STS-43: Postflight Press Conference

[Music] [Applause] [Music] he I wish we could stay up there 50 days so from a personal Viewpoint uh I I was happy that we went from 5 to 9 days it takes a big team to launch something like uh the pedis I us complex they're used in uh communication to the shuttle and the shuttle or in orbit and they're also used to process data from a lot of the NASA satellite such as the Hubble Space [Music] Telescope there's been a lot of things said about the ozone lay and what destroys it and what doesn't certainly I think it's well documented that it can be destroyed both by natural phenomen and manmade phenomena but the extent of the damage and how those things play against natural cycles in the ozone layer is not well [Music] understood lower body negative pressure in conjunction with fluid loading um has proved to be a more effective countermeasure than than fluid loading by itself um um with regard to orthostatic intolerance what that will cause is a stress on the heart roughly equivalent to one gravity um here on [Music] Earth I don't consider Mike a rookie on this flight he's a very knowledgeable person has been around this system and made very large contributions and uh I feel like he's flown two or three times [Music] [Applause] this was uh taxing into the ramp our second launch attempt uh getting ready to go for our mission and uh again as you saw there by that little bit of a lead in U a lot of things go on leading up to a flight and a lot of training and that was a little bit of a summary of it just to try to capsulate that time frame of the flight this is about uh 7 a.m. uh we're getting our launch and entry suits on and uh getting them all checked out before we go out to the vehicle it's going out to the crew van I think if I could remember the time about I'd say 7:50 in the morning out on the pad and about this time during the count uh you really start uh putting your thinking hat on on uh cuz you got to go to work and uh main engines start running and we run them for about 6 seconds the computers make sure they're good and all the smart people figured out how to make all that work and that's amazing to me that we have people in our country know how to do that and bang boosters light up uh boy those people with thall have been doing a great job as far as I'm concerned with all their new processing techniques and all our new safety inspections in fact I think the first 2 minutes 10 seconds of this ride is the safest time during that time frame it doesn't bother me at all I've watched those people at thol really proud of them and we sure had a good ride here Mike right now it's probably about a minute and a half into uh Ascent getting ready for the solid rocket Motors to separate it's kind of a nice shot here you can see the shock wavs on the Orbiter and on the external tank we pushed the limits this time a little bit more of the envelope went to a higher Dynamic pressure than we've been to before at this point it's probably about 2 G's two to two and 1 12 G's the ride is a little bit rough on the solids it Smooths out uh quite a bit once you get rid of the solid rocket Motors there they go it's another close-up shot of the SRB set that makes your front windows in front of bakes and I go opaque they literally just go Opa very uh bright flash when they uh come off there the of course the rockety engines keep on running and uh boy those Motors are complex and uh I see all those people and they do a great job making those engines run our major activity on the first flight day besides the launch was to launch the tedris IUS complex here we are we're up at 58 degrees and getting ready for uh uh the deploy inside the cockpit there's a lot of activity it takes all five crew people working together to launch something like this Jim and I were the primary uh people that were involved in checking the um IUS systems making sure everything was uh ready for deploy and um Mike's job was to make sure that the um shuttle was in the proper attitude for the deploy David was the person that did all the Fine Photography and it's his work that we're looking at right this minute and then um John's job was just to make sure all the rest of us were doing our jobs and when we actually did the deploy it looks like it's coming out sort of in slow motion it's not that's uh real time and the thing that always surprises you is how close it gets to the vehicle and we were all looking out and commenting on how close it was to the vehicle and then John puts in some impulses to move the shuttle away from the I and you can see this in just a minute as we begin to uh uh move away now to do a deploy involves not only the crew people inside the shuttle but involves all the people mission control that are uh monitoring systems it also involves people out at Sunnyville uh who are monitoring the iOS systems involves people at BO it involves the people up at Goddard who are looking at the uh tedra systems so you can see it's a huge teamwork of people a a big network of people all across the United States that are involved in launching something like this uh uh satellite now our job in the as the shuttle crew Ended as soon as we got the um uh satellite out of the bay and then uh a little bit later as we backed away from it but then people had to continue to monitor as the I was bringing the uh Tris on up to geosynchronous orbit now after we got rid of our major payload then the activity sort of focused down in the mid deck we sort of looked at the mid deck is the place where we do our eating and our sleeping and it's also our laboratory that we have uh on orbit and here I am working with um uh a biomedical manufacturing uh module and this module had flown before and it's going to fly several more times and it has uh uh several syringes uh and then you can put in different samples and the samples that we had we were growing different types of uh cells and cell culture to see if they would manufacture uh different amounts of enzymes that would be