well good morning and welcome to the
post flight press conference for the
sts-60 mission
the
crew of the mission
is joining us today the commander will
uh introduce the rest of the crew
charlie bolden and again this was the
60th shuttle mission the 60 uh 18th
flight for discovery and with that i'll
turn it over to crew commander charlie
bolden thanks very much kyle and uh
welcome to everybody wherever you are uh
very s uh quickly let me reintroduce the
crew since we've been through this
before
all the way down on my far right uh
ron sega who was our mission specialist
number two
uh to his left jan davis who was mission
specialist number one
uh to my immediate right
my pilot
ken rightler
to my immediate left
sergey krikalov who was mission
specialist number four and to sergey's
left our payload commander and mission
specialist number three uh franklin
chang diaz
so what we're going to do from here on
out we're going to show you about a 16
minute video that will give us an
opportunity to explain what we thought
we did and then you can ask us questions
in case we did something that you didn't
think we did or uh
we didn't do something that you thought
we did then we'll show you some slides
that are primarily geared toward earth
observations and after that we'll take
questions and answers so with that why
don't we go ahead and roll the video and
we'll make an attempt to describe it to
you as best we can
the first thing you're going to see is
an advertisement from the sponsor this
is uh the nasa logo the meatball that
we've all come to know and love
and these are the two patches that we
have come to know and love they're both
the
english and cyrillic versions of our
crew patch
as is normal we wake up get breakfast
and then we go in and get suited up and
you'll see each of us in succession here
as we go through the suit up and check
out in the launch and entry suits uh
everybody trying to act like we're very
relaxed and it's just another day at the
office but i think all of you know
better by now but we were very excited
about this flight everything had gone
very very well in the flow so far in the
countdown and
everybody but me was very confident that
we were going to get off on day one i
still had it to be proved to me since i
had never done it before so it was a new
and exciting experience
everything was just about like the
simulator until somebody said 3-2-1 and
everything started rumbling around and
the engines lit off
and we knew that it wasn't a simulator
anymore this is the real thing
on-time launch beautiful morning at ksc
feeling of those main engines and the
solid rocket boosters is just
incredible feeling of being pressed back
in your seat and accelerating upwards
followed immediately by that big role to
get us aligned with our
our high inclination right up the east
coast of the u.s
not a whole lot to see out the windows
because of the the attitude of the
vehicle but uh
really trying to pay attention to what
you're doing inside at this point
the
the first stage is pretty rough it's
like riding down a country road
but once the solid rocket boosters are
finished up about two minutes
they come off in a nice clean
burst of energy and then the main
engines take you the rest of the way
one of the first things we do once we
get on orbit is open up the payload bay
doors and this view of the payload bay
you can see the space have module in the
foreground and the wake shield
there and also aft of the wake shield we
had a gas bridge which included a
capital bridge and the brimsat
deployable and the otarax deployable
and then we get right away to spacehab
activation
basically uh this is the first order of
business for us on orbit and jan and i
got to do that and we found a few traces
of debris
common in a new type of spacecraft but
we took care of that and got down to the
business of getting all the systems
activated in the lab something fairly
fairly simple to get down to work
the space have module worked very well
all of the systems worked very well and
it turned out to be a really nice
environment to work in and here we are
checking out the initial systems and
doing the setup of the module before we
start doing the experiments in the space
head
even on the end of flight day one we
were busy doing ds0201 which is sensory
motor investigations you see jan in the
foreground as the subject here with
electrodes placed on her head and
there's sergey as well with a small
laser which is the white thing and the
accelerometer on top he's undergoing
sinusoidal head oscillations we perform
these exercises on day one two five six
seven and eight with jan sergey myself
and ken this was another one of the
joint science uh detailed supplemental
objectives dso202 which was metabolic
studies and believe it or not i've just
inserted a catheter in franklin's arm
and if you look very closely right down
there by my left hand you saw the blood
just start flowing into the tube uh i
was pretty excited about that once
charlie and franklin were finished
drawing blood from each other then they
handed it to me and
i was going to to work up the blood in
this centrifuge
you can see that we ran that centrifuge
pretty much free floating worked just
like a gyroscope
once the samples were taken both urine
and blood samples we had to freeze them
to to make sure that they would stay
preserved until we could get back and
harvest the science we use two freezers
gn2 freezers like this to to put the
samples in
this was always a pretty interesting
time when you go down to the mid deck
and you see this fog and haze down there
and you wondered what these guys were
doing with uh with a gn2 sample did you
into uh
