STS-50: Postflight Press Conference

Good afternoon. Welcome to Johnson Space Center and to the post flight briefing by the US Microgravity Laboratory crew. Now I'd like to turn over the program to Commander Dick Richards. Dick. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be back. It's easy to come back from flights like these that are so successful. Now the only hard part really is is to try to convince everybody how successful we actually were. It was a great flight. All the equipment worked well. All the pre-flight planning that we done for over a year really paid off and we've got a few slides and a movie to show you a little bit about what we saw and what we did on orbit. But before I get into that, I'd like to reintroduce my flight crew who I'm very proud of for their just outstanding performance during our 2 weeks on orbit. To my right Lieutenant Commander Ken Bowersox. He was uh absolutely essential during our flight. If anyone we had a vote here for most valuable player for STS-50, Ken would probably be voted that. He was everywhere during our 2 weeks. Anytime any of us needed assistance, we couldn't find something, he was the man that was there. He knew where everything was and I began to wonder if he had somehow snuck another flight in prior to STS-50 because he sure showed that spaceflight and he were easily accommodated. To Ken's right Dr. Ellen Baker who was our physician on board. She was also the one that let me get us get to sleep every night because she ran the orbiter systems while while Ken and I were asleep. She was also the one to make sure that we were keeping ourselves in good physical condition. Made sure we drank all of our fluids, did all the things necessary so that we wouldn't spoil our 2 weeks space stay in space by having problems during re-entry of which none of us did. We were very I was very glad to have Ellen on board the flight. To Ellen's right Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, payload commander for USML and she was the one that really pulled this flight together from start to finish. Did all the interface with principal investigators at the Marshall Space Flight Center, did all the work coordinating the flight plan with Marshall and was just absolutely essential and instrumental for the success of USML. To her right Colonel Carl Meade. Carl was mission specialist number three. He ran the blue he was our astronaut on the blue shift and complemented the work that Bonnie did on the red shift. Again just a fantastic job by Carl and uh in making sure to keep keep us going in the right place anytime we got off the straight and narrow, Carl was there to remind us what the big picture was and to make sure that we were doing the right thing. To Carl's right is Dr. Larry DeLucas who many of you seen um University of Alabama at Birmingham. His first flight but Larry as well as the other payload specialist Dr. Jean Wright absolutely adapted to spaceflight most readily. And um the only thing we were sorry about for Larry was that we couldn't keep him up on orbit another week which he expressed many many times during the flight that he wanted to just stay up on orbit a little bit longer and he could get all this work that he was doing with protein crystal crystal work completed. And finally to Larry's right is Dr. Jean Wright out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Again Jean was became famous as the wizard of the drop physics module of which you saw many many hours of television with his expertise in manipulating these very difficult water droplets in zero gravity zero gravity environment and he's got lots of words to tell you about how well drop physics module performed. And now I think I'd like to just quickly go through a 15 minute movie. Well, here's the NASA meatball which now is a permanent fixture of all spaceflight movies. Now and a good picture of our flag there and space shuttle Columbia's flag pre-launch. You see a few clouds in the area but we managed to hold them off until uh until long enough for us to get off the get off the ground. Standard picture of us going out to the vehicle. It was kind of odd to uh be up that time of the day. It was pretty easy for us but Carl Meade, Jean Wright and Ellen Baker had had the sleep shift almost 12 hours and they had just at that point uh they were about ready to go to bed even though we were just getting up. Ken, you want to describe the launch? Well, the launch was quite a ride for me. I When the engines lit uh I didn't get too excited but I did look over to the left to see what the gantry looked like. And I noticed that it started glowing before we started moving as we got the reflections of the engines and the SRBs. Then it slowly moved out of the out of the way the uh the lift-off sensation felt just like we get in the simulator. I was very pleased with the training that we'd had and felt very comfortable during the launch. I know the biggest impression I get on any launch is um the bright lights. Um you can see a little bit of that here during the roll program maneuver. And unfortunately for our guests down at the Cape we we disappeared into the clouds pretty soon after lift-off so they didn't get to see see us all the way out to MECO. But I can assure you the ride was very comfortable and very smooth. And the engines and SRBs worked just as advertised. Once we got up on orbit we caught our breath and then started right to work activating the Spacelab. Um I was a little bit captivated by the scenery. But Bonnie was a old veteran and went right to work. Well, the activation started out on the flight deck about 2 hours after launch by activating the Spacelab systems through the orbiter's computers. And then about 3 and 1/2 hours after launch we went down the tunnel. I opened the hatch to the lab. Uh ingress down through the tunnel and up over what we call the lip into the lab. We started operations immediately that day and what you're seeing here is actually uh into the flight and and then here's some blue shift shots with Jean and Carl. This is uh myself on the