STS-4: Postflight Press Conference - NASA

flight uh four is the last of our flight test programs this shot of the underside of the vehicle stacked on the pad one of the most significant things at this point is that we turn this vehicle around from one flight to the next in something on the order of 3 months that kind of a turnaround rate was done in spite of the fact that we had all of the scrutiny and and all of the thoroughness of a flight test program and yet that same rate will carry us through the Ops era for the next couple of years you see a couple of cats in a pressure suit this is also the last time that you'll see anybody wearing a pressure suit or using ejection seats from now on we're going to be going in church sleeve environments come out to the Launchpad one of the things we did here was to as Hank mentions we get ignition on time much less than a second off the plan trajectory here you see the engines coming up to speed the engines are controlled in the final count by the onboard computers we verify that we have good main engines prior to ignition of the solids which commit you to flight just prior to this we had uh loaded the payload on the pad which is another first for this part of our our mission and that's going to be one of the ways we streamline the turnaround time for future operations what you're watching now are pictures that show the umbilicals coming away from the tanks these are the ones that are used to keep the tanks topped off keep them full and as a way of controlling the vening here the spacecraft is lifting off going past the tower throughout this part of the ride from this point on you're looking out uh Hanks window as we do our roll down range this this is the vehicle turning it launches with its tail to the South and then we roll to pick up whatever launch esouth we need in our case a 28 and half degree inclination orbit throughout this part of the mission I was very impressed that the ride on the shuttle is much like it was in the Saturn one of the major advantages or or differences I would say is that you have more acceleration getting away from the pad and the vibration levels are reduced we see the vehicle here going through approximately mock one you'll notice that the shock waves start to build up around the nose of the vehicle and the tanks you can see that quite vividly we're somewhere over 20,000 ft now and uh speeds building very rapidly this is the region of Maximum Dynamic pressure here's a view taken from the Pilot's window as we pop through the atmosphere it's very dramatic as you get out of the atmosphere and the sky begins to turn dark very rapidly 8 and a half minutes from liftoff where some 58 nautical miles high and uh traveling at just under 26,000 ft per second here's a view taken in orbit as we do one of the MMS Burns that I described to you earlier we did two of these Burns to get into the 130 mile orbit two more to Jack the altitude up to 160 then a fifth one to adjust the entry roll phasing here's a brief look at the operation of the continuous flow electroforesis system this is a prime example of an experiment or an operation that can only be performed in Zerg efficiently it must have the space environment the principle of operation is that biological materials assume their own inherent charge in the presence of an electric field and that serves as a basis for separating these materials this can only be done now in the laboratory and only very small quantities of of biological materials that can be used in the treatment of disease can be separated in this fashion it could be done with a static device but to increase the yields you need Continuous Flow the principle being to put the biological materials in solution pass them between the electrodes of an electric field the the molecules with a larger charge would then have the largest lateral displace displacement in the field as the flow proceeded now the big enemy of doing this on Earth is gravity gravity limits how much or how concentrated the solution is with the materials you're trying to separate because the solution must keep it in must hold it up and in gravity uh you get the concentration too high it won't hold it gravity also plays a part in convection as the fluid is heated by the electric field convection current set up which destroy the purity of the sample being gathered and also affects the quantity that you can uh separate in the space environment you can increase the yield several hundred times over what you can do on Earth and this is extremely important because then this allows us to to generate clinical quantities rather than just experimental quantities the big factor here is the cost to produce the same amount of material on Earth as we can produce in orbit under a comparable period of time would cost a fortune so space use of this type of device is going to reduce the cost and make the materials available this is the first of six flights flying this device under a joint agreement between NASA and the contractor our first results show that this device worked very well and the results are very promising in the future we may very well have factories producing biological materials using this same technique and again I say the importance is that it can only be done in a space environment where there's no gravity or very little gravity device has run little micro computer here with see the pilot uh making an input into that computer here's a shot of an upfire in Jet and side firing Jets this is the kind of firing we took the data on as I told you with the plume survey there's one of the small verer Jets firing we took that picture from the elbow camera on the RMS the RMS was utilized in in two days of our flight the RMS is a sophisticated device it works very much like like your own arm in which the brain computes the drive rates for the different joints to make the arm do what you