STS-37: Postflight Press Conference

good morning welcome Johnson Space Center and the STS 37 postflight crew press conference I would like to introduce Commander Steven Nagel to my right and turn the program over to him thank you Barbara it's good to be back with you again I would first like to uh reintroduce to you the crew members that made this flight uh look easy if it did because they're certainly the folks that made me look good during the flight to my right is Ken Cameron the pilot who also was a backup RMS operator the uh IV crew member for the two Evas that we did and also had uh charge of several secondaries to his right is Linda Godwin our ms1 whose primary responsibility was the deployment of the grow with the RMS and she did a fantastic job of that to her right is Mission specialist number two Jerry Ross who in addition to the min duties on the flight was our uh ev1 crew member and conducted both of the Evas and to his right last but not least is J apt Mission specialist 3 who also was a key participant in the Evas with Jerry as well as doing many other things on the flight now we put together a uh short movie that we want to run first of all which is a synopsis or summary of the flight so we'll we'll run that and I think you'll see at the outset of this film uh the introductions have gotten a lot better from the the film that I had on the last flight I was on certainly it's a quite professional looking introduction that's a a 9 second summary uh if you will a quick summary of the activities to get ready for the flight itself and it has a soundtrack with it so we'll run that and then we will narrate the rest of the the film itself if you want to run that please [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] on April 5th uh we got out of bed about 4:30 in the morning ate breakfast checked the weather got suited up and jumped in the astrovan to ride to the Launchpad I frankly didn't have a lot of confidence we were going to launch that morning it was raining at the time but the weather cleared and off we went after what was a textbook countdown and a very short hold the uh liftoff was I might say entirely nominal and entirely exciting the uh engines uh started at T-minus 6 seconds followed by SRB ignition and roll program to a direction of du East off the pad the vehicle it's 4.5 million pound stack with Orbiter tank and srbs continued to accelerate upward and uh going faster and faster through ever uh uh decreasing density air we approached the point of Maximum Dynamic pressure about Mach 1 and here you can see a shock wav standing off the uh uh frustums of the solid rocket boosters the uh first stage continued for approximately 2 minutes in which time the solid rocket boosters had expended all their fuel and they were jettisoned into the ocean here you see the boosters being separated and as they continue to burn out they would uh parachute back into uh the Atlantic Ocean for recovery and Analysis main engine burn continued for a total of 8 and a half minutes at which time we achieved our moo velocity On Target and uh set ourselves up for ohms to burn and arrival on orbit one of the most significant events that we perform early uh after getting into orbit is the opening of the payload bay doors which you're seeing here not only is this sign ific for us to set up shop and to be able to stay on orbit but it also provided us with our first uh very beautiful view of the Gamay Observatory back there in the back end of the bus and that's the prime reason we were there and we were all ready to go to work the opening the doors also gives you an opportunity to use those aft Windows to take a look at some of the Earth's beautiful views and this was an early one as we came across uh Northeastern Africa on flight day two we set up some preparations for deploying the Gamay Observatory those were three main types one was getting uh the Gamay Observatory all checked out in cooperation with the payload operations Control Center and godded space flight center in Green Belt uh the second was to prepare ourselves by pre-breathing pure oxygen so that when Jerry and I went down to 5 PSI in the suits we wouldn't get the bends the third Was preparing the suits for the Eva and Jerry's starting that U here we checked out all the suits in case there was a contingency Eva um on the third flight day here Linda had grappled uh the they grow with the arm and here we are preparing to release the latches which hold the Gamay Observatory into the cargo bay we are releasing the uh fourth and fifth of those uh latches uh after we checked out the pocket checked out the systems as much as possible uh and Jade released those latches the uh I used the arm to start lifting grow out of the Bay now this is a 35,000 lb payload the heaviest we've ever uh moved about on orbit with the arm and while it doesn't weigh anything it has all those properties of mass so you have to move it very very slowly except time seems speed it up a bit when you're actually doing this in the F flight deck of the Orbiter uh so you can see there all the appendages are still Stow the arrays are folded up like accordion on the left and right side and you can see uh the end of the High Gain antenna dish underneath there still folded up we moved it straight up out of the bay uh to what we called a low hover position and then put the arm into an automatic mode that basically just uh moved it a bit in Translation but most L pitched it over about 110° and uh once we got the arm up to that position that was where it was to have stayed until a release Here you see it after the First Solar aray has uh been deployed and that went just like clockwork matter of fact the whole arm Ops worked very smooth and we were on the timeline here the other uh the other solar array you see actually in the process of being deployed and the next uh the next step in the deploy process after we maneuvered to an