Last minute cancellation of Shuttle mission

 

STS-51E – difficult decisions and crew disapointment

 

It is March, 1985 at Launch complex 39A Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Space Shuttle Challenger sits on the launch pad and is ready for her 7th flight into space and the second flight of 1985. The mission, STS-51E, is to deploy the second Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-B) in to orbit and also the Anik C-1.  Launch for mission 51E is set for 7 March 1985 after being delayed from February 20.  At 6:42 PM CST on March 01, NASA releases a status report for the mission in witch it cancels STS-51E. Until this date STS-51E is the only US space mission that was completely cancelled less than a week before launch.

 

                        BY  JACQUES VAN OENE

 

A NASA news release of that day stated: "Problems associated with the TDRS-B satellite have resulted in a decision to cancel the March 07 flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. In addition to repairing the previously announced problem with one cell of TDRS, 24-cell flight battery, NASA officials determined today that it will also be necessary to remove the TDRS from the Shuttle cargo bay to repair a timing problem. This problem came to light during recent testing of the TDRS-1, a similar satellite now in orbit."

 

TDRS program managers did now for some time that the TDRS already in orbit had some timing problems, but they first believed that they were telemetry oriented rather than inherent design flaws On February 26, NASA was told that problems with TDRS-1 were serious enough to force a delay in the launch of STS-51E and that more test would be done on February 27 and 28 at the TRW spacecraft contractor facilities. The test confirmed the timing problems resulting in the total cancellation of the flight. Problems with the TDRS-B and Anik C-1 satellites had already delayed the launch from 20 to February 28, then to March 03 and March 07, 1985 but those delays were not related to the newly discovered problems. The battery problem that forced an earlier launch delay prevented the spacecraft from being in orbit when the more serious timing problems came to light.

 

What to do next…

 

Now NASA had to take some actions on what to do next. First the TDRS-B satellite had to be removed from the cargo bay of Challenger together with the Anik-C1. That took place on March 03, 1985, and they where stored in the payload change-out room at pad-39A. The TDRS was returned to the Payload Processing Facility on March 12. On March 05, the complete Shuttle stack was rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). In the days before the rollback Challenger was saved, flight ordnance was removed, together with crew lockers from the middeck and the two EVA spacesuits from the airlock. Almost simultaneously workers began preparing Space Shuttle Discovery, (who would fly the next scheduled flight after STS-51E, mission STS-51D), to support launch of the Anik-C1 satellite. The plan to retrieve the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) scheduled for STS-51D was dropped. LDEF would remain in orbit, (It was finally retrieved in 1990 on STS-32). Challenger was de-mated from the external tank and its solid rocked boosters on March 07 and moved to the Orbiter Processing facility (OPF). Challenger would now fly STS-51B a Spacelab mission. Discovery was moved to the VAB on March 10 and rolled out to the launch pad-39A on March 15. As all of these things were taking place at KSC it looked like the crew of STS-51E was again without a mission, after the cancellation of STS-41E and STS-41F and now STS-51E. NASA made the decision to give the STS-51E crew the next flight, STS-51D with Discovery, the main reason for this was that Commander Karol Bobko was already assigned to STS-51J a Department of Defence flight, the first flight of the orbiter Atlantis later in 1985, and NASA did not want to break up that crew. The victim of the change in missions was Patrick Baudry, his equipment would take to much room, 5 lockers, on the middeck of Discovery and already placed aboard Discovery was the electrophoresis machine that would be operated by McDonnell Douglas Payload Specialist Charles Walker so the decision was made to replace Baudry with Walker on STS-51D. Baudry was reassigned to STS-51G together with the rest of the original STS-51D crew led by Commander Dan Brandenstein, only Payload Specialist Greg Jarvis had to give his place to Sultan Salman Al Saud from Saudi Arabia who was invited to watch the launch of the Arabsat satellite from space. Greg Jarvis was reassigned to mission STS-51L.

 

The crew

 

The crew for STS-51E, minus the two Payload Specialists, came from the cancelled missions STS-41E and STS-41F, (those two flights had already been combined into one flight after the STS-41D problems). Commander for STS-51E would be Karol J. Bobko. Bobko, 47, a Colonel of the U.S. Air Force was selected as an astronaut in 1969. He was a crewmember of the 56 days Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test (SMEAT) in 1972. Bobko made his first spaceflight in April 1983 as Pilot for STS-6, the maiden voyage of the Shuttle Challenger. During that mission the crew deployed the first TDRS satellite. Pilot for STS-51E would be Donald E. Williams. Williams a 42 year old Commander of the U.S. Navy was selected as an astronaut in 1979. Prior to his selection of pilot for his first space mission Williams worked as a test pilot in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL) at the Johnson Space Center.  M. Rhea Seddon a 37 year old Medical Doctor would serve as Mission Specialist-1 on STS-51E. Seddon was selected as an astronaut in 1978. Mission Specialist-2 would be S. David Griggs a 45 year old Captain of the Naval Air Reserve's. He was selected as an astronaut in 1979. Prior to his selection as an astronaut Griggs worked at the Johnson Space Center as a project pilot for the Shuttle training aircraft which he helped design, develop and test. Jeffrey A. Hoffman a 40 year old Ph.D. would be Mission Specialist-3. Hoffman was selected as an astronaut in 1978. He worked in the Flight Simulation Laboratory at Downey, California. He tested guidance, navigation and flight control systems in preparations for the first Shuttle orbital flight tests. The payload Specialist of STS-51E would be Patrick Baudry a 38 year old Colonel of the French Air Force. Baudry became an astronaut in 1980 and trained in Star City as a back up to Jean-Loupe Crétien for the first Soviet-French space mission in 1982. Crétien would now serve as back up to Baudry for STS-51E.  In January 1985, about one month before the scheduled launch !!!, a second Payload Specialist was added to the crew of STS-51E, Jake Garn a 52 year old

