good afternoon this is the sts 29 post
flight crew press conference
we're going to look at some home movies
slides video film and
listen to the crew tell us
their tales of
sts-29 i'm happy to introduce the sts 29
crew commander michael coats
thank you jeff
i have the distinct pleasure and i'm
very proud to introduce
the crew of sts-29
john blaha to my right
to his right is jim buckley
to his right is bob springer
and to his right is jim vagin
and i'd like to start off by
expressing my thanks and gratitude to
everybody that worked so hard to get us
ready to fly and to get the discovery
ready to fly
we have a
movie a home movie we put together
we'd like to show you
and then some slides we'd like to talk
to a little bit after that
so jeff if we're ready to
let's roll take
there's a discovery sitting in the
launch pad we hope to see that quite
frequently in the next few years
we had a hard time getting uh jim
beijing to wear coat and tie and our
last chance was launch morning so we all
got dressed up and he finally agreed to
do that so
we work coats and ties
here we are in the suit room
getting those uh
launch and entry suits on
if they look uncomfortable that's
because they are
and we're walking out of the crew
quarters into the astronaut van looking
like five orange doughboys here
if we ever end up in the water we'll be
glad we have those suits on but they
sure are uncomfortable to wear
especially if you're used to the old
flight suits that we wore for so many
years of course most of you realize we
had a a couple hour launch delay waiting
for the fog to burn off and the upper
level winds to
exceedences to go away
so we're really uh
pleased when they started
the countdown out of the nine-minute
hole after four hours on our back it was
a relief to start counting down again
and realized we're going to go fly
turned out to be a beautiful day once
the fog had burned off
one of the things we did during this
flight was uh activate a camera to
recording debris striking the windows
during the first couple minutes while
the sidewalk boosters are
are firing john the camera was on john's
side over there
and we got down to 10 seconds before
liftoff and all five of us in unison
said get the camera john
wouldn't let him forget that
and of course after two minutes uh the
solid rocket boosters come off and
that's always a good feeling
now here we have a shot of uh
the indian ocean the southern tip of
india with
the island of sri lanka
used to be a salon
called salon
down there i think that's a beautiful
shot
once we got past the uh the launch and
into fully into the orbit phase we
started reconfiguring the cockpit to try
and get things ready for the ios deploy
i think one of the more difficult things
about this particular mission is the uh
the post insertion timeline and getting
ready for the deploy operations uh
you've got to get
configured from your launch
configuration reconfigure the entire
orbiter for the deploy operations for
the on-orbit operations we facilitated
this to some extent as soon as we got on
orbit by going ahead getting out of the
launch entry suits and getting into our
uh are more comfortable on orbit
clothing which you can see varied
somewhat getting ready for the tdrs and
ius deploy once we got everything
started uh six hours and 12 minutes into
the mission we went ahead and deployed
the ius tdrs
it was a successful deploy we had a
hearts almost stopped about two minutes
before deploy we got a series of
anomalies and warnings that looked like
everything had failed and it turns out
it was just a data drop on the
communication link between the ius and
the orbiter we got a quick go for the
deploy from the ground when they saw
that the their telemetry was all right
so we proceeded with the deploy
uh and got it off uh on time
we were very delighted uh shortly
thereafter uh the had the two uh burns
that it took to get the ius up to its
geosynchronous orbit
and we found out that those two burns uh
went on schedule and as programmed
the tdrs was put into its uh initial
orbit
i think it had initially had a 40 foot
per second under speed as far as getting
to its uh its geosynchronous altitude
but it turns out that uh that was not
all bad it was a slight underburn and it
was on
the right side of things as the orbital
mechanics of it go and was actually
started to drift already toward its uh
park orbit
right after we got done with the tdrs
deploy
i had to get into uh experiment
activation this is the protein crystal
growth experiment uh fascinating
experiment because it's one of the
things we've learned to do in the
microgravity environment of space is to
be able to grow crystals in this case
protein crystals that are used in a
variety of applications in pharmacology
from our standpoint on
on the orbiter
our biggest job after activating the
experiment going ahead and mixing the
ingredients the precipitates that would
