oh
when i came to you
endeavor houston
good morning to the remainder of the dog
crew and we sure do appreciate y'all
working like dogs
good morning good morning
endeavour this is houston are you ready
for the event
wxia this is houston please call
endeavour for a voice check
endeavor this is
wxia how do you hear me
endeavor this is wxia
how do you hear me
wxia this is endeavor
we hear you uh loud and clear how do you
hear us
you sound good to me
captain walker
yes ma'am that's me all right i'm jill
becker in atlanta nice to talk to you
this morning sir
if it's all right with you we were
hoping to kind of skip some of the
technical uh
stuff that you are dealing with and ask
you some
personal questions about what it's like
to be in space is that all right
you can certainly ask anything you like
and we'll answer as best we can okay
all right well first of all now you've
been up in space several times and
you've been up on this mission several
days what's the sleeping like up there
anything different
but sleeping in space is very individual
jill um
we all have our own ways of doing it
this flight fortunately
has what we call sleep stations which
are really individual bunks
for four of the crew members and then
the airlock is available for sleeping
when
the four bunks are occupied so that's
where i've been sleeping and everybody's
been sleeping pretty well it's quite
comfortable once you get used to it
what about leisure time and i'm not sure
how much of that you actually have
but is there any down time for you and
what do you do during your downtime
well as you may imagine
we are pretty busy most of the time
partly because we're
we're given a lot to do and partly
because we're very interested in our
work so we we tend to sometimes overdo
it a little perhaps
there is planned leisure time a little
of it and during that time we mostly
watch the earth uh or the sky
you get a really beautiful view of
mother earth from here in fact we are
sunrise on the east coast here uh
as we speak and so it's it's beautiful
and it's a great way to spend that that
little bit of leisure that we do have
when you're on a lengthy mission like
you're on do you get at all anxious
uh
wanting to come back to earth or do you
just enjoy the precious time that you've
got up there
i can only speak for myself personally
but it has been said by others as well
that
once you get up here and accustom
yourself to the feeling of zero gravity
it's quite pleasant and the view is
gorgeous and you're always very aware
that you're
very privileged very fortunate to be
here and so most of us would actually
stay a little longer if we had the
chance and i'd certainly like to make a
plug for staying a little longer on the
part of our crew right now for those who
are listening and have the opportunity
to control that
we'll pass that along if they weren't
able to hear a couple other little just
funky questions for you you look clean
shaven how do you shave in space
that's a real good question again we do
it different ways we have both the
conventional
safety razors and electric razors
being a veteran of many of these press
conferences i used the electric razor
before the press conference
and another again funky little question
here do you all still drink tang up
there
again i can only speak personally tang
is not
something that i ordinarily drink and so
i haven't had any up here we have a wide
variety of things to drink various
juices and
and mixed sugar and juice drinks
i've never seen anything labeled tang in
any of that
all right
your morning wake up calls i know you
had hard day's night i believe this
morning from the beatles any requests
you'd like to send back to the guys at
mission control
thank you jill i appreciate the offer
actually
the wake up music is well controlled by
our capcoms and our friends all
participate in it and
we're getting a dog theme with ours of
course because of the
crew nickname so
we're happy to leave that in their
capable hands they've done really well
so far all right well good luck on your
um on the rest of your mission i know
you've got some some for houston for
interesting work ahead of you and we
appreciate your taking the time to be
with us today captain walker
go ahead
well it's a great privilege to be here
and i'm really happy to talk to you and
i hope that all your viewers yes
we've just noticed
through the television
processing module
we go we believe so
close to that point
all right so thank you captain walker
good morning endeavor uh jim boyd here
wcvb in boston uh can dave walker hear
me
jim this is dave i hear you loud and
clear
wow this is incredible how far away are
you 17 000 miles up or so
well we're going about that fast but
we're really only about 220 miles above
you as we speak
you're speeding along at 17 household
alphabet
yes it's uh low and fast as as orbits go
and end up at
about 250 miles above the earth it's uh
apparently taking a little bit of time
for my audio to get up to you so it's a
an interesting delay process we have
here
well i'll try to uh to not walk on you
and as we say in the trade when we make
our transmissions uh do you have some
questions for me this morning
absolutely do uh first question is
let me know you set the scene for me let
me know what you see when you're looking
out your window right now
well that's a very good lead-in
