4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0, clutch off!
In the first 22 years of the American manned space program, there have been 37 missions
and 50 astronauts have left the earth behind.
The space program has created heroes, names that fill our history books.
Alan Shepard, the first American man to go into space.
John Glenn, the first American man to go into orbit.
Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, the men of Mercury 7.
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.
Astronauts were men, until 1983 that is.
We go for main engine start, we have main engine start, and ignition, and liftoff, liftoff
of STS-7, America's first woman astronaut, and the shuttle has pulled the power.
June 18, 1983, Dr. Sally Ride made history.
It took her 6 years to prepare for her mission, but it took NASA 22 years to make it possible.
Ok, Discovery Houston with you through Hawaii and we've got a good picture of you all in
the commando.
Judy Resnick was next in August 1984.
And soon after, there was Catherine Sullivan, October 1984.
This is the story of the first three American women astronauts, and the historic roles they've
played in the U.S. space program.
You can't describe what the Earth looks like, and it's, you know, I've been trying, and
I've found that I just can't do it, and a lot of the pictures that we took, although
they're spectacular, we look at them and we're always disappointed because it just doesn't
capture what the Earth really looks like.
Sally Ride has had and experienced very few people now living will ever share.
She has orbited the Earth 231 times as a crew member of the space shuttle Challenger, but
she was more than just another astronaut.
She was the first American woman to fly in outer space, and the whole world was watching.
Would being female make any difference?
The women and the men do exactly the same jobs on orbit, and weightlessness is a great
equalizer.
You don't need to be strong to do things up there, and it's, there is really no difference.
But the fact that she was both a woman and an astronaut made headline news, and Sally
Ride became a household word.
Dr. Ride, the obvious question, how does it feel to realize that because, primarily of
your, the luck of your birth, along with some good work and so on, you are going to become
a footnote in history and a trivia question subject forever, among other things?
How do you relate to all of that?
Gosh, that's quite an honor.
Well, of course, I'm, I was very honored that NASA chose me to be the first woman.
I guess that I was maybe more excited about getting a chance to fly early than I was about
getting to be the first woman.
I think that it's a, it's a real, real experience, and the experience of a lifetime to be able
to fly in space and fly aboard the space shuttle, and I have to admit that I'm more excited
about that opportunity than I am about being the, you know, as you say, a footnote in history.
The questions continued three weeks before liftoff, a routine pre-flight press conference.
Now, Dr. Wright, during your, during your training exercises as a member of this group,
when, when there was a problem, when there was a funny, a glitch or whatever, how did
you respond?
How do you take it as a human being?
Do you, do you weep?
Do you, what do you do?
Why doesn't anybody ask Rick those questions?
I don't think I felt angry or disgusted.
It made me all the more determined to do things right and to, and to look professional while
I was up there.
The crew of STS-7 was responsible for what is now nearly a routine operation, the deployment
of satellites.
At $11 million a shot, it is more than just good business for NASA.
It provides opportunities to develop and to demonstrate new technical capabilities.
Okay, we see fan A on, and we'd like you to take Bravo off now.
A Canadian built remote arm was used for the first time on this flight to pick up, retrieve
and restow a satellite, proving NASA's claim that satellites could be plucked from their
orbit safely.
Dr. Sally Wright is one of NASA's expert arm operators.
There's a lot involved in the training to operate the arm.
I started, started working with it right after I came to NASA the first year that I was here
and worked a lot with the engineers up in Toronto, where the arm is made, in the engineering
development.
Spent a lot of time in their simulators.
Once I got assigned to a flight, that's when I really started spending the time at mock-ups
like this, where we've got a real live arm.
You know, it's a piece of machinery that you can move around and, and fly around and, you
know, you can bump it into things, you can break things with it.
And this is the only simulator that you can do that.
The arm itself is not strong enough to support itself under gravity, so you can't use the
real arm on the ground.
You can only use it in orbit.
On their flight, Sally and co-mission specialist John Fabian ran an experiment with the arm
called proximity operations.
They took a satellite called SPAS-01 out of the cargo bay and released it into orbit to
fly on its own.
Then, after circling the globe once, the shuttle was maneuvered close to the satellite and
the astronauts used the arm to retrieve it.
After nine hours of this, everyone agreed the test was a big success.
Inside the shuttle, zero gravity creates a unique work environment.
Weightlessness is fun.
That's probably the best way to describe it.
It's a completely different experience.
You can't simulate it on the ground.
