The Orbital Flight Test Program

8/7/2019 The Orbital Flight Test Program

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NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATIONJohnson Space Center,

Houston, Texas

November 5, 1980

STS News Briefing:

THE ORBITAL FLIGHT TEST PROGRAM

PARTICIPANTS:

Donald K. Slayton, ManagerOrbital Flight Test Program

Thomas McElm urr y, Manage rSpace Shutt le Program Mission Office

Larry KeyserandH.E. WhitacreProgram Mission Office

Alfred A. Bishop, ManagerSpace Shuttle Program Mission Office

Bob GordonPublic Affairs Office

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P R O C E E D I N G SVOICE: Huntsvil le, Alabama, Kennedy Space Center, Washing-ton; DFRC and JPL. We have our fifth in a series of NASA brief-ings on the Space Transportation System. With us today is Donald

K. Slay ton, "Deke" Slay ton, astronau t on the ASTP flight in 1975.With him is Ed Whitacre and Larry Keyser, of the Mission Opera-tions Office at the Johnson Space Center.

We want to apologize; probably at the other centers we aremissing some pages of Mr. Keyser's presentation. However, thesewill be s'hipped out today and will be at the various locationstomorrow.The next bri ef in g in this series will be at the KennedySpace Center, and this briefing is dep end ent upon transfer of theOrbiter Columbia to the vehicle assembly b uil din g. NASA willannounce the date of this briefing when we are firm in moving ofthe vehicle. So wit ho ut further ado, we will turn it over to Mr.

Donald K. Slayton.MR. SLAYTON: Okay. We are going to talk to you today pri-marily about the Or bit er Flight Test Program, how it is construc-ted, the first four flights. I am just going to give an intro-duction and these guys who work this thing daily in great detailwill g i v e you the details. At the conclusion -- we are going totry to keep it informal; however, the" Togl's tiers "don'"t~ allow youto ask question in real time, so make notes and we will try toanswer everybody's que stion s when we get to the end.There is one other guy I would like to introd uce before westart who is not up here, and that is Al Bishop, who is theseguys' boss. He is the one who is respo nsibl e for the overallmission planning for the Shuttle Program. He will be availableto answer questions at the end as required.As an i n t r o d u c t i o n let me just tell you where we are todaywith the Or bit er. We have a daily mee tin g at noon everyday wherewe tie everybody in by telephone coast to coast and see how itwent d u r i n g the last 24 hours and what the problems are for thenext 24 to 48.R i g h t now the external tank and the SRBs are in the processof bein g mated. We are in a process of doing a full test this

afternoon or tomorrow, putting a pre-load into the space betweenthose two; and that is due to be completed on second shift tomor-row. So at that poi nt they wil l be ready to accept the Or bi ter .We have an Orbiter Customer Acceptance Revi ew at Downeyscheduled..^Thursday and Friday of this week, and followed by onThursday of next week, on the 13th, the pre- rollo ut review todecide whether we are ready to take the O r b i t e r out of the OFFand out to the pad for ma ti ng .

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The engi nes are goi ng to be installed over the weekend; theyare ready to go right now, so eve ryt hin g is looking good they areready to go right now, so everything is looking good ri gh t thism i n u t e for rollout on the 23rd. On everybody's fav orit e subject,the tile, gap fillers and so forth, as of today we have 520 opencavities, another 28 potential threats. There is another list ofabout 500 approximately that are possible threats, but we arereasonably co nf id en t that we are goin g to work those off in thepapermill system and not mess wit h them.