foreground working on the surface tension driven experiment and Carl moving by holding a drop physics module film magazine which he became so good at changing the film. This is a close-up of the drop physics module with the bay one door open. You can see some of the instrumentation inside. And this is a live shot almost live shot of a drop deployment. And this is a very successful deployment and thank you Carl for taking a picture of that. The drop physics module was controlled through the IVA that you see. That's the second CRT on the right. And this is a short sequence of the behavior of the drop in microgravity. Uh these drops once they were deployed almost took a life of by themselves because of its their behavior in the absence of gravity and also because of what we did to them with acoustic radiation pressure. The aim here was to determine in very quantitative fashion the behavior of those drops in microgravity. And this is another close-up view of the surface tension driven convection experiment with the uh sequence of what you could see looking at the one of the video downlink looking at flow visualization pattern. These are speckle patterns of the tracer particles in the flow. And this is myself working in the glove box once again and I was doing protein crystal growth experiments and here you see a close-up of the way I did that. I used common syringes Hamilton syringes that you use in your laboratory. I basically did what I do in my own laboratory which is what I've said for a long time we really need in space is to have our own lab up there. And for the first time on USML we had the equipment to do that and the time. And I was using a microscope to observe crystals that I grew on orbit and from that information looking at the crystals I then decided how to change the conditions to optimize the crystal growth. And that's also the first time we've ever been able to do this in flight. And here's a crystal of the first protein that I crystallized in orbit. It's canavalin and it's a plant protein um that was donated to us by a professor at the University of California Riverside being looked at to genetically engineer a more nutritious food. And this is the generic bioprocessing apparatus. And once again these are the samples being loaded into a device which will measure the turbidity of each sample so that we can get essentially a time history of their their development throughout the microgravity experience. I think it's worth pointing out that for 13 days and 26 shifts we had almost flawless performance of all of our hardware. And in fact we were able to process more than we expected. I'm working in here in a what's called a flexible glove box facility for the crystal growth furnace which allowed us to change out potentially toxic toxic materials and we had a chance to evaluate this because we wanted to process more materials. And I think it's a good demonstration for space station. We had spare samples which allowed us to do this and actually produce more than we expected. Uh this is another shot of the glove box and I believe an experiment in here which is uh called um Oh, this is smoldering combustion. I I had a observe this for a little bit. They take a piece of foam and see how it smolders in microgravity again without the um benefits of buoyancy or the effects of buoyancy I should say. And it's another combustion type of experiment in that module which is in there. It's closed up so that the particles can burn and not affect the crew in any way. As you can see there's a video camera hooked to the top for data collection. Again, referring back to the earlier slide, Larry and I spent several days of our our mission working and performing experiments with the lower body negative pressure device. We also were able to visualize the heart during this process with a nearly off-the-shelf medical instrument called the echocardiograph and it was a Doppler echocardiograph and that it would use sound waves to also measure the velocity of blood flow going through the heart. We got quite a bit of quite a quantity of data from that particular experiment. We're going to go back down to the tunnel now into the mid deck and give you a feel for going through a little bit of what of our obstacle course was and see what mid deck operations were. If you recall, the lab is aft in the payload bay and there's a very long tunnel that connects it to the mid deck. We use this area as a little bit of a storage area and I'll turn it over to Ken to talk about that. Well, this had to be one of my favorite things to do up in orbit, cruising back and forth through the tunnel. It was sort of like being Superman, flying over long distances. It was a little bit of an obstacle course, too, but luckily everything was soft, so it didn't hurt too bad if you bumped into things. Here we're entering the mid deck and you can see how we've got things hanging on the lockers with Velcro. And uh You can also see how easy it is to float on up through the hatch into the flight deck. You just saw Dick's leg where he was on duty there. This was I can't remember where this was, over over Australia or maybe over the US again. I mentioned we were able to beam people up and beam people down if they had the right ham radio equipment and just talked to this individual and you can see the picture come on the screen through through the ham radio operation. This again turned out to be a lot of fun for us to do and I think Ellen and I tabbed up that we were talking to about 100 people a day for the period that we were up in space and I think generated a lot of goodwill for the space program throughout the world. One of our many sunrises and sunsets, it would be totally inappropriate not to capture one of these tend to capture one of these spectacular sunrises and sunsets and included in our photography. And again, we did have time to look out the window during our 13 days and you can see it always brings smiles to people's faces when we had time to do that. Ellen can describe you this little tour as well, too. Again, it's one of those things that's hard to capture and hard to describe. Another nice clear pass over the uh the Canary Islands and onto the coast of Africa. We did quite a bit of training with our earth ops people here and I tried to brush up on my geography with things going by at 5 miles a second. If you don't know what you're looking at, you don't have time to go look it up in the book. We have a little display on one of our onboard computers that gives you a general ballpark for where you are in the world. Sometimes a scene like this going over the Middle East is readily recognizable. The Sinai Peninsula there and everything, but there are parts of the world that I'm not that familiar with and uh and so I tried to bone up on my geography some. