columbia houston simo on air to ground
one and two when you're ready
we're ready
dr jim the mmt
had all players in on the meeting
right through from the factory and the
consensus is they just do not understand
the behavior of fuel cell 2
even though your folks efforts have done
a good job towards stabilizing the
problem it's significantly out of family
and so
it will
shorten the mission
and we're looking at a tig
on tuesday for us down here that's in an
met
of 3
22
14.
and of course we're looking at the
various types of entries looking at
procedures to reduce the load loss to
one fuel cell type procedures and we'll
be discussing those over the next couple
hours
okay that's certainly disappointed but
we know you guys put your best effort
forward and you're doing the right thing
and we appreciate all the work that's
going into that 3 2 14.
and i imagine between now and then we'll
keep marching forward with as much
science as we can
exactly right if you could continue with
the nominal timeline for now for uh
completing as much science as possible
and we've pretty much worked up the
procedure to reduce the load and looking
at potentially eventually safe in a fuel
cell but we haven't made that decision
yet
we'll have words for you shortly
if you would like a face to face with
some of the players down here we can
easily set up an oca video conference
yeah that would probably be helpful
maybe uh after you've gone through uh
your procedures and worked out your plan
and then we can have a face to face
okay we'll pick a time in the next
little while here
questions for you hello from rockford
among the experiments you're conducting
you're lighting as many as 200 small
fires to study plans in space does this
make you nervous at all
one of the things that we work very hard
on the space shuttle program is to be
safe we have a safety panel in
both at kennedy space center we have
safety troops we have safety folks at
johnson space center they all worked
very hard to make sure all of our
payloads are safe
the combustions on experiments on this
fight of course that extra attention is
one of the reasons why it's taken this
long to fly rockslide's combustion
experiments because in order to give the
science investigators the access they
need to run experiments yet still have
the experiments be safe with a very
difficult design issue and we've been
involved in the last stage of that price
of process and know that they work very
hard and
feel completely safe with the
experiments we have on board
thank you roger crouch you have managed
missions from the ground but never been
on a flight as we show our viewers some
pictures of yesterday's lunch describe
for us what it felt like and was it what
you expected
well it
wasn't quite what i expected i expected
the first two minutes to be real real
take a real long time because the solid
rocket boosters were the things that
really give you a lot of trust in fact
though the first two minutes were over
in about like 20 seconds it seemed to me
like we were all on the mid deck down
below
uh doing high fives and shaking hands
with each other and after we got to the
50 mile limit the commander announced
that we were truly in space from an
astronaut point of view and we were just
so elated it was like i guess a little
child maybe just screaming and hollering
about the first really great thing
they'd ever done their life i felt
really super about it
many of our viewers would like to know
what it's like to be weightless in space
describe for us what that's like and
what problems it can pose for you
one of the fun things with flying with
rookies like roger and gregory and
tara's other palette specialist is they
say all the things that you remember
happened on the first flight both roger
and greg have been talking about how
they feel like they're hanging upside
down all the time which is true because
the fluid tip causes the liquid that's
normally pulled in your feet to shift up
into your head and it feels like you're
hanging upside down all the time there's
a lot of things like that that sort of
catch you by surprise
but we've flown a lot of missions now
where the 83 third space shuttle mission
and we've had a lot of experience with
how to counteract those symptoms and how
to prepare yourself pre-flight and
in-flight like drinking lots of fluids
and eating lots of high-fiber foods or
taking other fiber supplements etc so
we've got a pretty good plan for how to
make sure that we can perform at full
efficiency while we're up here
i guess the other thing that
that you feel the vision is it's just
fun to float around in space it's just
fun everything you do is tremendously
enjoyable because you're completely free
to float it's like your little kid in
some kind of peter pan movie or
something like that
the the comet hellbop of course is
drawing a lot of attention are you
getting a good look at it right now this
is for any one of you
yeah we uh of course get to see it every
time we have a sunset and we've been
real busy the first couple days as you
can imagine but uh don thomas and i got
a good look at it with the binoculars uh
just a few hours ago and it's it's
really uh
incredible to see it and to
imagine that the last time human eyes
saw that comet was when they were
building the great pyramids 4 000 years
ago
and uh it really makes us feel special
to be orbiting the earth in a spaceship
looking at the earth and the comet in
the same glance
it also makes you wonder what human
civilization will be like the next time
the comet visits us
and uh i think all of us here feel quite
certain that that'll involve uh
colonization of space and we're real
proud to be
part of the baby steps we're taking in
that direction
we're wondering you know what would be
seeing you go up in space more often and
seeing you on television do you think
americans still the same enthusiasm for
this they had years ago
well one of the things that i was
privileged to do during the training was
to go to a lot of elementary schools and
talk to the children there
and i do believe that there's a certain
lethargy in a lot of
the adults in america about the interest
in the space program but when you talk
to kids and you talk to them about space
and their minds start to expand you can
just see the energy within the room and
it's an incredible energy that these
kids generate just in their thought
processes about going to space and about
the space program so i think there's a
lot of enthusiasm there and maybe people
just
are at a younger age when they're really
feeling it so much the people in the
older age maybe have
other worries too much right now
okay good heads up and i'll give you the
statuses as i push through these steps
okay that's complete
okay don you can follow through with fo2
step alpha to re-power on the exp unit
okay copy up o2 step alpha here to
repower
okay when you've completed those steps
i'll give you an experiment command we
would like you to enter
has been completed moving on to step
delta.1
copy
chambered pressure is reading 0.00
atmospheres
we copy that zero decimal zero zero
atmosphere
oh
experiment i can see here gas going into
the chamber
i can't put the dust cover back on
although if i press harder i probably
can
columbia houston for jim
and uh she's coming up call us about
that
link
yeah we're looking at that and we don't
have any steps for you right now we're
checking into a couple of things that we
may be calling you to now later
what we'd like for you to now do now
though is
we've made the decision down here to go
ahead and save fuel cell 2.
first however we have a number of power
down steps that are will involve both
orbiter and payload equipment for you to
perform and we've come up with some
priorities so we're just going to talk
talk you through it a few steps at a
time
and
we'll be watching you know the power
levels as we power down each equipment
so we know when we're below a good level