November 7, 2013 has turned out to be a pretty big day for the Andersons. Six years ago today, I landed at the Kennedy Space Center with the able crew of STS-120, after spending 151 days, 18 hours, 23 minutes and 14 seconds - okay, lets say 152 days - living and working in outer space. It was also my 15th wedding anniversary. Today, as my beautiful bride and I celebrate 21 years of marriage, we also celebrate the anniversary of my first space flight ending and the beginning of the spaceflight of my dear friend and spacewalking partner, Rick Mastracchio. Rick, along with his crewmates Koichi Wakata and Mikhail Turin, arrived at the International Space Station today to begin their near-six-month journey. Congrats my friends. Enjoy the good life! The numbers of 11, 7 and 15 hold specific significance for me and my family. Check it out via a short excerpt from my upcoming book (due out in about a year or so), from the Chapter entitled The Serendipity of Chance. Hope you enjoy it! Following a successful eleven-day mission, the crew of STS-117 departed from the International Space Station leaving me onboard with my Russian crewmates, Fyodor and Oleg, to begin my five-month stay. Theirs would not be an easy return. The weather was not favorable for a return to their primary landing site, the Kennedy Space Center. The ability to bring the Shuttle back to where she lifted off is a huge savings to the space program and the U.S. Taxpayer. The Florida weather continued to persist in its lack of cooperation. As a result, Mission Control informed the crew that they would be landing at Edwards Air Force Base in the arid and wind-swept desert of southern California. Edwards was the second priority target of two seldom-used back-up landing sites. Though typically blessed with gorgeous weather, Edwards nonetheless remained a less-than-optimal landing site because it is three-thousand miles from where it needs to be, and has little of the high-tech equipment required to start preparing for the next mission. Because of that complex decision to change the landing site, the shuttle program would require the orbiter to be mounted on the back of a modified Boeing 747 known as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for the flight back to Florida. This continental crossing would cost taxpayers approximately one million dollars. It also necessitated that the Shuttle Carrier stop for fuel midway in their journey. NASA does not readily announce where that stop will be as their choice is dictated by weather, facilities and air traffic patterns. SO --in the end-- STS-117, which had carried Nebraska’s first (and currently its only) astronaut into outer space, just so happened to stop at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska; twenty minutes from where I grew up. The slow, circular, low-altitude fly-over of the Platte River Valley provided thousands of Nebraskans with an opportunity never-before offered in history – the chance to see the spaceship that carried one of their own to a place few have ever reached. Coincidence? You be the judge…. In late October of 2007 Discovery launched to fly to the ISS to deliver a new module --dubbed “Harmony” by a public vote– and a new station crew member. Discovery’s crew moved one of the station solar arrays (temporarily positioned since its delivery to the ISS with STS-97 in 2000), acronymed into “P6,” to its final location on the port side of the station’s outboard truss segment. Perhaps most importantly of all, they returned me to Earth. Onboard Discovery, hatches closed and sealed tight, we were ready for re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Given that the orbital travel of the shuttle requires her to fly around the globe at a speed of about 17,500 mph and a successful re-entry trajectory can be achieved only when the shuttle has “burned off” almost all of that energy, an effective technique called a “roll reversal” is utilized. Essentially, the shuttle is like a stone being skipped across a lake. Each time the stone comes in contact with the surface, some of its energy is absorbed by the water. Eventually, its speed is reduced and it can be “captured” --sinking beneath the water’s surface. The principal with the shuttle is nearly the same, except that instead of skipping across water, we use the Earth’s atmosphere, banking the shuttle so that her black, silicon-tiled belly penetrates into its layers of air creating a powerful source of friction and thereby slowing her down. We begin by banking one direction, then swing (roll) the orbiter back in the other. These roll reversals continue until we have sufficiently decreased our energy enough to be “captured” by the atmospheric layer of our planet. While the two weeks in orbit went well, the mission had been extremely intense. An unexpected tear in an uncooperative, partially unfurled solar array, necessitated an Apollo 13-like EVA performance from the ground and crew. Focused solely on mission success, the crew had worked hard and everyone was suffering from fatigue. So much so that Commander Pam “Pambo” Melroy asked if we could have a daylight landing. Landing in daylight would go a long way toward enhancing our chances of success and safety. For safety reasons, most pilots would prefer to land in daylight, but our space fliers are trained for night landings as well. The decision to honor our commander’s request required a significant change in our current on-orbit trajectory and flight path. Extra work on mission control’s end would be required. More than that, the new trajectory would make our atmospheric entry point right over the heartland of the United States. NASA had (purposefully) not done an entry over the continental United States since the Columbia tragedy on February 1, 2003. On November 7, 2007, the planets must have aligned; special permission was given to Commander Melroy for us to alter our trajectory, enabling us to land in Florida’s beautiful morning sunshine. As we initiated our atmospheric entry profile, Commander Melroy keyed the microphone seconds prior to execution of the first of these critical banking maneuvers. In a voice reflecting her years of training and experience, she told ground control, “Houston, this is Discovery on air-to-ground one. We are initiating our first roll reversal over (and she paused briefly for effect) the great State of Nebraska.” Using these specialized maneuvers to slow us down to “entry interface” velocity, we fell toward Earth like a huge stone. Aero-surfaces performing flawlessly, we made our final turn for the runway at the Kennedy Space Center and at 12:01 Eastern Standard Time; we touched down on runway one-five. It was November 7, 2007 - my wife Susan and my 15th wedding anniversary. And oh, by the way, did you realize that the date of November 7th can also be written as 11-7 or 117!? Given the data analysis presented herein, I defy anyone to tell me that there isn’t a higher power out there that put these things in place so a small town boy from Nebraska could live his dream. I don’t think that it could have been scripted any better. Wait… did I mention that my NASA career spanned thirty years; fifteen as an engineer and fifteen as an astronaut? Serendipitous!
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 17:14:12 +0000
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