 Good afternoon. Glad to have you folks here. Glad to be able to be here to do something we haven't been able to do at the Center for a little while. They do to the efforts of all the folks and the whole shuttle team as we got one in the air. So without further ado I'm going to turn it over to the commander of this mission, Captain Dick Richards. Thank you PJ. Can you hear me in the back? Yes. Okay. Well thanks for showing your support and interest by coming out here this afternoon. We put together about a 20 minute video tape which are highlights of the things that we all did on SDS 41. I'd like to introduce my crewman. I was very fortunate and to have a great set of people on this particular flight. We've been asked to comment about what makes a successful flight and if you put good people like we have in this room and at this center together with good hardware it really gets easy and it's a it's a great great thing that we do here. We launched on time. We've done that before in the past. I knew we could do it and we did it and we're going to continue doing those sort of things. But let me introduce my crew. Immediately to my left a one of our first-time flyers that my pilot very fortunate to have in this flight a Marine Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cabana. And they keep changing the order of sequence here to see if I mess this up here. But in the middle another first-time flyer just reported here in 1987 and spent three years here and got an opportunity to fly in space the first US Coast Guard ever to fly in space commander Bruce Melnick. Next to him our other experienced mission specialist he was the Bosons made on our flight. For those of you who are not in the Navy they don't know what a Bosons made is. The Boson made is the one that keeps good order in the ship. And Bill Shepherd did that. Navy captain flew on STS-27 and I can't tell you how invaluable he was not only to me but to the other rookies providing us with the right words at the right time on what to do and during those four days. Captain Bill Shepherd. And lastly all the way to the end but certainly not least Bill Shepherd referred to him in our welcome home ceremony at Ellington as our secret weapon and that's and I I'll second that. Tom Acre's real quiet individual but I signed him the responsibility of getting Ulysses out on time and he did that. Those of you who worked with him know that a tremendous individual and really was a contributor and was absolutely essential to making the success of STS-41 happened for his not a bad job for your first flight major Tom Acre's. And without any further ado here if we can get the lights down and we'll roll this video tape we'll try to narrate you through some of the highlights for STS-41. Well here we are we were pretty happy at this point because no flight crew had made it this far at least being able to walk out to the Astrovan in about six months so we felt pretty good. I had left word overnight that if if we had had anything to wake me up and I had a nice sound sleep so I was optimistic when we got up particularly when we got out the launch pad and saw the weather. Bob will describe a little bit about what it's like to fly in the shuttle for the first time and have an asset. Well as pretty as a day as we had for everyone watching and as nice a view as it was let me tell you it was from a first-time flyer's point of view it was even more spectacular inside. The Cape provided us with a super vehicle and discovery and she performed flawlessly. It was an extremely smooth ride uphill especially once we got off the solid rocket motors it was just a nice steady acceleration out to Miko and really surprised me how smooth the ride was. As you can see from our our smoke trail going uphill here there's very little winch here it was just an absolutely super day and a super day to start an absolutely great mission. During the launch count it was absolutely almost identical to the one I had about a year ago the everything was nominal all the calls were as expected and we had a real clean vehicle the only thing we were concerned with the last few minutes was a couple of unplanned holes that we were we could tell would probably be we'd be able to get get past those and the launch count proceeded then we had one cloud near that held us and I think we were I think we're about five to ten minutes late from our planned takeoff time but well before the end of our launch period. At about an hour and a half after launch Bruce opened the payload bay doors as you see here and he and I began the check out of the upper stage booster system that was going to put Ulysses on its way to Jupiter and then ultimately the Sun as you can see in that picture we had an extremely clean payload bay and that was true also in the crew compartment the folks down at KSC did a great job on this vehicle. The checkout comprised the next three or four hours looking for about a six-hour deploy of Ulysses and in that time we checked out the upper stage booster system the crew interfaces with that prepared to activate the tilt table that would raise it to 60 degrees for deploy Bob our pilot maneuvered the orbiter to several different attitudes to provide the ground with the corrections they needed to give the upper stage system a precise attitude correction. Here you see the deploy and as the upper stage and Ulysses are pushed out of the payload bay at about four to five inches per second you'll see in a moment in the background there are things that look like particles or stars flying back behind the vehicle and those were just ice particles that continued to come off of the orbiter for the first several hours that first day and was really a spectacular show. At about a minute after deploy here which