attitude Steve did that to start charging these was to uh to deploy the High Gain antenna boom once we realized that the nominal and several uh other attempts would not release the High Gain antenna boom it was time to uh begin preparations for the Eva means of unlatching and deploying the boom here you can see Steve assisting Jay with his lower torso assembly while I was in the airlock helping to prepare Jerry who was already uh inside of the hard upper torso of the suit the uh Eva was one that we had trained for and uh prepared thoroughly for grow was designed for a lot of Eva work to be uh done on it and we performed a unscheduled or quick response Eva to uh take care of a problem that uh someone fortunately had uh foreseen here you can see the two crew members exiting the airlock to begin their work well as Ken said we had thoroughly trained to uh be prepared to react to spacecraft contingencies such as this and uh we were uh out on the spacecraft very quickly uh surveyed the situ ation did not see anything that should have been causing the boom to hang up and with some uh relatively easy Force inputs we're able to jostle the boom free uh analysis now says that probably there was just a little bit of thermal cover on the boom that was hanging up on some of the spacecraft structure I think at this point I I yelled gleefully it's free it's free uh as far as I was concerned when that boom came free that made my flight for me it it was the only reason that uh that we went on in this spacewalk and with a successful freeing of this boom uh we then translated over to the other side of the spacecraft where Jay and I completed the task of putting the boom into its on orbit position you can see this other view now uh I'm in a foot restraint and Jay is supporting me and watching uh my legs to make sure that we don't do any damage to the spacecraft as I very slowly and gingerly rais the boom up to full deployed position and then with a wrench was able to drive a uh mechanical system over Center which locked that boom into its onbit position then Jay and I uh quickly left the spacecraft so that the pck could turn on the spacecraft transmitters and receivers and fully check out the spacecraft in preparation for release and during that time uh both JS you see here and and me in the other window had a chance to come up and uh say hi to the folks inside and see what they were doing I think they were eating at this time Jay if I remember right while we were outside working too busy we're saying hi through the window to them there well some point after that uh matter of it was a good bit of time later the arrays we moved it back up to the release position the arrays were fully charged uh the pock finished testing out all the systems it looked really great we were ready to release grow which we do by opening the snares on the arm and very carefully backing away so it's not to uh provide any rates on it although a 35,000 payload is pretty stable up there in space that's what we found out uh we waited and as soon as the arm was clear uh Ken called that to Steve when the arm was clear uh of course it was called to me we just reset the digital autopilot and uh put some pulses in to move slowly away from the grow it it appeared to be as slow as you see in this film so slowly that I checked our displays to make sure it was the right rate but it was about a half a foot of second which is just a slow Drift Away there's a little thing you see fly by in this picture which caught my attention at to it was a piece of debris in the lens of the camera itself which the first time I saw it I thought there was a piece of something coming off the the orbit or the spacecraft but it wasn't of course we slowly drifted away and uh watched it go away from us and then set up for two more separation Burns uh the second of which was about 22 or so minutes after this first one and it was out of plane a couple of feet a second just to get out of the orbital plane of grow here you see it going away and the third was called a pag grade separation burd which got above and behind the orbit of grow uh and then later we came back to within 8 miles of it for a separate test here's a just a shot around the cabin uh you'll see a lot of cameras over there on the left side and we took a lot of pictures of the ground on this flight with Hasselblad 70 mm and also the big one you see is the AOL linhoff which we fly quite a bit uh the the flight deck uh was relatively uncluttered as we pan around to the right hand side you'll see our hamshack and uh we're all licensed amateur radio operators although I have to say Ken is hands down the most experienced so he was the senior Ham on the flight and he did quite a bit of operations through the equipment you see just a few cables over there on his side which he kept uh quite well under control I might add and back on the other panel our our recording devices two Orbiter vtrs and a a separate one that we flew we had a list of uh secondary experiments and tasks too long to elaborate on here for you but this is just an example of one of them little air sampler that we would change positions on each day I chose all the hard experiments to do like this for myself all I had to do is reset it and log log a time that I did it uh Jerry and I worked on another uh one of the mid deck experiments that we had it's it's acronym was share it was a very small abbreviated version of a heat pipe that uh they hope to be able to design someday for large space structures and the idea is you move fluids around by methods that are supposed to work in zerog such as wedding and capillary action but problem we keep seeing up there is uh we get a lot of bubbles in these things and they don't settle out without gravity uh to make them rise to the surface and so we just did some more work on them on transferring fluids around and a couple of test articles that we had and were're able to