good morning and welcome to space lab j
crew post flight press conference i'd
like to turn the program over to the
commander
hoot gibson go ahead
thank you barbara good morning and uh
thank you for the opportunity to speak
to you after the conclusion of a very
successful mission uh we of course are
the crew of space lab j
uh sts-47
which of course was the 50th flight of
the space shuttle and i'd like to
reintrodu introduce the crew
uh right to my right our mission pilot
major kurt brown
who was making his first flight aboard
space lab j
our payload commander mission specialist
number one
mark lee making a second flight aboard
space lab j
our flight engineer or mission
specialist number two
jf making his second fight on this
mission
mission specialist number three
jan davis
making her first flight aboard sts-47
our mission specialist number four dr
may jemison making her first flight
and our payload specialist number one
dr mamuru mori
uh the first japanese astronaut making
his first fight aboard sts-47
we're here today to tell you our story
to tell you the story of space lab j and
i think we can best do that with some of
the images from the mission so
with that if we can uh start the video
uh the crew will describe the mission as
we saw it
using our video images and our still
images
well at t-minus six seconds main engine
was starting and uh shortly
at t zero we started the 50th mission of
the space shuttle
once we clear the tower we begin our
roll maneuver which puts us in the
orbital plane that our mission would be
in and that was 57 degrees of
inclination
and shortly after liftoff
we reached 20 000 feet and already by
then we're at mach 1 and you'll be able
to see some of the shock waves off the
external tank and solid rocket boosters
and not much longer after that about two
minutes into the flight uh we've used
all the energy we can get out of our
solid rocket boosters and we separate
from those
and now we're only on the uh the main
engines for another eight minutes
once we got up we turned our
uh rocket ship into a spacecraft by
opening the payload bay doors there and
got ready uh to activate that laboratory
you see in the bay
and heading down the tunnel the more i
look at this picture is kind of like
taking the subway to work here
it's about 20 feet long and
it's fun to go down you just give a push
off at one end you have to make a little
jog as you go into
the
lab here and you can see you got to
stick your hand out to stop
a little bit but once you're in the lab
we started activation we got back there
about three and a half hours into the
mission and the activation went very
smoothly
a relative started working on a material
science experiment uh this is
accessorization experiments using image
mirror furnace
and i became also a subject of four
different japanese experiments
this is a
perceptual motor function experiment
using a joystick and in those
experiments scientists on the ground
checked my eye movement while i
attempted to track the flickering light
twice a day of course we would hand over
the vehicle we were working the dual
shift mission we had the redshift in the
blue ship so in the morning we'd hand
over from blue to red
in the evening we would hand over from
red to blue
handing over both the orbiter functions
and the space lamp
on the blue shift we did the free flow
electrophoresis experiment which is a
japanese experiment we're passing
electrical current through
some biological materials to separate
them out according to their electric
potential
we had three of these experiments
scheduled and we were able to do two
extra ones during the flight so we feel
like we had a really good experiment
there very successful even though we did
lose some of the downlink data
one of the experiments that you've heard
a lot about was lower body negative
pressure and these are just images from
the lower body negative pressure the
objectives of that experiment was to
really see how the heart adjusts to
microgravity and to figure out can you
use lower body negative pressure as a
counter measure to help people to
readjust when they come back some of the
other experiments that we did that dealt
with medical issues were fluid therapy
system
the fluid therapy system we used really
talked about
can you produce iv fluids in space and
whether or not you're able to
successfully administer them but we did
spend a lot of time working with lower
body negative pressure and we got lots
of results that good results back
well the space lab crew was busy working
back in the lab the orbiter crew was
also busy on the mid deck we had several
experiments that we ran
one of these is the protein crystal
growth which we see here being activated
once we got on orbit
the another experiment we had going was
a medical uh
data take of energy utilization and we
collected
some blood samples tests for glucose and
we logged all the food and water and
some urine samples we took to better
understand how the body actually uses