It's very benign environment.
It's very easy to move around.
And I know that personally, while I was up there, I felt like that's where I belonged.
It was much easier for the human body to function in weightlessness than it is with gravity.
When it came time to de-orbit and come back, we were ready to come back.
We didn't necessarily want to come back, but you psychologically prepare yourself to be
up there for seven or eight days and when seven or eight days are up, you start looking
forward to re-entry because that's another new experience.
The orbiter comes in and ionizes the atmosphere as it comes in contact with it.
That's what causes the communications blackout, but it also causes just a brilliant orange
glow that surrounds the orbiter.
You look out the windows and all you see is bright orange that kind of fades into pinks
and reds and it's spectacular.
And I was glad somebody told me about it before I saw it for the first time.
Once you get down a little bit lower and you start feeling the effects of gravity, even
though you're not feeling very much, you're maybe feeling half a G or half what we are
feeling right now, it feels very, very smooth.
There are a couple spaces, especially right around Mach 1 just as you're going subsonic
where you get kind of a burbling, you get a lot of shaking, but not very much more than
that.
I'll say once more, we're away to come to California.
And Challenger is back home, back to Earth.
With the unqualified success of this mission and the outstanding performance of all its
crew members, including Sally Ride, the question arises, why did NASA take so long to include
women in the astronaut program?
It hasn't really taken NASA 20 years to let women in the program.
We've had women working in the space program for a considerable period of time.
And again, if you look at the criteria, when you look at just the astronauts, the criteria
for selecting astronauts in the 60s and what was required, there were not a lot of women
who met those requirements.
To understand the requirements, we have to look at the early days of the space program,
the days when space flight meant sending humans into a dark unknown.
In the early 60s, the United States was in a space race with the Soviet Union.
The pressure was on to send a man into orbit.
President Eisenhower decided the new astronauts should be military test pilots, men who had
already distinguished themselves under extreme pressure and whose flight experience was most
similar to this new environment.
Under lengthy and rigorous selection process, 35 military test pilots made it into the final
round.
Not knowing what these men would have to endure, NASA wanted to make sure the very best were
chosen.
So the finalists were sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Its director, Dr. Randy Lovelace, was instructed by NASA to examine in detail the physiological
and psychological makeup of these candidates.
Beyond the standard clinical exams, he was looking for adaptiveness, endurance, and stamina.
The men were subjected to a wide range of tests.
Lovelace measured body fat as one indicator of potential performance.
He assessed reaction time by measuring the muscles' response to electrical stimuli, and
he tested endurance by having the men ride a stationary bike until exhausted.
After five days of rigorous testing, Lovelace turned the results over to NASA.
An old friend of Dr. Lovelace, a pilot by the name of Jackie Cochran, encouraged him
to now test women, and she offered to pay for the tests.
She knew a young pilot by the name of Jerry Cobb.
Lovelace agreed and invited Jerry to the clinic.
She underwent the same tests as the men and excelled at each.
Lovelace was so impressed, he invited 18 more female aviators in for examination.
Again, they did well, and some even outperformed their male counterparts.
Dr. Lovelace informed NASA of the results and suggested they include women in the space
program.
NASA rejected the idea.
In 1959, the Mercury Seven were chosen.
Shepard, Glenn, Shearer, Grissom, Cooper, Carpenter, and Slayton.
And with Alan Shepard, the race was on, May 5, 1961.
But Jerry Cobb was not content with NASA's decision.
In 1962, she and others pressed for and won a congressional hearing on the subject of
astronaut qualifications.
Jerry Cobb observed that the requirement for astronauts to be military test pilots effectively
eliminated all women.
Since women were not allowed in combat, they were not permitted to train as military test
pilots.
NASA's position seemed to hold up until the Soviet Union sent the first woman into space.
She was Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old parachutist who had no training prior to her
selection as a cosmonaut.
Despite the Soviet achievement, Congress stood by its conclusion that bringing women into
the space program would have to wait.
Right now, the training of women would take valuable resources away from America's national
goal, putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
The Apollo program was a resounding success.
But by the end of the 60s, the cost of space exploration had risen astronomically, threatening
its very existence.
In 1972, President Nixon charged NASA with finding a way to turn space into an economically
viable enterprise.
NASA responded to the challenge.
In the nine years between 1972 and 1981, the greatest flying machine ever was designed
and constructed.
The Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever to fly.
It travels 30 times faster than the top speed of a commercial jetliner.
