by Jay Barbree
The centuries-old technology that built Christopher Columbus’s three sailing ships passes the twentieth-century Space Shuttle Endeavour, awaiting liftoff on its launch pad. The replicas of the Santa Maria, Nina, and Pinta were part of the Spain ’92 Foundation tour of American ports to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. (NASA)
When Endeavour reached Hubble’s orbit, the astronauts found and seized the observatory with the Shuttle’s robotic arm as planned, and then the spacewalkers, equipped with pressure suits and working in pairs, went through an astonishing week of giving the crippled telescope new life and sparkling accuracy.
Floating a constant 375 miles above a curving horizon, looking like living snowmen, the spacewalkers performed weightless ballets to make their repairs. It was a feat unparalleled in history, surgeons of the new age operating beneath a star-filled theater. There had not been so much attention paid by billions of people since astronauts walked on the moon. With producer Phil Griffin running interference for us in New York, Tom Brokaw’s viewers, as well as those of NBC’s early-morning Today Show, were looking over the spacewalkers’ shoulders. Live television cameras followed their every move. We from NBC were sleeping in two shifts. The crew and I were up at 4:00 A.M. to take care of Today and then back to bed, then up again at 2:00 P.M. to take care of Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News. A couple of times we came close to meeting ourselves coming when we were going.
Floating on the end of the shuttle Endeavour’s robotic arm at the top of the mammoth Hubble space telescope, spacewalkers Story Musgrave and Jeffrey Hoffman are seen above the west coast of Australia. (NASA).
For the spacewalkers, performing microsurgery on Hubble’s systems, as well as moving bulky and cumbersome equipment into the right slot at the right speed and with perfect aim, was like trying to weave a frond basket wearing thick mittens. The astronauts performed eleven major repairs while Hubble managers on the ground sweated out every move. One misstep could wreck the mission and damage Hubble beyond repair. Yet, from changing fuses to sliding the refrigerator-sized COSTAR into the telescope’s bowels with less than an inch of room to spare, they pulled it off, against terrible odds, with nonstop perfection.
Finally the nerve-racking mission was nearing its end. The old solar panels were removed from their mountings. Spacewalker Kathy Thornton, with her five children on the ground clinging to the family’s television set, had her feet secured to the end of the Space Shuttle’s long robotic arm. Thornton held the twisted panels in her hands and pushed them away in tantalizing slow motion. Commander Dick Covey aimed the Shuttle’s rocket motors at the old solar wings. Streaming rocket thrust struck the golden panels, and they flapped eerily up and down, looking like mankind’s first space bird. Kathy’s children jumped up and down before the television, screaming, “Mom is Superwoman,” as the discarded solar panels began falling back toward Earth’s atmosphere to disappear in a burst of flame.
Kathy Thornton and her crewmates returned to Earth, and Hubble managers began chewing their nails. They now had to wait to determine whether the orbital telescope surgery was as successful as they dared hope.
Power was fed to Hubble’s controls. The space observatory accepted its checkout commands with a thumbs-up. The orbiting telescope was alive. Astronomers gathered before the huge television screen monitoring Hubble’s cameras in the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The control center was bathed in the same tension as a busy maternity ward.
The master television screen flickered, then its picture steadied, and there it was—the first image from the rebuilt Hubble. Star AGK +81 D226… clear and sharp. It was perfection, and those in the room stared at one another until the tension was gone and applause, cheering, and backslapping began. Astronomers hugged one another fiercely, and NASA’s top scientist, Ed Weiler, told those of us in the media, “It’s beyond our wildest expectations.” From nearsightedness to super vision, this was the new Hubble, and NBC space correspondent Robert Hager quipped, “It’s amazing what you can do with a $629 million pair of contact lenses.”
Before the astronauts’ rescue-and-repair flight, Hubble could see out to four billion light-years from Earth. Now the massive space telescope’s “vision reach” had tripled to twelve billion light years. Its new clarity would fulfill the promise of the massive orbiting telescope—its lens peering almost to the beginning of time.
Hubble fired the most doubting imaginations, because in the space telescope’s twenty-year lifetime it would answer many eager questions.
Were there other planets outside our solar system? Hubble answered yes as it showed astronomers hundreds in our galactic neighborhood.
How old is the universe? Hubble says 13.9 billion years.
Is the speed of light really the ultimate velocity? Or will we find unanticipated matter and energy that travel faster? What exactly is dark matter? Does it really make up most of the universe? And what happens to the trillions of tons of matter that vanish into the maw of black holes? What are the white gushers in space pouring vast amounts of subatomic particles into our universe—with no identifiable source or known reason? And is the universe expanding? Hubble says yes as it observes exploding stars in galaxies whose light was emitted when the universe was half its present age, and the space telescope reports the universe’s expansion is accelerating—being driven by an unknown force.
With Hubble still marching into the future, with astronauts planning one more maintenance-and-repair mission so the magnificent space telescope can study and photograph the first stars and galaxies formed twelve billion years ago, will we come to understand our place in the order of being? And of most importance, will we every answer the small child’s question, “How high is up?”
