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space
Another hard re-entry
A group of former astronauts knows exactly what the crew that will return NASA to flight is going through.
By CURTIS KRUEGER
Published July 10, 2005
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[Times photo: ]
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Discovery rolled to launch pad 39B weeks ago ahead of this week's launch. Despite threatening weather, NASA decided Hurricane Dennis was far enough away that it left the shuttle on the pad.
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CAPE CANAVERAL - Later this week, seven astronauts are set to put on their orange suits, climb aboard the space shuttle Discovery and wait on the launch pad for hours until a half-million gallons of rocket fuel starts blazing beneath them.
The wait will tick by slowly. All the astronauts will know they are making the first space shuttle flight since the 2003 voyage of Columbia killed a crew of their friends.
Who can guess what emotions will churn their minds?
Five people.
Five people who don't need to guess, because they felt the same emotions themselves.
Nearly 17 years ago, these five astronauts were preparing for their own milestone. They were getting ready to make the first American space flight since the Challenger exploded in 1986, killing a crew of their friends.
In September 1988, these five climbed aboard Discovery, the very same shuttle that will take America back into space this month.
They waited for the moment it would all begin, and tried not to think of what had gone before.
* * *
That 1988 "return to flight" mission and the one scheduled for Wednesday have much in common.
NASA considers this month's mission a test flight, as it did with the 1988 launch, because of all the technical changes designed to prevent a repeat of disaster. NASA has something to prove in this month's flight, as it did in 1988, because of intense criticism aimed at its management style. The crew on this month's mission plans to honor the astronauts of Columbia, just as the crew on the 1988 flight made tribute to those of Challenger.
And the path to each mission began with an unimaginable tragedy.
On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, Frederick "Rick" Hauck, a space shuttle commander, was having an upbeat meeting inside the flight director's office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was talking to a crew of fellow astronauts about procedures for his shuttle mission, scheduled for one month later.
Shortly after 10:30 a.m. Houston time, someone switched on a television. The Challenger was scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"So there we were watching it, and it blew up and nobody said a word," Hauck recalled in a recent interview. Everyone filed out silently.
"Of course I got back to the astronaut office and everybody was walking around, like, stunned looks on their faces," Hauck said. "Obviously your concern is about the families, your friends that have been killed."
The Challenger turned into a fireball 73 seconds after liftoff, as the astronauts' families looked on from Kennedy Space Center. All seven astronauts perished, including NASA's first ever teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. It was the first time American astronauts had ever died in a space flight.
Inside the flight director's office in Houston, it dawned on all the astronauts that the meeting for their upcoming mission didn't matter anymore. They obviously weren't going to fly any time soon.
* * *
In both cases, NASA spent more than two years responding to an outside board of experts and designing new equipment to make the shuttle fly safer.
Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth because of damage caused by foam that fell during its launch. So in this month's flight, the astronauts will use new equipment to inspect for damage and test repair techniques.
Challenger exploded during launch, so NASA focused on launch problems afterward. It redesigned the "O-rings" in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters, one of which was blamed for the explosion. NASA also created a launch escape system, to allow astronauts in newly designed pressurized orange suits to parachute out of the shuttle in certain types of launch malfunctions.
But the risk ultimately fell to the five men selected for the 1988 flight. The crew included the commander, Hauck, a Navy captain who had been a combat pilot and test pilot; the pilot, Richard Covey, an Air Force colonel and combat pilot from Fort Walton Beach; John "Mike" Lounge, a former Navy officer with a master's degree in astrogeophysics; David C. Hilmers, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and electrical engineer; and George "Pinky" Nelson, an astronomer. All had flown in space before.
"It was very much an honor and a privilege," Lounge said recently. "We were anxious to go fly."
The astronauts were well aware of how NASA's team redesigned the O-rings, Lounge said.
"By the time we flew, I'd contend we fixed it three different ways," Lounge said.
For more than two years, the astronauts trained and retrained, and focused on jobs they would conduct in space, such as releasing a satellite.
Still, said Hilmers, "the whole specter of the Challenger accident never was too far from our minds . . . I think it kind of permeated all aspects of the flight."
Hilmers said the crew believed in NASA's testing and redesign, but inevitably mused over "the possibility that it could happen again and whether or not the fixes that were made . . . were good ones."
* * *
NASA hoped to fly the shuttle again in May, but now it is scheduled to lift off some time between Wednesday and July 31. The flight after Challenger suffered delays too, but NASA eventually targeted Sept. 29, 1988.
For Hauck and the rest of the crew, the day began early. They rose about 1:30 a.m., showered, shaved, dressed and ate breakfast. Early in the morning, they donned the new orange space suits, rode to Launch Pad 39B and climbed into Discovery.
They strapped into their seats, with the help of NASA technicians. Because the shuttle was pointing straight up, the crew members were all on their backs, facing skyward. Hauck and Covey, commander and pilot, were seated next to each other on the flight deck, able to look out the windows above and to the sides. Hilmers and Lounge sat behind them, and Nelson sat in the mid-deck below.
