STS-34: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon and welcome to the STS 34 postflight crew press conference we're going to have the opportunity this afternoon to look at some slides and home movies and hear from each of the crew members and uh following that we'll take some questions from here in at other NASA centers and with that I'm very pleased to present the crew Commander Don Williams and the crew of Atlantis thanks Jeff this was a great adventure for us uh you guys have all met Mike McCully and Franklin Chang and Channon lucid and Ellen Baker today we're here to tell you about the flight from our Viewpoint the Viewpoint of Americans in Space the launch and entry suits that we use now are not trivial we had about 15 or 20 suited Evolutions sometime during our training so that this whole process on launch morning went very smooth and very clear as you might look from the ground here it's wet this is our real launch day as opposed to the second one we're still very happy but we're looking at Blue Skies even though there there has been rain this next sequence is half speed I believe main engine start of course and about this time I turned to look at dawn and I said you didn't prepare me for this as the tower went by a great deal faster than I thought it would based on my simulator experience 45 million pounds or so of uh of machinery and 6 and half or so million pounds of thrust the roll maneuver there was a great deal more vibration here than I expected and I think it's probably acoustic it shakes your your body and your soul not too far into the flight the the main engines throttle back and as you reach maximum Dynamic pressure and there's some very good shots here of the of uh the um the waves created by the speed the maximum Dynamic pressure as we went through the area of Max Q and of course SRB SE this is another area that Don failed to prepare me well for in the simulator there's a flash bub or something that goes off when you get the SRB set and in the real life there's an explosion that goes off right in front of your face it was wonderful but it but it was surprising sort of like an 8 and 1 half minute catapult shot well you get up on orbit and then you look out and this is what what you see you see the earth going by but you don't have a whole lot of time to look out the window you have to get busy and there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to uh reconfigure the shuttle so it's ready to stay up on orbit and during the post insertion time we also had to get ready to launch the IUS to to launch an i us it takes all five of the crew members to do that Ellen here is working U configuring the communications so that uh the I would lock up on the right fre quencies Franklin was busy downstairs Franklin was sort of in charge of all our cameras and he had to um configure the IMAX camera to get it ready so that we could take the movies then we had to go back upstairs and get ready to launch the I us the first thing a visual thing that we had to do was uh get the I up to 28° and that all went very smooth then we had to uh we changed our positions a little bit inside the cockpit and Ellen traded out with Don so that Ellen was sitting up in the uh Commander's seat and and uh monitoring the uh RTG Purge and Mike was orienting the shuttle so to be in the right position and Franklin was busy with the cameras and then Dawn moved back to the back so that he would be uh ready to fly the shuttle away from the I as soon as we deployed it and then I was busy at the I panel back there in the AFT well we went ahead and we did the RTG Purge we uh pulled the umbilicals and we raised the U IUS in the Galileo on up to 58° then we had a few minutes to sit there and wait uh until the proper deploy time came deploy time came we uh flipped the switch we deployed it and it slowly went out of the uh payload Bay and at that time both Ellen and I sighed a great sigh of relief because we figured uh Galileo was not our concern at that point because we' gotten rid of it and we also figured that uh you know happiness was an empty payload Bay and we got happier and happier as the I and Galileo uh got went further away from us and then Don was getting ready to fly the uh shuttle and and maneuver it away from the I and Galileo stack once uh once Galileo was safely on its way and they told us that it was doing pretty well uh we got down to some other nitty-gritty Hands-On science on board the first thing that we had to do was to activate the SSB UV can uh which was H set up in the payload Bay and you can see how it opens a lid to expose the instrumentation on board to the Earth we had to do this with very accurate timing and with the help of the ground we could uh know exactly when to expect the sunrises and sunsets that that were important for this experiment uh Shannon and Don were busy also setting up their uh uh apparatus for the student EXP experiment and this was another clear example of the importance of the human being uh working with experiments that have interactive capabilities this is one where we used a lot of the fiber optics system to be able to diagnose some of the problems that occurred and between uh Shannon and Dawn and and um and the people on the ground they were able to troubleshoot the problem and eventually the two of them were able to get some very nice Crystal formation of I in the small filament inside the chamber uh Shannon was also busy setting up for the PM experiment the polymer morphology from 3M Corporation and that experiment worked pretty nicely we had a little bit of an initial problem with it but once again with the help of the ground and uh working all together as a team we were able to troubleshoot the problem and come back with some solutions for it we had a very nice interactive uh computer keyboard that allows us to have some insight as to what was going on in the uh in the experiment the GH CD experiment uh was also uh done later on uh just before we came back to be able to freeze up the state of of the Corn shoots before we deorbited we did a bunch of medical studies Ellen here is measuring uh the uh the uh circumferential loss that I had in my uh legs uh due to the fluid shift to the top of my body I