welcome to the johnson space center for
the sts-26 post flight crew press
conference very pleased to introduce
discovery crew led by captain rick calc
thanks for coming here today we sure
enjoyed that mission and we're very
pleased to see from the smiles on
people's faces when we got back here
that
just about everybody did i think it was
a great shot in the arm
for the agency and as best i can
determine it was also a good one for the
country
we're sure pleased to be the most i
guess the most visible part of that
great team effort that involved tens of
thousands of people and
to start we'd like to acknowledge
publicly how much we appreciated uh
all the work that went into making this
mission such a success and uh
they're just
many many many thousands of people out
there that put their hearts into it and
it's very gratifying to come back with
being able to say that
the mission was as successful as it was
of course uh my crew here with me at the
table today dick cubby
dave hillmers
mike lounge
and finkie nelson
uh we'd like to get right into the uh to
the movie
so jeff we can turn down the house
lights we'll go into the movie
this is what it really was all about um
here is the ending of a beautiful
mission and
bringing the united states back into the
manned space flight program and we're
very proud to represent the country
and to
to be part of the team here we are at
suit up the morning before we launch we
really didn't think we were going to go
we knew that the winds were such that
our pre-programmed profile
might cause some problems with the
structure but we said well we'll suit up
anyhow and who knows maybe the winds
will get better
there were a large number of folks down
there at the cape here are some of them
we certainly appreciate it and i think
we could almost palpably feel the
support that we had
took a great effort on the part of the
mission management team to
come to all the right decisions which
allowed us to uh launch on this day and
then
some very excellent execution of the uh
flow and the count by the launch control
team
to get us off on the day that we said we
were going to and and not too long after
the time we said we were going to go
no matter how many times uh you ride
this rocket you're always a bit taken
back by the ignition of the solid rocket
motors
it's quite a ride
as you can expect
this is shown in half speed
which makes it take a lot longer than
what it really did but maybe that's kind
of what was going through our minds as
we rode through first stage it seemed
like it took a lot longer than it ever
did
in training
we understand there were a lot of very
excited people on the ground when we got
off the pad
and then they
re-emphasized their excitement once we
got to the two-minute point and the
solid rocket boosters uh separated
obviously the first
part of the flight the the ride on the
solid rocket motors was a very critical
one for this mission
much of the redesign effort that had
gone into the space shuttle program have
been centered around those boosters
and all indications are to date that
those boosters performed exceptionally
well we're interested in uh the
follow-up teardown of the boosters to
find out if indeed there are any other
uh deficiencies that we need to look at
here you see one of the 65 sunrises that
we saw during the four-day mission
here we have the payload bay doors open
and that's the first thing we did once
safely in orbit
and got busy preparing the uh
tdrs satellite for its deployment
from the payload bay there's rick at the
commander's
seat reading a checklist talking to the
ground there on the handheld microphone
dick going through his checklist making
sure the orbiter
is
go for deployment making sure everything
is ready
dave hilmer is back at the uh
payload station
checking the crt making sure all the
parameters are okay and uh
and controlling the switches that
release the
mechanisms that hold the payload in the
payload bay it's tilted up here at about
50 degrees
uh prior to deployment from the payload
bay
the tdrs tracking and data rely
satellite there the black
shape with the booster rocket underneath
it
here i am at the panel
on the aft flight deck that had all the
switch controls for the tilt-up
mechanism the ordnance arming functions
and the actual switch that you throw to
firo
fire pyrotechnic
devices that
cause the payload to separate from its
structure uh support structure
when you do that when i did that push up
push off springs
activate and push that whole
20-ton stack
slowly out of the payload bay at about a
half a foot per second
the whole sequence worked as it was
advertised
had two solid rocket burns that got it
to geosynchronous altitude which was its
target
within a very precise
window
here's pinky
taking a documentation of the deploy
and wreck performing the
maneuver to back away from the satellite
about one minute after deployment
we've heard that the checkout of the
satellite is going extremely well it's
about one third of the way into the
checkout right now
in fact this afternoon it's a maneuver
is going to be
completed to stop the drift
to the west and there will be checked
out some more
all the systems seem to be go right now
including the ku band antenna
a marvelously complex machine that
requires coordination of a lot of
different organizations to make it work
from the booster through the
the tdrs upper stage and the flight
controllers
with the satellite out we got busy on
the number of mid deck experiments we
had this is the protein crystal growth
where uh we're growing
crystals for biomedical samples uh
research ranging ranging from aids to
cancer research and a lot in between a
pretty complex experiment
another experiment we carried was a
student experiment
sponsored by mr bruce lloyd the idea
here was to heat up some titanium wires
that are encapsulated in these vacuum
tubes
beyond their
phase transition point to see
if on re-solidifying the crystal
structure is different than might be
obtained on earth the goal being to
develop stronger and more pure
samples of that titanium
we carry two different student
experiments on board this is the second
one that grew some