It was roughly T-three hours, NASA-speak for three hours before launch time, not counting certain built-in waiting periods.
All five astronauts had flown into space before, but this flight was different.
"I felt more vulnerable, absolutely," Hauck said. "I mean I could intellectualize my thoughts that this will be the safest one ever. But I did not have that comfort that I had on my first two launches."
The astronauts were even dressed differently. On previous flights, in their comfortable blue NASA coveralls, "If you had an extended delay on the launch pad, you could unstrap yourself, stretch, eat a sandwich or whatever and look out the window."
Now in their stiff and cumbersome orange space suits, "You were kind of like a turtle on its back," Lounge said.
All that added to the tension.
The crew spent time going over their checklists and mentally rehearsing procedures. Launches are highly automated - a computer actually makes the final decision to launch - but the astronauts and officials at Kennedy Space Center monitor everything, and can call off a launch at the last minute if they see something awry.
Then, while waiting on the launch pad, Covey, who was looking out the window at rain clouds forming, said "Uh-oh."
With that little comment, "a chill went down my spine" Hauck recalled.
All the astronauts knew that in the last seconds before the Challenger blew up, Commander Francis R. Scobee had responded to a call from Mission Control, saying "Roger, go at throttle up." That meant Challenger was doing as it was supposed to, flying with the throttle open.
But three seconds later, pilot Michael J. Smith had said "uh-oh." And the shuttle exploded. Smith's "uh-oh" was the last word transmitted from the Challenger.
Now, two years later on the launch pad aboard Discovery, Covey said "uh-oh." He was worried, but only that bad weather would force them to scrub the launch.
Hauck recalls: "I said, Covey, don't say "uh-oh' again. Ever."
* * *
At T-5, five minutes before launch, every second that ticked off the official clock brought the astronauts closer to a historic launch.
Auxiliary power units fired up. At this point, the astronauts started believing the launch they had been preparing for was really going to happen.
"Once you get under five minutes, you're pretty sure you're going to go," Hilmers said.
Then came T-31, 31 seconds before launch time, and a milestone in any space shuttle launch. That's the point at which an on-board shuttle computer takes control of the launch.
"Each event that happens, you're more and more sure you're going to go," Hilmers said.
But in NASA's world, 31 seconds is still a long time. A lot has to happen in that last half-minute, and it's still quite possible that the on-board computer will sense a problem and abort the launch.
At T-6.6, just 6.6 seconds before the launch, the first of Discovery's main engines roared to life. The second engine fired milliseconds later, and then the third.
* * *
The space shuttle is like a car with a half-million-gallon gas tank bolted onto it, and two enormous bottle rockets attached to its sides.
On the shuttle, the astronauts sit in the orbiter, the vehicle that returns to Earth. It gets power for three main engines by sucking fuel out of the giant orange, torpedo-shaped external tank.
But for launch, NASA needs to light the bottle rockets. These are the solid rocket boosters, two 15-story-tall cylinders on each side of the orbiter. Just like firecrackers, these cannot be unlit. Once they fire, the whole 4.5-million pound shuttle is going to move.
The Discovery countdown continued: Five, four, three, two, one.
Ignition.
The solid rocket boosters blasted white-orange flame, and the shuttle began to rise.
"My heart rate was up," Hauck said. "You feel the main engines throttle up and the thing starts to shake and you say, "Okay guys, this is it. . . . This is payday.' "
* * *
In seven seconds, Discovery cleared the 247-foot launch tower and 100-foot lightning rod.
Lounge felt relieved - he was glad to be lifting off, glad he wouldn't have to suffer any more delays.
Seconds later, the astronauts got something to worry about.
"Shortly after we launched, I think it was about 10 seconds, we had an alarm that went off," Hilmers said. "It turned out it was a sensor, I think on a fuel cell ph or something like that. It happened so shortly after liftoff, it really got your attention. What's going on here?"
The ride was rocky. With the solid rocket boosters blasting, "there's a lot of vibration," Hilmers said. The shuttle roared skyward, and G-forces pushed the astronauts back into their seats.
After 27 seconds, Discovery already was skyrocketing through the atmosphere at more than 1,100 mph, 1.5 miles above Earth. It roared up so fast that its computer pulled back the throttle, like a driver easing his foot back slightly from the gas pedal.
This is normal, to prevent damage as the shuttle blasts through thick layers of the atmosphere. Half a minute later, with Discovery climbing nearly 9 miles high at 1,600 mph, the air had thinned. So the shuttle engines throttled up again, to accelerate even more.
By then, Discovery had been blasting off for a minute, and was almost at the point at which Challenger's commander transmitted his last words: "Go at throttle up."
To get to this moment again was "kind of a hold-your-breath kind of thing," Lounge said.
