Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (26 page)

As they neared the runway, Mattingly said because he felt a little off, they were a little slow going through procedures leading up to the flair point, and they ended up flying under the standard approach.

I knew we were under the standard final approach glide slope, but now I wanted to get down and try to make a good landing with it. . . . So he’s calling off airspeeds and altitude, and I’m just staring at the horizon and I’m hawking it, and I have no idea what it’s going to feel like to land. When I would shoot touch-and-gos in the [
KC
-135 aircraft], there was never any doubt when we landed. You could always tell. So I was expecting bang, crash, squeak, something. Then nothing and nothing. Then finally Hank says, “You’d better put the nose down.” “Oh,” I said, “all right.” So I put it down, and I was sure we were still in the air. I thought, “Oh, God, he’s right. We can’t be very far off the ground.” Sure enough, we were on the ground and neither one of us knew it. I’ve never been able to do that again in any airplane. Never did it before. According to pictures, it looks like we must have landed at maybe 350 feet down the runway, and we didn’t mean to.

During planning for the flight, it was made very clear that even after the orbiter was safely stopped on the ground, there would still be one important mission objective for the astronauts—a proper patriotic performance. “We knew that they had hyped up the
STS
-4 mission so that they wanted to make sure that we landed on the Fourth of July,” Mattingly noted.

It was no uncertain terms that we were going to land on the Fourth of July, no matter what day we took off. Even if it was the fifth, we were going to land on the Fourth. That meant, if you didn’t do any of your test mission, that’s okay, as long as you just land on the Fourth, because the president is going to be there. . . . The administrator met us for lunch the day before flight, and as he walked out, he said, “Oh, by the way . . . you know, with the president going to be there and all, you might give a couple of minutes’ thought on something that’d be appropriate to say, like ‘A small step for man,’ or something like that,” and he left. Hank and I looked at each other and he says, “He wants us to come up with this?” And we had a good time. We never came up with something we could say, but we came up with a whole lot of humor that we didn’t dare say.

After landing, the crew members prepared for their moment in the spotlight. Anticipating that the president might want to come aboard the shuttle, Mattingly recalled, they put up a handwritten sign that read, “Welcome to
Columbia
. Thirty minutes ago, this was in space.” The astronauts took off their helmets and started to get out of their seats, a task Mattingly found surprisingly difficult after having adjusted to a microgravity environment.

I said, “I am not going to have somebody come up here and pull me out of this chair. . . . I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to give every ounce of strength I’ve got and get up under my own.” So I . . . pushed, and I hit my head on the overhead so hard, the blood was coming out. Goddamn. It was terrible. Oh, did I have a headache. And Hank said something like, “That’s very graceful.” So now I really did have something to worry about. . . . Hank’s got some of the funniest stories he could tell about this stuff. So we got ourselves down there, and we’re walking around, and Hank said, “Well, let’s see, if you do it like you did getting out of your chair, you’ll go down the stairs and you’re going to fall down, so you need to have something to say.” He says, “Why don’t you just look up at the president and say, ‘Mr. President, those are beautiful shoes.’ Think you can get that right?” He was merciless.

7.

Open for Business

The demonstration missions were complete. The shuttle was considered operational. America’s new Space Transportation System was open for business, and one of its primary purposes would be the deployment of satellites.

STS
-5

Crew: Commander Vance Brand, Pilot Bob Overmyer, Mission Specialists Joe Allen and Bill Lenoir

Orbiter:
Columbia

Launched: 11 November 1982

Landed: 16 November 1982

Mission: Launch of two communications satellites

Satellite deployment was precisely the mission of the first operational mission,
STS
-5. It was the first shuttle flight to deploy satellites into geosynchronous orbit, which is ideal for communications satellites because the satellite remains at roughly the same longitude as it orbits Earth. To achieve a geosynchronous orbit, a satellite must reach an altitude around one hundred times higher than that at which the shuttle orbits. For the shuttle to launch such a satellite, the satellite was carried into low Earth orbit in the shuttle’s payload pay and then boosted into the higher orbit using a booster rocket.