send down uh some direct camcorder video to the ground to show what we were doing at the end of a successful deployment of our primary payload and Eva as you want imag imagine our Spirits were very high so much so that we decided to celebrate that evening by having dinner on the ceiling and uh dining in the mid deck is uh quite an experience we're all in different orientations and as you can see that uh we were quite informal and in fact table manners were somewhat optional uh dinner was uh very good food on board the space shuttle is excellent we had a good Galley and we all sort of pitched in whoever was free uh took over the uh the duties of preparation uh when we got uh to the end of the meal Jerry provided the dessert and he dispensed the malted milk balls here very equitably I thought however his aim was sometimes off actually we had uh very little time on Orbit on our timeline and uh it turned out that the few moments we did have to relax were very precious on the fourth flight day we performed uh the planned Eva for this Mission which has a principal objective to do flight test on six different ways of getting around large space structures we had um the idea that this was going to be 5 and a half years before we did this Eva not about 12 hours since the last one uh but it made it just as sweet nonetheless here we are doing one of those types of translation methods and that's where when you put your feet in a cart that is able to slide along a rail and prop Yourself by hand motion we were testing whether you needed one or two hand rails to do that it turns out it's very easy to move along you can give yourself a couple of poles and go all the way to the end of the bay uh we constructed this rail all the way down towards the flag there at the end of the bay after gamr Observatory was deployed uh the second method that we tested uh on orbit was a kind of a railroad hand car that you can see uh in uh this view of course one thing most people don't realize right off is half the Eva is going to be at night and uh visibility was excellent we had no no difficulty and some of these tests I don't even remember if it was day or night um that uh that worked well and we also tested a new type of uh leg restraint device um that the engineering community here at the Johnson Space Center had developed the third method was a kind of motor generator set in which the operator hand cranked a generator and the electricity thus produced was transmitted to a motor down by the foot restraint again that worked very well we found some surprises all of them good uh these work much better in zg than they do on the ground proving again the value of flight test uh for any of the space station gear and this for space station or any large space structure we learned quite a lot not only here but of course in the uh shuttle heat pipe radiator experiment that Linda just described in the mid deck another method of moving around that we wanted to test was a way of keeping your safety tether along with you and making sure sure that uh you didn't have to tether to a point way at the end of the truss on a large space structure uh I'm holding here what we call the tether shuttle which was uh the transport mechanism for my safety tether in this test uh we also used it to move around here we are ingressing the foot restraint on the uh remote manipulator arm Lindy had maneuvered it down to where uh we could put the foot restraint in there and use it as kind of cherry pecker and one of the objectives of the Eva was to find the most efficient ways to use the remote manipulator arm as a work platform uh in the construction that we'll be doing from the shuttle uh in the future turns out it's an extremely stable platform uh it moves very smoothly uh I keep telling before the flight I told Linda that was operator technique and we must have buttered her up good because she did great it it was outstanding it's a great way to move around it's a great way to do uh work and it gives you some spectacular views of the shuttle that I think you'll see in some of the uh slides uh we also at the the same time that uh we were doing this we're testing how much force an astronaut can exert to free a bolt uh how much uh loads he then puts into structure so that sophisticated engineering folks can figure out how strong the structures must be here Jerry and I swapping places on the manipulator foot restraint uh which we did uh near the end of the second Eva and uh this activity brought to the close what we call the Eva return to flight and it uh it was the first set of Evas in 5 and a half years but it sure won't be that long again we're getting ready to do uh the next Eva mission in April of next year after that HST repair and then moving on to Space Station construction uh we were very fortunate during the flight we had a lot of cloud free areas that we were interested in observing from space and we were able to shoot a lot of uh film and video out the windows as well as a lot of still pictures and this is one of the scenes uh coming up on the uh Middle East over the area of Kuwait and I guess it's we could very vividly see from the shuttle the unfortunate occurrence of all of the uh the oil fires down there and the smoke smoke plumes and just the Big Smoke clouds that were being formed here's a pan across Southern California as we we flew by uh the white you see near the top of the screen is the snow on top of the Sierra Nevadas I guess they've gotten near UH 60 to 75% of the average snowfall all came late in the spring the sanen valley is the left of the scene as you come down coming into the the center now the v-shaped valley is the anope valley or the high desert in the center of that you can see Edwards Air Force Base or at least Rogers dry lake bed um it was a panoramic view these next two views are sped up to four times what we actually saw and you're going to have to stand or lay on your