In the world I came from, payload requirements would drive the time of day you launched, the time of year, everything. Gary Payton, now deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space, is the only one of the first group of military astronauts to fly he recalls, “I was naive enough to believe that the payload side would be treated by NASA the same way the Air Force launch people treated us. The MSEs thought their job was to help bridge the gulf between the military and civilian space agencies. One fundamental problem was how the two agencies perceived “payload specialists.” NASA thought of them as outsiders, almost guests-engineers or scientists who tended one particular satellite or experiment, and typically flew just once.
INSIDE NASA SPACE SHUTTLE FULL
They returned to the fort bleeding and full of wounds.” Paul Sefchek, one of those who didn’t (he retired from the Air Force in 1989 and died in 1997 at the age of 51), told me in an interview years ago that his colleagues were like “old Army scouts who were sort of aimed at NASA by the Air Force and told to find out whatever they could find out. Only one of that first group ever made it to orbit. And they believed they were the vanguard of the Air Force in space. They were experienced in satellite flying and acquisition. Most had advanced degrees in engineering one was a Ph.D. The new military astronauts ranged in age from 24 to 36. Two years before the shuttle’s first launch, the NRO selected 13 Manned Spaceflight Engineers as potential payload specialists, all but one from the Air Force. The uneasy relationship between the Air Force, NRO, and NASA assumed a human face in 1979, when the military chose its first group of shuttle astronauts. Delays in shuttle launches only increased their worry even before the 1986 Challenger accident, they were looking for a way off the shuttle and back onto conventional rockets like the Titan. Neither the Air Force nor the NRO was ever comfortable relying exclusively on NASA’s vehicle, however. The Air Force signed on to use the shuttle too, and in 1979 started building a launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in northern California for reaching polar orbits. “NRO requirements drove the shuttle design,” says Parker Temple, a historian who served on the policy staff of the secretary of the Air Force and later with the NRO’s office within the Central Intelligence Agency. The spysat agency also wanted the option to fly “once around” polar missions, which demanded more flexibility to maneuver for a landing that could be on either side of the vehicle’s ground track. The NRO built and operated large, expensive reconnaissance satellites, and it wanted a bigger shuttle cargo bay than NASA had planned. Why not?īecause STS-27 was-and remains-a secret mission.īetween 19, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office-an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time-requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system. We don’t know because not a word of the ONYX rescue was reported in newspapers or on television. The astronauts may just as well have fixed the satellite without a spacewalk by Ross and Shepherd. intelligence community.Īt least that’s one possible scenario for what happened. As it turned out, they succeeded in grabbing, fixing, and re-releasing ONYX, for which they later received a medal from the U.S. Without intervention by the crew, the billion-dollar satellite would become a hunk of space junk. But shortly after the astronauts released the spacecraft, called ONYX, from the shuttle’s cargo bay, on December 2, 1988, one of its antenna dishes had failed to open.
INSIDE NASA SPACE SHUTTLE SERIES
The mission of STS-27 had been to deploy the first in a series of new spy satellites that used radar to observe ground targets, in any kind of weather, day or night.
Downstairs in the airlock, mission specialists Jerry Ross and Bill Shepherd waited in their spacesuits for Gibson’s order to go outside and attempt a rescue. Commander Hoot Gibson and pilot Guy Gardner flew the approach, while mission specialist Mike Mullane, at the other end of the flight deck, readied the shuttle’s robot arm for a capture. The giant gold and silver satellite glittered against the black sky as space shuttle Atlantis closed in on it from below.
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