STS
-5 was a mission full of firsts. In addition to the satellite deployments,
STS
-5’s four-man crew doubled the crew from the previous missions’ commander and pilot team to include the first two mission specialists to fly, Joe Allen and Bill Lenoir. Because of the deployments,
STS
-5 was also
NASA
’s first “commercial mission,” with the focus being on performing a service for paying customers.

Joe Allen had been selected as part of
NASA
’s second group of scientist-astronauts in 1967, and the move to larger crews had long been awaited by him
and his classmates. “The first assignment of mission specialists we knew was going to be [
STS
-]5, because the system was going to be declared operational after the first four test flights if nothing untoward happened,” Allen recalled.

We also knew that the next in line to be assigned were the scientists-astronauts. Those who had arrived [in the first of the two scientist-astronaut selections] had already flown, Jack Schmitt being the first to fly on the last Apollo, and then Joe Kerwin, Ed Gibson, and Owen K. Garriott had flown on the Skylab. So there were just now, I think, nine of us who would be considered. I guess I never thought much about it, but I almost assumed that maybe they went alphabetically, because they put myself and Bill Lenoir aboard that first operational flight. And I was thrilled, absolutely thrilled.

After having been assigned to the crew for just a few weeks, Allen decided he understood why he had been picked to be a part of that particular team, and he commented on it to George Abbey, who made crew assignments. “I was the impedance matching device between the two marine pilots and the
MIT
engineer. ‘Impedance matching’ is an engineering term for getting very unlike electrical circuits to communicate, one with the other.”

Allen recalled that while he made the comment somewhat in jest, Abbey did not find it as amusing as he did. “I suspect that there were elements of truth in this, because I was very good at getting different groups of people to understand each other. With no scintilla of modesty at all, I would say that’s probably my strongest suit, understanding the way different individuals think about things and then enabling communication between them, in spite of their differences. I assert I was—I hope it’s not overblown—very successful in getting scientists to understand what flight-crew members needed, and getting flight-crew members to understand what scientists needed, even though neither group spoke the other’s language.”

Both groups had the same motivation—a successful mission—but each approached the task in its own way. “You wanted the ultimate result to be a successful mission, and successful in later Space Shuttle flights and in the last Apollo flights meant scientifically rich in what was achieved. So I was the impedance matching device between Bill Lenoir, an extremely smart, very well disciplined, very tightly wound individual, and Vance Brand and Bob Overmyer, whose backgrounds were military, with a military way of thinking about things, and they had a much higher tolerance for people being not quite so intense.”

The addition of mission specialists, and the corresponding increase in crew size, resulted in a modification to the orbiter for this flight. Prior to the mission, the commander’s and pilot’s ejection seats were pinned to prevent them from being able to be used. In
Space Shuttle “Columbia”: Her Missions and Crews
, Ben Evans wrote that the crew cabin was not large enough to have ejection seats for every member of the crew, only the commander and pilot. The thought with
STS
-5 was that if all of the crew wouldn’t be able to eject in the event of a problem during launch, none of the crew should be able to do so. Allen recalled that he and Lenoir were opposed to the pinning, arguing that it would be better for two astronauts to survive than for none to, but Brand disagreed. “He said, ‘That’s not a choice.’ He later said to me, ‘Joe, this is not a selfless decision on my part; indeed, . . . it’s selfish, because I could not live the rest of my life knowing that I survived and you didn’t. I couldn’t do it. I don’t think Bob could either. . . . I have some historical evidence as to that being a true statement. I don’t just surmise it.’”

Allen explained that Brand had been a test pilot in England for a while, and some of the English bombers enabled the pilots to get out, but not the gunners, so there was a small body of data from psychological studies done on individuals who had escaped but, in escaping, had left their shipmates to a certain death. “They had been definitely tormented, in terms of what the data showed, for the rest of their lives. So it was not a good solution. Vance was aware of that data, and he didn’t want to be another bit of statistic in that database—a decision I thought was gracious. He said it was selfish; I didn’t think it was selfish at all.”

