Jul 19 1985
From The Space Library
Space News for this day. (1MB PDF)
After spending 18 months at the factory in Palmsdale, California, Columbia, the flagship of the Space Shuttle fleet, returned for operational duty to Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the JSC Roundup reported. Columbia had undergone hundreds of modifications to reconfigure the ship from a developmental flight vehicle to a fully operational orbiter.
Columbia flew the first five Space Shuttle missions, and NASA modified the spacecraft at KSC for the October 1983 STS-9 Spacelab 1 flight. Following its return to KSC and removal of the Spacelab 1 payload, NASA in late January 1984 ferried Columbia to California atop the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.
Rockwell International performed five major modifications to the orbiter during its stay at the orbiter production plant. Structural modifications to the wings and midfuselage included strengthening of lower wing surfaces and installation of heavier straps across the orbiter's belly.
Rockwell added a heads-up display to the forward flight deck to allow the Space Shuttle commander and pilot to view critical flight information on a see-through panel while they looked through the forward cockpit windows.
Production workers removed the commander and pilot ejection seats, which were installed on Columbia for the initial development Space Shuttle flights, and replaced them with standard seats. Overhead blowout panels were also removed.
Rockwell modified two orbital maneuvering system pods to make them compatible with the other orbiters in the fleet and replaced the thermal protection tiles on the pods with the advanced reusable surface insulation blankets. Production personnel also installed supplemental instrumentation to gather developmental engineering data.
In addition, workers removed and replaced approximately 5000 high-temperature tiles from the orbiter's underside, because engineering analysis indicated several areas where greater heat protection was needed. About half of the wing leading edge panel assemblies was removed and modified to strengthen the supporting structure of the reinforced carbon-carbon panels, an infrared imaging device was installed on the vertical stabilizer to provide a temperature profile of the upper wing surfaces during reentry, and instrumentation was added to the nose cap to provide improved entry air data.
During the trip from California to KSC atop the 747 shuttle transport, rain damaged more than 1,000 of its head shield tiles, the Washington Post reported. NASA said that between 200 and 300 of the tiles required replacement. Damaged areas were around the windows and on the forward facing tiles. According to NASA policy, Space Shuttle transports were forbidden to fly through visible rain. However, the shower did not appear on ground radar or on the 747's onboard radar system.
NASA had scheduled Columbia to fly next in December on mission 61-C. (JSC Roundup, July 19/85, 1; W Post, July 19/85, A17)
Vice President George Bush announced that Sharon Christa McAuliffe would be the teacher to go into space in January 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle. McAuliffe, a social studies teacher at Concord High School, Concord, New Hampshire, was the finalist in the NASA Teacher in Space Program that was announced by President Reagan in August 1984. Her backup was Barbara Morgan of McCall-Donnelly Elementary School, McCall, Idaho.
McAuliffe proposed that, while in space, she would gather information for a personal journal, "just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals. My journal would be a trilogy. I would like to begin it at the point of selection through the training program. The second part would cover the actual flight. Part three would cover my thoughts and reactions after my return;' McAuliffe said.
Vice President Bush, in his announcement of the selection at a White House ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, where McAuliffe was accompanied by the other nine finalists selected from among 11,416 applicants, said, "We're here today to announce the first private citizen passenger in the history of spaceflight . . . We're honoring all [the teacher applicants] today, and we're doing something else because the finalists here with me and the more than a hundred semifinalists will all in the months ahead serve as a link between NASA and the nation's school system." McAuliffe, a teacher of 15 years and the mother of two children, would work a year for NASA. She and Morgan would report in September to Johnson Space Center for 114 hours of training over four months.
The Washington Post reported that a top NASA official said McAuliffe was an early favorite of the 20-member selection panel. The official said "the judges thought McAuliffe appeared to be a good team player and-vital to her image-making duties-stood out as a good communicator," the Post reported. (NASA Release 85-107; Admin of Ronald Reagan, July 19/85, 913; W Post, July 22/85, Al)
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