Space: Bugs, Bees and Balky Radios

Despite some slips, Columbia scores a hat trick in space

The problems were exasperating, almost tinged with gallows humor. Barely had the space shuttle Columbia settled into orbit last week than the ship’s veteran commander, Marine Colonel Jack Lousma, 46, developed a severe case of motion sickness. The ship itself also suffered a recurrence of an old ailment: during lift-off it lost several dozen heat-shielding tiles. As Columbia whirled 150 miles above the earth, still other things began to go wrong—two television cameras failed, the $1.2 million toilet clogged, a latch on the cargo-bay doors temporarily jammed, mysterious static rang in the astronauts’ ears, and a teleprinter spilled paper wildly. The most serious failure came when gremlins knocked out some of the shuttle’s radio links, briefly raising fears that there might be a premature halt to the mission.

Some spoilsport journalists suggested that Columbia was showing all the symptoms of a used car. Not so, replied Houston Flight Director Neil Hutchinson, adding, “If it’s acting like a used car, I’d like to own it.” In fact, Columbia’s glitches, with the exception of the radio breakdown, were all relatively minor, and it was unfortunate that they obscured the mission’s true importance. By making a record-breaking third voyage into space, Columbia was providing stunning proof of NASA’s basic vision: that the U.S. could build and operate a spacecraft capable of moving in and out of orbit with the reliability of a commercial jet flying between terrestrial cities.

For all the problems, Lousma and his sidekick, Air Force Colonel C. Gordon Fullerton, 45, a space rookie, tackled their assignments with gusto, so much in fact that they suffered from fatigue during the first few days. But they bounced back after getting extra sleep and rearranging their work schedule. Their biggest challenge was operating a Canadian-built, remote-controlled arm that reached 50 ft. outside the shuttle. When the TV camera at the far end of the arm malfunctioned, the astronauts skillfully used binoculars to guide the giant limb, even getting it to lift an experimental package out of Columbia ‘s cavernous cargo bay. They also maneuvered the ship so different parts faced the sun, exposing them to temperatures as high as 200° F and as low as -200° F for up to 80 hrs. at a time. That served as a vital test of the ship’s ability to survive extreme conditions.

The mission was another NASA television spectacular, and Lousma and Fullerton shone as showmen. As Fullerton pointed his TV camera at such scenes as Arizona’s Painted Desert and the snowcapped Rockies during one pass over the U.S., Lousma exulted, “This good old America, from sea to shining sea in just twelve minutes. It really is America the beautiful!”

Because late winter rains had turned Columbia’s previous landing site—the usually hard-packed desert floor around California’s Edwards Air Force Base—into a quagmire, the shuttle was scheduled to glide to a landing early this week in another wasteland, known as the Northrup Strip, at the western edge of New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. It was there that the first atomic bomb was exploded in 1945 and Wernher von Braun fired V-2 rockets for the U.S. Army after World War II. The last-minute switch in touchdown sites will cost an extra $2.5 million and nine days in “turnaround” time before Columbia’s next scheduled flight in June. But that is much less than the tab would have been if the flight had been postponed until Edwards dried out.

From the start, the space agency seemed determined to avoid postponements. A malfunctioning heat sensor caused an hour’s delay the night before the launch, but then Columbia hit its new blast-off time with 15-hundredths of a second to spare. As the shuttle punched through the hazy blue Florida skies, Lousma, who orbited the earth 859 times aboard Skylab in 1973 and also experienced motion sickness then, exclaimed, “The first part of this ride is a real barn burner!” Some three-quarters of a million people were on hand—the biggest launch crowd since the moon shots. The only visible difference from previous launches was a new color for the shuttle’s blimpish external fuel tank: an unsightly brown. To save weight (600 lbs.) and money ($15,000), NASA had left off the usual coat of gleaming white paint.

Though NASA had finally managed to launch the shuttle on the appointed day, not everything was A-O.K. A caution light soon flashed in the cockpit. It signaled another old problem: one of the shuttle’s three electric generators was overheating and had to be shut down a few minutes ahead of time. Lousma and Fullerton also reported a blizzard of white flakes outside their windows. These were icy chunks from the big fuel tank. Some may have knocked off about two dozen white tiles from the ship’s nose. A few loosened tiles apparently smeared the windshield.

That night Lousma was subjected to another kind of stress. While Fullerton snoozed in a sleeping bag on a lower level, he remained behind in the cockpit, where radio static woke him each time Columbia passed near the U.S.S.R. The Soviets were thought to be tracking the ship with their powerful radar. Mission Control jogged the astronauts out of their reveries the next morning with a recording of Willie Nelson singing On the Road Again. That proved an understatement. By afternoon so much work had piled up that the astronauts pleaded for a reprieve from some of their tasks. But there were things that could not be delayed.

Fullerton began guiding the remote-controlled arm, essential for retrieving satellites in the future, through various maneuvers, extending it and flexing its joints, only to discover that a TV camera on its “wrist” had failed. Another camera at the rear of the cargo bay succumbed as well. Even so, the remaining camera at the arm’s “elbow” was providing clear pictures, including shots of the nose showing where tiles had been damaged or lost. While reviewing films of the launch, technicians discovered that still other tiles had fallen off the top surface of the shuttle’s big body flap during liftoff. None of the missing tiles, however, seemed crucial to a safe re-entry into the atmosphere.

Far more so than on previous flights, science played a major part in the mission. One of the more intriguing experiments, performed in part during a telecast to earth, involved isolating kidney and blood cells by the use of small electrical charges. The technique, called electrophoresis, could be extremely useful in creating vaccines and other biological substances of exceptional purity, and should work far better in zero-g than on earth. As Lousma hovered over the glass columns, Fullerton’s bald head suddenly appeared upside down in a corner of the screen. “That must be the vampire coming after the red blood cells,” said Mission Control.

Nine so-called pathfinder experiments, all but one stored in the cargo bay, measured the shuttle’s environment as a prelude to future scientific work aboard the ship. Some 96 seeds and seedlings were kept in Columbia’s cabin to see how they would grow in conditions of weightlessness. Other instruments studied the shuttle’s electrical characteristics, the effect of the solar wind and the impact of micrometeorites, stray particles floating through space. One of the most complex of these experiments was a 350-lb. automated lab called the plasma diagnostics package. Held aloft and moved about by the mechanical arm, it measured the electromagnetic fields and charged gases around the orbiter.

Some of the bugs in the shuttle did not catch the astronauts by surprise. During a midweek telecast, Lousma and Fullerton unveiled a cage full of insect passengers, three dozen caterpillar moths, house flies and honeybees. They were on board at the suggestion of Todd Nelson, 18, of Rose Creek, Minn., winner of a nationwide contest for high school students. The object of Todd’s experiment: to determine the flight characteristics of various types of insects in zero-g. The bugs did not seem to get the idea. Except when their plastic containers were jostled by the astronauts, they mostly clung to the walls. The astronauts were sympathetic. Said Lousma: “You don’t see Gordo flapping his wings in zero-g either.”

The puzzling radio problems developed during Columbia’s 55th swing around the earth. Something was disturbing the transmission of telemetry—the thousands of bits of data that enable Mission Control to monitor everything from the astronauts’ heartbeats to temperatures in various parts of the ship. Investigating further, the controllers found three of the four telemetry channels had gone silent. No one could immediately explain why, although one suspicion was a computer error. But controllers saw no reason for alarm. Other radio links were available for transmitting the information, which, in any case, was not needed for a safe landing. So after a few nervous moments, the astronauts could look forward to spending a full week in space, Columbia’s longest flight to date.

—By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral