Astrosmiles (1990s)

this is the asent portion of our mission the countdown of the cape just went flawlessly we were really really pleased with the way things went down went on down there the engine starting you can see the shock waves come out of the throats of the the nozzles the nozzles vibrate the engines get up and stable in about 6 seconds uh solid rocket Motors fire and we're off and uh for a new guy doing this the first time it's really a thrill and that thing feels like being on a rough train while the solid rocket Motors are firing if y'all been on rough railroad track that's about what it feels like and uh it's a very interesting ride you can function normally and right before we lifted off said get ready for the ride of your lives and he was right it's the ride of your life it's still a big throw on your third time too the uh one of the one of the neat things about this mission was we're going to do direct insertion into orbit so we didn't do an orbital maneuvering system one burn right after the main engines cut off so we're going right into orbit off the pad and we're going up 250 miles so the trajectory and everything is a little bit different it made a made a real interesting ride out of it the uh solid rocket Motors the engines and everything just are magnificent we didn't have a glitch the whole Ascent which is really nice you don't want any glitches when this kind of stuff's going on outside your window we all kept on watching make sure this is the way it's always supposed to be yeah okay solid rocket motor separated you saw the plumes from the separation Motors those fog up our Windows pretty good up in front they they put a haze on the on the forward Windows when they go off and you get a nice nice flash in the windows but it's a nice smooth separation this was letting the bees out of their little house here trying to we did this oh a couple times a day it was uh good entertainment if nothing else and we were watching their progress on their uh on their honeycomb yeah we were made sure that there was no way they were going to get out of there I checked that first thing okay this is uh more of the housework I did a a lot of the cooking and bottle washing and if you look out the window there you can see the snow going by we're doing a water dump at the same time cooking a meal was about like doing it on the ground there this is this is a bank shot by kpp trying to get my eggs in my mouth we do you do tend to eat in space like you do underground almost almost some of us do hey at least I eat in space I eat like I do underground right so did O so did that was the real rotating grapple oh boy we gave us time to play up there too well in this uh particular sequence we're showing how we prepare a meal and uh we divided these tasks up uh among all the crew members uh Dale usually wound up doing breakfast because nobody was quick enough for him uh making um meals is a fairly easy task on orbit all you had to do is essentially like it's very good uh essentially like backpacking you essentially add water to to the food and um it was very good I'll let Rick describe what we're doing here well at the risk of endorsing a product that's an interesting uh physical demon ation on orbit of the fact that things really are weightless that's how the crew was rewarded when we did something properly Rick would release another handful since Anna did more things right than anybody she got most of them Dave on orbit described Dr Allen as uh as large in personality but Dominion of in stature whenever his personality got a little bit too large we would stuff him away in a locker for a few hours and uh then when a task needed to be done it was my job to go out go down and get him out this was a somewhat unpleasant task for me but uh but Joe Joe seemed to like the freedom at times and the hard part was putting him back in there again later once we got it and here's uh Gordon getting ready for one of the many uh burns with our smaller orbital maneuvering system rocket engines here you see us maneuvering attitude and the small uh attitude uh Jets firing we did an experiment so you could appreciate the acceleration we get out of these rocket engine firings we put 8 ounces of water on the mid deck and here you see it traveling across Dr Barto is catching it we also tried to sleep through some of these Burns and we staged this next scene to show you what it felt like in the bunk that hurt no it was a great train wreck believe it or not some of them slept through those once they got used to it here we're setting up for an on orbit ohms burn we're getting some things ready in the mid deck there's the ohms engines firing out the back and now watch what happens in the mid deck that's 1/16th of a g each of the ohms engin is 1 foot per second squared for total of 2 feet per second squared and that 1/16th of a g Fel felt like a lot to us after being up there for uh three or four days and you can see the acceleration on the tape it keeps wanting to go back towards the AF bulkhead because we're accelerating forward towards the left of the screen here we can see the left ohms engine burn and that's just the start up the burn last for a little while and this is what it looks like in the mid deck Jerry made it right into the airlock and uh we collected all those pieces