Stay tuned.
TWENTY-SIX
As the Century Turned
One of NASA’s oldest dreams was to build a permanent space station. It would, in some minds, be the beginning of an orbiting space city, a gravity-free outpost where earthlings could multiply, raise families, live longer, and produce the stuff and foods needed for self-sufficiency in orbit.
NASA had a small taste of operating its own space station in 1973. That’s when it used rockets and spaceships left over from canceled Apollo missions. The agency launched three separate crews of three astronauts each to spend up to nine months aboard the station named Skylab. The astronauts proved humans could live and work in space for periods up to eighty-four days with few ill effects.
The Russians, after losing the moon race, used their workable rockets to build their own versions. They launched a series of Salyut laboratories with two and three cosmonaut crews staying in space for months at a time. It was from this experience that Russia sent a larger and, to many space engineers’ way of thinking, the first real space station into orbit. It was called Mir, and cosmonauts stayed aboard their home in the sky for up to a year.
Spurred by Russia’s success, the United States signed an agreement with Japan, Canada, and the member nations of the European Space Agency to jointly develop an international orbiting complex. The United States would maintain the leadership role and provide the major elements of the future space city, with the Europeans and Japanese building research modules and Canada developing a mobile service center, a maintenance depot, and a large robotic arm.
By having to compete with the financial weight of America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (called “Star Wars” by some), the Soviet Union broke apart and ceased to exist. Officials of the cash-strapped Russian Republic began vigorous international marketing of the still-to-be-built larger station called Mir 2. The most interested party was the United States. Meanwhile the International Space Station survived by only one vote in Congress. This spurred NASA to negotiate a deal making the former Soviet Union the newest partner in the international dream.
With Russia adding its Mir 2 sections and rockets and Soyuz spacecraft to the program, the International Space Station grew by a fourth; its cr
ew would now increase from four to six. The addition of the Russians reduced America’s overall costs, and both houses of Congress smiled as the first of a series of international cooperative missions got underway. Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev boarded a Space Shuttle and became the first of many cosmonauts who would ride into orbit on America’s Space Transportation System.
Cosmonaut Vladimir Titov was aboard the shuttle Discovery when it flew to within thirty-seven feet of Russia’s Mir and began “station keeping,” a technique where each spacecraft orbits side by side with another, separated by a small distance. It was the first meeting of American and Russian spaceships in orbit since the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in July 1975, and it was a rehearsal for a series of Space Shuttle and Mir dockings.
From February 1994 to June 1998, NASA racked up eleven flights to the large orbiting complex. Seven American astronauts spent a total of 977 days, 2.7 years, in residence aboard Russia’s Mir. It was on-the-job-training for the time when the International Space Station would become reality—not only for Russia and America but for thirteen other partners in the international project as well.
Between March 22 and August 26, 1996, Dr. Shannon Lucid began America’s continuous presence on Mir. The veteran astronaut set an American single spaceflight record with her 188-day stay, and those who followed enjoyed uneventful visits until astronaut Jerry Linenger arrived for his residency. The good doctor became the first American to take a spacewalk outside of the Russian outpost, but he also became the first astronaut to fight fire in orbit. At 10:35 P.M. Moscow time, February 23, 1997, cosmonaut Sasha Lazutkin activated a backup oxygen canister. It was needed because the station was supporting an overlapping six-person crew. Soon after the canister was activated, the master alarm erupted, and Linenger’s eyes went wide. A four-foot flame shot across the Kvant 1 research module.
Astronaut Alan Shepard (left), America’s first man in space, and astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson (center), the commander of the hundredth American mission, recognize NBC correspondent Jay Barbree as the only journalist to have covered all one hundred American flights. (NASA).
Warm air doesn’t rise in a weightless environment. Fire cannot spread as it does on Earth. But this one had a built-in oxygen supply. The blowtorch-like flame rendered the Mir’s water-based extinguishers useless, and the flames blocked access to one of the two Soyuz emergency escape vehicles. This meant only three of the six people on the station could leave.
Unable to put out the fire, the cosmonauts and astronauts had only one choice: They had to let the fire burn out. Station commander Valeri Korzun aimed his extinguisher at the far wall to keep it from melting. The extinguisher acted like a rocket thruster, and Linenger had to hold the cosmonaut steady. Others brought in new extinguishers when the old ones ran out. The rest of the crew shut down equipment and powered up the accessible Soyuz. Fourteen minutes later, the canister had no fuel left to burn. The fire disappeared as quickly as it had ignited.
A second emergency happened on June 25, 1997, during astronaut Mike Foale’s stay. A manual docking system could have cost him and his crewmates their lives. A Russian Progress supply ship ran into the station, knocking a hole in the Mir’s Spektr module. The result was rapid depressurization, and the crew closed the hatch to Spektr. The station’s air pressure stabilized, and after a few flight adjustments, Mir was back in operation.
My colleague covering spaceflight in those days was Robert Hager. Called the “rabbit” by those of us who admired him, Hager would hop from one story to another, and just to fire up our competitive juices, he covered them all superbly.