freezer there
another part of the metabolic experiment
i'm not drawing blood here as it may
look like i am but i'm actually
measuring the venous pressure
of the blood that we have already
obtained a catheter for it's called
peripheral venous pressure a
non-invasive way to get pressure of the
veins we also did hermetic
tests on the blood as well with another
little centrifuge and that's what i'm
doing here filling up capillary tubes
from the blood and then inserting them
into a small hermetic
centrifuge and i'd run those for a
couple minutes and
then record the
readings this is the the rack there in
the back is called eclipse it's one of
our material processing experiments in
the space app having to do with liquid
phase centering it's from the university
of alabama at huntsville
we had an another rack uh kind of like
this one that you see here and it was on
the other side of the space hub and it
was called the sef space experiment
facility
and it was probably the most interactive
experiment we flew on on the space out
you see a crystal there the bottom of
the picture
the beginnings of a crystal that we grew
for several a couple days actually
highly interactive with keyboard entries
through a small computer and
the picture that you see there is the
end when the crystal was completely
formed and we get the feeling that it's
a pretty good one
this was another experiment in space hab
called orcep or the organic separation
experiment was actually two parts one
was a phase partitioning experiment and
the other actually a
live cell growth it both canisters
inside and what i was doing here was
actually conducting one of the many
status checks that we did this is in
what we call a crim it's a commercial
refrigeration incubation module and it
actually was able to keep the samples at
desired temperature
this is an experiment
we
expose several materials
in space and grow some
bio crystals
and this kind of experiment could be
very important in future to to
understand how we could use
weightlessness
and
to understand how what kind of
weightlessness we have in space
we had several another experiments and
this experiment named sams
record data from
space help
all vibration acceleration and we return
this data back to us for
development in future
another experiment we had was uh protein
crystal growth and this is a graph on a
power book that we had that shows when
nucleation occurred you can see the peak
at the end we had a laser scattering
detector which detected when a crystal
was actually growing and we were real
excited when we saw these two peaks and
the two different sea rims that we had
indicating that we had a really good
crystal and hopefully we have some good
results from this protein crystal growth
experiment from university alabama
birmingham
this is another biological
experiment life science experiment
actually
we flew
to
cage of
with rats and
we took care of them this
part of the experiment we show
as we fit
water
in these gauges
we had
over 50 of these uh canisters that had
uh different tubes in them filled with
different biological
experiments we had crystal growth we had
seeds actually seeds that were flown on
from eldef we had actually miniature
wasps and all kinds of different
biological experiments and we activated
them by mixing two fluids together and
in some cases we used these incubators
where we would take out the individual
tubes and place them in the front of the
incubator and
monitor
the temperatures and other data from
those experiments
a very late addition to our experiment
list was this sterling orbiter
refrigerator freezer which we
filled up with
drink containers to check out how it
worked we also had some ice cream on
board the first time the history of
space program that astronauts enjoy
truly
real ice cream
and we really we really had a good time
with that
we get an opportunity to see um
see us in our in action here on the mid
deck as we all the ice cream is packed
in small containers like the the old uh
food containers that i think most of you
became accustomed to before we started
using uh the much more flexible ones it
was quite quite delicious
we had an opportunity to perform a
couple of uh in-flight maintenance
activities this one got i think a little
bit more visibility in it than the
others it was this collapsed rubber duck
that provided a means of transporting
air from the orbiter into the spacehab
module
eventually what we ended up doing was
just taking the cover from our atlas uh
plastic cover and inserting it kind of
as a stiffener on the inside of this
rubber duct here and then reinstalling
it it worked very well
and this is another experiment to
understand what kind of environment we
have on board it's very simple but it's
allowed to
visually see what kind of acceleration
we have on the space shuttle
these are some of the scenes of
preparing food in the in the mid deck
which you probably have seen in the past
but it's a matter of just simply
rehydrating uh
containers plastic containers with dried
out food
flight day hey this is a special night
we call it international night we uh not
only had uh chopsticks and uh japanese
food curried chicken and so forth we had
the small russian uh bread loaves as
well as cheese uh dip that sergey
arranged to have on the flight so we uh
we ate everything from american uh jerky
to uh
to japanese and and russian food on
flight day eight
it's a more challenging way to have
dessert here as
sergey
i think has a cashew bounced off the
flight deck lockers
so each each one was uh was more
challenging you'd expect and here's
charlie on the on the ergometer each of
us had an opportunity to exercise and
this
