Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (49 page)

During training, Bolden explained, the sim crew would introduce some errors to see how the astronauts would respond to them, but then at other times, they introduced abnormalities simply to try to distract the astronauts from the important things. “There is probably one critical thing that you really need to focus on, and the rest of it doesn’t make any difference. If you don’t work on it, you get to orbit and you don’t even know it was there. But if you notice it and start thinking about it or start working on it, you can get yourself in all kinds of trouble. They love doing that with electrical systems, so they would give you an electrical failure of some type.”

Bolden recalled that on this particular occasion he was working an engine issue, and the sim team introduced a minor electrical problem. He first made the mistake of trying to work the corrective procedure on the wrong electrical bus, one of multiple duplicate systems on the shuttle.

The training team intended it this way. You learn a lesson from it. So I started working this procedure and what I did in safeing the bus was I shut down the bus for an operating engine. When I did that, the engine lost power and it got real quiet. So we went from having one engine down in the orbiter, which we could have gotten out of, to having two engines down, and we were in the water, dead. Here I went from I was going to feel real good about myself because I’d impress my crew to feeling just horrible because I had killed us all. And Hoot kind of reached over and patted me on the shoulder. He said, “Charles, let me tell you about Hoot’s Law.” That’s the way he used to do stuff sometimes. And I said, “What’s Hoot’s Law?” And he said, “No matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse.”

And I remembered Hoot’s Law from that day. That was probably 1984, or 1985 at the latest, early in my training. But I remembered Hoot’s Law every day. I have remembered Hoot’s Law every day of my life since then. And I’ve had some bad things go wrong with me in airplanes and other places, but Hoot’s Law has always caused me to take a deep breath and wait and think about it and then make sure that somebody else sees the same thing I did. And that’s the way I trained my crews, but that was because of that experience I had with Hoot.

STS
-62
A

Crew: Commander Bob Crippen, Pilot Guy Gardner, Mission Specialists Dale Gardner, Jerry Ross, and Mike Mullane, Payload Specialists Brett Watterson and Pete Aldridge

Orbiter:
Discovery

Launched: N/A

Landed: N/A

Mission: Deployment of reconnaissance satellite, first launch from Vandenberg

As 1985 wrapped up and 1986 began, the Space Shuttle was beginning to realize its promised potential. The early flights had hinted at that promise, but in 1985, with the orbiter’s high flight rate, variety of payloads, and distinguished payloads, the nation was beginning to see that potential become reality. And as those flights were taking place, work on the ground was foreshadowing even greater times ahead—an even greater flight rate, a teacher and journalist flying into space, the imminent launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and entirely new classes of missions in planning that would mark even broader utilization for America’s versatile Space Transportation System.

After his completion of mission 41
G
, Bob Crippen sought and was given command of a groundbreaking mission, 62
A
. The mission was the first time that the “2
”
was used in a designation, indicating that the launch was to take place not out of Kennedy Space Center but rather out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

“The air force built the launch site out there to do military missions which required a polar orbit, and it was a flight I wanted a lot,” said Crippen, who explained that the assignment was a homecoming of sorts for him. During the 1960s, before his transfer to
NASA
, Crippen had been a part of the air force astronaut corps, based at Vandenberg and assigned to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory space station program. The
MOL
launches would have used Space Launch Complex 6 (
SLC
-6) at Vandenberg, and now
SLC
-6 had been modified to support Space Shuttle launches.

“I felt like I’d come full circle, and I really wanted that polar flight,” Crippen said. “I lobbied for it and ended up being selected, although not without some consternation. I think since this was primarily an air force mis
sion, there was a big push by the air force to have an air force commander on the flight. But the powers that be ended up discussing it a lot and letting me take the lead on it.”

The crew, which included U.S. undersecretary of the air force Pete Aldridge, spent a lot of time at Vandenberg, Crippen said, making sure the launch complex was acceptable. “We actually took the
Enterprise
out there and used it to run through where they had to move it to stack it, and they actually had an external tank and some not-real solid rockets out there. . . . So we mounted it all up, and I’ve got pictures of the vehicle sitting on the launchpad like it’s ready to fly, but it was the
Enterprise
, as opposed to the
Discovery
.”

Jerry Ross recalled that a key difference between Kennedy and Vandenberg was that the shuttle stack was going to be assembled on the launchpad itself. At Kennedy, the orbiter,
SRB
s, and external tank were stacked inside the massive Vehicle Assembly Building and then moved to the launchpad on the crawler. “The solid rocket motors were going to be stacked up out on the pad. The external tank would be mounted to those out at the pad, and then the shuttle [orbiter] would be brought out on this multitiered carrier from its processing facility several miles away and taken out to the launchpad and put in place once everything else was ready,” said Ross. “The entire launch stack could be enclosed in basically a rollaway hangar type of facility, and also the Launch Control Center was basically underneath the pad. It was buried in the concrete, not directly underneath, but still right there contiguous to the launchpad itself. That should have been a fairly noisy place to operate out of.”

Ross learned that he had been assigned to 62
A
while still in training for 61
B
. “I was assigned to a second flight before I flew the first one,” he said.

I was very excited about that, and the fact that you’re going to get to do something so unique like that for the very first time was fascinating to me. When I launched in November of ’85, I was supposed to fly again in January of ’86, out of Vandenberg. Of course, everybody knew that date was not realistic at that point. But while I was on orbit, that date had been slipped out to July of ’86, and most people thought that that was a fairly realistic date. So that would have been very close, two flights within six, seven months of each other.