lost about 2 Ines on the uh on the upper part above my knee uh and about an inch and a quarter or so on the lower part below my knee and it was uh almost immediate it was rapid fluid shifting due to the weightless condition uh here's a very unique way in which you can do examinations on board of the eye with a human subject the position is whichever way works best for you and these are some of the pictures that we down link uh uh almost live directly from from from the instrumentation that we were using and Shannon is here measuring the cored blood flow uh to uh Don's brain and here in this case it is measuring uh just a little bit dstream of that flow uh in coming into the brain in my in the case the subject is myself we did this kind of experimentation uh just about every day and uh it worked pretty well well the equipment that everybody used and everybody was Adept at was the cameras uh certainly one of the big bonuses of space flight is that you get to look out of the window and uh these two windows the overhead windows were the prime real estate and their uh little crew module uh anytime there was a free moment we would uh put our face to the window and watch the world go by and it's a a magnificent site we carry a variety of cameras normally uh few hustle Bloods with a variety of lenses and a variety of different films uh some nikons again variety of different films variety of different lenses we have the payload Bay cameras uh several different kinds of moving picture cameras and occasionally a camera like the IMAX so uh we're all studying to become Adept photographers and as I said uh this was the Prime real estate whenever it got a little bit dull or dark we'd ask Shannon to put on her sunglasses and they really brightened the place up again you can see a lot of features uh from space this is a dust storm if you uh you can look at the coast you see the uh the dust streaming off the coast of Northern Africa uh the Nile Delta the Sinai the Middle East uh truly magnificent um and I wish I could think of the right words to describe it and I'm certain almost everybody has said that that same thing and uh Franklin's old stomping grounds uh again we uh we were really pleased that the weather was good over Central America Franklin had told us we wouldn't see anything and uh we were real pleased to be able to take some good shots had nice weather over the Caribbean uh this is a shot of Cuba and we'll zoom in now on Guantanamo Bay uh but I was very amazed at the amount of detail that the human eye can see and certainly with a 250 mm lens uh you can see even greater detail uh you can tell by the wobbling it's it's hard to hold the camera still it's easy to see the cities go by at night uh it's sometimes hard to identify where they are uh we need the help of our computer to to do that but the weather was also another really astounding thing the enormity of some of the storms that we saw over Central America and Africa were really something uh we did downlink that picture of the Aurora uh in black and white and we're very fortunate that Franklin was able to capture it in color again the cameras are one of our Prime piece of equipment and we're all fairly uh Adept at taking the pictures this next segment is about living and working in space one of the two most frequently asked questions when we go out on the road and do public appearances and the one that most school children have asked me anyway is what's it like to be in space what's it like unfortunately this is probably one of the most difficult questions to answer since the word like implies a comparison and it's not like anything you've ever done before so most of us are stuck with describing the differences yet even there many of the words don't exist to tell you the story weightlessness how do you describe weightlessness when we live in a world where everything weighs something the ability to move about almost by thinking about it no up or down behavior and misbehavior of common ordinary things such as liquids elastic food objects watch the video with us compare it the things you do on earth look for the differences perhaps you can describe them to us eating is an adventure it works fine in just about any attitude may look a little strange but it works fine housekeeping is required the ship doesn't run entirely by itself on computers and automation yet so it's still requires things like cleaning up changing out the CO2 scrubber system for the air revitalization system and the days come to an end like days do here on Earth all the sunrise and sunset still occurs every 45 minutes when you're on board it comes time for the sleep period your clock runs to a different time than Houston time or New York time or California time or Tokyo time but it comes time to go to sleep these are the sleeping Arrangements it's a little bit like a camping trip except you never get out of your camper for 5 days so this is the good night Mike good night Ellen the day before entry was uh somewhat interesting in that all these suits that Mike described to you before the launch now have to be sorted out and climbed into on orbit the re-entry was spectacular as I remember it before a fire outside the window during the earlier part of re-entry a sense of tremendous speed as you travel across the surface of the Earth from 400,000 to 300,000 to 200,000 ft the rush of the ground coming up as a run as a spacecraft approaches the runway The Landing much like the simulator yet different a very responsive airplane a very real airplane a real magnificent flying machine the touchdown the roll out the nose whe steering tests and the end of an adventure for the STS 34 crew one which we'll never forget and we're happy to have a chance to fly with you to share with you today as you watch the end of this Mission and the crew eress all smiles on all five faces as you might expect at this point a very happy group greeting the associate administ administrator for space flight Dr Lenor and the NASA administrator Admiral truly who also seemed very happy a beautiful spacecraft designed engineered built by Americans for one of the finest programs in the world today we're very proud to be here and share it with you we hope you are also thanks