help to form the crystals was to do some
photography of it we did a activation
photography to capture what the
experiment looked like as we started up
this is the chromex experiment it's a
plant growth experiment we flew to see
how plant roots that would just start to
germinate would develop one orbit
without the influence of gravity and
that way to see if the chromosome
divisions that normally take place would
proceed as you'd expect
and allow the growth of the plant this
is particularly useful for future ops
and space station
where people worry about both food
growth and closed environmental control
systems where you can not only scrub co2
but generate some oxygen
this is one of the life sciences
experiments it's a transcranial doppler
it's one of the dsos and here we're
looking at some blood flow in the middle
cerebral artery and that's the velocity
waveform look in there on mike
and we hope to try to carry light
changes in
blood flow in the brain with possible
symptoms of space adaptation syndrome
and in that way maybe get a little bit
better handle on what the cause of that
is
so we
we did a fair amount of studies on that
to try to get that wrapped up
here's a little thing we did on the side
there was concerns for space station
about how to because we'll be there for
a longer period of time how to deliver
normal type health care how to care for
people and this is an iv bag intravenous
fluid you have bubbles in it well on
earth they just drift to the top and you
get them out zero g they just kind of
look like effervescence just bubble
suspended in the fluid well by just
centrifuging it by hand like that you're
able to have all the bubbles migrate to
the one end and just bleed it right off
with any extra equipment on board just
use a blood pressure cuff in the iv bag
just as you would here on earth so it
works real well
uh here's bob doing a central venous
pressure measurement and by blowing in
that mouthpiece he raises his pressure
in his lungs to the same pressure as the
uh as a central venous pressure and then
when that happens there's no longer any
flow and he was measuring the flow in
the external jugular vein there with the
flow probe
also we thought that there was a study
to look at changes in intraocular
pressure just as you measure intraocular
pressure for glaucoma
we're using what's called a tonopen and
here you have to anesthetize your cornea
which i just did with those little drops
and now i shove this pen and tap it off
my cornea
continue to tap it and you got to get
used to that just staring in the eye as
you bounce it off your corner you can
tell when you touch it not because you
feel it
but it changes your refractive area you
can see everything get blurry
this is uh john vellinger's experiment
you know he's a
senior at purdue university now he
started this experiment many years ago
he really did a great job with this i
really congratulate him
we saw him last friday he told us
preliminary results so far
as it turns out the embryos that
launched that were two days old were all
had died
on landing for some reason up in orbit
and they have to figure that out yet
also on easter saturday all 16 of 16
that launched that were nine days old
hatched so
maybe some very significant results and
a lot of unanswered questions from that
experiment
this is a another thing for space
station we were looking at they were
concerned could you use standard type
medical equipment like for suturing
wounds stitching up wounds as you would
in 1g so we just had a little little
block with some basic like artificial
skin with various lacerations made in it
since they didn't want us to lacerate
ourselves plus it's a little tougher to
get volunteers for that
uh we're gonna first though anyway
uh we got the suture material out and
just see to see if you could stitch up a
wound in the same way you would here on
earth
and bob did a good job focusing on the
suture you can see it right there it
doesn't tangle up the normal links like
you used in the operating room here will
work there it works just fine
what you see on the laundry on here is a
share experiment which is a space
station radiator assembly
though it didn't perform as we had
predicted the nasa engineers and mission
control team were able to get an awful
lot of very very good data from this
experiment
and it really
tells us why it's so important to fly
pieces of the space station and
equipment on early shuttle flight so we
can get a good engineering basis for
station
here we are in the mid deck mike's
looking at a
tags picture
tags is texan graphics
which allows us to send up high fidelity
almost like
thermo graph type pictures
we use these
during our imax
filming to look ahead at weather
satellite photographs so we could tell
what areas
were going to be clear around the world
and which were not
on the flight deck we did several