It takes off like a rocket, orbits the Earth like a spacecraft, and lands like an airplane.
But most important, it is reusable.
Each vehicle is capable of at least 100 missions and can usually be readied for its next flight
in 60 days.
The Shuttle has revolutionized space travel.
This is the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, headquarters for shuttle training.
One person who has played an active role in NASA's changing direction is Associate Director
Dr. Carolyn Huntoon.
Shuttle is a vehicle that is a transportation system.
It will be used each time it's used for some slightly different mission carrying a slightly
different payload.
And what we wanted was a scientist-engineer type that would specialize in the mission
part of the Shuttle and what it was carrying that time, the payload element, or the work
it was to do while it was on orbit.
And when those qualifications were laid out, we realized we did not need the high-performance
aircraft pilot-type test pilot skills.
What we were looking for were people skilled in engineering and sciences.
So this also gave us the original list of qualifications that we went out with in 1976
or 77 for the first call for the Shuttle astronauts.
And we made it clear at that time that NASA was encouraging both men and women to apply.
With ads like this, NASA began an extensive recruitment effort.
Advertisements were placed in both general interest publications and technical journals.
I had honestly not thought about being an astronaut.
I had not thought that it was really a career possibility until I saw NASA's announcement
back in 1977, I think, that they were accepting applications for astronauts.
They hadn't selected any since the middle to late 60s.
And I had never thought that it was something that I could apply for.
And it was the moment that I saw the advertisement that I knew that's what I wanted to do.
My brother, who's a corporate jet pilot, had heard about this and was very keen on it and
began to try to persuade me.
And his selling points were that NASA wanted scientists and they were hoping women and
minorities would apply and be accepted on equal basis.
And how many 26-year-old PhDs could there be ought to try.
And I tried to explain to him that at least from what little he had told me about the
job, what NASA wanted and what I was doing under the oceans were probably fairly far
apart and nice try.
But you've got to be kidding.
NASA went to a great deal of trouble to recruit women and minorities, to let them know they
could apply.
And once we closed the applications, then all the applications were treated the same.
The 1972 amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major impetus for NASA's recruitment
drive.
The act states, federal employment must be made free from any discrimination based on
race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
And NASA as a federal agency was required to comply.
NASA's recruitment efforts were well rewarded.
More than 8,000 people applied, 1,500 were women.
Out of those applications, 35 new candidates were chosen and invited to begin their five-year
commitment at the Johnson Space Center in July 1978.
This was the largest candidate training group ever selected and the first to include women
and minorities.
They came from all over the country and from backgrounds ranging from civil engineering
to nuclear physics.
The majority were in their mid-20s and all were in outstanding physical health.
From this group, 15 were to train as pilots and 20 as mission specialists.
The six women were to become mission specialists.
They were Dr. Sally Ride, physicist, Dr. Judith Resnick, electrical engineer, Dr. Catherine
Sullivan, geologist, Dr. Anna Fisher, specialist in emergency medicine, Dr. Rhea Seddon, surgeon,
and Dr. Shannon Lucid, biochemist.
Although each candidate excelled in science or engineering, they were chosen not only
for their technical knowledge, but also for their ability to learn quickly and to apply
their knowledge to new problems.
You had to recognize that you were not going to be able to continue in research on the
basis you were familiar with, i.e. being a front-line, granted, funded scientist.
Maybe a collaborator, maybe intimately involved in some of the projects on certain flights,
but not as a primarily marine geophysicist.
And that wasn't a problem for me.
I was happy with that decision.
One of the appealing things to me about being a mission specialist was that you could do
what I had done, which is diversify, go into one field, spread out, get into a lot of state-of-the-art
technologies, make a contribution of sorts, then move on to something new.
That was something I had been trying to find in my career and had been doing at piecemeal,
and here NASA had it in one package as a mission specialist.
The training necessary to transform these scientists into a disciplined core of shuttle
specialists takes at least two years.
The first year they work as a group to master the basics.
I think that once NASA made the decision that they were going to bring women astronauts
into the program, they made that decision and stuck by it.
And NASA was well prepared for us when we came, I think, for the most part.
They treated us the same as they did the men.
Our training has been no different, either in the physical side of it or in the actual
assignments that were given, the tasks that were assigned, the flight assignments.
I really don't think there's been any distinction between the women astronauts and the men astronauts.
One important part of early training is learning how to maneuver comfortably in NASA's high-performance
training jets, the T-38s.
