[AS] Flight of the “Geritol Bunch”: Remembering STS-6, 40 Years On

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Flight of the “Geritol Bunch”: Remembering STS-6, 40 Years On
by Ben Evans April 4, 2023


The grandeur of Earth provides an impressive backdrop to a busily working Story Musgrave. Photo Credit: NASA, via Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Forty years ago today, on 4 April 1983, America’s second Space Shuttle thundered into orbit for the first time. Challenger went on to spend five days circling the Home Planet, deploying a giant communications and data-relay satellite for NASA and featuring the first U.S. spacewalk in nearly a decade.
https://www.americaspace.com/2023/04/04/flight-of-the-geritol-bunch-remembering-sts-6-40-years-on/

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Średnia wieku załogi wynosiła 47,75 lat i była wtedy rekordowa.

[Orionid]

Artykuły sprzed 40. lat

4 Astronauts Ride 2D Space Shuttle Into Earth Orbit
April 5, 1983 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Cape Canaveral, Fla., Tuesday, April 5 -- Four astronauts rode the new space shuttle Challenger into earth orbit Monday and deployed a large satellite that was boosted early today toward a distant point in space where it will be used for tracking and communicating with future spacecraft.

The satellite and its attached rocket were sprung free of the Challenger's cargo bay at 11:31 P.M. A two-and-a-half-minute firing of the rocket, beginning at 12:27 A.M. today sent the 5,000-pound tracking and data relay satellite on its way to a 22,300-mile-high orbit over the Equator above Brazil.

The operation, the mission's most important goal, was reported to have been successful. A full checkout of the satellite will begin later today after it reaches its ultimate position.

When the satellite is in position and is joined this summer by a similar device, many of the ground stations now used to track spacecraft, including the shuttles, will be closed.

The space-based tracking network will provide almost continuous communications with as many as 26 spacecraft at a time. Under the present system, the shuttles, for example, are out of contact with ground controllers 80 percent of the time.

Minor Damage to Insulation

The astronauts and all systems aboard the new space shuttle, except for some apparently minor damage to insulation on an engine pod, were reported to be in good shape at the start of the planned fiveday mission. It is the nation's sixth shuttle flight, and the first for the Challenger, a lighter and more powerful version of the Columbia.

The Challenger was launched at 1:30 P.M. Monday, only eighthundredths of a second behind schedule. But it had initially been aiming for a launching Jan. 20 until its three main engines developed leaks and had to undergo extensive repairs and retesting. Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the engines performed flawlessly.

From launching pad 39-A, where the salt air of the sea mingles with the fragance of orange blossoms, the Challenger rose into the clear blue sky and remained visible several minutes after it arced out over the Atlantic Ocean. The winged spaceship disappeared 70 miles downrange, at which time it was climbing steadily toward its 175-mile-high orbit.

"After two and a half months of struggling," said Alfred O'Hara, the launching director at the Kennedy Space Center here, "we are pleased it went so well."

Once in orbit, the astronauts - Paul J. Weitz, Col. Karol J. Bobko of the Air Force, Dr. Story Musgrave and Donald H. Peterson - also seemed pleased. When the Challenger was over Africa Weitz, a retired Navy captain who is the commander of the flight, radioed to Mission Control in Houston, "The consensus up here is that we heartily recommend this for everybody."

President Reagan sent a message of congratulations that Mission Control re-layed to the astronauts. "You genuinely are challengers," the President said. "You and your ground crew are daring the future."

Weitz is making his second trip into space; he was a member of the firstSkylab crew in 1973. The others are making their first space flights. Soon the crew began checking the shuttle's condition."Everything is going tickety-boo so far," Weitz said.

After the astronauts opened the cargo bay doors, however, they could see out of the rear cockpit windows to the aft end of the spaceship. They noticed some of the insulation covering one of the two orbital maneuvering rockets was sticking out "like a tree," as one of the astronauts remarked.

When the Challenger flew over a tracking station here, the astronauts transmitted television pictures of the damage. Jay Greene, a flight director, said the Nomex insulation blanket, a nylon material with a silicon coating, seemed to be loose at the corners on the starboard engine.

"The preliminary analysis is that it should be no problem," Greene said at a news briefing in Houston. Temperatures in that area during re-entry should not exceed 700 degrees Fahrenheit, which Greene said should not cause any damage to the engine's structure. None of the shuttle's 30,000 heatshielding tiles, which cover the most exposed areas of the spaceship, appeared to be damaged.

Greene said some thought was being given to having Dr. Musgrave and Peterson, a retired Air Force colonel, inspect the engine pod when they take their space walk, planned for Thursday afternoon.

Later, the astronauts turned their attention to the mission's primary objective, the deployment of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. The space agency describes it as the "largest and most advanced communications satellite developed thus far."

In time, three of the satellites, situated at widely separated positions 22,300 miles above the Equator, will constitute a spacecraft tracking network in the sky. Two of them will be the main links in the system, with the third standing by as a backup satellite.

Data acquired by the satellites will be relayed to a ground terminal at White Sands, N.M. From there, the data will be relayed by domestic communications satellites to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which controls the shuttle flights, and to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which handles many of the unmanned civilian spacecraft.

The data relay satellites were built by TRW Inc., and are owned and operated for NASA by Space Communications Company of Gaithersburg, Md. This is a partnership involving Continental Telecom Inc., Fairchild Industries Inc. and the Western Union Corporation.

Ready for Service in 90 Days

The satellite deployed by this mission is expected to be checked out and ready for full service in 90 days. One of its first tasks will be to handle the heavy flow of information from Landsat 4, an earth survey and mapping satellite already in orbit. When the twosatellite network is ready, its first work will be to relay scientific data collected by the European-built Spacelab, which is to be flown on a shuttle this fall.