And now it was Hauck's turn. He said: "Roger, go!"
The shuttle kept climbing.
"Once we got by that, that was a big milestone for all of us because that was the point at which the Challenger had exploded," Hilmers said.
Two minutes into the flight, 28 miles above Earth, the solid rocket boosters separated from the external tank and dropped toward the Atlantic Ocean, with parachutes slowing their fall.
"That was another big load off our minds," Hilmers said. "You know, they were gone and they had worked."
But their worries weren't over.
The shuttle, still attached to the external tank, streaked miles and miles further above the Earth, faster and faster.
"I do remember going uphill, at one point going through mach 16, we'd already gotten off the solid rockets," Hauck said. "We were about six minutes into launch and I thought "Yeah, is this thing going to blow up?' "
Hauck never forgot that human beings made the space shuttle and, "As good as we are, we're not perfect." But he also reminded himself that wasn't productive thinking, so he told himself, "let's go back to looking at the gauges."
And not long after, 8.5 minutes into the launch, the main engines turned off and the external tank separated from the orbiter.
"So when the main engines shut down and we got off the tank, we were really stoked," Hauck said. After a maneuver to circularize the orbit "we were truly in space. We just let out a whoop, smiled and laughed."
"We just decided we had time for one big whoop of joy," Hilmers said. "I mean, it was just really an incredible feeling at that point knowing that essentially you're in orbit. You need to make a couple other burns, we needed to focus our attention on that but, I think Rick allowed us 10 seconds of jubilation just to kind of celebrate. And I remember to me, wow, this is like, "We made it. We're alive, and we're back in space again.' It was just a real emotional moment."
* * *
Back in space, where everything was safe.
At least that's how the astronauts felt. The old axiom is that the two most dangerous parts of space flight are the launch and the re-entry to Earth's atmosphere.
But here is where the 1988 flight of Discovery differs from the upcoming one.
In the 1988 flight, all the astronauts knew re-entry was dangerous, because of the 3,000-degree heat that builds up on the orbiter's belly as it plummets into the atmosphere. But some actually thought of it fondly.
"Entry is just so much fun, it's much less violent than launch," Lounge said. Looking out the windows, "you see this pink haze which is the space shuttle ripping apart the atoms of thin air up high . . . that's the big fireball that you see from the ground."
As the orbiter falls lower toward Earth, "your sense of speed is increased tremendously . . . it's just a very fun sort of slide downhill. You know you're going home, you'll see your loved ones in an hour or so, and it just was a pleasure and not a big concern."
At least, that's how it used to be.
The Columbia, unknown to its crew, had suffered a gouge on its left wing from a piece of foam that fell during its January 2003 launch. During the heat of re-entr y on Feb. 1, superheated air shot inside the wing like a blow-torch, melting and breaking apart the orbiter.
The next crew of Discovery will not have the luxury of a carefree attitude.
Maybe the upbeat feelings about re-entry could be considered "complacency that shouldn't have been allowed," Lounge said, "but that's also a loss. I don't know how many more times we'll fly the shuttle. But every one of those will be a nail-biter. Every one."
Lounge called it "a loss of innocence."
Hauck said that on his first two flights before 1988, he felt the comfort of knowing that "we have never lost a human being during a U.S. space flight before. That was a great comfort. It's no longer there. And now this crew, (Discovery commander) Eileen Collins and her crew, no longer have the comfort that we've never lost a crew during re-entry.
"So they've got their own issues to deal with."
Curtis Krueger can be reached at krueger@sptimes.com or at 727 893-8232.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
After the 1986 Challenger disaster, America returned to space with a five-man crew aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1988. All had flown in space before. They are:
FREDERICK "RICK" HAUCK, space shuttle commander, now 64. A former Navy test pilot whose first shuttle mission also carried Sally Ride into space. He recently left his job as president and CEO of AXA Space, a company that provides property and casualty insurance for the risk of launching and operating satellites.
RICHARD COVEY, shuttle pilot, now 58. An Air Force colonel and combat pilot from Fort Walton Beach. After the Discovery mission, he commanded Endeavour in 1993. As a retired astronaut, he was chosen to help oversee the outside advisory panel evaluating NASA's compliance with recommendations after the Columbia disaster. That group recently said NASA had failed to fully meet the most important safety recommendations.
JOHN "MIKE" LOUNGE, mission specialist, now 59.
Was a former Navy officer, and has a master's degree in astrogeophysics. He left NASA is 1991 and now works for Boeing-NASA Systems as the business development director for space exploration systems.
DAVID C. HILMERS, mission specialist, now 55.
Was a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and electrical engineer. He retired from NASA in 1992, went to medical school and became a doctor. He now works at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
GEORGE "PINKY" NELSON, mission specialist, turns 55 Wednesday.
An astronomer, he now teaches at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash.
[Last modified July 9, 2005, 23:53:31]
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