crystals of lead acetate crystals that
grow to a fairly large size in a short
time
uh was activated by mixing uh two fluids
together and then
right before eyes we could watch these
huge crystals grow
they will be analyzed once they got back
on the ground to see if there are any
differences between those and earthbound
ones here i'm setting up a phased
partitioning experiment phase
partitioning is a method for separating
biomedical cells
uh by using two different types of
liquids we had a
container
with 18 chambers that we
documented the demixing characteristics
of the different types of
liquids
another engineering
evaluation or test that we did was
taking pictures of the earth's limb at
sunrise and sunset
to
measure exactly what the brightness was
so that sensors could be built for
future satellites
after the primary payload had been
deployed and we spent much of our time
uh accomplishing earth observation
photography
now during the course of our mission we
took over eighteen hundred uh
seventy millimeter photographs of the
earth we also had about 4 000 feet of 16
millimeter film that we took much of
which was out the window as you see here
coming across the middle east
this is always a very important part of
our flights to the crew members because
we not only get to look out the window
but we get to document what we see
it turns out that during the course of
our flight it was an unusually
clear period across the northern
hemisphere according to those people
that are used to looking at space
photography
and they're very excited about the
photographs that we took
and they've even said that there are
things that we've taken pictures of that
they haven't seen before or it's been a
long time since they've had a good
photograph of them
this data that comes the data that comes
from these photographs is used by a wide
spectrum of people
geologists
oceanographers
people who study agricultural trends
such as uh
the burning of the
the uh equatorial jungles
and
people who look at our atmosphere and
try to ascertain changes in the
atmosphere
those people are quite excited about
what we've what we've seen on these
photographs as they have been on
previous space flights this was a an
exceptionally good pass over the
hawaiian islands
we had many opportunities to photograph
hawaii
primarily because
of the lighting and and the time of day
that we launched
we probably saw more of it than we did
of the other parts of the united states
the equipment that we use is primarily
for earth observations is a hasselblad
70 millimeter camera which you saw mike
there with
50 100 and 250 millimeter lenses
uh volcanology is one of the areas that
we're always interested in
photographing from space this is a pass
over to canary islands off of the west
coast of africa
they happen to be very clear many of the
days that we passed over them
we also had several different attitudes
that we
had the orbiter in which let us get uh
this particular one of those attitudes
let's get this pass over the himalayan
mountains looking up into china
uh this was when the orbiter's nose was
pointed to the south
here's a shot of meal time meals are
always enjoyable
as a social event we play with our food
a little bit like we're supposed to
and just get a chance to discuss what's
going on that day and what's planned for
the next day
here's a target practice with an m m
that's out there in the middle and uh
i think it's a bullseye
it must have been a fluke because uh the
next shot misses by three inches
we do carry up with us some photographs
of our families you see them on the
lockers to the left we also
during a period during one day take some
pictures next to some stickers from our
alma mater and so on but you can see we
keep a pretty clean cabin in the back
you can see the sleep stations that mike
and i use
had our own fish bowl here
we've eaten most of the fish by this
time yes
sometimes you've got to unwind the
commander a little bit
this was entry day you see us wearing
the gray
underwear that goes under the orange
suits
we were inspired i was inspired to try a
little pommel horse routine uh
using the treadmill there
i didn't find this so hard at all i
don't know why
why it's actually i'm not pretty either
mike
however the judges did vote and gave
fairly generous
the zero g olympics we did want to
communicate uh particularly to the youth
uh of the country that we we really the
space is a fun place and even though we
went through a terrible tragedy several
years ago we still want to communicate
that there are some things up there that
are unique we want to
to really inspire the youngsters to take
an interest
prior to entry you've got to get the
suits
back on again and the seats set up and
and strapped in after the
luxury of being in a shirt sleeve
environment for four days it's
kind of hard for us to
get back crawl back into these things it
hurts just to watch it and
but these are the the suits that we wore
them both during the launch and during
the entry turns out to be not much
different getting into them on the
ground
you can see the pole strapped to the
ceiling well this is a sunset taken out
the window before we close the payload
bay doors just to transition into the
deorbit and landing phase it's always
beautiful
as we fade from
bright sunlight to darkness
this is real time
we cross the
western coast between la and santa
barbara it's a beautiful day at edwards
and as we have done many times before
came in overhead the edwards lake bed
and made our 300 mile an hour descent to
a
flare at about 2000 feet above the earth
and then
dick covey the pilot did what every good
pilot should do and that is lower the
landing gear when we asked
and
came down to a
touchdown at around 190 knots about 200
miles an hour
the machine was absolutely
superb in performance cleanliness we had
a few uh
system problems that
we had backups too
but
at touchdown we'll stop we could look
back on a
flight that was as far as i'm concerned
picture perfect and could not have been
better for the country and getting us
back into manned space flight business
our patch that we love love so much that
symbolizes so many things to us
you