Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986

7. Open for Business

7. Open for Business The demonstration missions were complete. The shuttle was considered operational. America’s new Space Transportation System was open for business, and one of its primary purposes would be the deployment of satellites. sts-5 Crew: Commander Vance Brand, Pilot Bob Overmyer, Mission Specialists Joe Allen and Bill Lenoir Orbiter: Columbia Launched: 11 November 1982 Landed: 16 November 1982 Mission: Launch of two communications satellites Satellite deployment was precisely the mission of the first operational mission , sts-5. It was the first shuttle flight to deploy satellites into geosynchronous orbit, which is ideal for communications satellites because the satellite remains at roughly the same longitude as it orbits Earth. To achieve a geosynchronous orbit, a satellite must reach an altitude around one hundred times higher than that at which the shuttle orbits. For the shuttle to launch such a satellite, the satellite was carried into low Earth orbit in the shuttle’s payload pay and then boosted into the higher orbit using a booster rocket. sts-5 was a mission full of firsts. In addition to the satellite deployments , sts-5’s four-man crew doubled the crew from the previous missions’ commander and pilot team to include the first two mission specialists to fly, Joe Allen and Bill Lenoir. Because of the deployments, sts-5 was also nasa’s first “commercial mission,” with the focus being on performing a service for paying customers. Joe Allen had been selected as part of nasa’s second group of scientistastronauts in 1967, and the move to larger crews had long been awaited by him open for business | 143 and his classmates. “The first assignment of mission specialists we knew was going to be [sts-]5, because the system was going to be declared operational after the first four test flights if nothing untoward happened,” Allen recalled. We also knew that the next in line to be assigned were the scientists-astronauts. Those who had arrived [in the first of the two scientist-astronaut selections] had already flown, Jack Schmitt being the first to fly on the last Apollo, and then Joe Kerwin, Ed Gibson, and Owen K. Garriott had flown on the Skylab. So there were just now, I think, nine of us who would be considered. I guess I never thought much about it, but I almost assumed that maybe they went alphabetically , because they put myself and Bill Lenoir aboard that first operational flight. And I was thrilled, absolutely thrilled. After having been assigned to the crew for just a few weeks, Allen decided he understood why he had been picked to be a part of that particular team, and he commented on it to George Abbey, who made crew assignments . “I was the impedance matching device between the two marine pilots and the mit engineer. ‘Impedance matching’ is an engineering term for getting very unlike electrical circuits to communicate, one with the other.” Allen recalled that while he made the comment somewhat in jest, Abbey did not find it as amusing as he did. “I suspect that there were elements of truth in this, because I was very good at getting different groups of people to understand each other. With no scintilla of modesty at all, I would say that’s probably my strongest suit, understanding the way different individuals think about things and then enabling communication between them, in spite of their differences. I assert I was—I hope it’s not overblown—very successful in getting scientists to understand what flight-crew members needed , and getting flight-crew members to understand what scientists needed, even though neither group spoke the other’s language.” Both groups had the same motivation—a successful mission—but each approached the task in its own way. “You wanted the ultimate result to be a successful mission, and successful in later Space Shuttle flights and in the last Apollo flights meant scientifically rich in what was achieved. So I was the impedance matching device between Bill Lenoir, an extremely smart, very well disciplined, very tightly wound individual, and Vance Brand and Bob Overmyer, whose backgrounds were military, with a military way of thinking about things, and they had a much higher tolerance for people being not quite so intense.” 144 | open for business The addition of mission specialists, and the corresponding increase in crew size, resulted in a modification to the orbiter for this flight. Prior to the...