We have 600 tra ili ng edge-gap fillers to go, about 150leading-edge and about a thousand Ames. That all fits into thecurrent flow, so we are con fid ent that we are going to make the23rd..(Slide)MR. SLAYTON: Let's press on with the briefing. Okay. Wehave some vugraphs here; let's jump to the fi rs t one. These are

not-numbered, so for everybody on the loop, we may h ave a littleproblem wit h your keepi ng in sync with us. The fir st one I havehere is what the Orbit er Flight Test Program is all about.OFT is a fo ur -o rb it fli ght test program. We launch out ofCape Kennedy on all four of these fli gh ts , and we land at EdwardsAir Force Base on all four of them; our M a s t e r Plan. And our ob-ject ive is to get an early operational"~c~a~pa~b~rxity~^f~~the SpaceTransportation System.We did start in with more flig ht than this in the program atone time, and we keep whittling it back. The objective, ofcourse, of any space flight program is to confirm that we didhave a good desi gn, verify the design and ver ify our performance.And a major con side rati on, of course, when you start build-ing a f li gh t test pro gram , you need to underst and what can be andwhat has been done in the ground test and analysis; you do wantto get a reasonable incremental buildup in risk. In my opinion,abo ut 90 percent of your risk in a total prog ram comes with afirst flight, and the rest of it you can spread across the otherthree. But we do make an effort to build into this thing incre-mentally the best we can.The problem we have as usual with space fl ig ht is tha t once

you hav e gotten that far off the pad, the best t hin g you can do-- the best place you can go from there is into orbit. There isno nice in-bet ween milestone. You have to bite it all in onechunk.Of course, availability of hardware and software decides howfast you can build into the program. We do have some mods thatare planned as we press on t hr ou gh , we change softwar e betwee nthe first and second flights and there will be changes subsequentto that.

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Your turnar ound operations, and detail to that, of course,is another thing we have to consider. And we are trying to thebest of our ability dur in g the Flight Test Program to demonstratesome payload capabili ties. That is wha t the Shu ttl e is all about,is payload.But on the other hand, we can't let payload drive the basicprog ram. The basic test program is dr iv en by test requi rement sthat you are going to hear a lot more about; and we consider thepayloads as secondary.(Slide)MR. SLAYTON: Okay. Next vugraph: Approach you take to theFlight Test Program, of course, is a progressive expansion of theflight envelope. And we are trying to ma xim ize our capabilitiesin four flights. As I said, the transfer from fli gh t test tooperations is not a clean transition. You cannot totally removeall your placards in four flights; we know that. And we will

show y..ou later on some areas we know right now that it is goingto take at least nin e flights to work t hr ou gh them.So our objective is to accomplish most of what we thin k canbe done in four flights wit h the recognition that some thingswill dribble over and the vehicle will be placarded inside thesoec values in some areas.In general, to the best of our knowledge to date, none ofthat ends up being a constraint to the operational program. As atypical example, h ig h Beta angel thermal requi rem ents don't occuruntil very far downstream, around the 25th payload. So thosekinds of t hin gs are not a co ns tr ai nt to us, despite the fact that

we couldn't get them done earlier in the program.(Slide)Okay. Where we are now in overall status, I have given youa little bit of that already. As far as the Orbiter is concerned,laun ch fac il it ie s are in pr ett y good shape, ready to accept theveh icl es when they get there. As far as Edwar ds Air Force Base,that is coming along. I think most of you know we are usingNorthrup Strip; Whi te Sands is an AOA (abort once around) also isan alt erna te prime landi ng site. That is com ing along okay.The f light crew is goin g to be well tr ai ne d as usual, prob-ably ov er -t ra in ed , and Miss ion Cont'rol Ce nte r, those guys havebeen over there working. Some of you have watche d some of thathere in the last few weeks, and that is goi ng very well.We haj/e some long du ra ti on sims scheduled, one for December,and then i'n conjunction with the FRF in February, we will runwhat we call a Missi on Ver ifi cati on Test, whi ch will be a full-upsimulation all the way around the network including the recoverysite.