The T-38 flying is a very important part of our training, and I didn't appreciate how
important it would be until I came to NASA.
One of the first things that we learn is how to coordinate as a flight crew, and you learn
that in the T-38.
You learn to appreciate what the pilot's doing.
The pilot learns to trust you in navigation and communication.
You learn how to use the radios.
You learn how to use all of the navigational equipment, some of which is similar to what
we use in the space shuttle.
And I think that it really provides an environment that is closer to a space shuttle-type environment
that is a flight crew environment that nothing else around here provides.
Sally Ride, like all mission specialists, flies as the flight engineer in the second seat.
The T-38 pilots are in training to fly the shuttle.
They come to NASA with military test pilot experience, still a prerequisite for selection
as a shuttle pilot.
To date, no women have satisfied that requirement.
To the astronauts, T-38 flying is fun, but it also requires learning survival techniques,
what to do in case of an emergency at 35,000 feet, how to survive a crash landing either
on land or at sea.
Here in Florida, the new recruits practice parachuting and water survival.
The first year of our basic training was a lot different than most people imagined.
The press only filmed the aspects of the training that looked exciting when we were doing water
survival or parachute training, that kind of thing, but really that only took up maybe
four or five days of that year.
Most of the year was spent in the classroom learning about the space shuttle systems,
the space shuttle experiments, a little bit of background on the shuttle, and it was just
like going back to school.
The curriculum is designed to take individuals of diverse skills and give them a unified
knowledge base.
All candidates, both mission specialists and pilots, are required to take courses in space
physiology and medicine, space physics, materials science, astronomy, and earth observation.
They are also introduced to each of NASA's 12 facilities, familiarizing themselves with
NASA's procedures and protocols.
We built it for about $40 a square foot, and you can't build a house in Texas for that
right now.
What I would like to do is just to briefly run around the room and make sure that what
Bill described to you is the various functions for the various control room operators, you
understand where they would be actually located in this room.
In mission control, the astronauts learn to perform the job of capsule communicator, or
CAPCOM.
During missions, this person is the vital link between ground operations and the shuttle
crew.
With this responsibility comes the opportunity to see firsthand how spacecraft systems operate
during flight.
At the end of the first year, the candidates are promoted to astronaut.
They are then eligible for specific flight crew assignments.
Once assigned, the crews train together, and each crew member starts developing his or
her own specialty.
Here we're standing in building 9A of the Johnson Space Center, and this building houses
the simulator facilities that we use that have the real-sized hardware in it.
One of the facilities we have is what we call a manipulator development facility, and that
is for the remote manipulator system.
We have actually a physical arm that you can use to pick up mock-ups, cardboard mock-ups
of the payloads that we would be deploying in space with exactly the same fittings, using
exactly the same cameras that we use on board.
And I worked in that area for a couple of years.
I also did some training on it for our mission, so I've had quite a number of hours in all
the different facilities that provide bits and pieces of training for the RMS.
Another part of training is getting accustomed to the interior space of the orbiter.
This is done inside a full-size replica, also located in building 9A.
This is a very accurate mock-up of the orbiter's mid-deck, the living and stowage area, and
you can see it's not very big.
It's about four and a half feet wide, and it's maybe six feet tall, and front to back
is maybe about 10 or 12 feet in.
A lot of it's taken up a storage area, and the airlock takes up a big portion of it.
On our flight, for example, this is where seven people ate their dinners and slept and
so forth.
Sleeping restraints are on the wall.
That's just where we store them.
We don't really use them there necessarily.
You could hook one off on the ceiling and just let the rest of it float free, or you
could just stop in the middle here and let go and relax, and you'd fall asleep right
there and just slowly drift around the cabin.
This big thing on my left is the crew module hatch, or low-pressure hatch, for the airlock,
and this hatchway goes in here to the area that we stow.
The hard portions of the spacesuit's in, and where all the control panels for the electrical
power and the water and oxygen servicing are plumbed in so that we can refill the spacesuit
tanks and go out again if we need to.
Being an astronaut is not a 40-hour work week.
Every day is different, especially when you're training for a crew.
You have to spend 12 to 16 hours in the simulator one day, spend the next day flying to, might
be Florida for a test.
It might be Colorado to visit an experimenter and see the experiment that you're actually
going to be flying.
You might spend the next day over here operating the arm.
Every day is different, and every day is long.
