Orbiting with Flash and Buck

By Frederic Golden

A historic touchdown ends Challenger's bittersweet journey

Splendidly white in the morning sun, it looked like a great migratory bird returning to its winter haunts. Indeed, as Challenger appeared out of the blue Florida skies at week's end, it was truly coming home. Touching gently down on the Kennedy Space Center's long concrete runway, within sight of the towering gantry where it had taken off on its 3 million-mile odyssey eight days earlier, the winged ship became the first spacecraft of any nation to end its celestial wanderings where they had begun. From Mission Control, half a continent away, came heartfelt congratulations: "Welcome home. That was a fantastic job."

The breathtaking landing, amid Florida's marshes and palmettos rather than the baked sands of California's Mojave Desert, was a stunning finale to a flight that was, at best, bittersweet: a dazzling display of the space shuttle's tremendous potential and yet a dismal reminder of the continuing frailty of technology in challenging the cosmos. The troubles ranged from the disastrous loss of two highly sophisticated communications satellites, valued in excess of $150 million, to a rash of lesser mishaps: a clogged toilet, the mysterious blowup of a ballyhooed navigational experiment, and a sudden case of the cramps in the shuttle's Canadian-built mechanical arm.

Yet all that was overshadowed by an awesome triumph of the tenth shuttle flight: a show-stopping space walk, a celestial trapeze act 175 miles above the ground. For just over five hours last week, the ghostly white silhouettes of two astronauts, framed by the blackness of the heavens, twisted and turned, chugged up and down, slipped sideways, even wheeled and somersaulted. Hurtling through space at orbital velocities of more than 17,000 m.p.h., the speed of the shuttle, the two free floaters became the first human satellites of the earth. Never before had astronauts or cosmonauts, in dozens of space walks, ventured forth without a lifeline. Only a remarkable jet-powered backpack, which looked like castoff hardware from a science-fiction film, kept the walkers from drifting off into the cosmos. As Shuttle Commander Vance Brand, 52, put it, "They call each other Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers."

These daredevil exercises were a rehearsal for Challenger's April voyage, when its crew will try to recover and repair a $150 million scientific satellite called Solar Max (for Solar Maximum Mission), which was launched in February 1980, at the approaching peak of the solar cycle, to gather information on the effects of the sun's activities on the earth. The robot observatory has been crippled for the past three years because of a minor electrical problem. Flying to the satellite with his manned maneuvering unit (MMU), an astronaut will attach himself to the ailing bird. Then he will use the force of the MMU'S jets to arrest the satellite's slow spin so that it can be grappled aboard the shuttle by the remote-controlled arm. The satellite will be overhauled inside the shuttle's cargo bay. If this first aid succeeds, Solar Max will go back out on orbital patrol and provide convincing evidence of a favorite NASA theme: that humans will be as important as robots in taking advantage of the growing scientific and industrial opportunities in space.

Although the playful antics of the astronauts on television were greeted with praise and rapt attention throughout most of the world, the reaction to the flight from the other major space power was as sour as borsch. Soviet TV noted only that failures were continuing to plague the Challenger on "a routine mission." For three days, not a word was uttered about the historic space walks, although an old canard was repeated: that the shuttle had been built for sinister military purposes. In a display of competition, Moscow announced last week that three cosmonauts had been sent off to reoccupy Salyut 7, the Soviet semipermanent space station. The cosmonauts successfully docked with Salyut 7 and settled in for what may be an attempt to eclipse the 211-day orbital endurance record set by the Soviets in 1982. With their three-man launch, the Soviets inadvertently joined with the Americans in establishing another mark. For almost four days last week, eight humans were circling the planet, two more than ever before.

The U.S. space walks, photographed by a handful of color TV cameras, including one perched on the MMU, began on the fifth day of Challenger's flight. Appropriately it was Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless II, 46, a Navy captain, who got first crack at the $15 million backpack. While waiting 18 years to make his first flight, he has been working closely with the MMU's designers to perfect the complex machine, which looks like a seatless chair and can be steered by controls in its armrests. Each of these controls activates one or more of 24 jets that expel puffs of nitrogen gas. When McCandless fired jets on one side of the MMU, they provided a textbook example of Newton's third law ("For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"): the astronaut was propelled the other way.

McCandless started cautiously on the epic walk, slowly moving beyond the edge of the cargo bay at a sluggish .2 m.p.h.* But as he ventured deeper into the forbidding abyss of space, whatever apprehension he may have felt--NASA no longer talks publicly about astronaut heartbeats--seemed to vanish. "Hey, this is neat!" McCandless shouted, and then followed with a verbal bow to Neil Armstrong's famous comment when that astronaut first set foot on the moon: "That may have been one small step for Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap for me."

As the distance widened between Challenger and the stiff, toylike figure, McCandless bubbled with superlatives. "Beautiful," "Super," "Superb," he kept telling mission controllers in Houston, adding, as if they did not already know, "We sure have a nice flying machine here." The excursion began while the shuttle was still in the earth's shadow and ended 90 minutes later, about the time it takes the shuttle to make one pass around the earth. Slowing down in front of Challenger's windshield, McCandless asked: "Hey, you going to want the windows washed or anything while I'm out here?" Skipper Brand snapped back with mock military brusqueness: "No, we want you to get out and back before sunset though."

Safely back in the cargo bay, McCandless turned over his Buck Rogers contraption to Lieut. Colonel Robert Stewart, 41, the first Army man to journey into space. (Of the two MMUs aboard Challenger, one was always kept in readiness as a spare.) Urged McCandless: "Enjoy it. Have a ball." The hot-rodding Stewart, a former helicopter pilot, took that advice. When he throttled up to a radar-timed speed of .7 m.p.h., Brand warned him to slow down.

