Crippen for convincing them that they weren't going to launch, thereby allowing them to enjoy the otherwise beautiful morning!) The winds did conspire to delay the launch by an hour and 38 minutes, and technicians also had to attend to failed vent fan fuses in the cooling systems of Covey's and Lounge's suits. At 11:28 a.m. EST, the Launch Director polled his team for their final status. As Hauck's crew listened in, they expected Crippen to declare a "No Go," on the basis of the high-level winds … but were surprised when he gave his consent for them to fly. The excitement began to build in the cockpit, and at 11:37 a.m. the marshy Florida landscape was rocked by the tremendous roar of three main engines and the golden flame of two boosters, carrying men into the heavens once again. For Dick Covey, watching the main engines brought back memories of Challenger in more ways than one … for he had been one of the Capcoms sitting in Mission Control, and he had spoken the last words to Commander Dick Scobee. On that terrible day, Covey had been too engrossed in his procedures to glance over at a monitor and see the carnage, but fellow astronaut Fred Gregory, seated to his right as the lead Capcom, saw it immediately and recognised it for what it was. As Gregory saw the video feed and Covey saw the data on his screen freeze, both men's jaws hit the floor. At first, they wondered if a contingency abort was in progress. Had the range safety destruct system accidentally triggered? Had the SRBs been prematurely jettisoned? Had a main engine exploded? Should Covey radio further instructions to the crew and, if so, what could he possibly say? For the longest time, no one could be certain.

At length, it was Flight Director Jay Greene who spoke. "Lock the doors," was his instruction, telling all controllers to secure their data for the investigation … and, instantly, Gregory and Covey and everyone else in the room knew that they were beyond contingencies or abort scenarios and the possibility of recovery was gone. Their friends were either dead or in the process of dying. Lock the doors. Three simple words. Three words which would also be spoken shortly after 9 a.m. EST on 1 February 2003. Three words which signified that all hope was lost.

The Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS)—mounted atop its Boeing-built Inertial Upper Stage booster—drifts serenely away from Discovery, a handful of hours into the STS-26 mission. Photo Credit: NASA

Almost three years later, the wait for launch on STS-26 was exciting, but uncomfortable, and not just on account of the partial-pressure suits. "We were still using the urine collection devices," said Covey, "and those aren't particularly comfortable or easy to use. When you're on your back for four hours out there … then it's a long time. It's uncomfortable." The launch itself resembled previous launches, although all five men were keenly aware of what had happened to their predecessors and the level of anxiety peaked as they neared the 73-second psychological barrier beyond which Challenger had failed to pass. Before 51L, Rick Hauck felt that NASA had shuttle launches "wired," but now he was relieved when the SRBs were jettisoned, as planned, two minutes into the ascent. When the fateful Go at throttle up call had come from Mission Control, perhaps not wanting to mimic Dick Scobee's response, Hauck had replied simply, "Roger, Go."

Covey remembered as the Mission Elapsed Time clock ticked past 88 seconds, "We're all kind of thinking about what happened the last time the space shuttle had gotten to that point." With six more minutes to go before Main Engine Cutoff, Hauck relayed the progress of the flight to Pinky Nelson on the middeck as Discovery passed through Mach 16 and onwards. At length, at 11:46 a.m., the sound of the engines was gone and the ghosts of Challenger, finally, were laid to rest. Several months earlier, it had been Dave Hilmers who suggested that the crew should commemorate their lost friends in some way. "We shared a personal loss in the class," said Covey, "and personal loss of friends across those classes." Hilmers had written it and gave a copy to Capcom Lacy Veach. On the third day of the flight, on Sunday, 2 October, each crew member took turns to deliver their piece of the eulogy to the Challenger astronauts. "It was something that needed to be done," said Hauck. "It was a need that someone during the mission needed to say something that all of us could reflect on … and I gathered from what was said later by people in the office … that it captured the thoughts."

Additionally, the crew felt the need to thank the ground teams who had invested so much sweat and tears in preparing them to fly. The Orbiter Processing Facility teams had labelled themselves "Loud & Proud" and, on occasion, they would wear "loud" Hawaiian shirts to work. When electrical power was provided to Discovery, the STS-26 crew were in attendance and were made honorary members of the "Loud & Proud" crowd and presented with honorary Hawaiian shirts, which they took into space with them. "Once we had the weighty issues behind us," said Hauck, "we decided now is the time to break out the Hawaiian shirts." They were passing over Hawaii at the time and downlinked some video of themselves, clowning around on the middeck in their shirts and sunglasses.

Life's a Beach was Hauck's comment. …

Clad in Hawaiian shirts, the "Loud and Proud" STS-26 crew take a few light moments for a photograph on Discovery's middeck, late in the mission. Rick Hauck is flanked by (clockwise from top-right) George "Pinky" Nelson, Dick Covey, Mike Lounge, and Dave Hilmers. Photo Credit: NASA

Aside from the enormous responsibility of getting America's human space programme back on track, the deployment of TDRS-C occurred in a relatively straightforward fashion at 5:50 p.m. EST, some six hours and 13 minutes after launch. The IUS booster functioned perfectly, achieving geostationary  orbit, and the satellite manoeuvred into its position above the Pacific Ocean at 171 degrees West longitude. Four days in space came to a spectacular conclusion at 9:37 a.m. PST (12:37 p.m. in Florida) on 3 October 1988, when Hauck and Covey brought Discovery smoothly onto Runway 17 at a sweltering Edwards Air Force Base. "A great ending to a new beginning," was the congratulatory call from Capcom Blaine Hammond as the orbiter rolled to a stop. Vice President George Bush was in attendance, as were NASA Administrator James Fletcher, California Governor George Deukmeijian, and famed aviator General Chuck Yeager. Hauck fluttered an American flag as he descended the steps from the orbiter, a move which Time magazine derided as a "staged" example of a politician using the space programme for political gain.

"I remember writing a letter to the editor of Time," said Hauck, "where this was opined and I stated the facts that … we were not prompted by anyone to bring a flag. That was our idea and we were very proud to have the vice president of the United States meet us at the bottom of the steps. It didn't matter whether he was Republican, Democrat, or whatever." That Monday afternoon, as Discovery returned safely home from a mission which Challenger and her crew had been cruelly denied, her otherwise "vanilla" mission demonstrated its profound significance, for had STS-26 failed the remarkable accomplishments which followed—launching and servicing Hubble and building the International Space Station, to name just a handful of triumphs—could not have been met. The achievement of the STS-26 crew and the thousands who made their mission possible allowed the ghosts of Challenger to be laid to rest and enabled the shuttle to rise from its knees and glimpse an exciting future.

 

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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