During the EVA, the slidewires were used as part of a safety procedure to prevent Musgrave or Peterson from inadvertently floating away from the shuttle.Ĭhallenger rises smoothly to orbit under the impulse of her three main engines and twin Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs). The spacewalkers’ first task was to tether themselves to slidewires running along the sills of the payload bay walls (one on either side, to prevent mutual interference) and move towards the aft bulkhead, in the process evaluating their ability to handle tools. It’s a history lesson and a geography lesson a sight like you’ve never seen.” But the main impression is visual: seeing the totality of humanity within a single orbit. “Even though there’s a vacuum in space, if you tap your fingers together, you can hear that sound because you’ve set up a harmonic within the space suit and the sound reverberates within it. “You remember little things like sound,” Musgrave told a post-flight press conference. Bush spoke to them on-orbit, they could not resist but showing him an F-Troop flag…and proudly displaying a hand-crafted placard, whose legend read: “111 Years of Aviation Experience”.ĭon Peterson (right) and Story Musgrave work close to the Airborne Support Equipment (ASE) “tilt-table” at the rear of Challenger’s payload bay. They had a bunch of F-Troop photographs on-board and he retorted that after landing they would not be shown to anyone under the age of 35. “Maybe that was something everybody said about us when we weren’t around,” he said, “but when we were in orbit, somebody was talking about how old you guys are.” Peterson couldn’t resist. Another portrait saw the men don vintage spectacles.Īs for the Geritol Bunch name, Peterson did not recall that one with quite so much fondness. According to Peterson, the sword once belonged to a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army. Weitz arranged for tongue-in-cheek portraits to be taken, showing the four men clad in Civil War attire: cavalry hats, braces, red and white neckties, swords, a Winchester lever-action rifle, bugle and flag. The crew took it, to an extent, in good humor. Weitz’ iconic “F-Troop” portrait, including a sword reputedly belonging to a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army. Four days later, on 2 February, she was named “Challenger”, honoring the steam-assisted Royal Navy corvette which undertook a prolonged cruise from December 1872 until May 1876, covering 80,000 miles (128,000 kilometers) and returning a vast quantity of scientific data about the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On 29 January 1979, under a $1.9 billion contract between NASA and the shuttle’s prime contractor, Rockwell International, STA-099 was selected to be upgraded as a second orbiter. Unlike Enterprise, STA-099 was an incomplete shuttle airframe, which made the process of modification simpler to execute. Photo Credit: NASAīut as part of the shuttle development campaign, NASA had built Structural Test Article (STA)-099 as an engineering facility to simulate the thermal, acoustic and other stresses that the spacecraft would experience during launch, ascent, orbital operations, re-entry and landing. Structural Test Article (STA)-099, which became known as “Challenger” from February 1979, is pictured during her initial construction.
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