we're looking
right down
on florida west palm beach
i can see lake okeechobee i can see
actually the cloud cover is obscuring
the kennedy space center in cape
canaveral and i can see a lot of
airplane pond trails headed for
places south
must be the winter tourists heading down
to my home state of florida it's
beautiful and now of course as we're
talking
we're moving so we're passing out into
the ocean uh off the coast of florida
and uh and the time has taken me to say
this we're
heading down uh over the caribbean
not in the atlantic actually
you're going south
going southeast actually at the top of
our orbit
since it's an ellipse as you i'm sorry
it is an ellipse but as you see it over
the ground
uh it looks like a sinusoid so we go
from
28 degrees north on a map on a global
map to 28 degrees south traveling east
all the time
give us a progress report on your
mission you're having first of all you
had some difficulty in getting off the
ground twice delayed with this mission
of endeavor
and also you're having some difficulty
with the wake shield saddle
well um
one way to look at it which which we've
considered is that most of nasa's
missions uh go so perfectly and with
very little hitches that every now and
again you have to have one where all the
little hitches seem to seem to catch up
and it evens out we've had more than our
share of the little hitches
but the good news is that they haven't
stopped us from getting done what we
needed to do at all and as the mission
goes on
everything is smoothing out
including the hitches with uh getting
the launch of the satellite now the
satellite is supposed to be trailing you
for
some
time for you to determine whether or not
the problems that existed have been
repaired
well in fact its nominal profile jim uh
keeps it
about 30 to 40 miles away from us
while
the
ground control personnel who are
controlling the science on the
satellites from the university of
houston
do their controlling of that science and
we
stand by to back them up should it be
necessary due to loss of communications
that's all the way it's supposed to be
and in fact
that's been going better and better and
now we're in the middle of what we would
consider our critical science period
where we're really getting some good
science done
as a team effort between the ground and
and us here aboard endeavor
things that we very seldom hear about
and talk about is the enormous cost of
satellite technology that you're dealing
with and the cost of the missions
does that put an additional pressure on
you and other members of the crew to
make sure you get things done get them
done right get them done on time
well there is tremendous pressure on us
to do things right and get things done
on time
i think that's related mostly to the
fact that we consider ourselves
to be agents of the american people in
the space program it's it's the people
space program and we're trying to do the
best we can for them
the costs actually
first of all are not
something that we deal with on a daily
basis and second of all are relatively
small in absolute terms by comparison
with what people spend on other things
nasa's budget is is trivial by
comparison with most other things and we
think the return
is way in excess of what's invested
so then talk of privatizing nasa and
taking it out of the u.s budget entirely
or at least
it is now you have any impressions of
that any opinions on that
i have opinions
right now what we know about the process
of privatization
is i think insufficient for me to make a
sensible answer to that i do think
however that nasa
as we have done business has given the
american people a great bargain
i don't think you'd want to pay my
salary for example if i were a civilian
contractor
a good point
let me ask you you talked earlier about
we're headed you're projecting in your
orbit and you're headed southeast over
the caribbean
while you're there are you
able to get a look at the hurricane
louise and
it's probably
where it is now and um
uh jim we did see quite a bit of it the
first day or two of the mission however
it's moved uh far enough north now that
it's not easy for us to observe we do
get an excellent opportunity to see the
weather patterns in what they call the
hurricane belt as we head here towards
africa and there is
constant activity down there
it's real obvious that the whole world
is
is ocean or an awful lot of it is ocean
and most of that ocean is generating
weather at this time of year
and again to talk about your orbit now
you said that you were over florida when
we started our conversation just about
10 minutes ago at this point
is there any projection for you to be
over boston or over the new england area
anytime in in the next 20 hours about
no i may go visit my family in boston
after the flight but that's as close as
i'm going to get to it anytime soon
we go no farther north
on a map of the united states than about
28 degrees
because we launched due east
out of the kennedy space center in
florida
that is the northernmost point of our
orbit so we we don't get to see nearly
as much
of our homeland as we would like to and
as i've been able to observe on previous
missions that have gone a little further
north in latitude
and commander one last question for you
and that is uh assess the mission at
this point are you considering it a
