(00:00:00) I don't think you'll find his remarks impaired by that at all. And we listen now to Bruce McCandless. (00:00:07) I'm frequently asked is it fun? Yes, it is space is is really a very pleasant environment. There is a brief adaptation period which depending on the individual can range from just a couple of hours on through perhaps a day and a half or two days in the case of the space shuttle missions which are by their very nature relatively short that is 4 to 5 days up to a maximum that we've flown of ten days this of course has a certain significance. Although nobody has ever been incapacitated to the point of not being able to perform their duties. But as we move on to the space station with typical crew tours of Duty up there on the order of 90 to 180 days. I think you can all agree that the problem of spending a day or two getting accustomed to your surroundings is a very inconsequential in that scale of things. I'm currently working on the Hubble Space Telescope. I first became involved in that in the fall of 1978 when the project was starting up and have been working about 25 or 20 percent of my time fairly continuously since then on it looking mostly at how we can make it more maintainable on orbit and how we can adapt it to crew interaction during the deployment and maintenance and repair missions. The first known instance of someone advocating a telescope in orbit was in 1923 by Hermann oberth who recently passed his 100th birthday are recently achieved the age of a hundred and I believe it is still alive and he wrote a thesis which was submitted to the University of Heidelberg and was rejected for being trivial and not based on substance. In fact the idea then suffered a period perhaps of dormancy until 1946 when Professor Lyman Spitzer of plasma physics Fame and also astronomy Fame authored a report while he was at the Rand Corporation pointing out and enumerating the advantages of a telescope in orbit and the astronomical Community since the Advent of spaceflight the Sputnik the U.s. Satellites have been moving slowly in that direction and the Hubble Space Telescope is really the first in a series of satellites known as the great observatories Series. So without further Ado, let me see if I can show you a few of these slides. This is the same satellite device, whatever you want to call it that and started life as the large Space. Telescope was renamed Space Telescope after some congressmen apparently expressed concern that large was perhaps a luxury and then was later renamed the Hubble Space Telescope and honor of Edwin P Hubble and astronomer who is known as the father of extragalactic astronomy or astronomy outside of our own Galaxy. Amongst other things he discovered the redshift which is the shift in the spectrum of stars. Toward the red Direction meaning that they are receding from us or going away much as the Doppler effect is associated with the sound of a train whistle, which is it builds up in Pitch when it comes as it approaches you and then as it recedes into the distance it falls off in Pitch. Well, it turns out that as far as anybody can tell all of the galaxies are receding from some Center The Big Bang Theory and their velocity is apparently a function of how far away in the farther. They are way the faster they're going and the farther into the red part of the spectrum or in the red direction of the spectrum other Spectrum shifted the Hubble discovered this he came up with the constant of proportionality known as Hubble's Constant and as a result of that it was seen fit to put his name on the telescope. In terms of looking at justifications for putting a telescope up above the atmosphere. One of the principal ones is the filtering effect of the atmosphere down here. You can see the wavelength region that the human eye is sensitive to and the the green area here. I believe are the windows of transmission through the atmosphere of different wavelengths and the fact that we are sensitive into the area that comes through with the least amount of 10 attenuation is probably not an evolutionary accident, but probably the result of either a grand design or or tens of thousands or millions of years of evolution. The relative capabilities of various other instruments are indicated on here oao is the orbiting astronomical Observatory series a series of small unmanned satellites. The iue is the international ultraviolet Explorer the Palomar Schmidt telescope up here and then the larger one the 200-inch telescope are also shown and the expectation is that the Hubble Space Telescope will be able to exceed all of these instruments in terms of sensitivity and wavelength coverage. (00:06:00) basically (00:06:03) As a result of being up above the atmosphere and being able to resolve things more clearly. It can pick up objects, which are seven times fainter that is sort them out from the background noise and this gives you an increase in distance of seven times farther out. Which when you Cube it for the volume of a sphere gives you about 350 times more of the universe that will be able to see then we can at the present time. It is the first to be launched from a space shuttle. It's planned for 15 to 20 year life time on orbit and it will be maintained and have instruments swapped out periodically as either advances in technology dictate or is components fail this bullet here on return to Earth for refurbishment as pretty well been deleted from the program the expectation being that will be able to maintain it successfully on orbit. The 15 to 20 year Lifetime and that it may ultimately come back and go in the Smithsonian Institute or something of that sort, but not for refurbishment. Here's an artist's concept. It has to be an artist concept showing the resolution of the Space Telescope in comparison with