Like any test pilots, the astronauts gave their flying chair a thorough checkout; McCandless reported that his only real surprise was that the MMU shook and rattled when he turned on the forward-motion jets. The space walkers also retrieved a faulty camera from the aft end of the cargo bay, engaged in a brief and successful tryout of the shuttle's sinewy, 50-ft.-long arm, readjusted a scientific instrument on the big West German-made movable platform called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) and tested some of the tools created for April's satellite retrieval.

There was one hitch: Stewart had trouble fitting his bulky boots into foot restraints temporarily attached to the remote-control arm. These are designed to give the astronauts leverage while they work in the weightless environment. At one point, the frustrated McCandless voiced an earthy expletive. On the ground, at the close of that busy series of activities, relieved Flight Director John Cox told reporters at the Johnson Space Center: "It was a super day. We did all the things we had planned to."

In their second space walks two days later, the astronauts were scheduled to enact a dry run of one key part of April's mission: halting Solar Max's spin. But the gremlins that had been so disastrous earlier in the flight struck once more. The astronauts discovered that the shuttle's trusty triple-jointed arm had mysteriously developed a machine's equivalent of arthritis. It could not adequately move its "wrist." The problem effectively scuttled the plan to lift SPAS out of the cargo bay and rotate it slowly in space at the end of the arm. While SPAS simulated Solar Max's spin, McCandless was supposed to attach himself to it with a specially designed pin. Unable to cure the arm's ailment, however, the astronauts could do no more than practice the maneuver on a nonrotating satellite. When McCandless gunned the jets on his MMU, the pin held firmly in place, and a pleased Mission Control insisted that the test demonstrated the feasibility of capturing Solar Max and stopping its rotation.

Earlier the controllers had sounded similarly reassuring after another preparatory exercise for April's satellite rescue had flopped. That was when a big Mylar balloon released by the shuttle apparently expanded while still in its canister and burst. The shuttle had been scheduled to chase the balloon from distances up to 120 miles as training for finding Solar Max. At week's end, there was still no explanation of why that $400,000 experiment had misfired.

Two other foul-ups ended more satisfactorily. Left untethered in the cargo bay, a foot restraint was accidentally jogged and began floating away in space. "We can go get it," McCandless volunteered. But Commander Brand, exercising caution, immediately replied: "No, no, no, no." Instead, he maneuvered the shuttle toward the fleeing bit of hardware until McCandless could reach out and snare it. The balletic catch brought applause from the Houston controllers. McCandless was pleased too. Improvising on a slogan of an earlier shuttle crew, he joked, "We deliver, but we pick up also."

Meanwhile, inside the shuttle, Navy Commander Robert Gibson, 37, the copilot, drew a less enviable assignment: he had to free a jammed waste-clearing fan in the shuttle's balky $1.2 million toilet. This high-tech chamber pot, designed to work in the absence of gravity, has broken down repeatedly during shuttle flights. To the crew's relief, Gibson's plumbing skills eventually got the facility working.

Before the two space walkers could rejoin their buddies inside the cabin, all activities were stopped for what has become a shuttle tradition: a presidential telephone call. Speaking from his California ranch, Ronald Reagan praised the men for their courage and inspiration. McCandless, asked by the President to explain the significance of his and Stewart's activities, replied grandiloquently. Said he: "We're literally opening a new frontier in what man can do in space, and we'll be paving the way for many important operations on the coming space stations." Reagan had formally endorsed the idea of such a program in last month's State of the Union address.

Successful as the maneuvers outside the ship may have been, they could not entirely erase the gloom cast over the mission by the loss of two sophisticated communications satellites. At week's end, NASA still could not explain why Western Union's Westar VI and Indonesia's Palapa-B2 had failed to achieve orbit, except to say that their rocket motors had apparently shut down prematurely before completing their scheduled 85-sec. "burns." The prime suspects are the bell-shaped nozzles from which the boosters' flaming gases are expelled. McDonnell Douglas, builder of the rockets, is assembling a board of inquiry to look into the twin failures, which left the satellites far short of their intended orbits 22,300 miles above the earth, yet now beyond the reach of the shuttle for a possible rescue.

Mission controllers exonerated the shuttle crew from any responsibility in the calamitous satellite losses. Under the direction of Physicist Ronald McNair, 33, both satellites were spun perfectly out of Challenger's cargo bay. Even so, there could be serious repercussions for NASA and the U.S. aerospace community. Unless the problem with the little boosters, called PAMs (for payload-assist modules), is resolved soon, some upcoming lift-offs may have to be postponed. PAMs are scheduled to be used for satellite launches in May as the upper stage of a conventional Delta rocket and in June during the maiden voyage of the third shuttle, Discovery. Insurance brokers are now warning of rising premiums, if such policies remain available, for future satellite launches. The loss of Westar and Palapa will cost underwriters $180 million. Also NASA could lose business if concern about the reliability of American rocketry encourages customers to turn to Europe's competing Ariane booster. Western Union, however, did appear steadfast. Said a company spokesman: "Yes, we shall use the shuttle again."

Following Challenger's spectacular homecoming, NASA too showed renewed faith in its machine. At week's end, it announced that the shuttle would take off again on April 4, in a record turnaround time of only 53 days. --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Kennedy Space Center and David S. Jackson/Houston

*Relative only to the shuttle, however. He was zooming around the earth at orbital speeds.

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin, David S. Jackson