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So I think we look to be ready to fly ahead of schedule asfar as most of the Mission elements are concerned. The only otherthings are launch commit cr it eri a, which again is in very goodshape. We have a lit tle open work to do relative to the FRF be-cause we are in a ground en viro nmen t mode and runn ing in a plustime, and it can't be done exactly the same as a f light; so thereis some work yet to be done there.(Slide)MR. SLAYTON: The major test drivers to the Flight TestProgram, this par tic ula r one of course, I think are obvious toeveryone. I will go over them real quick. The ascent envelopeand ascent performance, obviously a dri ver we want to build upour "Q" or loading on the vehicle in progressive steps and makeit as benign as possible on the first flight, and eventually getup to our spec value.Entry Aero and Fl ig ht Control, same issue here. We want to^ork into that very gradually. As a mat ter of fact, we do almostno intentional aero f li gh t test on first flight . We don't wantto dis tur b anything; we want to fly that entry cor rido r as benignas we know how. So we will worry abou t getti ng aero test pointslater on in the program.Thermal protection on entry is the same kind of thin, aswell as the on orb it thermal, and any other driver , of course,that is operational performance - o f - subsystems-.So, with those pr eli min ary comments, I am going to turn itover to Ed, and he is going to talk the overall program; and thenLarry is going to talk STS-1 specifically.VOICE: If I may for the record, for Mr. Whitacre, he is theSTS Four Mission Staff Engineer.MR. WHITACRE: Okay. What I am goi ng to do is bore you wit ha lot of slides and deta ils of the Flig ht Test Program, the spe-cific things we are trying to accomplish.(Slide)The first thing I would like to point out about the FlightTest Program is that most of the char ts I am going to be talkingabout have to do with what we do in flight. There is anotheraspect to the OFT Program that is equally important, and in some

respects even more im por tan t; and that is that a Flight TestProgram br ings together for the first time in reality all of theelements of the ope rat ion al system: The ground processing, theSR B refurbishment, the ET activities, ferry operations, and allof the Control Center Operations in your v ari ous ground trackingstations, commun ications networks, and so on. All these factorsare essential to the overall Shuttle operational capability, andthey will all be verified for the first time we would bring

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together an OFT Program.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: Another aspect of this which is very impor-tant also, is that fli ght testing of the vehicl e is just a con-cluding effort in a long process of v e r i f i c a t i o n of the vehicle's

capabili ties.We have had many years of testing of subsystems components,subsystems themselves and combin ed systems in grou nd vacuum test-ing, in the ALT (approach and lan di ng tests) pr ogra m and in awhole wide variety of ground test fac ilit ies .And the flight test is not only a ver if ic at io n of the realworld c on di ti on s for these subsystems, but it br in gs them all to-geth er -in an overall vehicle for the fi rs t time other than thosethings which we did during the short ALT flights.And when we go into OFT, then, we pick up some additionalthings that we can't do very well on the ground in terms of asystem as complex as the Shuttle. These things like totallyintegrated man/machine software int erac tio ns, full scale aero-dynamic effects, zero G effects, the real world thermal vacuumeffects, space, and so on.(Slide) . .MR. WHITACRE: The way we get to the Flight Test Program,just brie fly , let me talk about the docu ment atio n for just amoment. We go to the subsystems people who are the real expertson the var iou s complements of the O rbiter, and we ask them essen-

tially, what is your status in terms of verification of the capa-bilities of the va ri ou s components of the vehicle and what stillneeds to be done when we put all of these thi ngs together into anactual fl ight vehicle and put it into orbit.We take those requ ire men ts and we combine them wit h overall,program objectives. We document the first of these in what wecall the Fli ght Test Requirements Documents, which lists all ofthe flight test requirements for individual subsystems, and wehave another docume nt we call the .Master Fli gh t Test AssignmentsDocument, whi ch pro vid es the basic prog ram objectives and assignsthe flight test requirements themselves to specific flights. Andthen we wri te another document which is called the Flight Re-quirements Document, and that is w r i t t e n for each ind ivi dua lflight; and it is a sort of an Ed MacMahon document, which tellsyou everything you ever wanted to know about that partic ularflight in terms of what we are trying to accomplish.I, 1This document in turn is used as the guideline in coming upwith the long, long list of operational documents which definethings like the fli ght crew file, crew a cti vit y plan, fli ghtrules. And there are liter ally dozens and dozens of docume nts

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whichoccur detail allin flight.(Slide)

of the specific aspects of what is going to

MR. WHITACRE: Then we get on with the job of planning anOFT Program. I will say a couple of words about the chart on yourleft. This is really just a memory jogger for me, but the thingis it just gives you an idea of the kinds of things which go intoplanning for any fligh t whether it is OFT or otherwise, and thesame thi ngs t hat you see listed up here are the things that youreally end up verifying by performing the flight.These are the things you are concerned abo ut when you planit, the things that you verify when you fly it. So that when youget into an operational period, you have enough of a data basethat you no longer have to be greatly co ncerned a bou t thesethings in your planning.

