The Space Shuttle: 5. Space truck

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Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

This is a hexagon reconnaissance satellite and

this was developed in the late 1960s.

At the National Museum of the U.S.

Air Force, you can stand underneath a monster of a satellite.

This is a really big satellite.

It's the size of a school bus.

Duane Day is a space historian and a walking encyclopedia on the US military space program.

I remember a friend of mine, he had seen one of the early ones in the 1970s and he told me that it reminded him of a locomotive.

It has a cylindrical section at the back, which was where the rocket motor was located, and they used that rocket to reboost it as it sank down in orbit.

It's called the KH-9 hexagon, also known as the Big Bird.

This isn't any ordinary satellite.

This one was used to gather intelligence.

Its story goes back to the 1970s when the Cold War was at its height, a time when space was a potential new battlefront.

And in the middle, it has two powerful cameras and the cameras would swing back and forth and would record large portions of territory below on film that went through the satellite at very high speed.

Hexagon's cameras would grab images of the land below it, not digitally as we do today, but on analog, photographic film.

That showed what the Soviet Union was doing, where their aircraft were deployed, where their armies were in the field and things like that.

And then the film would be gathered up in these re-entry vehicles at the front of the vehicle.

The four re-entry vehicles were essentially large buckets.

Together, they could hold close to a ton of tape.

And as each one filled up, it would be dropped back to Earth.

It would come down through the atmosphere and it would deploy a parachute.

Then it would be caught mid-air by a military transport aircraft.

And they would just catch this giant thing hanging under its parachute lines.

They'd pull it into the back of the aircraft, and then the plane would fly to Hawaii with this top-secret payload.

From there, a jet would carry it to California and then on to New York.

That very precious cargo would be taken to a facility at Kodak and they would process the film.

And there were miles and miles of this exposed film.

Yes, he means literally miles.

This was a massive undertaking.

And then once they had done that, they would would load up individual canisters of the developed film into another airplane and they would fly it down to Washington, D.C.

Various people would spread the film out on light tables and they would look at it with microscopes and they would use that to see what was going on behind the iron curtain.

This was not a fast way of doing things.

It took about a week from taking the photograph to actually looking at that photograph.

It wasn't instantaneous.

It didn't tell you if the invasion was about to happen tomorrow, but the intelligence data that it provided was good at giving a picture of the overall capabilities of the Soviet Union.

And it was made possible because of this hexagon satellite.

From the beginning, the U.S.

Department of Defense had a stake in the shuttle.

They supported the program financially and politically.

The idea was that it would become an important tool in a very dangerous time in world history when an open war between the United States and the Soviet Union was a constant threat.

And this bus-sized satellite was the key reason the shuttle looked the way it did, with its enormous payload bay taking up most of the length of the spacecraft.

For the military to agree to use the space shuttle, they stipulated that the shuttle had to be capable of carrying one of these satellites.

And that meant that the shuttle payload bay had to be at least 60 feet long so that this thing could fit in there and could be deployed in low Earth orbit.

Compared to expendable rockets, the shuttle would be a cheaper way of getting hexagon into space.

There were even plans for missions to service satellites or reuse them, bringing them back to Earth to be launched again.

The shuttle was designed to be flexible and multi-purpose.

Its main job was to deliver a wide range of payloads into space cheaply and dependably.

From spy satellites to space telescopes, from scientific laboratories to communications hardware.

The official name for the shuttle is the Space Transportation System, but perhaps the best description for it is this.

It's a space truck.

From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle.

I'm space scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Episode 5 of 10.

Space Truck.

So here I am.

I think I'm in 26 years old.

I mean, grew up in a small town PA.

I'm standing underneath the space shuttle, fourth landing.

It's Independence Day, 1982, in the Mojave Desert, California.

The heat is shimmering off the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base.

Bill Carr is working as a safety officer for Rockwell, the contractor which has built the Space Shuttle Orbiter.

He's just watched Shuttle Columbia land after a week in space, the program's fourth mission, STS-4.

And here comes about six or eight limousines with the American flags flapping on the front fenders.

As they're coming across the desert, it's, you know, it's a big cloud of sand because you're coming across that lakebed.

The guest of honor today for the return of Columbia is none other than President Ronald Reagan.

And it's the 4th of July.

I was somewhere wanting to break into the Star-Spangled Banner.

God bless America.

I mean, I just was ready to start singing something, and I just, it was just amazing.

The presidential motorcade drives out onto the runway where Columbia has come to a halt.

