NASA Space Shuttle by Roger D. Launius

Author:Roger D. Launius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motorbooks
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

An emergency fire drill. In reality, the Shuttle did not have any easy system for enabling a crew to escape in the event of launch problems. “Abort” options during the initial ascent phase were limited.

Better Days

For a decade between the return to flight after Challenger and the beginning of the Space Station era, the Shuttle notched up many successful operations. Nothing demonstrated this better than STS-49 in 1992. “Happiness is a great rendezvous mission,” astronaut Kevin Chilton said about the recovery, repair, and redeployment of a huge communication satellite during an epic EVA conducted during STS-49 on May 13, 1992. The first three-astronaut space walk by Rick Hieb, Tom Akers, and Pierre Thuot came after two earlier attempts to capture the 4.5-ton (4.0 metric ton) Intelsat VI, maneuver it into Endeavour’s payload bay, and attach a new upper stage that would boost it into its correct orbit. In all, the crew made four space walks totaling 25 hours and 23 minutes, making their mission one of the most memorable in NASA’s history.

STS-49 symbolized, as much any other mission, a confident return to Shuttle operations after the Challenger accident, and the subsequent decade certainly was a high-water period for NASA. A stunning record of achievements accumulated as the Shuttle became a functioning vehicle, and the astronaut corps, a remarkable cadre of pilots, scientists, engineers, researchers, and repair people. During this era, spanning the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, the Shuttle demonstrated what it could achieve. At a fundamental level, the sixty-six missions flown during this relatively happy period swept away the dark shadows that had surrounded Challenger’s loss and enabled America to reclaim its position of preeminence in space affairs.

One mission stands out in the public imagination. After its launch in April 1990 from Discovery’s payload bay, the long-awaited Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be essentially blind, because its main mirror had been manufactured incorrectly. The $2 billion project, a decade in development, was apparently a fiasco. Fortunately, the telescope had been designed for servicing by Shuttle astronauts. Optical engineers designed a clever and compact system of lenses to bend the fuzzy images back into focus. On December 2, 1993, Endeavour lifted off carrying a rescue crew. Working in two alternating teams, astronauts Story Musgrave, Jeffrey Hoffman, Thomas Akers, and Kathryn Thornton completed various repairs and installed the new optics in five back-to-back space walks totaling thirty-five hours. This servicing mission, the first of a series over the coming years, reawakened public enthusiasm for astronaut adventures. The scene was set for NASA’s most ambitious program of modern times.

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