 That gives us sort of a quick rundown on the payload and what we anticipate to happen this morning. This vehicle, those of you that haven't seen it before, gets off the rail very fast. It's not quite like watching a liquid one of the NASA launches that sort of climb out reasonably slowly. This one gets off like a missile because that's what the first stage basically is. You'll see the first stage burn out, the order of six seconds. Then you'll see a coast face and then you'll see the second stage ignite after we have reached the right dynamic pressures to do that. The sustainer motor on the second stage is a fairly long burn time so you'll see that climb out. As the plume of the vehicle climbs out through any wind shears, I don't think there are too many today. You'll see the plume sort of scatter around a little bit. That's not the vehicle maneuvering like that. The vehicle hopefully is going straight down the range. That's just the plume being hashed about. Wendy Beatty, who's doing the count for us, she will give us the plus count. At T plus 12 seconds she will announce second stage ignition. That's in an altitude of 3.75 miles. Then there will be a plus count at T plus 18 that will hear. That means the end of the S-19 boost guidance system. That occurs at about six miles altitude. T plus 44 is the next count. That's the end of the second stage ignition, a second stage burn. That's about 30 miles altitude. T plus 52. We have the payload D-spin. That means the vehicle that was spinning up due to the bin camp angle set in to give us a spin stabilized vehicle. We have what we call a yo-yo D-spin, which is simply some weights that come out on wires much like an ice skater puts her arms out to stop the spin. When she's spinning on the ice, it changes the moment of inertia in technical terms. Then as she puts her arms down, she'll spin up. We will put this D-spin, yo-yo D-spin system out. That essentially takes all the spin rate out of the vehicle to make us ready to enter the microgravity condition for the experiments. We'll get a payload separation at T plus 58. That's at 48 nautical miles, excuse me, not nautical miles, miles. T plus 74, we have the beginning of the microgravity period. And at T plus 290 seconds, we have apogee, which is actually 198 miles for this mission, but close enough to 200 miles altitude. T plus 506 seconds, the end of microgravity at 68 miles. That's as we arc over. T plus 622 seconds, the main chute will deploy. We'll get an indication of that. You're not going to see that today. And that's at 3 miles altitude. And then T plus 878 seconds, we will have a payload land in 15 nautical miles downrange. So it's about a 15-minute flight. It's 878 seconds. So I'll keep quiet here now. We're close to the launch condition, I think. A consortium for materials development in space at the University of Alabama in Huntsville was formed in September of 1985 when the university received a NASA grant from the Office of Commercial Programs. The intent of the consortium is to promote commercial activities in space and to enhance the technological position of the United States for foreign trade. We are intending to run experiments and we are performing experiments in the low gravity of space so that we can learn things about materials, make new materials, learn things about processes that we can't learn on Earth where they are masked by Earth's gravitational pull. The nice part about a sounding rocket like this is that it can be done approximately every six months or so. Our first launch in March of 1989, Consort One, was a successful launch in which all of the experiments worked and worked very well. That payload was built entirely by UAH and integrated by McDonnell Douglas, Space Systems Division in Huntsville, Alabama. On Consort Three, then, is experiments not only from the UAH consortium for materials development in space, but also from three other NASA centers for the commercial development of space. From Attal in Columbus, Ohio, from Penn State University, and from the University of Colorado. We also can change experiments very close to launch time as opposed to if you're flying on a man-rated vehicle like the Shuttle, there are considerable amount of documentation that you have to go through. Safety documentation to assure the launch people and to assure the astronauts that we are not in any way compromising their health and well-being. The formation experiment is looking at the billion-dollar-a-year home installation market as one application. It's also looking at building structures on the moon for going on lunar Mars types of missions. The foam formation in this particular experiment will have aluminum particles in it so that we can see what the effect of aluminum is on some of the acoustical properties of the material. The reason we want to study the foams are that if we can make a small amount of improvement in the way that foams are currently built, with there being such a large market for it, any small improvement can have a large potential savings in energy and also in production costs. Our interest in the project starts from some general observations that have been made for every cell, tissue, human, animal that's gone into space. That is that there are a series of subtle changes in physiology that have been observed, maybe roughly categorized as changes in cell secretion or changes in hormone response. While these might be quite unimportant, one really doesn't know the importance of these over some long-term experience in the microgravity arena. The other intriguing part is these problems that are seen in microgravity are also very clearly related, in our minds at least, to general unsolved disease states on Earth, such as cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and so forth. So the question for us became one of, can we get double money out of our experiments here where we can use microgravity as a test tube in order to learn something about these important diseases? In order to do that, we have to sample a microgravity experience and we have to learn