success and uh everything is going to
wind up safely back home on time
i consider it a great success i hope the
people that really matter that being the
american public do so as well
we've had minor hitches and and some
that could have been more than minor had
they not been responded to properly
by the ground controllers in houston and
by the crew on orbit
we've been well trained to do what we do
the people who help us do this
are the best in the world and this has
already been a considerable success and
i think will be a great success before
it's through there's some really good
science being done
and we're uh we're progressing every bit
as well as we would have hoped it just
hasn't been quite as easy to get to this
point as it would be if everything had
gone perfectly
and it's been uh very pleasurable
talking with you uh for
this morning i'll continue to do a
successful and a safe flight and see
okay thank you very much enjoy talking
to you and uh to all the american people
who are
hopefully watching this in the boston
area hello from endeavor and uh we're
real happy to be doing this uh in your
behalf
and we have the downlink
okay great before we before we start
with the with the video uh which we
intend to narrate we did want to take a
moment as a crew
to express our thanks
to somebody real special to us who's
no longer
with the shuttle program per se but who
had a lot to do with
getting
us where we are now and we're very much
appreciative of it and we wanted to take
a
an opportunity to say thanks to brewster
shaw
who
left the program as you remember
laden late in our flow after having made
some real crucial decisions about the
boosters and
having uh managed the program
tremendously well for quite a while
he's been uh well succeeded of course by
tommy holloway but brewster's special to
us
and we uh we wanted to thank him
personally and directly for all he did
uh
up to and including being on the roof
with our families uh at the launch and
holding madeline's hand and just
generally being the great guy he's
always been
rooster you're you'll always be a dog to
us
with that i'm going to turn it over to
my production manager for videos uh
the wiley dog face who is going to start
the narration and the and the video
downlink
i'll start the narration i'm just
showing
what what it is that pilots
like to do best which is sleep and eat
right now we'll show the eating parts
more dynamic
i know a lot of you know all about this
but
food comes in many different varieties
some is pre-packaged in little packets
that you can just throw in the oven
and
let it warm up prior to eating others
comes in bottles that we bring aboard
this is some of the red dogs barbecue
sauce
not everyone's favorite
certainly red dog's favorite we got some
cans of fruit
our drink comes in
in bags
and
and some vegetables that i have in my
other hand also comes in little
containers that need to be hydrated
is doing the filming for us here and
he's
showing the
showing the water squirting into this
rice dish
i really enjoy uh eating vegetables
while on orbit i like them pretty well
on earth as well but
uh on orbit i like vegetables better
than sweet things and so a lot of my
meals are
as well as some meat uh several servings
of veggies
and where are the shrimp
sorry i think you got most of them in
the program
yes sir
and with every meal a nice cup of coffee
in a bag
we are getting an excellent picture
composition lighting everything it's
perfect
well as you know our
our production manager is uh wiley jim
boss
he does an excellent job
i want to take this
opportunity to give our
the crews thanks to the flight control
teams you all guys have always been
great during this flight during this
training flow and really uh having
worked down there where you are some
i can tell that this is an excellent
team
thanks got a bunch of smiles around here
and while we're on the subject of food
we'd like to
give our thanks to gloria and vicky
call sign dog food
that
have helped us select and prepare these
wonderful items and over to red dog
okay this is one of our more interesting
secondary uh well actually dso but it's
got enough
stuff to do that it almost has taken on
the character of a secondary payload
this is the portable cynical blood
analyzer dto492b
and there is uh in my hand
the
instrument which does the flood
analyzing pretty nifty little gadget
what you do is
after fading out
and fading back in
the doctor is in is is the
side behind that but what you do
is you use a
little sticker
to take
some blood from a from a victim a
subject
and
once the subject has given you his blood
uh
there's a and it's not very much blood
fortunately since uh
some of the subjects are more willing
than others to be vampired
um
you take a small capillary tube
put the blood into a little cartridge
self-contained cassette that then goes
into the portable clinical blood
analyzer
the little remote control device that i
showed you there and in a minute and 20
seconds
it
gives you a pretty good blood analysis
and the thing is uh just terrific we've
been very pleased with the way it works
and this is one of those dsos
that actually works better in space than
it does
on the ground at least partially because
the blood is a heck of a lot easier to
get into this little capillary tube up
here where gravity is not trying to
