Word: payloaders
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When the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Florida last week, the roaring flames signaled the start of NASA's busiest year in space. Ten missions are scheduled for 1984, including one with a secret Pentagon payload. But Challenger had barely settled into orbit 190 miles above the earth on the tenth shuttle mission when space gremlins struck. A multimillion-dollar communications satellite, one of two carried on board, mysteriously vanished into the void. Still, in spite of the embarrassing loss, NASA hoped to redeem itself with another of its spectaculars. This week, for the first time, astronauts plan...
These new headaches demonstrated once again that the shuttle is still very much an experimental vehicle. Even so, NASA could take pride in the debut of Spacelab and the new breed of payload specialists-scientists from outside the regular astronaut corps, including one West German researcher-who managed its heavy load of 72 experiments. The space agency noted that more than 90% of the studies had been completed. If the scientific data transmitted from orbit in just a single burst were lined up as small, text-size electronic symbols, one official calculated, they would extend from the earth...
Because the early hours in orbit are critical in judging human reaction to weightlessness, the scientist-astronauts got a fast start on their biomedical program. They took blood samples from one another (Payload Specialist Byron Lichtenberg, as the chief bloodletter, became known as "the vampire"), underwent eye tests, lifted steel balls, were flung around in a sledlike contraption called a body-restraint system, and even endured electric shocks. Not surprisingly, the orbital guinea pigs complained that the tests were making them ill, although the torture had a medical purpose: to learn more about the nausea, headaches and general lethargy, known...
Monitoring the experiments is a new breed of scientist-astronauts called payload specialists. On Spacelab's maiden voyage, they are Ulf Merbold, 42, a West German physicist whose specialty is the behavior of materials at low temperatures, and Byron Lichtenberg, 35, a biomedical engineer from M.I.T. and Brown University with a particular interest in solving the problem of motion sickness that has afflicted so many astronauts...
...specialist in ionospheric physics who spent 59½ days aboard Skylab, and Astronomer Robert Parker, 46, who was a member of the support crews for Apollo 15 and 17. Both are so-called mission specialists: These are career astronauts who concentrate on science rather than flying. By contrast, payload specialists are hired only for a particular mission. In either case, all the crew members will earn their salary (astronaut pay starts at $24,500 a year and goes to more than $50,000) since this is the first flight in which someone will always be on duty. Tours will...