The View from Space: Landing scare for Columbia

By John Holliman

e-mail: jholliman@CNN.com

May 5, 1998
Web posted at: 3:36 PM EDT (1536 GMT)

In this column:

• Vets in space
• Next stop: Mir
• ISS update

(CNN) -- Space Shuttle Columbia is back on the ground and the crew back in Houston, but it was touch and go there at the end.

For the shuttle to land safely, the commander has to do some fancy maneuvering in the final few minutes of flight. The shuttle leaves orbit an hour before landing and must slow from 17,000 mph to about 200 mph before touching. To do that, he has to make a series of turns to slow the spaceship down. Unlike an airplane, the shuttle can't use its engine for landing. It glides in without getting a second try at the runway.

The controls are very similar to those on an airplane. And for them to work, there has to be power to the shuttle's control surfaces. This comes from three auxiliary power units. They're fast-turning pumps that make hydraulic fluid move the rudder, the elevons, the brakes and the nose wheel.

Despite problems, Columbia landed safely Sunday

They spin so fast that they need their own cooling system. Standard procedure is to turn on the APUs just before landing. The day before, one of them is turned on for testing, just to make sure at least one is working. Last Saturday, when the No. 3 APU was tested, it failed.

NASA managers told us the problem was not major and that the shuttle could land with one APU, although the controls would be sluggish. Even so, the loss of an APU is a scary thing for the shuttle crew.

Ground managers decided to turn on one APU a few minutes before the de-orbit burn, turn on the second one a bit later, and then attempt to turn on the No. 3 APU just before touchdown. It all worked and the landing went fine, as you probably saw on CNN, but the faulty APU will be taken apart to try to make sure this situation does not ever occur again.

Vets in space

The mission is being hailed as a big success, and the astronauts did lots of research into why blood pressure changes make some people lose their balance when they get up suddenly. There were a number of experiments on sleep problems. Astronauts have a tough time sleeping in space. Who wouldn't with all the excitement of being in orbit? Several crew members were given the natural sleep aid, melatonin, and others were given a placebo. I imagine the ones who got the fake pill know who they are, but we haven't heard for sure yet.

Astronauts wore special headgear as part of a comprehensive sleep study

One of the crew members who was outfitted with a series of probes attached to his head for sleep pointed out that on Earth nobody could sleep with all that stuff banging around on the pillow, but in microgravity, you don't even feel it.

Rick Linnehan became an emergency animal doctor early in the mission. When the veterinarian-astronaut noticed that the mother rats were not feeding the newborn rats on board, he recruited his fellow astronauts to help save their lives. While Linnehan and Canadian surgeon Dave Williams injected liquid under the skin of the baby rats, the other astronauts took other sick rats into their hands to warm, wash and dry them and try to coax them back to health. It worked pretty well. Several dozen of the rats survived the experience.

There has been talk about allowing this crew of seven and Columbia to take another trip to orbit in August to conduct more experiments on the brain. NASA has decided not to allow this to happen for a couple of reasons. First, all the science objectives of neurolab, the shuttle's cargo, were accomplished, and second, the ground-based scientists don't understand why more than half the baby rats on board were allowed to starve to death by the mother rats. This second problem shocked many of the biologists and medical scientists who prepared the rats for this mission. Until they understand what went wrong, neurolab will remain grounded.

Next stop: Mir

The next shuttle mission will fly in early June. Discovery is being prepared with a roomy cargo bay to travel to Mir and bring Andy Thomas back to Earth. There's extra room in the spacehab module out back, because this will be NASA's last shuttle trip to Mir. The engineers and scientists who sent millions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment to Mir want to get at least some of it back.

Mir's future is becoming more certain every day. Russian space officials tell CNN that Mir probably won't be inhabited much after this year. There's even some talk about having the current crew of cosmonauts turn out the lights and leave the station when their tour of duty is over this fall.

Mir

Mir's Russian program manager, Valery Ryumin, is traveling to Mir on shuttle Discovery to take a look and determine for himself if there's much reason to keep the space station aloft.

The Russians have a plan to lower Mir's orbit, starting with the next Progress supply ship visit. In the past the shuttle and unmanned progress ships have been used to raise Mir's orbit to keep it in space, but now the opposite is being done. The plan is to separate the space station into pieces one by one, and allow the individual segments to fall into the atmosphere. The final segment of Mir will consist of the base block, which was the first piece launched 12 years ago, and the Krystal module, which has been used for science research and habitation. These two pieces will be dropped into the ocean as Mir's final orbit ends.

Andy Thomas, who is in his final month as a Mir astronaut, says he'll hate to see the space station die. He hopes it will remain in orbit for at least another year.

ISS update

The fact is, Russia continues to have severe financial problems with its space program. The people I'm talking to say its just not possible to continue spending on Mir and to meet the demands of other international partners for the new space station.

A team of NASA and Boeing officials is just back from more than a week of talks with the Russians about delays in the new station. There's a growing consensus that it makes no sense to start building the space station until the end of this year. The original goal of launching the first piece in June is totally off the books. A December or January launch is looking more and more likely.

My favorite story this week comes from NASA's Wallops Island, Virginia, flight facility. Four teams of high school students have spent the year preparing experiments to fly in space, and they're at the launch pad this week to load their equipment on a sounding rocket and watch it fly. The students are from Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota. The students have been working on their experiments all year, and this week they get to see them fly. We'll let you know what happens.

The next week in space will be busy for me. I'll be in Houston for a series of briefings on the new space station. We'll talk from there next week.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.

Related stories:

• Shuttle flight schedule wrecked by Russians - May 4, 1998
• Columbia lands safely - May 3, 1998
• Shuttle astronauts nurse rats, but more die - April 28, 1998
• Russia's Mir to start winding down next month - April 28, 1998

Related sites:

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• NASA
  • NASA Shuttle Web
  • NASA Shuttle-Mir Web
  • International Space Station

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