here's a picture of Gordo uh establishing himself in that area and why you move the coat there Gordo and get it out of the way thank you okay and of course one of the things gardo had to do is brush his hair every morning eating was a real pleasure of course it's impossible to knock your milk off the table up there kiddos it's there's no way to get in trouble with mom you just leave things float around and when you want them you just grab them out of thin air and uh you can eat standing on your head or uh however you please here's here's our Guru here this is a story doing his demonstrating what happens if you ever drop a cat it always ends up on its four feet No Matter What attitude and that's we've had a lot of discussions about how this works how you can move around he's not shoveling the air it's actually he's he's you want me do it here the the the one on the right of course is a magnet and the one on the left is just a pencil and we had no idea they they going to decide to mate we're still waiting the results Gordo practicing his uh Landing technique get ready for re-entry looks like we're lost in space there right well we get up in the morning and U you know brush our teeth and comb our hair and the rest of that stuff here some of the crew equipment we had was limited so we had to share it you're not allowed to laugh this this sequence we call Hair Wars as you might expect the commander one of course I'm not dumb enough to get the hairbrush away from the commander this next scene is not is not staged this is a real teleprinter message we set a new record on this flight for the amount of teleprinter messages sent up uh every single rev uh on the night side they send up a new detail plan for the uh scientists here to accomplish on the next solar pass and that was an actual message all full of fine print that fortunately for me all I had to do is uh take it up to the upper deck and pass it out to the people who really had to read it we uh recorded a new space first on this flight we ran out a teleprinter paper after five and a half days it's the first time that's happened and story Musgrave changed out the paper roll in space for the first time but the hairbrush one wasn't staged either Lord we had to devise a number of exercise [Applause] routines little weightlifting and balancing act here now not many of you can do this right here he doesn't put them on one leg at a time like everybody else as soon as I uh get this down I'm going to get a Dorothy haml wig and try out for the ice and of course Marines aren't happy unless they do their push-ups every day that wasn't too tough so uh you know look one arm and if you want to you can do foot up now if you really got frustrated you can do this here we are sitting down for supper uh we had trays you can see some of the food stuck to the back there uh we had trays that we could position on our laps velcro and then set our food in them as Steve pointed out this Z gravity adds new meaning to the term past the potatoes they float them all the way across the cabin the menu was uh quite varied and uh really pretty good people accused me we had color code and people accuse me of always having my color on everything exercise was part of our daily routine on orbit uh just like it is back here on Earth getting set up on the treadmill takes a little bit longer on orbit but it feels just as good to quit and our sleep Arrangements looked a lot like a summer camp a little bit of bunks here and there two of us slept anchored to lockers two of us slept strung across the room and two of us slept on the wall and you notice that in zero g when you relax your arms tend to float up it was very comfortable we didn't always sleep with the NightLight on well it's constantly fascinating just to watch the way objects behave in zero gravity here we have a set of Gyro stabilized binoculars there was a little bit too much friction in them so they were actually a bit gyro unstabilized but uh still with 14 power binoculars uh it was just amazing what we could see on the ground and uh of course I also enjoyed what I could see up in the sky since I'm a an astronomer we also carried some science demonstration objects commonly known as toys um this was done primarily to uh make some educational footage which we can use and distribute to science teachers throughout the country here bo uh forgot to spin the gyroscope up and somehow it just didn't didn't stay stable uh so we're going to give him another chance and uh here he's going to get it spinning there we go of course the uh principle of gyroscopic stability has been around a long time weed it for navigation our satellites use it when they uh come out of the cargo bay um but of course without the uh without gravity and just being able to float it free here you can study the Behavior Uh of the gyroscope and and watch the way it moves around in in a way that we never get a chance to do in in laboratories on the earth I'm sure all of you have uh held a gyroscope on a string or on your fingers and after a while as it spins down uh the force of gravity uh starts to torque it and it starts to process around of course that that never happens in in zero gravity you can keep playing with it almost up up to the moment where uh where it is not spinning at all and it still stays stable in fact