the sort of pictures that were getting today from ground-based (00:07:26) observatories (00:07:28) putting things in a little bit different perspective. I mentioned the 350 times greater volume of the university to be able to see with the telescope. That's this big spherical boundary out here compared with the largest ground-based observatories Palomar and the unaided human eye down here. In terms of sensitivity it'll go out to approximately the 31st Stellar magnitude or about three orders of magnitude lower and the fundamentals. I don't know. I hope I'm not talking down to any astronomy students here, but I figured this was a general audience. Basically. It's a reflecting telescope. It's a cassegrain. It features a single large mirror 2.4 meters in diameter or about 96 inches in diameter, which receives the incoming light reflects it back to a smaller secondary meter about little less than one meter in diameter and then reflects it down through a hole in the first one to the instruments. (00:08:39) The structure (00:08:41) started Life as a honeycomb sandwich of ultra low expansion glass was put together in this form with a face sheet and a Honeycomb Core and then a rear sheet and two of these units were fabricated one by perkinelmer Optical company in Danbury, Connecticut and the other by Eastern Kodak in Rochester. The configuration to a section of a parabola is accurate to approximately one-fortieth of the wavelength of red light. So they also represent one of the most precise jobs of mirror grinding to date in addition. They are backed up by little actuators. I believe there are 24 of them on the back that look a lot like Jack screws and can be controlled from the ground to put small forces on the mirror to warp it to more perfectly coincide to a parabola in response to light emitting diode signals that are up by the secondary mirror so that you can literally correct the configuration of your mirror as the years go by and as things may change and more importantly after you get away from the gravitational force of the earth under which its assembled. It turns out that one of the major considerations in ground-based observatories is the deformation caused by That he on the mirror and on this massive structure as it Maneuvers to the different angles pointing at the objects in the heavens. All these mirrors the two of them two, big ones are caged in a graphite epoxy metering trust structure, which in turn is attached to a titanium main ring for rigidity and low thermal coefficient of expansion here. You're looking at a shot of the the metering trust as it was fabricated by Boeing Corporation of Seattle Washington and delivered to perkinelmer. The instruments themselves attached to the back end of this titanium ring. There are four so-called actual scientific instruments each of them about the size of a telephone booth weighing about 750 pounds one so called radial scientific instrument from the jet propulsion laboratory of Caltech in California and three fine guidance sensors these instruments all have a mirror. Pick off of some sort the crowds into the central focal plane area, which is about a foot in diameter competing for their share of the optical plane. It is reflected off the the secondary mirror. The instruments that we have are basically two cameras to spectrometers a photometer and then a capability for astrometry or measurement of the precise angular differences between astronomical bodies using the fine guidance sensors, and the affiliations of the institutions are over here in the middle column. You can see that University of Wisconsin. UC San Diego JPL Caltech are all very prominently featured in this protocol. I'd also point out to you that this is an international project the European Space Agency is provided one of the instruments and is also providing the solar arrays about which I'll say a few more words later at no cost to the US and in return they are to get 15 to 20% of the observing time. So we're very fortunate in having them on board as International Partners typically a spectrometer, which are referred to earlier takes in light passes it through a slit to give you a narrow beam through a prism to generate a spectrum on a laboratory wall or a piece of paper or what have you in the astronomical configuration the same sort of thing applies except that you start out with an image coming through a telescope a slick a prism and then onto an electronic record. Medium one of the spectrometers the high-resolution spectrometers just shown here diagrammatically. The beam is folded several times starting out at the entrance pupil of the entrance aperture on the instrument. It comes in those down through a mirror comes up and bounces around through a series of gratings, and it's finally recorded and Link down to the ground by radio signal (00:13:27) astronaut Bruce (00:13:28) McCandless Jammer, which is probably the premier camera and we'll be sending back the most interesting pictures features. A mirror pick a Pick Off mirror extending into the absolute center of the field of view or the area where the best image quality exists and then a series of folded Optics to develop an image on a charge coupled device Matrix, which again is sent down to the ground electronically. The full Suite of instruments is represented here and I won't go through them individually. The point out the major areas of interest to each of the instrument investigators are shown on this slide in addition to refining the value of the Hubble constant. It's intended to search for planets in orbit around Stars other than our sons and to try to establish the existence of black holes. Nobody currently knows exactly how you're going to be able to document that other than as an aberration in light coming from a point past the black hole. It will