Robert Hager is a decent, warm, and most likable fellow, and he convinced Tim Russert, another decent, warm, and most likable fellow who is NBC’s Washington bureau chief, that we needed a detailed model of Mir. We needed it if we were to continue covering fires and wrecks and such on the Russian space station. But the main reason was Hager’s belief in models. He used them on most of his stories, including on his wedding night. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, and he told Tim Russert it shouldn’t cost more than a couple of hundred dollars.
Russert, being the supportive manager he is, said, “Fine. Do it,” and Hager was off to model factories seeking the best at the craft.
To cut to the chase, he had this detailed Mir model built at a cost of thousands of dollars. Mir never suffered another accident, and we never got to use the model. I’m told Russert moved it to the center of the bureau to use as a coat rack. Hager retired quietly to a farm in Vermont, where the senior country squire dresses smartly Saturdays and drives his tractor to the better square dances. His wife, Honoré, standing on the back between the two large tires, seems just a bit unseemly.
Back on Earth, trips into space were running like a well-oiled clock, and another senior was getting restless. John Glenn, the first American to orbit our planet, decided he’d had enough of Washington politics, and he retired from the United States Senate with the hope of returning to the pursuits of his youth. John had a hankering to prove a seventy-seven-year-old senior could handle modern spaceflight.
Most agreed it would be difficult for the average septuagenarian. Disregarding any ills, the slow movement of bodily joints, and the reduced strength of bodily functions alone would be enough to keep the average senior citizen out of orbit. But John Glenn was anything but average, and NASA was quick to recognize the public-relations value of welcoming back the senator.
But there was another problem. Lingering like a houseguest who refused to leave was a NASA promise. After the Challenger disaster, the agency announced that when it was ready to fly citizens again, the first person would be teacher, Barbara Morgan, who had been Christa McAuliffe’s backup. But a fast-thinking NASA moved quickly to nullify its promise. The agency decided to make Morgan an astronaut instead. She would attend the same astronaut-training program as the others. She would be trained to fly and to pull regular astronaut duties; then Senator Glenn could go fly again, and everyone would be happy.
Happy, my Aunt Hilda’s petunias! What the hell about the Journalist in Space Project? NASA had promised a journalist would follow the teacher. When I asked, NASA decided, in the tradition of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, it would think about that another day…
It was clear that no matter how well I had recovered from my health setbacks, I could never be more than an “earthbound” astronaut. There would never be a “Journalist in Space”! Instead, there would be those going for political value. The Russians would soon be flying tourists at $20 million a pop!
There are many times in life one must accept the inevitable. I filed the dream away in the “what could have been” drawer and refocused on my job.
I was pleased for my friend John. With a wink and a nod here and there, Glenn, national hero, passed all of NASA’s physical and mental requirements, and the agency loaded up the septuagenarian former astronaut and test pilot with a series of assignments. He was to go into orbit and do research on aged bodies. Well, John Glenn sure had one of those, and he slipped his aged body into his bright orange spaceflight suit and helmet and marched off to join the STS–95 crew.
Curt Brown and Steve Lindsey were the aviators for the mission, and they welcomed the old marine fighter pilot with open arms. The question of what citizen flew first in space was quickly forgotten, and all other critics and whiners and complainers were herded off into the nearby Florida swamps, where they were lost for days.
Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, who had been John Glenn’s backup for his first launch on February 20, 1962, flew down to the Cape to join Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, David Bloom, Robert Hager, and me for NBC’s launch coverage. Scott Carpenter was there to re-create his famous good-luck good-bye. At the precise same moment, Carpenter was to say “God speed, John Glenn” as he had before, and Tom and Brian wanted me around for a little aged experience.
White House correspondent David Bloom (left) is seen here with field producer Dan Shepherd
(right) covering John Glenn’s return to space for the Today Show. (Shepherd Collection).
Seventy-seven-year-old John Glenn relaxes among his experiments on his second space flight. (NASA).
The event had grown into a massive homecoming week at the Cape. The spaceport swelled with gray-haired folks falling off buildings and out of trees, and we seniors were all just tickled to our toes to see John Glenn climb aboard another spaceship. We prayed and wished him luck, and on October 29, 1998, at 2:19 P.M. Eastern time, the space Shuttle Discovery headed into a blue and happy sky. Those of us who had admired Glenn and appreciated his friendship for forty years were never more proud, and we spent nine days watching this seventy-seven-year-old never miss a step. He proved to be the champ we all knew he was by taking care of his assignments, having fun in orbit, and doing a little rocking and singing.
On Saturday, November 7, 1998, at 12:04 P.M. Eastern time, Discovery touched down on its Florida landing strip.
An hour or so later, after all the housekeeping chores on board the shuttle were over, John Glenn strolled off Discovery seemly without a care in the world.
Now you may say, “Why not?”
The why not is that the lack of gravity in space weakens the arms and legs, and it takes some thirty-something astronauts hours, sometimes even days, to get their land legs under them again. Most doctors felt Glenn would need a wheelchair—possibly for days.