Secret Service agents watch Bill Carr and his co-workers as the President and First Lady step out of the vehicle.

The two astronauts who have just returned to Earth, TK Mattingly and Henry Hartsfield, appear through Columbia's hatch.

Still wearing their pressure suits, they walk carefully down the steps towards towards the waiting welcome party.

Reagan is saluting them with his wife Nancy, and then I think the astronauts actually gave them both a hug.

I remember him hugging Nancy.

And there's a photo that was taken by the Los Angeles Times.

I have a copy of it, and I'm clearly right there behind them, standing underneath the orbiter.

Quite a moment.

I was very fortunate, sometimes pinched myself to have had the opportunity to be, you know, front and center for some of these, you know critical milestones that happened on the shuttle program

ladies and gentlemen the president of the united states and mrs reagan and astronauts mattingly and hartsfield

this was the fourth mission and the last in a series of test flights up until this point it's been about testing the shuttle systems and capabilities

But the space shuttle program is about to go up again.

The fourth landing of the Columbia is the historical equivalent to the driving of the Golden Spike, which completed the first Transcontinental Railroad.

It marks our entrance into a new era.

The test flights are over.

The groundwork has been laid.

This is the beginning of a new era of spaceflight.

With not just one vehicle, but a whole shuttle fleet.

Beginning with the next flight, the Columbia and her sister ships will be fully operational.

Fully operational.

This is the moment the real work starts.

Ready to provide economical and routine access to space for scientific exploration, commercial ventures, and for tasks related to the national security.

Challenger Houston, we're negative reporting from here on out.

You have a final wish star.

Go for deploy.

Okay, we copy.

Go for deploy.

Everything looks good.

It's two years on from Reagan's speech, and the first day in orbit for STS-41B, the 10th Space Shuttle mission.

Deployment in a minute 30, we have some pre-arm.

And yes, that number, 41B, is confusing.

After STS-9, NASA changed its numbering system to include fiscal years and launch locations and to avoid the number 13.

Dr.

McNair initiating the final command to the onboard computers.

Aboard Challenger, the second shuttle orbiter, mission specialist Ron McNair is at the console at the rear of the flight deck.

In less than a minute, he'll release a satellite into space.

Imagine a large drum.

It's around nine feet or three meters high.

It's nothing like the monster spy satellite Hexagon, which despite being a key factor in shaping the size of the cargo bay, never flew on the shuttle.

It was superseded by smaller, more technologically advanced military satellites, similar in size to the run Run McNair is about to deploy.

15 seconds, data still looks good.

It's called WestStar 6, a communications satellite.

It's the latest in a chain of satellites extending data, voice, fax, and video communications across the USA.

Five seconds to deployment?

Now it's the shuttle's job to release it into space.

Springs eject the satellite from the payload bay and it spins out away from the shuttle.

It's an arresting, strangely beautiful thing to see, which isn't lost on the astronauts on board Challenger.

Hey, Houston, Challenger.

Challenger, Houston.

Tell all those West Star folks they really have a pretty bird heading out to

be heading into geosynchronous orbit pretty soon.

We have about

ten eyeballs and

five noses all at the window looking.

Challenger's crew congratulate themselves on a job well done.

It seems to be going to plan so far.

This is the space shuttle doing exactly what it was designed to do.

West R6 is the third advanced Western Union satellite to be put into orbit.

And how much money is the company saving through shuttle delivery?

NASA says $12 million.

A similar community.

So far, everything's gone to plan.

There's just one final job left.

The satellite's kick motors will thrust it upwards, moving it from low Earth orbit, about 200 miles or 300 kilometers above sea level, to its final destination, more than 100 times higher, to a position called a geostationary orbit.

From this vantage point, it will constantly stay above one position on Earth.

And then it was later on in the day that Mission Control called us and said,

hey, when you guys launched the satellite, did Weststar look like it was okay to you guys?

We said, yeah.

Hoot Gibson is the pilot on board Challenger.

He's one of the 35 new guys, the astronaut clerks of 1978.

And this is his first mission.

They said, was it spinning nice and steady the way it should be?

We said, yeah.

They said, something like, you didn't see any pieces coming off of it, did you?

Or anything?

I said, does this mean you can't find it

and they said yeah we don't know where it is

we can't find it it's not where it's supposed to be

so at this point we have no no real new information to report on the whereabouts of uh of west star and and what the situation is with the satellite itself

something has gone wrong Westar is literally lost in space, and NASA have no idea why.

