Thirty years ago this month, on America’s 206th birthday,
astronauts T.K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield returned from
Earth orbit, landing safely on Runway 22, a concrete strip
at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Among the dignitaries
waiting for the crew were President Ronald Reagan and First
Lady Nancy Reagan. Years later Mattingly remembered that NASA
had marketed the mission so heavily that the crew had “to
land on the Fourth of July, no matter what day we took off.
Even if it was the fifth, we were going to land on the Fourth,”
he joked. “That meant, if you didn’t do any of
your test mission, that’s okay, as long as you just
land on the Fourth, because the president is going to be there.”
STS-4,
the final flight of the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) program,
did in fact complete 92 percent of its test objectives. The
OFT program consisted of four two-man crews for the first
four missions of the shuttle program. Each flight crew conducted
a series of assessments and tests on the vehicle’s hardware.
The test program verified the accuracy of tests conducted
on the ground in wind tunnels and simulations and also provided
engineers with a greater understanding of shuttle heating
and loads during launch and landing. STS-4 provided important
data on Columbia’s thermal performance, the reaction
control system and the Remote Manipulator System, or robot
arm.
NASA was on the cusp of a new age. As Columbia’s crew
prepared for the final orbital test in the spring of 1982,
visible changes were underway, especially in crew training.
At a May news conference Hartsfield explained, “Our
preparation for STS-4 has been emphasizing perhaps a little
different nature,” than those of the first three flights.
“That is, we’re trying to prepare ourselves to
move into the ops era. We’ve spent a great deal of our
training in replanting our procedures, weeding out some of
the contingency things that you worry about on early flights.”
For instance, he said, “We’ve been worrying more
about how to adapt our procedures and streamlining them for
operations.”
STS-4
represented the space agency’s first step toward using
the vehicle as a microgravity space factory, specifically
to determine the viability of producing pharmaceuticals in
orbit. The Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System (CFES),
a device built by McDonnell Douglas in partnership with the
Ortho Pharmaceuticals division of Johnson & Johnson, flew
on the shuttle’s middeck where Hartsfield operated the
experiment. The flight proved the concept and later Charlie
Walker, a member of the McDonnell Douglas team, became the
first industrial payload specialist to fly onboard the space
shuttle on Hartsfield’s second flight, STS-41D.
The program’s fourth flight also featured the first
Department of Defense payload, which resulted in changes to
NASA’s open access policy. No secure communication line
had yet been established for the mission so the crew devised
a system of communicating with the ground so that classified
information would not be leaked.
“We
had the checklist divided up in sections that we just had
letter names like Bravo Charlie, Tab Charlie, Tab Bravo that
they could call out,” Hartsfield explained. “When
we talked to Sunnvale, to Blue Cube out there, military control,
they said, ‘Do Tab Charlie,’ or something. That
way it was just unclassified.”
“We
had the checklist divided up in sections that we just had
letter names like Bravo Charlie, Tab Charlie, Tab Bravo that
they could call out,” Hartsfield explained. “When
we talked to Sunnvale, to Blue Cube out there, military control,
they said, ‘Do Tab Charlie,’ or something. That
way it was just unclassified.”
The shuttle’s final test flight opened a new era in
human spaceflight. Reagan equated the landing with “the
historical equivalent to the driving of the golden spike,
which completed the first transcontinental railroad.”
The space shuttle was now operational, and the program turned
its attention to utilizing the resources and capabilities
to be found in low Earth orbit. The next flight, STS-5, featured—for
the first time—two mission specialists and the successful
deploy of two commercial communications satellites from the
Orbiter's payload bay, moving NASA’s space shuttle into
the business of spaceflight as a space freighter or truck.
For more information on this exciting mission, read some selected
oral history interview excerpts about STS-4.
And for more memories and experiences from more than 700 remarkable
people involved in the space program over the last 50 years,
read their oral histories available
on the JSC History Portal: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/oral_histories.htm.
View
the STS-4 photo gallery!
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