STS-45: Postflight Press Conference

good afternoon and welcome to the Johnson Space Center and to the postflight press conference for the atmospheric laboratory on science and applications I would like to introduce to you the crew Commander Colonel Charles F Balden Charles thank you very much Barbara and thanks to all of you for coming and the audience wherever you may be let me uh impose upon everyone for just a few moments I'll reintroduce the before we get we formally get started and that way uh everybody will be able to tell the pro the players whether they have a program or not I'm going to start with our red shift down on the far end uh Dr Byron lixenberg and Dr C Michael fo uh Navy Captain David lzma Dr dir from out here who starts off the blue shift Dr Katherine Sullivan our payload Commander uh my rightand man again our pilot uh Colonel Brian Duffy US Air Force and I think all of you know me by now I'm Charlie Balden and we're pleased to be here with you what we're going to try to do over the next uh oh few minutes is summarize our excitement and accomplishment and hopefully some achievements that we made over the nine days that we were flying aboard Atlantis and uh with the atlas One mission we think we brought back good science at least that's the report that we have when we visited the Marshall space flight center uh one of the things that I was most happy with was the fact that uh as we talked to parents and teachers and youngsters themselves uh for at least N9 days uh kids across the world were turned on to science for a little while so uh we feel that that was very very important and we want to share with you some film and some slides and also some conversation today about how that happened this is our crew patch this was a a breakfast that I'd long dreamt of attending and here I got my chance along with the rest of the crew the red shift you can tell who they are um had been up all night and this is the uh you finally see the final scenes of the blue shift suiting up and the red shift coming up here uh we got into our suits uh in plenty of time and we were excited and getting ready to uh to go to the pad uh next scene you'll see us walking out and uh this is about 5:00 in the morning heading out for an 8:00 launch well we were sitting there looking at uh looking at fairly blue skies although we uh we were able to see some clouds coming around eventually after a slight delay we got to go to launch uh and then things started getting busy for us inside right about this point right here we knew we were going somewhere um just pretty incredible the way the vehicle leaps off the pad begins accelerating and doesn't stop for almost 8 and 1 12 minutes go from zero to a little over 17 ,000 M an hour and 8 and 1/2 minutes and when you divide those two numbers out and realize you're accelerating about 2,000 M hour per minute uh it makes sense that you feel the the strength of push that you do in the back of your seat and superimposed on that is a little bit of an earthquake from the solid rocket Motors it's a pretty impressive ride one of the things that was impressive to me from the standpoint of the other crew members was we had a running dialogue going Brian was uh kind of calling out mock numbers and altitude and I would try to throw in something every once in a while but in checking with the folk down on the mid deck uh everybody seemed to be quite aware of what was going on and that was a comforting feeling uh you know as a commander to know that everybody was alert and and and ready to get going the boosters came off right here and that was of course accompanied by a nice flash of um of fire from the booster separation Motors across the windows we got a little bit of glazing on the Windows uh at that point um eventually it ended up burning off during the entry however so it wasn't ever a factor shortly after Mo we had external tank separation and we were able to get some pictures of it and uh that's a picture of our external tank uh after it left us the challenge of the blue shift was to quickly jump out of the suits and grab some clothes and the books that we needed to begin operating and buy about 2 hours after liftoff be up on the flight deck with the doors open and ready to power up the laboratory and all the experiments uh this is a scene of P bay door opening which is about an hour and a half into the flight it was already pretty clear I think to all of us that Atlanta's had a high probability of just being a superb platform for our work for 9 days because this had gone far more gracefully than you ever see it in any of your training and really gives you a comfortable feel for starting a busy Flight Plan uh we turned to right away and had the lab powered up in short order and you see the typical view that we looked at out the payload bay windows here with the black uh balls on their platforms which are the charge collecting devices that CPAC used to provide a return path for electrical current and this is where the orbit AC crew did most of the work up in the for deck we're getting right here we're finishing up our flight control system checkout before we entry and over 220 Maneuvers to accomplish over 9 days to make sure all the experiments were pointed in the right directions the the space lab operation operation of the pays were done from the art flight deck and mostly in the dark that's why we don't have a lot of pictures of it because it was during the night time like here this API came alive like I was saying was getting out of the locks and pointing then to to an aurora or to the AR try to find artificial Aurora so the it was always exciting to see this this experiments actively working it it's pointing up okay this is the scene of the Aurora the Earth's up as you see it on the screen there and you can see the three little turrets of the uh the appy camera I want you to as you zoom in here look to the middle left and you'll see as meteorite go by actually above us in the