Nov 15 1982
From The Space Library
November 15-19: Press reports said that problems November 15 with new million-dollar space suits had canceled the first space walk scheduled in nearly nine years and would bring STS-5 to a conclusion November 16. The walk was canceled when the fan in astronaut Joseph Allen's suit quit and the device maintaining oxygen pressure in William Lenoir's backpack behaved so erratically that flight directors feared a breakdown during any space walk. Pro-gram managers said that the walk could be done on a later flight; Glynn Lunney at JSC said that the program was "still right on track." The next three flights would carry space suits for any unexpected problems, such as cargo- bay doors that refused to close. The next flight was scheduled for February 1983.
Inspectors after the November 16 landing said that Columbia came through the fifth flight better than previously: an inboard tire on the left side was shredded and flattened on landing by a brake jamming against it, but only 4 of the 33,000 protective tiles were damaged or came loose during reentry. A seven-man panel investigating the space-suit failure said that they hoped to have answers within a week. One possibility was that the suits were dropped while in their cases or when removed and stowed in the ship. Engineers were baffled by the failure of both suits at the same time for different reasons.
The New York Times said that the suits, "most complex human garments ever made," differed from those used in Apollo moon landings, or for Skylab in 1973 and 1974, which functioned well but were too stiff for easy handling of tools needed by Shuttle astronauts. Shuttle missions had called for production, by United Technologies' Hamilton Standard Division, of 43 suits and 13 backpacks at a cost of about $2 million each; the suits had been tested by the company 160 times while unmanned and 70 times while manned, said a company spokesman. (W Post, Nov 16/82, A-1; Nov 18/82, A-7; NY Times, Nov 16/82, C-3)
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