Author Topic: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back  (Read 32036 times)

Offline Ares67

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RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« on: 05/05/2012 05:40 pm »
Hi, everybody, it took a while, but here is the first part of my presentation of NASA’s Return to Flight after the Challenger accident. In order to recap the situation shortly after January 28, let’s start with this Newsweek article:

NASA’s Troubled Flight Plan – There’s no turning back, but are we on the right path?

(By Melinda Beck with Mary Hager, William J. Cook, Mark Miller, Susan Katz and Daniel Shapiro – Newsweek / February 10, 1986)

See attached PDF-file

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #1 on: 05/05/2012 05:46 pm »
February 5: Columbia was powered up to allow workers to resume post-flight servicing and generic systems checkout and processing, NASA officials said. The work includes post-flight leak testing and functional testing on the three main engines, general orbiter inspections and routine thermal protection system maintenance. (Florida Today, Feb. 6, 1986)

February 20: Only 22 days after the U.S. space program had experienced the loss of Challenger and her seven-member crew – a Proton rocket rose into the early morning skies above the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Only minutes later it placed Mir into orbit – the next generation of Soviet space station technology. Although it represented only a slightly improved version of Salyut 7 – which was still operational at the time – there was one major difference between the old and the new generation: a five-port docking adapter at the front of Mir. Together with a rear docking port this represented the base block of a modular space station concept. During the next four years the Russians planned to dock another five modules to this base block. – Eventually it would take a little longer, but who – at the time – could have guessed that nine years after its launch this Mir (Peace) space station would start hosting American astronauts and in fact would represent the first step towards the ISS… 

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #2 on: 05/05/2012 05:50 pm »
March 1: NASA officials are investigating possible uses of launch pad heating units and a safety device on the Solid Rocket Boosters to prevent hot gases from escaping between segments. Developed at Kennedy Space Center for shuttle launches at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the heating unit is operated by two jet engines housed in a nearby building. The engines pump hot air through a pair of pipes. Each pipe has an outlet at the base of the shuttle, shooting heated air up between the boosters and the external tank, said Vandenberg spokeswoman Sharon Walker. (Florida Today, Mar. 2, 1986)

March 3: NASA acknowledged that shuttle flights would be halted for at least 18 months. The agency suggested that it might use some expendable rockets to pick up the slack caused by the Challenger disaster and ease scheduling pressures on future shuttles. - A record attendance at Spaceport USA is due in part to the Jan. 28 Challenger accident, according to Arnold Richman, chief of Kennedy Space Center's Visitors Services Branch. An estimated 200,000 people toured the KSC visitor information center in February, breaking a previous record of 146,950. "Before the accident we were up about 25 percent over last January," Richman said. "Afterwards, that surge just kept on gaining and going." He said he has noticed a marked change in the outlook of Spaceport USA visitors since the accident. "It's a little more intensive for the adults," Richman said. "They're more inquisitive. It's a more somber attitude. People are out there to read and see and learn about what is happening with our space program. When they're out here, they're much more attuned to what's going on." (Florida Today, Mar. 4, 1986)

March 5: NASA is proceeding with the construction of two projects at Kennedy Space Center worth $35 million. Work began last week on the $10 million Orbiter Modification Facility that will be used to prepare shuttles for flight. Construction also is continuing on a $25 million plant where the shuttle's Solid-fuel rocket boosters will undergo final assembly and refurbishing. Officials said the projects will provide a total of 475 jobs before construction is finished. NASA spokesman Jim Ball said the new orbiter facility is needed because the Vehicle Assembly Building had become cramped. "We had what amounted to a bottleneck," said Ball. "Whenever you were bringing in an external tank, you ran into conflicts." He said the facility will have a 95-foot-high bay where one orbiter can be stored while technicians do necessary work between flights. He also said the halt of the shuttle program would probably not affect work at the facility once it opens. "The only curtailment we currently have is not authorizing any overtime," he said. (The Orlando Sentinel, Mar. 6, 1986)

Don Dallas, 45-year-old Kennedy Space Center technician, received second-degree burns on his hands during an electrical accident at Pad 39A, said Lockheed spokesman Stuart Shadbolt. "He was trying to cut off a portion of the line itself," said Shadbolt. "In so doing, he caught the electricity in his hands." Dallas was taken to KSC's occupational health facility after the accident. He remained in satisfactory condition through the night in Titusville's Jess Parrish Memorial Hospital, said a spokesman for the hospital. (Florida Today, Mar. 6, 1986)

March 6: The launch of conventional unmanned rockets from Cape Canaveral is receiving new attention with the hiatus in the shuttle program. "We are continuing to implement the schedule that calls for the launch of seven expendable vehicles between now and August 1987," said NASA spokesman George Diller. The next unmanned launch is scheduled for May 1 and will deploy a weather satellite to be used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Florida Today, Mar. 7, 1986)

March 12: Kennedy Space Center's runway is safe and will continue to be used when the shuttle program resumes, according to Dr. Charles Niebauer, chief of launch and landing operations. "We think the landings at Kennedy, given good weather conditions, are safe, and we don't think there will be a change in that philosophy," he said. (Florida Today, Mar. 13, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #3 on: 05/05/2012 06:00 pm »
March 13: NASA's woes were further accentuated by a Soviet coup. Just as U.S. television cameras were showing the Navy recovery ship, the U.S.S. Preserver, bringing to Port Canaveral its dolorous cargo in a flag-draped container last week, Soviet television was beaming to the world images of a triumph: the successful launch of a Soyuz spacecraft that carried a pair of cosmonauts to the Soviets' newest space station. Normally, the Soviets announce space shots only after they have been safely launched. Though last week's "live" telecast appeared to be risky--what if something had gone wrong?--the Soviets actually hedged their bet. They appeared to have built a 60-second tape delay into the broadcast of the launch.

NASA officials acknowledged last week that the impact of the crash on the U.S. space effort has been to ground the shuttle program for at least a year, and perhaps as long as 18 months. A study by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that redesigning the flawed rocket booster and replacing the shuttle's cargo, a tracking satellite, will cost some $440 million. If a new orbiter is built to replace Challenger, it would cost at least $2.3 billion and take three or four years to complete. When NASA does resume shuttle operations, its overambitious aim of launching 24 flights a year by 1988 will be scaled down to no more than nine the first year, 14 the next, 18 the following year. Even that schedule may be unrealistic: NASA has never managed to launch more than nine shuttle flights in a twelve month period. The backlog of unlaunched satellites and space experiments is already mounting. The shuttle launches of the Jupiter probe Galileo and the solar probe Ulysses, originally scheduled for this May, have been put off for more than a year, and then only one of the two craft may fly. NASA has had to tell paying customers of the shuttle to look elsewhere. The Pentagon, a prime NASA customer, will have to put off plans to conduct certain top secret experiments in space for President's Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Always suspicious of the shuttle's reliability, the Air Force last year won congressional approval for a $2 billion program to build ten unmanned rockets for satellite launch by 1988. A federal interagency task force set up to make U.S. space policy decided last week that the military may need to buy ten more of these missiles.

NASA began de-emphasizing unmanned rockets about ten years ago in order to push the shuttle program. "NASA put all its eggs in one basket, and the basket fell on the concrete," says Wilbur Pritchard, president of Satellite Systems Engineering, Washington consultants to satellite makers. Space agency officials now ruefully admit the error. Last week NASA Acting Administrator William Graham urged private industry to try to develop unmanned rockets to launch satellites. Some private aerospace executives, however, bitterly noted that before the Challenger disaster, NASA had actively tried to discourage private industry from competing with the shuttle for satellite business. They also pointed out that it will still be difficult for private companies to under-price the Space Shuttle and Europe's Ariane system, both of which are government subsidized.

The shuttle had originally been designed to construct and then service an $8 billion space station to be in use by 1992. Even before the Challenger disaster, that date had slipped to 1994. The purpose of the program is to provide a platform for conducting scientific experiments, some with commercial applications like zero-gravity manufacturing, and to provide a base for further exploration.

The new Soviet space station, named Mir (Peace), was put into orbit last month to serve as the core of a planned complex of living quarters and laboratories. Many experts believe that the Soviets, who have concentrated on space-station technology while NASA focused on reusable shuttle craft, are years ahead of the U.S. in establishing a permanent space presence. The Soviet space program picked up more plaudits last week as its probe Vega 2 passed within 5,125 miles of Halley's comet. Meanwhile, NASA's $1 billion space telescope designed to peer to the edge of the universe, originally scheduled to be launched by the shuttle this fall, sits uselessly on the ground. (TIME, March 24, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #4 on: 05/05/2012 06:07 pm »
March 16:  A majority of Space Coast residents believe the Space Shuttle will be flying again within the next 12 to 18 months, according to a survey conducted by Florida Today. Almost 73 percent of the people polled agree with NASA's assessment that the next shuttle will fly before the fall of 1987. (Florida Toda, Mar. 17, 1986)

March 17: Atlantis was moved from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building, NASA officials said. The newest shuttle was expected to remain in the VAB pending a decision on whether to unstack Solid Rocket Boosters that already have been attached to the vehicle, NASA spokesman George Diller said. The unstacking was proposed so officials could check the O-rings that seal the segment joints. (Florida Today, Mar. 18, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #5 on: 05/05/2012 06:18 pm »
March 24: Joseph L. Tyre, a construction worker at Kennedy Space Center, was killed after he fell 90 feet while installing a bridge crane in a new facility, officials said. The employee of Cherokee Steel Erectors (Orlando, FL), Tyre apparently was pulling a cable while installing the crane in the cargo Hazardous Servicing Facility when he fell at 2:45 p.m. He was taken to KSC's infirmary where he died a short time later. The accident is under investigation.(The Orlando Sentinel and Florida Today, Mar. 25, 1986)

A body discovered March 22 in remote woods near the Kennedy Space Center has been identified as Frank "Buster" Sims, 49. The Mims resident and EG&G electronics engineer had been missing for two weeks, a sheriff's spokeswoman said. "Investigators are working it as a suspicious death," she said. (Florida Today, Mar. 25, 1986)

With the U.S. space program grounded indefinitely by the Challenger tragedy, the Soviet Union demonstrated once again last week that it is strongly forging ahead in space exploration. From the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia, the Soviets launched the first in a projected series of supply missions to their new manned space station called Mir (Peace). The unmanned cargo vessel Progress 25, boosted into orbit by a workhorse Proton rocket booster, hooked up on Friday with Mir, bringing food, fuel, water and other supplies to Cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev, whose own Soyuz T-15 spacecraft docked with the orbiting space station on March 15.

To frustrated proponents of an expanded U.S. space effort, the latest Soviet achievements provoked an old rallying cry. "We've been sputniked again," exclaimed Sandra Adamson, a director of the L5 Society, an organization formed to promote an all-out American effort to colonize and commercialize outer space. Adamson's reference was to the 1957 Soviet satellite launch, which galvanized the U.S. into the effort that culminated in the 1969 manned moon landing. Such concern is overdrawn. Despite the Challenger calamity, American experts say, in many respects the U.S. space program is still ahead of its Soviet counterpart. Nonetheless, Moscow has racked up a number of major achievements in space over the past 2 1/2 years. Among them: a record 237-day manned flight by three cosmonauts aboard the Salyut 7 space station, a daring repair mission to restart that station after a near total power failure, and a highly sophisticated radar mapping of Venus by two robot Venera probes. Earlier this month the Soviets dazzled the international scientific community with their Vega 1 and Vega 2 inspections of Halley's comet. Each Vega flyby was preceded by a swing past Venus to drop an instrument-laden balloon into the planet's dense atmosphere.

Then came Mir. On March 13, the Soviets sent veteran Cosmonauts Kizim, 44, and Solovyev, 39, aloft on Soyuz T-15 to activate the space platform, which had been launched into a slightly elliptical 210-mile-high orbit three weeks earlier. (Both Kizim and Solovyev took part in the record-breaking Salyut 7 flight between Feb. 8 and Oct. 2, 1984.) The subsequent rendezvous marked a milestone: the establishment of what the Soviets have heralded as the first permanently manned space station. According to current estimates, the first comparable U.S. station will not be operational before 1994.

As usual, the secretive Soviets have released little information on the exact specifications of the Mir station or on their long-range plans for its operation. Some scraps of information, however, are available. Mir, which measures 56 ft. by 13 ft., is 16 ft. longer than the Salyut 7 but only slightly wider. Since the new space station is not intended to house bulky experimental gear, it has much more living space inside. Crew members have separate "cabins," or cubicles, each equipped with a folding chair, a desk, a mirror and a sleeping bag. The common area of the space station's living unit features a dining table, a buffet built into a nearby bulkhead, and exercise equipment for the crew. The station is fitted with a large number of portholes, providing views from all four sides of Mir. One oversize porthole has been installed in the floor for viewing the earth's surface. Above the living area is the ship's control and work area, containing the main console from which the cosmonauts will monitor computer-controlled dockings, relying on floodlights and remote-TV cameras mounted outside the ship. Above the work area is a cylindrical docking unit with four "module ports" around its circumference and a fifth at the end (see diagram). Both manned and unmanned spacecraft will dock in the end port and then will be shifted to the module ports by an external arm. A sixth docking port is located at the opposite end of the space station and is intended to receive cargo. Mir has much larger solar-panel "wings" than those on Salyut 7: 800 sq. ft. vs. 440 sq. ft. The distinctive appearance of the station has already moved Soviet Flight Commander Kizim to a flight of poetic fancy. "As we came close," he said in a TV broadcast, "it looked like a white-winged seagull, soaring above the world."

According to James Oberg, an engineer for a NASA contractor and an expert on the Soviet space program, the next step in the assembly of the new station may be to switch a laboratory module known as Cosmos 1686 from the aging Salyut 7 over to Mir. Currently, the two major Soviet spacecraft are in virtually identical orbits, with Mir several thousand miles ahead of Salyut 7 and a few miles closer to earth. In coming weeks, says Oberg, Mir will get farther and farther ahead and eventually come up behind its rival around mid-April for the linkup. Before then, Oberg believes, there is a good chance that another team of two or three Soviet cosmonauts will visit Salyut 7 and transfer reusable material into the laboratory module. The next spacemen "could go up any day now," he says. Oberg also expects that a second unmanned laboratory may be launched in the next week or two to attach to Mir. Thus, he sums up, "we're talking about a Mir, a new module on it, and the Soyuz T-15 at the back end. Then the old Salyut 7, the module hooked up to that, and another Soyuz with a crew. That's a real constellation."

Even more grandiose Soviet plans appear to be just over the horizon. There are indications that Moscow might soon launch its own version of the space shuttle program, ferrying crews and supplies to Mir and eventually bringing back industrial and biological products manufactured in space. Planning is also reportedly well under way for a Sovietled international project to send two unmanned probes skimming past the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos in 1988. Roald Sagdeyev, director of the Soviet Institute of Space Research, has even entertained the possibility of a joint U.S.-Soviet manned landing on Mars.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership in Moscow is clearly enjoying the acclaim generated by the country's space triumphs. Last week the scientists in charge of the just completed Vega missions were summoned to the Kremlin for congratulations by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist Party General Secretary merely echoed the words of many Western scientists when he called the space efforts a "brilliant achievement of Soviet science and engineering" and a "convincing example of fruitful international cooperation in the peaceful exploration of outer space." (TIME, March 31, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #6 on: 05/05/2012 06:26 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #7 on: 05/05/2012 06:35 pm »
April 18: Another blow to the American space effort came on April 18 when a Titan 34-D launch vehicle exploded six seconds after it was launched with a military reconnaissance satellite (KH 9-20) from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. With the shuttle grounded indefinitely, loss of the Titan, the next powerful launcher in the American inventory, temporarily stalled the Department of Defense satellite program pending analysis of the Titan failure.

Like the shuttle, Titan was powered by liquid and solid fuel boosters. The vehicle was manufactured by Martin Marietta; the liquid propellant engines by Aerojet; and the solid motors by United Technologies. A Titan 34-D had failed before, in August 1985, also carrying a reconnaissance satellite (KH 11-07) on a launch from Vandenberg. That failure had been diagnosed as premature shutdown of the liquid fuel engines in the first stage. The 1986 explosion was attributed to a solid rocket booster failure. Thus, both propulsion systems on the Titan had failed catastrophically in less than a year.

Like the shuttle boosters, the Titan solid rocket motors were stacked in segments, but sealed with only a single O-ring instead of two used in the shuttle SRB. In testimony before the Rogers commission, Marshall engineers had cited the consistently good performance of the Titan boosters with only one O-ring as a convincing indication that the shuttle boosters were safe with two, even if the secondary seal was characterized officially as non-redundant. Now that argument had gone up in smoke. (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #8 on: 05/05/2012 06:38 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #9 on: 05/05/2012 06:44 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #10 on: 05/05/2012 07:07 pm »
April 22: U. S. Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Melb., FL) delivered the keynote address to open the 23rd Annual Space Congress in Cocoa Beach, FL. "In the aftermath of the national tragedy we have all experienced, it is more important that you are convening now," he said. "This is sending out a message across the land about the future of aerospace development. The enthusiasm is beginning to build again as we are in the process of binding and healing. It is very much the character of America that when its back is against the wall, we move on."

Nelson added that the recent explosion of a Titan rocket at Vandenberg AFB "is going to add to the urgency" of getting the space program back on track. "We'll find the problem, fix it and get on with the program." The congressman also renewed his proposal for a U. S.-Soviet "summit" in space. "Wouldn't it be something to have a summit meeting in space, where the two superpowers would have the perspective I had in political decisions affecting the destiny of this planet?" (Florida Today, Apr. 23, 1986)

Alex Bosmeny, formerly a photographer for Technicolor Government Services Inc. (now called TGS), sued Rockwell International Corp., claiming he was injured after workers negligently spilled rocket fuel while performing maintenance on the Challenger in 1983. At that time Bosmeny was waiting to take pictures of the orbiter in the Vehicle Assembly Building. According to the suit filed in Brevard Circuit Court, on April 17, 1983, the highly toxic fuel – monomethylhydrazine - leaked from several plugs in an orbiter engine while workers performed maintenance on the Challenger which had just returned from California after a space mission. Rockwell, which has a contract with NASA to process the shuttles after flights, failed to turn on the alarm or exhaust system, evacuate employees or warn them immediately after the spill, court records show. (The Orlando Sentinel, Apr. 23, 1986)

April 24: Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, Commander of the Space Division of the Air Force Space Command, told the 23rd Annual Space Congress that he was "disappointed" in the recent failures in the shuttle and Titan rocket programs, but he hasn't lost faith in either program. "I have no reason to believe that there is any better hardware in the world than our expendables and our shuttles," he said. "We really don't know what happened in last week's Titan rocket explosion at Vandenberg AFB, and we're working very hard to find the cause and fix it," he said. (Florida Today, Apr. 25, 1986)

A GOES weather satellite was mounted atop a Delta rocket early this morning at Kennedy Space Center as NASA prepares for its first launch since the Challenger disaster Jan. 28. Spokesman George Diller said the operation went smoothly and tests would continue today. Launch is set for May 1. A problem with part of the mechanism that couples the satellite to the rocket's third stage delayed the mating for one day, Diller said. (Florida Today, Apr. 25, 1986)

April 26: A botched systems test at reactor four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Prypiat in the Ukrainian SSR resulted in the second major technological disaster of the year 1986. A large hydrogen explosion and a fire released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. The immediate area around the Chernobyl power plant obviously received the largest amount of nuclear fallout – leading to 32 official deaths among staff and emergency personnel and thousands of victims suffering from radiation-related illnesses. At first the Soviet government tried to cover up the disaster, but with radiation levels across the western USSR and all over Europe rising in the days and weeks following the accident, this proved to be impossible. Even more than the nuclear fallout, the political changes and financial burdens resulting from the Chernobyl disaster are believed to have played a major role in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

May 1: NASA decided to scrub the 6:18 p.m. launch of a Delta rocket carrying a GOES weather satellite after engineers found rocket fuel in the first-stage had leaked from the main engine valve. "We're never disappointed to find these things before we fly," NASA spokesman Hugh Harris said. "This is what tests are for to find any problems." About a quarter cup of highly refined kerosene dripped onto a portion of the first-stage engine and possibly onto fuel lines that must remain dry until launch, NASA spokesman George Diller said. "There was no chance of an explosion... there was concern that the rocket could lose thrust."

Launch managers, concerned about overworking ground crews, decided to wait until May 2 to begin purging and cleaning fuel lines. "Rather than take a chance of not getting full performance from the first-stage, we decided to let those lines dry," Diller said. If the valve continues to leak, the replacement could take up to ten days. (Florida Today, May 2, 1986)

May 2: The launch of an unmanned Delta rocket carrying a GOES weather satellite was rescheduled for May 3 at 6:18 p.m.; the launch window extended till 7:17 p.m. "We believe we had a seal in the main-engine fuel valve that was not fully seated," said George Diller, NASA spokesman. Engineers believe the seal seated itself when the fuel was pressurized May 1 before being loaded. Two more leak checks were scheduled to be performed before the May 3 launch. (Florida Today, May 3, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #11 on: 05/05/2012 07:12 pm »
May 3: A Delta rocket and its GOES weather satellite payload were intentionally destroyed less than two minutes after launch when the rocket's main engine abruptly shut down, causing the spacecraft to veer wildly out of control. The main engine shut down 71 seconds into flight after slx of the nine solid rocket boosters had been jettisoned. The remaining three boosters had just ignited when the rocket's liquid-fuel
main engine failed 10.3 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

The nose of the rocket quickly broke up as the Delta turned sideways and tumbled at 1,407 mph. A range safety officer from the Eastern Space and Missile Center at Patrick Air Force Base sent a signal 20 seconds later to destroy the Delta. The rocket's pieces fell 15 miles into the ocean, 30 miles from Cape Canaveral, FL. Navy officials said they had no idea what caused the usually reliable Delta to fail - only the 12th failure in 178 launches dating back to May 13, 1960. The first successful Delta launch was Aug. 12, 1960, and it orbited NASA's first communications satellite, ECHO-1. (The Orlando Sentinel, May 4, 1986, and The Office of Public Affairs, NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland)

The United States space program suffered its third blow on March 3 when a NASA Delta 3920 rocket carrying an 1,851-pound weather satellite failed 70 seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral and was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer. It was the 178th launch of the Delta, NASA’s principal expendable launcher for the last quarter of a century. The Delta payload was GEOS 7 (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite). It was targeted for an equatorial orbit in 22,300 miles’ attitude. There it would hover relatively stationary at 75° west longitude, where it could photograph weather systems and track hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

Not only was the loss of GEOS 7 a serious handicap for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its parental Department of Commerce, but the destruction was the first major Delta failure in years and confirmed that quality control had gone awry in American rocketry. Now the Delta was grounded like the shuttle and the Titan until causes of these failures could be determined and fixed. Only one major satellite carrier system remained operational in the United States: The Atlas Centaur.

(…) The Delta rocket debris had barely reached the ocean when the shuttle salvage vessels, engaged in cleanup work, steamed after it. The USS Opportune began a search for electronic boxes, wiring and other electrical parts from the rocket’s midsection. Although its small solid propellant rockets (Morton Thiokol) had functioned nominally, the first-stage liquid fuel engine (Rocketdyne) had shut down prematurely, as if switched off. Telemetry clues suggested an electrical failure. With loss of thrust and attitude control, the 115-foot rocket began to tumble, and range safety signaled the destruct package to explode. (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #12 on: 05/05/2012 07:23 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #13 on: 05/05/2012 07:27 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #14 on: 05/05/2012 07:30 pm »
May 4: An eight-member panel was appointed to investigate the unexplained shutdown which led to the destruction of May 3rd's Delta launch. Lawrence Ross, Director of Spaceflight Systems at NASA's Lewis Research Center, will lead the investigation. He arrived today at Kennedy Space Center to meet with those involved in the launch. Six other NASA officials and an Air Force representative also were appointed to the team by Rear Admiral Richard Truly, NASA's Shuttle Director and Associate Administrator for Spaceflight. The panel was given a July 2 deadline to report on the accident and recommend "corrective action." (Florida Today, May 5, 1986)

May 5: NASA officials said that an electrical short circuit may have caused the engine shutdown that led to the destruction May 3 of a Delta and its weather satellite cargo. Delta manager Bill Russell said technicians found evidence of a short circuit eight-tenths of a second before the first-stage engine shut off, causing the rocket to gyrate wildly out of control and necessitated its destruction 91 seconds into the flight. Investigation panel chairman Lawrence Ross said the Delta accident made it unlikely that the Atlas-Centaur launch scheduled for May 22 will occur as planned. "There's a fair probability it will be delayed, unless we can find the cause of May 3's malfunction very quickly," Ross said.

Four pieces of debris from the Delta rocket which was destroyed May 3 washed ashore in Cocoa Beach and Satellite Beach today, a Kennedy Space Center spokesman said. A control box from the GOES weather satellite was discovered about 10:30 a.m. floating near a Cocoa Beach hotel, and three rocket hemisphere tanks for fuel and nitrogen were discovered later in the morning near Patrick Air Force Base, Air Force Lt. Col. Bob Nicholson said. Michael Borsof, manager of the Beach Island Resort, reported finding the control box during his daily rounds at the hotel and recognized its importance from an inscription reading "GOES Triflex Filter." (Florida Today, May 6, 1986)

Kennedy Space Center celebrated the 25th anniversary of America's first manned launch. Tape recordings from the flight of Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 were played at the launch site; Shepard sent his thanks in a telegram from Los Angeles where he and four of his Mercury colleagues were attending a celebration. Standing in for Shepard at KSC was astronaut Bob Crippen who said: "A wise man once said the longest journey begins with the first step. Many of you gentlemen took that first step. The journey was a trip to the stars. We have a way to go. Thanks to you, we're on our way."

Referring to NASA's recent launch failures, he said, "It's rare to win without some losses. We like to feel we're infallible. We're not. We proved that on Jan. 28 and underscored it this past Saturday (May 3). We'll learn from our errors. When we fly again – and we will it will be in a stronger, safer vehicle."

KSC Director Dick Smith spoke of the same determination to succeed. "A lot of you remember we had a lot of problems in the early days. Still, you were shocked, we were shocked by the recent failures. Perhaps we'd become a little complacent. We all know we're on the front edge of technology. A lot of things can happen; a lot of things can go wrong." (Florida Today, May 6, 1986)

The Challenger disaster understandably haunted space officials at the Cape last week as they prepared for their first launch since the accident. They checked and rechecked a 116-foot Delta rocket that was to carry a $57.5 million weather satellite into an equatorial orbit to detect developing hurricanes. When a tiny fuel leak was detected on Thursday, the launch was prudently postponed until Saturday as technicians pored over the problem.

The launch team had another concern: the last two attempts to send Titan rockets into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had failed, one last August, the other on April 18. Both Titans reportedly had been trying to put secret military photographic satellites in position to keep watch on the Soviet Union and the Middle East. With the shuttle program on hold and the once trusty Titan turning unreliable, America's ability to get satellites into orbit had been seriously impaired. But NASA looked with confidence to the workhorse Delta. It had flown successfully 43 consecutive times, including its last mission, on Nov. 13, 1984. "We need this satellite," said NASA Acting Administrator William Graham, "and we need to remind ourselves that we have had success in the space program."

The sleek three-stage Delta roared off its pad at 6:18 p.m. Saturday after a trouble-free countdown. Its main liquid-fuel engine and solid-fuel boosters all fired as planned. Delta soared into the clear Florida sky. Then, 71 seconds into its flight, monitoring technicians experienced a chilling case of dιjΰ vu. Their instruments showed that the main engine had shut down before it was programmed to do so, causing Delta to lose its flight stability. Veering out of control, the rocket began to break up. At 91 seconds, range safety officials destroyed it by remote control. Once again a fireball flashed over Cape Canaveral. Again there would be an intensive investigation to find out what had gone wrong. Inexplicably, America's space program seemed to have shifted into reverse. Even as the Challenger astronauts were buried, more gloom overtook a once proud space agency. (TIME, May 12, 1986)
« Last Edit: 05/05/2012 07:33 pm by Ares67 »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #15 on: 05/05/2012 07:36 pm »
May 6: Kennedy Space Center Director Dick Smith expressed pleasure on hearing the news that the U. S. Senate had confirmed former NASA Administrator Dr. James Fletcher by a vote of 89-9 for a second term as head of the space agency. "I'm very pleased,” Smith said. "I've been a supporter of Dr. Fletcher's since before the nomination. I'm happy to see him back and look forward to working with him again." (Florida Today, May 7, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #16 on: 05/05/2012 07:42 pm »
May 7: The apparently faulty engine that shut down on the Delta rocket launched May 3 was found 30 miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral, according to an official of the research foundation assisting in the recovery effort. NASA spokesman Dick Young said he was unable to confirm the report. In a related development, NASA delayed for a month the planned May 22 launch of an Atlas-Centaur rocket. Its first-stage engine closely resembles the suspect Delta engine. Officials wanted more time to examine the rocket. (Florida Today, May 8, 1986)

May 12: It had been conceived as a joyous occasion, a chance to let U.S. pride soar. The six surviving original Mercury astronauts would be reunited at a gala Los Angeles dinner, and workers at the Kennedy Space Center would gather for a ceremony. At both events, speakers would celebrate the 25th anniversary of American manned space flight and chronicle the quarter-century of achievements since Alan Shepard's historic suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. After Challenger's seven crew members perished on Jan. 28, plans for a more somber observance continued; a reminder of past successes might restore NASA's morale.

Then, on April 18, a Titan 34D rocket blew up on launch at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base while trying to lift a Big Bird photo reconnaissance satellite into orbit. And just two days before the anniversary ceremonies were held last week, yet another U.S. space failure occurred: the main engine of a $30 million Delta rocket carrying a $57.5 million weather satellite shut down just 71 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. The Delta was destroyed by ground command. "We like to feel we're infallible," Shuttle Astronaut Bob Crippen told the subdued workers at the cape. "We're not. We proved that on Jan. 28 and underscored it this past Saturday."

The U.S. had suffered three consecutive launch disasters, not counting the failure of a small Nike-Orion rocket on April 25, disclosed by the Associated Press last week. That adds up to the worst string of failures since the early days of the space program. Democratic Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee saw more than bad luck at work. Said he: "There may be a quality-control problem at NASA." Gore revealed that the space agency had slashed 70% of the personnel assigned to monitor the quality of its work between 1970 and 1985.

Still, the Titan failure, as well as a Titan explosion last August, were Air Force launches. Whether the space accidents were merely coincidental or shared some human failing was not clear. A poorly designed joint in the shuttle's boosters, coupled with the refusal of officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the rockets were developed, to heed engineers' warnings about the cold weather at launch time, presumably will be cited by a presidential commission as contributing to that catastrophe. The commission disclosed last week that just five days before the disaster, the Marshall managers had virtually dismissed the recurring flaws in the joint, deciding in an unsigned internal memo that "this problem is considered closed." Three of the Marshall officials who pushed the fatal launch are leaving their posts. Stanley Reinartz, the shuttle manager, last month asked for reassignment; George Hardy, deputy director of science and engineering, took early retirement at 55; Lawrence Mulloy, the booster manager, last week was shifted to another position at the center.

