Word: cargoing
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Unlike the cargo on current flights, Vandenberg payloads such as meteorological and navigational satellites will not have to be placed in bulky canisters to keep them free of contamination. Instead the devices will be taken into the Payload Changeout Room, Slick Six's third movable building. This 158-ft.-high, 6,000-ton structure moves by rail toward the waiting assembly building, where a mammoth door of six panels, each measuring 30 ft. high and 130 ft. wide, will slowly rise, just like a garage door. Inside the building-within-a-building, the payload will be lifted into...
...inside the U.S. Marine compound, its pilot careful to avoid jerking the huge netted crate that hung like ballast beneath it. With machine gunners at the ready, it whirred low over the beachside terrain and headed for U.S. Navy ships on the horizon, there to set down its cargo just as gingerly. Meanwhile, 400 yds. to the west, a steady stream of landing craft nosed into a heavily fortified jetty and began collecting a seemingly endless line of forklift pallets lashed to more wooden crates. "The beach has been working 24 hours a day for the past two days," reported...
...disastrous earlier in the flight struck once more. The astronauts discovered that the shuttle's trusty triple-jointed arm had mysteriously developed a machine's equivalent of arthritis. It could not adequately move its "wrist." The problem effectively scuttled the plan to lift SPAS out of the cargo bay and rotate it slowly in space at the end of the arm. While SPAS simulated Solar Max's spin, McCandless was supposed to attach himself to it with a specially designed pin. Unable to cure the arm's ailment, however, the astronauts could do no more than...
...other foul-ups ended more satisfactorily. Left untethered in the cargo bay, a foot restraint was accidentally jogged and began floating away in space. "We can go get it," McCandless volunteered. But Commander Brand, exercising caution, immediately replied: "No, no, no, no." Instead, he maneuvered the shuttle toward the fleeing bit of hardware until McCandless could reach out and snare it. The balletic catch brought applause from the Houston controllers. McCandless was pleased too. Improvising on a slogan of an earlier shuttle crew, he joked, "We deliver, but we pick up also...
Mission controllers exonerated the shuttle crew from any responsibility in the calamitous satellite losses. Under the direction of Physicist Ronald McNair, 33, both satellites were spun perfectly out of Challenger's cargo bay. Even so, there could be serious repercussions for NASA and the U.S. aerospace community. Unless the problem with the little boosters, called PAMs (for payload-assist modules), is resolved soon, some upcoming lift-offs may have to be postponed. PAMs are scheduled to be used for satellite launches in May as the upper stage of a conventional Delta rocket and in June during the maiden voyage...