STS-39: Postflight Press Conference

hello welcome to the ss39 postflight press conference I would like to introduce the commander Michael El coats and turn the program over to him go ahead mik thank you Barbara gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce uh the rest of my crew to my right is my pilot blae Hammond to his right is Mission specialist Don mcmonagle next up is Rick hee Greg Harbaugh guy blueford and Lacy V we were extremely proud of this flight we feel like we accomplished all the major objectives on the flight and uh we're proud not only of the uh job the crew did up there working very hard for eight days but the people on the ground we think we had an outstanding team uh put together and I think it uh all the training hard work that had gone into the pre-flight planning and training paid off when we got up there with a few minor problems we had uh they were overcome uh quite easily I think and that we felt like we were part of a well-oiled machine and uh we'd like to extend our congratulations and appreciation to the people that work so hard to pull off this flight we have a uh movie that we put together some of the more interesting aspects of the flight that we think will describe the major highlights of this flight and if we could go ahead and roll the movie after the movie we have some slides uh we took some uh pretty interesting pictures we think uh on this flight and we're anxious to show you some of the the better shots well here we are coming out of the onc building even though we were the tallest crew ever to fly in space averaging over 6 feet in height we still look like seven orange billiard balls walking out there and even though it was a pretty much standard morning you I think you'll see in this shot of the the launch we had some unique combination of environmental conditions give us a shock wave from the uh you can see the condensation from the srbs igniting right here right behind the the stack it's quite impressive I think that's one of the only times I've ever seen that of course we lift off the pad and uh the hole of asent was totally nominal which was I was happy to see because meant the last 12 months of training were pretty much wasted uh here we go into the uh here we go into our 140° roll heading down down range and uh for about the first two minutes we're all just pretty much along for the ride as we uh ride the solids interesting view here of the shock pattern coming off the tank and about 2 minutes of of ascent we uh get ready ready to separate from the solid rockets and that of course all went nominal as well and then for that that point on to Mo we are riding the three main engines and just a real nice smooth ride uh gradually increasing the G up to 3GS uh at the time of main engine cut off beautiful day in Florida beautiful day to be flying up uh into space nice early morning launch once we got on orbit and we uh got to go from the control center Lacy and I went to work opening the pad bay doors the pad Bay was very clean uh it was a real Testament to the folks at the cape who did that sort of work uh the footage you're seeing here is actually sped up about 4 to1 ratio so the doors open about a quarter of the speed normally but all that went just fine and uh it was great to see the real Hardware out there that we trained so hard in preparation for operating and we were ready to go to work shortly after getting the doors open uh the blue shift started getting ready for bed on their first day and we got the arm out and scanned along the payload Bay here from the elbow camera in the a you can see AFP 675 here we're now come to the uh Spa carrier spacecraft and then as we uh Pan the camera forward in the payload Bay which is kind of to the left from the elbow camera view you can see a stp1 space test program payload that carried a number of different gas canisters at the top of this screen it's a little bit dark uh you can see the various cro gas release canisters which were lighter in the mission deployed uh ejected out of those cans and now we're scanning forward to the to the cockpit area the forward bulkhead we started collecting science data with 675 just a few hours after getting on orbit that was a shot of me in the cabin and I'm running the Cirrus uh infrared telescope uh through its paces here getting a little bit of a feel for how the gimbals worked not taking science data right here in the foreground you can see Ur with the uh logo and the American flag on it the uniformly Redundant array the X-ray telescope that we carried on the 675 pallet and back in the right side out of view is the uh far UV this is a shot uh from the Sirrus telescope uh the lowlevel light uh telescope showing the Aurora off the South pole we got some uh very spectacular shots of the Aurora and uh you can see that there in this shot here off on the left you can see a little air glow this is another shot once again of the Aurora and it's sort of like a uh dancing curtain of Lights uh very green lights uh glowing lights uh as we uh fly through it and if you uh on some of the film itth it gets a little reddish at the the top and in this shot you can see the air glow about 90 km above the Earth and we did an awful lot of study of that in addition to using the cameras available to us on the payload Bay we used or on the payloads we also used the Orbiter low light level TV in the payload Bay to take some pretty magnificent shots of the earth what you're seeing here the bright splotches in top of the picture are the Kuwaiti oil fields which are burning at this time and you can compare that to some of the clouds in the lower left where we had lightning that we were able to see from space you can see that the oil fires were burning uh very brightly this another aspect looking Northwest up the Persian