good afternoon welcome to the sts 35
post flight crew press conference i'd
like to introduce to you the commander
vance brand and turn the program over to
him
thank you barbara
well it's a pleasure to be back here
after a mission that
we certainly enjoyed i'd like to
introduce my crew
guy gardner pilot
we have jeff hoffman ms-1
mike lounge ms2
bob parker ms3
sam durants
ps1
ron paris at the end there ps2 we had a
big crew
this flight more than many
demonstrated
the
value of man
in space as a as a flexible element
as the person who's able to
do troubleshooting
to continue on
with manual control after
automatic systems
have failed to perform like we thought
they would
so
i i was just very pleased that
we had those capabilities on board
to use man as a flexible
element
finally and most important i think our
mission really demonstrated teamwork
people on the ground here really got
with it after we had some space lab
failures and
they came up with ways for us to
continue and in the end
through manual pointing i think our
astronomers were
approaching if not equaling
the
capabilities of
the automatic systems that would have
controlled the pointing of the
telescopes
much of the teamwork
between the marshall space center the
johnson space center
and us and
the crew in orbit
came about
in a short 12-hour period everything was
pulled together here on the ground in
that short of time to
allow us to continue
and
bring in quite a lot of scientific
information
so with that we'd like to show you our
film
and
i'll start out with the narration
and then others will uh chime in
our pants in colombia and orion is the
star field you see there a very uh
prominent constellation in the northern
hemisphere seven crew members
astro mission this is what our ship
looked like as it sat on the pad
and we were having breakfast actually
late in the evening
there we
after having received weather
information we're in the suit room
getting suited myself
we have guy
we have mike
sam
jeff
ron
and somebody in there there he is bob
bob was helping a manager adjust his
time
seven crewmen
going out to the van
you know we had a
late night or early morning launch
whichever you'd like to call it
so it was a little before midnight as we
were
going out there
here come the main engine and ignition
which of course light up about seven
seconds before we lift off so we can
check them out they stabilize we pull
the umbilical light the srbs and we're
off here you can see vance waving to us
as you go by the tower
and just a spectacular night launch i've
never seen one they say they're
spectacular to watch but it certainly is
spectacular to watch from inside as well
we managed to launch with almost a full
moon and here's a beautiful shot of us
going right by the moon
there was a cloud deck at about 7000
feet
which you'll see us light up here as we
go through it it was really spectacular
look out the windows and watch that
approach
after two minutes the srbs have consumed
their fuel and we jettison them little
rockets fire to push them away from the
orbiter
and we continue to burn the main engines
for a total of about eight and a half
minutes which gets us up to over 17 000
miles an hour and we're up in orbit
around the earth
here we are
finally in orbit about an hour after
launch with a second burn having put us
into a circular orbit
going into the orbit to do astronomy has
two benefits one of course is you get
you above your clouds but that's not the
primary one the primary one is to get
above the atmosphere itself you see a
series of layers of atmosphere sitting
above this rather pretty sunset
one of the first things we do on orbit
is to begin the opening the payload bay
doors this not only exposes the payload
so the telescopes can see the stars we
came to observe
but also the inner surface of the doors
are radiators and allows us to start
cooling the vehicle
once that's accomplished we began
activating first the space lab itself
with its computers that help us control
things
in the payload bay here you can see some
of the elements of our payload first of
all the x-ray telescope in the far back
from the goddard space center and then
here parts of the space lab which was in
fact produced
in concert with us by the europeans
they activated the space lab we
proceeded on then to
uh activate the ips itself
with its three large telescopes in fact
once this uh
platform with the telescopes was erected
that's about the last we saw of the
x-ray telescope which is hidden
behind this much larger array of
telescopes
with the
telescopes erected pointing out the bay
towards space
we're now in a position to begin
observing uh first with the orbiter crew
positioning the orbiter you can actually
see a little jet firing here on on that
frame right there
once the orbiter crew gets the orbiter
pointed in the proper direction then the
mission specialist
could in our case begin pointing the ips
the pointing system that had the
telescopes begin pointing it more
precisely sort of fine-tuning towards
the exact star galaxy we're working on
we had troubles with the uh with the
automatic star trackers doing that and
we resorted to what we call the
old-fashioned method of hand guiding
this was done with a lot of help from
the ground which ron will talk about
one of the really great things that
happened this mission was to watch
within one 12-hour shift of bringing up
a whole new way of operating where we
had the johnson space center mission
control center operating the instrument
pointing system commanding it
and the experimenters at the payload
operations control center in huntsville
commanding the the telescopes
and us on board doing the target
acquisition and fine guiding
towards the end of the mission our
efficiency was getting up to the point
where we were observing just as many
targets if as if we had
had not had the failures
so we were we and the scientists also
were quite pleased with that
we were divided into two teams a red
team and a blue team this is the blue
team getting out of bed in the morning
ready to go to work
we tried to maintain a lot of discipline
and do everything by the numbers so
we're going to work by the numbers here
floating out of our sleep stations
it was a little crowded down there
these wide-angle views make it seem
bigger than it was
it's always fun to experiment in
weightlessness with
things like bubbles of water here and
and observe the dynamics of that
free-floating fluid
jeff was a little thirsty i guess
meal time is very important a chance to
relax and recap the events of the day
and play with your food a little bit the
school kids we show these two always
like those scenes
some more fluid dynamics experiments
hygiene is very important we
occasionally took
where does that water go
just living in the spaceship creates a
lot of wastewater of course
and normally that's held in a storage
tank and every day or so
we dump that out into space which is
really a gorgeous site if you get the
sun angle just right
it looks like a snow storm or a blizzard
or a heavy heavy rainstorm
really spectacular out the window
as you see this
