STS-4 Flight Activities Officer

Abstract

The fourth flight of the space shuttle in July 1982 was the last of the Operational Flight Test Program and the first of a classified military payload controlled by the Air Force out of Sunnyvale, CA. The author served as a Flight Activities Officer on the Entry Team in Mission Control, responsible for crew procedures, schedule, and vehicle attitude and pointing. On the first day of the flight, the secret payload DOD 82-1 sustained a failure, the details of which could not be discussed except on a secure phone line that failed early in the flight and uncovered weaknesses in supporting secure operations. The crew, T. K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield, instituted a space suit demo that hadn’t been coordinated with the flight control teams preflight, uncovering communication issues that needed to be solved prior to the first shuttle spacewalk, then planned for STS-5. Gene Kranz used the amount of teleprinter paper required to update the crew as an example of why an electronic system was needed to communicate with the orbiter in space. The author and her husband, who was a Guidance Officer on this flight, became the first married couple to both work consoles in the Mission Operations Control Room.