STS-30: Postflight Press Conference

welcome to the sts3 postflight crew press conference our time is somewhat limited today as we have a press conference planned uh with Admiral truly in Washington at 2 p.m eastern daylight time but first things first uh we're here to talk about uh shuttle mission sts3 and the successful dispatch of mellan on my right the crew of Atlantis Dave Walker Ron gravy mark Lee norm fagard and Mary cleave Captain we have a film that we put together with the help of the real good TV and movie folks here at JSC starts with our traditional NASA logo here we are getting ready to go out to the pad in our launch Escape suits which are relatively comfortable at this point because they're been cooled down pretty well nice day it was wonderful to see so many folks there to see us off and we had a very pleasant trip out to the pad here we picking up with the launch sequence as a result of our first scrub the attitude in the cockpit was actually relatively relaxed of course there's a limit to how relaxed you can be when someone lights off that big torch beneath you here's the Orbiter going by the launch Tower clearing the tower you see the Orbiter of the vehicle roll to place us in a heads down attitude and to to align the vehicle in the proper aouth for its Ascent phase here's some a sequence taken out the overhead window using the handheld camcorder we'll show you a little more of that later on continuing on up in first stage as Dave mentioned we were wearing the launch Escape suits this time around they provided a little more acoustic insulation and it it seemed a little quieter to me than my first flight I think that was shared by the other crew m members that had compared it to previous launches the next sequence will be the IUS deploy once you get on orbit uh we got the pay bay doors open and we took a good look at Mel and it was good to see that it was in the same pristine condition is when we uh took off we started uh the elevation procedures for the deploy and inside once we got on orbit we had to reconfigure a number of systems for on orbit operations uh Dave reaching back to one of the overhead panels and Norm helping them out and shortly after that we started into the procedures that we use to deploy uh the IUS principally it's the uh the panel in back of me and over to the right of Norm once we elevated up to 29° and then on up to 52 degrees for the deploy we went ahead and threw the switch and sent mellan on its way uh it comes out of the payload Bay at about half a foot per second and during the first minute we just sit there and watch it leave the the Orbiter Bay we're in free drift uh as far as a shuttle is concerned and the way it is deployed as you know is a super zip it's a mechanical or a metal band around the I that is separated and several Springs send it uh from the payload Bay uh I us here it's flowing it's it's a very very reliable upper stage we used it several times and it put a melin on its trajectory uh the attitude was good and it was wi 3 m/ second of where they said it was going to be which is pretty remarkable uh performance so it's been a real Workhorse of the Space Program uh especially return to flight after Challenger and right about this time you'll see the rate pick up of the payload it's when we put a minus X burn in to the Orbiter it separates us from the payload and that's the last maneuver that we do until 15 minutes after deploy when we go ahead and do our separation from the IUS this is a shot taken out the uh overhead window uh closeup view of I it's about 4 to 500 feet away when we finally do our burn it's about 1,00 to, 1500 ft away and this is the the business end of the I we're looking at right here inside the gold insulation is the I Sol rocket motor and this is when the solar rays deployed they deployed 10 minutes after the IUS was deployed in connection with the RCs system on iOS being activated and this is a nice shot we got we initially thought that Venus was going to be too close to the Sun for us to even see but we didn't realize till we got up there and follow it several times after Sunset we could see uh Venus trailing the Sun at the Terminator so we got a picture of Venus uh Sunset and down in the lower portion you see some of the clouds that thunderheads that had built up we had a mid deck experiment called a fluid experiment apparatus which you can see here my hands are inside of this it's a little furnace we were growing indium crystals it was really an excellent mid deck for us to work on we changed out samples and actually interacted with the science here's an example of the crystal um the rougher uh section to the right was done at a lower temperature than this stred section which was melted at a higher temperature so by adjusting the wattage we could adjust the temperature which this indium was being melted if you get it too high it'll break if you get it too low it doesn't melt through so it's sort of touchy and actually the wattage was different on orbit than it was um On The Ground by about 10 watts we controlled it with our little experiment computer which worked great