force it down onto the floor
uh
it just climbs right up in the capillary
tube it's really easy to do all the
procedures that i struggled with
in training and uh
the life sciences folks
deserve an attaboy for the composition
design of this
particular dso it's
it's actually kind of fun to do except
for the
part where you have to calibrate the
machine which isn't too difficult
there you see the there you see the
blood itself in the capillary tube and
pujo is actually shooting the camera
he's going to zoom in there
and you can see
it's just a little it's just a little
cassette it's got electrodes on the
front end of it that interface with the
portable clinical blood analyzer innards
once you get it inside
and um
you never
have any blood to clean up and all all
the mess is contained in a small
biohazard bag and
it's
definitely better and easier
than the kind of blood draws that we
have done
in other occasions uh
different situations this is going to
have a lot of
applicability
in fact it probably already does um
before emergency room medicine and
remote medicine type things
and believe me if i can do this anybody
can do it
because i'm the fighter flight surgeon
type when it comes to this stuff
looks great
i knew that would appeal to the
to the surgeon or to the doctor's side
of you a story that you would appreciate
that's basically
the procedure
i think we've
covered it pretty well there's the pcba
itself
and the little cartridge goes in there
and you just punch in your patient id
numbers
and operator id numbers and shortly
we'll see the
see the answers which fortunately in our
case so far
have been
indicative of normal levels of the
various
constituents of the blood this is
um
well it has application to many
different experiments in the life
sciences world so
it doesn't doesn't really matter too
much what but
sure does make the process of collecting
blood for any scientific purpose easier
uh on orbit and one would assume
in other
difficult situations
okay this is running on longer than we
realized when we did it so i'm not
trying to hog all the video time we
are going to try and show you what the
display itself looks like
and uh
lot to turn it on i told you i was a
fighter pilot
and it's really hard to see in the video
but it's it's a graphic display and it
works really well
okay here is underdog to talk about
exercise
well even though we stay busy uh it's
real important to schedule time for
exercise and uh it's real important in
space on earth
you have your own weight to react forces
against in space of course you don't and
so uh we come up with exercises where
you can
either react forces against your own
body as i was just doing with that red
dyna band or position yourself such that
any force you generate is reacted
in such a way that you stay in a stable
configuration
and
in such a way you can isolate muscle
groups and actually get a really good
workout
and uh
typically we're scheduled for an hour
and a half exercise and that entails
time to get ready to exercise
as well as time to clean up after the
exercise
and uh
oops there goes some
some paper floating by but
we actually do get quite a good workout
and it really does
make you feel a lot better
and you always have to be thinking about
newton up here because
if you don't
you never know what's going to happen to
you
and i think you'll see an example of
that here in a minute
here i'm doing some
shoulder extension exercises
underdog you know just how amazed i am
and if you don't watch out whoa
it's superman
hello this is pluto and i'd like to take
you on a short tour of the orbiter wide
web
uh we have nine pgscs on board we have a
number of different uh
experiments that we're doing with them
as well as operational use of them in
order to help us with uh
operating the space shuttle
there's the
male disc bag
to its left we have the heart of the
orbiter wide web is the data
distribution center
the pcmmu data from the orbiter comes
into that machine and is distributed
where it needs to go
this is one this experiment here is the
gps relative gps experiment and next to
it
is the
mpd manipulator position development
experiment
for the rendezvous we've positioned what
we normally used as the world map we've
positioned up by the commander so that
he can use our pop the rendezvous and
fox ops program in order to help him fly
currently we have a world map on it
we'll have it up using the uh reno and
box ops program tomorrow for the wake
shield rendezvous as we did for spartan
now on the mid deck we didn't have quite
enough room on the flight deck
on the mid deck we have two other pgses
one of them is being used for the
goddard experiments the spartan the con
cap and so on and so forth the other one
is the other part of the gps
experiment
relative gps is a particular favorite of
this crew
as my crewmates like to remind me
and what it is doing is it's using the
orbiter gps data and comparing it with
the wake shield gps data
that allows us to
get a an accurate relative state vector
between the two we think in the future
the our fidos and flight controllers
will find this very useful
as we get the orbiter into the latter
part of the 20th century
in addition to the
gps data it also has a world map which
we can use
to show
where we are
this is the complement of dgses on the
middeck
of all nine
all of them are actually in use