US Senator from Utah. Garn would fly as the first congressional observer on Challenger.

 

The crew patch

 

The patch for mission 51E has quite some history. In fact, four different versions were made. The most known version of this patch is the fourth and final design, that of Shuttle flight STS-51D. The third version of the patch might also be known to some people, the difference being that this sports the name of Challenger and the name "Baudry" as well as a small French flag instead of the name "Walker". Some sources claim that this Challenger patch is the original version and that the Discovery version is based on it, which is not true. In fact, it is the other way around!

If all had gone according to plan, the Discovery patch and five members of the crew would already have flown in August 1984, on Discovery mission STS-41F. STS-41F was to be the second flight of Discovery and the 13th mission of the Shuttle Program. At the time the crew designed their patch, it was still tradition to incorporate the name of the orbiter ("Discovery") in the emblem, as well as some symbols referring to the mission number, with a certain amount of stars being the most popular way to do so. Up to then, this had not posed any problems, although mission STS-41B, the tenth Shuttle flight, had 11 stars on its patch - the original tenth mission (STS-10) had been cancelled in November 1983, too late to change the design.

This, however, did not withhold the (then) five member crew of STS-41F, led by Karol Bobko, to use a 1776 13-star Betsy Ross flag as the center piece of their patch, referring to the fact that they would fly the 13th Shuttle Mission. When STS-41D, the mission prior to STS-41F ran into problems on June the 26th, 1984, having an on-pad engine cut-off that required lengthy maintenance work, the payloads of this first Discovery flight were combined with that of the second, Bobko's STS-41F mission.

After mission 41F was cancelled and the Bobko crew was assigned to the 16th Shuttle mission, STS-51E. Although the symbolical 13-star flag did not make much sense anymore, the crew chose to hold on to their original mission patch design. Two changes had to be made, however: first, STS-51E would be flown with the orbiter Challenger instead of Discovery and second, the name of French astronaut Patrick Baudry, who was already scheduled to fly on STS-51E, had to be incorporated in the patch design. Since there was no room for his name on the main body of the emblem, his name was put on a tab at the bottom of the patch. Since the patch had to be redesigned anyway to sport the name of Challenger, there was no need for the tab to be sewn on separately - as had previously been done for late addition crew members Paul Scully-Power and Marc Garneau on STS-41G - so that the patch could be made out of one piece. 

Soon, the patch manufacturers wished they had been wiser, because a seventh crewmember was assigned to the Bobko-team (Senator Jake Garn) when the newly designed STS-51E patches had just been produced and were waiting to be distributed. Because there already was a fixed tab to the patch, it was impossible to add Garn's name using a sewn on tab. The patch manufacturer chose to simply cut off the fixed Baudry tabs from the emblems and create the third version of the patch by adding a separately sewn on tab with the names of both Baudry and Garn instead. This tab was not placed at the exact center of emblem, to keep Baudry's name in the same position. Because the Baudry-only patches had not yet been distributed, next to none of these escaped from the "Baudry amputation" and that is why this patch is extremely rare. Evidence from the surgery is however still visible in the earlier versions of the patch Baudry-Garn patch.

Ironically enough, all this trouble was to no avail, NASA decided to cancel mission 51E altogether. The Bobko-crew, who had already been bumped once, was granted a ride on the next Shuttle flight, STS-51D. But it had some affect to the patch. Baudry was reassigned to STS-51G so his name would have to be replaced with that of Walker, but the orbiter changed also from Challenger to Discovery so the Challenger patch could not be used anymore. One luck for the patch maker, it meant that the original STS-41F patch design could be used after all with the newly made Garn/Walker tab, to form the fourth and final Bobko emblem and that is the one that was flown on April 12, 1985.

For NASA's public relations office it was not too difficult to come up with a new meaning for the 13-star colonial flag and the 2 stars flanking Discovery: originally referring to the 13th mission, the flag was now "a link to history" and the two stars (standing for the 2nd flight of Discovery) now referred to both Discovery and its namesake, the research vessel it was named after. All of this led to one thing the name of an orbiter would not show up on a crew patch until the maiden voyage of Endeavour, STS-49 in 1992.