STS-29: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon uh this is the STS 29 postflight crew press conference uh we're going to look at some home movies slides video film and uh listen to The Crew tell us uh their Tales of uh STS 29 I'm happy to introduce uh the STS 29 crew Commander Michael coats thank you Jeff uh I have the distinct pleasure and I'm very proud to introduce uh the crew of STS 29 John Blaha to my right to his right is Jim Buckley to his right is Bob Springer and to his right is Jim bent and I'd like to start off by uh expressing my thanks and gratitude to everybody that worked so hard to get us ready to fly and to get the discovery ready to fly uh we have a a movie a home movie we put together that we'd like to show you and then some slides we'd like to talk to uh a little bit after that so Jeff if we're ready to Let's rotate there's a discovery sitting in the Launchpad we hope to see that uh quite frequently in the next few years we had a hard time getting uh Jim be to wear coat and tie and our last chance was launch morning so we all got dressed up and he finally agreed to do that so we wore coats and ties here we are in the suit room getting those uh launch and entry suits on if they look uncomfortable that's because they are and we're walking out of the crew quarters into the astronaut van looking like uh five orange doughbys here if we ever end up in the water we'll be glad we have those suits on but they sure are uncomfortable to wear especially if you're used to the old flight suits that we wore for so many years of course if most of you realize we had a a couple hour launch delay waiting for the fog to burn off and the upper level winds to exceedances to go away so we were really uh pleased when they started uh the countdown out of the 9-minute hole after 4 hours on our back it was uh a relief to start counting down again and realize we're going to go fly turned out to be a beautiful day once the fog had burned off one of the things we did during this flight was uh activate a camera to record any debris striking the windows during the first couple minutes while the solid rocket boosters are are firing John the camera was on John's side over there and uh got down to 10 seconds before lift off and all five of us in unison said get the camera John wouldn't let him forget that and of course after 2 minutes uh the solid rocket boosters come off and uh that's always a good feeling now here we have a shot of uh the Indian Ocean the southern tip of India with the island of Sri Lanka used to be a salon called Salon down there I think that's a beautiful shot now once we got past the uh the launch and into fully into the orbit phase we started reconfiguring the cockpit to try and get things ready for the I deploy I think one of the more difficult things about this particular mission is the uh the post insertion timeline and getting ready for the deploy operations uh you've got to get configure from your launch configuration reconfigure uh the entire Orbiter for the deploy operations for the on orbit operations we facilitated this to some extent as soon as we got on orbit by going ahead getting out of the uh launch entry suits and and getting into our our more comfortable on orbit clothing which you can see very somewhat uh getting ready for the tedris uh and I deploy once we uh got everything started uh 6 hours and 12 minutes into the mission we went ahead and deployed the I us tedris uh it was a successful deploy uh we had a Hearts almost stopped uh about 2 minutes before deploy we got a series of anomalies and warnings that looked like everything had failed and it turns out it was just a data drop on the communication link between the IUS and the Orbiter uh we got a quick uh go for the deploy from the ground when they saw that the their Telemetry was all right so we proceeded with the deploy uh and got it off uh on time we were very delighted uh shortly thereafter uh the had the two Burns that it took to get the I up to its geosynchronous orbit and we found out that those two Burns went on schedule and as programmed uh tedris was put into its U initial orbit I think it had a initially had a 40t per second under speed as far as getting to its uh its geosynchronous altitude but as it turned turn out that uh that was not all bad it was a slight under bur and it was uh as on the right side of things as the orbital mechanics of It Go and was actually starting to drift already toward its Park orbit uh right after we got done with the tetus deploy uh I had to get into an experiment activation this is the protein crystal growth experiment a fascinating experiment because it's one of the things we've learned to do in the microgravity environment of space is to be able to grow crystals in this case protein crystals that are used in a variety of applications in Pharmacology from our standpoint on uh on the Orbiter uh our biggest job after activating the experiment going ahead and mixing the ingredients the precipitates that would uh help to form the crystals was to do some photography of it we did an activation photography to capture what the experiment looked like as we started up this is the chromax experiment it's a plant growth experiment we flew to see how plant roots that would just start to germinate would develop one orbit without the infl of gravity and that way to see if the chromosome divisions that normally take place would proceed as you'd expect and uh allow the growth of the plant uh this is particularly useful for futur Ops in space station where people worry about both for f food growth enclosed environmental control systems where you can not only scrub CO2 but generate some oxygen this is one of the life sciences experiments it's a trans cranial Doppler it's one of the dsos and here we're looking at some blood flow in the middle cerebral artery and that's the the velocity waveform looking there on Mike uh and we hope to try to correlate changes in uh blood flow in the brain with possible symptoms of space adaptation syndrome and in that way maybe uh get a little bit better handle on what the cause of that is so we uh we did a fair amount of studies on that to try to get that wrapped up here's a little thing we did on the side there was concerns for space station about how to since we'll be there for a longer period of time how to deliver normal type health care how to care for people and this is an IV bag intravenous fluid you have bubbles in it while on Earth they just drift to the top and you get them out in Zer G they just kind of look like effervescent just bubbles suspended in the fluid