of use in a later type of manufacturing process and the mid deck is very very valuable asset that we as a country have to do all these types of uh experiments as Shannon has indicated we the we turned the shuttle into a laborator flying laboratory after we deployed the IUS tedris satellite and here you're you're seeing us perform Shannon and I are performing one of about a dozen physical science type experiments we had about an equal number of medical uh supp supp objectives or experiments on board this particular one is a setup for uh an optical coupler that that actually transmit transmits video and audio signals through fiber optics uh and through through uh video couplers in the windows that you see here uh this is really a test to find out if uh if it's practical to use uh fiber optic technology to transmit uh audio and and video type signals uh in and out of the cargo bay from the uh crew compartment of the shuttle you're seeing whole Maze of fiber optic cables here that I'm manipulating there and uh and also the audio and video signals that come from the TV monitors and go to the videotapes that we have on board the shuttle uh Shannon and I did a series of experiments using this equipment and uh took about an equivalent of about three hours of data uh on videotapes to bring back for analysis to find out how good a quality we could maintain and what the practicality is of doing this in the shuttle this is another experiment where we uh undertook to analyze the uh uh the propagation of flame fronts in solid materials in this case of an ashless filter paper that's inside a containment uh I'm igniting it here with my with push button you see the flashing light in a moment you'll see the flame uh you'll notice that the flame is round it doesn't point up like a candle flame in zero gravity a flame uh forms a sort of a ball flame front as the paper burns uh we've got a series of thermal couples attached to the filter paper uh above and on the paper to determine what the nature of flame propagation is in zero gravity okay this is a view of the payload Bay and on the right side you can see Sher Sher was the uh uh space station heat pipe Advanced radiator element it's a mouthful but uh we took that up it consists of two heat pipes which you can see here that uh we tested uh for use on Space Station these uh would reject heat on Space Station you could use uh many of these elements in in a row basically and uh the advantage is there's no moving Parts no pumps involved um if they were to take a meteorite hit uh the whole system would still work uh unlike uh the systems that we now use on the shuttle for instance uh the results of the test were excellent it worked uh just as uh expected another one of the experiments that we did for the space station was evaluating different kinds of cursor control devices for use on board um the data management system on Space Station um we used a Macintosh computer and four different kinds of cursor control devices um Jim Adamson Shannon Lucid and myself evaluated those uh throughout the mission uh one of the uh privileges that we had on this mission was to fly some new software uh and some new computers the first time that the combination had ever flown together in the space shuttle uh We've upgraded both systems and among the software changes that we've made is a new digital autopilot for flying on orbit called an Al alternate digital autopilot and in this particular uh scene I'm working with John to uh do a series of 22 flight tests on the digital autopilot and to find out what kind of responses uh it provides for the vehicle this is just a little view up on the uh flight deck that I put in just uh to show you three really great people working on orbit uh this was in between while I had different clocks running on different things they're doing uh I'd catch them like this every now and then so I thought I'd capture this once on film but it's really a neat thing to see uh all these uh human beings working in space so well with the ground trying to get everything accomplished and uh I just think a lot of that and think a lot of that capability that we have in the country this is another demonstration of some physical principles in zero gravity you can see a pair of longnose pliers there that are very stable in that mode when you open them up a little bit you can see that they've got two stable modes you can see them flipping back and forth between those two I saw David do this once so I told him I had to get that on film this is a Jim working on the F flight deck for SSB UV the space shuttle solar back scatter UV experiment or data collector actually uh it took both of us essentially to to work this uh uh secondary payload that's in a gas can out in the payload Bay uh I would maneuver the Orbiter to either a earth viewing attitude or solar viewing attitude and Jim would operate the APC to open and close the lid and start the different modes of the ssbv experiment was housed in which what we call a gas can which stands for getaway special and you can see the uh mechanical lid that we act actually uh activated from inside the crew compartment using a a little computer and uh entering inputs uh very fascinating experiment not exact not designed to measure the ozone layer but actually to calibrate other satellites and instruments that do measure the ozone layer what we would do is is actually measure the backs scatter ultraviolet rays uh directly emitted from the Sun and also then back scattered off the Earth so we would actually look at the sun with the experiment and then turn around and look at the Earth this was the battel materials for commercial development of space investigation of polymer membrane processing the bottom line is microgravity they can get some idea the physical and uh characteristics of materials and as a result uh develop U improved U membranes here on the planet to be used for uh to help uh better filters for liquids and solids I think this is a uh that was a sunrise and this is up on