something then about the behavior of cells in this situation. This is why we've constructed what we call the Penn State Biomodule, which starts from a modular set of about eight experiments the size of an eraser, and in this we can put solutions in the various side arms and cells and tissues of interest in the main chamber. This becomes the fundamental unit that we work with. These then can be assembled according to the geometry demanded by the payload onto a base plate. And here we see a base plate with our little computer, auxiliary electronics put underneath, and a place for four separate biomodules, and this is what we'll be flying in the concert free flight. We picked the chameleon skin and tadpole skin problem. Basically everyone's seen the color change that occurs in chameleons. They may have seen the spot changes that occur in tadpoles. These color changes, although they are very similar in overall respects to much more complex processes involved in humans. Now the value of these systems are, the tissues are very robust, they're easy for us to prepare, and we can do meaningful experiments in this particular environment. So what we're setting up here is to test proof of principle. The question we're trying to ask then is some place over 6.5 billion years of evolution and cells have learned to handle gravity as a settling force within them and I have made use of that we believe for other processes that are involved. We're trying to ask simple questions like when the chameleon skin goes into space and if it's challenged with an appropriate hormone does it change color in the manner that one would predict? This is the spirit that we're going to follow. As the payload integrators for concert three, McDonald Douglas has a number of responsibilities. We've worked on this particular payload for four months, most of that in Huntsville, beginning with the understanding and the implementation of the experiment package requirements and the build up and checkout and integrated testing of each of the experiments in the payload. There are 12 experiments in there and several other pieces of supporting hardware, accelerometers, power supplies, power distribution systems, computers, accelerometers. All these things have to work together 100% to conduct the mission and our job is to see that that happens. Same to you Pete. Feets probably kept you all up to speed on what's happened here. We had a couple small problems down there of course we had a ten minute old at the end which was a range problem, the radar went down and we finally got an older radar online and went ahead. We also had a gyro problem again and we had a noise signal under pitch gyro and we scratched our head pretty hard there for a while whether we should scrub or not but Mark ended up talking to the factory guys and we consulted with NASA and finally concluded that we could fly safely and did. So all in all it looks like it was a good flight. We don't know of any anomalies during flight at this point. The vehicle landed in the sand up there so it would be an excellent shape. We believe that the PIs got all of the data that they were looking for. I think there was indications one experiment may have malfunctioned a little bit but at least everything flew exactly the way it was supposed to fly. So at this point we're very happy. Leave it, Hannah's Rocket Company's done it one more time. They have telemetry on a number of their experiments some of them they don't get the data on until they land but there are some functions that show up on a telemetry. I believe this was the foam experiment but I'd rather not speak to that actually Fran Leslinger, Dr. Lundquister one of their people should discuss that because we're really not qualified to speak on their behalf on that. As far as we know everything went just fine. The attitude stayed we only had three thrusters far during the whole zero gravity period so they should have got some excellent zero gravity which is the purpose of the flight of course. Pardon? What's next? Well we're working on a whole variety of launches. We have a crew back in Houston now working on a proposal for NASA which is these are orbital flights, ten orbitals. There's a Air Force proposal coming out here within the month for another 40 flights. We're working on some these are all orbital also. We're working on a number of programs that involve suborbital such as you saw here today. So we've got a lot of stuff out there ahead of us that we're working on and we're very confident that we're going to end up doing. We've got more proposals than we can handle or between new and launches but that's a nice problem to have. We don't object to that at all. Well yeah, the day's flight certainly anytime you have a success it's obviously helpful. I guess if you fail the problem will give you more negative than a success is to give you positive unfortunately but it was obviously a big help to us. We think everybody in the industry actually to have the success. It doesn't help anybody in this industry for anybody to fail. So we're happy when we see anybody succeed and of course especially when we do. We don't get too tense. We've been involved in a lot of them here. We had guys flying on them as long as you're unmanned the worst that can happen is not too bad. But we were not tense but we had some serious discussions there about whether we should or shouldn't until we got more data. We were a little bit concerned there we might in fact have to scrub and if we did we were looking at it anywhere from three to six days and slipping we were very happy we didn't have to do that. But on the other hand we weren't about to do anything dumb we wanted to be very confident that it was going to go good before we went into that final three minutes of the count. Well you're right. The last one was a kind of a weird thing. I guess in this business you know you apply a lot of skill and cunning is the right choice of words and do the best you can but there's always that one percent or two out there that's pure luck and once in a while you have bad luck and