picture here but it's below us as far as the earth goes um the Aurora of course are generated by a he's coming up now there you go yeah you saw it the Aurora generated by protons coming from the Sun spiring down the field lines here's the Electron Beam coming out just a little right of Center and superimposed on that is the uh results from the appy camera you can see a little glow to the left of center uh about every 15 seconds we're going to cut back and forth here's another beam firing and then you see the the the glow that you see in the middle is the natural Aurora and in the middle of that you can see the spot from the beam and that was really the the first time that this has been done in space and that we have been able to watch it from from the from with a camera so that beam really did look like one of the phasers that in Star Wars or Star Trek it's really amazing phenomena to see this come out of the Orbiter for the first time in addition to the U electronic detector that the appy experiment involved the investigator also had supplied us with a fairly complex set of photographic cameras and Optical equipment and you see me here on one of those tests often the target was the same as what the detector was looking at but we could use different filters or or other Optical elements to get complimentary data again this is uh this one was photographed to show you what we were doing when the lights were up a little bit normally this was done by by feel and by memory of the procedure uh in the dark as the target one sliding by everybody has something that they call their favorite when you go fly and mine is lightning because um I always tell everybody that to me it's like an orchestra uh playing and it seems like the lightning plays off off each strike you know you'll see one and it just ripples all across the face of the Earth uh it's a beautiful spectacle you can actually see the Earth limb in the upper leftand corner there and the big city or the bright spot you see that's steady there is the city of Buenos ciris uh as we're coming up uh on an ascending uh orbit here and we're actually going up along the out over the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of South America this is the sunrise the the the picture that you have with the different colors that from red to to Blue from sometimes it's uh really uh you see nearly all the colors and the different layers there are quite a number of layers that some of this colors are produced by the dust that is in the atmosphere so it's uh since the eruption of the pinat tuo we have quite some dust and this add to to to the red glow that we see in space this is the red shift uh going to work uh in the morning uh is we put new mining into tumbling out to go to work in the morning tumbling out of bed but that's the bunks that we used and they work very well to give us a good night sleep while the other shift was up working of course we have to have our actors on board and uh it's a it was tiresome work sleeping all night in those buns Brian had mentioned earlier that we were going to show you some of the the mundane types of things that go on and uh so for the next few seconds here you'll get to see us uh as we prepare food we did a number of things that that you would not necessarily think are done on a spaceship but you've got to eat and that means that somebody's got to go to the kitchen uh that's our water dispenser and uh oven that every once in a while you'll see Kathy open the door here and stick food in uh the foods were very very tasty uh very very filling although you wondered that because we seem to be eating all the time um we really enjoyed the food and drink and uh so that's kind of one of the things that's going on here in addition to this something you won't see we had to clean filters uh you had to dust and and mop and we'll show you a little picture of us swabbing as I call it later on uh here Dave's eating one of the favorites of almost all the crews and that's shrimp cocktail so uh you get a chance to see some of the better food there and it behaves much better than it does down here uh gives you an opportunity to to think about it here we were doing some of uh another one of the more fun things to do is decide how you would like to have your M&M's you just uh turn them free and then you go get them and kids always have a very good time with this they can imagine being there and I'll do a reverse slam dunk here in a second and Gobble up one one of the secondary experiments we had on board was sarx or the shuttle amateur radio experiment here you see Dave uh talking to someone I don't remember do you don't remember where you were Dave doing that I think I was talking to a school and you'll see the concentration trying to listen to the the kids questions here in a minute and then then be able to make answers it was kind of fun to talk to auditoriums full of school kids while you're flying right over the top of them uh three of our crew members um Dave Kathy and Brian talked to all seven Inc continents during our 9 days in space well here you see our commander keeping fit for the entry and I'm really glad he did that cuz he did an excellent job um Charlie was doing a a DSO uh for 30 minutes every day running which he sometimes enjoyed but maybe not of course I had a different approach to uh what you should do with a treadmill here you see them U changing Lio out basically the treadmill was mounted across those uh those those holes in the uh in the floor the mid deck where we keep the lithium hydroxide which we use to extract the carbon dioxide that we exhale during the day course we do that once every uh shift and then uh when we do that we do it rather carefully we have to put it into these little cellophan packets to make sure that the uh the debris from the from the canister which can be toxic doesn't get into our atmosphere and then you saw what I was doing with the treadmill um I got a lesson in what physicists do with