the flight deck it's just a nice picture of the flight deck and space uh me looking at the flight plan there and uh and of a something I did a lot and so somebody took this picture of me once yeah we thought we needed a picture of John being the commander keeping track of all of us doing our thing and making sure we stayed on the timeline great great man to work for this is down in the mid deck um again you'd see this a lot different people trying to get uh different types of work done all in parallel and um so it's just busy place on the mid deck Shannon in the medical kit here I asked her to get me some sleeping pills I'm watch she was getting them I thought I'd take a picture of her getting them for me you can ask her about several the experiments that with the medical experiments that we did had to do with assessing the cardiovascular systems um this particular one um was called blood pressure variability in which we uh dawned an automatic blood pressure cuff and a halter monitor um you could see we were wired for sound right there and for 24 hours um three different times during the flight um we had our heart rates and our blood pressures um taking constantly um B John and I uh all did that in fact we had to do that pre-flight several two or three times and we we've also done that postflight two or three times John's giving a sign language there say that that's his it's measuring his heart rate there now another one of the uh cardiovascular medical experiments that we did was running on the treadmill um John and I did that virtually every day for about 30 minutes per day when we did this we dawned a heart rate monitor that went around our chest we also had a watch on our wrist there that uh um contained a readout of what our heart rate was as well as a time um and during this 30 minutes every 10 minutes we would um attempt to step our heart rate up uh um to a different a higher level there again John and I both did that on orbit Jim was a control subject he did it on the ground and so we've got some uh some good data of all three of us pre and postf flight you're going to see David enter the scene here uh while I was running down there I looked around once and saw this and I thought that was quite amazing he was trying to beat me running around the world I think this was our hamster experiment it's much easier to run on that without these straps um probably the biggest medical experiment exp that we had was called lower body negative pressure um and in this experiment um baks and I would would slide inside that can there if you will which had a waist seal that would come up um and and seal around our waist and we could lower the pressure inside that bag to um about- 50 mm of mercury which um is equivalent stress on your heart of standing up in 1G um again this took uh took place during four separate days on orbit um and as you can see here with the uh lowerer body negative pressure device there it it took three people took up virtually the entire mid deck whenever we did this um you can see Shannon Lucid um was taking some uh ultrasonic images of of our hearts while we were in that um she's got a an American flight echocardiograph machine that uh is actually recording that data there um you've got the subject in the bag and then you've got another person that is operating the controls down in the lower end there um and entering the data the um heart rate and blood pressure data on board a uh Macintosh computer and again this took up uh The major portion of our days for four separate days while we were on orbit as I'm looking at this I'm just thinking I'll comment the space shuttle is an absolutely incredible machine I mean it has tremendous flexibility and uh so uh you know as as you've seen here we deployed a satellite on the first day and then a tremendous amount of scientific and medical research uh for the rest of the the mission and uh a real National Treasure in fact the only thing in the world that that has this kind of capability so um boy Americans ought to be very proud of this system I might add also that I flew this on SCS 32 and they've made some uh some great improvements both in the comfort of the device as well as the uh the hardware itself it's it's more automated and easier to use now this a picture on the flight deck uh in between experiments uh you'd catch uh different people with different cameras here bakes has a telephoto Hasselblad lens uh camera and Jim had an IR filter on different people trying to take different pictures for oceanographers meteorologists geologists all around the world there different requirements uh this is a beautiful scene of our planet it's just a big blue white ball basically blue planet's a good description from the IMAX movie this a little sequence where I caught Mike taking some pictures uh out of the Pilot's window uh this is looking into North Africa you can see the Earth limb there at the top U Morocco Algeria Libya uh the Mediterranean Sea really quite beautiful our planet and of course these pictures don't do it any justice but um they're the best we can return to you um absolutely beautiful this planet makes you realize there are no International boundaries because I don't see the boundaries of any of those countries there and um but a real nice place we need to take care of it there's the Sinai Red Sea down into the Nile River delta there there really beautiful coming out of Cairo headed down south towards the towards the oswan dam Lake Nasser coming to the scene here in a second real reason I'm showing you that is i' flown on two other missions and I never saw the Awan this time I did as John has insinuated Earth observation is one of the favorite pastimes on orbit for astronauts flying in space and I think uh one of the things that that impresses me the most about it is that since I was a a young man going to high school the geology books as a result of the Space Program have been almost totally Rewritten and the whole concept of plate tectonics and shifting Continental