well by just centrifuging by hand like that you're able to have all the bubbles migrate to the one end and just bleed it right off without any extra equipment on board just use a blood pressure cuff in the IV bag just as you would here on Earth so it works real well uh here's Bob doing a central Venus pressure measurement and by blowing in that mouthpiece he raised es his pressure in his lungs to the same pressure as the U as the central Venus pressure and then when that happens there's no longer any flow and he was measuring the flow in the external jugular vein there with the flow probe also we thought that there is there was a study to look at changes in intraocular pressure just as you measure intraocular pressure for glaucoma we're using what's called a tonopen and here you have to anesthetize your corny which I just did with those little drops and now I shove this pen and tap it off my cornea and continue to tap it and uh you got to get used to that just staring in the eye as you bounce it off your corny and you can tell when you touch it not because you feel it but it changes your refractive you can see it get blurry this is uh John Bellinger's experiment you know he's a senior up at Purdue University now he started this experiment many years ago uh he really did a great job with this I really congratulate him we saw him last Friday he told us preliminary results so far uh as it turns out the embryos that launched that were two days old uh were all had died on Landing for some reason up in orbit and they have to figure that out yet also on Easter Saturday all 16 of 16 that launched that were N9 days old hatched so um maybe some very significant results and a lot of unanswered questions from that experiment this is a another thing for space station we were looking at they were concerned could you use standard type medical equipment like for suturing wounds stitching up wounds as you would uh in w so we just had a little little block with some basically like artificial skin with various lacerations made in it uh since they didn't want us to lacerate ourselves plus it's a little tougher to get volunteers for that uh it would have been a first though anyway uh we got the Sutra material out and just see to see if you could stitch up a wound in the same way you would here on Earth and Bob did a good job focusing on the Sutra you can see it right there it doesn't tangle up the normal links like you use in the operating room here will work there it works just fine what you see on the Linger on here is a share experiment which is a space station radiator assembly uh though it didn't perform as we had predicted the NASA engineers and the mission control team were able to get a awful lot of very very good data from this uh experiment and it really uh tells us why it's so important to fly pieces of the space station and Equipment uh on early shuttle fli so we can get a good engineering basis for station here we are in the mid deck Mike's looking at a uh a tags picture uh tags is text and Graphics uh which allows us to send up High Fidelity uh almost like uh Thermo graph type uh pictures uh we use these uh during our IMAX uh filming to look ahead at weather Satellite photographs so we could tell what areas uh we're going to be clear around the world and which we're not on the flight deck uh we did several experiments this one happens to be a uh a coass uh which is an optical device allowing the crew to realign their inertial platforms in the event that they should uh malfunction and and lose their nav base Mike was able to do that sighting on the sun this is the IMAX camera and you see Jim here uh loading a magazine uh putting the film into the camera I compliment the IMAX people uh excellent support and training they gave us throughout the uh leadup to the mission which really enabled us to be very successful uh we found operating with the camera in Zog to be uh quite similar to 1G and had no difficulty loading the film here's a scene on the flight deck Jims holding the camera here and I'm trying to put 100 mm lens on in this case and you see see Mike up front talking to Mission Control uh this is usually the sequence Mike was trying to maneuver the Orbiter here's a shot of me uh taking a picture of this case uh Florida and coming into the Bahamas here I believe but basically the way we worked with IMAX is we had somebody filming we had somebody as a spotter looking out the window because when you look through the the viewfinder of the IMAX uh it really shrinks your field of view and and so you need a spotter and somebody maneuvering the Orbiter and of course uh Jim was working um changing out the magazines in the black bag usually and I was loading the camera so quite a team effort to pull off the filming we did for IMAX some of the other cameras we had on board that we used for Earth observations are 70 mm Hasselblad this happens to be a shot over Cuba uh of note is all of the active uh core reefs just to the south side of Cuba we had some very very good shots of that and showed some live Coral uh and Reformation just south of that Island as you can see the whole East Coast was uh was very clear for most of our mission including the Caribbean so we got some footage that uh normally is cloud covered another camera that we used extensively was the AOL linhoff it's a handheld aerial photographer camera a little bit larger film format uh and as a result the resolution is is somewhat better than uh some of the smaller uh film cameras this shot is coming over Central America looking down a chain of volcanoes you can see the volcano sticking up in the lake and again John using another Hassel blide camera we're able to use with the attitude we were in use just about all of the windows uh the side windows for black shots overhead windows for directly down and it worked out very very well for our Earth observation program we had four good windows and five crewman J this is a shot of the Himalayas uh it shows a a view looking North you can see the Orbiter tail at the top and the brownish area in the background is the Tibetan plateau and it gives you a nice feel for it uh in the look in the north looking view you see it more in profile it really gives you a feeling of the relief the elevation of the Himalayas there because in the foreground the Ganges River Basin is basically sea level so you're seeing a 29,000 ft rise down with a 13,000 ft Plateau behind and it's uh even more impressive in person that's the problem with having a your satellite Deploy on the first day is that after that somebody has to get stuck with the housekeeping chores