"We've Got a Good Bird There"

By Natalie Angler

Overcoming glitches, Discovery makes a spectacular debut

A blood-red sun was just peeking over the eastern ridge of California's Mojave Desert when the space shuttle Discovery began to descend like a silver hawk in search of prey. As it shattered the sound barrier, a thundering crack! seemed to rend the sky in two, and a cheer swelled from the crowd below. Within minutes the ship had rolled to a halt along the right side of the runway at Edwards Air Force Base, kicking up massive clouds of dust. Not since the landing of the first shuttle had NASA officials been so openly emotional. Said Mission Commander Hank Hartsfield: "We've got a good bird there."

The crew had every right to be proud. With that uneventful touchdown, NASA could claim a strikingly successful debut for Discovery, the newest member of its three-shuttle fleet. For six exhausting days on Flight 41D, six astronauts tackled the busiest shuttle agenda ever, twice staying up past their assigned bedtimes to troubleshoot glitches. Every task, however, from knocking a pesky hunk of ice off the ship's hull to operating manually a drugmaking machine that was supposed to be controlled by computers, was completed on time.

NASA needed the triumph. To the dismay of space officials, the maiden launch of Discovery had been postponed three times. The original takeoff date of June 25 was put off when a back-up computer refused to answer a command. The next day a fuel valve faltered 4 sec. before blastoff, again delaying the mission. Then, on Aug. 28, the day before the third scheduled launch, a NASA engineer discovered that the computer charged with the last-minute double-checking of equipment might miss some critical signals. Blast-off was deferred for 24 hrs., as computer programmers scrambled to write a "patch" over the errant software instructions. Even on the successful launch date, Aug. 30, Discovery's crew marked time for 7 min. while three wandering private planes were chased away from the Cape Canaveral area. Said Shuttle Operations Director Thomas Utsman: "I had a feeling that a black cloud was following us."

The gloom quickly vanished when the black-and-white bird finally arced through the bluest skies that shuttle watchers had ever seen. Hours later the crew got down to work, releasing a Satellite Business Systems Comsat, the first of three communications devices to be deployed. The 1,069-lb. cylinder, to the intense relief of everyone involved, went toward its proper geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above earth without a hitch: the payload assist module (PAM) used for the launching was the same kind of device that had shoved two satellites into uselessly low orbits last February. A second satellite was sprung successfully on Friday, this one employing the new so-called Frisbee launcher. The mechanism, designed especially for the shuttle, acts as an Olympian wrist, snapping off the satellite from the cargo bay in a slow spin that quickens to 30 r.p.m. once in space. The following day, a PAM-driven AT&T satellite was set free. Said Mission Control as the last cylinder twirled into the void: "That's three for three."

Astronaut Judith Resnik, the second American woman in space (Sally Ride was the first on the seventh shuttle flight last year), went to bat next to test an experimental solar sail. While her abundant curls, freed of the tethers of gravity, rose in serpentine locks around her face, Resnik manipulated the controls to unveil the sail, a 102-ft.-high, 13.5-ft.-wide array of solar cells. To test the sail's durability, Resnik extended the accordion-like array to about three-quarters and then out to its full height, making it the largest structure ever deployed in space. Laser diodes detected the sail's tiniest vibrations. Marveled one astronaut as he gazed through a window at the sail, sitting like a giant fan atop the ship: "It's beautiful, gold-looking out there."

The work of Payload Specialist Charles Walker was less of a smooth sail. An engineer with McDonnell Douglas, Walker was the first employee of a U.S. firm to venture into space, a paying passenger whose ticket cost $80,000. His job was to monitor a secret electrophoresis experiment in the gravity-free environment, which would create a mysterious new hormone for a division of Johnson & Johnson. The substance was reported to be a key to the manufacture of a superin-sulin. The equipment for the complicated test, packed in a box the size of a refrigerator, employed an electric current to separate chemicals 400 times as fast and make them 700 tunes as pure as could be done on earth. For the first two days, however, the device repeatedly broke down and Walker finally had to bypass the computers and reactivate the machine himself. Although precious production time had been lost, Walker was still able to finish with about 83% of the anticipated quantity of the needed medical material. Said James Rose of McDonnell Douglas: "It was Charlie's presence that made the difference.""

Human intervention was also necessary when a giant snowball began forming outside the ship. For unknown reasons, waste water dumped into space crystallized around the ship's disposal nozzles. NASA feared that the 20-lb. frozen chunks might break off during reentry, damaging the orbiter's protective shell of tiles. Although the shuttle's space toilet, which has a reputation for breaking down and clogging up, seemingly had nothing to do with the ice, NASA told the male astronauts to use old-fashioned "doggie bags" rather than the privy, to avoid adding to the snowball. The shuttle was turned toward the sun in an attempt to melt the ice, and the steering rockets were fired to try shaking it off. Neither exercise worked. At last Mission Commander Hartsfield, guided by radioed instructions from Ride, who had successfully tested the shuttle's 50-ft. remote-control arm during her pioneering flight, maneuvered that robotic device to knock the hunk off. At Houston's Mission Control, the Discovery crew members were promptly dubbed the Ice Busters of 41D. On landing day, one final problem developed when two oxygen tanks began to leak. But possible trouble was quickly averted by switching to two back-up tanks.

With the Discovery flight over, NASA announced that it planned to fly one ship each month for the rest of this year and eleven in 1985. A jubilant President Reagan has declared that the first nonpaying private passenger of some future shuttle would be an elementary or secondary school teacher. Still, NASA will not rule the skies uncontested; if anything, the competition aloft* is growing more fierce: the European Space Agency is becoming an increasingly aggressive contender for commercial cargo and the Pentagon is planning to divert some of its space payloads to its own expendable rockets. But despite some past stumbling, NASA officials vow to prevail. The proud new ship Discovery has shown them the way.

* Aboard the Soviet Salyut station last week, three cosmonauts passed the record of 211 consecutive days in space.

With reporting by Benjamin W. Gate, Jerry Hannifin