the food that we intake while we're in
zero-g environment
the first thing i had to do in the body
right after i woke up
was to attack three different directors
on my body
except the fourth and fifth days i wore
all the time a backpack called pms
and to monitor my exocardiogram and
retrograde wave and skin conductance
level
every day
in the afternoon
i wear this
and i spent a couple of hours to
conduct cell culture experiments using a
specially designed culture kit
and optical microscope
we mainly observed how cells are
developed under micro g and took many
microscopic pictures
i'm not sure if we had a record number
of in-flight maintenance procedures but
we did have some fairly critical ones
early in the mission we had a water leak
in the materials science rack and we
went in there and it was a fairly simple
thing to fix once we took the insulation
away it was similar to just fixing a
leaky faucet
at home but it
kept the loop intact and were able to
continue with furnaces such as this
which is the image mirror ferns
it was one of the funded projects to
work on on orbit because it was rather
interactive you had to establish a melt
zone in this particular scene we're
putting a quartz tube
around the sample and then once we got
the image mirror closed we went ahead
and brought the samples together and
we bring them together so that the focus
of the there's a light bulb in the back
and also one in in the in the cover
the focus of the energy is on the gap
between the two samples
this was one of them that we did we did
two other
experiments in the in the image mirror
furnace one of them was a glass cube
experiment
this glass cube where the objective was
to turn it into a glass sphere and do
some measurements in this particular
case
the temperature got a little bit higher
than we expected
and i guess it's one of the reasons that
you do experiments to try to understand
the reaction to certain materials in
zero gravity and the other one that was
looks like it's very successful with our
summer skype
sample we have a sample here that's
about oh it gets
six to eight millimeters long
in addition to the image furnace we also
had some other major furnaces in the two
material science racks we had four other
major furnaces including this one which
was a continuous heating furnace which
had two heating chambers and two cooling
chambers
of course we also had the large
isothermal furnace and the gradient
heating furnace as well as our acoustic
levitation furnace which were able to
conduct our experiments because we had
the
water leak fixed in the material science
racks for a total of 22 material science
experiments
we had a couple of audio dosimeters that
we kept in place in different parts of
the orbiter every time i came back to do
one uh the payload commander accused me
of coming back to perform pilot science
this is a little bit of pilot science
that we're seeing right here
and this is a study in angular momentum
and of course we're all familiar with
the way an ice skater
starts out with their arms out and
retracts their arms to increase the
rotational speed and uh our pilot is
here uh checking it out to see that it
does in fact work in in weightlessness
this spooled him up pretty good watch
his eyes when he finishes
we had a relatively new piece of gear on
board the bicycle odometer and this is
really a wonderful contraption and we
were able to use this up on the flight
deck and it's quiet enough that we're
able to to exercise during sleep periods
well after a busy day doing experiments
and uh working out we headed for the
galley and the child up there is really
pretty good here's mark making a meal
and
we were very fortunate to eat
early and often during this mission
and uh we all liked it and we found
chopsticks up there pretty practical in
zero g although you'll notice our
japanese payload specialist is having
cross-cultural experience he's the one
using the spoon
uh but we found uh curry rice up there
with superb and uh i'm gonna recommend
taking it uh as a standard item
chopsticks were real good for most the
foods we ate up there but not for all of
them so we used other techniques
for
certain foods that we ate there and
here you'll see it
getting ready to get dark up there which
of course it did 16 times a day and it
uh it gets dark in a big hurry as you're
just about to see
out the window there right behind her
just like on earth you have certain
personal hygiene things you must take
care of this is the red shift getting up
and getting ready to go to work for a
day and uh doing a little uh teeth
brushing there and
washing our hair and
our commander you know he you can only
do so much for what you got to work with
but
he's doing his best here and it's
actually pretty easy in space you don't
have to find a wall to hang a mirror on
you can kind of just let it hang around
but uh he's
he's working away there
it takes a little while to get ready
i understand that four members of our
flight had a lot of interesting