left side to actually see this one correctly uh what you're seeing here is the entire Southwest of the United States all the way from the uh California Mexico area across Arizona and the Grand Canyon area and in a little while you'll see a white spot about in the middle of the frame coming into the top of the field of view and that's White Sands New Mexico absolutely beautiful view of all southwestern United States there's a white Sand's coming into the field of view right now uh second view again sped up at the same rate is as we approach the southwestern coast of South America uh the Andes down there are just absolutely beautiful to look at uh you can see how rapidly the coastal plane of uh South America Rises into the highlands of the andies you can see the large uh salt pans out there as well as uh all types of indications of volcanic activity in a nut distant pass one of the secondary experiments We call we carried was an amateur radio station uh called shuttle amateur radio experiment we used this equipment which was all put together by amateur radio enthusiasts to contact uh students across the United States and share our space flight experience with them we also talked to students in Australia and people in uh uh South America and Africa as uh you could see we also uh got some uh gymnastic exercise we thought uh that some of the Maneuvers performed on orbit uh were uh skillfully executed we rated Linda 10 .0 for enthusiasm on that last uh rolling maneuver and we found that in general the zero gravity experience was one that we all enjoyed we uh adjusted to it very well and had uh quite a good time we found that we had skills and abilities that uh far exceeded those we had on Earth following uh the uh uh second Eva on flight day five we uh began our flight control system checkout this is when we begin to prepare for return to Earth and we exercise all the aerodynamic controls that we will need upon re-entry to the atmosphere to begin our transition from spacecraft uh to aerodynamic vehicle again here you can see the elevons being cycled through their full range of motion this exercises the hydraulic systems the actuators and we perform diagnostic tests on all of the displays and controls that we'll be using in the upcoming uh re-entry evolution for re-entry we get back into the uh orange launch and entry suits these suits are uh provide us with protection from uh reduced atmospheric pressure they provide our Communications and uh thermal protection and also uh something that might not be so apparent is that uh they provide anti-g protection in the form of a git which is very similar to what is worn on a high performance fighter after a week of zero g a single G or perhaps one and a half to two feels like a tremendous load and so we uh here you can see we take on additional fluid we actually load our bodies with uh prescription uh water and salt uh indicated or provided by the doctors so that we can begin to recover some of the blood volume which is normally reduced during uh orbit the deorbit burn was uh done actually we delay today as you all know so we came in on the seventh day deorbit burn was done over Africa uh nearing sunset and we flipped around and flew the whole entry at night uh to arrive at a sunrise over California and that's the view out the forward Windows you see the bright flashes on the back of Ken's helmet and as you turn the Linda turned the camera and looked out the overhead window back towards the tail that's actually looking down the wake of the airplane behind as the superheated air is Recon converging behind the airplane it was quite impressive to say the least there's the approaching Sunrise as we're uh just coming up on the California coastline and uh quite a beautiful site the entry was uh perfectly normal we had several program test inputs as they were called which are automatic inputs to the flight control system to perturb the Atlantis get additional aerodynamic data so we can fly it further forward centers of gravity uh we entered the heading alignment Circle and came around to land uh The Landing was a low energy Landing uh for a couple of reasons uh I got a little bit low energy on the heading alignment Circle and was slowly making it up and as well we had some rather unusual winds that were of high velocity down to lower altitude so that the two of those factors is translated into a a lower energy but safe touchdown you see one of the advantages of being able to carry a camcorder on a flight we've got some footage that we were never able to get before out the windows and uh Linda was holding that camcorder tethered and that last scene was looking and that scene there is looking out one of Ken's middle Windows looking forward into the side as well so you get a real feel for how it looks out the window uh we pre-f flared and lowered the landing gear at 300 ft and then came on down and touched down it was a real nice day at Edwards the temperature was around I think 37° when we landed and it felt really nice when we got out we landed on uh lake bed Runway 33 which is one that has not been landed on before by the by the shuttle there was a braking test which we did to apply a light Breaking this was the first flight of Atlantis with carbon brakes on the wheels as opposed to the brillium which we'd had before uh they worked fine there was there was no adverse effect of those brakes at all it felt real good so we rolled to a stop went through the post Landing switch list to power things down and get the Atlantis ready for a hand over to the ground crew uh and then got out we did the uh typical handshake at the bottom of the stairs and then a walk around to look at the Atlantis and uh at a glance and also from reports we've heard after the flight it was in real good shape it suffered very little damage uh to the tile both from the ascent and also from landing on a lake bed and uh that ended the STS 37 flight