..(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: The chart on the right, which is chart numberfive, list some of the parameters of the four OFT Fligh ts, whic hgives you a pretty good overall perspective of what we are tryingto accomplish here in terms of the way we are going to fly theflight.The thin g to really notice is that in someareas we are ma kin g grad ual progressions from ation for the first flight to, let us say a moretion on OFT-4.

of the crit icalnice easy situa-stressful situa-

I might mention a few of those. One thing we are doing righthere early is the inclin ati on. We are sticki ng wit h the 40.3 de-gree inclination for the first two flights, and the basic reasonwe are doing that is because of concern with regards to overspeedon the main engines; if we should have an overspeed and we wentto 38 degrees, for example, we have a possibility of some impactof ET frag ments in the Aus tra lia n Conti nent area. So we stickwith 40.3 degrees un ti l we get a bette r feel for actual ve hicleperformance.

The F-Max Q. Now you can see that we gradually step throughthat to a 680 psf (pounds per square foot) on flight four. Westart off on Flig ht One at 580 psf, and we do t hat to hold downthe loads on the vehicle and then gradually build that up untilflight four, so again, we are building a data base as we go.Alpha Profile, this is entry angle of attack. And what weare doing here is we are flying three flight to 40 degrees AlphaProfile, "which is not the presently planned oper atio nal AlphaProfile; 38/28 is the planned operat ional Alpha Pr ofi le, and thereason we are sticking with 40 degrees is it imposes a much lowertotal heat load on the vehicle. It allows us to enter with less

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stress on the Thermal Prot ecti on System.Then on flight four, we go to the lower Alpha Profile andget higher heat loads. I will show you considerably more detailon all of these t hi ngs later on.The second flight we add to that the OSTA Pallet, which is

about another 5600 pounds, and it is a sci ent ifi c instrument pal-let. On the third fligh t we have the PDRS (payload deployment andretrieval system) test art ic le , or by anot her name, the PSTA(payload system test arti cle ), whi ch is a test article desi gnedspecifically to veri fy performa nce of the PDRS system, the arethat is used for taking payloads in and out of the payload bay.And on flight four, we have the OSS-1 payload, a littlepackage that is called the Get-away Special. You have probablyread a- lot about the get-away special concept, which are small

payload carry ing capabi lity in a cani ster that anybody can signup for. Well, we are goin g to try to fly the fi rs t one of thoseas a test article on the fourth flight, of OFT.(Slide) . !MR. WHITACRE: In looking at an overview of the overall OFT,the major test objectives, the real thing to get out of thisslide is that there are a let of major test object ives and thatthere are a fair amount of them that sre^ nqt_ g^>ijig _tq_get doneentirely on OFT. It is misleading to think that this" is all the

tests, and the things that occur in flight one for any one ofthese line items it is not necessarily the same thing that occurson fli gh t two, three or four.They are di ff er en t tests. This is just an overall perspec-tive of the general areas. As you note down here at the bottom,there are actually some 1,180 tests identified for the OFTProgram.To support that test ing we have approximately 3,500 sensorson the vehicle, DFI sensors. I mentioned the DFI package. Thatis what it is all about, getting a large data base on the way thevehicle really flies.(Slide) . 'MR. WHITACRE: Now., I have br oke n this down fu rt he r into the

ascent ac ti vi ty ; and agai n you can see as we go into these thingsthat some of them don't get done in OFT. But on this pa rt ic ul arthing, the main thing to point out is during ascent, most of whatwe are doing we don't perturb the vehicle.; -t ,

There* are only a few tests during ascent where we actuallydo anything at all to the vehicle in terms of a special crewactivity, or a special input to the vehicle. Basically, we letit fly, and some of the things I mentioned before, such as Max-Q

