 Good afternoon and welcome to the STS-57 post-flight press conference this afternoon the crews with us to talk about the Eureka Retrieve and the first flight of the Spacehab experiments module plus other experiments on board the flight and to my right is the crew commander, Air Force Colonel Ronald J. Grabey and I'd like to introduce him and turn the program over to him. Ron? Thanks very much Barbara. We're delighted that you'll all be here with us so we can share the highlights of the flight. It was a great flight and we're certainly interested in telling you all about it. Let me introduce the rest of the crew. To my right is Brian Duffy. Brian was making his second flight on STS-57. He was our pilot. He was a member of the three-person orbiter crew along with myself and the flight engineer. Brian also orchestrated the EVA for us. He was the prime choreographer of the rendezvous flight plan as well and he participated in a number of the Spacehab experiments. To Brian's right is David Lowe. David was the payload commander. That means that on this flight he had prime responsibility for integrating the Spacehab module as being the first flight of Spacehab. That took quite a bit of his time. He was also one of our two EVA crew members. In addition to that he was the prime operator for the RMS during the Eureka Retrieve so as you can see he had a full plate on this mission as well. To David's right is Nancy Sherlock. Nancy was our MS-2 or flight engineer. She was the third member of the orbiter team for us. I sent an entry along with Brian and myself. Nancy was the prime RMS operator during the EVA so it was a very busy day for her and Nancy had a great deal of participation in the Spacehab experiments as well. On Nancy's right is Jeff Weissoff. Jeff was also making his first flight along with Nancy. Jeff was the rendezvous mission specialist for this flight along with Brian and myself. He was responsible for ensuring that the rendezvous profile was properly executed and he had some particular responsibilities regarding that as we closed into Eureka in the final stages. Jeff was the second member of the EVA team along with David. Jeff had a great deal of interaction with the Spacehab experiments and he had a couple of other experiments that required his attention as well including shoot and fare which we'll talk about a little bit later. To Jeff's right is Janice Boss. Janice always gets introduced last but that's by no means least. She's the person who had more than anyone else to do with the successful implementation of the Spacehab experiment procedures on this flight. She really did the lion's share of the work back in Spacehab. In addition to that we integrated her into the rendezvous profile and Janice was the backup RMS operator during the EVA. So as you can see it was a full flight and everyone on the crew had a great deal going on during the course of the 10-day mission. What we'd like to do with you today is first show you a film that'll cover the highlights or some of the highlights of the STS-57 flight and then after that we'll switch medium to slides and at the end of that we'll have about a 20-minute question and answer period. So if we could roll the movie please. This is our crew patch. Sure it's familiar to most of you. Here we are the night before launch. We actually had one dry run or dress rehearsal the day prior to launch. The weather wasn't quite good enough but undaunted we set out the next day. This is a beautiful sight. Here we are in the suit-up room on the morning of launch. Here I am adjusting my microphones. Here's Brian. Next is G. David. Everyone you can see is really anxious to go. Here's Nancy. You see a little hello here to her daughter. Here's Jeff. Very high spirits. As is Janice very eager to get on with it. Once our suits were all checked out and confirmed that they were all operational we headed out to the pad. This is always a fun time. You know you're always going to be greeted by a lot of folks at the end of the ramp. There were people at your friends with. A few hours later when it's time to go to work of course the main engine start and the booster's light and the STS-57's on its way. The roll program for us this time was nice and smooth. We had a cloud that was nearby. You'll see us going right by it. Went right by the edge of it. Ron and I had been sitting there looking at it for quite a while. It had just moved left and right over the pad but it was not a factor. Shortly after takeoff you can see the shockwave here on the vehicle. Janice and I rode on the mid-deck. In the two events you really feel other than the initial takeoff is when the SRBs separate after about two minutes we can feel and hear the sound of that separation. And then we go for another six and a half minutes on the main engines and one of my real great pleasures was my first sight of the earth when I got to go up to the fight deck to participate in the external tank DTO photography. I handed David a camcorder and he took these great pictures of the tank floating away and I was using an F4 to take stills. Shortly after we arrive on orbit we begin configuring the orbit orbiter for orbit operations. This is me opening up