Because of the satellite's heft, a new two-stage rocket was required to boost it from the shuttle's low orbit to the satellite's eventual destination 22,300 miles over the Equator. The 37,000-pound solid-fuel rocket, called the inertial upper stage, was built by the Boeing Company under contract to the Air Force. The regular commercial communications satellites hauled by the Columbia on its mission last November were boosted to high orbit by a smaller onestage rocket.

Besides the communications satellite, the Challenger is carrying an assortment of small scientific experiments. Its total payload weight is 45,000 pounds, the heaviest load to be carried by a shuttle to date.

When time permits, astronauts make movies of the lightning discharges from thunderstorms, as seen from out in space. Dr. Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of New York at Albany hopes the experiment will help in the development of sensors to identify severe weather conditions from future meteorlogical satellites.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/040583sci-nasa-challenger.html

Challenger Touches Down
By Thomas O'Toole April 10, 1983

The space shuttle Challenger made a perfect landing in the Mojave Desert today, ending a maiden voyage described as the best of the six shuttle missions flown so far.

Maneuvering the 100-ton space liner through stiff crosswinds, Commander Paul J. Weitz brought the shuttle to a full stop in the middle of the main runway with more than 9,000 feet of concrete to spare.

Less than half an hour later, Weitz and astronauts Karol J. Bobko, Story Musgrave and Donald H. Peterson were out of the spacecraft looking over the shuttle. Challenger came through five days in space with fewer scars and blemishes than the first space shuttle, the Columbia, picked up on any of its five trips.

"The Challenger is a better spacecraft than Columbia and that's what one expects the second time around," Air Force Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told a post-landing news conference. "We've had fewer things go wrong on this flight than on any of our other flights."


The main thing that went wrong during the mission took place aboard the Tracking Data and Relay Satellite deployed into orbit by the shuttle crew on the second day of its mission. The second stage of a rocket motor attached to the satellite apparently misfired and sent it into an orbit that dips almost 9,000 miles closer to Earth than it should.

An investigative board has been set up to find out what went wrong with the second-stage engine. Abrahamson disclosed today that an Air Force camera in Socorro, N.M., 80 miles south of Albuquerque, photographed the engine burn and recorded from a distance of almost 20,000 miles what may have gone wrong to put the $100 million communications satellite into the wrong orbit.

"You can see the plume of the engine exhaust stretching out in space for 300 miles," Abrahamson said. "At the time of the failure, you can see the plume turn hard about and kind of push it over in a different direction."

Finding out what sent the TDRS satellite into an errant orbit is crucial to the eighth and ninth flights of a space shuttle later this year. On the eighth flight, now scheduled for the first week of August, Challenger will take a second satellite into orbit. The second satellite will complete a network that will serve as a command post for future earth-orbiting satellites flown by the United States.

On the ninth flight, the space shuttle Columbia is due to carry the $1 billion Spacelab experimental station built by the European Space Agency into orbit. Two additional astronauts, one of them a European, will fly in Spacelab, performing no fewer than 40 scientific experiments that require constant communication with earth.

"We need both of those satellites in orbit to run a complete Spacelab mission in September," Abrahamson said. "We will not fly a second satellite on the eighth shuttle flight until we understand what went wrong on this flight."

The next shuttle flight--the seventh--is tentatively scheduled for June 9. Challenger on that flight will be the first to land at the 15,000-foot runway at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, only a few miles from its launch site.

Right now, the TDRS satellite is in an orbit that must be bumped about 9,000 miles from its low point sometime in the next two weeks. The procedure will take an estimated 850 pounds of the more than 1,200 pounds of hydrazine fuel on board the satellite that was sent up to fuel motors used to keep it from drifting out of orbit over the next 10 years.

The first of 14 two-hour burns of two small thruster engines will be made in the next week or two to start moving the satellite into a higher and more circular orbit. When that is done, the satellite will be put into operation.

Abrahamson said that Spacelab could be flown in September using one communications satellite but that only half of its scientific goals would be achieved.

"The Europeans are our partners in Spacelab and they want it to go off on time in September," Abrahamson said. "We're convinced we will understand the engine misfire that raised so many problems on this flight in time to do that but it will be a very tight schedule indeed to make everything work on time."

Today, coming out of orbit over the western Pacific Ocean, Challenger flew by its five computers as precise a downward path as any shuttle flight before it. Burning onboard engines a fraction of a second less than they were supposed to, the astronauts came across the California coast, then flew over the lake beds that today were under two feet of water from the heavy rains that have pelted southern California for the last few months.

"We see balmy Lake Edwards," Weitz said as he made the turn at the far western end of the desert. "There's probably a lot of sailboats out there today." Minutes later, Weitz had Challenger on the ground coasting to a landing on its nosewheel and two wingwheels. The landing took place precisely at 1:53 p.m. EST, plus 42 seconds. The scheduled time for landing was 1:53.

"It was a good burn, right down the pipe and smooth all the way," Weitz reported. He said he had given "everybody a last vote at 30 seconds to see if they wanted to go around Earth one more time and all I got was blank looks--nobody wanted to do that."

A quick ground inspection of the shuttle showed that three chunks of thermal blankets were bent or missing from pods alongside the tail on top of the craft. The blankets are a new type of heat shield used on parts of the Challenger.

The damaged blankets posed no problem, Abrahamson said, adding, "We can resolve that pretty easily."

"It was a great mission, incredibly routine, which is what we want," Abrahamson said. "The guys put the bird right in the middle of the runway, a good Air Force landing."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/04/10/challenger-touches-down/837c76af-c057-49d7-9ed1-79d88d4ea843/
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