The suspect in the April 18 Titan failure is also a booster rocket. But a burn-through caused by faulty insulation seems the likeliest explanation. As for the Delta failure, two unexplained surges of high current in the main engine's electrical circuits apparently lowered battery voltage, leading to the premature shutdown. This possibility had been detected in 1974. Some corrections were made then, but not to the circuit that failed.

The failures leave the U.S. temporarily without any means of getting medium to heavy payloads into orbit. "It wasn't very long ago when people were talking about there being too many satellites," says Ivy Hooks, a former NASA engineer. "When you suddenly can't launch them, you realize how critical the weather, spy and communications satellites are." None of the three remaining shuttles, which can lift as much as 65,000 lbs., are expectedto fly until the summer of 1987. The Titan 34D, which can put 27,500 lbs. into orbit, will be grounded for at least six months. The Delta, which had run up 43 successes since the last failure in 1977, has a 7,500-lb. lift capability that will be lost until August. The nation's other medium-lift rocket, the Atlas-Centaur (13,500 lbs.), was scheduled to loft a Navy satellite on May 22, but that launch has been postponed until the Delta problem is understood; the Atlas has an engine electrical system similar to Delta's. Said a top Pentagon official: "We are denied access to space, and it does impact our capabilities."

Despite that impact, insists Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, a member of the presidential commission, "we are not, as some have suggested, in a crisis situation." Hereferred to the "relatively healthy" key satellites the U.S. has in orbit. A single KH-11 spy satellite, which is even more effective than the Big Bird, is still operational, keeping special watch on the Soviet Union and the Middle East. It has enough maneuvering fuel to last at least another year. Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has an orbiting weather satellite identical to the one lost in the Delta accident and expects it to continue performing for at least two years. Nonetheless, concedes NOAA Spokesman Joseph LaCovey, "the single satellite doesn't give us as good a view as we would like."

Overreliance on the shuttle for launching satellites has left the U.S. short on unmanned expendable rockets. There are just six Titan 34Ds, 13 Atlases, three Atlas-Centaurs and three Deltas left in the national inventory. The Air Force, however, has ordered ten more advanced Titans and will modify 13 old Titan II rockets to take some pressure off the future shuttle demands. The expected cost: $2.4 billion. It also intends to design its critical payloads for either shuttle or expendable rocket launches. Says Kutyna: "We want never again to be as vulnerable as we are today." (TIME, May 19, 1986)

[bMay 13][/b]: Air Force Col. Edward O'Connor said lessons learned in the lengthy recovery of Challenger debris sped up efforts to salvage the suspect main engine components of the failed Delta rocket which exploded May 3. Those same lessons provided the knowledge needed to develop a computer program which will enable authorities better to track down spacecrafts, aircrafts or satellites falling from orbit back to Earth. Creighton Terhune, director of payload management and operations at Kennedy Space Center, will head a panel on launch and flight data collection for the board investigating the May 3 explosion of a Delta rocket. (Florida Today, May 14, 1986)

May 19: NASA and its contractors initiated systems improvement programs at Kennedy Space Center to update, streamline and standardize shuttle processing operations and to eliminate hardware and procedural deficiencies. Some of the deficiencies were long standing and some were uncovered in the course of reviews and investigations resulting from the Challenger accident. Government and industry leaders said the current work corrects shortcomings and makes the processing system more time and cost efficient. They said, further, that previous procedures had not contributed to the 51-L disaster, but that they had needed improvement.

Many of the work items under way had been relegated to a low priority because shuttle turnaround and launch schedules were so tight that there was no opportunity to fix them. The most significant areas involved: documentation and record keeping, maintaining and upgrading ground support equipment and facilities, modifying and testing orbiters, and training and recertifying the entire management, engineering and
technician workforce. (Aviation Week & Space Technology, May 19, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #17 on: 05/05/2012 07:44 pm »
May 20: Atlantis and Discovery swapped places at Kennedy Space Center; Atlantis moved from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building and Discovery took the reverse route, said NASA's George Diller. At the VAB, technicians currently are stacking two solid rocket boosters that eventually will be joined by an external tank and then Atlantis. Officials hope to move the shuttle "stack" to a launch pad during the last week of June, Diller said. At the pad, a Centaur rocket would be placed inside the payload bay, along with the spacecraft or a mock-up. (Florida Today, May 21, 1986)
« Last Edit: 05/05/2012 07:45 pm by Ares67 »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #18 on: 05/05/2012 07:48 pm »
May 23: The Pentagon named Col. Jon Mansur as the new commander of the Eastern Space and Missile Center beginning June 25. The missile center, which includes Patrick Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, provides support for shuttle and unmanned rocket launches. (The Orlando Sentinel, May 24, 1986)

A 35-foot-long tank from the Delta rocket which failed shortly after launch on May 3, was discovered less than a mile away from where the main engine was found, NASA officials said. Divers from the Navy salvage ship USS Opportune found the tank 32 miles east of Kennedy Space Center in 150 feet of water, NASA spokesman George Diller said. Spokeswoman Lisa Malone said that divers are "looking for some electronics boxes that control certain events during the launch and during the flight, wiring and any hardware having to do with the engine." (Florida Today, May 26, 1986)

May 24: NASA's launch rules are "going to be revised from top to bottom," said Bob Sieck, NASA director of shuttle operations at Kennedy Space Center. He predicted the new policies will lead to a more conservative approach than the one that allowed Challenger to lift off Jan. 28 in the coldest weather for any shuttle launch. Three changes being considered from among 3,000 launch commit procedures are: making
weather constraints tougher, announcing over an in-house radio network the launch decisions made by contractors during the countdown and these decisions would be tape recorded, and involving more people in the formal launch decision. One of the key changes under consideration, Sieck said, would stop managers from basing part of their launch decision on the temperature at liftoff time. That single factor would be replaced by looking "at the previous trend for the past 24, 36, even 72 hours," Sieck said. (The Orlando Sentinel, May 25, 1986)

May 29: Atlantis and two Solid Rocket Boosters were moved to different areas of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for the first shuttle "stacking" since the Challenger tragedy. (Florida Today, May 30, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #19 on: 05/05/2012 07:50 pm »
May 30: Another launch failure – this time for Europe’s Arianespace: During the maiden launch of an Ariane 2 from Kourou, flight V18, the failure of the third stage engine resulted in the loss of its payload – the Intelsat V-A F-14 communications satellite. It was the second accident of an Ariane rocket within less than a year – again due to the failure of the third stage. On September 12, 1985, an Ariane 3 (V15) went down with two satellites aboard. “Now China and the Soviet Union announced they would enter the commercial satellite launching market,” Richard S. Lewis describes in ‘Challenger – The Final Voyage’. “And the Japanese space agency indicated it would soon be in a position to compete.”

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #20 on: 05/05/2012 07:55 pm »
June 1: Hundreds of Kennedy Space Center employees were late to work when the drawbridge on SR 401 in Cape Canaveral was stuck open. A barge carrying a crane knocked down a power line next to the bridge, causing the bridge to stick in the up position. The drawbridge was open for about an hour before an emergency generator was able to lower the first of the three movable bridge segments, a bridge tender said. (Florida Today, June 2, 1986)

June 2: “What's been achieved in space is extraordinary. If you laid out a proposal to do in the next 25 years what has been done in the past 25, no one would believe you.” -- Joseph Loftus, assistant to the director, Johnson Space Center

Whether recalling the glories of the past or peering with lofty vision into the future, the men and women who have led America to the high frontier of space still marvel at what they have wrought and yearn restlessly to get on with what they are certain will one day come to be. In a mere quarter-century, the human race has broken its immemorial bond to the life-sustaining surroundings of the home planet. U.S. space pioneers have been able to orbit the globe, walk on the moon, ring the earth with communications satellites and send a machine nearly 1.8 billion miles to inspect the planet Uranus. Such wonders are indeed extraordinary.

Then came Challenger. On Jan. 28 the fireball in the blue skies over Florida, after 24 seemingly routine shuttle launches, was seen at first as an inexplicable aberration, akin to an act of God. It was widely assumed that a Government agency with NASA's can-do spirit and engineering wizardry would never permit six crew members and a schoolteacher to perish through some avoidable human error. Surely a mechanical glitch would be found and speedily fixed. Within days the mechanical problem was located: a joint on one of Challenger's two Solid Rocket Boosters had failed. But the root cause of the tragedy ran deeper. A presidential commission, headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers, discovered NASA itself was deeply flawed. Far from representing the best of American know-how, the twelve-member commission found, NASA had become a bureaucracy that had lost its way. Before the first shuttle was launched, the agency had known of the fatal seal problem but had buried it under a blizzard of paper while permitting schedule-conscious managers to keep the orbiters flying. In retrospect, it began to seem, the Challenger tragedy was all but inevitable.

The problems worsened. On April 18, a startled Air Force watched its once trusty Titan rocket explode at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely and the vehicle tumbled out of control.

Suddenly the U.S. had no way to lift even a medium-size payload into orbit. Temporarily, at least, the nation's vaunted space program has been grounded, its wondrous space future receding. "How bad is it?" asked Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's really terrible --worse than some Government officials realize."

Amid the deepest gloom since three Apollo astronauts died in a gruesome launch-pad fire at the cape in 1967, the U.S. space program has been forced into a long-needed reassessment of its goals and the means to reach them. Not since President John F. Kennedy insisted, just 25 years ago last month, that America should place astronauts on the moon within ten years have national leaders concurred on what the U.S. should be doing in space. "That was the last presidential policy for space," contends former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, who now chairs a Reagan-appointed National Commission on Space.

In surprisingly rapid sequence, events are converging to stimulate the dialogue and potentially shape the U.S. space program well into the next century: President Reagan may soon decide to replace Challenger with a fourth shuttle orbiter. A new bird will cost nearly $3 billion and take three years to build. The controversial decision would be a resounding victory for NASA and a presidential gamble that the shaken agency can recover from its ills.

The Rogers commission report is to be given to the President later this week. In unsparing detail, it will lay out, in the words of one commission member, "the awful failures and compromises that ended in that January disaster." Strict new safety procedures and accountability will be recommended, as well as increased astronaut involvement in the decision to launch a shuttle.

The Space Board of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences issued a report that called the overreliance on the shuttle for launching large payloads "devastating to space science" and urged a return to unmanned rockets as the primary vehicles for lifting space probes.

The National Commission on Space, after a yearlong study, sketched a detailed timetable for colonizing the moon and Mars during the next 50 years. The report was scorned as unrealistic by a White House aide, but Paine, the commission's forward-looking chairman, predicted that if his panel reassembled in 15 years it would "severely criticize" its own report as insufficiently visionary. "Somebody will be mining the moon by the year 2005," he declared. "The only real question is what language they'll be speaking."

The U.S. expects to have the space program restored to at least minimal launch capacity this summer: NASA hopes to use an Atlas-Centaur rocket combination later this month to lift a Navy fleet communications satellite, although the similarity of the electronics in the Atlas engine to those in the failed Delta remains a concern. At the earliest, Delta and Titan could be back in the air in six months. On NASA's part, the agency's newly appointed administrator, James Fletcher, has said he expects to correct the flaws in the shuttle and resume flights by July 1987.

Beyond the mechanical fixes, however, is the need to retool NASA. The consensus in Washington and the aerospace community alike is that NASA needs to be stripped of its near monopoly over U.S. space operations and returned to its former pre-eminent role as a research-and-development agency. The Reagan Administration has already started to reverse a disastrous decision made in 1972 by the Nixon Administration to develop the shuttle as the sole vehicle for putting both humans and payloads into orbit. Instead, the U.S. will move to a mixed launch fleet including both shuttles and expendable rockets. Ten new advanced Titan 34D7 rockets are already on order, and the Air Force wants at least ten more to provide an increased launching capability beginning in 1988. Within a week or so, a National Security Council Interagency Group on Space is expected to recommend that NASA severely restrict or even abandon the launching of foreign and commercial satellites. The Reagan Administration believes private enterprise should compete for at least some of this business. More important, the Administration wants NASA to dedicate the bulk of its future shuttle payloads and research programs to the military, particularly missions for the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Under any circumstances, Fletcher will be hard-pressed to meet his deadline for relaunching the shuttle. The problems demanding urgent solutions involve far more than redesigning the rocket joint that failed. NASA has identified about 50 potentially dangerous faults that will require remedies before a flight can be scheduled. They range from long-standing braking problems that have made many landings risky ventures to a basic question about the reliability of the orbiter's three main engines.

Rogers Commission Member Eugene Covert, a professor of aeronautics at M.I.T., headed a joint government-industry team in the late 1970s that solved the problem of these engines' repeatedly blowing up in ground tests. But he still worries about how long they can continue to perform under the stress of repeated launches. So does J.R. Thompson, the senior expert on these engines at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The engines "have been working," says Thompson, "but they always can come back and bite you." In the view of NASA Chief Engineer Milton Silveira, the various shuttle problems will cost at least $500 million to fix. This checklist of difficulties raises questions about the wisdom of committing money to a replacement shuttle. When the Interagency Group on Space visited the White House last month to propose a new orbiter, Chief of Staff Donald Regan suggested that the shuttle might represent outmoded technology. Yet most aerospace experts still consider the shuttle an engineering marvel and the best available technology for a vehicle that can return from space and fly again. Nevertheless, some scientists consider a replacement unwise until the U.S. knows what it wants its shuttles to achieve. "To build another orbiter when the whole purpose of the shuttle program has been thrown into question is illogical," contends Caltech's Murray. "The shuttle has become a substitute for a goal instead of a means of obtaining a goal." Murray and many other space specialists argue that manned flights should be confined to those missions that require a human presence. Placing satellites into orbit, they argue, rarely requires that astronauts go along on the dangerous ride.

Still, the U.S. is left without an immediate practical alternative. Many multimillion-dollar satellites, which can take years to develop, have been designed for shuttle deployment. Not only the Pentagon but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and numerous private communications companies are eager for NASA to resume shuttle operations. So is the agency, which has already lost some $200 million in fees it would have collected from launch contracts that it has been forced to cancel since the Challenger disaster.

(…) James Fletcher, 66, the former University of Utah president who headed NASA from 1971 to 1977 and was called back by Reagan to lead the beleaguered agency to recovery, has accused critics of conducting "a witch-hunt," and complained that some of the press coverage of NASA's problems may be inflicting "irreparable damage, not only to the agency … but also to the nation as a whole." If the U.S. space program is in turmoil, Fletcher said last week, "most of that chaos is external to NASA." That optimistic viewpoint is in keeping with Fletcher's outlook. During his first stint at NASA, he projected payload-launching costs for the shuttle at $100 per lb.; they never got below $3,500. After heading a study team that urged Reagan to proceed with his Star Wars shield against Soviet missiles, he recently predicted that a "near perfect" system had a fifty-fifty chance of being deployed by the year 2000. Few if any of SDI's scientific proponents expect anything near perfection to be possible.

Still, optimists usually make the best pioneers. While reluctant to return to NASA, Fletcher is now gung-ho. "I didn't want the job," he says. "But the President persuaded me. He's not called the Great Communicator for nothing." Fletcher sees his short-term priorities as fixing the shuttle ("Ironically, that's the easiest part," he said), improving NASA's management practices, and then rejuggling a backlog of shuttle payloads. He intends to set up a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences to oversee the shuttle redesign, and has already appointed other outsiders to review the agency's management. On his return to his old post, he says, he was surprised to discover that top officials "didn't seem to be talking to each other." He intends to "get to the bottom" of the communications problem. As for the impending Rogers report, Fletcher expects that "it will be pretty harsh."