shelves have has really been totally uh rethought as a result of uh observations made in space this scene you're saying right here is one of the bad scenes that's all aqu o fires you burning running South down in Saudi Arabia and uh boy I saw that and as murky as it looks there that's just was the contrast that we saw in orbit I mean the planet's beautiful and you got to that area and uh boy it looked like the planet was out of focus uh there's no question the kuati oil fire fires are putting a lot of stuff into the environment affecting the lives of 5 billion people and billions of animals and plants all over this planet and uh hope we get those fires out soon you're not seeing this real good uh but um uh you're looking into the velocity Vector people always say what does it look like on orbit as if you're on a space vehicle where you're looking right down the velocity Vector here uh approaching the Northwest uh portion of Australia um quite beautiful you're moving at 17,500 mph and uh that's what it look looks like um one morning um I was up eating breakfast and while I was eating breakfast this is what I was looking at and I thought boy what a lucky person I am to be able to see this scene really a very a very beautiful planet except when you see a scene like we saw there in quit it's another flight deck picture of uh some people taking um pictures here of the hurricane that we saw Mike you may want to talk about that you saw that a lot we saw uh actually we saw about four hurricanes on on our flight this was Hurricane FIFA and uh we had the opportunity to fly right over the eye which was really quite spectacular the first uh r or so that we saw this hurricane the eye was not really well developed and then when we uh timing was perfect for us as soon as we as the eye became developed we flew right over it if you keep your eyes on the top left of the screen you'll see a shooting star just went by it's kind of interesting to see that from space because you're looking down on it instead of up at it you saw different stars there on the bottom is space in the planet of course is dominates the upper 78 of that picture and this is a bunch of lightning storms going on people always ask what do they look like from space so I thought we throw a little of that in this time and I think this is a sunrise uh here and we're getting ready for entry day and you're going to see the payload bay doors coming closed um I think David came up with the camcorder and got a pretty good sequence of Jim and Shannon putting that in progress on the left side there the payload bay door is starting to close every time I see all this I wonder how how how does it work so much complexity and U I think it's really U in it's about 2 hours before the deorbit burn roughly about the time we close these doors this is the entry time frame and uh we're about 250,000 ft here and uh out the front windows you can really see the glow come up with the fire uh it's quite an amazing ride every time you do it uh you say wow what an amazing vehicle and what a beautiful ride coming in Jim took this photography as John has indicated you spend most of your time on orbit uh falling around the earth at about 17,500 uh ft a second and uh in order to get back to Earth the the trick is to take some of that velocity out of your orbit and actually slow down which causes you to fall back into the gravity field of the earth and in doing so you generate an awful lot of heat and some of the fire that you've seen shooting up over the top of the vehicle is a symbol of that here we're going subsonic coming over top to Kennedy Space Center and uh getting ready to turn on to The Heading alignment Circle that's about 90° a turn to go uh when I looked out the far left window it was clear blue down there and by the time I got to the front window I thought I was going into the LA Smog um that's just what it looked like rolled out on Final uh boy all our shuttle training aircraft uh training we get uh all of our training in the KC 135 and all that really pays off here you feel like you're right at home bigs put the gear down and uh boy what a be beautiful flying machine to me it's the easiest airplane to fly in the world in this time frame but again we get a lot of excellent training that that makes it easy it's kind of incredible to think that that vehicle lifts off uh on top of a bunch of Rocket engines pushing it out in the space uh you do all that stuff and then it comes back in it lands like this like an airplane unbelievable I don't know where we got all the people that knew how to make that work but uh we do quite an amazing uh machine with tremendous flexibility to do many different missions and of course we tell you about that U every time you hear about a different Mission a lot of people wonder why it takes the crew so long to get out of the vehicle after we land and of course uh going through the re-entry and everything we need some sort of cooling on board for avionics and once we close the payLo bay doors uh we don't have the radiators anymore so one of the things we use to cool the vehicle here is ammonia boilers and the ammonia being given off by the ammonia boilers creates a kind of a cloud around the vehicle and in this particular Mission we had to wait a little while to get out because there was a lot of ammonia outside blowing out of the ammonia boilers and uh so it it was pretty smelly trying to get out of the vehicle so we had to wait a bit for that to clear this little scene just showing you the crew working on that flight deck uh after landing we've got to do a bunch of little things and uh I don't know if you've seen that before so we thought we'd throw it in coming out of the vehicle here again uh I feel very privileged to have had such a great team of people to work with up in orbit um and wish them luck in any of their future endeavors they're really a super group of people and here's just a scene of the Kennedy Space Team putting uh the vehicle getting it ready for STDs 44 in November