on
the flight days involving the wake
shield
we also have a pilot computer for use as
a landing refresher for the commander
and pilot
but we couldn't find a way to tie that
one into the orbiter wide web in the
short period of time that we had
well we almost forgot a couple of very
important pgscs those are back on the
flight deck
giving us a total of seven on the flight
deck
and
those
two are
for the wake shield the wake shield
is part of its own mini web and it
communicates with
the pgcs communicate with the wake
shield allowing us to see the wake
shield data and to back up
the wake shield poc in its commanding
and data
monitoring
we're flying over africa in this video
a quick uh last look at the orbiter wide
web
we're using uh for this period of time
we're using an old tgsc for the world
map in front
the old ones
can't be interfaced to the orbiter wide
web yet
now we're focusing on the wakefield
pgscs
and here's the pjc for commanding the
wake shield
on its free flight it's two day free
flight it's out there right now
uh doing science growing semiconductors
and here's another pgc for monitoring
the data real problem with uh
data is in this day and age there's so
much information that we can't have it
all on one computer we really need the
extra data screens in order to be able
to see all the data at the appropriate
times
uh it was quite a pleasure at first my
payload commander jim voss told me that
we had too many pgs and just recently
both he and my commander asked why we
don't have more
done by then
this is one of our secondary payloads
the commercial generic bio processing
apparatus cgba
red dog and i have been doing this one
throughout the flight it's sponsored
primarily by the university of colorado
and kansas state names research center
dr mark edwards out at university of
colorado has been the primary person
we've worked with it has 29 experiments
with 152
different tescu type things called fluid
processing apparatus
it has a lot of different things in it
biological processes waste management
microbial control here you see me
deactivating actually about seven of the
test tubes that are inside the canister
in this
group activation pack there are a series
of test tubes and you turn the crank to
push
a plate down that mixes fluids we mix
them first have it do its process here
on orbit and then we deactivate it uh
later like i'm doing right now you can
see in the container which is an
incubator keeping it warm a lot of
different of the gaps that have many of
the different 152 different things going
on
some of the interesting things they're
doing with these are
3d polymer matrices with a protein
data storage medium they're also looking
at some different materials for
disinfecting bacterial contamination
both for water purification on space and
in earth that's a university of or
kansas state university
experiment there's some bone marrow
growth
immune suppression uh
system out of kansas state
and
a lot of different things that they're
they're working on medical disorders
drug development microbial control it's
one of the ones that you get a lot of
bang for your buck an interesting
type
one
our production values have suffered just
slightly by virtue of the fact that
we've had primary mission stuff to
perform here
we're now over the gulf
and we should be looking at corpus
christi
and the inland waterway up the gulf
coast
we're getting a great picture you can
just go right along the coast there and
should be able to find houston here
shortly
this is pretty good viewing of the
gulf for this time of year there's not
as much haze as we sometimes encounter
hope you guys are having good weather i
suspect it's kind of hot story
it's been a little a little warm up to
93 degrees but it has been an early fall
here
well as much as we love it up here
we like
we like being home and although we're
going to enjoy it as long as we can
including milking you guys for as much
extra as we can
we'll be happy to see you when we get
back
if you look above the cloud layer you
can see all the contrails of the
airliners going back and forth
pretty interesting indication of the age
we live in yes sir we got a good view of
them
looks like go weather for the cat crew
this will just hold until they get ready
to launch
now we're over the southern part of the
peninsula we're centered up on lake
okeechobee now you can pull back and see
the entire part of peninsula is that not
pretty
yes it's fantastic it's unbelievable how
clear the peninsula is
yeah this is uh this is nice weather
down home
jim said he ought to be taking pictures
instead of showing these to you but i
think this is worth sharing with people
it's uh
it's as close as you can come to being
here and as you know it's
it's missing a lot of the other
sensations but the cameras we've got
these days really enable us to share a
lot there's the
there's the south florida the end of the
peninsula the beginning of the keys
and here comes the bahamas
okay as you go into the handover we'll
give you this uh we'll give you this
picture
and that'll probably close us out
can you see that story yes sir we have
it
well
the message from our perspective is
we sure would like to be going back
there we we think that and the other
the other
orbiting satellites of other planets and
of the sun are the places we ought to be
going next
you