The financial service company Western Union hired NASA to put this satellite into orbit.

Alongside financial consequences for Western Union and potential impacts for their communications network, it's not a good look for the shuttle program.

They just lost $75 million

in space.

And there's another issue.

Weststar wasn't the only satellite on board Challenger.

There's a second, almost identical satellite, which they're due to deploy in just a few hours' time.

In exactly the same way, in exactly the same orbit.

Will this one fail too?

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

This is Mission Control Houston, three days, zero hours, 49 minutes, mission elapse time.

We are moving along toward a...

It's now day three of Mission STS-41B.

Yesterday, the crew's task was to release a balloon into space, to practice maneuvering the shuttle towards it and away from it.

A satellite stranded in space.

An exploded balloon.

So far, nothing is going right.

But now it's a new day with a new task.

The crew has started the countdown clock leading toward the deployment and is currently reviewing their procedures prior to the deployment.

The experts got together and were trying to decide, well, is the problem a unique problem to Western?

Payload Officer Michel Brecci is on her way to mission control.

Teams at NASA have been deliberating about whether to still release the second satellite, Palapa B2.

It's owned by the Indonesian government, but it's virtually identical to West Star 6, the satellite already lost in space.

So they met

and decided that it's very unlikely this is a generic issue and they were go to proceed with the Palapa deployment.

And that's when I came in to mission control and coordinated the deployment from the shuttle.

Yeah, so that was one of my first missions as a front room operator in Mission Control.

For Brecky, this job is the realization of a childhood dream.

I had an older brother.

He was two years older than me.

And he and I did everything together.

And when Star Trek came out, I was 10, he was 12, and we just got hooked on Star Trek.

But a few years later, tragedy hits her family.

Her brother dies in an accident when he is just 18.

At first, I was completely broken,

but as the days went on and the world started to spin again, I realized that I had my whole life ahead of me.

I was 16 and I was here for a purpose.

And my brother was gone, but I think he had a purpose too.

So I convinced myself that I need to go find my purpose in life.

And I'd pay attention to what was on the news and so on.

And about eight weeks after my brother died, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

In July of 1969.

And I watched that moon landing and I watched the astronauts bound down that ladder and start bouncing around the moon.

And then I said, that's what I'm going to do.

That's going to be my mission.

She decides that she wants to be an astronaut.

But how do you find out what to study to get that job?

Her dad has an idea.

Why didn't you write to our congressman?

I got a letter back.

It's not encouraging.

Saying that it was very noble of me, a girl, to to want to be an astronaut, but at this time, NASA wasn't allowing women to fly on the spaceships for the following reasons.

First of all, the hygiene equipment was designed for a man,

to which I said to myself, wait a minute, I'm a Girl Scout.

I know how to pee in the woods.

Surely, if NASA can land men on the moon, they can figure out a way for a woman to pee in space.

The second reason is that NASA only recruits military test pilots as astronauts.

And at this point, only men can fly military jets.

And I thought, well, wait a minute.

Doesn't this guy watch Star Trek?

There's lots of women on the Enterprise, and they're not pilots.

They do other jobs.

So I thought, well, wait a minute.

I don't want to be.

a pilot.

I want to operate the spacecraft.

I want to push the buttons, turn the knobs, sit at the console like we saw on on Star Trek, and be a part of the team.

And the congressman mentions a third reason.

Astronauts need an advanced degree in science or engineering.

To which I said, I can do that.

So I

made it my mission to get an advanced degree in aerospace engineering.

And when I graduated with my master's, that same year, NASA started accepting applications from women to be astronauts.

And I thought, oh my gosh, it was meant to be.

And it is meant to be but not quite as she imagines.

She isn't selected as an astronaut but NASA sees her potential and offers her a different job.

She starts as an astronaut instructor.

Now in 1984 she's on her way to mission control in her new role as payload officer.

coordinating between NASA and customers who want cargo, like satellites, taken into orbit.

Good morning, this is Reed Collins with the CBS World News Roundup.

Today is more news interest than usual.

The media sense a story.

This satellite named Palapa B is just about identical to Westar 6, the package that was delivered to the wrong address, a uselessly low orbit.

As she arrives at mission control, a few hours ahead of the satellite's deployment, Michel Brecci plugs her headphones into the console and looks around her.

She gets a real buzz from being here.

You know, I liken mission control to a beehive.

If you are outside looking in,

just like with a beehive, it looks like total chaos.