also be used for imagery and studies of asteroids orbiting farther out than the orbit of Earth typically in the Mars Saturn belt. Some of the imagery that we would expect to get back or scenes of roughly this quality of the Red Spot on Jupiter and Saturn's rings. This is imagery that is currently available of this quality only from flyby spacecraft literally once in a lifetime or twice in a lifetime and with the Hubble Space Telescope on orbit will be able to get this sort of imagery and this quality essentially on (00:15:23) demand. (00:15:25) Supporting all of this scientific package are some housekeeping functions. There's a support systems module around it that contains most of the electronics package has there's a fixed head star tracker system that provides the intermediate pointing capability in orienting the telescope it starts out with son sensors son being the brightest star in the sky. Once it finds out where the sun is. It goes looking for some stars with the star tracker and then when you point it to a specific Target, the fine guidance sensors take over and using a selected pair out of 25,000 guide stars that have been individually catalogued and screen to make sure that they are not binary or dual Stars stabilizes the line of sight of the telescope to within 71 thousands of an arc second and can hold this orientation literally for days on end. Unlike telescopes on the earth here where typically you have a day-night cycle many portions of the sky can be observed continuously for days on end without problems of sunlight. As long as the telescope is pointed more than about 60 degrees away from the Sun and no closer than 20 degrees to an illuminated limb of the earth. It can observe whether it's daylight or Darkness outside makes no difference whatsoever to it. The actual pointing is accomplished by for Reaction Wheel assemblies two of which are seen here and the idea is that the Reaction Wheel assemblies are each one like a big electrically driven gyroscope and when you Turn on the juice to spin one of these gyroscopes up the gyroscope starts turning one way and the telescope turns the other way out of reaction. So to establish a rate on the telescope of a certain speed you would spend the one of the wheels up to a given speed and it would keep going in the telescope with keep going till you got to where you wanted to be and then you can stop the wheel and telescope would stop also. That works very well, except that even at the telescope's intended operating altitude which is approximately 320 nautical miles above the Earth. There are still small aerodynamic torques drag if you will that will eventually cause these wheels to saturate consequently not shown here, but later slide, there are four magnetic stalkers big long solenoidal windings electromagnets. If you will which are controlled by the computer to interact with the Earth's magnetic field and caused the reaction Wheels to slowly spin down. There are no propellants whatsoever on the telescope the astronomical Community wanted to avoid having contaminants from propellants outgassing anything of that sort. The entire shell scope has been baked out in a thermal vacuum chamber at moderately high temperatures under high vacuum for several weeks, so that Expected most of the volatiles are gone from it even so it'll take approximately two months after its deployed on orbit for all of the water vapor the humidity if you will do out gas from the graphite epoxy structure in the thing to totally stabilized. This is just an artist concept if you will of the entire telescope put together showing how the different modules the instruments and the different electronic components are all arranged and you can compare that with this next shot which is the actual flight vehicle taking in the vehicle assembly and test area or clean room at at Lockheed missiles and spacecraft in Sunnyvale, California where the telescope currently is located. We are planning on a December the 11th of this year launch of the telescope don't put too much stock in that specific date. However, because well now don't laugh because one of the problems with the telescope is that it can go up any day of the year you like. I say a problem because that means that it also has no leverage or no muscle for holding to any specific lunch date. We are working very hard to get the next shuttle flight off under a deadline in part imposed by the subsequent one, which is to deploy the Magellan spacecraft which will be headed towards Venus to put a probe in orbit around Venus. And of course the launch window there is somewhat less than a month long and it's about an 18-month cycle if they miss the window before another one opens up. So Magellan has a lot of Leverage. And later in the year in October. The Alyssa's probe going to Jupiter also has a lot of Leverage since it has a window that only opens every 13 months. So with the Space Telescope, we are very anxious to get it going but it might slip a launch or it might conceivably move up one or two. If something else happens to the Manifest once it gets into orbit. It will wind up in this configuration the solar arrays that I mentioned earlier roll out from a central stowage assembly. It's a very ingenious design. The arrays are supplied by a German firm integrated by British Aerospace of Bristol England with Swiss electronics for control of the whole assembly the aperture door on the far end protects the Optics while it's being carried in the Orbiter and also provides a sunshield. Once the door is open and this particular side of the telescope pointed toward the Sun. Here you see again the telescope out of it the clean room and Lockheed you can see the size of it from the humans in the foreground the the barrel and the mirror of the mirror. I mentioned is 96 