we had a little clog in the line that
dumped that water overboard so
toward the end of the mission
we rigged up some tubing and and were
able to transfer that waste water
into storage bags on the inside of the
orbiter
well throughout all this
problems with the orbiter plumbing we
kept right on trucking as far as the
observations and kept getting good
science data
throughout and i'd say really all of
these problems were no more than a minor
inconvenience
we had four people on board who have
actually
at various times in our careers have
taught in universities so we
took this idea of teachers in space and
and the interest that nasa has in
education and we actually taught some
lessons
direct to classrooms on the ground with
students here's sam talking about the
electromagnetic spectrum
showing why we go into space to see some
of the radiation which we can't observe
from the ground and the students
on the ground heard this in in real time
after sam finish i i took over to talk a
little bit about
space operations we're going to give the
students a chance to ask some questions
later to bob and ron
i guess
some of you have heard about my tie-in
space which i wanted to demonstrate
before the
the actual lesson
i think it uh turned out to be a big hit
with the students and and hopefully it
will inspire some of them to go on and
and study hard and and perhaps go on to
do some work in astrophysics or
astronautics themselves because that of
course is what these projects are all
about
the other shift kept on observing while
we were teaching this lesson and here i
am showing something about how we
observe up on the flight deck
and then after we uh shifted and took
over these students had a chance to ask
questions
took a lot of work on the part of a lot
of people but i think it was worth it
continuing on in the educational vein
one of our midnight experiments the
shuttle amateur radio experiment or
psarx
head is one of its main objectives to
allow students at various places around
the united states the opportunity to
interact directly
with the shuttle crew
we talked to 28 groups of students
and
many other people just private citizens
around the world
in a lot of ways this flight was uh
a preview of what's to come in in the
space station world when we finally get
a space station built
i took the time to put together a short
demonstration of of some of the space
station issues handling trash is one of
the major issues
you saw how we got rid of waste water by
dumping it overboard however any solid
trash we accumulate and over the course
of
nine days with seven people you
accumulate a lot of trash
and
finding places to stow this trash is
always a major problem it gets more
important to solve the longer you fly in
space
we had a trash compactor experiment here
that allowed us to compress the trash by
a factor of three or four
and you see bob extracting this
bag of compressed trash
in a
odor-tight water-tight bag that worked
very well and
allowed us to store that stuff much more
densely
well after uh several days of really
pathfinding ultraviolet observations it
was time to put the instrument pointing
system to bed
lower it
and lock it into the payload bay and
come home
now we were up there to do astronomy and
we could tell from what we had seen that
that we had reaped an immense harvest of
data in ultraviolet astronomy
it was clear from what we saw in the
ground that we had a successful
scientific mission
it was time to come home first of all we
checked out the orbiter
systems started up an apu and cycled the
flight controls and checked out all the
sensors that we use in re-entering the
earth's atmosphere
and here's a picture you see of the
elevons that we're cycling to make sure
that they all work properly this is not
to be confused with this is the way we
stay up in space by flapping our wings
but we checked all this stuff out the
day or so before we came back and it all
worked fine and we knew we were had a
good ship for re-entering the earth's
atmosphere after uh nine days up in
space
well ron and i were the rookies on this
flight and
it's it's really hard to describe and
certainly to put in words or in video
the feelings that you have when you're
watching this it's really an awesome
experience
the first thing you notice is uh how
fast you're going you're traveling about
five miles a second which takes you oh
eight or ten minutes to go all the way
across the u.s
and the earth as seen from there is
a beautiful place
one of the things we got to do was a lot
of nighttime observing we were an
observatory
this uh
moon set here is we saw many of those
and at night we had the cabin darkened
so that we got a fairly unique view of
the dark earth because we were dark
adapted in the cabin
and we could see the airglow layer at 95
kilometers and we could see the cities
float by
with lights we could see the us about a
third of the united states at once as we
went over
well this is our
final sunset on the payload bay before
we close the doors
and came home with a very
deep rich harvest of ultraviolet
astronomy data
we landed at night and so in order to
see the shuttle we use these infrared
cameras because the shuttle has no
lights on it and you wouldn't be able to
see us at this point otherwise so this
is infrared photography on the outer
glide slope
with a heavy orbiter we came down on
glide slope at 17 degrees rather than
the 19 degree glide slope of the lighter
vehicles
i consider this the most important part
of the mission right here as the pilot
gets to lower the landing gear
and then vance brought it in for
just a super smooth landing on the hard
surface runway at edwards runway 2-2
right on air speed right distance down
the runway just just the way it ought to
be done
you can see the
gear heat up immediately as they touch
down here and start glowing white
this is what it looks like visually our
family's got to watch this from the end
of the runway and so just spectacular to
not be able to see anything and all of a
sudden this huge shuttle just comes
roaring into the field of view
back to infrared you can see the hot
spots or the white things you see there
the nose of the orbiter is still pretty
hot from its reentry
and the flames you see on the back just
in front of the vertical tail are the
exhaust from our auxiliary power units
the apu's and they are they work by
pulsing the hydrazine
and turning the
motors that keep the hydraulic system
powered and so it looks you see that
kind of engine puffy look coming out of
the
exhaust from the hydrazine
but we rolled out on the runway and
vance did a great job we were
folks came up and said i'd never seen an
orbiter that was parked so precisely on
the center line of runway when it came
to a wheel stop
the end of just a wonderful mission
here we are coming down the
stairway
you can see we're pleased to
be home we really enjoyed the trip but
it's always nice to get home
all of us were probably
an inch or two taller than uh normal
that point having stretched out a bit in
weightlessness
once again our patch
many people on the crew helped put it
together