Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (31 page)

The other problem McCandless ran into was that the internal thermal control system for the spacesuit was configured assuming that the astronaut would be exerting effort that would cause him or her to generate heat. The idea was that an astronaut would be working up a sweat and the spacesuit would keep him or her comfortably cool. However, in reality, McCandless found himself cooled far past the point of comfort—it turned out that using the
MMU
required far less effort than moving from place to place on a regular spacewalk and it resulted in a cooler environment.

23.
Bruce McCandless using the Manned Maneuvering Unit, or
MMU
, to fly freely in space. Courtesy
NASA
.

“At one point I was actually shivering and my teeth were chattering, and that tends to detract from your overall performance,” McCandless said. “If you look at the front of the
MMU
you’ll see a big knob and some markings on the beta cloth running from C to H, which I naively thought meant cold and hot. It turns out that hot just means minimal cooling, and it was set up for somebody who was physically active, that is, with a reasonable metabolic workload in a warm environment such as the payload bay, meaning something that was reflecting heat back and that nominally was maybe 0
[degrees] Fahrenheit but certainly not minus 190 like the effective temperature of deep space.”

Initially, when McCandless was maneuvering in the orbiter’s payload bay, he didn’t have problems. But once he got out away from the shuttle and wasn’t as physically active, he said, he got quite cold.

At the time the spacewalk rules precluded shutting off the cooling system, out of fears that, once it was turned off, it wouldn’t work if it were turned back on. However, McCandless got cold enough that something had to be done, so Mission Control gave him permission to turn off the cooling system and see what happened. “Well, predictably, after about ten to fifteen minutes it got warmer, pleasantly warm, and a little later it was getting hot so that Mission Control’s agreement was I turn it back on, and miracle of miracle[s], it just started right up. No trouble. Over the course of the spacewalk I turned it off and then back on maybe three or four times, and every time it stopped perfectly and then started back up perfectly.”

During the flight, McCandless became the subject of one of the more famous photographs in spaceflight history, showing him in the distance floating untethered above Earth. McCandless said that, decades later, having seen the picture countless times, it still connected him to the experience.

When I see it, I guess maybe a little bit of a tingle or goose bumps. It is extremely famous, and I think that perhaps one of the attributes of the photo that makes it so popular is that the sun visor is down so you can’t really see my face and it could be the face of anyone or the face of “mankind,” whatever you want to call it. And in fact, at Space Center Houston—the tourist facility down there outside of
JSC
—and a couple of other places, they have a full-size blowup of that with the faceplate cut out so people, mostly kids, could climb up a stepladder behind it and put their faces through it and get photographed.

The photographer was 41
B
pilot Hoot Gibson. “It’s customary during a shuttle mission to swap off or change off duties depending on the mission phase,” McCandless recalled, “and this particular phase of the mission, Hoot’s job was to use the Hasselblad camera to document the
EVA
. I think it goes without saying that he did a spectacular job both from the technical standpoint and from the quasi or artistic standpoint of composition and selection of scenes.”

Astronaut Jerry Ross was the CapCom for each of the
MMU
tests. “Those lucky guys,” Ross said. “I knew that Bruce had waited a long time and worked
many, many years here in the office to get a chance to fly, and so I was happy for him and Bob Stewart when they got a chance to go outside and do their thing.” Ross, who later went on to complete nine
EVA
s in orbit himself, said it was fun to talk to the crew during the
MMU
demonstrations, but he couldn’t help but be a little jealous. “You can imagine how envious I was getting, sitting there on the ground and watching all those guys go out there and have fun.”

In addition to the test of the
MMU
, another of the mission objectives was to test out for the first time the shuttle computers’ rendezvous software. The shuttle’s first rendezvous target was a Mylar balloon, launched out of the shuttle’s payload bay and away from the shuttle by a spring, said Brand. “When it got out a little ways, it timed out and it filled with gas. We were watching it go away from the spacecraft, and all of a sudden it exploded. Not that it was any danger to us, because it was away from the ship, and after all, it was only a balloon. It wasn’t like a stick of dynamite. But when this balloon exploded, I said, ‘It blew up.’ And on the ground they were wondering, ‘Does that mean it exploded, or does that mean it filled with gas, ‘blew up’?’ Well, it exploded.”

The crew salvaged the test by tracking the biggest balloon fragment with radar and continuing with the test. “It was fun to do those early things,” Brand said. “Many things that are done on the shuttle today as very routine things, back then had to be checked out. The rendezvous system was one of them.”

While the equipment test portions of the mission were successful, Brand said the satellite deployments didn’t work out so well. The crew deployed two satellites that were similar to the ones successfully deployed on
STS
-5. The
PALAPA
-
B
2 was for Indonesia, and the
WESTAR
-6 was for Western Union. Each of the satellites deployed flawlessly, and both were supposed to wait half an hour to get some distance from the shuttle before starting the solid rocket motor burn that would lift them into geosynchronous orbit, twenty-three thousand miles above Earth. The engines started the burns but after about twenty seconds unexpectedly stopped. According to
NASA
, the culprit was the failure of the Payload Assist Module-D (
PAM
-
D
) rocket motors. With nothing they could do about it, the crew abandoned the satellites in orbit and returned home.