inches. The barrel is about 10 feet in diameter. And the widest section is about 14 feet on the deployment Mission sts-31. We will be carrying it up in the orbiters payload Bay on the second day of the mission will use the remote manipulator arm to lift it out and then the solar arrays and the high-gain antennas and things like that will be unfurled as you saw in the previous slide one of my jobs along with Kathy Sullivan who incidentally was the first u.s. Woman to make a spacewalk are to function as insurance policies and to go out and do a spacewalk or extravehicular activity if any of these You're Asian operations don't go as intended. The telescope will then be left on orbit to do its own thing. The shuttle will return to the ground and will be controlling it. Here's a closer shot of the solar array at British Aerospace. The array is about eight feet wide and about 20 feet on each side and it's a flexible array. It gets rolled up on the central drum and these Rod like or pole like structures that you see on each side are what they call stowable tubular extendable members for stemming in Aerospace parlance. And if you envision the Carpenters tape, you know how when it comes out of the rule comes out of the role. It has a little bit of a curvature and it tends to make it stiff carry out a little farther. So you've got a piece of metal rolled up its form so that when it comes out it forms about three hundred to three hundred and thirty degrees of a circle if you take two of these tapes on roles and extrude them so that they overlap in the gaps are a hundred and eighty degrees out you've formed one of these so-called stems or by stems and by pushing these tapes out and literally Forming a rod and sort of the old Indian Snake Charmer trip trick only with metallic tapes one on each side pulls a bar out which pulls the solar arrays out and this whole thing unrolls like a window shade forcing itself out by its bootstraps from the center. It's a very efficient very effective system. Our only concern is that it was designed. Unfortunately for true zero gravity, which means that it can only tolerate 61 thousands of a g. And as a consequence is very flexible and subject perhaps to somewhat less reliability than we'd like to see but we're anticipating eventually getting things quite satisfactorily deployed. There's a shot those taking the water tank up at the Marshall space flight center. One of the things that we do in training for extravehicular activities is have a crewman inside of a pressure suit, which of course Filled with air the suit is them weighted down with about 50 pounds of strategically placed lead weights until you are neutrally buoyant that is if you let go you neither rise nor sink and if you put yourself in an attitude you stay in that attitude. This gives us probably the best simulation of weightlessness overall that were able to get down here on the ground. It does have some problems such as the fact that when you move something underwater, they're still viscous drag some of your tools and things like that aren't neutrally buoyant. So if you let go of them they drop to the bottom or or fall in a diver and perhaps most annoyingly if you turn upside down well everybody else on the outside says, oh yeah, that looks neat. He's upside down and it feels great. Well, you're literally standing on your collarbone inside the suit, which is filled with air and you still have all the blood rushing to your head and things like that as You were standing on your head over here with your feet up against the wall. So it has certain limitations the other techniques include use of an aircraft. We have a I shouldn't say. Oh we have a kc-135 which is the military version of a Boeing 707 that has the guts all stripped out on the inside to make a bigger volume and by flying that along at a modest altitude 1520 thousand feet pulling up and then flying a parabola pushing over the top you can generate an effective zero gravity field inside the aircraft for about 45 seconds until you get over to a steep nose down attitude and then the pilot has to pull a plane out with about two geez so you don't get anything for free, but for 45 seconds, you have no water and you can evaluate various phenomena in a close approximation to weightlessness. Back in the Apollo program. We also use techniques such as harnesses and slings that had pneumatic suspension system. So you could walk around and 1/6 gravity things of that sort simulated 1/6 gravity. And of course there are air bearing floors that use a cushion of air to move around on a frictionless fashion and things of that sort. But all in all the water tank is our Mainstay for simulating weightlessness, and it's also probably appropriate at this point to mention that we have no single means really of getting a total simulation of a space mission. You have to take something from the water tank something from working on a laboratory bench top something from a simulator something from mock-up something that the previous crew told you maybe something from your previous experience and you have to mentally integrate all of those stuff to get the the totality of the zero gravity. The on-orbit environment so that the first time somebody goes into space. There's always still has a little bit of this adjustment period certainly mentally if nothing else but it's a very rapid transition. Once the telescope is in placed in orbit. There is no eyepiece. That is we the crew don't get to look through it. The data all is sent electronically via the tracking and data relay satellite. One of which was launched on STS 26 in September of this last year another which is on the next shuttle mission and the third only partially functional which was launched an SDS 6 (00:28:32) Bruce McCandless. The (00:28:34) astronaut satellite