I think the way that we train by repeating and rehearsing all the different parts of
each mission with a lot of malfunction emphasis and how to recover and how to cope with problems,
I think that's the way that historically we've trained in the space program, and I think
we have proven that it's done us well.
We had practiced in our simulators many, many launches with and without problems.
We had also practiced down in Florida in the vehicle being strapped in in all of our gear
in the proper attitude and so forth.
There's a lot of activity and a lot of monitoring systems that goes on before launch.
I think all of us were in there doing the job that we had trained and practiced so many
times for.
When the solid rockets ignite, there's no question that you're going somewhere.
It's a kick in the pants, and essentially it's like a bumpy train ride, and you feel
like you're going pretty fast, but we knew we were going someplace.
Three, two, one.
We have SRB ignition, and we have liftoff.
Liftoff of making 41B, the first flight of we have in a Discovery, and the shuttle has
cleared the tower.
Flight 41D took off on August 29, 1984, only 16 months after Sally Ride's historic liftoff.
It was the 12th shuttle flight and the second to include a woman.
Discovery Houston with you through Hawaii, and we've got a good picture of you all in
the crew module.
Nick was one of the mission specialists on the six-person crew.
A full roster of activities was planned for their six-day mission.
On the first day, they deployed two satellites and started documenting their work.
Another important job was to test a new piece of equipment for NASA, a solar array panel.
This is the largest structure ever deployed in space.
It was 1,300 square feet, yet it only weighs 300 pounds.
The purpose of the array is to supply electrical power to a spacecraft or a space station by
using the sun's energy.
A wing this size has about the same capability as one of the orbiter's fuel cells, which
is just about as much power as we typically use on orbit.
The solar array, when fully extended, reaches 300 feet.
This artist's rendering of a future space station shows how the solar array panels would
look if installed as the station's primary energy source.
Everything went smoothly until the fourth day.
Then the crew noticed something unusual.
They saw an unexpected accumulation of water at one of the waste water vents.
The large, odd-shaped ice structure is coming out of the water supply tank valve.
Beneath that, the dark opening is the waste water tank valve.
Using the camera at the end of the remote arm, the astronauts and mission control could
watch the water freeze as it poured from the valve.
The problem we had on board was that the tanks that accumulate the water, when they get full,
we dump them overboard.
There was a problem with the dump process where instead of just dumping overboard in
little ice particles, it became a big icicle and prevented us from doing any further dumps.
What we ended up doing was using the robot arm to look at that situation at first.
That was when we saw the icicle.
The first thing that we did was we turned the orbiter so that its side, that side was
facing towards the sun and we left it there for a couple of days to make the icicle shrink,
which it did.
Since it did not totally go away, it seemed to be the prudent thing to do to bump it off
so that during reentry it wouldn't accidentally come up and hit some structure that we didn't
want it to.
The coordination between onboard and on the ground was such that the ground went into
the simulators and developed some procedures for using the arm to gently nudge the ice
right along the edge perpendicular to it.
They did it in the simulator, it took some time to develop the procedures because once
again the arm is wrapped sort of underneath where you can't see the whole end of it and
also the camera sits on the top so that as you're going in to bump the ice off, you lose
sight of it because the camera is up above it.
So we essentially had to do the procedure in the blind by numbers.
Sally Ride and others in our office did a lot of the simulator work on the ground and
Hank Hartsfield on our mission actually did the operation of the robot arm to do this
task and I was sort of the intermediary between the two of them to discuss the whole situation
and to integrate what was going to be done next and to help Hank and to talk to Sally
whenever we needed to discuss anything.
With Sally's instructions, Hartsfield guided the arm along the side of the vehicle and
carefully nudged off the ice.
One of the things about your body in zero gravity is that you don't use your legs for
anything and we have found over the years that it is very important in getting readapted
back to gravity to have exercised your muscles because with no exercise at all, not only
do you have no exercise, you don't even have the benefit of standing on them, walking on
them and people have readapted much better with the exercise capability of a treadmill
or something similar to that.
And our sleep arrangements looked a lot like a summer camp, a little bit of bunks here
and there, two of us slept anchored to lockers, two of us slept strung across the room and
two of us slept on the wall and you notice that in zero G when you relax your arms tend
to float up.
At the end of the 96th orbit while over the eastern coast of Africa, the shuttle began
its descent for landing at Edwards Air Force Base 90 minutes later.
I think the most memorable thing about Mission 41D for me was the crew.
