STS-2: President Reagan Visits Mission Control

Abstract

The author was a member of the Ascent Team in Mission Control at Johnson Space Center during the second space shuttle flight that launched on November 12, 1981. She was responsible for monitoring the crew’s activities, amending procedures, and documenting the accomplishment of orbiter and payload tests, including the first use of the shuttle’s robotic arm. As a critical power-generating fuel cell and one of the APUs failed, the ground team and astronauts Joe Engle and Richard Truly scrambled to reconfigure systems and reschedule planned tests. The flight was shortened to two days from five, but no managers would approve deleting any activities, so the crew exhausted themselves trying to get everything done. In the midst of a packed schedule, President Reagan visited Mission Control. Despite this visit and accomplishing almost all of the flight objectives, the news media portrayed the flight as a failure of the shuttle’s reusability test.