experiments this one happens to be a
coast
which is an optical device allowing the
crew to realign their inertial platforms
in the event that they should
malfunction and
lose their nav base
mike was able to do that sighting on the
sun
this is the imax camera and
you see jim here uh loading the magazine
putting the film into the camera i might
compliment the imax people
excellent support and training they gave
us throughout the lead-up to the mission
which really enabled us to be very
successful uh we found operating with
the camera in xero g to be
quite similar to 1g and had no
difficulty loading the film
here's a scene on the flight deck uh
jim's holding the camera here and i'm
trying to put a 100 millimeter lens on
in this case
and you see mike up front talking to
mission control this is usually the
sequence mike was trying to maneuver the
orbiter
here's a shot of me
taking a picture of this case
florida
and coming into the bahamas here i
believe
but basically the way we worked with
imax is we had somebody filming we had
somebody as a spotter looking out the
window because when you look through the
viewfinder of the imax it really shrinks
your field of view
and so you need a spotter and somebody
maneuvering the orbiter and of course
jim was working
changing out the magazines in the black
bag usually and i was loading the camera
so
quite a team effort to pull off the
filming we did for imax
some of the other cameras we had on
board that we use for earth observations
are 70 millimeter hasselblad this
happens to be a shot over cuba
of note is all of the active
coral reefs just to the south side of
cuba we added some very very good shots
of that
and showed some live coral
and reformation just south of that
island
as you can see the whole east coast was
uh
was very clear for most of our mission
including the caribbean so we got some
footage that
normally is cloud covered
another camera that we used extensively
was the errol linhoff
it's a handheld aerial photography
camera a little bit larger film format
and as a result the resolution is is
somewhat better than
some of the smaller
film
cameras this shot is coming over central
america
looking down a chain of volcanoes you
can see the volcano sticking up in the
lake
and again john using another hasselblad
camera we're able to use with the
attitude we were in use just about all
of the windows
the side windows for black shots
overhead windows for directly down
and it worked out very very well for our
earth observation program
we have four good windows and five
crewmen
this is a shot of the himalayas uh it
shows a
view looking north you can see the
orbiter tail at the top
and the brownish area in the background
is the tibetan plateau and it gives you
a a nice feel for it
look in the north looking view you see
it more in profile it really gives you a
feeling of the relief the elevation of
the himalayas there because in the
foreground the ganges river basin is
basically sea level so you're seeing a
29 000 foot rise down with 13 000 foot
plateau behind
and it's uh even more impressive in
person
that's the problem of having your
satellite deploy on the first day is
that after that uh somebody has to get
stuck with the housekeeping chores so uh
here's a shot of
of the food preparation process uh
actually uh what i would note is that uh
number one the galley worked very very
well for us i was
since this is my first flight i was very
pleasantly surprised at
how palatable the food was the cold
water was cold the hot water was hot
just the way it's supposed to be and and
that was actually a bit of a surprise we
actually have an oven on board that we
can use to heat up the food
and it's a bit like a camping trip in a
way that there's a lot of overhead that
goes into
maintaining the shuttle and the food
preparations part of it
we did finally get together for a crew
dinner although that was a rarity
actually on this flight we we stayed
busy enough that uh for most of the
meals we just worked right through the
meal and and somebody that was available
would do the food prep down on the mid
deck and then as you had a couple
minutes you'd
float by and grab something and have
your dinner on the run so to speak or on
the fly i guess it's more appropriate
but we did sit down i think on the
fourth night or fifth night and have a
a dinner all together and it was a it
was the one family meal that we had on
board the shuttle on this this
particular flight
we wanted a shot of the
sleeping bags you can see i'm getting
into one sleeping bag and jim buckley's
getting in the other uh
he's more or less heads down and i'm
somewhat heads up here
you can obviously sleep any way you want
up there
you don't need to sleep in a sleeping
bag
i like it because it keeps the
temperature pretty constant it keeps you
from floating off and bumping into
things in the middle of night