goes down to the ground at White Sands, New Mexico back up to a Communications relay satellite and down to the Goddard space flight center, which has operational control of the telescope there goes Landline over to the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland where the the actual investigators will be doing their work and scheduling their priorities. It's estimated right now that the observing time is over scheduled by excuse me is over requested by a factor of about eight during the initial years and they're anticipating continued interest. The principal investigators are known as guaranteed time observers. They get a certain amount of guaranteed time and they get exclusive use of their data for the first year after the data is gathered and then it becomes available in the public domain. The other category is guests observers, which will probably include some serious amateurs that data is scheduled on Merit based on a Review Committee and the data is available almost immediately in the public domain. So that anyone can can profit by its utilization or profit by any conclusions. They can draw from it. At about three to five year intervals will be launching maintenance and repair missions to the telescope. Basically the shuttle will go up to this 310 to 330 nautical miles altitude using the remote manipulator arm. The telescope will be grabbed will be set on a piece of Flight Support equipment in the cargo bay and then using components carried up on this so called orbital replaceable unit carrier which can vary from find guidance sensors to batteries to science and scientific instrument command and data handling and literally anything that isn't welded onto the structure of the telescope can be carried up there and replaced on 224 spacewalk or Evas following that the telescope will be put into a higher orbit or reboosted. And on this slide. What I've Illustrated is the comparison between water tank training run. In changing out one of the large scientific instruments and the same operation as currently carried out on the ground at Lockheed when they change the instrument in case you've never thought about what's involved in taking a box that weighs 700 pounds and sticking it in some place and supporting it on a latch that has only two points one of the top and one at the bottom and then a rotational stabilizer. I was fascinated the first time I watched because what they have is a beam that gets bolted onto the face of the instrument. This beam is suspended by a crane at about this location and it has a mobile counterweight pick up the box and with electric motors that drive the counterweight out until it's exactly balanced level and also Drive the counterweight back and forth to get roll put bubble levels and things like that and micrometer. Yeah. Is on it and you run it in and lock it down. It says here in fine print that we're going to be able to do all that in orbit taking advantage of zero gravity just by sliding it in operating the latches and and locking it down. We've done it in the water tank. It seems to work very well, but it's still a very close fit. Some of the other tasks just few representative one include the replacement of a whole batch of small electronics black boxes located on the doors. And in the base of the the telescope, we've also simulated this underwater train for it one of the programmatically realistic but also frustrating things about the telescope is that it started out with the concept that everything would just sort of zip in and out like the replacement units on an airliner you walk up to. And you flip the latch and you fully all went out and stick the new one any close the latch. Well early on it was decided that that was a too expensive and be too heavy so they backed off to a compromise position with mounting bolts and Keyhole slots and connectors that were driven by Jack screws and then there was a budget Crunch and when the budget crunch hit only about 10 different units retain this philosophy and everything else was declared to be non-replaceable and then a few years went by and we managed to convince folks that just because somebody's box was classified as non-replaceable if it failed and incapacitated the telescope that didn't mean that he wouldn't want it replaced. So we have argued and made a lot of In roads and going back the other direction so that virtually anything with the exception of the mirrors and some of the stuff down inside the barrel of the telescope can be replaced on orbit with the appropriate amount of effort going into it. Another shot of the the water tank operation aiming towards a maintenance and repair Mission. This is a an underwater version of the so-called Canada are more remote manipulator arm. You can see we're using it here with a foot restraint on the end and a crewman out on the end of the arm being positioned to work on the telescope. It also points up one of the shortcomings in this facility. This is at the Marshall space flight center. The water tank is 40 feet deep, but with the orbiters payload Bay with the support platform, which is not shown there and the telescope on top you really need something closer to 60 feet of water depth to keep it from sticking up out of the water. The telescope itself is 46 feet long overall weighs 24,000 pounds and about 14 feet at its widest diameter. So we do this simulation also piecewise with the telescope sitting on the bottom of the And from my angle, I can't see exactly where the bottom of the tank is, but it's about here and mentally putting all this together. We are starting at the Johnson Space Center work. Hopefully next year on a new bigger water tank, which will be 60 feet deep and about 250 feet by a hundred and twenty five feet in which we plan to be able to put an entire initial assembly