The NASA boss is noncommittal on proposals that the agency stop lifting payloads for other countries and for private commercial purposes. While conceding that "somebody's got to take some of the backlog," Fletcher expressed doubts that "there is a good way" for private industry to step in quickly and develop its own expendable rockets. Still, plenty of private entrepreneurs seem willing to try. "We're certainly ready, willing and able," declares Richard Brackeen, vice president for Martin Marietta's space launch systems division. His firm and its chief competitor, General Dynamics, have long experience in producing rockets for the Air Force and NASA and, with the unexpected new demand for such launchers, would like to reverse their role. They would rent Government launching facilities and use their own rockets to orbit commercial satellites. The potential benefit: providing competition that would force lower launch prices and, in turn, lure more private business.

While there is no shortage of commercial satellites in space - off which signals for TV, telephone and even printing plants can be bounced for instant arrival at distant points -  the cost of launching replacements is rising because of the U.S.'s launch failures. A few U.S. companies have shifted from the shuttle to Europe's Ariane system, operated by the French from launch pads in French Guiana. Arianespace has raised its prices by nearly one-third, to $35 million a launch, and has at least 29 orders on its books, worth some $1.2 billion. But the consortium has only eight slots open through 1988, so its ability to lure business from the U.S. is limited. Beyond that, the French discovered again last Saturday that space mishaps are not confined by national boundaries. An Ariane 2 rocket had to be destroyed by controllers when its third stage failed to ignite 4 1/2 min. into its flight. Lost with the rocket was a $90 million telecommunications satellite. It was the fourth failure in 18 Ariane launches and the third malfunction of its third-stage engine, suggesting a possible system problem. So Ariane, too, was grounded while the accident's cause is sought.

Most American companies seem willing to wait out the shuttle's return. Hughes Communications, a subsidiary of the largest private American satellite maker, has sent one launch to Arianespace but has committed some $500 million for the use of NASA facilities, including eleven projects over the next five years. Says the company's president, Steven Dorfman: "I want to launch all our systems on the shuttle. It would be potentially disastrous to the communications satellite business if NASA no longer were permitted to launch them."

While insisting that it faces no immediate crisis, the Air Force deeply regrets its overreliance on the shuttle. "We have learned a lot, the hard way, from the Challenger mess," admits one general. "It was wrong to mix both civilian and military payloads in that unreliable, complicated system." Air Force Major General Donald Kutyna, a member of the Rogers commission, has estimated that even if shuttles resume operation next summer and make an improbable 18 flights a year, there will be a defense-payload backlog of some 45 needed flights by 1992. The Pentagon is worried about the delay in lofting experiments for SDI research. It also frets about its diminished ability to keep a clear space eye on the Soviets and Middle East hot spots with its KH (keyhole) and Big Bird spy satellites. The Air Force has sent seven KH craft into polar orbits over the past nine years, but only one is still operational. The satellites are normally used in pairs, and a replacement for the last one to go dead was lost in last August's Titan rocket explosion. The single eye is expected to function for at least another year. Until its new Titans start to become available in 1988, the Air Force has some crisis protection: a known stock of 13 older Titan IIs that are already being refurbished as launch vehicles, and some 40 Titan D2 missiles that are being removed from their silos and could be modified.

The Pentagon's appetite for devouring all available launch capacity deeply concerns many civilian space scientists. The report by the National Academy of Science's space board points out that relying on the shuttle for scientific launches has seriously delayed projects such as the Galileo and Ulysses probes of Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope. The last major scientific space mission by the U.S. was the 1977 Voyager 2, launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket; Voyager's bypass of the planet Uranus in January provided then U.S. with its only space success this year.

Other scientists fear that the U.S.S.R. has seized the lead in the next stages of space exploration. The Soviets' Mir (Peace) space station, manned on March 13, is operational, while the U.S. is not yet fully committed to developing such a permanent space platform. The Soviets, long ahead of the U.S. in the lift capability of its super-rockets, will soon have a new SL-W booster that can push 220,000 lbs. into orbit, about 3 1/2 times as much as the U.S. shuttle. The Soviets have, of course, one huge advantage: their authoritarian government provides long-term planning and consistently high funding for its priorities. "The Soviets worship only certain things," observes George Jeffs, president of Rockwell's North American Space Operations. "Lenin's tomb is one and space is another."

In hopes of stimulating similar long-term thinking and national commitment, the Paine commission produced a glossy, colorfully illustrated 211-page report that implicitly dismisses the worries about America's current space failures as the product of small minds and faint hearts. Calling the solar system "our extended home," the document urges the U.S. to take logical, sequential steps toward colonizing space over the next 50 years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit with a single-stage engine. These two new vehicles would compete to see which would become the shuttle's successor, carrying passengers and cargo between earth and the space station.

Yet another craft, a kind of space truck, would also be created to move crews and material from space stations to geosynchronous orbits (22,300 miles up) and the moon. In this futuristic concept, the first space station would be expanded into a spaceport. Other such ports would be deployed in more distant orbits, including one some 35,000 miles from the moon, where the gravitational pull of the earth is canceled by that of the lunar body. This base would provide the jumping-off point for manned flights to Mars. Eventually, two "cycling spaceships" would be in continual operation. Depending on the trajectory chosen, they would take five to seven months to make the one-way trip. Blithely explains Marcia Smith, executive director of the commission: "You'd have an up escalator and a down escalator."

But why go to all the expense and bother? The 15-member commission contends that, beyond the sheer accumulation of new knowledge, exotic types of manufacturing can be done only in the conditions of space, the Moon and Mars, and that useful organic materials can be recovered from these surfaces. While at first people, living in enclosed "biospheres," would explore the distant bodies and set up factories there, many of these operations would later be controlled from earth. The sciences of robotics and artificial intelligence, in particular, must be accelerated to make all of this possible.

The cost? To sustain the timetable, the annual NASA budget would grow from its nearly $8 billion today to about $23 billion by the year 2000. This, the commission predicts rosily, will be only about one-half of 1% of the gross national product and would be "reasonable in relation to the expected benefits to our nation." The U.S. public may well wonder if the commissioners are merely blowing heavenly smoke with such thoughts at a time when America seems unable to put any object, much less people, into orbit. But without such visions, most space scientists agree, vast sums and a marvelous, ever developing technology will be wasted in aimless wandering. Yes, they also concede, there will be more deaths in the hostile environment of space. But if goals are clear, the sacrifices at least will have advanced a widely accepted purpose.

Virtually without dissent, the otherwise often competing voices of America's space leaders declare that if the national space program is to regain its bearings, the direction must come from the Oval Office. Insists Moustafa Chahine, chief scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "We need a clear enunciation of our priorities by our President." As the reports from scientists, commissions and study groups are delivered to the White House, Ronald Reagan will have to decide how he views America's future in space. (TIME, June 9, 1986)


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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #21 on: 05/05/2012 07:58 pm »
June 3: Carver Kennedy, Morton Thiokol Inc.'s vice president for space services at Kennedy Space Center, was named to head the company's solid rocket booster program in Brigham City, Utah, officials said. Kennedy says he realizes that the booster program will be under intense scrutiny while the joint is being redesigned, work that is already underway. "We're going to get it fixed and get it flying again," said Kennedy, who had been in charge of Morton Thiokol's KSC operation since 1983. (Florida Today, June 4, 1986)

U. S. Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Melb., FL) said it's clear NASA will undergo organizational changes because of the Challenger accident and that if more NASA personnel are needed to insure safety, he would support the buildup. "I think this disaster is going to demand that the agency be run by Dr. Fletcher" from NASA headquarters in Washington without as much autonomy as individual NASA centers enjoyed in the past, said Nelson, chairman of the House Space Science Subcommittee. (Florida Today, June 4, 1986)

June 10: The Atlantis is now in the transfer aisle of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center waiting to be joined with its external fuel tank and Solid Rocket Boosters June 16, according to George Diller, NASA spokesman. Rollout for Atlantis to Launch Pad 39A is scheduled for June 25. At the pad the orbiter will undergo mechanical and electrical tests of ground support equipment for the Centaur booster it is scheduled to carry in its payload bay, Diller said. (Florida Today, June 11, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #22 on: 05/05/2012 08:04 pm »
June 11: NASA spent nearly $1.5 million on the care and feeding of members of Congress and other VIPs flown to Kennedy Space Center to watch the liftoff of the first nine shuttle flights, according to a General Accounting Office study completed in 1984. NASA officials said the agency maintains the practice of flying government officials to Cape Canaveral to view launches, although on a reduced scale. (Florida Today, June 12, 1986)

President Reagan expressed a desire to build a replacement orbiter for the Challenger in his news conference in Washington, but wondered if money were available. He added that pressure to get cargo to space on unmanned rockets could mean delays in finding the money for a shuttle. "I want to go forward with the shuttle program," he said. "But there is a backlog of space cargo that is supposed to be up there."

Kennedy Space Center spokesman Hugh Harris had no official comment on the president's remarks because "the president didn't really give any definite plans about what he wanted to do. He was very supportive about the shuttle program, and that is bound to make a lot of people happy. But he really didn't say exactly what he was going to do, or when he was going to do it."

Reagan also offered his own explanation for the Challenger tragedy: the balmy weather in Florida. "I've often wondered this," he said, "if part of it wasn't due to the balmy climate of Florida and that it was difficult for anybody to believe that they'd had a cold snap that could render that O-ring dangerous." (Florida Today, June 12, 1986)

Kennedy Space Center officials believe they can handle 12 or more launches a year once the space shuttle program is back on line. Provided the money, resources and personnel are available, they say each of the remaining three shuttles should be able to complete four or five flights a year. Shuttle operations chief Bob Sieck and KSC Director Richard Smith presented an upbeat attitude regarding resumption of shuttle operations.

"Launching at a very slow rate does not ensure safety," Smith said. "Of course, launching at a rate that is too fast and overworks people also doesn't ensure safety. You should launch at as rapid a rate as you can that keeps high morale." Said Sieck: "We've found that you get the best product if you do provide an incentive to the work force. Give them a goal, give them something to reach for, and they approach it much more aggressively and you get a better product."

"Yes, we've got to watch the overtime," said Sieck. "Yes, we've got to beef up our management system to keep an eye on the workload for the critical skills area. But we shouldn't just approach the future flight rate as 'slower is safer' from the standpoint of workload."

Sieck, who has been with NASA since 1964, when he was hired as a Gemini spacecraft systems engineer, is in charge of preparation, launch, recovery and refurbishment of shuttles. He was at a console in the launch control center when Challenger exploded Jan. 28.

Both Smith and Sieck seem undaunted by criticism that the space agency had tried to fly shuttles too frequently. "It comes out in the Rogers Commission Report a number of times that we were unrealistic, possibly too bullish on our approach to the manifest," Sieck said, using NASA's word for 'launch schedule." Of KSC's relationship with its prime processing contractor, Lockheed Space Operations Co., Sieck said: "My assessment is: It works – needs improvement."

Sieck singled out improved...work documentation systems, better training and better work scheduling to avoid massive overtime. He said Lockheed had improved quality control systems and predicted those areas will become stronger. The operations chief said he expects to find ways to shorten turnaround time at the Edwards Air Force Base landing site in California that the Rogers commission recommends using until better steering, brakes and landing conditions are available for KSC landings.

Smith said the commission's landing suggestion was nothing new. "We had already decided...we were going to get that system fixed before we started routinely landing here. I think, in the program, there is still the thrust and desire to, as soon as we can, get back to where we should be landing here. Clearly, we're always going to have a problem with the weather in Florida. I think we can improve the weather forecasting, and we're working on that."

Sieck said he would expect to handle 12 or 13 missions a year under the revised guidelines. "Probably closer to 13, if they're all landing at Edwards," he said. "If we can work in a few at Kennedy, then you can keep working back up to what I call the optimistic goal of 15." Smith later agreed that KSC can readily process four flights a year on each remaining orbiter, if funding is forthcoming. But he said the first year will see a conservative, perhaps four-flight schedule.

Many of the delays KSC experienced trying to meet earlier schedules stemmed from such problems as a serious lack of spare parts, which led to taking them from other orbiters, a time-consuming process, both agreed. Smith said switching parts from orbiter to orbiter also increases the risk of wear and damage. "It's not the right way to run a railroad." Smith said the problem should be solved by the transfer to KSC of spare parts management, which Johnson Space Center Director has agreed to relinquish. "I think that's appropriate," Director Smith said, "because the user is the one most acutely aware of the need for the tools or the parts, or whatever. He suffers when they're not there.

"We haven't magically made money available" for the required changes, Smith said. "I think the emphasis made in the commission's report will help make the system aware of this. Granted, that whenever you wind up with x-amount of money you can spend in a year, you always have to make some priority choices. And I would be naive to think that KSC will get everything we'd like to have on our priority list when compared to everybody else. But I expect to get a fair hit.

"Yes, we had an accident. But I think coming out of this will be similar to what happened after the Apollo fire. The agency came out of it stronger and better, and probably that guaranteed the safe lunar landing and return. I think a couple of years from now, we'll have the same story to tell," Smith said, "that the agency and the space program will be stronger and better." (Florida Today, June 12, 1986)

June 20: United Space Boosters Inc. intends to lay off 120 workers due to delays in the shuttle program, said USBI spokeswoman Kathy Mason. The workers are involved in the processing and refurbishment of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. In January, USBI announced the immediate layoff of about 50 employees. Edward Kolcum, a senior editor with Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine said more KSC layoffs are inevitable unless NASA can stick to its timetable to launch July 28, 1987. "They're getting to the point where they're going to have to furlough more and more people as they complete the work while the shuttle launch is stymied," Kolcum said. (Florida Today, June 20, 1986)

The Centaur upper stage engine was banned from future shuttle flights because NASA managers feared that the engine's thin-walled pressurized liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel tank presented too great a safety risk, agency officials said. NASA leaders reviewed the risks posed by carrying Centaur aboard the shuttle at a special meeting June 19. The decision not to fly the Centaur engine causes a further interruption to NASA science missions and Air Force payloads. (The Orlando Sentinel, June 21, 1986)

The launch site for a secret military shuttle mission may be moved to Kennedy Space Center, a NASA official said. Mission 62-B was expected to launch the first of a new generation of Department of Defense satellites. Bob Sieck, director of shuttle operations at KSC, said officials are concerned about "how much coverage you get with a safe trajectory" from Kennedy Space Center. (The Orlando Sentinel, June 21, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #23 on: 05/05/2012 08:09 pm »
June 23: Shuttle director Richard Truly said that NASA isn't sure it can launch a shuttle by its target date of July 15, 1987. “Until we really get an oversight committee on board, I don't think it will be helpful to set a new date," he told a group of 200 aerospace executives at a United States Space Foundation conference. "I'd like to get into position where we don't change the launch date ever a few years." Efforts to implement the Rogers Commission recommendations have been "in the works," Truly told the executives. He said that "we may have cost threats to the schedule and
schedule threats, but I assure you we won't have safety threats.' (Florida Today, June 24, 1986)

Plans to move the space shuttle Atlantis to Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A for the purpose of testing the upper stage of a Centaur and a planetary probe were officially canceled. NASA spokesman George Diller said the tests were scrapped as a result of the space agency's declaration last week to terminate the Shuttle-Centaur program. (Florida Today, June 24, 1986)

The Soviet Union has an "almost frightening" ten-year lead over the U.S. in the practical exploitation of space. That is the jarring message of the 1986 edition of Jane's Spaceflight Directory, published in Britain last week. Editor Reginald Turnill's appraisal is based partly on the fact that the Soviets have already launched the Mir space station, possibly the base module for an even larger structure, while it is likely the U.S. space station will not be operational until 1996, at best. "That's the ten-year gap, and this was the case before Challenger exploded," Turnill declares. "One can even argue that it's more," he says, citing the Soviets' longer and more numerous manned spaceflights.