want it to do in the same fashion the computer computes the rates with which to drive the arm here we see an example of how you can roll a payload about its own longitudinal axis yet not make it translate you can do the same thing in similar fashion by causing the payload to go up and down with respect to the Orbiter or we can make the payload go back back and forth parallel to the own axis as you see here without rotating the payload so it's a very versatile and useful too this is a an example of dawning the lower torso of a space suit I'm wearing a liquid cooled garment that provides cooling when you're outside the pictures are taken inside an airlock that's in the back of the of the spacecraft cabin on the midday the air loock is something we've never had before it allows you to go inside and the hatch you're looking at is an exit into the payload Bay where you have the vacuum of space inside you can go in in a shirt sleeve environment Dawn the suit check it out and then translate outside without having to depress the major part of the cabin the purpose for this exercise and sts4 was to prove that we had good Mobility inside the airlock and you've just seen me put my feet in a set of stirrups that are going to Anchor my feet so that I can simulate opening the hatch and the payload Bay this was in preparation for sts5 where two crew members will come inside close off from the cabin depress the air lock and go outside to perform an Eva here's one of the Prime reasons we go into space not to have fun but the presence of zero gravity imagine the applications of this we've already talked about one the seus in which we use the lack of gravity to do something very useful in in technology and production but you could also use this to say process materials in which it's important that the materials not touch a container with which that it's in lack of gravity also has some disadvantages in that you must somehow anchor yourself if you want to work in space here the kman puts his toes under the edges of the locker and notice he has quite a bit of fre Freedom then to move about without coming loose and floating around as you saw earlier another device we evaluated was this little foot Loops that he put his foot in just a little Loop hooks his foot under and then he's able to make some movements a third device we looked at are these little sandals with suction cups on the bottom we evaluated this uh for several days during the flight and found them to be uh very useful uh we probably still need to do a little more development on them but the concept concept is sound one of the devices we like the most on flight for improving morale was a treadmill it works just Exercise Works in space just like it does on on Earth clears your thoughts and makes you ready to charge again we had a harness that attached the lower Taro and those bungees cords there applied a force equal to the body weight so your legs were seeing the same forces they would see in one g on the surface of the Earth we also had a an electronic device to run off a battery you could attach to your ear loob was also attached the treadmill you could tell what your heart rate was uh how far you'd gone how long you'd been running this was a a a real morale builder for our flight to be able to use this one of the things we took a look at in our operational evaluation was some revised packaging of the food system in order to save weight and space on the spacecraft we have gone to dehydrating the food putting it in some plastic containers now Hank is on the left side of the picture putting water in to hydrate it uh you mix it up since most food tastes better if it's warm or if it's cold rather than ambient we have this uh aluminum thing looks like a suitcase it's actually a little portable heater put the food that has to be warmed in there and then we'll put it off to the side for uh 15 or 20 minutes and let it warm up at the same time we had a little refrigerator which we carried for the first time in this flight then we could put uh Beverages and things in there that would be cooled and uh you put it all together so that you have a hot meal with cool Beverages and it goes a long ways towards making the food a lot more flavorful and just as it does on Earth having a good meal does a lot to bring up morale and when you're working 15 16 hour days that's important this is a picture taken with a television camera in the moonlit night now the little dots you see off on the right side of the picture are stars the white area you see in the center and left is the earth that's a cloud cover and the white line that you see off to the top at first looks like the Earth's Horizon however we noticed some stars that went right through the Horizon and came down on the earth and uh before admitting we lost our marbles we observed it some more and determined that no what we're really seeing is the top of the Earth's atmosphere that's about 90 km up and that's one of the reasons that scientists would like to take their telescopes outside into space so that they can avoid having to look through that layer here and you can see two little stars in the top left corner of the picture that are just now about to go down and penetrate and they're hidden by the Earth that shows you that that really is the Earth's limb this is a picture taken at Sunset and as I keep pointing out the pictures that we see are never as Vivid as what you see in the real world we found the the colors to be brilliant Reds and blues and they changed with latitude and longitude as you go around the earth I think it gives you a chance to to observe things I think you can see the amount of aerosol like dust and volcanic ash that's in the atmosphere as it shows up and changes the colors this is a picture taken at Hypersonic speed with a telescope on the California coast and I think that's an illustration of the Precision with