publicity down here the fog embryology
experiment was one that i think was very
successful
we
took four female frogs up we
gave them humor chorionic gonadotropin
causing the ovulate were able to
actually
have over a hundred live tadpoles that
were brought back that were actually
conceived and born in space
the experiment went very well
the results now the investigators out at
ames research center working busily on
things but very
generally the gross appearance of the
tadpoles that were conceived in zero g
are
looked very normal they seem very normal
so it was a good experiment one of the
things we also wanted to look at was how
what was the behavior was there a
problem with
their
tadpoles interpretation of what goes on
on zero g can they swim normally so we
actually took up tadpoles that were
hatched here on the on the ground and
watched their swimming behavior some of
the things it seemed like is that they
had a difficult time figuring out
which way to swim as you can see so they
swim in circles but we're able to bring
tadpoles back down and also observe
their behavior
we also did our studies on a blue shift
of angular momentum and since i am an
ice skater it was kind of fun to play
with pulling my arms in going faster and
then putting them back out and
slowing down
we also had fun with
other things
and watching the physics of how they
behave
when we spin them around there's a pair
of pliers
she is using thorax which is amazing
radio equipment to communicate directly
to the people on the ground we contacted
many schools around the world
here we flew over japan it was very
impressive for me to see my hometown
from space
this is hokkaido i just resold the
northern ireland of japan
sapporo is the capital of the uh
hokkaido where i used to work
most of the time when we flew over japan
was cloudy but i had a long time
to see a tokyo metropolitan area
i was very much impressed that the tokyo
bay was very clean
as you see there
this is hurricane
bonnie which was about 500 miles north
northeast
of bermuda when we took this photo and
you can see the spiral bands around the
well-developed eye it's a classic
hurricane
just after that we got ready to check
out the vehicle uh for landing and here
we are checking out the elevons during
what we call the flight control system
checkout you can see them moving back
there
on the wing in this wide-angle view and
we were well satisfied the vehicle was
ready for entry and so was the ground
well after a very successful mission
it's time to come home even though we
got an extra day so we had to prepare
the vehicle for entry got in our suits
got all strapped back in
uh made our deorbit burn that was very
successful and we're on our way home
this is a view out my window we're in
the the red is a globe from the entering
the atmosphere the
excitation that orbit does and you can
see the sunrise we're in a big right
bank at that point
back
in our atmosphere with the hoop flying
here
we are starting to get some
tips off the wings
and uh then doing some more checking
we'll be in our right turn here on our
heading alignment circle preparing to
roll out on final
uh
to complete the landing phase
the orbiter as you see looks like it's a
very nice flying aircraft it looks very
uh
very happy in that environment there
on the ground it looks like it's falling
like a brick as we probably all know
we had had a lot of concern about the
weather at the cape and being able to
get back in there but as you can see we
had just an absolutely beautiful day to
come back to the kennedy space center
air suit rolling out on final and
shortly you'll see him put the nose down
a little bit we'll pick up some more air
speed and prepare for the final landing
phase
i got to fly the orbiter for a few
seconds on entry and uh thanks to hoot
and
the older flies very nicely it felt like
a much smaller aircraft than it really
is
a very nice handling machine
a view from the vertical assembly
building as we come in you can still see
the the moisture off our wings getting
ready my primary job in life now is to
put the gear down there comes the gear
and
here's the commander coming in for a
very very spectacular landing
hit all the parameters that we're
looking for as we come into land very
nice touchdown
we touched down at 205 knots and shortly
after that we were calling out airspeed
we're looking for 175 knots and at a
point we uh i got to deploy the drag
chute
we were the first deploy with the nose
still in the air a test that we're doing
to hopefully expand the envelope
and then the nose touched down about 130
knots
approaching about 60 knots we've gotten
about all we could out of drag chute so
we go ahead and jettison and then we let
the orbiter roll to a stop
like in the previous emissions
as i mentioned this was the conclusion
of a very successful mission we had just
uh one
one redshift handover one redshift tag
up left to make
and this is uh kurt and i having our
final redshift tag up just after we'd
rolled to a stop
you