NASA was quick to respond, noting that the Soviet shuttle has yet to fly in space and touting U.S. "capabilities in retrieval, repair and construction in space, which are well beyond anything they have done." Others point to the U.S. lead in satellite technology and the feats of America's Viking Mars landers and Voyager planetary probes. "We tend to move in leaps and bounds, and they move incrementally," says Nancy Lubin of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. "The race hasn't ended yet." (TIME, June 30, 1986)

June 27: The exact cause of the May 3 Delta rocket failure was not found by engineers investigating the accident, said Lawrence Ross, head of the inquiry. But any changes that are made would not be far-reaching nor "take the vehicle out of business for a long time," said Ross. The accident panel will report their findings July 2 in Washington to shuttle chief Richard Truly. The group spent the preceding weekend at Kennedy Space Center finishing the report. "We're still discussing the redundancy systems," said Ross.

June 30: Attendance at Kennedy Space Center's Spaceport USA climbed at a record rate in June to 215,000 for the month, according to the latest NASA figures. The figures represent the second highest attendance for June since the attraction opened to the public in July 1966, said NASA officials. In June 1972 - when Skylab was orbiting - the visitors center hosted 250,000 persons. An attendance figure of 1.1 million for the first six months of 1986 marks an 18.8 percent increase over the first six months of 1985 and is the highest growth rate in the attraction's history. (Florida Today, July 2, 1986)

July 7: NASA plans to roll out Atlantis to a launch pad for tests on a newly installed weather protection system, said Kennedy Space Center spokesman Jim Ball. The tests will involve a $3.3 million system of moveable doors and panels designed to keep rain, wind and hail from damaging the shuttle's sensitive thermal protection system, Ball said. Rollout to pad 39B will take place Aug. 5; Atlantis will return to the VAB seven weeks later. (Florida Today, July 8, 1986)

July 10: Kennedy Space Center Director Richard G. Smith announced his plan to retire July 31 and his intention to take a position as president and chief executive officer of the General Space Corp. (Pittsburgh, PA). Speaking over the public address system and on closed circuit television to the center's 14,900 employees, Smith said leaving the space center now would give the new director time to become acclimated before the next shuttle launch. Ranking officials at KSC expressed disappointment on hearing of Smith's retirement.

"Personally, I feel I am losing a fine boss and a good friend," said John Conway, director of payload management and operations. "I've been very close to Dick and he told me he had been agonizing over this decision. I knew it was a close call." Robert Sieck, KSC's director of launch operations, said, "I would consider it a loss in that he obviously leaves a big pair of shoes to be filled. Everybody here knew him and liked him. It's like we've added another cloud to the uncertainty that's been floating around here."

In a prepared statement, NASA Administrator James Fletcher said Smith's "leadership in running major space agency programs and directing the Kennedy Space Center through th e advent of the Space Shuttle era will be sorely missed." Added Thomas Utsman, soon to be the acting director of KSC, "It's always going to be tough to replace someone of his caliber. I guess I was a little sad from a personal standpoint;" (Florida Today, July 11, 1986)

July 14: NASA officials confirmed that the next shuttle flight won't occur till early 1988 and that the workforce at Kennedy Space Center may suffer further layoffs. NASA Administrator James Fletcher said the solid rocket boosters could not be redesigned and developed in time to meet shuttle chief Richard Truly's earlier launch objective of July 15, 1987.

"Since we have moved the target date back a few more months, we are going to have to take a look not only at the Kennedy Center but across the system," Truly added. "But we also want to take care of our people, so we'll have to be looking at that right away." (Florida Today, July 15, 1986)

July 15: Launch pad 34 is one of two at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where NASA is considering building a facility to test the shuttle's redesigned Solid Rocket Boosters in a vertical position, said Kennedy Space Center spokesman Dick Young. (Florida Today, July 16, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #24 on: 05/05/2012 08:11 pm »
July 16: After a surprise visit to the now mothballed Salyut 7 space station between May 5 and June 25, and an even more surprising return and second docking to the new Mir station on June 26, Soviet cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov ended their 125-day Soyuz T-15 mission with a perfect landing about 55 kilometers northeast of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan. With a total of 374 flight days (including Soyuz T-3 in 1982 and Soyuz T-10 in 1984) Commander Leonid Kizim became the first person to amass one year of spaceflight experience. 

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #25 on: 05/05/2012 08:19 pm »
July 17: George Meguiar, Spaceport USA spokesman, disclosed that the Kennedy Space Center attraction plans to open a $2.3 million exhibit next year that will provide visitors with a simulated walk through the nation's proposed space station and, from that vantage point, a look at the daily work of satellites. The exhibit was designed by Robert W. Kirchgessner (Orlando, FL) and is part of a five-year plan to upgrade Spaceport USA by its operator TW Services Inc. (The Orlando Sentinel, July 18, 1986)

July 21: The resumption of shuttle flights, moreover, will be delayed into 1988. NASA conceded that its optimistic target date of July 1987 will not be met because the redesign of the boosters is proving more complicated than expected. Explained John Thomas, manager of the rocket-design team: "With so much at stake, we're going to take all the time that's required." The redesign problems will prolong the severe limitations on America's ability to place critical spy satellites into orbit. But a senior Air Force space surveillance officer insisted, "We're not blind up there, not by a long shot." The U.S., he explained reassuringly, has Atlas-Centaur and various versions of Titan rockets "tucked away somewhere" that could be used if the need becomes acute. Said he: "We're O.K." That was the only upbeat note of the week on America's continuing space troubles. (TIME, July 28, 1986)

July 22: The Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to roll out to Pad 39B on August 19, a week later than planned, NASA spokesman Jim Ball said. Modifications of the launch pad designed to protect portions Of the shuttle from weather damage have been nearly completed. (Florida Today, July 23, 1986)

July 23: NASA delayed until November the launch of an unmanned Atlas-CenJuly 22taur rocket. A U.S. Navy spokesman said the launch delay from its August 28 liftoff means that one of the military's most important communications systems will continue to depend upon a single satellite which had already outlived its expected life. Lawrence Ross, director of Space Flight Systems at Lewis Research Center (Cleveland, OH), said the delay was necessitated when NASA discovered some of the rocket's electrical components came from the lots that experienced high failure rates. NASA is now deciding whether those parts will need replacement before launch. (Florida Today, July 24, 1986)

July 28: Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney will be the next Kennedy Space Center director, according to the latest issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology. The trade publication correctly predicted the departure earlier in the month of current director Richard Smith. McCartney is presently in charge of the Air Force's Space Division in Los Angeles. NASA officials would not confirm the magazine's story which did not attribute a source for the information. McCartney is the former director of range engineering at the Air Force's Eastern Test Range at Patrick Air Force Base. He later became program director for the Space Division, the primary developer of military satellites. (Florida Today, July 29, 1986)

July 29: One Kennedy Space Center worker was slightly burned and another became nauseous when they were exposed this morning to a highly toxic substance used to maneuver the shuttle, said a KSC spokesman. The Lockheed Space Operations Co. employees were working on a valve containing gaseous nitrogen tetroxide at Pad 39A when a cloud of the substance was released, said NASA spokesman George Diller. The cloud drifted over the ocean and temporarily diverted KSC bus tours. Both workers, whose names were not released by NASA, were treated at the KSC health facility and released. (Florida Today, July 30, 1986)

July 30: Workers at Kennedy Space Center began installing engines in Columbia, the oldest shuttle in NASA’s reduced fleet of three. The veteran orbiter's three main engines have been inspected and tested since the Jan. 28 Challenger accident, according to KSC spokesmen. The engines' fuel pumps were also replaced. (Florida Today, July 31, 1986)

July 31: Richard G. Smith ended his career with NASA and Kennedy Space Center today; he will become president and chief executive officer of General Space Corp., a Pittsburgh-based company which wants to finance privately the construction of a new Space Shuttle. KSC Deputy Director Tom Utsman, 49, will administer the space center until Smith's replacement is officially named. (Florida Today, July 31, 1986)

The city of Titusville formally thanked departing Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith for seven years of service in a letter sent to Smith by the north Brevard County city's council. "During your seven years of leadership at Kennedy Space Center, both the Space Center and the city of Titusville have seen dramatic changes. Our community has become a new focal point for commercial and industrial growth resulting from the expanding private sector involvement in space activities. In these difficult days for the space agency, we share your conviction that the program will emerge stronger than before, and we remain confident of the future and committed to meeting the challenges," the letter read. It was signed by Mayor Truman Scarborough and members of the City Council. (Florida Today, Aug. 1, 1986)

August 1: NASA has chosen Nov. 13 as the date it plans to launch GOES-H, a weather satellite which will restore full hurricane tracking capability. Spokesman George Diller said the launch will be aboard a Delta rocket and be at Cape Canaveral Air Force station. The launch will be the second Delta mission When flights resume, Diller said. A classified military payload will be launched also on a Delta prior to the GOES-H. No date for the military launch has been announced. (Florida Today, Aug. 2, 1986)

United Space Boosters Inc. officially opened its new $25 million Solid Rocket Booster Assembly and Refurbishment Facility at Kennedy Space Center. An outgrowth of USBI, the Booster Production Co. will assemble and refurbish after use the twin solid rocket boosters that help launch the space shuttle. The 238,000-square-foot structure Will accommodate 800-900 persons, said Bernie Grossman, Operations Manager. Calling the building "a commitment to the future," Robert Daniell, president of United Technologies, USBI's parent company, said the facility "is designed for a Shuttle program of the future, a growing program, a thriving program." Grossman said that with the shuttle grounded tilt 1988, work at the new facility will focus on redesigning the boosters. "We'll spend the next year, or the next 18 months, or the next two years challenging ourselves to improve, to perfect what we do inside these walls." Grossman said that some boosters will continue to be produced as needed and that one is currently being built for testing. (Florida Today, Aug. 2, 1986)

August 6: Six community leaders from North Brevard were invited to a private meeting with Kennedy Space Center officials to discuss NASA's decision to close Playalinda Beach temporarily. Acting Director Tom Utsman said that with the shuttle program on hold it was important to begin assessing certain shuttle operations now. "The timing is right from the overall standpoint of the program," he said. The beach will be closed beginning Sept. 2. NASA officials want to move the Atlantis to launch pad 39B to test a new system design and to protect the orbiter from potentially damaging rain and winds. (Florida Today, Aug. 7, 1986)

August 11: The dismal Washington summer din is mostly about Justice William Rehnquist's old memos and about sanctions against South Africa. None of this even starts to be as important as the question of what we are going to do in space. National security is no longer defined by nuclear warheads and aircraft carriers. The larger forces now shaping our globe are communications, the state of technology, economic vitality and the international respect all that creates. Weapons are secondary.

At the very heart of this concern lie our understanding of the heavens and our prowess in putting up satellites to probe and spy and report. Yet since the Challenger disaster, we have dithered like children. After six months of debate on the issue, a Cabinet council split evenly on the question of a new orbiter. Pentagon officials and others have taken to announcing their own proposals, including ideas like building unmanned rockets or having the military take over the shuttle program. Ronald Reagan has sensed the larger picture, nagging his budget centurions to find the funds for another orbiter. This week the White House plans to announce its scheme to get going again.

But one more Space Shuttle will not meet the challenge. For the moment, America has lost its nerve and its vision from the top down. What we do in space now is just as important as the Panama Canal, the atom bomb, the cure for polio, the trip to the moon. The most frightening deficit is in boldness. Last February the Soviets put up a new space outpost called Mir (Peace). In March they docked a crew on the station, then fired up a couple of supply payloads. Next the crew taxied out to Salyut 7, another of their space redoubts. They returned to Mir and landed back on earth a few weeks ago. A maneuver like that by U.S. astronauts would have made even the Senate windbags look up. The Soviets are 15 years ahead of us in manned space experience. They outspend us up there 4 to 1. Why? Because the struggle on earth will be decided up there, as John Kennedy said a quarter of a century ago.

It is not a matter of cosmic toys for scientists. If we don't keep pioneering out there, others will shove us aside -- and anybody who cares to notice can already feel the elbows. We don't need one new shuttle. We need three or four. The nation's sharpest aerospace analyst, First Boston's Wolfgang Demisch, suggests that a single shuttle will build us right back into the mess we are trying to climb out of. A fleet of four shuttles (three current, one new) will have to work perfectly to meet our needs. "It's like the Soviet economy," says Demisch. "If everything works 100%, it is fine. It never does. When one part fails, the whole system fails. We need a realistic program. We are approaching a national emergency. We are re-creating our own crisis."

Tom Paine, NASA's boss when we landed on the moon, came through the capital last week, echoing the same dim thoughts. NASA has tried to do too much with too little. Its $7.7 billion budget is not chicken feed. But it is not much; after all, we are spending $25 billion for subsidies that are not solving the farm problem. A NASA budget of $10 billion or even $20 billion, taken from other places, is perfectly parsimonious considering the dividends.  From Houston comes the clear voice of Alcestis Oberg, space author: "I protest the graying of NASA, the aging of thought, the middle-aged acquiescence to discouraging circumstances, the paralysis of spirit and the stagnation of vision." We should join this courageous woman. (TIME, Aug. 18, 1986)

August 12: (…) Addressing a problem that must be solved before any shuttle can fly, NASA tentatively selected a $500 million redesign for the shuttle's solid-fuel booster, the rocket responsible for the disaster. "We have taken every step to understand what failed on the Challenger and to incorporate a design that won't allow that to happen again," said John Thomas, who headed the modification effort at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Formal adoption, which might take months, will hinge on exhaustive tests by both the agency and booster contractor Morton Thiokol.

January's disaster was the result of 38 degrees temperatures, which weakened an O-ring, one of a pair of synthetic-rubber washers that keep hot gases from squirting through tiny gaps in the joint between sections of the solid-fuel rocket. When the O-ring failed, escaping gas cut into the shuttle's liquid-fuel booster like a blowtorch and triggered a massive explosion. The modified design, said Thomas, will make a repeat catastrophe virtually impossible.

The most important changes are a new material for the O-rings (probably a nitrosilicon rubber), which NASA expects to pass tests down to 31 degrees, and a small heater installed at each joint, just in case. Another is a "capture latch," a metal lip containing an added O-ring, which would force escaping gas to turn an extra corner and lose momentum. The maximum distance that joints can pull apart under the stress of launch will be reduced from the current one thirty-thousandth of an inch to one-fifth that figure. A "vulcanized, rubbery substance" will replace the putty that now fills the gap as a sealant.

The proposal has the advantage of using booster sections that already exist, and the primary alterations will be made only at the joints. So testing could begin at Morton Thiokol's Brigham City, Utah, plant later this month. But starting from scratch is still under consideration. Says Thomas: "The solid-rocket industry is to provide, by the end of October, a clean-sheet design (of solid boosters), which means that they are not constrained to existing hardware." Rebuilding the existing boosters, however, now seems the most likely solution, especially since it has the best chance of meeting NASA's current takeoff target of early 1988. This prospect, coupled with the go-ahead for a fourth shuttle (Aug. 15), indicates that the wounded space agency is moving forward again. (TIME, Aug. 25, 1986)

Thomas’ redesign team appeared to be unanimous in establishing a rationale favoring horizontal booster firing tests instead of vertical tests. The reported consensus held that certain bending and buffeting loads on the booster could be simulated more accurately in the horizontal test stand. Whatever technical advantages vertical testing might offer appeared to be outweighed, in NASA’s view, by the money and time it would take to build the vertical test stand, presumably at Marshall. Time was of the essence. Thomas estimated that vertical testing would add ten to twenty months to the redesign program beyond the February 1988 date for resumption of flight.