We trained together for 19 months, we knew each other well, we had confidence in each
other's abilities, we had a lot of things to do on our mission so nobody could know
everything, so we had to trust the other person to do his or her job and the camaraderie that
we had during the period of time that we trained together and worked very hard learning the
systems and payloads and experiments that we were responsible for made us a very close
crew and when we got on orbit it was just like we had practiced in the simulators.
We enjoyed working with each other, we had a good time yet we could get all of our work
done very efficiently and I think that's the thing I remember most about our mission.
Back at the Johnson Space Center, Catherine Sullivan was finishing the preparations for
her mission scheduled one month later.
She was to be the first American woman to walk in space.
EVA is a NASA acronym that stands for the big word extravehicular activity which in
turn stands for a space walk basically and in the shuttle program we have a new space
suit that was specifically designed for the sorts of work we envision ourselves doing
from shuttle.
The total ensemble weighs on the order of 225 pounds and we put it on basically in five
pieces.
First we wear a liquid cooling garment which is like a set of nylon long underwear with
fine little water tubes running everywhere through it and the air ducts that carry fresh
air up to the top of your body and pick up the warm and dirtier carbon dioxide rich air
off your fingertips and your feet and pull it back out to get all the carbon dioxide
scrubbed out of it.
We squirm up into what we call a hut or hard upper torso and that's like having an old
breastplate of armor on only now it's fiberglass molded to fit the human torso and that's
the hard shell that we've mounted the pumps and tanks to and that we've mounted the bearings
and joints that allow your arms to move too.
So you squirt up through that getting your arms into the sleeves and your head up through
the neck ring and then you've already put on prior to doing that probably a pair of
pants basically which is the lower torso and that seals around the metal ring just above
your waist.
The next thing you put on is the little communications cap over which you put the helmet which seals
around your head.
What you need for zero G is a nice dexterous set of gloves that give you fairly good feel
on the fingertips and isn't too hard to move and a lot of mobility of your upper arms and
upper body.
So the shuttle suit is designed with those things in mind.
It has a large backpack that contains several oxygen and water tanks.
The water tanks provide you cooling and the oxygen tanks provide you both the pressure
in the suit and the clear gas, the clean gas to breathe and a set of fans and motors and
so forth obviously to pump all those things around so you have fresh air and cool water.
Working in the suit in 1G here on earth is very different than it is in zero G and some
of our training involves actually walking in the suit in vacuum chambers with all the
air pumped out at vacuum so that you can get a feel for how well the cooling system will
take the heat that you're generating as you do exercise and you actually walk on a treadmill
which is a very ungainly thing to do in that suit.
You're in a machine and that's where you want to be because the machine is giving you all
the things you need to live in a vacuum but you're in a machine that has fans and water
and air circulating around and it's got a big hard part to it that you can bang against
if you start rattling around and so in 1G it's a fairly cumbersome thing to use.
The best place to practice maneuvering with the suit is underwater where the effect of
gravity is lessened.
In this building there is a full size mock up of the shuttle's cargo bay at the bottom
of a pool.
It's here that Catherine Sullivan and her partner David Lietzma spent many hours practicing
the task they'd be doing in orbit.
The water tank training that we do here in Houston for each flight is really about as
good as you can get.
There are a lot of factors that are not realistic for actual work in space.
The fluid dynamics of moving you in a space suit through something as viscous as water
as compared to moving through the vacuum of space of course means that for anything that
you're trying to do the forces you have to exert are a lot higher in the pool than they'll
be on orbit.
These million dollar suits are so heavy when fully assembled the astronauts can only hang
on a rack but despite the suit's overall weight smaller weights are balanced strategically
on the legs and arms.
The weights keep the astronauts from floating to the surface when in position underwater.
Once properly balanced the astronauts are slowly lowered to the bottom where they are
assisted by scuba divers.
For their mission Sullivan and Lietzma worked on a prototype of a satellite refueling system
placed in the shuttle's cargo bay.
The goal of their planned EVA was to demonstrate they could pump highly unstable hydrazine
fuel from the shuttle to a simulated satellite and to prove that satellites not designed
for refueling could with the proper hoses and clamps be refitted and refueled.
They practiced intensively over a six month period.
While the pool is a fairly good work environment it is no substitute for actually experiencing
the real thing zero gravity and the best way to experience zero gravity without actually
being in space is to fly parabolic dives in the KC-135 or K-Bird.
The KC-135 is a military version of the Boeing 707.
