Flight most ambitious

Press, 14 June 1983, Page 9

Flight most ambitious

NZPA Cape Canaveral Twenty-two years, 36 flights, and 88 male astronauts after Alan Shepard blazed the American man-in-space trail, an American woman finally gets to travel to the new frontier on Saturday morning (local time). Dr Sally Ride’s historic role has overshadowed other aspects of the flight, but it is one of the most ambitious yet in the fastmaturing shuttle programme.

With Dr Ride, aged 32, playing a key part, the five astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger will deploy two commercial communications satellites, practise rendezvous manoeuvres with a third payload, and conduct more than 20 science and technology “It’s a really exciting flight, with something for almost everyone?’ said Captain Robert Crippen, the mission commander. “It will set many guidelines for the future.”

The flight, Challenger’s second, will begin at 7.33 a.m. eastern daylight time (11.33 p.m., Saturday, N.Z. time) and will last six days. Its return to Earth will be on a 4570-metre, swamp-surrounded runway at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, just five kilometres from the launch-pad. Challenger will be the first shuttle to use the Kennedy runway. Landing there eliminates the need to bolt the shuttle to the back of a Boeing 747 and fly it back from the California desert landing site used on earlier

flights, cutting at least a week off the preparation time for the next mission. Captain Crippen, aged 45, is commanding Challenger on the seventh shuttle flight. He was pilot of Columbia’s maiden trip in April, 1981, and is the first man to make a second trip in the reusable ship. The other crew members are the pilot, Commander Frederick Hauck, aged 42, and the mission specialists, Lieutenant-Colonel John Fabian, aged 43, and Dr Norman Thagard, who is 39. Dr Thagard, a medical doctor, was added to the crew in December to study motion sickness that has afflicted seven of the 16 astronauts who have flown in the shuttle. The five-member crew will be the biggest launched from Earth in a single spaceship. Previously the largest crew size was four on both the fifth and sixth shuttle missions.

Two Soviet women have flown in space. Dr Ride will take her place in history books as the first American woman to make the trip. During a recent crew news conference she chided reporters for focusing too much attention on her being a woman.

“It is time in this country that people realise women can do any job they want to,” she said. “She carries her share, and more, and she will prove that during the flight,” said Captain Crippen, a naval officer. Dr Ride will be busy from the moment of lift-off, serving as flight engineer during the blazing ascent into orbit. She will sit behind and between Captain Crippen and the pilot, Commander Hauck, monitoring instruments and calling out the check-list. Once in orbit she and Colonel Fabian, a United States Air Force officer,

will conduct a countdown and remotely deploy a communications satellite for Telesat of Canada. On the second day they will release another for the Indonesian Government. Each of these customers is paying the National Aeronautics and Space Administration SUSI2 million for the space delivery.

Day five, when Challenger will play tag with a scientific satellite named S.P.A.S., will be a big one for Dr Ride and Colonel Fabian. It is the reason they were selected for the crew.

Not long after they were selected for the astronaut corps in 1978 both were assigned to work with the shuttle’s robot arm — and for three years they have mastered the intricacies of the 15-metre Canadian contraption. Dr Ride and Colonel Fabian will take turns exercising the arm, twice snaring the S.P.A.S. package, depositing it in a separate orbit and then retrieving it after Captain Crippen and Commander Hauck have practised rendezvous manoeuvres in a rehearsal for a satellite rescue and repair mission next year. S.P.A.S. was built by the West German firm, Messer-schmitt-Boelkow-Blohm, which hopes to sell commercial space on it to various experimenters. Many of the experiments on board focus on exploiting the weightlessness and vacuum of space to manufacture materials and pharmaceuticals with a purity not attainable in Earth’s gravity.