“Right now, we’re talking in the area of $300 million through the certification process to get ready to fly again,” Thomas said. This price took into account that the 360 motor segments in inventory at Morton Thiokol would be usable in the new design. These constituted the existing hardware that had been incorporated in the redesign under the constraints of time and money. “We can use all of the motor case segments we have in inventory,” Thomas said. “And we only make a few additional segments that are at field joint locations. We’re not discarding any existing segments.” (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #26 on: 05/05/2012 08:23 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #27 on: 05/05/2012 08:30 pm »
August 15: President Reagan approved building a $2.8 billion shuttle to replace Challenger, but how NASA will pay for the new orbiter was unclear. Reagan also ordered NASA to phase out its commercial satellite business to provide a strong incentive for a U.S. commercial rocket industry. "Without the fourth orbiter, NASA's capabilities would be severely limited and long-term projects for the development of space would have to be postponed or even canceled," the president said in a prepared statement. (The Orlando Sentinel, Aug. 18, 1986)

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release August 15, 1986

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT


I am announcing today two steps that will ensure America's leadership in space exploration and utilization.

First, the United States will, in FY 1987, start building a fourth Space shuttle to take the place of Challenger which was destroyed on January 28th. This decision will bring our shuttle fleet up to strength and enable the United States to safely and energetically project a manned presence in space. Without the fourth orbiter, NASA's capabilities would be severely limited and long-term projects for the development of space would have to be either postponed, or even canceled. A fourth orbiter will enable our shuttles to accomplish the mission for which they were originally intended and permit the United States to move forward with new exciting endeavors like the building of a permanently manned space station.

My second announcement concerns the fundamental direction of the space program. NASA and our shuttles will continue to lead the way, breaking new ground, pioneering new technology, and pushing back the frontiers. It has been determined, however, that NASA will no longer be in the business of launching private satellites.

The private sector, with its ingenuity and cost effectiveness, will be playing an increasingly important role in the American space effort. Free enterprise corporations will become a highly competitive method of launching commercial satellites and doing those things which do not require a manned presence in space. These private firms are essential in clearing away the backlog that has built up during this time when our shuttles are being modified.

We must always set our sights on tomorrow. NASA and our shuttles can't be committing their scarce resources to things which can be done better and cheaper by the private sector. Instead, NASA and the four shuttles should be dedicated to payloads important to national security and foreign policy, and, even more, on exploration, pioneering, and developing new technologies and uses of space. NASA will keep America on the leading edge of change; the private sector will take over from there. Together, they will ensure that our country has a robust, balanced, and safe space program.

It has been over 6 months since the tragic loss of the Challenger and her gallant crew. We have done everything humanly possible to discover the organizational and technical causes of the disaster and to correct the situation. The greatest tribute we can pay to those brave pathfinders who gave their lives on the Challenger is to move forward and rededicate ourselves to America's leadership in space.

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #28 on: 05/05/2012 08:38 pm »
Under the Reagan administration’s new policy, most commercial space cargo would be shifted to private-sector expendable launchers. The policy would allow NASA to fly only 19 of 44 commercial payloads under contract as of the first quarter of 1986. The 25 payloads that were cancelled under the new policy would have to fly on U.S private, French, Chinese, Soviet, possibly Japanese rockets. The European (…) Ariane rocket, operated by France’s Arianespace, was expected to get the largest share of rejects. The shuttle (…) was to be used principally for military, scientific and space station construction payloads, probably for the balance of the century. (…) The new shuttle flight program (…) was scheduled to start February 18, 1988, with the launch of Discovery. Five flights were planned in 1988, ten in 1989, and eleven in 1990. The flight rate would rise to sixteen flights a year by 1994, at least half of them dedicated to space station construction and testing. (…) Two of the five 1988 flights were dedicated to the Department of Defense on Atlantis in May and Columbia in July. (…) The projected manifest (as of Oct. 3, 1986) complied with the administration’s new space policy; (…) only those commercial and foreign payloads deemed to be “shuttle unique” or to have national security or foreign policy implication were considered. From the resumption of shuttle flights to 1994, 41 percent of the cargo space would be allocated to Defense, 47 percent to NASA’s needs, and 12 percent to commercial, foreign government, and U.S. government civil space requirements. The NASA allocation included scientific as well as space station payloads.  (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

August 18: Kennedy Space Center's new director will be named by the end of the month, said NASA Administrator James Fletcher. He said that NASA is awaiting word on its fiscal 1987 budget before making a decision on possible job cuts. "I can't say one way or the other whether there will be additional layoffs at KSC in the near future," he said. (Florida Today, Aug. 19, 1986)

Beyond (the SRB redesign plan described by Marshall’s John W. Thomas on August 12), the National Research Council’s oversight panel had asked four other booster propulsion companies (other than Morton Thiokol, which was participating in the NASA redesign) to offer competing designs. They were Aerojet, United Technologies, Hercules Powder Company, and Atlantic Research Corporation. These would be so-called “clean sheet” designs, i.e. designs not using any existing hardware. By late summer, however, NASA headquarters had virtually adopted the redesign formulated by Thomas and his team. During a visit to the Kennedy Space Center on August 18, 1986, Fletcher said that the Thomas team fix looked promising. The administrator estimated then that the cost of the Challenger accident would reach $630 million plus $108 million to fix the “anomaly” – the defective joint design. (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #29 on: 05/05/2012 08:40 pm »
August 20: Air Force Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney has been appointed director of Kennedy Space Center, the first military officer to hold that post. Former director Richard Smith said concerning his successor that McCartney was "good for KSC, and I think the KSC employees will like him." Because of his high rank, McCartney had to be nominated for the directorship by President Reagan and still must be confirmed by the Senate, said Air Force spokesman Capt. Miles Wiley. The confirmation is not expected to be controversial and won't take place until the Senate returns from its recess after Labor Day, Wiley said.

McCartney was director of range engineering for the Eastern Test Range (now the Eastern Test and Missile Center) at Patrick Air Force Base from 1971 to 1974 and still has a home in Indian Harbour Beach, according to acting KSC director Tom Utsman. McCartney has held several other space-related positions since leaving Patrick, including commander of the MX program. NASA Administrator James Fletcher said: "General McCartney's close association with our nation's space program and his outstanding management record make him an excellent choice to become director of Kennedy Space Center." Acting Director Utsman said, "I think we're very fortunate to get Gen. McCartney." (Florida Today, Aug. 21, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #30 on: 05/05/2012 08:47 pm »
August 25: NASA plans to determine whether the joints between Solid Rocket Booster segments are strained when a shuttle is transported from the Vehicle Assembly Building to a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. The tests will occur when the Atlantis, attached to its external tank and solid rocket boosters, is moved to Pad 39B in mid-September, said Jim Ball, NASA spokesman. The tests were requested by Marshall Space Flight Center and have never been conducted before. "There's no expectation that we will see anything unusual but we don't have hard data to show that," Ball said. "It's really just for verification." (Florida Today, Aug. 26, 1986)

Virginia Jackson (EG&G) who inhaled halon gas was treated and released today from Jess Parrish Memorial Hospital (Titusville, FL). She breathed the fumes when they were released automatically during a false fire alarm about 3:50 p.m. at Kennedy Space Center, said Dick Young, a NASA spokesman. He said the gas was a fire extinguishing chemical. Twelve other EG&G employees who were exposed to the gas complained of discomfort but none required treatment. (Florida Today, Aug. 26, 1986)

September 2: NASA plans to cancel 15 to 20 Spacelab missions scheduled to be flown on shuttles as a direct result of the Challenger accident, said an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology this week. "There is no point in us putting any funding now into any mission that will have no flight activity in five years, so those missions have been canceled," Samuel Keller, NASA deputy associate administrator for space science and applications said. NASA now plans to launch only three more Spacelabs before the end of the decade. (Florida Toda, Sept. 2, 1986)

September 4: Acting KSC Director Thomas Utsman announced at 3:30 p.m. that there would be an additional 1,108 layoffs from work at the space center. He also said that these layoffs should be the last to result from the Challenger accident which had earlier precipitated the loss of another 1,100 jobs. Utsman said the agency plans to recall some of the critically skilled workers as early as next spring and summer. Speaking center wide over the public address system at the beginning of a news conference, Utsman said: "There's going to be a lot of mourning tonight and I'm going to be mourning with them." He said laid-off workers will start receiving pink slips the next day - Sept. 5 - with the layoffs taking effect two weeks later on Sept. 19.

"This is one of the most painful things I've had to do in my life," Utsman said. "I think that we have an excellent workforce. We're very close to our people and this is not a fun thing to do. It is one of the inevitable things that has to be done with respect to the situation," he said. He said, further, that the majority of affected workers will be technicians and quality control workers. The one exception will be critically skilled engineers. "The engineering workforce is fundamentally not being affected," Utsman said. Responding to a question concerning morale at the space center, Utsman said, “I don’t think the morale is too good. But I think as you look at it, you have to get strong and come back. I think the work is there, and I think the people realize that. As you look ahead, I think the morale of these people will improve.”

“The only caveat I would put on that,” Utsman continued, "would be if there were some significant change in program content or something like that, and we don't foresee that at this time. We're going to be bringing people back - depending on the particular skills – as much as nine to twelve months" in advance of the next shuttle launch, Utsman said.

The majority of the layoffs - some 834 - affect companies which work on the Shuttle Processing Contract: Lockheed Space Operations Co, will reduce by 582 employees; Grumman Technical Services will furlough 142 workers; Morton Thiokol Inc. will lay off 78 workers and another 32 workers will be laid off from Lockheed subcontractors. Two other companies not involved in the shuttle processing work will also reduce their workforces: McDonnell Douglas – shuttle payload processor - will reduce by 133 workers; EG&G Florida the base operations contractor – will eliminated 141 employees from its workforce. Previously, EG&G had laid off 32 persons. (Florida Today, Sept. 5, 1986)

Launch Complex 39A will be put into "inactive status" for about two years to allow time for needed modifications, NASA announced. Some of the 1,108 layoffs also announced today were tied to the 39A decision, said Tom Utsman, KSC's acting director. LC 39B from which Challenger lifted off Jan. 28 will be the primary launch facility when the program resumes in 1988; the pad's multimillion dollar refurbishment was completed late in 1985. NASA also plans to mothball "for a few years" one of the mobile launch platforms used to launch the shuttle, Utsman said. Both Pad 39A and the launch platform are being shut down because of the reduced number of shuttle flights anticipated when the program resumes, Utsman said. "We will bring it (Launch Pad 39A) back up when we need the flexibility of two pads," he said. In addition, NASA is examining whether other facilities should be closed, Utsman said but declined to specify which facilities are being studied. (Florida Today, Sept. 5, 1986)

Astronaut David Walker recently visited Pad Operations and Mobile Launcher Platform workers during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. Walker, who piloted Discovery on shuttle mission 51- A in November 1984, briefed all shifts on the current status of training among the astronauts. He then stated, "On behalf of the astronaut corps, I want to extend my sincere appreciation for the outstanding job you've done and are still doing under some difficult circumstances. You have not been forgotten and we want you to know we still have the highest confidence in the jobs you do." Walker added, "This is not the time to bury our heads in the sand, but to look up and go forward with the tasks that will lead us back to flying the shuttle again." (Star Gazer, Sept. 4, 1986)

September 5: An unmanned Delta rocket carrying two experiments said to be part of the Strategic Defense Initiative lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 11:08 a.m., said Department of Defense officials. "I think the Delta mission was very significant," said NASA launch director Charles Gay. "The agency needed it - we needed it for morale purposes, and the country needed it because we've had a string of failures." NASA Officials said the launch went smoothly except for some turbulence when the first six of the rocket's nine solid rocket boosters were jettisoned, but the disturbance was said not to be unusual and caused no problems. Security was tight for the Delta launch, with Air Force guards wearing fatigues and carrying automatic weapons while patrolling the site. Launch time was kept a secret till minutes before it occurred. (Florida Today, Sept. 6, 1986)

Lockheed Space Operations Co. was given a three-year $1.3 billion extension of its shuttle processing contract for East and West Coast shuttle launch sites, NASA announced. The contract, which takes effect Oct. 1, involves all aspects of preparing the shuttle for flight and employs some 5,600 workers. The new contract totals $927.2 million for operations at Kennedy Space Center through Sept. 30, 1989, plus $390.7 million for operations at the shuttle launching facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Several changes were made to the contract. For instance, shuttle chief Richard Truly announced that a review group would be formed to scrutinize shuttle processing as well as the contract. Also, the Vandenberg facility will be unused till 1992. [Lafferty. Florida Today, p. 5A, Sept. 6, 1986.]

September 7: Betty Barksdale Broadwell, 47, a Kennedy Space Center security guard on her way home from work, was killed early this morning after she lost control of her car and flipped over in the median on U.S. 1 about a mile south Of Titusville, said a Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman. Mrs. Broadwell was driving north on U.S. 1 near SR 405 about 6:10 a.m. when her 1979 Toyota left the road, FHP reports show. She was pronounced dead at Jess Parrish Memorial Hospital (Titusville, FL) about half an hour later. Broadwell, who worked for EG&G Florida, was the 63rd person to die on Brevard County roads this year, compared to 72 fatalities last year at this time. (Florida Today, Sept. 8, 1986)

September 8: The Space Shuttle Columbia's move from Kennedy Space Center to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was delayed for a month, officials said. The new transfer date will be the first week in November, said NASA spokesman Dick Young. The delay gives KSC workers more time to modify the orbiter so it can be used to test the Air Force's new $3.3 billion shuttle launching facility, Young said. "It just makes more sense to do that work here than to do it out there," said Young. Despite plans announced to mothball the west coast shuttle facility, Young said "plans are very much still in the offing to move Columbia to Vandenberg." He did add, however, that those transfer plans are undergoing review by NASA management. (Florida Today, Sept. 9, 1986)

For a change, the mood at the Kennedy Space Center was upbeat last Friday as a Delta rocket carrying a secret military payload for the Star Wars space defense program lifted off flawlessly at 11:08 a.m. "We feel we are back in the groove," said NASA's Delta project manager William Russell. The flight was Delta's first since a rocket was destroyed after lift-off in May. And it was only the second successful major U.S. launch of any kind in six attempts, starting with January's space shuttle Challenger disaster. The rocket reportedly carried two satellites on a dual-purpose mission: to detect and track an Aries rocket launched an hour and a half later from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and to test a system for destroying enemy satellites. Both tests were a success, the Pentagon said. (TIME, Sept. 15, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #31 on: 05/05/2012 08:52 pm »
September 13: Christine Brown, 33, an employee of EG&G, gave birth to a healthy girl in her car moments, after the vehicle pulled up to the back door of the Occupational Health Facility at Kennedy Space Center. She'd been driven to the dispensary by her husband who also works at the space center. The 7-pound infant, first ever born at the space center, was delivered about 4 p.m. by Dr. Margaret Moore. Mrs. Brown and her newborn daughter were taken to Cape Canaveral Hospital and were listed in good condition. (The Orlando Sentinel, Sept. 13, 1986)

September 15: Atlantis's rollout to Launch Complex 39B was delayed till next month, said NASA spokesman Jim Ball. A problem was discovered about two weeks ago with some doors at the pad that provide access to the shuttle's payload bay and their repair proved more difficult than expected, Ball said. "For some reason, they (the doors) get the point where they are binding up," he said. Technicians recently finished installing devices on Atlantis's right Solid Rocket Booster to monitor stress, Ball said. (Florida Today, Sept. 16, 1986)

Rear Admiral Richard H. Truly, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, said he will form a review group to assess shuttle processing, the processing contract and the relationship between flight hardware contractors. That also could affect the value of the cost-plus-award-fee contract which is negotiated every six months. (Aviation Week & Space Technology, Sept. 15, 1986)

Cutbacks in the Spacelab program produced several hundred layoffs and reassignments already with more likely to come. The shuttle budget contained about $90 million per year before the accident to support Spacelab/Shuttle integration workforce of 800-900, which has been reduced by about 80 workers at Kennedy Space Center. Spacelab personnel supported by the space science budget is expected to be reduced by 350 workers because of a $35-$40 million reduction in the
$100 million pre-Challenger accident annual Spacelab budget. (Aviation Week & Space Technology, Sept. 15, 1986)

September 18: The 1,108 layoffs announced by NASA on Sept. 4 take effect today. "I've seen a big change in morale since everybody knows where they're at," said Pat Oliver, spokeswoman for McDonnell Douglas. "I think most of them understand. They're sad to leave but they're taking it well," she said. While about 2,200 jobs have been lost at KSC since the Jan. 28 Challenger accident, some were eliminated when contracts expired or when the Shuttle-Centaur booster program was canceled. Today's layoffs are expected to be the last unless the next shuttle mission is delayed   beyond early 1988 or unless there are other "program changes," NASA officials have said. Barring those prospects, NASA expects to be rehiring some workers early next year. (Florida Today, Sept. 19, 1986)

September 22: The first stage of an unmanned Delta rocket scheduled for launch later this year was erected on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. An "interstage" that connects the first and second stages of the rocket will be installed Sept. 23, while nine Solid Rocket Boosters are to be strapped onto the rocket later this week, said George Diller, NASA spokesman. A weather satellite owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be the Delta's cargo. The satellite is identical to one destroyed in a May 3 Delta accident. November's Delta launch will come two weeks after the liftoff of an unmanned Atlas-Centaur rocket, for no earlier than Nov. 6. (Florida Today, Sept. 23, 1986)

October 1: Kennedy Space Center's new director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, spent his first day on his new job meeting key center managers and addressing KSC employees over closed-circuit television. In that address, McCartney said, "I can't tell you how delighted I am to be here and to be a part of your team. I can think of no other place I'd rather be today than here, on board, in this job. We've come through a period that has not been pleasant for many of us," he said. "We have an important mission and some very exciting times ahead and I'm looking forward to it." (Florida Today, Oct. 2, 1986)

October 2: Kennedy Space Center Director Forrest McCartney said today he doesn't anticipate making any major changes in the center's operations or management. "Right now I can think of no significant changes I certainly see that need to be made," he said. "Any organizational changes I see would be those that would evolve and would be driven by the job to be done. I think that undoubtedly we will see some changes, but not due to my coming here."