of the space station at one Fell Swoop and to demonstrate putting all the pieces together the space station. You'll also be very appropriate for the follow-on mission training for Space Telescope maintenance. Following repair and replacement of instruments on orbit. The telescope can be latched down using its original kill fitting to that Oru carrier. I showed you a few minutes ago. And in sort of a three-point suspension between the Keel fitting and the servicing platform held tightly enough to allow the Orbiter to carry the whole package back up to a higher altitude typically back to the 330 nautical miles. So as to preserve its operational capability one of the big debates right now concerns how high the current sunspot activity cycle will go. The last cycle was a record in terms of peak activity and we're about three quarters of the way up the the curve apparently at the present time and as sunspot activity picks up what it does literally is like Wind blowing over water and the case of the wind stirs up the wavelets and the white caps and make the water rougher in the case of the sunspots. It gives rise to particle storms and Magnetic storms and stirs up the upper atmosphere so that the telescope starts running into the equivalent of turbulence and waves in the upper atmosphere creating more drag and bring it down more rapidly. I mentioned just briefly the great Observatory program. When I started out this is both a program to cover the entire observational spectrum of Interest running through the visible region through the gamma rays X-rays and infrared and it's also a very interesting approach to getting the astronomical Community to quit bickering with each other over whose telescope goes first and to come up with a plan and then have everybody support first getting the Space Telescope up and next getting the gamma ray Observatory up and basically having an orderly progression of launching these instruments the gamma ray Observatory is nearly complete. It's expected to be launched late next. Late in the spring of next year or early summer and consists of two fairly massive solid detects detectors that will record the tracks of incoming gamma particles gamma rays, excuse me, giving you intensity and direction of the gamma rays and is also there has also been designed to be serviceable and it also is being launched on the Space Telescope the next one actually F the advanced x-ray astronomical facility was started last summer that is the formal new start the contractor for it as is the contractor for GR o is TRW of Southern Southern, California, Redondo Beach, I believe. Unlike the two others though actually half is being designed for launched from an Expendable launch vehicle and for servicing from the space station its projected for about a 1992 to 1994 launch and the last in this series, the shirt of for space infrared telescope facility is projected for a new start in about the 91 or 92 time period and realistically probably gets launched right around the year 2000. I'd like to stress that it all of these really are facilities in the case of the Space Telescope. We already have three replacement instruments under construction. One is an improved wide field planetary camera. Another is a cryogenically cooled infrared experiment and to be honest with you. I forgotten what the third one is. The other projects will also have interchangeable experiments and much like the ground-based observatories will be able to respond to the progress of Science and to the advances in technology and even perhaps to astronomical Politics as the desire to move off in different directions of Investigations develops, but for the moment, our real challenge is to get the Space Telescope out of its clean room at Sunnyvale from which it can see absolutely no stars up into the on-orbit configuration where we hope soon to be bringing back imagery such as this artist concept of a black hole or the trifid nebula. Or the spiral galaxy (00:40:50) that was astronaut Bruce McCandless who is going to be Mission specialist for the shuttle launch of the Hubble Space. Telescope said jeweled for sometime this year Bruce McCandless speaking to an audience at Morehead State University and I hope the slides didn't throw you too much kind of like slides as a matter of fact, they allow you to use your imagination a little bit now and then well anyway after his formal remarks Bruce McCandless took time to answer some questions for members of the audience and he'll be repeating most of these questions before giving his response. I'll jump in when I have (00:41:24) to she was I mentioned a budget crunching. What does the financial Outlook of NASA look like for the coming years, the crunch that I was referring to specifically had to do just with the Space Telescope that was originally approved with a fixed dollar amount and a ten percent margin and Let Me Over N that it was awfully hard getting additional funding the agency Outlook right now looks very good. I think we're coming up on a budget for the next fiscal year on the order of 12 and a half to 13 billion dollars which is still down around 1% of the federal budget that's intended to give us about two point one. I built I believe for the major work on the space station getting that under way and also for continuing operations with the shuttle and for bringing the the so-called mixed Fleet concept along with Expendable launch Vehicles. So right now it I would say it's looking looking very good. We weren't 100% sure what mr. Bush's position was going to be on Space until he got into the White House and we're still not a hundred percent sure, but it looks like he's planning on being very supportive (00:42:48) McCandless was then asked about the future of unmanned launches. (00:42:53) Well, the air force of