is basically a a fixed bicycle and we uh
we thought that was really important we
were so busy in flight we probably would
have liked to exercise a bit more than
we got a chance to
let me try to look nice
and here's a scene of just brushing
teeth and basically uh how to maintain
yourself in the uh in the environment of
the uh of the space shuttle
in my case i uh i slept in the space hab
so not only did i transport myself down
back and forth during the normal days
but also in the evening
we had the opportunity to send a couple
of messages to the russian people in
this case we were singing a lullaby
spiatustali
guruski which means tired toys are
sleeping it's a traditional lullaby
right before the evening news to put all
the children in the right frame of mind
to go to sleep
this is during some of our rms
activities
i think actually ron was operating the
arm in that case and i was backing him
up this is during one of the unbirthing
of the wake shield
we had really good luck with the arm it
was very smooth and
our training prepared us well for these
activities
we had four
unbirths
actually three members i guess and this
is one of the times when we rotated the
arm
so that the wake shield hardware could
look at
different
atmospheres the horizon sensor was
looking at different things and checking
out the hardware on the wake shield
we noticed that uh on flight day four
that the attitude control system had a
problem and one of the attempts to
diagnosis was to bring the wake shield
over the overhead windows of the
of the orbiter and look at it with a
camcorder and looked at the mechanical
motion
we did
a growth on the port side arm and very
successful with respect to vacuum and
films and we also could control it from
laptop computers there as you see on
board
very interesting experiment plasma
physics uh used the wake shield as a
source of voltage
and that we would observe the actual
changes in the luminescence of the wake
shield at night with image intensifier
optical train on board
this was uh the deploy of odor x and as
you can see the balls start coming out
there were a grand total of six spheres
metallic spheres and they were used for
subsequent tracking by radar sites on
the ground
our primary site was eglin the air force
base and uh there's also a backup site
in kwajalein but this was
pretty interesting to watch and
you see these balls go trailing out and
then
kind of coming together again out there
and there they'll probably be there for
a couple of years orbiting until they
finally burn up in re-entry
the next deploy that we had and both of
these occurred on flight day seven uh
was the deploy of the
brimsat satellite from the university of
bremen in germany a very small
lightweight satellite and its primary
objective is to
do some of observations of earth's
atmosphere while on orbit and then
during its uh subsequent re-entry which
will come in a few months
to actually collect data about the
makeup of the atmosphere as it comes
back through
we had a very busy flight on
flight day eight we actually closed up
the hab
closed the hatch out as you can see here
and deactivated the space hab we were
really busy
the night before trying to stow things
and the morning of entry we also
were very busy
trying to clean up everything on the mid
deck and stow away all of our equipment
and get ready to to come back home after
uh busy and we felt a very successful
flight
this was hilarious because remember the
bicycle ergometer that we were on this
is it or pieces of it and i remember
hearing ron and the guys down on the
midday going
pieces were just going everywhere
they're trying to gather them all in and
put them back in their place
time to get back into the launch and
entry suits and get ready to come back
this re-entry came in right across
alaska and canada down across the
heartland of america and right in across
atlanta it was mostly daytime and so we
didn't see a lot of the real spectacular
fire that you see sometimes but it was a
very very clean entry we did have to go
around one time because of the some
concern with weather that was not a
problem at all very comfortable just
sitting there in your suits all the work
was done it's just a matter of letting
time pass and letting the weather work
itself out
weather was great charlie made a real
nice approach over the cape
and brought discovery in for a for just
an absolutely perfect landing it was a
great uh great ending to uh to a really
fantastic flight as far as i'm concerned
the everybody had a lot of concerns
about the weather i think on board
we just kind of roll with the punches
and roll with the flow we were very
confident when they finally told us that
we had to go for de-orbit and we had had
an opportunity to see the weather on our
previous pass and knowing the folk that
worked the weather and knowing that hoot
was in the shuttle training aircraft
making the evaluations i was very
comfortable and like ken said it was a
gorgeous low level it's what it seemed
like coming down across alaska and
canada right through the heart of the
u.s
we did deploy the drag shoot we did a
little bit different procedure than has
been done before this was the first time
that we actually deployed the drag chute
prior to initiating the derotation
it was unbelievably smooth
very very stable when the nose came down
all of your speeds end up being a lot
slower than you're generally accustomed
to but it makes the orbiter very very
nice to handle and i was i was very
pleased with the handling
characteristics of the orbiter there
this is again a one last word from the
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and that finishes our our video