the payload bay doors and Brian is taking film footage of the door opening which we then later downlinked. And for me personally as those doors open and I got my first glimpse of the earth from 250 miles was just absolutely spectacular. This is a view of the Eureka satellite as we're closing in on flight day four. It's actually sped up a little bit but it gives you an idea of what Eureka looked to us. Actually it's coming down almost immediately overhead Janice's vantage point as she was back in the space hub. Here we are on the flight deck and you can see there's a lot of activity going on in this time frame. This is all just prior to grapple with Eureka. As Ron mentioned while the other five members of the crew were up on the flight deck I was using the space hub overhead window to look through a night vision system and the laser range you see me taking out there to help support the rendezvous with range and range rate data. This is the view that I had of Eureka as Ron was doing the fly around to get the grapple fixture poised for David's activity. You can see David here looking at the monitors to make sure everything's ready for him to grab a hold of Eureka and put it back in the bay as Ron is doing the fly around. And this is the view again out of the D camera. You can see the RMS coming in in the right hand portion of your picture there. The payload was very very stable. That's a tribute to both Ron's flying capabilities and also just how stable the payload was. It was rock solid there which is from an RMS point of view that's a great sight to see. Coming in here this is just prior to grapple. In fact I think grapple is about right there and now it's being the end effector. The snares are actually pulling the payload into the end effector there. This is an A camera view right now. This I don't know how many minutes later it was we were already over in the post capture position. And so the payload is pretty stable there. What you can see in the background there we're just coming across the west coast of the United States. You can see the LA basin down there with the clouds right there. And coming up into view right now about in the middle of the picture is the high desert area of California and Edwards Air Force Base is just up beyond that. You can see the San Joaquin Valley up above that too. One of the small problems that we had during the retrieval was that the antennas on Eureka failed to latch. So we took the opportunity to post grapple to send down some film footage of that so that the payload operations center over in Germany could take a look at that. And then once everyone was satisfied we had some good views. We began birthing operations and deactivation of Eureka. And this is David operating the robotic arm manipulating Eureka down into the birth position and to latch it into the payload bay. And we then began preparations for the next day's EVA which was to begin with an EVA to latch those antennas. The birthing sequence itself went very very smoothly. The next morning as Nancy mentioned we had the planned EVA that was flight day five. And we started out making sure that the suits were all ready once we got the crews into the suits. We actually brought them into the mid-deck area from out of the airlock where they could practice some translation techniques and also determine the way in which they wanted to carry their tools out for the work that they knew they had ahead of them. Here we see David and Jeff and you can see just what tight quarters it is in the airlock. When the four hour pre-breath was up David opened the hatch on the tunnel adapter and the thermal cover. Here you can see him making his initial egress from the tunnel adapter. And then there's a shot from the inside the airlock where you can see us positioning ourselves to go out. This is myself positioning to go out Dave's now outside of the hatch. And here I am filing him out. He's in the lower left hand corner of the picture now. The first task that we had to do was to basically set up the work site so that we could go work on the Eureka antennas. And Jeff installed a PFR attached device on the arm and a safety tether. And then I came on over and attached the portable foot restraint right there that I was going to step in and then Nancy was going to drive me around on the end of the arm there. All of that is now attached to the end of the arm to the end effector there. And I'm just about ready to ingress the portable foot restraint. You can see the arm. You're going to see that move a little bit. Putting some inputs into the arm you can see it probably moved up to a foot or so. And I think Nancy got some break slip messages when both Jeff and I ingress the portable foot restraint. And then from there Nancy drove me on over and positioned me in front of the Eureka. The latching into the antennas while Eureka was birthed in the payload bay was one contingency that we really hadn't trained to. So overnight the RMS and EVA folks worked very hard to send us some good procedures that they uplinked in the morning. And that involved manipulating David over in the middle of the payload bay and putting him right down between the chute payload and the Eureka