course has a number of launches coming up and I'm on a lot shake your ground frankly when it comes to to recapping the unmanned schedule for (00:43:08) you. (00:43:12) But we are moving over to the mixed Fleet concept. You will see shortly the first launch of a Delta II with I believe navstar global positioning satellites on them and you'll also be seeing much more in the way of launches actually conducted by private companies such as Martin Marietta McDonnell Douglas and and folks of that sort. So NASA is is encouraging commercialism as well as diversifying its payloads out. There's a certain amount of logic to taking the the communication satellite deployments for example off of the shuttle were basically we were carrying them to orbit and and deploying them as though they had been on an unmanned launch vehicle on the other hand. The argument was that we had greater reliability and I still think that in the long run. We do have greater liability because except for the 51l the Challenger accident. We had not lost a single payload, even the two that were deployed on 41 B and failed to make it to geosynchronous orbit through a rocket motor problem didn't wind up in the ocean they wound up in an orbit that were later recovered by 51 a mission. On the other hand in terms of the overall program structure. You can probably do it more economically by putting them on Expendable launch vehicles and pumping them off that way. Please okay. NASA has been testing two new versions of space suits for the space station and have I had a chance to view them and test them I've had some involvement with that but I've not been one of the principal evaluators on the suits by way of background. There are several objectives of the new suit design. One of the the primary ones is raising the suit pressure from the current 4.3 pounds per square inch absolute that we're using with the shuttle to approximately eight pounds per square inch absolute so that you get away from the requirement for pre-breathing that is breathing a hundred percent oxygen to get rid of the nitrogen in your body that's carried around it at sea level atmospheric pressure equivalent. So you don't get the bends when you drop from 14.7 to 4.3 or or eight also the new suits are being designed for longer lifetime the current shuttle suit is only certified for something like 24 hours of operation between ground-based refurbishment which basically comes out to a couple of hours in a vacuum chamber test before launching in three spacewalks on orbit the suits intended for the space station obviously have to be capable of going up there and being maintained for a minimum of three months and preferably six months to a year on orbit by the crews that are using them without a great deal of Manpower being invested in them. So those are the two major emphases and there's a move to to go to a harder suit structure that is hard me metal sizing rings and things of that sort. So you can rapidly adjust and resize them and also to try to make the life support system. Less dependent on consumables. That is the effort is being made to have the carbon dioxide removal system re General in the space station. So you don't have to carry up this continual supply of lithium hydroxide canisters, which we do right now and also to provide cooling by some means other than subliming water off out of an evaporator so that you don't have a lot of water being evaporated off the space station. So all total there are five or six different changes improvements that are being factored into them the reactions that I've gotten coming back from the folks that have been doing the evaluations on them are generally pretty positive. There's been a lot of work that's gone into the design of the glove which in my opinion is the most critical link and they're really increasing the pressure from 4.32 8 PSI in the current glove would be unacceptable to just wear your hands up. To do anything (00:47:51) next in audience member wanted an old from Bruce McCandless if there's any way for universities or other organizations to participate in space experiments. (00:48:01) Okay in that context for participation there is still a program known as the gas can or the gaas getaway special program which for $10,000 you can buy the right to send along a payload which is about three cubic feet and about a by a and gets carried in a can out in the cargo bay and will have simple commands sent to it to operate it in the orbital environment. We have currently quite a number of those backlogged probably on the order of 80 to a hundred but the intent is to start well we are flying them all ready to clear the backlog of way. This gives you a and there are a number of universities that have done this boss. A skin and had a series of student investigations into the effects of weightlessness on on crystals and seeds growing things of that sort. So whatever you can imagine can be accommodated. They're also containers that have lids that open so you can look out or expose your sample or whatever you want to the vacuum of space at the same time though. I have to say that they are required to be self-contained which means your own power and except for a fairly simple interface to the crew to be autonomous, but we will turn them on and off and go through a few functions on the things. It's please. How do I feel about SDI? Well, As you're probably aware NASA is charged with the Civil space program. So we're not directly involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative in general terms. I think the concept is certainly one that is worth pursuing if we could get to a position where we didn't have to worry about Mutual assured destruction for maintaining a stalemate and I point out to you that the mutual assured destruction scenario does not accommodate