and i found that very comfortable just
to put the sleeping bag up against the
lockers and
gave me a little bit of stability
this is uh jim and bob actually one time
i came to the mid deck and i saw them
doing this so i grabbed the 16
millimeter and started taking this
footage
i couldn't figure out what was quite
going on here
here we had a doctor and a marine trying
to prove prove who could do the most
pull-ups so i
i couldn't resist the picture
one the next time i came
the next time i came through the mid
deck uh jim happened to have this set up
the our treadmill so i jumped on there
they looked like they were doing real
good i thought i'd try it and uh
unfortunately that was a lot tougher
than i thought it was
well despite the fact that uh we were
working very hard there's always the the
ever-present uh
fluid experiments that uh that we wanted
to do uh and and while on one hand it's
a it's a bit of fun doing this it's also
very useful when we're talking to school
children uh it allows you to see what
happens to a fluid when it's released in
the microgravity of space and of course
a food will tend to assume it's a
minimal energy level which is a sphere
and
that's the science part of it uh the fun
part of it is watching a bunch of grown
men trying to play with uh bubbles of
fluid and zero gravity
you try very hard to get two bubbles
two spheres to float together to see
what they do that may be impossible i
don't we couldn't do it in
an hour or so trying
this is actually remarkable
this is a remarkable shot because we had
this is just the the morning before
our press conference on board the
shuttle and we had all changed into
clean clothes mike had gotten cleaned up
put on a clean white shirt and then
proceeded to play with drops of
strawberry juice which he managed to
splatter across his white shirt just
before the press conference well this
tells the truth we uh we said we won the
fly tortillas and we're more interested
in that than fresh bread but i think it
was probably more for the aerodynamic
qualities of the tortillas than
their actual flavor
interestingly enough though that that
proved the tortillas proved a very very
good uh bread substitute didn't crumble
as well the uh
the suits
we normally stored in the airlock except
when we first got on orbit when you're
not in them there's no weight they just
kind of take on a life of their own and
they're you know they take a lot of room
here we are just kind of playing around
the night before we pulled the suits out
to check them out to make sure
everything was set up the way we thought
they should be and if there's any repair
or servicing they needed we could do
that and
it just shows you know there's only two
or three suits in the picture and
there's actually five from there it
takes a lot of room
here's uh we're just going through a
suit donna here uh bob and i jim just
helping us a little bit to get in
and you find you just kind of float and
just kind of
with more or less effort pop on through
i don't have to worry about catching my
hair on the neck seal when i come
through
so it's probably a little easier for me
in that respect
but they're fairly fairly quick dining
the biggest trouble is getting the
zipper you have to pull around
and you always can most of us need a
hand all of us don't i certainly do
it's the shot of a sunset again we
really enjoyed the sunsets and sunrises
as you've always heard whenever we have
a
cloud mass sticking up into the
atmosphere it
it's a beautiful sight
this is a shot during the reentry taken
from vandenberg
air force base they tell us this is
about 150 000 feet up so that's quite a
camera they've got down there
here we are coming down the outer glide
slope
getting ready to land on the runway
edwards 2-2
we do so much training in the shuttle
training airplane that uh once you get
down below about 15 000 feet you feel
like you've been there a hundred times
before it's very comfortable
situation the only difference is the
wind noise of course in the shuttle
training airplane you have the engines
running all the time even in reverse and
it's a little bit noisy and you don't
have that of course with a shuttle
so you can hear the wind noise
we're very interested in doing a braking
evaluation
which is why we landed on the runway
and we wanted to follow
our normal
braking profile and put about 25 million
foot-pounds into each of the
main brakes
main gear brakes
and we hit that very close i think we
had 22 million in
the left side and 29 million foot pounds
on the right side so it was a very
successful test and it had responded
quite well we were very pleased with the
brakes
since it was so cool outside about 40
degrees we elected to keep the
launch and entry suits on instead of
trying to struggle at them down in the
mid deck after we landed
it's really crew preference what they
want to do when they get
on the ground