again occurred at six hours in about a minute mission elapsed time after one minute Dick did a minus X or a back off maneuver where we backed away from the spacecraft which gave us about two and a half feet per second separation. As you can see we deployed in darkness and you'll see in a minute when the spacecraft comes into the sunlight it was really again a very spectacular show. After 15 minutes from deploy we did an ohm separation maneuver that ultimately placed us above and behind the spacecraft at about 40 miles separation. You'll see here in a moment the curved object you've probably heard about that appeared in the screen the first time we had noticed it and they're still investigating as to what that possibly is they think it's ice of some sort that came from the rear of the vehicle and don't think it came from anything associated with the spacecraft or with the deploy and there you see that object coming into view. This was essentially my view looking out through the overhead window and during the deploy sequence I didn't even see this object and it wasn't until after we replayed the videotape that we finally picked it up. And then again as I mentioned at about 65 minutes after deploy we went into a window protect attitude so we can no longer see the spacecraft and of course it was a long ways off by then also and the first solid rocket burn of the upper stage occurred and was exactly as they expected it to be and then the second stage and then finally the third stage the PAMS solid rocket motor burn and after about 16 or 17 minutes after that first burn the folks on the ground started looking for Ulysses data and founded the Ulysses exactly where they expected it to be so it was almost as precise in fact a little more precise than anybody on the ground had expected the three burns to be and as of today Ulysses is over six and a half million miles away and doing much better than expected. Tom and I cranked up the remote arm on the first part of day two and put it in this RAM position you see here in part to support the space station but mainly to provide some data on the intel set solar array erosion that has been estimated. This is a shot of the activation of the SSBUV or the Shuttle Solar Backscatter ultraviolet experiment it's a major secondary payload that we carried in the payload bay here it is it flies in a gas can to get away special and the SSBUV is going to be used to calibrate the NASA Nimbus satellites and the NOAA Tyro satellites which are presently orbiting the earth measuring the ozone layer it does this by comparing the radiation that's emitted from the Sun with the radiation that's backscattered from the earth the ozone absorbs the radiation and therefore they measure how much of the radiation is being absorbed and can get a grasp on how much ozone there is in the atmosphere. This is a shot of us getting ready to activate the SSCE or the Solid Surface Combustion Experiment which you've probably heard about our fire in space the data from this fire in this enclosed container was recorded on with two cameras a 16 millimeter film and as a backup Shep came up with the neat idea of using our fibrous scope to put down in front of the one of the windows and recorded on board our one of our onboard cameras and TV in the vehicle and this is a recording of that that we downlinked subsequently of one of the two views of the flame. Of course the intent of the experiment is to evaluate the characteristics of flame spread in the absence of buoyant convection or in microgravity we did this by in igniting a small piece of paper in this container and then just letting it burn and photographing what happened with those cameras. The experiment is going to fly seven more times with varying fuels oxygen concentration and pressure in the container and of course the application is going to hopefully improve our fire safety aspects of space flight. This is a shot of activating the IPMP or the investigations into polymer membrane processing. SDS 41 was although it was a short flight only four days in length though was the first flight to start medical tests for future extended duration orbiter flights when we when we attempt to fly for in the 15 to 20 day time frame and even though we had such a short flight there was of course they want to anchor their database with with the low end as well as the high end. This is I'm hanging on top of the escape pole there and and Tom is wiring me up with a blood pressure cuff device which we wore Tom and I wore for about 48 hours on the ship and slept with it as well too and and hopefully given some good data about how the heart adjusts to the sudden onset of zero gravity. This is a plug for my alma mater they sent me the last minute sent me a sweatshirt which turned out to work pretty good to contain all of this extraneous hardware on this particular medical experiment. Here chef and I are participating in DSO 472 and 474 it's a retinal photography and also measuring his interocular pressure. We did this three times on orbit to document fluid shift in the body and see if there was any correlation to SAS. We all got a chance on board to work with three different types of laptops and we also had the first orbital floppy disk and we're looking at various kinds of displays and also cursor control devices here's one called a Felix that will take the place of a trackball and may have some application down the road in space station. That previous sequence there was the one a lot of us a lot of times we get accused of doing this in a hangar someplace in Texas and so that last sequence with the disk was our proof that this was on board the orbiter in a micro G environment. No flight crew movie can be complete without somebody being filmed playing with their food