When launch day finally arrived,
STS
-5 added to its list of firsts by becoming the first shuttle mission to launch right on time. “We didn’t have one hiccup, not one delay, no nothing, and we went . . . on time,” recalled Allen. “We were told the night before that a Russian spaceship had actually changed the timing of its orbit somewhat and would come right over the Cape at exactly that time. Because we did launch on time, I suspect there are some photographs that could be found in the archives of the Soviets of us coming off the ground. I have no idea, but clearly they intended to at least watch us do it with their own eyes.”

On the day before launch, however, Leonid Brezhnev, the premier of Russia, died, and newspapers around the world were filled with news of his death, not of the Americans’ space launch. “There was maybe a little
blurb, a little photo of us in the lower corner of some newspapers, but we were pretty much second-page news, with the exception of my hometown, Crawfordsville, Indiana, where I was the front page,” Allen said.

That hometown front page was a major step forward for Allen. Years earlier, in August 1967, when he was selected as an astronaut, this same hometown newspaper ran a front-page account of the calf-judging contest at the county fair, with only a small article on the back page about the local native selected to be a
NASA
astronaut. “My mother knew the newspaper editor very well, and she called him, quite upset,” Allen recalled. “She said to him, ‘Harold, you know my son Joe was selected as an astronaut. I think that’s very important news, and there’s practically nothing.’ And he said to her, ‘Harriet, you know perfectly well we’re a small town; we’re a very small newspaper. If you want a story about your son Joe in the paper, you’re going to have to write it yourself.’” By the time he actually flew into space, however, Allen merited front-page news without his mother having to write it.

The first priority of
STS
-5 was to successfully deploy the first hardware put into orbit by the Space Shuttle. Two commercial communications satellites were deployed, one for Canada and one for Satellite Business Systems. Allen said the crew worked closely with the satellite developers to understand how the satellites were put together and what was needed for successful deployment. “The concept of the satellite in itself is simple,” Allen explained.

They are meant to be deployed spinning, and the way you do it is just put the satellite on a table that will spin, like you put a record onto a record player. . . . It’s mounted on the table prior to launch, then you go to orbit. . . . Once there, you cause the table to spin and you point the shuttle in exactly the right direction, and then at precisely the right part of the orbit, you just release hold-down arms that are holding the satellite to the tabletop. When you release the arms, springs on which the satellite sits expand and just give it a very gentle push out, spinning very beautifully.

The second-highest-priority planned objective of
STS
-5 was the Space Shuttle’s first extravehicular activity, by Allen and Bill Lenoir. “Although we had other bits and pieces of experiments to do,” Allen recalled, “on the day before the spacewalk was to take place, we commented to ourselves that we really had just two important things left to do. One was the spacewalk
and then the second was the reentry and a safe landing. I made the observation, ‘Vance, out of these two, if we have to make a choice, let’s choose the safe landing.’ And we all laughed about that.”

But what started as a joke quickly turned into reality when Allen encountered a problem with his suit. “Just as the spacewalk was to begin my spacesuit failed,” Allen said.

It was an electrical failure in the spacesuit. When one is in a spacesuit, and you power it up, you hear a very high pitched hum there someplace in your ear, just a high-frequency hum. When I powered mine on, the hum started, but it didn’t sound like it was healthy. It sounded, indeed, more like an angry mosquito. It just changed its pitch. I’d never heard it before. Then I proceeded to make various electrical checks of the suit systems, and none passed the check. So we tried all sorts of things, powering it on and off, and it was just not going to work, a very bitter disappointment to me, without any question. It was equally bitter to Bill, and the question now was, could he even do just a little part of a spacewalk—a short solo, if you will. . . . But Mission Control said, “No buddy system, no spacewalk.” Bill was really upset, obviously.