that happens to everybody in the business and this is just a case where I think everybody had done everything you could easily expect them to do the same system had flown a number of times in exactly that configuration and we just happened to get bit by it. So it was an accident there waiting to hit somebody and we just were unfortunate. The other frustrating part of that one of course is we were only half a second away from a successful flight if we had kept flying one half second more just like this one. So you're just that close between success and failure in this business. Yes it is. Yeah the hardware we use the guidance package and recovery system are reused they're refurbished at the factory and this system we flew today I believe is our third flight we flown that hardware. So I think we're now concerned about worrying things out if that's essentially your question although that's always possible but now we take we send it back to the factory get it refurbished and re-verified and this basically comes out as new equipment from a functional point of view. Yes it does. You bet. Actually we only missed about two miles where's Mark? Mark Daniels has got the exact number but I believe we were targeted for 52 miles we landed in about 54 so this is well within the limits you'd expect. Mark is running continual wind checks and launcher settings throughout the count and he gave them the last one. Mark you want a quarter second? There was our program manager Mark Daniels who's the guy that really made this work and they were wondering how we did on the impact relative predictions. Well we were right on the money with our impact predictions we were predicting about 50 miles north of here and 6 miles west and we impacted 54 north and 11 west so that's about as close as you can get to being on the money that's correct 54 miles north of the launcher so we were not as happy as I think you can get with everything that all the systems in the performance today. It's a signal coming through on the TM, the electronic noise, the wiper arm that goes against the gyro itself we think there was some contamination there on that so it was interrupting the electrical signal and this would have given the feedback into the servos which would represent itself as a chatter and a control system we concluded that even if it had in fact happened in flight it probably would not have reacted into the vehicle we'd had enough filtering in the electronic system plus dynamic damping in the vehicle itself that it would have not been a problem but as you can imagine we're pretty conservative at this point and we weren't going to gamble until we convinced ourselves that it was really not a problem. Yeah the question about how this relates to the orbital flight actually takes the same kind of a team exactly, we have different players but the difference between an orbital flight and this one from the mission preparation and the launch is very very similar there's not a lot of difference really almost no more people involved as a matter of fact the only difference is instead of going up and coming down we go to the same altitude and keep going in fact most orbital flights don't even go that high they only flatten out and you just use the energy to accelerate the orbital velocity to win one of those. The NASA contract are set for a mid-93 first launch the Air Force is fall of 92 and there are a couple other programs that could be in the mid-92 time frame probably nothing in 91 How do you feel right now I guess? Well we feel very good about it we've felt since day one we have an excellent orbital launch system we believe it's the best one we've got of course we're a little prejudiced we'll admit but it's based on highly reliable components and we are able to insure the insurance companies have looked at it and set our premiums and we've got about as little premiums as anybody in the country so we think that's a vote of confidence in our system so we think we've got an outstanding system there we just hope we have the opportunity to go use it I think Dr. Lundquist from the University of Alabama there were some earlier questions about the payload and he's the guy to talk to those so does anybody have anything else on the launch vehicle? I'll answer it otherwise we should turn it over to him okay well thank you we're happy you're all here to watch it and then get a good fight out of it I'm Chuck Lundquist from the University of Alabama in Huntsville the consortium for materials development in space let me begin by congratulating Deake and SSI on a great flight we got the kind of ride we wanted and are now awaiting the recovery of the payload obviously it came down on parachute and we don't have a report yet from the helicopter having reached the site so I can't tell you exactly what form the payload is in but it came down well on parachute so there's every reason to believe that it's a successful recovery the recovery will be taking place probably right now with regard to any of the specific experiments it's too early to make any kind of a diagnosis from the telemetry we can tell that the timers that operated the different instruments worked and so the twelve experiments were working one way or another and until we looked at the individual equipment when it gets back and do more detailed analysis it's just premature to say anything about any of the experiments the one message or one bit of indication was a temperature measurement but there could be other interpretations of that too so I'd say it's premature to make any kind of a diagnosis on any of the experiments we don't really know anything about any of them specifically we know that the general apparatus worked within the payload we see that on the telemetry but just much too early to go beyond that questions let me again say that we're just very pleased with the flight that SSI provided it was a perfect day for it went very well and we now have to analyze the results from the individual experiments to see what results we got but I'm very optimistic that it was a very successful flight