and then in this case it was me who got caught by chef up their set of canned peaches that I had a lot of good time with. Tom mentioned that the Cape provided us with a very clean vehicle I thought Columbia was clean on my previous flight but this one was even better we found very few extraneous objects a total maybe of three that we put in our things found in discovery bag and we worked we worked very hard to to try to maintain maintain the cleanliness of the orbiter and you see Tom tucking away is a drink container and also gave him an opportunity to plug this place in Missouri and he can talk about that. This is an advertisement for my hometown eminence Missouri and of course the red wings are as the high school athletic mascot. Another important aspect of the flight was the time that we spent observing the earth beneath us as you know we use a variety of cameras to document changes in the earth's environment we saw a number of them here we are coming up over the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad in Africa this is an active volcanic region on the earth we noticed a lot of fires throughout Africa and South America and changes in the levels of lakes and also different volcanic areas. Well being in the Coast Guard the only time they let me take pictures of the ocean was when we were over shallow water and here we are over the Arabian Sea just off Somalia and if you look close in the middle you'll see a ship's wake in the sun glint we also observed several other oceanographic phenomena that are really only visible from earth orbit such as the Suloys the ocean waves and also some spiral eddies and we got to get a good look at some of those things while we're up there looking at the ocean in the sun glint. Also took some other earth ops photos and other land masses we crossed Central America and South America quite often up there and a lot during our awake cycle and also we covered Australia quite a few times here's a view going over Shark Bay and looking into the Shark Bay on Western Australia and then we jump to a scene in the central area of Australia in the Lake Eyre area. The Lake Eyre area is very important to observe from space because of the different amounts of rainfall it gets really determines how much water there are in a different watershed areas. As we've already talked about we have very many cameras that we use in the orbiter and the next clip coming up is a demonstration of how we might be able to more automate how we use the cameras on the space shuttles in specific the TV cameras. The last several days in space and we thought you'd like to see how it's been working for us. George Salazar and his crew down there at the Johnson Space Center put together a system that allows us to control the cameras without using our hands. We can just use voice commands to talk to the cameras. So here's a quick demonstration on how they work. Voice command activate. TV one. Delta action. Stop. Tilt up. Stop. Right. Stop. Change rate. Tilt down. Change rate. Tilt down. Stop. Right. Stop. Too much. Too much. Too much. As you can see it's a great system and we really like it. At the end on day four one of the one of the things you have to do is get ready to come home and we Bob and I started off the process by doing the FCS checkout of flight control system the orbiter AP Bob cranked up one of our three auxiliary power units to provide hydraulic pressure out to our control surfaces and just like any airplane you'd have out at Ellington or hobby one thing is a pilot stew before they go flying is wipe out the flight control system and move the control surfaces around and we do that just by letting the computers do that. Everything was extremely nominal and told us that we probably could expect a smooth entry. The evening before we the orbited Tom Bruce and I stowed the arm after having the Intel sat array out in the flow for a little over a day and a half and all the arm ops were completely normal. We couldn't resist putting at least one orbiter sunset that we saw of the 60 or so that we did see. Here we are with one of our long range tracking cameras coming in. We had a calm beautiful day out there at Edwards just like we expected and for myself the first time I've ever flown this vehicle for real. It matched very closely with our shuttle turning airplanes that we have out here at Ellington Field and the fact that I had done this about a thousand times prior in our shuttle turning airplane that felt very at ease with the orbiter coming into Edwards Air Force Base landing on the concrete runway out there runway two two. This test we did have a test of the carbon brake system on this particular flight for those most some of you may know we've got a new braking system here and this was the second flight of it and our objective was to put a moderate amount of energy into the brakes and this is a series of three flight tests of which after the third one the carbon brake system will be cleared for a nominal emission usage and appropriately having the Sun go through with the Ulysses project there the landing rolled up we thought that was an appropriate thing to conclude also. The braking system very smoothed to me and the orbiter responded just like it did in flight to exactly to my expectations. I was a 15,000 foot runway and we landed about 2,300 feet down the runway with about a 9,000 foot rollout and as I turned to my crew just before we walked out the white room they performed perfectly in my opinion for four days and I said this is the last time you guys can mess up and fall down the stairs and as you can see they did did that just as equally well as they did everything else for the previous four days and the previous nine months here that we've been together. A great flight.