payload to push on the antenna. We first went to the first antenna which is a forward one. Here I am manipulating him back to the aft antenna and he's going to push on that antenna while the payload operations center commanded the latch. Jeff was absolutely invaluable to us. You see him over on the side. He was our eyes out in the payload bay to determine any clearances. The Eureka portion of the EVA took just a little bit less than two hours. And from that point on we pretty much went into what we had planned as far as our DTO was. And that involved three major objectives, the first of which was what we called mass handling. And in this case I was on the end of the arm and I was carrying Jeff and we were simulating. Jeff was just being basically a 500 pound blivot. And I was using Jeff to simulate maneuvering around a large scientific instrument that we might have to do on future missions. Yeah, he acted his blivot very well. While we were doing this Nancy would maneuver me forward and aft in the payload bay as well as up and down out of the payload bay. And we did this both in vernier and coarse rates on the RMS. Results that I'd like to report are that the arm is a very stable platform driving around in either vernier or coarse rates. It was a fairly simple thing to do. As long as you move slowly, as long as the inputs I made into the mass were slow inputs, it was very, very controllable. You can see here me rolling Jeff around just a little bit. From there we went on and we did some fine alignment. And again we found the same results there as long as you move slowly on fine alignment you can align things very precisely. After the fine alignment task David and I switched places on the arm and I was going to do the third task which was the high torque task. The idea behind this was being held in the foot restraint on the arm to go down and use a torque recorder to torque on some bolts, which is what I'm doing here, a bolt that was held on the sill. And the idea there was to look at the reaction forces and how the arm moved as we put those inputs into the bolt. And that turned out to work very easily, very much like our WEDF training and seemed to be a very easy operation to do while you're held in the foot restraint. The other major payload we had on board was Spacehab. This was the first flight of Spacehab. It's a commercial module connected to the crew compartment by a tunnel. There's a hatch at either end of the tunnel for asset entry and you see David here opening up the hatch on flight day one so we can get Spacehab ready for experiment operations. It flew uphill powered because some of the experiments required temperature control and monitoring. But there were a number of systems that had to be started up on that first day to get ready for use. You see David here on the forward wall of Spacehab where the Spacehab subsystems equipment mostly was getting things ready to start operations. This is the tunnel going down the tunnel that was connecting the two parts of the Spacehab and the orbiter. This is early on in the flight. It gives you a nice view of the aft wall of Spacehab before we've put out all our experiment procedures and gotten a little more clutter than as you'll see in later views. This is Brian checking out some orbiter equipment that we had stowed back there that actually is the laser ranger that we used on the Eureka Retrieved Day. And you can see how the aft wall is covered with lockers very similar to the mid-deck lockers. Spacehab was envisioned as kind of an extension of the mid-deck to give you access for lots of experiments doing early design work. This is the port wall. We found that to be a very convenient place to store our procedures and the computer disks. You can see me taking some computer disks out there as well as Nancy working on an experiment on the forward wall. With two people back there in the corner you can see there's plenty of space in zero G to get around. And Spacehab was a very nice area to work. It was nice and bright and had a lot of easy access for getting into the experiments. The starboard wall, Spacehab has the capability of putting racks in. You see Jeff here working at the rack which had a workbench on it and some foot restraints. It was very handy for performing experiments and you saw me working on a computer. We also had some experiments in the mid-deck. This is Ron working on one of our protein crystal growth experiments, adjusting the focus for some photo TV we were taking of it. We flew a lot of computers on this flight and this is an experiment tools and diagnostic system which is basically checking to make sure you can do some IFM on baseline equipment. This is a liquid encapsulated melt zone and by encapsulating it in a liquid they were hoping to grow very pure crystals. This is Jeff also operating an experiment called CGBA which involves mixing the fluids together and then you'll see him shake the fluids here in a second. These were mostly all biological samples that he was activating. One of the experiments I ran from the mid-deck was called SCG for solution crystal growth and we're stirring some solutions here as a precursor to another experiment that grew some ceramic