Drydock for a Used Spaceship

By Frederic Golden

A triumphant Columbia returns with two faulty suits and a flat

As it came to rest on Runway 22 at California's Edwards Air Force Base last week, the space shuttle Columbia looked a little travel-weary. In the orange glow of the early-morning desert sun, the ship's protective tiles showed pits and bruises. Dark streaks lined the fuselage, and a tire was flat, apparently worn down by the friction of a wheel that locked on landing. Casting a baleful eye on the craft that has logged 10.8 million miles on five voyages, Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, director of NASA'S shuttle program, commented, "It's beginning to look more like a used spaceship all the time." But his words were more of a compliment than a criticism. By successfully completing its first operational flight, Columbia showed convincingly that the often maligned $10 billion shuttle program finally was in business.

Business in a real sense. Astronaut Vance Brand, 51, had barely brought down the shuttle in a textbook landing--"painting the numbers on the runway," as pilots say--when other NASA hands began thinking of collecting the fees for Columbia's services. During the five-day mission, the shuttle had carried aloft two commercial communications satellites, one of them American, the other Canadian. NASA will earn more than $18 million for this orbital freight hauling, hardly enough to cover Columbia' s fuel bill, but a first small step in turning the shuttle into a self-supporting enterprise.

For a while last week, one of NASA's new customers, Telesat Canada, had some anxious moments. Both satellites were safely ejected and climbed swiftly to geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles above the equator, where they would travel in synch with the earth's rotation. But before Telesat's Anik 3-C reached its resting place over the Pacific, controllers discovered that they were unable to "talk" to the satellite on any of the programmed frequencies. The radio silence perplexed and panicked Telesat's control room on Guam. Unless Anik (Inuit for brother) accepted their commands, the controllers could not angle it properly toward the sun or keep it locked in place. Thus its critical maneuvering propellants would quickly freeze. Without this fuel, the $24 million bird would be a dead duck.

The controllers desperately began sending random messages on every possible frequency. Finally, only minutes away from a fatal fuel freeze, Anik answered and accepted the lifesaving instructions. What had gone wrong? A computer programmer had apparently goofed, reversing the number of the correct communications frequency.

Not all of last week's orbital glitches ended so happily. For the first time since 1974, U.S. astronauts were scheduled for a space walk outside their cabin. But the EVA (NASAese for extravehicular activity) had to be postponed when Astronaut Bill Lenoir, 43, one of the space agency's new breed of scientifically trained mission specialists, came down with a bad case of space sickness, a puzzling ailment that afflicts about half of all travelers in zero-g. Lenoir may have contributed to his own queasiness by indulging a passion for spicy-hot jalapeno peppers during the flight.

The next day Lenoir felt better, and he and his fellow specialist, Joe Allen, 45, got into their new $2 million space suits. But there were more difficulties. The fan that circulated oxygen in Allen's helmet mysteriously kept cutting out, and the pressure in Lenoir's outfit stayed inexplicably low. In Houston, NASA engineers, in consultation with the manufacturer, United Technologies' Hamilton Standard division, tried to solve the problems, but failed. The complicated suits, which are, in effect, one-man spacecraft with full life-support capability for the harsh vacuum of space, resisted all efforts at repair. The space walk was scrubbed.

Abrahamson is now talking about adding an EVA to the next shuttle flight in January, when the new orbiter Challenger sets off on its maiden voyage. Columbia, scheduled to be piggybacked to Florida this week atop a NASA 747, will go into the space version of drydock for a major overhaul. Its interior will be rebuilt to permit as many as six people to work on board, and its engines will be upgraded to give it more lifting power. When America's first reusable spaceship goes into orbit again in September 1983, another historic moment will be marked: in its cargo bay, Columbia will carry Spacelab, a true scientific laboratory in the sky contributed by Western Europe to the U.S. space effort; it will be used for a wide variety of experiments and observations. Presumably, by then, Columbia will also have a set of new tires. --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Houston and Joseph J. Kane/Edwards Air Force Base

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin, Joseph J. Kane

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