Boldly Going Part 4
The early years of
Enterprise’s path to flight proceeded against a backdrop of general success in the Shuttle program. The Spacelab module made its orbital debut in a demo flight in 1983, followed by an operational debut on STS-51-B in 1985. This flight and two more Spacelab missions that same year helped clear the path for the three-segment Spacelab module which would be launched aboard
Space Station Enterprise to serve as the station’s initial primary laboratory facilities. However, the nine missions of 1985 were put to shame by the planned schedule for the following year. Shuttle flights might be becoming routine, but they were still news, particularly when it seemed every mission broke new ground. Some flight objectives were less immediately gripping, like the launch of one military and two civilian comsats aboard STS-61-H. However, even such “ordinary” missions achieved some note. Two firsts in international crew were racked up with the flights of payload specialists Pratiwi Sudarmono, whose mission to support the deployment of Palapa B-3 aboard STS-61-H made her the first non-Soviet, non-American woman in space, and Nigel Wood, who achieved the honor of the first British astronaut in space overseeing the deployment of the Skynet 4 military communications satellite [1]. Other firsts were carried out to more immediate public notice. Millions of schoolchildren watched live broadcasts of the launch and mission of Christa McAuliffe, which aired on cable news. The next month,
Columbia went to space for a look at Halley’s Comet, another mission whose ease of explanation carried it well into public knowledge. Uncrewed exploration allowed the Space Shuttle to again insert itself into headlines with the rapid-fire launch of two large science missions during the 1986 Jupiter launch window. In a demonstration of the quick-turn capabilities of the crews of Kennedy Space Center, the orbiter
Atlantis launched carrying the space probe
Galileo aboard STS-61-G on May 23rd, within 24 hours of the landing of
Challenger after it in turn had carried the
Ulysses probe aboard STS-61-F. It seemed every flight brought leaping advances, not just in the ability of even ordinary civilians and scientists to fly into space, but also in dispatching the next generation of exploratory probes through the Solar System. In this, the Shuttle’s crowning achievement of 1986 was opening eyes to the entire universe with the launch and “first light” of the Hubble Space Telescope on STS-61-J.
While these successes were dramatic, the launch of Hubble and the Shuttle-Centaur missions were emblematic of deeper rooted issues both in the Shuttle program and throughout NASA at large. While the capabilities of the Shuttle-Centaur were critical to the successful execution of the
Galileo and
Ulysses launches, the Johnson and Glenn teams responsible for Shuttle and Centaur respectively had barely come together to carry the project to the pad in time for the critical Jupiter launch window. The two teams had struggled over technical definitions of Centaur as either a “payload element” or a core element of the Space Transportation System. This subtle distinction affected whether control remained with Glenn and the existing Centaur team who were eager to put their skills to work to support the Jupiter probe missions or to Johnson, who were skeptical about the safety of Glenn’s plans and protective of their control of the Space Shuttle program. The two teams eventually resolved enough differences of opinion to establish a working relationship, but the astronauts aboard the flights using Centaur had half-seriously referred to them as “Death Star” missions [2]. The presence of tons of explosive cryogenic propellants inside the Shuttle’s payload bay had weighed on crewmember’s minds, as had the 106% power demanded from the three SSMEs. Reassurances that the risk of the Centaur tankage was a minimal addition to the thousands of tons of equally explosive propellants in the External Tank, or the tons of both explosive and corrosive toxins in the RCS and OMS pods spread around the vehicle, were not particularly effective.
Hubble, for its part, had run into continual issues during development, leading to its launch slipping four years from 1982. The most serious of these was a major flaw found in its original Perkin-Elmer mirror when cross-tested by Kodak as a sop for the cancellation of Kodak’s backup mirror project in 1981. Kodak had quickly found their instruments indicated a problem with the Perkin-Elmer mirror’s shape. Perkin-Elmer, in answer, blamed Kodak’s test instruments, saying it was in effect a “sore loser” trying to cast doubt on the solution of the contract winner. A minor scandal had erupted with the two companies sniping at each other in technical conferences while NASA worked to determine which set of testing instruments was correct. The result after weeks of frantic work by NASA was Perkin-Elmer’s carefully phrased announcement in late 1981 that they had found and corrected an issue in their mirror testing system, but that the telescope would be ready in spite of this for a 1986 launch--a two year slip from the 1984 date which had been targeted only months before. Kodak’s reaction to the statement that their backup mirror’s development was still to be cancelled to “ensure margin for correction of outstanding problems with the primary mirror” were unprintable. The eventual success of Hubble’s debut saw the beautiful images the new telescope revealed make headlines in popular press even as the astronomical community eagerly devoured its early returns. It was enough to cover many sins by the program on its way to flight in the minds of some at NASA Headquarters and in Congressional offices, but the near-failures along the way (like the debates surrounding the safety on Shuttle-Centaur) still lurked in the concerns of those at NASA’s field centers who had been responsible for working past them day-to-day.