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-- the ascent trajectory itself is va ri ed . We have dif fer ent SRBstaging altitudes. Those thi ngs all affect the way the vehicleflies; but basically as far as doing something special, we don'tdon that except in the flutt er bu ff et area, and we have a testhere where we do some UHF tests through the SRB plume.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: There are some really major aspects to ascentphase aside from just g ett ing into orbi t. One of them is ascentheating. We have done a great deal of ground test in wind tun-nels, but there are realistic limits to what you can accomplishin win d 'tunnels when you are t al kin g abou t a vehicle the size ofthe Orbiter, especially when you are talking about the kinds ofvelocities we are talking about.We are talking about, the things we are looking at are flowfield dynamics, localized hea tin g. One thing that is a concern insome areas is the interaction of various shock waves off the ve-hicle and the poss ibil ity of localized heati ng in certai n areas.This is som eth ing you can subscale tests on in wind tunnelsbut until you get to the real thing, you still have some areas ofconcern. We are concerned about ET; when I say "concern" by theway, I don't mean that we are greatly worried about it. I meanthat the engineers feel that we have an incomplete data base andwe need more dat a to see how it is really o per at ing and whatkinds of conditions really exist. We are talking about ET heating at hig h altitudes. You areprobably aware that the ET is not recovered ; it does break up on

entry; and one of the things which affects where it breaks is theheati ng that occurs during the launch period. So we would liketo get a much bet ter data base that is possible through wind tun-nel tests.

We are lookingif you will; and weon to design a better103 and--104.

at the adequacy of the TPSare looking at things thatvehicle as we getdesign or margin,will help us lateron to building Orbiters

I mentioned already that we do things I said that we keepour hands off in flight. That is true; but pref light we do th ingsin planning in variations in trajectory l oftin g, changes in MECO(main engine cu toff) al tit ude , SRB separation and di ffe re ntthrottling pro fil e changes. All of these thing s affect the loadinduced on the vehicle.(Slide)MR..


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data aga in, on v;hat kinds of aerodynamic loads we are going toget. But it is, agai n, very dif fi cu lt to do this on the groundand find out what the real effects of the combined vehicle actu-ally per for min g in real launch are.Here we are talking about the inte rac tio n between the ET,SRB, and O rb it er in a combined v ehi cle , the loads which are in-

duced on the connect stru ts between the vehi cle, the dynamic re-sponses of the vehicle, things like aerodyna mic input, vehicleslushing, engine thrust vector control.There are quite a variety of thing s happening all at once;all of these are making various inputs to the vehicle, and we aretrying to get a good dat a base on tha t.On the Or bi te r intern al loads, we are looking at thin gs likestrut loads dissi patio n, wing loadin g, loads on the vertical tailand the dynamics of payloads themselves. We know that some of thepost-OFT period payloads are rather dynamic in terms of a very

flexible payload, and we want to get better data base of what ishappeni ng in the payload bay whe n we have payload.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: A third area which has been around for a longtime .and is king of a gremlin that sticks with all of our rocket-ry is the item called Pogo, wh ic h .is..a_very~d-y-nami.cinteractionbetween the total propellant system in the engine and results inengine instability, if you will, or dynamic variations in theengine performance, which leads to lon git udi nal oscillations inthe vehicle, which leads to struct ural loading in the vehicle,which leads to nastry problems if it really happens.In the case of the Shuttle, we have designed in the systempogo suppressors, and it has been tested extens ive ly, but this issuch a dyn amic problem and is so difficult to analyze analytic-ally that the only real way that you ev er find out that you'vegot a good safe ma rg in on Pogo is you go out and fly it.Now we think from all of the tests, from all of the analysisthat has been done we have a safe ma rg in in terms of Pogo. Butthe real proof of the pu dd in g so to speak, is that we get out andfly the total vehicle and show that the Pogo suppressors work andthere is no dynamic engine instability in the engine operation.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: I keep commenting on one thing here and Ithink it is a very impo rtan t point. In a large number of areas,the real 'thing that we are doing is we are putting together avery complex system, a very complex combination of systems, forwhich there is no practical way to do ground "testing.It is not entirely that you can't do ground testing on some

