Abstract
Reporting the launch of Discovery for the STS-51C mission in the early afternoon of January 24, 1985, the New York Times said, “The sky was so clear that viewers could still see the speck of light five minutes after lift-off.” But the transparency of the mission was inversely proportional to that of the Earth’s atmospheric shroud. In fact, almost nothing was known about the payload or the mission objectives, because for the first time NASA had broken its custom of issuing a press kit to the media and the general public to outline the flight. The agency did not even disclose the launch time, activating the large countdown display that sits on the grass of the KSC press site just 5 minutes prior to lift-off. Instead of thousands of viewers eager to be rattled, shaken and overwhelmed by the power of a Shuttle launch, the event was witnessed by only about two hundred people.
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Notes
- 1.
“Speck of light” was a reference to the ability of ground observers to stare at the hot-as-hell exhaust from Discovery ’s three main engines even though it was already more than halfway through the ascent.
- 2.
According to the laws of space mechanics, the lowest orbital inclination that a rocket can achieve is equal to the latitude of the launching site. In the case of the Kennedy Space Center , this means that a payload can be placed into any orbit ranging from 28.5° (the latitude of KSC ) and 90° (polar orbit). If necessary, the payload can be subsequently maneuvered to a lower inclination but the high cost in terms of propellant makes it better to launch from a launching site at a lower latitude. For this reason, the closer to the equator the launching site is the wider is the range of orbital inclinations available for any given payload.
- 3.
This does not mean that launches across ground cannot be made. In fact, because Russia and China do not have launch facilities close to the ocean, they launch their rockets over large areas that are scarcely populated.
- 4.
The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) was a 1960s Air Force program which had the ostensible goal of placing military personnel on-orbit to conduct scientific experiments to determine the “military usefulness” of flying men in space and, if the need ever arose, the techniques and procedures this would require.
- 5.
Flame trenches are placed beneath a rocket launch pad to discharge the exhaust away from the pad, so that it does not bounce back to the ascending rocket and flood its engines, potentially leading to destruction of the rocket in a matter of seconds.
- 6.
Behind every Shuttle crew there was a team of five to eight astronauts who served as the crew’s point of contact between NASA-JSC and NASA-KSC . They were the eyes and ears to the Shuttle vehicle. Officially the Astronaut Support Personnel (ASP) they were nicknamed the Cape Crusaders.
- 7.
The Shuttle launch pads were composed of a Fixed Service Structure and a Rotating Service Structure that closed around the stack on the pad. However, the rotating structure provided only limited weather shielding, as its main purpose was to allow loading of the payload into the vertically oriented payload bay.
- 8.
This is the radius as measured from the Earth’s rotational axis, not from the planet’s center.
- 9.
On the other hand the closer a launch site is to the equator, the better it is for launching into geostationary orbit. And the best latitude for launching deep space missions into the plane of the ecliptic is one at a latitude of 23.5° to cancel out the tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to that plane.
- 10.
The Orbiter payload bay doors were not part of the primary structure designed to take up flight loads from the surrounding fuselage; they were only an aerodynamic fairing. The SRB casing was the primary structure of the booster itself.
- 11.
Membrane stiffness can be thought of as the difficulty of bending a laminate of composite material when a compressive force on the laminate plane is applied at two opposite sides. As an example, hold a sheet of paper with your two hands and bring the opposite sides close. Try this with a sheet of cardboard. While it will be easy to bend the paper, it will be necessary to apply a greater force for the cardboard. The membrane stiffness of the paper is almost nonexistent while that for the cardboard is considerably greater. The stiffness of a membrane can be radically altered by changing the number of layers and their thickness and orientation.
- 12.
This was the first time since Apollo 13 that a US manned space missions was affected by the illness of a crew member.
- 13.
For the Shuttle, every additional degree in inclination cost 625 pounds in useful payload.
- 14.
Eberst, Neirinck and Karcher were other satellite spotters.
- 15.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has its headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, Colorado.
- 16.
At the time of this book’s publication, Richelson was a senior fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington DC. Its goal is to gather declassified US documents obtained by the Freedom of Information Act to help to shed light on some of the most tantalizing and mysterious espionage programs of the United States.
- 17.
Despite being written with upper case letters, this is not an acronyms. It is a code name. It might not be the satellite’s real name at all.
- 18.
PAPI stands for Precision Approach Path Indicator. It is a system of lights on the left of the runway which enables a pilot to ascertain whether he is following the correct approach path.
- 19.
The SDIO was created by the Department of Defense in 1984 to oversee the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a missile defense system intended to protect the USA from a nuclear attack by ballistic missiles. Part of the system would include orbital platforms to detect and shoot missiles aimed at American soil. The SDI was publicly announced by President Ronald W. Reagan on March 23, 1983, and soon nicknamed the “Star Wars” program.
- 20.
The SPAS-II was an improved version of the SPAS-I that flew on STS-7 and STS-41B .
- 21.
For a detailed description of the Orbiter’s RCS and OMS, refer to Chapter 6 of my previous book To Orbit and Back Again: How the Space Shuttle Flew in Space.
- 22.
For a detailed description of the Orbiter’s avionics system, refer to Chapter 1 of my previous book To Orbit and Back Again: How the Space Shuttle Flew in Space
- 23.
In collaboration with other agencies, NORAD safeguards the sovereign airspaces of the USA and Canada by responding to unknown, unwanted, and unauthorized air activity approaching and operating within these airspaces.
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Sivolella, D. (2017). Space Shuttle in Uniform. In: The Space Shuttle Program. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54946-0_9
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