Such growing concerns of small issues being papered over in the name of “go fever” were lurking across all of NASA’s programs, including on
Space Station Enterprise preparations, as normalization of deviance raced to new heights. The Shuttle had flown ten times in 1986, and yet there were still milestones to clear. As the year raced towards its conclusion, NASA was still aiming to achieve more than one flight in a month. September would be critical to this goal, as NASA aimed for three launches, a campaign that would use each available Shuttle launch pad once: the full set of LC-39A, LC-39B, and Vandenberg’s SLC-6. The end result would be NASA for the first time having two Shuttles in orbit at once. In early September,
Columbia launched a DOD mission from Florida (STS-61-N), the secret payload being the first of the SDS-2 military communications satellites. On September 27, only a few days after
Columbia’s landing,
Challenger launched on STS-61-I carrying the program’s first Indian satellite, INSAT-2, with a plan to retrieve the Long Duration Exposure Facility orbital laboratory satellite. The trio was completed with
Discovery’s STS-62-B launch on Sept 29. For the first time, two orbiters were in space together, as the Shuttle program celebrated the twelfth flight of the year, executed in just nine months. However, the failures of program management and normalization of deviance were about to come home to roost. The challenges of supporting two Shuttles at the same time, launching from two coasts within days of each other, pushed NASA’s flight support teams to their limits. Low-priority reviews were abbreviated given the rapid turnarounds and short durations of the missions and the challenges of more critical support of the crew activities on orbit like the deployment of the Ford-built Indian communications satellite, then the maneuvering of
Challenger to rendezvous with and retrieve the LDEF. The five day flight was packed and only on
Challenger’s final day in space was review of the
Challenger ascent imagery completed.
Only with the final report on the STS-61-I launch issued and reviewed was the flight support team belatedly able to begin the detailed ascent imagery analysis for STS-62-B on October 2nd. With just days to go before the planned completion of
Discovery’s classified polar mission, the team at Johnson dug into the second set of data gathered from the Vandenberg recorder systems. These were slightly different from the data sets and camera positions they were used to evaluating from Cape Canaveral. Moreover, Vandenberg’s weather proved as much of an impediment as it had been to tracking uncrewed launches. Fog and clouds had lurked on launch day, and made interpreting imagery of the ascent for any off nominal performance or debris more of a challenge than it might otherwise have been. Two days of frantic labor by an already overworked team ensued, including several engineers working straight through the night. They examined shadows in individual frames and the smallest blips on radar to do the usual evaluation that the Shuttle’s ascent had shed no debris or otherwise had a result which might pose a risk to the orbiter. However, tired eyes and 48-hour days were the final critical normalized deviations which robbed
Discovery’s crew of their chance to survive. Lost in the clouds and fighting against time, the Johnson engineers didn’t grasp the true size of a chunk of foam shed from the forward bipod, and could only partially model the risks of ET foam and other debris they could spot in the imagery. Their report was inconclusive, but phrased poorly gave false confidence: “Potential impacts identified in data from launch. Indications are some potential risk, but previous data sets indicate models for foam penetration are conservative.” After discussions, the flight directors took this as a clean bill of health.
Discovery made her retro burn on October 4th, headed back to Vandenberg. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, the foam which impacted
Discovery was more than 600 times larger than any previously modeled, a factor so far beyond reasonable that any conservatism in the model was moot. During descent, the tiles which had been damaged by the impact failed. Scorching plasma penetrated into the primary structure, and despite the best efforts of the orbiter’s commander at the stick, the results were almost foreordained. NORAD radar, following
Discovery’s descent, tracked anomalous returns and loss of signal as the orbiter broke up over British Columbia’s Purcell Wilderness. Neither the orbiter nor any of her crew would survive.
[1] From
@nixonshead : “This would probably be a Skynet 4 satellite. IOTL Skynet 4B was the first of the series launched, in 1988, but that was a delay due to the need to switch from shuttle to expendable launchers, so 4A would likely be first ITTL. Probably no-one cares, but my first job out of Uni was on Skynet 5, so I have a soft spot for the series
”
[2] For more on this debate in real history, check out the fantastic book “
Taming Liquid Hydrogen,” particularly Chapter 6 ‘Centaur Reborn’ and Chapter 7 ‘Eclipsed by Tragedy’.
[NOTE]: In OTL, one of the two Centaur G' units is on display outside of NASA Glenn in Ohio (The other stage was converted to the Centaur T standard, and used to launch Cassini to Saturn):