A journalist, noting McCartney's military background, asked him whether information on KSC's operations would become less available. "I would like to assure you right off the bat," McCartney responded, "that the policy of openness and of providing you with as timely information ... as we possibly can is one that will continue here." He also remarked that his appointment did not represent a militarization of NASA. "I came here with absolutely no instructions from the Department of Defense," he said. I came as a person who has the experience who wanted the job because I think it's important. I work for Dr. Fletcher," he said, referring to NASA Administrator James Fletcher. (Florida Today, Oct. 3, 1986)

October 4: The rollout of Atlantis to Launch Complex 39B Oct. 7 will be the first shuttle rollout in nine months and more than likely the last until 1988. Atlantis will make the 4.2 mile trip without its main engines and will remain on the pad for seven weeks to undergo a battery of tests NASA officials want to complete before the next shuttle launch in Feb. 1988. "We're going to be so involved in processing that flight that we probably won't have another opportunity to do this," said NASA spokesman Jim Ball. Launch pad tests will include: checking out a $3.3 million weather protection system; conducting a practice countdown designed to "help maintain launch team proficiency" while the shuttle is grounded, and allowing astronauts to practice techniques for leaving the shuttle during an emergency on the launch pad. (Florida Today, Oct. 5, 1986)

October 6: A Delta rocket mission previously scheduled for Nov. 20 has been delayed till the first part of December, NASA officials said today. The delay was caused by a problem with the rocket's payload, the GOES-H weather satellite. The satellite's photo-imaging system has not been functioning properly and the faulty components will be replaced. (Florida Today, Oct. 7, 1986)

October 7: NASA delayed the rollout of the Space Shuttle Atlantis for at least 24 hours because of adverse weather conditions - heavy rain and lightning - spokesman Jim Ball said early today. (Florida Today, Oct. 7, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #32 on: 05/05/2012 08:56 pm »
October 9: A small hydraulic leak in the crawler transporter delayed the start of Atlantis's rollout to Pad 39B till 12:26 a.m., a half hour later than projected. "It was quickly repaired and of no concern," said Conrad Nagel, flow director for Atlantis. The shuttle reached the pad about 6:30 a.m. and was secured in place shortly after 8 a.m., Nagel said. Part of one test was completed during the rollout, said Nagel. Mounted sensors gathered information about how the rollout affected the joints between the segments in the solid rocket boosters. A leaking joint was blamed for triggering the Challenger accident. Nagel said engineers should have the test data analyzed by next week, although officials believe the results will show rollout effects to have been Insignificant. The sensors will also be used to collect information during the shuttle's return to the pad. (Florida Today, Oct. 10, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #33 on: 05/05/2012 08:58 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #34 on: 05/05/2012 09:00 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #35 on: 05/05/2012 09:03 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #36 on: 05/05/2012 09:05 pm »
October 10: In a review of the (solid) motor redesign program (…) the National Research Council’s oversight panel concluded that “the chances for success for the current approach to case field joint redesign are sufficiently good that it should be pursued.” The panel added, however, this qualification: “The choice is the consequence of the understandable desire to use existing hardware to the greatest extent possible, including new case forgings previously ordered.” It said that if the 360 case forgings had not been “a design constraint, we believe that more basic alternatives to the baseline design would probably be preferred once thoroughly analyzed.”

The panel noted that the NASA redesign team had recommended horizontal rather than vertical firing tests and agreed that horizontal testing “can be appropriate for this situation.” It added that the test program should reveal not only launch and flight loads but how these loads are transferred from the booster to the External Tank through the fore and aft attachment struts. (…) The redesign program should also take into account the effect on the joints of the phenomenon called “twang”, in which the shuttle structure bends and then snaps back like a bow at lift-off. (Also, in his memorandum of Dec. 29, 1986, John Young expressed concerns about the dynamic effects of wind shears during launch on the booster attach ring structure. He said that the booster test program should analyze these effects.)

To assure that all such effects would be observed in the test program, the panel recommended the construction of an additional horizontal test stand for full-scale motor testing. It would supplement an existing stand at the Morton Thiokol test facility at Brigham City, Utah. It would reduce the risk of a long program delay if a catastrophic accident should destroy the lone test stand. NASA and Morton Thiokol agreed to construct the test facility at the Thiokol plant, Brigham City, Utah, sharing the estimated $20 million cost.

Although the panel approved the capture feature, it warned that the device would increase the rigidity of the joint and cause additional bending stresses on either side. These stresses need to be understood, the panel said. (The capture device would add 600 pounds per booster, reducing the orbiter payload capacity by 100 pounds, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology of August 18, 1986)

(…) Although the panel said it recognized the importance of returning the shuttle fleet to service without unnecessary delays, it added that “We strongly recommend that NASA maintain a program to explore the development of original, possibly quite different designs, for the next generation of Solid Rocket Boosters in parallel with the current redesign effort and for the contingency that the baseline design may not offer sufficiently good performance and margin of safety.” (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

October 16: Columbia, the last shuttle to fly in space, will be mothballed indefinitely at Kennedy Space Center, NASA said today. The decision was made because Columbia's trip to Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA, had been canceled, and Columbia will be the last of the three remaining shuttles to fly when missions begin again in 1988. Jim Ball, NASA spokesman at KSC, said plans are being made to remove Columbia's three main engines as well as its orbital maneuvering system. Other orbiter systems will also be removed for repair, Ball said. Columbia will then be transferred to the VAB, where it "will remain in storage for quite some period of time," said Ball. While Columbia is idle, workers at KSC will concentrate on preparing Discovery and Atlantis for flights in 1988 - February and May, respectively. Columbia is not scheduled to fly again till July 28, 1988, carrying a DOD payload. (Florida Today, Oct. 17, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #37 on: 05/05/2012 09:09 pm »
October 20: In To Space & Back (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard; $14.95), a children's book co-written by Sally Ride last year and published this month, the nation's first woman astronaut tells her readers that all adventures are "scary." After last January's explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, Ride seemed to find the prospect of another shuttle assignment a bit too scary. A member of the commission that investigated the disaster, Ride declared in March that the shuttle was unsafe and that she would not board it again. Currently riding a desk at NASA, she said last week that she was ready for lifting off again. Why the change of heart? NASA has done a "real good job" redesigning and testing the rocket boosters that helped cause the accident, explained Ride. All the astronauts are now eager, she adds, "for one of us to get back into the Space Shuttle." (TIME, Oct. 27, 1986)

“What’s it like to be in space?” “Is it scary?” “Is it cold?” “Do you have trouble sleeping?” – These are questions that everyone asks astronauts who have been in space. The experience is hard to describe. The words and pictures in this book will help you imagine what it’s like to blast off in a rocket and float effortlessly in midair while circling hundreds of miles above Earth. (…) On January 28, 1986, this book was almost ready to go to the printer, when the unthinkable happened. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded one minute after lift-off. After the accident I thought a lot about the book, and whether or not I wanted to change any part of it. I decided that nothing except the dedication and the words I write here should be changed. I wrote this book because I wanted to answer some of the questions that young people ask of astronauts. Many of the questions are about feelings, and one that now may have added meaning is, “Is it scary?” All adventures – especially into new territory – are scary, and there has always been an element of danger in space flight. I wanted to be an astronaut because I thought it would be a challenging opportunity. It was; it was also an experience that I shall never forget. (Sally Ride, foreword “To Space & Back”)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #38 on: 05/05/2012 09:12 pm »
October 26: Air Force Captain Joe Fury and the Apollo Society are determined to have Apollo 11's 410-foot launch tower restored and erected at the Spaceport USA Visitors Center along with a full-scale replica of a Saturn 5 rocket. "We think now is a good time to glorify the great triumphs of the space program," said Captain Fury. The tower, torn down in 1983 and now in pieces behind NASA headquarters at Kennedy Space Center, was also used for Apollo 8, the first flight to orbit the moon; the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission; and the first Apollo Skylab mission. Fury said $15 million is needed to erect the tower and construct the Saturn 5 replica; another $5 million would be raised for maintenance and preservation. (Florida Today, Oct. 27, 1986)

October 27: Delays ranging from one week to more than two months were announced for two unmanned rockets that had been scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral later this year. A Delta rocket set to carry a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellite into orbit in early December has been rescheduled for no earlier than Feb. 19, 1987, because of changes being made to the rocket's payload.

Less severe is a delay in the launch of an Atlas-Centaur rocket, which has been moved from Nov. 13 to Nov. 21 so launch teams can perform another practice countdown, said NASA spokesman George Diller. A practice countdown conducted Oct. 9 went smoothly, but officials want to repeat the procedure after technicians finish replacing certain guidance components aboard the rocket, Diller said. (Florida Today, Oct. 28, 1986)

A fiscal 1987 budget increase for NASA will translate into a boost for employment along the Space Coast, U.S. Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Melb., FL) told Brevard County business leaders. By Sept. 1987, the space agency should start rehiring some of the 2,200 employees laid off after the Challenger accident, as it prepares for a Feb. 1988 shuttle flight, Nelson said. By the third shuttle launch, all 2,200 employees should have been rehired and the 16,000-member workforce at Kennedy Space Center will continue to grow even larger, said Nelson. The added workforce will result from the effort to orbit a space station by 1992. (Florida Today, Oct. 28, 1986)

October 30: Former Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith, who retired from NASA to become president and chief executive officer of General Space Corp. is now out of a job. Astrotech International decided to cease operations of its subsidiary General Space. Contacted at his Pittsburgh, PA, home, Smith said he planned to return to Florida. He said he "knew there was a risk" when he accepted the job but was eager for the challenge. Astrotech's satellite processing facility in Titusville will not be affected by the General Space decision, Smith said. (Florida Today, Oct. 31, 1986)

Discovery's transfer from the Vehicle Assembly Building to a processing hangar was hailed as a "milestone in the Space Shuttle's return to flight," according to NASA spokesman Jim Ball. "This is sort of the next step in getting Discovery ready for flight," he said. Sometime in December 1987, Discovery will return to the VAB to be stacked with an external fuel tank and two redesigned Solid Rocket Boosters. "Next time it comes out it'll be rolling out to the pad for the launch February 1988," said KSC Deputy Director Tom Utsman. (Florida Today, Oct. 31, 1986)

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #39 on: 05/05/2012 09:16 pm »
November 3: NASA is returning to the numbering system for shuttle flights that prevailed through STS-9. When Discovery lifts off in Feb. 1988, it will officially be numbered STS-26. The numbering method NASA dropped was meant originally to convey more information; i.e., fiscal year that the cargo was scheduled to fly, location of launch site and the alphabetical order in which the launches occurred. When the launch schedule got off track, the numbering scheme became cumbersome and confusing. (Florida Today, Nov. 4, 1986)

A successful practice countdown moved the Atlas-Centaur at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station a step closer to its November 21 launch. "We had a splendid practice countdown," said George Diller, NASA spokesman. "We didn't encounter any problems anywhere during the test. I think everybody is very happy with the way things went today." A "flight events demonstration" early next week will test the new guidance components and other electronics on the rocket. The original guidance components were removed after a factory audit revealed they came from what may have been a bad batch. (Florida Today, Nov. 4, 1986)

November 5: A reorganization of the top command (of the shuttle program) was announced by Dale D. Myers, new NASA Deputy Administrator. (…) The essential change (…) was transfer of control of shuttle operations and program from the Johnson Space Center, Houston, to headquarters, Washington. This was done by appointing Arnold D. Aldrich, shuttle manager at Johnson, as director of the national Space Transportation System and moving his office to Washington. (…) Two deputies were appointed to assist Aldrich. His deputy for operations was Robert Crippen who divided his time between the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers. His deputy for program management was Richard H. Kohrs, his former deputy at Johnson. Kohrs would remain in Houston but report directly to Aldrich in Washington. At the Marshall Space Flight Center, the Shuttle Projects Office manager (William R. Marshall) would report directly to Kohrs. As operations director, Crippen would be responsible for shuttle preparation, mission execution and the return of the orbiter from California, where the shuttle would land for the indefinite future, to Kennedy for processing. He would be the presenter at the Flight Readiness Review, which would be conducted by Richard Truly. Of first importance, Crippen would take charge of the final launch-decision process. He would also chair the Mission Management Team.