Gulf at the Kuwaiti oil fires with Saudi Arabia and lower left and Iran and lower right at the end of uh Blue flight day four blue shift flight day four it was time to uh I get ready to deploy the ibss spacecraft we completed the Cirrus observations for the most part and uh here I am grappling the spacecraft and unbirthing it uh I maneuvered the ibss to its uh release position and handed over from there to Rick who uh actually executed the release the unbirthing process was very straightforward the release was extremely smooth as all of them have been with the RMS uh there was no tip off at all that we could detect imparted to the Spy spacecraft and it sat there just as steady as could be for several minutes until the the set maneuver could be performed wared well here's us inside the cockpit you can see that we were we had every camera available and every crewman available and just after the release uh we wanted to test out the attitude control system of the spa spacecraft so I commanded it through a maneuver that took about a minute that was slightly faster there there's a separation maneuver we tried to get a 2.2t per second uh separation velocity and we speeded that up about four times so it looks like we engaged Warp right there but it was much smoother than that it's a real pretty shot with the moon in the background here you can see the spa is looking back at the Earth you see the Earth background as we did the set maneuver and more or less Flew Over the spas on our way back to the farfield position the uh plume operation came next and we're kind of guy has the camera scanning around the cockpit we had every available C with a job to do and you pretty much had to stay in your spot as we talked about before the flight in order to do your job we had really each person had at least one job and sometimes folks had two jobs and the communications were interesting as we called back and forth across the cockpit to to pass data one way and the other and it was a it was really interesting to watch this whole thing in progress once we got to the far field uh Rick and uh Greg pointed the Spas back to the orbit in the bright spot you see there those flashes are the actual Orbiter uh executing some RCS Burns just another uh point of the cabin to show you how crowded and how busy we all were in these particular uh events this is the SS burn that we were one of our major objectives with the ibss and that flash was the ohms lighting off and you can see the the lightly shaded portion is the continuous plume for 20 seconds at the end of 20 seconds the ohms will automatically shut off and you'll see sort of a spurting effect as they do and then following that you'll see a bright flash which uh we think is The Purge the nitrogen Purge which expels all the remaining propellants out the out the lines through the nozzles after completing the SS burn uh we uh first plume burn we uh did what we call the Malarkey milkshake maneuver named after John Malarkey who came up with these procedures within 5 minutes we had to swap ends on the Orbiter here shown six times real speed where we pointed back in the direction from which we came and got set up for another ohms bur to take us back to the previous position and get set up for another series of ss plumes this is what it looked like at the nearfield you can see the RCs Jets firing here in this case you'll see four Jets fire at once and then the uh the MMS burn from the nearfield didn't show up quite as clearly as the farfield there goes the first of the three chemical releasee observation Subs satellites we didn't deploy them this quickly in Flight the first one was at about 3 and 1/2 days and the third was at about about a day later in the second you'll see the crow B observation looking at one of the rocket propellants in the canister it was a pretty spectacular view we're sorry we don't have color film of this we could see this very clearly on our monitors in the cockpit as the gas cloud expanded very brightly and then as you'll see here continues to expand and then begin to fade and then in the middle of the of the cloud you'll see the canister the now empty canister reappear that little Dot and in a second you'll see its Beacon flash it had a a beacon to help us find it there a star moving in from the bottom yeah that's right that's a star coming up to F The View there below the uh Civ gas release occurred also at the nearfield and this is one of the gases we released four different gases from within the payload Bay that was nitrous oxide the only one of the four we could see the uh rondevo itself took an awful lot of crew coordination with seven of us up there uh executing the Rendevous as well as the grow observation at the same time it took a lot of crew coordination and it was really a lot of fun to see it all come together and work in the Orbiter like it did in the simulator Mike got the spa spacecraft stabilized just out next to the Orbiter and it was easy task to reach over with the RMS and make the grapple here and uh once we had it grappled again we did another one of our interesting handovers and I passed the controls back to Greg what you're seeing here is uh one of the experiments we did with the ibss later on uh in the mission this is the out of field of view rejection where we uh simultaneously maneuver the Orbiter and the the ibss using the arm uh to approach and then back away from uh uh the Sun and what we're looking at is the sensor response as it approaches and moves away from the Sun this is actually a 4 to1 speed so you're actually see seeing it happen much more quickly it's a good example of the operational complexity that was uh designed into this Mission and how we used every facet of both the arm and the uh Orbiter uh early in the mission we knew we had a problem