ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The astronauts aboard the shuttle Discovery spent the day moving tons of stuff off the shuttle and onto the International Space Station. This is the point in their mission when zero gravity really comes in handy.
They docked at the space station yesterday, after putting the shuttle through a slow-motion back flip. This morning, I spoke with Pilot Mark Kelly and Commander Steven Lindsey, who told me how they overcame a problem to make that turn. There was a bad thermostat on a thruster they needed for the back flip, and they had to be sure it wasn't too cold.
Mr. STEVEN LINDSEY (Discovery Astronaut): Well, we keep the shuttle warm much like you do on earth. If you don't have air conditioning or heating or anything like that, if it's a sunny day, you go out and you get in the sun, and the sun will warm you up. So what our controllers did is come up with some attitudes, basically what's called a solar inertial attitude, and what that means is we keep pointing at the sun, and we keep that thruster in the sun, and if it gets too cold, it'll start leaking, and that was our concern. So what they did is kept that thruster warm enough, and once we fired it, then it would stay warm, and that enabled us to use the small thrusters for the rendezvous yesterday, which basically makes it a more precise flying task. It is not quite as hard to fly when you have those little thrusters.
SIEGEL: So you used some low-tech solar energy to accomplish that mission?
Mr. LINDSEY: You'd better believe it.
SIEGEL: As a veteran of shuttle missions, Mark Kelly, do you find that these reports of splotches or bits of gap-filler that are protruding, or a piece of foam came off - are these signs that the shuttle is showing its age, or have these things happened on all flights, and now with our concerns about safety, we're just hearing a lot more about them?
Mr. MARK KELLY (Discovery Astronaut): Well, Robert, we never had the capability before to see the underside of the vehicle like we do now. We have a lot of cameras we use during lift-off, and then part of the maneuver to flip the vehicle over when we get underneath the space station to take video, we never did that before, either. So we can see a lot more than we can now, and we've got a pretty clean underside of Discovery, but I imagine that, you know, all shuttle flights have probably had, in the past, had little pieces of gap-filler sticking out, and little blotches here and there, so we're really happy with what we know about the condition of the vehicle right now, and we're going to find out a little bit more later today and into tomorrow.
SIEGEL: The shuttle that you are piloting was designed, by my calculations, back when you were, at most, in high school, if not younger than that. As a pilot, do you know what you like a more modern craft to be able to do when shuttle flights are retired in 2010?
Mr. KELLY: Well, Robert, the first space shuttle launch, I was in the 10th grade, I might have been in the 11th grade, but anyway, it was a while ago. But the shuttle's a great vehicle. We don't have many problems with it at all. I mean, it could keep flying, and we're going to keep flying it until 2010.
For the next generation vehicle, you know, the number one thing I would like out of it is that it could go somewhere other than earth orbit, and we're planning on doing that. We're designing a vehicle that's going to be able to go to the space station, but it's also going to go to the moon, and it ultimately will be used as a return vehicle coming back from Mars, so you know, we're really looking forward to that and, you know, I think, you know, it's an exciting time for NASA.
SIEGEL: One last question for Steve Lindsey. For the half of Americans who, in polls, say they don't think the shuttle missions are worth it, what do you say to them?
Mr. LINDSEY (NASA, Space Shuttle Discovery): Well, what I would say to that is the kind of work we do, going after space exploration and things like that, is an investment in our future. And, you know, just like we invest in research and universities and things like that, these things that we do, human space flight is hard. It's hard work, it's difficult to do, it's challenging. It has risks associated with it. But, you know, usually when you go after something that's a real challenge, usually you discover things and you learn new things and you have to develop new technologies to make that happen. And in that process, you end up generating an awful lot of things that are used to make life better for folks on earth. So what I would say is it's an investment. Yeah, it costs money, but the return is huge. The numbers I've heard before is eight or nine dollars to every one spent on space.
I don't know what that number is today, but I have no doubt that as we go into the exploration business here, and as we continue with settling in station, that the things that are going to come out of it will yield all kinds of new things that really we haven't even thought about today.
SIEGEL: Steve Lindsey and Mark Kelly, thanks to both of you, and good luck.
Cdr. LINDSEY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Astronauts Steven Lindsey and Mark Kelly spoke this morning from the International Space Station, orbiting some 200 miles above the earth. In the short time that we talked, they passed over Italy, Romania, Ukraine and southwestern Russia.
Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.