Good Data and a Feces Crisis

By Anastasia Toufexis

On board the shuttle Challenger last week, Physicist Don Lind could not contain his wonder. "The streaks of light we're seeing are really spectacular stuff," he radioed to Mission Control in Houston. The shuttle, about 200 miles above the ocean south of New Zealand, was passing through the top of a green-and-pink aurora--a huge, glowing band of light generated by charged solar particles hitting the atmosphere. It was the first time that the shuttle had actually flown through an aurora.

Unfortunately, the seven-man Challenger crew also saw an abundance of less spectacular stuff during the first half of their planned seven-day mission: a literal flood of foul-smelling particles of food and feces spewing from the pens of 24 rats and two squirrel monkeys in the $1 billion, 15-ton, European- built Spacelab stowed in Challenger's cargo bay. So pervasive was the odiferous tide that it was carried through a connecting tunnel into the shuttle's cockpit. "This isn't very much fun, guys," complained Commander Robert Overmyer to Mission Control.

By midweek the crew, wearing surgical masks to reduce the danger of possible infection, had managed by using vacuum cleaners to clear the air and get on with the major business of the 17th shuttle flight: conducting scientific experiments in the Spacelab. The two physicians aboard observed and tended to the rat and monkey menagerie, checking the animals' reaction to weightlessness and looking for clues to the space sickness that has plagued many astronauts during their first few days in space. Meanwhile, two physicists and a chemical engineer were busy on projects ranging from shooting pictures of the auroras and growing crystals in solution to studying the dynamics of water, glycerin and silicone droplets in weightlessness and probing the atmosphere below to measure its content of man-made pollutants. All told, 14 of the 15 scheduled experiments were providing what Mission Manager Joseph Cremin called "good" and even "great" data.

Aside from the feces crisis, there were a number of space glitches, none of them momentous. A drinking-water spigot temporarily stuck, leaving the crew so thirsty that some proposed to use the water in their survival-kit rations. The crew successfully spun off one satellite that will aid air-traffic control, but they were unable to launch another that could have assisted the Defense Department in tracking submarines. Reason: the apparent failure, possibly due to weak batteries, of a microswitch on the door of the canister housing the satellite. Other frustrations included a sticky latch on an air lock in the Spacelab, which prevented mission specialists from maneuvering the Very Wide Field Camera outside to survey ultraviolet radiation from interstellar sources, and a failed effort to monitor crew members' urine production in a weightless environment.

Still, few of the problems involved Challenger itself, which had a near perfect launch from Cape Canaveral only ten days after its sister ship Discovery touched down on the nearby runway. That demonstrated NASA's ability to achieve quick turnaround times for the four-ship shuttle fleet, an important factor in attracting commercial customers. At week's end, as the seven-man crew prepared for its scheduled landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, NASA did not hesitate to call Challenger's mission a success, although admittedly hard won. "We had to make some ad hoc decisions to solve problems," said Flight Director Gary Coen. "I wondered at times if we would ever get there, but we did."

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Kennedy Space Center and Geoffrey Leavenworth/Houston