Training for 61
B
kept him quite busy, but Ross managed to squeeze out a little extra time to also train with the 62
A
crew at Vandenberg. “I was wor
ried with the flights getting so close together that maybe they were going to replace me,” Ross admitted. “I talked to Crip a couple of times about that, and he said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.’”

The planned launch, Ross said, would have been a fascinating ride. “We were going to go into a 721/2 degree inclination orbit. . . . It would have been awesome. We’d have basically seen all the land masses of the world, so it would have been neat.”

Fellow 62
A
crew member Mike Mullane agreed. “The idea of flying into polar orbit, oh, man, I was just looking forward to that so much. You’re basically going to see the whole world. In an equatorial orbit like we were flying, or a low-inclination orbit like we were flying on the first mission, you don’t get to see lot of the world. So I was really looking forward to that.”

As with other DoD missions the shuttle had flown, preparations for 62
A
involved a high amount of secrecy, with astronauts required to not even tell their wives what they were doing. However, Mullane said he enjoyed working on military missions; his next two shuttle missions were also military missions. “You had a sense of this national security involved about it, which made you feel a little bit more pride, I guess, in what you were doing and importance in what you were doing.”

Ross said the original flight plan had included twenty-four-hour-a-day operations by two air force payload specialists—Brett Watterson and Randy Odle—but Odle was bumped in favor of Pete Aldridge, undersecretary of the air force. “That would have been some pretty high-power folks flying with us on the flight.”

The mission was assigned two main payloads: an experimental infrared telescope called Cirris and a prototype satellite,
P
-8888, called Teal Ruby. “My understanding was [Teal Ruby] was a staring mosaic infrared sensor satellite that was trying to be able to detect low-flying air-breathing vehicles, things like cruise missiles, and a way to try to detect those approaching U.S. territories.”

Mullane said he had no additional concern at the prospect of launching from a previously unused launch complex. “Not any more beyond a natural terror of riding a rocket,” said Mullane.

I don’t care where it was launching from; I didn’t personally have any fear about it being a new launchpad and therefore more danger associated with it. It’s just that on launch on a shuttle, you fly with no escape system: no ejection seat, no
pod, no parachute of any form. You fly in a rocket that has a flight-destruct system aboard it, so it can be blown up in case something goes wrong. Those are reasons why you’re terrified. It’s not where you’re launching from, in my opinion; it’s [that] the inherent act of flying one of these rockets is dangerous.

STS
-61
F

Crew: Commander Rick Hauck, Pilot Roy Bridges, Mission Specialists Mike Lounge and David Hilmers

Orbiter:
Challenger

Launched: N/A

Landed: N/A

Mission: Launch of the
Ulysses
space probe

While Crippen and his crew were getting ready for 62
A
, Rick Hauck was preparing for his own first-of-its-kind Space Shuttle mission. He was the astronaut project officer for the Centaur cryogenically fueled upper stage, which
NASA
was planning to use on the shuttle as a platform for launching satellites.

The Centaur upper stage rocket had a thin aluminum skin and was pressure stabilized, such that if it wasn’t pressurized, it would collapse under its own weight, like the Atlas missiles used to launch the orbital Mercury missions. “If it were not pressurized but suspended and you pushed on it with your finger, the tank walls would give and you’d see that you’re flexing the metal,” said Hauck. “Its advantage was that it carried liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which, pound for pound, give better propulsion than a solid rocket motor [like
NASA
had been using on previous missions to boost satellites].”

Preparations were being made for the Centaur to launch two interplanetary probes—the
Ulysses
probe and the
Galileo
probe—which needed the powerful rockets available to be launched into deep space from the shuttle.

“At some point,” Hauck said, “the decision was made, well, we’ve got to use the Centaur, which was never meant to be involved in human spaceflight.” The origins of Centaur are older than
NASA
itself; it began as a project of the air force in 1957. Throughout its history it has been useful as an upper stage on expendable launch vehicles for launching satellites and probes to the moon and to planets other than Earth. But there was a high level of danger
involved in pairing the highly volatile Centaur with a shuttle full of people.

“Rockets that are associated with human spaceflight have certain levels of redundancy and certain design specifications that are supposed to make them more reliable,” Hauck commented.

Clearly, Centaur did not come from that heritage, so, number one, was that going to be an issue in itself, but number two is, if you’ve got a return-to-launch-site abort or a transatlantic abort and you’ve got to land, and you’ve got a rocket filled with liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen in the cargo bay, you’ve got to get rid of the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, so that means you’ve got to dump it while you’re flying through this contingency abort. And to make sure that it can dump safely, you need to have redundant parallel dump valves, helium systems that control the dump valves, software that makes sure that contingencies can be taken care of. And then when you land, here you’re sitting with the shuttle Centaur in the cargo bay that you haven’t been able to dump all of it, so you’re venting gaseous hydrogen out this side, gaseous oxygen out that side, and this is just not a good idea.

Hauck was working those issues when George Abbey called on him to command the first flight of the Shuttle-Centaur to launch the
Ulysses
solar probe. Astronaut Dave Walker was assigned the second Centaur mission, to launch the
Galileo
probe to Jupiter. The two missions had to be flown close together—in the first ten days of April 1986, Hauck said—because of the positioning of Earth in its orbit relative to the two satellites’ destinations. “It was clear this would be very difficult,” Hauck said. “We were going to have just four crew members, because that minimized the weight. We were going to 105 nautical mile altitude, which was lower than any shuttle had ever gone to, because you need the performance to get the Shuttle-Centaur up because it was so heavy.”

The Shuttle-Centaur integration was being managed out of the Lewis Research Center, now Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Centaur was developed originally. “Lewis had been the program managers for Atlas-Centaur, and so they knew the systems,” Hauck said,