You got bees flying everywhere, zooming here, zipping there, just total craziness and disorganized.

But if you're inside that hive,

every single single bee has a job.

They know exactly where they're going and what they're going to do when they get there.

And that's the way mission control is.

If you're inside mission control, it is a finely tuned machine, and I was getting to be a part of that.

Challenger, Houston, Palapa is go for deploy.

It's a couple of minutes until the satellite will be released.

Roger,

Palapa is sitting at the back of the cargo bay on a turntable which begins to spin up.

When it's released, this rotation will help keep it stable as it flies free of the shuttle.

Head deploy pre-arm.

At the back of the flight deck, Roll McNair is watching the satellite on camera as it spins in its cradle in the payload bay.

10 seconds to deployment.

At mission control, the guidance officer confirms that Challenger is stable and ready to launch the satellite on its journey.

And deploy fire.

The explosive bolts holding the satellite on its turntable fire.

Palapa leaps away from Challenger.

The orbiter and the satellite are now flying alongside each other.

Palapa is spinning nearly once every second.

Okay, Jerry, the deploy was absolutely nominal on time.

Current attitudes are low, 54.49.

As mission specialist Bob Stewart reads out the figures, it looks like Palapa's deployment is right on the money.

Copy that, can't ask for any better.

Thank you, Bob.

The crew starts the separation maneuver.

Propelling Challenger away from the satellite, clear of any debris or exhaust generated by Palapa's kick motor.

Okay, a couple quickies for you, Ron, helping you to set up your cameras.

As the spacecraft separate, Challenger's remote manipulator system, often known as the robotic arm, is extended with a camera at the end to catch the action.

We recommend that you zoom in.

After the failure of Weststar, Mission Control wants to be very sure they catch a video of Palapa as its kick motor fires.

And then if you can see the Palapa, you can go ahead and zoom back in to whatever you think is appropriate.

The satellite is due to start its burn when it's right over the country which owns it, Indonesia.

Just as with Weststar, Palapa is a geostationary satellite, so it needs to reach a much higher orbit to maintain its position over its home country.

But at that moment, Challenger is out of contact with the ground.

When they regain the signal through Guam, an island in the Pacific Ocean, everybody at Mission Control is anxious to hear if it has worked.

Challenger, Houston, with you through Guam for eight minutes.

Roger Houston.

To its new orbit.

We saw the beginning of his burned on

close-circuit TV here.

BTR.

Roger copied that and understand it looked good.

It looks like everything's gone perfectly this time.

The satellite's motor has fired.

And it's the end of the day for Challenger's crew.

Palapa is far behind them now and hopefully on its way to its new orbit.

Final messages being prepared for the crew before they're put to bed for the night.

About 30 minutes remaining before their scheduled sleep period.

I love to imagine what it might be like sleeping in space in that micro-gravity environment.

At home we lie down in our beds, bodies supported against the force of gravity.

But out there, in free fall, which way is up?

Sleeping on the floor feels just like sleeping on the ceiling.

But if you're untethered, you might just float off.

So most of the crew zip themselves into sleep restraints, a kind of sleeping bag which you can attach to the wall, or the floor, or the ceiling.

And it's not always easy to sleep on the shuttle.

It's a noisy place.

And as you're orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, you can throw in a sunrise and a sunset every 45.

So even if you're wearing a sleep mask, this environment can seriously disrupt your sleep cycle.

For the next eight hours, while the crew of Challenger try to rest, Mission Control doesn't disturb them with any non-urgent radio messages.

But on the shuttle's mid-deck, there's the occasional chatter of the teleprinter.

Just like every night, the team on the ground pass on any important information.

Tonight, it's bad news, but the crew is asleep.

It'll be hours before they see it.

Good morning, Challenger.

Houston is with you.

It's the next day.

Challenger's commander, Vance Brand, is responding to the daily wake-up call.

Morning, Jack.

How do you hear?

Roger, you're loud and clear.

We just read the teleprinter, the news, and

that blows our minds.

Roger, I understand.

Certainly, as you know, Vance, everything that the spaceship did and all the procedures that you did were absolutely correct.

Palapa has also failed.

It blew our minds too, and we're having, as you can understand, a lot of engineering assessments still going on.

The kick motor on Palapa has malfunctioned, just as it did on Westar.

Now, two satellites are drifting in the wrong orbit, far from where they should be.

$150 million

lost in space.

Both satellites of ours wound up in 400-mile-high orbits.

Pilot Hoot Gibson again.