crystals. Here's just a quick shot of one of the things I did one day was to solder a circuit board. The idea being to look into how feasible it is to do on-orbit repair of electronic components. Another thing we were doing back in the space have was we were actually looking at an experiment that was looking at how feasible it is to grow plants in space which is something that we figured we'll have to do in the long term and that's what Nancy was doing here. Looks like she got going in one direction and figured out it was easier to just spin all the way around. Another experiment that we carried called SHUTE which was superfluid helium on-orbit transfer was operated from a PGSE on the flight deck. Janice and I worked with that PGSE and Brian and Ron coordinated the burns. Here you can see the cryogenic doers for the superfluid helium on the MPAS structure. The idea behind this experiment is to study the transfer of cryogenic fluid for future servicing of satellites. The other secondary that we carried on the mid-deck called FAIR is a fluid transfer experiment between two tanks to study future design of propellant tanks. This particular one is very similar to the design that's planned to be flown on the Cassini probe that will go to Saturn at the end of the decade. We had a lot of training pre-flight and Earth observations because of course looking out the window gives you a very interesting view of the Earth. You can see me taking some pictures there with our 70mm camera which gives you very high detail for looking at the Earth. This is a view of the Sinai Peninsula. You can see the Gulf of Aqaba there leading down into the Red Sea. This is further down under the Horn of Africa, the Somalia area at the southeast corner of the Red Sea. And this is not Africa. This is the west coast of Australia there. You can see Exmouth Bay which is the big bay that you see along to the right there. And Sharks Bay is just underneath the tail of the orbiter there. And one of the other experiments that we did was called DSO 618, writing a cyclerogometer. It was one of the other experiments that we were trying to use to increase your orthostatic tolerance when you come back and land on Earth. We were extremely busy on this flight and as you can see Jeff didn't take time to eat so Janice compelled to feed him. And just like every crew we felt obligated to play with our food. However in this case we decided to take this opportunity to bombard Jeff behind the camera there with M&Ms. One of the other things that we flew was a bear for the drug abuse resistance program, a dare bear. And his little t-shirt says dare to keep kids off drugs. And he got pretty good at translating across the mid-deck. As you're getting ready to come home for entry you check out some of the systems on board that you haven't been using in a while. Or in the entry configuration making sure everything's ready. This is checking the RCS system. You can see Brian and Ron moving around. Of course actually it's the orbiter moving around as the jets fire. And you can see how they are enough of an input that there's a significant movement on the part of the orbiter. With the wave off days we had we got a little more chance to look out the windows. You see the terminator here as everybody had told us first time flyers, sunrises and sunsets are gorgeous. As you heard we had a lot of practice at deorbit prep and this is one of the scenes on the flight deck as we prepare to come in in the LES. David did a lot of this camcorder footage and Brian did from the flight deck. So you can kind of see the aft part of the flight deck there and everybody seated and ready to come in. Once we were decided to get serious about this entry stuff we finally did the deorbit burn. And we were in the dark for some of the high Mach time and up in Mach 24 range. And here you see the plasma which surrounds the vehicle during the entry up there. We flew into the daylight around Mach 23 so we didn't get to see that all the way down. Also we got to Florida short of 9 in the morning so we probably didn't wake everybody up. But we think we announced our arrival with the sonic booms. Here we are with a view of the orbiter on the final approach. We landed at KSC runway 33. It was a great treat for us to be able to come back to KSC. You always like to bring the orbiter back to the place that you launched from. Here's a view taken from the STA the shuttle training aircraft as we approach the runway. The wheels are now down. Just crossing the underrun. Crossing the threshold to the runway. Now we transition to a view looking down the runway. There's touchdown. If you look for them a brief flash here at the tail. There it is that's the drag shoot beginning its deployment sequence. You can see the drag shoot coming out on the side view. There's the shuttle training aircraft flying with us in the vertical assembly building going by in the background. There's nose gear touchdown. And now a picture looking head on at the orbiter from the other end of the runway. There's drag shoot jettison. You can see it comes almost straight down. We didn't have much of a crosswind that day at all. It was almost an ideal condition for a landing.