which our system both the the spacecraft and the ground have been able to pull off an entry the entry was uh very similar to what we've had in the past the one difference between this and the ballistic approaches is that now you have time to experience the transition between 0g and 1G here's a picture taken out of the Commander's window as he turns left coming around on the lake bed in the center right part of the window is the runway that was used on the lake bed for landing sts1 and two we're turning on around and coming in towards the hard surface Runway at the Edwards Air Force Base I think it's uh rather significant that in spite of the fact that pilot may experience a certain amount of vertigo and the transition to 1G weight effects but in spite of all that the system with its information and the training program we have allows you to make a landing that looks like this which is perfectly routine we've just passed over the aim we're pulling up the nose and here's where the gear comes down now you can see the runway approaching and from this point on you just sort of hold everything steady as you come up check the the gear is down it's always a good plan next thing you do is you come up on the runway and if you look closely I think you can see touchdown as it occurs right about there here's an outside view of the same thing Chase plane over on the left side of the screen the gear is coming down and this thing flies just as solid as a rock approaching the overrun now it'll touch down about 1,000 ft down the runway at about 195 knots about this point Hank calls out that we have 185 and it's time to drop the nose you can see the elevator is wiggling as it controls the rate of the nose coming down speed brakes are open and now we perform a braking test where we try to hold about 9t per second deceleration I think the fact that we can go out and do all of this in public is a real tribute to our entire system and at the end of the day probably the most spectacular part is the flight of Challenger on his way to join a fleet we're no longer going to be a ones ship Airline this is the asent uh liftoff for those of you who weren't fortunate enough to be there uh very fortunate from our standpoint but I understand from the folks on the ground it was one of the clearer days we've ever had you in Florida when when the solids get a hold of you right here you know you're going where those solids want to go and you hope that something keeps them pointed in the right direction because you're on your way the role as reported before was not disconcerting or confusing in any way you know that that's about uh a 90 Dee roll there as soon as you clear the PAD as Bose said we were kind of prepared for more shaking and clattering and vibration than we actually had we're approaching SRB SE here you see tail off they're the set Motors and uh as I say those cause it to Fall Away in the right direction this is a view of the uh of the track track in data relay satellite in the bay this is as we were elevating it from the stowed position to the 29° checkout position it moved a phrase I used earlier in the uh with management today was that thing just moved majestically it uh is quietly silently as a matter of fact and almost inexorably goes about its its thing this is it as it was moving up toward the final attitude 45° you can see on our protractor that was our minimum elevation angle once it got to 45 if everything else was okay that thing was going whether we got the 58 or not now that's the nozzle of the solid rocket motor and this is the instant of Separation as Don said we read had to kind of check the television view from this aspect to see that it was in fact deployed absolutely perfect deployment mechanically it came straight out of the ASC the Airborne support equipment with no rates just at uh again it it's 4/10 of a foot a second which isn't all that fast and now at about a minute after deploy as we thrust backward toward it and you're not sure the thing is really clear the Orbiter but that does cause you to pitch down also or away from the thing but it nevertheless it gets its attention when you're thrusting back toward a 17 or 18 ton piece of metal in the sky the white part is the IUS the the inertial upper stage here's where we started to uh to thrust toward it and Pitch down this is the FCS flight control system checkout we do it uh every flight on the vehicle that uh is story operating a camera to take data for the uh continuous flow electr fesus system experiment say once a joint venture between McDonald Douglas and Johnson and Johnson which they have every confidence is going to have direct earthborne application very shortly he's uh he was taking some photos of the the streams up there and down here he's uh getting ready to change out some samples Don was basically uh he was a housekeeper and you can see that he kept the a nice neat ship down here you know there not a lot of trash and equipment and items hanging on the lockers and on the bulkhead and and that really helped a lot and this was flight day two here while Bo was telling the world about the getaway specials they were mounted in those three canisters we did a antenna test which necessitated us getting Crossways to our velocity vector and then rolling at 2° a second we took some pictures of it and I tell you it was a little more impressive from on board than it is here but nevertheless it was a a welcome diversion from just going around the world with a payload Bay facing the Earth all the time this is on Eva day that's story and Dawn in the airlock beginning their pre-bath you know requires 3 and 1 half hours of pre-breathe on 100% oxygen to make sure or to have better assurances that we flushed nitrogen out of the system so folks don't get the bends when they're exposed to the lower pressures in the suit B was cleaning up the airlock and uh making sure that