Establishment of the shuttle directorate at headquarters moved the launch and flight decision-making processes out of both Marshall and Johnson. The Kennedy Space Center, without a program function, retained some input to shuttle programming as member of the Space Flight Management Council. This body, mainly advisory, included Marshall, Johnson, and the national Space Technology laboratories (NTSL), the shuttle main engine test center at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. (Richard S. Lewis: “Challenger – The Final Voyage”, 1988)

November 10: Concerns about a primary computer led to the eighth delay in the launch of an Atlas-Centaur rocket, NASA announced. The delay stems from tests performed last week by Teledyne Systems Co. of North Ridge, CA, said NASA spokesman George Diller. The company was testing a computer nearly identical to that of the Atlas-Centaur when a power system failed. Despite the computer's flawless performance aboard the Atlas-Centaur during tests, launch officials decided to remove it in order to check for problems similar to those discovered by Teledyne. No decision has been made on whether to install a new power system. "This is a precautionary action," Diller said. "We don't want to commit this vehicle to launch until we understand why that system failed." (Florida Today, Nov. 11, 1986)

KSC security guards on routine patrol at Playalinda Beach found two duffel bags containing cocaine and U.S. Customs officials found two others at Port Canaveral. The cocaine, which was turned over to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, had a total street value of $6.2 million. KSC spokesman Dick Young said this is the first time he has heard of cocaine being found on KSC beaches. Playalinda Beach has been closed to the public while Atlantis is on a nearby launch pad undergoing tests. (Florida Today, Nov. 11, 1986)

November 14: NASA announced it would try Dec. 4 to launch an Atlas-Centaur rocket carrying a military communication satellite on a mission which had already been scrubbed eight times. Barring further problems, the liftoff would occur at 9:04 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch window extends to 12:02 a.m. Dec, 5. The most recent postponement was caused when engineers cancelled the scheduled Nov. 21launch to double check the main computer. The precaution was taken after problems were found in a Similar computer undergoing tests at the Teledyne Corp. plant in Northridge, CA, where it is built. The computer was removed from the rocket and shipped back to the plant where it has been recertified ready for flight, said NASA spokesman George Diller. The computer will be returned to Cape Canaveral next week. (The Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 15, 1986)

November 17: A Space Shuttle launch drill to start at 7:40 p.m. today will include the first countdown at Kennedy Space Center since the Challenger tragedy. Atlantis' "dress rehearsal" will involve .astronauts and ground technicians. (USA Today, Nov. 17, 1986)

At 7:40 p.m., KSC officials began a mock countdown for the shuttle Atlantis that will continue through 11 a.m., Nov. 18, when it will end with the simulated firing of the main engines. For the last two and one-half hours, five astronauts will be on board: Cmdr. Robert "Hoot" Gibson, pilot Charles Bolden, and mission specialists Franklin Chang-Diaz, Steven Hawley and George "Pinky" Nelson. All five were members of the last successful shuttle mission, 61-C, which ended Jan. 18. For about three hours, Nov. 19, NASA will conduct a crew-escape test with seven rookie astronauts, after which Atlantis will be returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building. (Florida Today,
Nov. 18, 1986)

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #40 on: 05/05/2012 09:20 pm »
November 18: Despite several technical problems that might well have scrubbed a real shuttle launch effort, the five-member astronaut crew aboard Atlantis said the experience brought back "a bunch of very, very fond memories." Pilot Charles Bolden said, "It was almost like deja vu." Cmdr. Robert "Hoot" Gibson said, "We felt it was a real good test...everything went pretty well."

The site of the orbiter on Launch Pad 39B, Gibson acknowledged, stirred memories that aren't as fond as his recollections of Columbia's flight, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18. “I think it's going to be very difficult to look at an orbiter or look at the launch pad" without remembering the Challenger crew and the tragedy,” he said. "They were our companions. They were our very close friends. And I don't think I'm ever going to quite get over that completely." "I decided a long time ago," he added, "I was going to keep going and that I want to fly on the shuttle again."

The fact that the countdown was halted 25 seconds short of the simulated main engine firings because of computer software problems does not diminish what NASA was trying to accomplish during the exercise, Gibson said. "I think the fact that we got some problems during the countdown made it a much more useful simulation that it would have been had we just proceeded right on down to T-zero," he said.

Two computer problems arose during the countdown, said NASA spokesman Jim Ball. One was with a mission operations computer at Johnson Space Center in Houston, which sends data to the shuttle on the ground and during the flight. That problem was remedied quickly and the computer supported the remainder of the countdown, Ball said.

The other problem was with the computer software in the Launch Control Center at KSC. Software normally used during launch countdowns was changed - or "patched" - because the orbiter was without its main engines, Ball said. He added that officials were concerned that the patched software might not perform as expected and result in damage to flight hardware. Therefore, launch officials chose to stop the count at T-31 seconds, which is when computers automatically take charge of the launch. "What stopped the countdown was caution," Ball said. "We didn't want anything unexpected happening." (Florida Today, Nov. 19, 1986)


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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #41 on: 05/05/2012 09:22 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #42 on: 05/05/2012 09:25 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #43 on: 05/05/2012 09:29 pm »
November 20: Seven rookie astronauts participated in a crew emergency simulation conducted at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39B and using Atlantis which is currently on the pad. NASA officials said the disaster drill will help improve safety in the aftermath of the Challenger tragedy. "The simulations were very realistic and well-orchestrated by the people in charge," said NASA launch director Gene Thomas. "We learned an awful lot about where improvements can be made."

The mock emergency was declared in the morning just as the astronauts were entering Atlantis. Those participating in the drill were: Cmdr. Frank Culbertson, pilot Stephen Oswald, mission specialists Carl Meade, Kathryn Thornton and G. David Low, and payload specialists Pierre Thuot and Jerome Apt. NASA officials simulated a fuel leak in the shuttle's reaction control system and then looked on as fire and rescue workers rushed to the scene from a station about a mile away from the pad. The simulated spill involved hydrazine, a toxic chemical that could incapacitate an astronaut in a real emergency. The drill included simulated injuries to an astronaut, a quality control inspector and two members of the crew that assists the astronauts into the orbiter.

Within six minutes, a fire and rescue team was at the pad helping the astronauts and pad workers put on breathing apparatus. The "injured" were carried across a platform to wire baskets at the cabin level of the pad, 147 feet above ground. The astronauts and support personnel - 19 in all - entered the baskets but didn't ride them to the ground. Officials said the ride was too risky to attempt except in a real emergency. The baskets were filled with sandbags and sent to ground level. The drill participants rode an elevator to the ground and re-entered the baskets. After leaving the baskets, "uninjured" astronauts scrambled to a protected bunker near the pad and rescue workers hurried the "victims" into three armored personnel carriers, which then drove to a nearby heliport. One carrier broke down and a van was used instead.

Stand-ins for the injured then were transported by helicopter ambulance to three Central Florida hospitals. The drill concluded Atlantis's testing on the pad. "We had a very good visit to the pad," Thomas said. "Whenever we have a shuttle considered safe to fly again, we'll be ready to launch it." Atlantis is scheduled to roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building early Nov. 22. (Florida Today, Nov. 21, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #44 on: 05/05/2012 09:33 pm »

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #45 on: 05/05/2012 09:35 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #46 on: 05/05/2012 09:38 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #47 on: 05/05/2012 09:40 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #48 on: 05/05/2012 09:42 pm »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #49 on: 05/05/2012 09:43 pm »
November 21: NASA workers began moving Atlantis back to Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building from Launch Complex 39B where it has been for the past seven weeks. (Florida Today, Nov. 22, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #50 on: 05/05/2012 09:46 pm »
November 23: Playalinda Beach was reopened to the public by NASA following the rollback of the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Kennedy Space Center officials said that the beach will probably not be closed again till shuttle flights resume early in 1988. (Florida Today, Nov. 24, 1986)

December 1: After eight delays NASA will try a night launch of an Atlas Centaur rocket Thursday, hoping to end the agency's slowest year ever with the delivery into space of a Pentagon communications satellite. If successful, the liftoff would be a small victory for the troubled space agency, which has had fewer launches during 1986 than in any year since it was created in 1958. The Atlas flight has had its share of problems, including suspected faults in the vehicle's main computer and guidance system, which have led to the launch postponements.

Blastoff for the two-stage, liquid-fuel rocket is set for 9:04 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and should provide a spectacular show for Central Florida residents as it blazes into the night sky. Countdown delays could push the launch to 12:02 a.m. Friday before it would have to be rescheduled. Officials are counting on the Atlas to give them something to cheer about as they leave a disastrous year behind and confront dozens of major obstacles that must be resolved before shuttle flights can resume.
''It would certainly be a good way to end the year,'' said James Womack, chief of operations for the Atlas launch. ''We've been down here a long time.'' Other officials emphasized that flight preparations have been extra cautious to ensure nothing goes wrong. ''We've had it out there six months and addressed every conceivable concern,'' said Kennedy Space Center spokesman George Diller. ''From the standpoint of the the Atlas Centaur program, it's probably the most thorough review ever.''

With the Challenger accident and loss of an unmanned Delta rocket in May grounding most of NASA's space fleet, the agency can point to just three launches this year, breaking the record low of five liftoffs in 1959 and 1979. The Air Force also suffered a blow in April when a Titan 34D rocket exploded shortly after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, shutting down the program until spring 1987. NASA's few successes came with the seven-day mission of the shuttle Columbia in early January and the return in September of the Delta carrying a military Star Wars experiment. Another small Scout rocket made it off a California launch pad in November with a scientific payload for the Defense Department. The one program spared major grief has been Atlas, with two Air Force launches of the rocket boosting Pentagon payloads into orbit from Vandenberg in February and September.

The launch Thursday will be the first time an Atlas has flown from Cape Canaveral since 1985. Its cargo will be a versatile satellite that provides instant communication between Navy and Air Force troops anywhere in the world. Among reasons for the mission's many delays have been worries that the rocket's guidance system and main computer contained faulty components. The concerns forced engineers to ship the systems back to the manufacturers, where they were double-checked and replaced. Nonetheless, Diller said an extra computer for the rocket is ''on the sidelines'' in case a stand-in is needed. The launch also will bring a continuation of management safety practices begun as a result of the Challenger accident. (The Orlando Sentinel, Dec. 2, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #51 on: 05/05/2012 09:48 pm »
December 4: NASA's 9:30 p.m. launch of an unmanned Atlas-Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was the fourth successful U.S. launch in four tries. NASA"s last launch of 1986 was a $125 million Fleet Satellite Communications - FLTSATCOM - satellite. Jim Ball, NASA spokesman, said "It certainly is a good way to bring the year to a close. We had an excellent liftoff. It was great. It was beautiful." Liftoff came 26 minutes later than planned because of a problem with equipment used to track the flight of the spacecraft. (Florida Today, Dec. 5, 1986)

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #52 on: 05/05/2012 09:52 pm »
December 7: All shuttle crew escape methods currently under review would cause NASA to miss its target of Feb. 18, 1988, for launch of the shuttle Discovery in the first post-Challenger mission. Instead, officials at the space agency said that installing a bailout system would most likely scrub the first liftoff until at least the summer of 1988. Robert "Hoot" Gibson, commander of the last successful shuttle mission said, "I think we will not fly again before we have something in the orbiter to at least give you some chance of getting out." (The Orlando Sentinel, Dec. 8, 1986)

December 10: NASA will commemorate the first anniversary of the Challenger tragedy and the deaths of other on-duty astronauts by observing 73 seconds of silence at all agency offices Jan. 28. It will be an annual observance. The period of silence, lasting as long as Challenger's flight, will begin at 11:38 a.m. and flags will be lowered to half staff at all NASA installations, according to Shirley Green, chief of public affairs for NASA. No other agency observances are planned next month, but NASA employees may hold other remembrances, Green said. "That's really it," she said. Administrator James Fletcher "felt it was appropriate for all NASA centers to observe the date the same way as a NASA family." (The Orlando Sentinel, Dec. 11, 1986)

December 12: Kennedy Space Center will create a top division for safety, quality assurance and reliability as part of a major reorganization to streamline shuttle management and to improve communication at the launch center, said NASA today. The KSC changes involve new assignments for nearly every top shuttle official, most of whom were involved in the Jan. 28 launch of Challenger. Gene Thomas, launch and landing director, was made director of the center's new Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance wing. He'd served as launch director for mission 51-L.

In addition, the KSC realignment calls for combining shuttle operations and shuttle engineering work under one division, reflecting a similar change at NASA headquarters. This change is intended to improve communication by making reporting channels more direct and explicit, a need cited by the Challenger commission. Thomas Utsman, KSC Deputy Director, will keep his present job but will also head the new division as director of Space Transportation System Management and Operations "through the next few shuttle flights,” according to the NASA press release. Utsman will work with NASA headquarters to coordinate KSC's processing work.

Robert Sieck, who presently heads KSC's shuttle operations, will report to Utsman as launch director. George Saseen, manager of Advanced Projects, Technology and Commercialization Office, will become engineering director. Thus, Sieck and Saseen will be the "primary directors" of KSC shuttle tasks and will work with Utsman to manage shuttle processing.

Other administrative changes include: Marvin Jones, director of safety, reliability, quality assurance and protective services, will head a new Protective Services Office that will report to Center Director McCartney. William Rock, deputy director of shuttle operations, was named manager of the Advanced Projects Technology and Commercialization Office. James Womack, chief of the Centaur Operations Division, will be in charge of expendable launch vehicle operations. (The Orlando Sentinel, Dec. 13, 1986)

December 13: Kennedy Space center Director Forrest McCartney told Florida Institute of Technology graduates that KSC was moving steadily and carefully toward resuming shuttle flights. Lt. Gen, McCartney was commencement speaker at FIT's graduation ceremeonies in Melbourne, FL. "Our country, indeed our world, has an urgent need to get the Space Shuttle flying again. We still have a great deal to accomplish before we can fly the shuttle again," McCartney told the students. "The schedule is tight, and when we resume shuttle flights, there will still be many sophisticated high-tech problems to challenge us as we continue to probe the vast frontiers of space."

After the ceremony, McCartney, who has headed KSC since Oct. 1, said space center managers are examining their work force needs and laid off workers may be back to work sooner than planned initially. "We are going to try," said McCartney, "to do all we can to make sure those employees are back again as soon as we can. I can't give you any definite time period now but, yes, I think that: will be the trend." (Florida Today, Dec. 14, 1986)

December 19: Installing a crew escape system in the Discovery before its scheduled launch Feb. 18, 1988, is a "90 percent bet," said Shuttle Flow Director Tip Talone. The system is among several modifications set for the orbiter; 30 of the changes must be in before launches resume. "The astronauts have final vote on all changes, and I just can't imagine them giving this up....Our scheduling for a Feb. 18 launch hasn't taken into account installing an escape system, but I don't think it would set us back," Talone said. "Discovery is being tested like it's never left the ground. We've got problems with about 30 of the modifications. I'm not making promises, but it looks like we'll get work schedules, money and new hardware all together on time." (Florida Today, Dec. 20, 1986)

December 31: Kennedy Space Center attracted an estimated total of 2,142,785 tourists this year, making 1986 the busiest year ever experienced since public tours began in 1966. In 1985, KSC hosted 1,795,857 tourists. NASA spokesman Mitch Varnes said the space center was probably getting some of the "spillover" from Disney World where tourists had been turned away because of the crowds. (The Orlando Sentinel, Jan. 1, 1987)


Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #53 on: 05/05/2012 09:58 pm »
To be continued in

RTF 1987 – It’s a Long Way…

I’m already working on it and will bring it to you as soon as possible.

Meanwhile you may want to have a look at this:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=18724.0



« Last Edit: 05/05/2012 10:01 pm by Ares67 »

Offline Beemer

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #54 on: 05/05/2012 10:54 pm »
I had forgotten a lot of this after living through that time  :o

Thanks for bringing it all back, bad and good.
Ride, Sally Ride! In memory of Sally Ride [1951-2012] America's first woman astronaut

Offline theonlyspace

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #55 on: 05/06/2012 12:19 pm »
Excellent....Thank you for all your hard work

Offline Mark Dave

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #56 on: 05/08/2012 01:29 pm »
More please. :) I wish to see the  first RTF mission STS-26R and events leading up to it and beyond.

Will there be a similar thread to STS-107 and RTF of 114?
« Last Edit: 05/08/2012 01:29 pm by MarkD »

Offline Ares67

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Re: RTF 1986 – Find Your Way Back
« Reply #57 on: 05/18/2012 05:07 pm »
More please. :) I wish to see the  first RTF mission STS-26R and events leading up to it and beyond.

Will there be a similar thread to STS-107 and RTF of 114?

Yes, MarkD, I'll do that. But STS-107 and 114 will have to wait, because my intention is to continue in chronological order now. Here is the good news: The RTF 1987 thread will go online today. And RTF 1988, followed by STS-26R, will probably be ready next month.


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