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see a lot of South America. This is a a pass coming over the coast of South America and the Andes and it was remarkably clear over South America as well, but for most of our daylight South America passes, I was asleep and and Dick and Socks were awake taking these pictures. We were very fortunate with South America. It was about the driest I've ever seen in that particular area, so a lot of our lot of our observations were possible, whereas before you would be cloud covered. This is Ellen just proudly displaying her New York Yankee hat while she goes through the process of getting some exercise and you can and then Carl, who had some stretching exercise. He was one of our backup EVA crewmen and I cautioned him to make sure he kept his muscles in good shape in case we had to go outside unexpectedly and so this was his way of doing some stretching exercises during the flight. Again, food, we got a chance to do food operations as I would call them and everybody would try to come up with some new stunts to outdo the next person with the rotating spoons or floating meatballs or whatever Ken is trying to grab over there. Potatoes. Grooming was always very important and I found myself using for the first time electric razor. And one of the first things to go on orbit is your hair. And so but we've come a long way and got some got some shampoo equipment that we just scrub on and then wipe off with a towel. Of course, you got to sort of keep yourself in control here and I'm not doing a very good job of it right now. And we've got our personal hygiene kit, little mirror and brush your hair and you're you're ready to go for the day. This personal hygiene kit contains a lot of toilet articles and so it was always a question difficulty trying to manage it here about where to put all these things even though they have Velcro. It seemed like every time I opened it up, there was about three or four things I wanted to take out. This was an unsuccessful attempt to manage that. And the sleeping quarters were very, very adequate and I found myself sleeping quite a bit and of course when you wake up in the morning, you have to find your way out. Sometimes they didn't want me to get out of there and put the odometer right in front of it, but that didn't deter me. This was our first my first flight with these sleep stations. It was a nice quiet place to go to give you a little privacy for 2 weeks and can't imagine flying without it. One of the pilot's job on orbit is is cleaning. And my wife liked that. She likes seeing me operate the vacuum cleaner. Here I'm trying to clean some of the filters. It's important to keep the equipment cool and keeping the filters clean contributes to that. Believe this is Dick and I preparing for FCS checkout. Getting all the systems ready for deorbit. Ellen was right in there helping out and uh it was a three three-person operation. Everything was everything was nominal on the day before entry, so Ken and I went to bed. We got waved off one day due to of all things a July hurricane in California. So that was the only bit of misfortune we had, but good side of it was that the Kennedy Space Center, I guess all the bad weather got sucked into California cuz Florida was beautiful. Next day after one day one day appreciated one day delay, which all of us all of us got an opportunity to look out the window on that day, we started reentry. This is some camcorder footage. I wish I could describe to you what I'm seeing out my window here, but it's you can see that burnt orange down filling up the window and then you see a very bright white light there just to the right. That's actually a blue thin blue band caused by sunrise and there was a big orange glow on top of that. There was I wish I could have had time to get the camcorder with a big wide angle lens over. We as I say, it was a beautiful day in Florida. It was pilot's kind of day. Uh acquired the runway way out uh We had a new capability here with added some extra speed to the orbiter to get us further down the runway. This is the first flight of that, also the first flight of some new tires that that are more resistant to damage on rough runways, particularly like the one we have at Kennedy Space Center. Touchdown seemed to be to be very smooth and at no time did I feel like I was really behind the vehicle. We had we intentionally delayed derotation of the nose gear by about 10 knots due due to our weight. Got that down on the runway and immediately Ken deployed the drag chute. Throughout the rollout sequence, winds were very light and I felt very very similar to the way I felt in my previous 4-day flight of a very solid vehicle, very tightly controlled and absolutely no problems. At 60 knots, in order to keep the drag chute from being entangled in the drag chute, we intentionally jettisoned the chute and then finally rolled to a stop with using up about 13,000 ft of the 15,000 ft of runway we had there. This isn't cooling fans for us. This is the blow that get any gases that might be out there, harmful gases, away from the vehicle, but very quickly Ken and I were able to get out and do an inspection of the vehicle and everything looked great to us. All in all, 2 weeks in space well spent. I couldn't ask for anything more out of a vehicle or or my crew.