Fragment obszernych wspomnień astronauty:
Donald H. Peterson
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-NazzalHouston, Texas – 14 November 2002
NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript(...)
Ross-Nazzal: Well, let’s talk about your flight, your Space Shuttle flight. When did you learn that you were selected for this crew?
Peterson: This is going to surprise you, but, you know, I don’t know. I don’t remember. Our flight got delayed. We trained for about, as I remember, thirteen months, and we were all ready to go, and then they had a hydrogen leak, and they couldn’t find it. We then got, like, a two- or two-and-a-half-month delay, and so we just kept on training. So we were in training for a long, long time.
So I had to have been told sixteen, seventeen, eighteen months before the time we actually flew, because we trained sixteen or seventeen months, all told. Of course, you had to know you were on the crew before you’d start training. But I don’t remember exactly how I found out. I don’t know whether [George W. S.] Abbey called or Paul [J.] Weitz called. Somebody called on the phone and said, “I offer you a flight on STS-6 if you want to do that,” and it was always that kind of thing.
But as I remember, it wasn’t a huge big deal. I mean, I just figured sooner or later I’d get a chance to fly, and when it came along, obviously [I accepted]. Now, we didn’t know at the time, we didn’t know until very late in the training cycle that we were going to do a space walk. That was not planned. That happened because the spacesuits on the flight before ours, both of the suits failed, and those guys could not do the space walk that they were supposed to do.
It’s kind of funny, George Abbey, I think, had some people already picked out that he wanted to have the honor of doing the first space walk, and when that cancelled, he said, “Well, we’ll have to slip now. It’ll take months to get another crew ready.” Jim Abrahamson, who’s an old friend of mine, was the [Associate] Administrator. He called me on the phone and said, “Can you and Story do the space walk?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
So he said, “Okay. We’re going to do it on the next flight.”
Well, it didn’t give us much time to train. I didn’t have very much experience in the suit, but the advantage we had was, Story was the Astronaut Office point of contact for the suit development, so Story knew everything about the suit there was to know. Story had spent, like, 400 hours in the suit in the water tank, so he didn’t really have to be trained. He probably knew as much as anybody on the training team about that.
Now, my training was pretty rushed, pretty hurried. I think I was in the water, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty times, but that’s really not enough to really know everything you need to know. But, see, all we were doing was testing the suit, testing the airlock, so we weren’t really doing anything that was critical to the survival of the vehicle. We were just testing equipment, and the deal was, if something went wrong, you’d just stop and come back inside. So the fact that I wasn’t highly skilled in the suit really didn’t matter that much.
It’s interesting, I think, that my suit leaked pretty badly for a while [about twenty seconds] and then stopped, and the ground didn’t know that at the time, or they’d have told us to stop.
I was working with a ratchet wrench. We were just testing tools and stuff. We had launched a satellite out of a big collar that’s mounted in the back of the Orbiter, and the collar was tilted forty-five degrees. It had to be tilted back down before we could close the payload bay doors and come home. So instead of driving it with the electric motors, they said, “Let’s go back and see if we can crank it down with a wrench, to simulate a failure. Suppose it failed, and we’ll see if we can do that.”
So that was one of my jobs. We had foot restraints, but it took so long to set them up and move them around, that we didn’t want to do that. So I just held on with one hand, actually, to a piece of sheet metal, which is not the best way to hold on, and cranked the wrench with my other hand, and my legs floated out behind me. So as I cranked, my legs were flailing back and forth, like a swimmer, to react the load on the wrench. The waist ring was rotating back and forth, and the seal in the waist ring popped out, and the suit leaked bad enough to set off the alarms.
[We did not know] what it was. I stopped and said, “I’ve got an alarm.” Story stopped what he was doing and came over. We were trying to check what was going on, and the seal popped back in place and the leak stopped. So we went ahead and finished the EVA.
Now, in those days we didn’t have constant contact with the ground. They didn’t see that. They weren’t watching at the time that that happened. They didn’t have any way to watch. By the time we dumped the data from the computer to the ground that showed that leak, we were already back inside the Orbiter. Then they called up, and they were all upset about what happened here and what was that.
We said, “Well, we really don’t know. We got an alarm. The alarm stayed on for about twenty seconds or so, and then it went off, and everything seemed okay. So we just finished what we were doing. I mean, everything seemed all right.”
Well, the next story I was told was that “You were working so hard that you were breathing so much oxygen, that you depleted the oxygen in the suit and forced a higher feed level and that set off the alarm.” Well, I talked to some of the doctors, and they said, “We don’t think that’s right.”
Well, my heart rate was very high. Working in the suit’s very hard. My heart rate was 192, okay, when I was cranking that wrench, so I was working very hard at the time. But a guy my size can’t work hard enough to breathe enough oxygen to set off the alarm that way. We didn’t find out what that was, really find out what that was for, like, two years, because they just sort of said, “No, we think you just breathed up too much oxygen. Don’t worry about it,” and nobody really did.
Before you fly, you put your suit on. The suit’s so heavy, you can’t hardly stand up in it. So they put you in a sling that holds up the weight, and they put you in a vacuum chamber on a treadmill, and they let you walk the treadmill. That’s just to exercise the suit, because each suit’s a little different. They make funny noises, and the valves open and close a little different, and they want you to get used to that.
[Before] Shannon [W.] Lucid [flew, she was testing her suit.] So she’s walking on the treadmill, and all of a sudden her suit—the alarm went off. What it says is, the oxygen flow rate’s too high, and that means that you’re pumping oxygen from the tank into the suit, but that also means the oxygen is going somewhere. It’s going out of the suit somewhere. So they knew they had a leak, in her case, and they could also see the oxygen coming into the vacuum chamber, because they were getting pressure inside the chamber.
She stopped walking, and when she stopped walking and stood around a little, the leak stopped. There was a technician sitting there. These guys amaze me, but he looked at that, and he said, “You know, I’ve seen this same thing before. I don’t remember the details, but I’ve seen this same phenomenon before.” They went back and got the video of my flight and looked at it. He said—and this is kind of interesting—he said when Shannon Lucid was walking, since she’s a woman, her hips swivel, and her suit was actually rotating, and we’d never seen that with a guy because guys don’t walk that way. But he said, “That’s the same thing that happened to Peterson’s suit two years ago.”
So then they went in and changed the seals and all and fixed the problem. But it always amazed me that those guys were dedicated enough to have that kind of memory fixed in their heads, and as soon he saw that, he said, “I don’t know where I saw this. I’ve seen this before. I don’t remember where, but I’ll go find out,” and sure enough, he did, went back and went through a lot of film and said, “Looks just like this, doesn’t it?”
Of course, I got a lot of insulting calls from that guy. “You know, your hips move just like Shannon’s.”
I said, “Not for you.” [Laughter]
Ross-Nazzal: Well, you mentioned that you did the first Space Shuttle EVA.
Peterson: Yes, that was fun. (...)
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Wątek: Donald Herod Peterson, Sr. (1933-2018) (Przeczytany 5028 razy)