different floppy disc for each experimental run we perform a number of medical experiments each flight this shows Mark getting censored up for one such experiment which looked at some physiologic parameters I believe like uh heart rate and that sort of thing and in this scene you see see Mark and I getting ready for a pre-breathe when we do space walks to avoid bends we have to breathe pure oxygen for a while Mark and I were the spacewalk crew members if we had to do something like that and for operational reasons to shorten up that pre-bath we like to lower the cabin pressure to 10.2 PSI and we plan to do that on future flights so to test all of that out and see how the cabin behaved we dawned the helmets in the cabin and we actually did the 1hour pre-breathe As the cabin pressure was is being lowered from the normal 14.7 down to 10.2 PSI and uh I'm over there checking out and making sure that our oxygen is actually on we also have laptop computers you can see one of the ones we carry here the pgsc and you can see what that screen looks like they're very useful for experiments and for keeping track of where we are around the world for Earth observation purposes this sequence T picks up with some of the typical on orbit operations this is me in the pilot seat checking out some systems is in conjunction with the depressurization to 10.2 PSI cabin pressure that Norm talked about here's Mary at the overhead Windows this is our primary vantage point for Earth observation photography here's some pictures of some thunderstorms approaching Sunset one of the experiments we had on board dealt with the photography of lightning and here we are getting ready to set ourselves up for that here are some lightning flashes as seen by some of the cameras in the payload Bay there's a nice one coming up here shortly there it is there's a rather large lightning discharge back to P to flight deck operations this time we're entering a maneuver to put the shuttle in a new viewing attitude here's Norman back of me entering some data into the onboard computer the portable computer that is Mary again at the F station with one of our 70mm cameras there a little example of some of the earth OBS these are irrigation Fields circular irrigation fields in Saudi Arabia there are hundreds of these and some of these are very very large the diameter getting up to 2 to 3 km across they're very prominent when viewed from low earth orbit we are coming across Baja California sunglint in the sea of Cortez and panning down to the southern tip we all got a chance to take a lot of photography on this Mission and that's a lot of fun to do and in addition it's useful to a lot of folks uh geologist uh people who do cartography and ocean oceanographers for the two Floridians on board Dave and myself we love this shot uh you can see Alligator Point in Tallahassee there for a while some of my old stomping grounds and panning down the peninsula it things are just very prominent lake okobe is very prominent there you can see all of the Miami area and that's a huge area these days with nearly 12 million people that the state has uh in addition to the Motion Pictures obviously we took a lot of Ste photos and while this is a camera view the fact is that with a naked eye you can see almost everything that you can see in this view this is a picture of the cape and you can see the shuttle landing facility the two launchpads including the one from which we had launched just a few days before the Florida Keys just a beautiful view and you can certainly see the Metroplex area there the metropolitan area of Miami and of course Lake okachobee coming into view I really as a Floridian love these kind of pictures and we had it seemed like all the passes we had over Florida during the mission were like this very few clouds and it's almost like looking at a map except you don't see any of the boundary lines as we go to the east of course we come to the Bahamas a nice place for a postflight trip we uh sort of shared doing the the food cooking duties that whoever got hungry first seemed to be the person that would end up cooking uh with a galley on board I didn't have one on last one the gley on board it made it an awful lot easier and faster to get meals prepared um but it's actually a lot easier in Zerg going up the stairs in 1G you have to be careful and take the trays one at a time you can just grab them and float up uh in zero g and we usually ate our me up on the flight deck here's Mark um with his VHS of r a high school t-shirt on or um sport shirt uh with a piece of beefer beef jerky just enjoying Zerg mark it was Mark's First Flight he's a rookie and he really had a good time you could tell it he was really enjoying being weightless he kept playing with his food I'm sure his mother wouldn't want him to do that but he kept playing with his food and now you can see here all the bags that's re-entry morning that's all of our suits uh re-entry Escape gear that was packaged up in these bags before we unpacked them you can see it took up a lot of space down here a lot of times at work I feel like I'm running around in