I remember after we landed and came back to Houston, there was a cartoon in the Houston Chronicle that showed

two men walking down the street, and just above their heads, there's a satellite going by.

And they were saying, well, it's a complete success.

It just wasn't quite as high as we wanted it to be.

So they were making fun of us.

We had messed up both of our satellites.

We had exploded our lead balloon.

Nothing is going well on this.

The toilet hadn't failed yet.

That happened, I think, the next day.

So far, nothing on this mission has gone to plan.

But there is one more task left.

Now the crew has a chance to change Challenger's luck.

And if it works, the crew will have tested a revolutionary new tool for use in space.

The mission has a chance to make history with a space first.

Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart are now in the airlock aboard Challenger, suited up and ready to step out into space.

Bruce McCandless joined NASA in 1966 at the time of the Apollo program.

He's been working towards this moment for years.

Ah, it looks nice out there.

The two spacewalkers are hovering in the shuttle's huge cargo bay, with its massive doors flung wide open.

And McCandless is wearing what looks like a huge white backpack, wider than him and about three-quarters of his height.

That was a really interesting piece of hardware.

It had

armrests with the hand controllers on it, one for moving forward and back, up and down and side to side, and one for rotating.

And it was a bit like a a video game.

This is Jerry Miller, instructor and spacewalk specialist, talking about the manned maneuvering unit, the MMU.

Essentially a jet backpack for a crew member doing a spacewalk.

Up to now every single astronaut doing an EVA, a spacewalk, has been attached to the spacecraft via a tether, an important lifeline.

But this time, with the MMU, it's different.

It was the only time that we deliberately disconnected the safety tether because once the crew member was in the MMU, they were able to be a free flyer.

McCandless drifts out of the cargo bay into the darkness of space.

He has the perfect line ready for mission control.

But it's a heck of a big leap for me.

Roger, copy that, Bruce.

He says, this may have been one small step for Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap for me.

As he operates the hand controller, the MMU fires little jets of nitrogen gas to move him upwards.

McCainless has maneuvered the MMU to a position where he's looking right into the windows into the aft crew station and the flight deck.

The three astronauts aboard Challenger have the perfect view of him and his space jet pack.

Have a lot of envious people watching you.

Looks like you're having a lot of fun up there.

It's working very nicely.

Looks like daylight is upon us.

It's dawn, but the sun will set again in 45 minutes.

We want you to get out and back before sunset, though.

McCandless and his manned maneuvering unit constitute a separate spacecraft of their own now.

And that's exactly what he is.

A separate spacecraft.

A satellite in his own right.

And it may not feel like it as he drifts alongside the shuttle, but he's also traveling at 17,500 miles per hour.

That's 28,000 kilometers an hour.

Now McCandless has manoeuvred to the back of the spacecraft spacecraft beyond its tail fin

and is looking at the three nozzles of the engines which propelled Challenger into orbit.

I got a real good look at the main engines now.

I think this thing was sitting on the launch bed just a few days ago.

And then, gradually,

McCandless moves further away,

deeper into space.

In mission control, in Houston,

everyone is mesmerized.

And I have to say it was a little disconcerting to see him jet backpacking away with no safety tether attached.

He looks a long way away.

That was truly,

I mean, just a...

an awe-inspiring moment for everybody in flight control.

Ron Zaguli works on the shuttle's remote manipulator system, its robotic arm.

Seeing him so far away from the orbiter flying that MMU,

you know,

you just didn't know what to say.

You were just, your mouth was hanging open

watching the video of him 350 feet away from the orbiter, and he's just flying and having a good old time.

As McCandless slowly drifts away, his fellow spacewalker, Bob Stewart, stays tethered to the shuttle in the payload bay.

His opportunity to practice with the MMU will come later.

On Challenger's flight deck, the commander, Vance Brand, and mission specialist, Ron McNair, are busy too.

Vance was fretting about our free-flying astronauts.

Ron McNair was operating the TV cameras to keep them inside and keep a a laser tracker pointed at them.

Everybody has a role right now, except for Hoot Gibson.

As the pilot, a co-pilot, I was the only person on the crew that had absolutely nothing to do.

He's looking through the window of the flight deck, watching McCandless journey around the outside of Challenger, and then gradually further away.

But Gibson loves photography, and he happens to have a camera to hand.

I will just never forget looking through the viewfinder when Bruce got just barely outside the bay.

I looked through that viewfinder the very first time

and I didn't even take a picture.