treadmills and you will get an opportunity to to see it come into view here Dr fo was real big on moments of inertia and uh getting an opportunity to try different things and see if he could display varying moments of inertia of different components that we had on board you see I've been told to hang on the ceiling and just be quiet and out of the way and hold the treadmill what else was I going to do with it the was that my version of exercise was Far preferable one of the things you have to worry about is with seven people you generate a lot of trash and we have a trash monster down here and we had to be careful when we fed him every day that we didn't get caught you didn't want to let him get you cuz then you get pulled down below the mid deck and that's a bad place to be in one of the things I learned a long time ago when we started training was that uh I had two rabid golfers on board I say I would say Avid if I counted Byron in but Byron is not quite rabid like like Dave and briyan but this is the 44th ho at at the Atlantis uh golf club and I'll let them describe it to you I'll ke it up uh it's pretty easy never falls off the tea never falls off the tea now watch this carefully cuz this is the longest drive in history that's about 15 miles right there in about 3 seconds that's how far that ball went now lining up putts is very difficult and Brian he had a good idea here except he was lining it up from the wrong from the wrong attitude so we had to we had to correct that and and figure out of course neither he and I could really get it lined up properly and it took Byron to to hit it in here in a minute I remembered that we were not flying level but inverted here so he took the opposite approach that's right these two guys gave me a good reading and as as typical Cades you know one says break down and right the other says break up and left so uh when I got up here I just kind of tried to hit it towards the hole and uh voila 45th hole we were fortunate in having uh three Academy graduates on board two from the United States Naval Academy and uh one from the US Air Force Academy and we happen to have a United States Military Academy graduate as a Capcom for several of our shifts so we sent this uh visual message to to Sam gimar while he was down there just Just in Love Charlie was uh Charlie was really good at documenting what other people were doing but we we were a little laxing getting him so we finally wanted to tried to find him commanding so this is this is a view of what Charlie does when he's commanding let see what the crew is doing yeah meanwhile down below Charlie said something about why don't you you Brian you take your shift downstairs and swab the decks and and I didn't know what that meant because I'm not in the Navy so he had to explain it but we found out on Blue shift very quickly what that meant is we moistened up wash clo and went all over every surface we could find to as Charlie said before neaten the ship up and return it in proper form to the folks that had given us such a good spacecraft see and even I was employed for that there is something they have never told them before that they had to do that on board I've never got any training for it either well finally after 9 days it it was time to come home and I must say I really wasn't ready to do so and I don't think anyone else was um we were very very comfortable on orbit we had a very successful Mission we had a good routine and we were enjoying ourselves immensely and uh this is really the beginning of the end of our glorious flight this is the uh the plasma going out the back end of the Orbiter and it was really pretty impressive as Kathy and I took some pictures back out the overhead uh it and then we took them back out forward and you can see the the reflections of that on both Brian and Charlie as we're going through entry it is totally dark outside by the way the camcorder can't really do this Justice in particular the colors which are all sorts of shades of salmon and pink and orange uh they really do look somewhat like the inside of a blast furnace you may notice the horizontal streaks or small blips of light through the scene those are electronic noise that are created in the camcorder because of all the electrical energy that's involved in the process that you see outside lighting up the sky once the uh once the light show was over we got in we flew in a daylight somewhere around Mach 6 or so approaching the cape and uh we turned on of the onto the hack we had some pretty good uh pretty good winds which made it a a healthy turn for us uh and I got it around about halfway and Charlie picked it up and um when I took over from Brian we be basically on board we have guidance that we follow that tells us whether things are good or bad and um I mentioned to the guys in the office this morning by the time we got ready to roll out on Final everything looked like it was good because we we go to another um Landing Aid that's called a microwave Landing system and it gets you you know real fine lineup and the Orbiter again was amazing because when we fly our simulators you always see things jump around when you get the MLS is as you're getting to the final fine guidance and everything but uh on the Orbiter it it did not move at all so we were right where we wanted to be um basically what I did was was get everything set up during the what we call the outer Glide slope portion of the approach and then make a final adjustment just before the touchdown about the 30 or 40 foot point and let the Orbiter land itself and it it's an amazingly stable vehicle uh it flies very very well it flies better than any any simulator that that I've ever had the opportunity to fly so um there was nothing surprising about its performance at all uh unless you want to say that it performed a lot better than I than I thought it was and it handled a lot better than I thought it was going to be um that was it kind of the the end of the flight