I wanted to do a good job. We were at the start of a nine-day mission and had come through the first phase with things well organized, but there wasn’t any time to waste. The timeline called for starting a number of experiments immediately after we entered orbit.
Scott and I floated back through the tube to SpaceHab to activate several experiments that held the potential to improve medical treatments on a wide range of fronts. The BioDyn payload was a commercial bioreactor that contained work in several areas: protein research that could aid in ending transplant rejection; an investigation into cell aging, seeking tools to fight various geriatric diseases that cause immune-system breakdown; improved ways of making microscopic capsules to deliver drugs directly to the site of a disease; tissue engineering aimed at making synthetic bone to improve dental implants, hip replacements, and bone grafts; and heart patches to replace damaged heart muscles.
Then I moved on to ADSEP, part of a series of experiments in separating and purifying biological materials in microgravity with aims such as producing genetically engineered hemoglobin that may eventually replace human blood. Starting ADSEP meant moving its various modules from storage into active bays and setting switches and turning dials according to detailed instructions in our flight-data files. These experiments were only a fraction of the science we would do during our nine days on board.
By the time we returned to the mid-deck, I was hungry. It was then five and a half hours into the flight, longer than the total flight of Friendship 7. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and hadn’t had time to grab a snack from the pantry, a shallow drawer near the mid-deck ceiling that was loaded from the bottom, like a kitchen drawer at home but upside-down, with the contents secured with netting.
Eating involved first injecting hot or cold water into rehydratable packets, then waiting three to five minutes. As it absorbs the water, the food thickens and won’t float out of the packet. We all carried scissors for cutting the packets open as part of our regular equipment. The packets had small Velcro patches on their surfaces, so you could eat anywhere and stick your meal onto one of the orbiter’s hundreds of Velcro strips if you wanted to put it down.
I ate a full meal, starting with a shrimp cocktail and moving on through macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly in a tortilla, dried apricots, banana pudding, and apple cider. After eating, it was time to prepare for sleep. We had been up since six that morning, and working in space since mid afternoon. The schedule called for a two-hour presleep period that gave us time to wash up, send E-mails, review the next day’s work, or gaze back at Earth from one of the windows. A few of the crew put on headphones and listened to music. We all had the opportunity to bring a selection of compact discs along. My choices included music by Henry Mancini, Peter Nero, and Andy Williams. Peter and Andy are good friends, and Annie and I had been especially close to Hank and Ginny Mancini, visiting and vacationing with them on many occasions before Hank died in 1994. I also took along a disc of barbershop chorus harmonies by the champion Alexandria Harmonizers, a taste I inherited from my dad. After that, the entire crew slept. Space days and nights lasted the same forty-five minutes I had experienced in Friendship 7, and since the shuttle orbited through five of these days and nights during an eight-hour sleep period, its windows and portholes were shaded while we slept. Chiak and I bedded down in our sleeping bags in two of the sleep stations. Steve Robinson took another, and we reserved the fourth in the tier for storage. It was like being tucked into a long pine box with a sliding panel for a door.
The rest of the crew hooked their sleeping bags to the walls or ceilings wherever they pleased. Curt slept on the deck, Steve Lindsey in the mid-deck, and Scott and Pedro found space back in SpaceHab or the tunnel.
I used a block of foam for a pillow, even though my head and the rest of me, for that matter, needed no support in weightlessness. It was just a way of making sleep in space familiar, even though it meant bringing the pillow to my head instead of putting my head down on the pillow.
When we awoke, in the so-called postsleep period during which we washed with foamless soap and brushed our teeth with foamless toothpaste, I noticed that we all had fat faces. This resulted from the fluid shift that weightlessness causes. The body senses it no longer needs the same fluid volume it has in a gravity environment, and you eliminate the excess through urination. The fluid that’s left moves from the abdomen and legs into the upper body and face. We all looked comical, Steve Robinson even more so because his hair was standing up like Dagwood Bumstead’s. But the facial effect isn’t permanent; it would recede in another day or two. Steve’s hair, however, would keep floating.