I put it down and I said, oh my gosh.

I can't believe what an image this is.

I must have shot 20 pictures of him as he was separating away.

It was just a whole bunch of photos, one right after the other.

I'm looking out the window at him,

and I tilted the camera to put the horizon level in the pictures, because we were at an angle to the horizon.

And that is the moment that Gibson gets the photo, the one he's been waiting for.

I remember as I was doing this, I said to myself, wow, if I don't mess these up, I'm going to get the cover of Aviation Week.

Well, he ends up getting that cover.

And more than that, he captures one of the defining images of human spaceflight.

I'm sure you know it already.

Just search online for famous space photo and it's one of the first ones that comes up.

And this is it.

McCandless is cradled in the MMU facing towards the camera.

An astronaut drifting alone in space.

He's at an angle tilted towards the right compared with the blue curve of the Earth below him.

You can see a thin band of atmosphere with the clouds and the weather system too.

It truly is a breathtaking image.

I remember seeing it as a teenager.

and thinking, wow, I just so want to do that.

Floating out there in space, with the majesty of our glorious planet behind, being untethered looked like freedom.

This photograph would seal my desire to get out there into space, a desire I still have today.

And this picture stayed with Ronzagoo,

just like it stayed with me.

I don't know how much I feel about faith and religion in terms of my personal views, views but

that view of Bruce out there alone in the heavens

put a lump in your throat you

you wonder if there isn't something that's guiding our thoughts and our capabilities to create something so incredibly profound that we're able to do these kinds of things.

And

it touched me a lot.

I still have Bruce's picture in my office at home.

This particular mission, STS-41B,

was mostly a series of things gone wrong.

But today, decades later, no one would remember those failed satellites.

It's the wonder and the magic so beautifully captured by astronaut Hoot Gibson's photograph that is still with us.

Maybe it's because it represents so much more than one astronaut testing a new technology.

It seems to symbolize all of us as humanity ready to cross a new frontier in space exploration.

At last,

truly untethered from the Earth.

I was sent to be on the Today Show because the manned maneuvering unit was flying and they wanted someone to comment on that.

Anna Fisher is one of the 35 new guys.

She's not flown a mission yet, but she's worked intensively on training and simulation for spacewalks.

And part of her role, as it is for any NASA astronaut, is to talk to the media.

In this case, the mission I've been telling you about.

As I was getting ready to leave, they deployed the first satellite and had the problem.

And so I head up to New York.

And of course, that's before the days of cell phones and all that.

While she's traveling, the second satellite, Palapa, is deployed.

And I landed at LaGuardia and took a taxi and I was talking to the taxi driver and told him what I was doing.

And he said, well, I think they just had the same problem with the second satellite.

And I'm going,

oh, I don't think so.

I said, if they had a problem with the first one, I can't imagine NASA deployed the second one too.

And he said, I think so.

So I got back up to my hotel room, called back to Houston.

Sure enough, taxi driver was right.

Although Fisher has been asked to go onto the Today Show to talk about the manned maneuvering unit, she realizes that she's probably going to have to field questions about the stranded satellites and why they released the second one after the first one had failed.

And so I'm going, oh, great.

Now, now they're going to ask me why they did that.

And I have no earthly clue.

I would have thought that they wouldn't do that either.

And sure enough, the next day they asked me questions about that.

And one of the questions seems really far-fetched.

And then they asked me if you thought NASA would try to retrieve the satellites.

And I said,

no way.

This is pretty early in the shuttle program.

And those satellites weren't designed to be retrieved.

So, no, I don't think so.

That was in February.

And in November, I gladly ate those words

because I got to be on the flight to go get those two satellites.

That's next time on 13 minutes.

This has been episode 5 of 10.

Thank you for listening to 13 Minutes Presents, The Space Shuttle from the BBC World Service.

It's a BBC Audio Science Production.

I'm Maggie Adarin Pocock.

13 minutes wouldn't be 13 minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then shared them with us.

Thanks to every single one of them.

We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound and the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for its archive interviews.

In this episode, it's interview with Hoot Gibson.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

I hope you're enjoying listening to this extraordinary story.

Most people discover podcasts through recommendations, so if you can help us out with that, I'd be very grateful.

And if you can, leave a rating and review.

The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange.

The assistant producer is Robbie Wojciechowski with additional research by Fabri Smallhart.

Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

And produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

The sound design is by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay.

The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.

The podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

And the series editor is Martin Smith.

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

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Winner, best book.

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.