with uh one of the sets of tape recorders on the AFP 675 payload so blae and I performed a inflate maintenance procedure that was extremely well developed by the ground we we executed a procedure by which we uh spliced into a couple of wires to be able to send the data to the ground instead of recorded on board guy had to uh make sure this the FP 675 was safe before we and powered down before we went in there with all these wires and it's not a great feeling to cut into a wire when you're not sure you know totally sure U the results but we were glad to hear a few days later that uh they were getting great data and and uh it helped uh make that part of the mission stay alive and and continue working during the mission one of the things we participated in were a lot of medical tests because as we move into longer and longer missions we're concerned not only about how the body adapts to the space environment but how it readapt when you come back home and we participated as a crew in 25 different medical tests and as you can see there I'm wired for sound here Lac and I are changing out the lithium hydroxide canisters in our warp drive unit I mean our air cleaning unit and which purifies the aors for us to uh to breathe in and involved removing the treadmill and uh just basically we had a big storage uh volume of full of these these canisters we change them that twice a day just part of our normal housekeeping activities on orbit one of the many things that aren't advertised is things that we do to stay busy we didn't have a whole lot of air to ground uh time to show the crew in the cabin at one point they call up and say oh we've got a few minutes where we don't have to look at the payload can you show us something so I decided I'd uh give a little demonstration of how to prepare food and I think it was Kathy that said uh why don't you make a peanut butter sandwich and I had to laugh CU that's the one thing I cannot stand to eat is peanut butter but I broke out a tortilla and made a uh peanut butter and jelly sandwich fortunately Blaine will eat anything in everything so after I put it together and so forth I floated at to Blaine and he ate it right there while I was on TV and that's that's as close I've ever come to being sick on orbit as watching him eat a peanut butter jelly sandwich you need a little more jelly boss little more jelly next time but I I talked to a lot of schools and the children love to to learn how you eat in space and Compare Food and so forth and that Galley is just fantastic we had such a Quantum Leap from the uh early flights my first flight where we didn't have a galley and we had a metal food warmer the galle is just fantastic this is a shot of uh of Rick shampooing his hair doing an SS burn and we on our flight did 16 ohms Burns and you can see the effect it had in the cockpit throwing everything either one direction or another uh we also did some informal science experiments on board you can see here is a bubble of lemonade and a bubble of strawberry drink and the surface tension has the two bubbles bounce off of each other without combining in our first attempt to to try to make them combine Mike uh perhaps unknowingly had laid down the gauntlet there because he had said that they tried to do this in a previous Mission unsuccessfully so of course we had to demonstrate that it could be done and that's the first known uh Lemonberry juice in flight and uh I would uh strongly rem recommend that you not drink that stuff at [Laughter] home well as Greg put it everybody's got to have away to unwind and it was it was a tight fit but we you know it was kind of interesting to see how you spin about an axis and I turned out to be a pretty good subject for spinning maybe I'm just tall enough to fit in there Don popped his head out of a Sleep Station there to see what all the racket was I think he just gave up and discussed and closed his door I thought it was a bad dream well on orbit Don and I were scheduled for some other medical tests involving running and I couldn't figure out why I was sweating so much much but I guess it was this metal object and all these straps attached to my feet here but he seems to be having a lot easier time of it than I was and uh fortunately after 5 days I broke the treadmill and uh we couldn't do any more of that we we appreciated that here we here we are strapped in for entry I'm about to put my helmet on the entry was uh fascinating for me because we came right down the center of the United States over the heartland of America on a pretty clear day and going mach 20 at 200,000 ft uh is a fantastic feeling we could see the uh uh cities and airports and so forth Just whizzing right by we passed up an airliner you know I wanted to wave so forth and it was really quite a feeling coming in for entry we uh I think everybody is ready to come home after 8 days of working hard up there and when they said we're going to Florida instead of California the crew said okay whatever it takes we did a braking test uh as planned except for a Max brake pulse at 70 knots and uh I was surprised it slows down very quickly at 10t pers second squared the acceleration rate we didn't waste any Runway this is a shot of the crew coming out of the Orbiter I think we caught KSC by surprise on this landing and it took him about an hour to get us out and as we come down the stairs here we're sort of uh trying to get our land legs uh under us as we uh descend back and make the adjustment back to 1G at the bottom of the stairs we had a welcome from the management uh General McCartney was there as well as Bob seek and welcoming us back and we sort of expressed our appreciation for being back and this is a shot of the crew after completing 199 hours in space 134 orbits and a little over 3 million miles uh of travel