it was just a constant source of Fascination all the different things you could do with these uh very ordinary devices this is a little magnetic wheelo that I'm using and normally on the earth you start this with gravity I found it was pretty easy to start it up using centrifugal force uh this one as long as I was holding it uh behave pretty much the way it did on the Earth but as soon as you let it go then it does all sorts of neat things and here comes Mr yo-yo uh we had some we I've had a lot of discussions with physicist friends of mine about whether the yo-yo was going to work uh and it worked fabulous you could do it fast you could do it slow you could do it uh to the ceiling that's the famous ooi uh Dave did flying saucers around the moon he's a real champ and if they don't let him into the yo-yo Association of America there's just no justice in the world um putting the Jacks here uh there was constant constant danger of of massive explosions if the ball came back in the wrong place uh we we managed to go through without ever losing the Jacks and although it's not on film Ray did manage to do her 12's by the end of the flight if you uh if you let a a paper airplane just uh float uh it's pretty much Carried Away by the air currents in the shuttle as you see here and so it really doesn't take very much force just to start it on the most beautiful flight that you ever seen of uh any paper glider hope you like our home movies so far the pball behaved a lot like it does on Earth and that you can uh paddle it in nearly any direction if you're clever enough I'm not sure I am clever enough to keep it going in in in each Direction and as you can see here so the ins and outs ups and downs were about the same uh it's a little harder to do uh let's say to do this trick on Earth the straightforward sort of paddle ball operation uh uh is much slower and it's much easier this one is a little tougher uh Jeff has here some magnetic marbles uh I'm not sure how you shoot marbles in space because it's a little hard to keep them in that ring uh but your shooter uh seems to work fine it joins right up with them all and it forms a it forms into a into a torite as you might expect with the magnetic lines uh and the magnetism that's inherent in the marbles if you watch carefully now on not this uh not this one but the the one after this as Jeff sailes the marble Past after he repositions the uh his ring here with its little tail and relative to the horizontal lines on the on the ball cat behind him watch what this marble does see a curve upward as it as the magic lines of force the pass by the others and here's our unofficial mascot you might say he flipped out over this side rat stuff really had it the slinky uh without the SAG that you have to contend with in 1G behave pretty much the same as it does in 1G uh you can start to see that of course they've set up a sine wave oscillation here which continues to be reflected back and forth and now a double one or perhaps a triple and perhaps within there you can also see the standing waves reflected back and forth the centrifugal force of course keeps this little car going around its track on earth when it gets to the top it would of course fall out in space what do you expect it's going to do well with a Little Help from the doctor sure enough I saw that it falls out see when you've been in space a little while down is Up and Up Is Down it doesn't make any difference really doesn't Mission this complex requires strict discipline uh and fortunately we had a well discipline crew of course you know you take four guys off the farm some of them are able to respond a little quicker and learn a little faster than others to military movements [Music] and some guys just never learn that's crazy doing any more parades we did have a drill team uh crack drill team here that we practiced every morning zero gravity's got to be fun if you hadn't noticed or picked up on it right now it just as a a great deal of fun after 300 hours of space space flight uh you can really learn how to adapt yourself to Zer G and and and do the tasks a lot more rapidly than than you ever could on the ground and and most of the things like stowing the cabin were were really no problem at all with some exception almost cables develop a mind of their own this helps you understand why we didn't break the camera out the real difficulty of this scene was holding the camera still while he was trying not to giggle it well in the words of an old philosopher it ain't over till it's over and I guarantee it's not over yet because we still have to land and here we are at uh Runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center uh good calls from the folks uh in the air and on the ground John Young weather Pilot the weather was good to the north so we landed with a slight tailwind and coming down here at 300 ft Dave deployed the landing gear and the Orbiter flew beautifully just as we trained for it to fly in the shuttle training airplane look at the vortexes being Shed off the wing tips there and when we touch down you can see how the smoke from the tires gets caught up in those vortices real pretty picture touchdown was at about 190 knots so I understand about 2700 ft down the runway and we used a total of 93 to 9500 ft of Runway during the roll out for