The airplane climbs steadily to 35,000 feet and then dives deeply for 30 seconds.
As it goes over the peak of the curve the passengers experience the weightlessness associated
with zero gravity but only for 30 seconds at a time.
All the astronauts are required to spend some time in the K-Bird.
In addition to experiencing weightlessness small tools are tested and new pieces of equipment
are evaluated under these circumstances.
Getting to get the suit on in the K-Bird is one of those cases where you're not in zero
g.
The K-Bird is fooling you.
You're not really practicing in zero g.
You're practicing in 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, 30 seconds on and it can go pretty smoothly
sometimes.
It's usually a little bit uncomfortable and sometimes close to dangerous because the suit
still weighs 225 pounds and when you pull out at the bottom it weighs twice that and
it takes several people to help you out and keep an eye on things to make sure that you
don't get stuck somewhere coming out of your 30 seconds of zero g with an arm caught under
the suit or part way into the upper torso and about to get one of the ribs pushed down
on your body somewhere.
Getting out of the suit even with assistance is no easy feat.
Catherine Sullivan's launch was on October 5th, 1984, Mission 41G, the first with two
women crew members.
This flight made Sally Ride a two-time veteran.
The operations and checkout building led by the two women on this flight, Cathy Sullivan
and Sally Ride.
As we were about to step into the orbiter just before the launch, I think that we were
all a little bit apprehensive about what was about to happen but more than apprehension
I think we all felt excitement.
Dr. Sally Ride is now entering orbiter Challenger for her second flight into space, a technician
wiping down the soles of her shoes to make sure that no excess dirt.
It's a very exciting situation, you're the only ones on the launch pad, you've just gone
all the way up this elevator to the top nearly and there are just three or four people up
there and they're the ones that are, they're only there because they're going to strap
you into the orbiter and then they're going to leave and it's a very lonely feeling as
soon as the, as soon as the people close the hatch and kind of wave goodbye to you and,
and head down the, leave the launch pad.
Mission specialist one Cathy Sullivan now boarding, boarding Challenger's cockpit.
T minus fifteen.
I don't think you forget the sense of power and sense of speed building up that you have
during those first few minutes of flight, the first six minutes or so are very impressive
when you're going.
Over the course of this eight day mission, the seven person crew demonstrated the importance
of having astronauts on board to solve unforeseen problems.
We had several experiments, it was primarily a scientific mission.
The first day we lifted up a large satellite with the remote manipulator arm and let it
go and back to the orbiter away from it to leave it go off on its own for a two to five
year mission, looking at the balance between the sun's energy that comes into the earth
and the energy that the earth radiates back out and understanding that balance should
help us understand a lot, in a lot better detail, the earth's climate and in turn how
the climate interacts with the ocean, so it's a radiation budget experiment to see how the
earth's systems are driven.
We ran into a problem with the satellite because it has two solar panels that need to be swung
out before the satellite can be deployed, otherwise the satellite can't get any solar
power and it's really dead.
When we tried to deploy the first solar panel, nothing happened and we tried several things
and nothing happened, we couldn't get it out and they finally had us take the arm and
basically shake the satellite, trying to free the solar panel and that eventually worked.
It took us about an hour of moving the arm and stopping it, moving the arm and stopping
it and trying to just unjam the panel.
Okay, Sally's backing the arm off of the pin at this time and we'll stand by.
And this is Sally again maneuvering the mechanical arm on one of the days that we had trouble
stowing or refolding the Serbia antenna, she brought the arm down to where it latches itself
shut and as you'll see in just a second here, gently tapped on the latch mechanism so that
the little claw would come out over the striker bar and secure the antenna in the payload
bay.
This is the Houston Press Center challenger, we're ready for questions now from Houston.
While orbiting the earth at five miles per second, the crew held its first in-flight
press conference.
This is for Commander Crippen and Sally Ride, could you compare this mission with the other
missions that you've been on, comparing the problems and the crowded conditions and the
heat, as well as the accomplishments of what you think you're doing up there?
Well, the last mission that I was on with Crip was a great mission and we really didn't
have many problems and we had a great time the whole time we were up there.
This mission, I guess any spaceflight is a great spaceflight and we're having an awful
lot of fun.
We've had a few more problems, but so far we've been pretty successful in all the things
that we've been trying to do.
We got the Earth spacecraft deployed on flight day one, although that was a little bit of
a struggle, but just made us all the more happy when we got it out there.