so uh here's a shot of uh of the food preparation process uh actually what I would note is that number one The Galley worked very very well for us I was since this my first flight I was very pleasantly surprised at uh at how palatable the food was the cold water was cold the hot water was hot just the way it's supposed to be and and that was actually bit of a surprise we actually have an oven on board that we can use to heat up the food uh and it's a bit like a camping trip in a way that there's a lot of overhead that goes into uh maintaining the shuttle and and the food preparation as part of it we did find fin get together for a a crew dinner although that was a rarity actually on this flight we we stayed busy enough that uh for most of the meals we just worked right through the meal and and uh somebody that was available would do the food prep down on the mid deck and then as as you had a couple minutes you'd uh you'd Float by and grab something and have your dinner on the run so to speak or on the Fly I guess is more appropriate uh but we did uh sit down I think on the fourth night or fifth night and uh and have a uh a dinner all together and it was uh it was the one family meal that we had on board uh the shuttle on this this particular flight we wanted a shot of the uh sleeping bags you can see I'm getting into one sleeping bag and Jim Buckley's getting into the other uh he's more or less heads down and I'm somewhat heads up here you can obviously sleep any way you want up there U you don't need to sleep in a sleeping bag uh I like it because it keeps the temperature pretty constant it keeps you from floating off and bumping into things in the middle of the night and I found it very comfortable just to put a sleeping bag up against the lockers and uh gave me a little bit of stability this is uh Jim and Bob actually one time I came into the mid deck and I saw them doing this so I grabbed the 16 mm and started taking this footage I couldn't figure out what was quite going on here uh here we had a doctor and a marine trying to prove prove who could do the most pull-up so I I couldn't resist the picture Marine won the next time I came the next time I came through the mid deck U Jim happened to have this set up the our treadmill so I jumped on there they looked like they were doing real good I thought I'd try it and uh unfortunately that was a lot tougher than I thought it was well despite the fact that uh we were working very hard there's always the uh the everpresent uh fluid experiments that uh that we wanted to do uh and and while on one hand it's it's a bit of fun doing this it's also very useful when we're talking to school children uh it allows you to see what happens to a a fluid when it's released in the micrograv of space and of course a fluid will tend to assume its a minimal energy level which is a sphere and uh that's the science part of it uh the fun part of it is is watching a bunch of grown men trying to play with bubbles of fluid and and zero gravity we tried very hard to get two bubbles of two spheres to float together to see what they do that may be impossible I don't we couldn't do it in an hour or so of trying I this is actually remarkable this is a remarkable shot because we had uh this was just the the morning before our our press conference on board the the shuttle and we had all changed into clean clothes Mike had gotten cleaned up put on a clean white shirt and then proceeded to play with drops of uh strawberry juice uh which he managed to Splatter across his white shirt just before the press conference well this tells the truth we uh we so we went to fly tortillas and we're more interested in that than fresh bread but I think it was probably more for the aerodynamic qualities of the tortillas than than their actual flavor interestingly enough though that that proved the tortillas proved to be very good bread substitute didn't crumble as much the uh the suits we normally stored in airlock except when we first got on orbit when you're not in them there's no weight they just kind of take on a life of their own and they're you know they take up a lot of room and here we are just kind of playing around the night before we pulled the suits out to check them out to make sure everything was set up the way we thought they should be and if there was any repair or serviceing they needed we could do that and it just shows you know there's only two or three suits in the picture and there's actually five of them there takes a lot of room here's uh we're just going through a suit dining here uh Bob and I Jim just helping us a little bit to get in and uh you find you just kind of float and just kind of with more or less effort pop on through uh I don't have to worry about catching my hair on the neck seal when I come through so it's probably a little easier for me in that respect but they're fairly fairly quick dinning the biggest trouble is getting the zipper you have to pull around and you always can most of us need a hand all of us don't I certainly do it's the shot of uh a sunset again we we really enjoy the sunsets and sunrises as you've always heard uh whenever we have a Cloud Mass sticking up into the atmosphere it uh it's a beautiful site this is a shot uh during re-entry taken from Vandenburg Air Force Base they tell us this is about 150,000 ft up so that's quite a camera they've got down there here we are coming down the outer Glide slope uh getting ready to land on the runway Edwards 22 we do so much training in the shuttle training airplane that once you get down below about 15,000 ft you feel like you've been there 100 times before it's very comfortable situation the only difference is a wind noise of course in the shuttle training airplane you have the engines running all the time even in reverse and it's a little bit noisy and you don't have that of course with a shuttle so you can hear the wind noise we're very interested in doing a braking uh evaluation which is why we landed on the runway and we wanted to follow uh our normal braking profile file and put about 25 million foot- pounds into each of the uh main brakes main gear brakes and we hit that very close I think we had 22 million in uh the left side and 29 million foot pounds in the right side so it was a very successful test and it it responded quite well we were very pleased with the brakes since it was so cool outside about 40° we elected to keep the uh launching entry suits on instead of trying to struggle out of them down in the mid deck after we landed it's really crew preference what they want to do uh when they get uh on the ground