At breakfast, I put into my mouth the largest, fattest, longest jelly bean anybody ever tried to eat – and I wasn’t allowed to chew it up. It was the thermometer pill that transmitted core body temperature readings to an external monitor. The readings would constantly chart fluctuations in my body temperature.
After another day of work, meals, and a sleep period, day three began with the first of my orbital bloodlettings. Scott, as the flight doctor, took the almost daily blood draws used for the protein turnover, immunology, and blood chemistry studies for which Pedro and I were subjects. Each draw produced two samples, one that I would analyze with an in-flight blood analyzer, another that I would separate by running through a centrifuge and freeze for later analysis. I attached the centrifuge to the ceiling with duct tape. The centrifuge spun at 3,000 rpm, and once when I tried to move it off its axis of rotation I found this was impossible. Its torque was enough to send me spinning.
I’d discovered on the ground that a semipermanent intravenous catheter to supply the blood had proven too uncomfortable after a full day’s activities, so I decided I’d rather take the needle sticks. Scott became my Count Dracula after he floated in my direction for a blood draw wearing a set of plastic Halloween fangs. By a few days into the mission, he started grinning whenever he came my way with the syringe – or maybe it was just my imagination that he got to look more maniacal than ever.
The protein turnover study, the mission’s experiment in muscle loss and rebuilding for which I was a prime subject, required me to take alanine pills and histidine injections several times during the flight, just as I had in preflight testing. The researchers would compare the findings with the baseline studies done back then, and also with on-Earth readings taken after the flight.
Night four of the mission saw me and Chiaki rigged up in our head nets and instrumented vests. The twenty-one leads from the apparatus fed into boxes we wore on our waists, where the information was recorded for later analysis. We repeated everything the next night. These procedures, too, were bracketed by blood draws and urine samples, and were followed by cognition testing.
Sleeping with the elaborate head net and vest turned out to be easier in orbit than on the ground, where the electrode leads were uncomfortable. Imagine sleeping with a dozen buttons over half an inch thick stuck on your head that you feel every time you roll over. Weightlessness improved the irritating pressure.
On night six I donned a Holter heart monitor that I wore for twenty-four hours to provide a constant electrocardiogram. Anomalies in heart function in some of the other astronauts during space flight made NASA doctors decide to look at the action in a seventy-seven-year-old’s heart.
All the while, I kept track of other experiments back in SpaceHab and on the mid-deck. The one that fascinated me most was Aerogel, a superthin, light, translucent substance with marvelous insulating qualities – a microscopic layer insulates as well as thirty thermal windows. It was my job to activate it simply by turning several switches. It’s thought that manufacturing Aerogel in microgravity might solve the problem that keeps it from being in common use on Earth. So far, it’s been impossible to make it as clear as glass.
On nights seven and eight Chiaki and I put the sleep nets and vests on again for two more sets of readings.
The Spartan satellite we were to deploy was our biggest payload, and the reason for our high orbit. It weighed a ton and a half, and was designed to photograph the sun’s corona and the effects of solar winds from outside Earth’s atmosphere. Solar winds produce interference that affects communications, electrical grids, and electronics on Earth, an effect that is heightened during times of high solar activity.
On the third day of the flight, Steve Robinson took the controls of the fifty-foot robot arm and maneuvered to connect with the Spartan, lifting it out of the payload bay and away from the orbiter. This was a delicate operation, requiring great care.
Once the Spartan was on its own, Curt used the orbital maneuvering system to move away from the satellite. The satellite would orbit independently for two days, taking pictures, until Steve retrieved it again on day six. To accomplish this retrieval, Curt maneuvered the orbiter to within a few feet of the Spartan, a flawless rendezvous that put Steve in a perfect position to bring the Spartan back on board. I was in the SpaceHab with the best view in the house as he nestled Spartan gently back into its cradle.
On November 3 I briefly donned my political hat. It was the first time in years I didn’t go to the polls on