her does not include terrorist action things that might be launched by some other regimes that would be responsible. So I think that in general the SDI concept is good. I think they've made a lot of progress. And we'll just have to wait and see how it works out. NASA really doesn't have anything to do with SDI. You've got to bear in mind that actually in terms of size of space program and dollars and lunch rates and everything the quote military Space Program unquote has gotten larger than the NASA space program and SDI is both a research and development. Organization and to a certain extent has been launching some payloads using the Air Force launch capability. So we have next to no (00:51:13) involvement with it. Yes, please. (00:51:18) Okay. The question was do I foresee any joint missions between our shuttle in the Soviet Mir space station or their Boron space station? I think that's possible. You've got to recognize that in putting the other emission like that. There are the technical aspects and then there are the political aspects and back in the mid-70s when they taught was in flower and the political decision was to have a Cooperative Mission with the Soviets. We were able on relatively short notice to put together the apollo-soyuz test project which from a Cooperative Mission standpoint went very, well. It also indicated that they were very very determined to uphold their end of the agreement. And as an example of that we had a backup crew for our half and we train them on the ground and we simulated everything but in the Soviets had a backup crew with the Soviets launched their backup crew about five months before the mission with another show years and went up and flew their entire portion of the profile to verify it sort of like going out and dancing with an imaginary partner before going to the big dance to make sure that you've got all the details ironed out. We have yet to see a manned Flight of the Boron but I expect it'll be forthcoming in the not too far distant future and it appears to me that the relationship between the Soviets and the Western world is warming considerably so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see something in the coming years, but I can't give you a date or a specific. Enumeration of which elements would do what to whom certainly if we could or when we get the space bar space station up. I think it would be nice capability to be able to accept their shuttle and the European are maze if it gets built and things of (00:53:23) that sort. The penultimate question to Bruce McCandless was this one doesn't NASA still have some sort of extended exposure platform in space. (00:53:33) Yep, ldf long duration exposure facility. Okay, LF was deployed on the 41c mission in April of 84 and same mission that repaired solar Max to be left in orbit for one year and then recovered it's still in orbit. And the plan is to recover it this fall on STS 32 or 33 and about the November time frame then Brandon Stein who is currently the chief of the astronaut office and for others are going up to get it and deploy another lease at communication satellite on the (00:54:19) way. It's (00:54:23) well to be honest with you many of the experiments have been over exposed in the same sense that you can over expose a roll film, but we hope they will still be some data on them. And we also want to get it back before it makes you uncontrolled or entry Yeah, I got a question. Does the Air Force have their own space shuttle? And how many are they expected to get the answer is no there was a period of time when the Air Force was Staffing up and building something. They called the see soccer the Consolidated space operations center at Colorado Springs and they were anticipating controlling all of the Department of Defense flights from there as well as launching a number of shuttles from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the west coast in the polar orbits and possibly to eventually having their own shuttle in the wake of the Challenger accident. They have decided not to go ahead with the see sock but they continue controlling all missions from Houston. They have mothballed the Vandenberg facility and they're building more Expendable launch vehicles. So we will be continuing to handle a number of their payloads. I can't go into specifics, but I think you can appreciate that. If something is designed for a 60-foot long 15-foot diameter cargo bay and optimized for the shuttle. It may be difficult to modify it to go on top of a Titan 34 or Titan for so probably that class of payloads plus things that have a man presence like a laboratory laboratory star lab or something like that will continue to be shuttle payloads. (00:56:08) That's astronaut Bruce McCandless Mission specialist for the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope speaking at Morehead State University Bruce McCandless two minutes now before one o'clock Coming up tomorrow. We have Peter Popovich Lee new Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court coming in to the studios here in st. Paul and the phone lines will be open for your questions to him about what Minnesota's highest court does and what judge Popovich thinks are some strengths and weaknesses in the Minnesota court system Peter Popovich, very interesting individual. And if you have not heard him, you'll enjoy meeting him tomorrow. And then on Thursday at noon Harvey Mackay will be back. He wrote the book how to swim with the sharks without being eaten alive. The book is now out in paperback and Harvey will be in to answer your questions about a variety of things on Thursday Marion Barry the mayor of Washington DC will be at the national Press Club and will carry that on Friday at noon. So that's the rest of the lineup here for Midday this week.