everything was ready for him this photo was taken through a uh no this is from the AFT TV cameras that's the airlock hatch being opened in preparation for airlock egress and this is story like a uh butterfly coming out of its crysalis I'll discuss the uh extra vehicle activity or The Space Walk the thing we wanted to test and evaluate there was our ability to do construction type work repair type work in the environment of the uh the shuttle Orbiter we wanted to check out our suits and the life support systems on the back that we call emus we wanted to evaluate way how we check them out before we take them into the airlock and depress and take them outside we did have three suits on board we want to look at our ability to move about in the payload Bay up and down the lons or up and down the long distance of the payload Bay and across the bulkheads for and a we want to look at our safety tether Dynamics the safety tether we wear to be sure that we stay connected uh to the Orbiter we want to exercise various tools winches and in summary our basic ability to do work constructive type work or repair type work in the environment of the Orbiter Don here is back at the IUS tilt table this is in the AF in he's using a ratchet wrench here to uh reposition some equipment a story mentioned before they their practice run through of the IUS tilt table Resto mechanism for which we have a an Eva procedure that's just kind of a gwis thing I tell you this this thing really does have a a Star Wars effect 65 ft is a long way back and it's a big vehicle and it's still surprising you look back you're in orbit you're in a spacecraft and a damn thing has got Wings in a tail it just it seems innocuous and and when those guys were in the back end of the vehicle they were far enough away and and everything just absolutely silent you know you're Gliding Over the Earth due to some some fortunate magic and and they're back there having a heck of a good time in this case and uh it really does have it's more star warsy than Star Wars I think except Star Wars spaceships have wings also this is as we were going down we we fortunate here that's the West Coast of Mexico just below guadalahara where it kind of bends from the southeast to the east Southeast so we were zinging right along the Mexican Coast which has no significance except I think it makes for a nicer looking picture than if you had nothing down there you notice on the fin the rudder is offset to the left a little bit up there that kind of surprised me it turns out in talking to folks afterward that the flight control system checkout leaves The Rudder Park to the left and uh it's nothing to be concerned about that's just what it does now those are all daylight scenes here are some with the with the uh the film compensates for the the lack of overall Illumination in the in the cargo Bay I think story mentioned that uh the helmet mounted lights were for all practical purposes essential and at the payload Bay flood lighting was not adequate to do your tasks sory here is using the uh Eva wench that uh is utilized for several different tasks this is on the Ford bulkhead and it's routed down to he just pointed to an exr Genie down there which is used only to provide a load on the uh on the line that we use here we're doing some suit Mobility checks kind of uh uh reach envelope determination suit stability and Mobility evaluation seeing if there were any objectionable uh lockups in the uh in any of the the bearings see if you could put it in one position where you wanted it keep it there so-called neutral point performance of the emus was just like the performance of the vehicle it was uh we've had some bad starts but uh they all they both work like Champs and this particular Evolution and we're very gratified by that also this is getting back into the airlock turns out we have a little work to do on uh the term story used is choreographing this Evolution and that that's a very good term I think is that uh as far as our procedures for getting out of and into the airlock this is on the last day of the flight when we had our impromptu uh conversation with a vice president we decided we were uh notified during the flight that we had the dubious distinction of uh of being the in average age the oldest crew to ever fly anytime anywhere these were taken from the TV photo Chase on return to Edwards you can see the weather was as good out there for entry as it was at uh in Florida for the launch this is through the HUD through the head up display the HUD was a tremendous asset I feel toward making what subjectively from uh from the operator's point of view that I thought was a a relatively smooth approach and Landing here we are in a flare preparation for landing Landing this almost counts as a Carrier Landing as you'll see in the next photo by an overwater approach here Edward dry like bed right uh we felt a little turbulence one gust on Final on the Final Approach and it just sailed right through it with with no crew response necessary uh the touchdown was nominal uh from my St Point anyway relatively smooth I didn't hear any gasps so you guys might all been holding your breath or something speed brakes are starting open our standard procedure as soon as the main gear on Deck I call speed brakes open and B manually opens the speed brakes to help impart some drag to it but anyway it's starting to come together folks the whole system is uh I we're on our way did feel good to be back on the ground again even though it was a tremendously exhilarating experience but that is just such a a huge impressive vehicle especially when it's sitting on the ground I cannot say from my own personal standpoint how pleased I was with the performance uh of this vehicle and I just can't say too much about this vehicle which demonstrates to me the maturity of the entire shuttle program the shuttle transportation system