circles and so I tried actually running around in circles and it worked up there and it was a lot of fun there's something about zero g that makes even adults regress we were always told not to play with our food but the fact is you can get such interesting effects now the fish crackers that we have there in the plastic bag are primarily for eating but interestingly in that plastic bag they really almost did look like a pack of live or a school of live fish uh ultimately however you have to remember that they're there primarily to eat and there go a school of them and just like Predator fish you can't resist and then you got the problem of course of getting those things out of the air before they drift off and we'll introduce the crew Ron gravy and then having some difficulty getting through there as he's Tangled Up in all the wires and cords and inevitably seemed to be in the way Mark Lee and I think I'm next here and I get a little Tangled Up in the cords as well but there's always someone there to grab you if you do get lost in space and in our Persona as Finn and oay we try to outdo Hans and fr with their little girly legs and do our pump you up act and now Mary CLE nice aerobatics thanks and dat okay we thought our last day on orbit would be a pretty easy day we're going to do some more uh Crew movie and Earth OBS type of uh video work but we ended up changing out the computer and this is a real good shot in the avionics Bay where we had to work it's it was pretty tight but being in zero g uh there were no real pressure points so it was pretty easy to stay in there for a couple hours and do the work one of the biggest problems is housekeeping as we brought out each one of the wire bumbles we made sure that it was marked correctly U Mary and I both checked them to make sure that uh we when we put it back together uh we put it back right would have been pretty embarrassing if we would have got the right cables hooked up and uh so we marked everything we put it in bags uh all the screws and bolts float around so we had to we had to make sure that we kept track of all of those and once we got it back in in Mary's showing here torquing down the bolts each one of the bolts has specifications this was 100 in pound that we had to do these two and there were a couple other eyebolts so we had to go to 30in PB uh once they were in place then we hooked up all the electric connectors we powered it up and the computer worked great after getting the computer replaced we got a good night's sleep got up the next day suited up to come home this is just a little demo of how that can be done uh it's fairly easy to get in and out of the suit and zero gravity although it isn't all that comfortable to wear and then we started downhill on schedule this is a picture of plasma interaction around the Orbiter which Mark was able to get with the camcorder there's some spectacular photography there of the plasma sheath discharging this is pretty rare photos then you can see out the window again with the same camcorder uh the Earth Horizon as we do the roll Maneuvers that allow us to guide ourselves down the re-entry track all of this went very smoothly there's a little bit of High mock Buffett and you can see that reflected in the slight uh shaking of the camera I said I said Mark actually I think Mary was taking all of these and Mark uh took the photos uphill and then finally back at Edwards Ron flew a little bit after we went subsonic and then I took it for the landing it was very smooth all the way down till we got close uh relatively close the last few th000 ft when the turbulence and the Crosswinds which we had expected uh since we were trying to get a crosswind uh developmental test objective done became U obvious the Orbiter flies very well through that sort of conditions here's another picture out the side window as we come down we had no difficulty approaching the runway some mild compensation for the crosswind and then and uh as you'll see lands pretty smoothly Ron is going to do the most important job that he has to do in the flight here in just a second which is to lower the landing gear which we're very appreciative because we switched runways late in the game we don't have as good a photographic coverage of the landing as we usually do but it's still adequate to see that the Orbiter is flying well on touchdown the crosswind becomes more evident and requires more compensation but still it's quite safely flyable we had a smooth soft touchdown a little bit of drift left and then back to the center line rolled out about 10,000 ft and stopped uh without difficulty and after having gotten out of our launch Escape suits and cleaned up a little bit we're ready to come back to Earth where uh Dale Myers and dick truly were waiting to greet us and where we could take a look at the Orbiter and make sure that it was indeed in as good a shape as we had hoped it looked fine and we were happy to be back after what was very exciting although to our mind too short a flight we would have been happy to to stay longer and we'll be happy to go back when the next opportunity presents itself