STS
-41
C

Crew: Commander Bob Crippen, Pilot Dick Scobee, Mission Specialists George “Pinky” Nelson, James “Ox” Van Hoften, and Terry Hart

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: 6 April 1984

Landed: 13 April 1984

Mission: Deployment of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, repair of the Solar Maximum satellite

Shortly after his return from
STS
-7, Bob Crippen was once again assigned to command
Challenger
, a post he believes he was given to take specific advantage of the experience he had gained on his last flight. “I think what they were trying to do was to build on the experience that I had from doing the proximity operations,” theorized Crippen. “The next, 41
C
, was going to do our first rendezvous. We had a satellite that was disabled that they needed repaired, so it was similar to what I’d done before, only an extension of it. So maybe that’s why I got picked to fly it.”

The mission of 41
C
was to deploy the Long Duration Exposure Facility and to capture the Solar Max satellite that had been launched on a Delta launch vehicle in 1980.

According to astronaut Terry Hart, who operated the robotic arm for 41
C
, the skills Crippen picked up during years of experience in the astronaut corps were obvious from the very beginning, including in some unusual ways. “It’s funny,” Hart recalled,

I remember the day we posed for our crew picture. You all put your blue suits on and you bring the helmets in or something, and we took maybe twenty pictures, trying to get us all to have the right expressions on our face or whatever. And then the tradition is, you bring them back to the Astronaut Office and then you ask the secretaries to pick which one is best.

So Crippen and Scobee and Pinky and Ox and I are sitting around, looking at all these pictures. In one of them, one of us would be winking or our smile would be crooked or something like that. Every one of us had maybe a 50 percent hit rate on the pictures, having the right expression on our face. And we looked at Crippen. . . . Every photograph had the same expression on Bob Crippen’s face. He had it down pat. He knew exactly how to smile.

The mission marked the first time a shuttle flew a direct ascent trajectory, meaning that instead of launching into a low initial orbit and then using the Orbital Maneuvering System to raise it to an altitude of about three hundred kilometers, the shuttle used the
OMS
during ascent to achieve a high
initial apogee and then used it again to round out the orbit at that level.

From the very beginning of the mission, Hart had difficulty adapting to weightlessness. Not one to have ever had issues with motion sickness on Earth, the space sickness caught him by surprise. “I wasn’t weightless for more than three minutes and I knew I was in trouble,” he said. “I just felt awful, and I was throwing up, mostly just dry heaves, every thirty minutes or so for a day.”

Despite feeling so bad, Hart said that he made sure to get on camera once that first day, just so those on the ground would know that he really was there. “I could barely force myself to get out of the corner of the cabin and get up on camera. There were some things I had to do that first day, but they were minimal. I just had to unstow the arm, and I barely made it through that. I really was totally incapacitated for the first day, and I tried the usual drugs that they give you to help, but I had it so bad, nothing helped at all.”

That night, Hart was exhausted and fell asleep fast. But his sleep didn’t last for long. “I started dreaming, and I dreamt that I was falling, which I was. I was falling. But I had like a visceral reaction to a fear of falling all of a sudden. I remember I was in the blue sleeping bag and I remember reaching to grab something as I came awake, to stop my falling, and I did it with such force that I ripped the bag that I was sleeping in. It was that violent. And I grabbed on to something, and then I realized where I was.”

In Hart’s opinion, the repair of the Solar Max satellite was the highlight of the mission. The solar observatory satellite had been in orbit since 1980, observing and studying the sun during the peak of the eleven-year solar cycle. But within a few months of its deployment the satellite had started popping fuses, Hart said. “There was a thermal problem, and some of the fuses got too hot. They had derated the fuses and that had caused them to pop, and the fuses were powering the attitude-control electronics on the satellite. So as a result, the satellite was spinning and they couldn’t control it. It was pointed at the sun, but it was wobbling so that it was not of any use to the scientists.”

The mission was to capture, repair, and re-release the satellite. It was to be the first on-orbit spacecraft repair, and Crippen and his crew were just the ones for the job. They even called themselves the Ace Satellite Repair Company.

“The Ace thing had come along earlier, actually prior to the shuttle flying,” Crippen recalled. He and some friends in the corps helped the wife of
a fallen pilot move, and the onetime gig turned into a regular service when other friends needed help moving. “We formed the Ace Moving Company, and our motto was, ‘We move single women anywhere and husbands out.’ It was mostly a social thing, but we started that and then sort of built on it. Prior to our flight—I believe it was
STS
-5—they also used the Ace Moving Company sign, because they were deploying satellites. So it was sort of an extension of those earlier days to call ourselves the Ace Satellite Repair, because that was our job to go up and repair the satellite.”

Although the satellite was built and launched before the shuttle started flying, scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center had the forethought to design Solar Max with future in-space repairs in mind. Attached to the satellite was a grapple fixture that would allow the
RMS
to grab it.

The main challenge the crew faced in the task, according to Crippen, was that many of the rate gyros on board had been lost, so it was difficult to stabilize the satellite. The repair required astronauts to undo small electrical connectors, which were difficult to handle while wearing large
EVA
gloves.

“The other aspect was this was going to be a flight using maneuvering units [
MMU
],” said Crippen. “That had been done once before without a real task, and this one we wanted to have Pinky [Nelson] go out and actually capture this satellite.”

Nelson recalled his excitement at learning that he had been selected for the duty:

I remember meeting with Crippen . . . in one of the little conference rooms over in Building 4, where he doled out the assignments. He assigned me the role of flying the
MMU
, which kind of made my year, because here was a mission with four military pilots on it, and Terry Hart and Ox van Hoften were both mission specialists, engineer types, but they had also both been fighter pilots, and Scobee had flown everything that had wings, and Crip, this was his third flight already on the shuttle. And they decided to let me fly the maneuvering unit. I never asked why. I didn’t want them to think about it.