Space reporting has its highs and some lows

Press, 14 May 1985, Page 6

Space reporting has its highs and some lows

By

HOWARD BENEDICT

NZPA-AP Houston

Watching a crystal grow in space is about as exciting as, well, watching ' grass grow. But watching a crystal grow is what reporters did most of as they covered the flight of the space shuttle Challenger. This is what space, the final frontier, has come to. For most of seven days, reporters at the Johnson Space Centre had their eyes glued to closed circuit television that showed a small electronic crystal growing aboard the space-borne laboratory. Three whole millimetres a day. It did get bigger over seven days, 30 times bigger. By the time the astronauts closed out that experiment and returned to Earth, the crystal was the size of a sugar cube. Scientists were excited, but they could not be sure their excitement was merited until they had analysed this crystal and those from two other experiments on Earth. Journalists who have an obligation to write daily stories view such non-news as one of life’s hazards, but this flight tested them severely. Experiments worth hundreds of millions of dollars were being conducted in the spacelab mounted in Challenger’s cargo bay. The astronauts, two of

them doctors, three of them scientists, were gathering data on the stars, the Sun, monkeys, rats, materials processing, cosmic rays, and the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists briefed reporters daily, but they said it might be months before they know results. So all there was to write about was what the astronauts were trying to do. As a result, news stories focused on problems overcome by the handyman astronauts, on a sick monkey, on the escape of the food particles and faeces each time the spacemen changed the food trays in the animal cages. There were only three such tray changes and the debris were vacuumed up each time ydthin 20 minutes. But it is for the flying debris that this flight will be remembered. It would have been the most boring of the 48 United States man-in-space flights, except for the reporter vigils of 29, 59, and 84 days on the three Skylab space station flights in 1973 and 1974. The Challenger-spacelab mission was reclassified as the third most boring, behind Skylab’s 2 and 3. Skylab 1 made some news. Coming on top of a series of shuttle flights in which astronauts have free-floated in space and released and recovered satellites, the seventeenth shuttle flight

was a letdown. Does this mean that shuttle missions have become routine? No. Because of the chance of a serious problem in a very chancy business, major news organisations have to monitor flights round the clock. There are some interesting flights ahead. During the remainder of this year, several satellite launchings are planned, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on a scheme to recover a failed satellite in August, Atlantis will make its maiden flight and spacewalking astronauts will erect metal beams and other structures to test techniques for building a future space station. Next year, shuttles will be dispatching spacecraft to Jupiter and the Sun, both within five days in May. There also will be the space telescope, enabling astronomers to probe 50 times deeper into the universe than before. By the time N.A.S.A. reaches its projected launch rate of 24 a year by 1988, the public may be tired of the whole thing, but not space writers, the ultimate space junkies. They are leery, however, about those two or three Spacelab flights planned every year. The one next October is dedicated wholly to crystal growing. Help!