I think that the crowded conditions, it's more crowded with seven people than it was
with five, but everybody's been pretty good about trying to stay out of everybody else's
way and it's really working pretty well.
And as far as the heat goes, we're all from Houston, so it's nothing that we're not used
to.
We thought we had seven people aboard, but when we opened up the airlock, we had seven
people aboard, but when we opened up the airlock, it looked for a moment like we had an eighth.
We called this guy Ralph for a while.
It's actually the backup space suit that we carried.
Catherine Sullivan's specialty is working in the cargo bay.
To do her job, she has to walk in space.
The process of getting ready for an EVA starts here in the major portion of the mid deck
where we put on our Long John style cooling garments and then moves in here where we have
the hard torso portion of the space suit mounted on the wall.
And we put on the lower pant-like lower torso and squirm into the upper torso and seal that
all up, do a pressure check to make sure it's holding all the air inside, and then spend
48 minutes washing out of the suit the carbon dioxide and washing out of us and our suit
the nitrogen that may be left in our bodies so that we don't have any problem with the
bends.
And once we're through with that, this hatch is actually sealed while we're doing that
final pre-breathing process.
And then when we're finished with that, we do a couple of final leak checks and begin
to lower the pressure in the airlock, just dumping the air overboard into the payload
bay.
Okay, O2 is EVA, time EVA is 03, time loss 750, 99% normal limiting, 98% O2, 4.3 suit
pressure, battery voltage 16.8, amps 3.1, RPM 20.0, CO2 0.4, water temp is 72, gas pressure
15.5, water pressure 15.
That's it.
Very far off.
Okay.
That's an iron.
I just thought he'd like some tools to work that into a couple of hours.
You know, you would think sitting here and dreaming about it, you'd think it would be
an amazing moment like reaching the top of a mountain and you just sort of bask in it.
And it's actually not like that.
There's a lot of work to be done out there.
I was a little surprised in fact that I was so focused on what we had to get out into
the payload bay and do.
Catherine Sullivan and David Lietzma had spent six months preparing for this moment.
Endless hours of practicing satellite refueling procedures was about to pay off.
Our exercise here basically was designed to show that we could change our mind about a
satellite that we had not intended to fuel on orbit and with a sophisticated set of tools
modify the ground valve so that it could be resurfaced on orbit.
What you got?
You got a cap.
The job went smoothly and we did have some periods of time along the way.
Usually when Crippen reminded us from the cabin that it was okay to stop and stand back
and look at what was going by because otherwise if you didn't look outside of your narrow
field of view it was awfully much like doing it in the tank and you'd have to stop and
lean back a little bit to realize that you had never seen that view in the tank before
and you were really doing this on orbit now.
Okay, the cap is off.
Get the seal.
Nope.
Oh, grass cap.
Feeling it?
Doesn't look like it's in there.
Nope, grass cap's not in there.
Grass cap's not in there.
Chronic boom has been heard at the Kennedy Space Center.
Challenger descending at 200 feet per second.
Altitude 34,000 feet.
That is the Challenger friendly opening landing gear, iso number one.
We copy.
Challenger now turning left overhead.
After 133 orbits and 3.4 million miles in space, the crew of 41G landed at the Kennedy Space
Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida.
I think there's a new wave of interest and excitement about space and we've come back
out of the sort of slow period that followed the Apollo years and I think we're going into
a period that will just continue to expand in everybody's interest as commercial things
expand and scientific things.
So there is more attention on who is doing what and how is it getting done and where
do these people come from and how could I get there.
There's a generation of people now who've grown up with space as a reality in their
life and it's not unusual for them to figure that normal people are doing this and maybe
I have a chance.
Five years from now I have no idea where I'll be or what I'll be doing and there's
nothing that I'd rather be doing right now.
I'm intending to stay with NASA as long as they'll let me stay.
I really enjoy the work that I'm doing here and I would hope that I can be around long
enough that I can participate in the space station.
There are two things I'd like to be doing in five years.
One would be getting ready to serve a tour as project scientists for a couple months
on the space station and the second would be either involved or getting ready to be
involved in helping plan a return trip to the moon.
I can't get incredibly good vision, but I'd go anywhere.
If I get any rotate eyes, I would follow out with doing something similar.
I really like how people can be down to business now rather than making a case for
them for beside space.
I also want to stir up this conversation.
I want to talk about space travel, the persuade the people and the
Thank you very much.
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