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of these things; it is just that you already have adequate ma rg inof safety in your analysis and testing that you can do, and it isnot cost effe cti ve to try to do very, very complicated groun dtesting where you try to simulate all kinds of dynamic conditionsat the same time. It is much more effective and it is the realthing when you get out there and fly it (inaudible).Another thing that is very important to the payloads peoplein terms of the Orbiter is what we call the enviro nment charac-terization, which is what is really happening in the payload bay,what kind of noise levels do we have in there, what kind of par-ticulates and matt er do we have floa ting around , what kind ofoutga ssin g occurs, vehicle flexi ng, and so on.We have an instrumented payload bay, we have instruments onthe payloads we are carrying during OFT. We have microphones,strain"gages, and so on, on OSTA. We have them on the IECM, wehave them on the Or bi te r, we have them on the OSS payload. Andthe reasons we have on the payloads themselves is so we can notonly .measure the in puts the vehi cle creat es, but we can also mea-sure the responses that the payloads themselves do (inaudible) .For example, on the outgassing and free particulates, whichobviously you want to min imi ze particles floating around in theveh ic le, so we have measurements on the IECM to measure not onlywhat is happening during ascent, but we go on into orbit thisway, and we c ontin ue the same se ri es of--tests.-in-or-bit^-(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: We are down to chart number 12, for those ofyou on the loop. We really continue right on into orb it with the

same ki nd s of th ings that we are te sting on ascent, except thatwe are doing a dif fer ent kind of testing now.The outgassing that we are looking for in orbit, for ex-ample, conta minat ion mon ito rin g, we are looking at outgassingthat is caused by space vacuum environmen t and by thermal heatingfrom the,Sun. Whereas during ascent, we are looking at outgassin gthat is basically caused by (inaudible).In ascent we are getting a lot of particles shook loose, anddes pit e any ef fort s that anybody can ever make on putt in g a pay-load in to a payload bay on loading the vehicle as far as cleaningit is concerned, you can't get every thing out, and there is going

to be pre-particulate matter during ascent. This mate rial isshook loose and while you are concerned about where it lodges onthe payload, then in orbit you are concerned about the fact thatthe particulates now are loose and they float around and theyreflect sunlight like nice little stars, and they also affect theintent of "'certain sci ent ifi c payloads to gather data.The same is true of out gas sing . On orb it test we are veryinterested in our thermal control systems and our environmental

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control systems.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: One of the things I just mentioned is thethermal control system. I am just going to touch on some of themajor thi ngs we are doin g on or bi t. As I said, the differe nce in

orbit and ascent is the d u r a t i o n in which you can do the testing.Our thermal control system of the vehicle, and by the way,let me just mention two or three points about the thermal controlsystem. . It is composed primarily of the bla nket layering overthe vehicle to protect it against heating and loss of heat, both,on the areas of the vehicle.A series of heaters that are located at various placesthroughout the vehicle as part of the active control system, aseries of thermostats and sensors which are located also through-out the vehicl e which are used to pr ov id e crew and ground data onthe performance of the systems, and to also provide control to

thes'e active thermal control systems.Now, we are pretty sure that we have analyzed this systempretty well, but in fact, any system of thi s complexity you havethings such as heat short s, where ther e is a compression of yourthermal blankets, for example.You have a certai n planned hea t transfer cnaracterist ic be-tween two mated par ts and you find out that one or the other ofthe surfaces is contaminated. The parts are mated all right andyou hav e analyzed one heat tra nsf er rate and found out that infact you have a di ffe re nt hea.t transfer rate due to any kind of a

variety of things -- the parts aren't as tight together as youthought. They are not as flat as far as the contact surfaces asyou analyzed and may have surface conta min ati on due to somebody'sthumb pr in t. There is a whole wid e var iet y of things that youcan't quite get your "handle" on when you do analysis.We do a long series of tests on orbit to verify that thesesystems'really do work as planned. These thermal tests, I showyou here the kinds of things that we are doing.PTC is passive thermal control; that basically is the roll-ing at ti tu de of the vehicle; the ve hic le is slowly rolling overwith tespec to the Sun, so that you ave rag e out your heat ing and

cooling on diffe rent parts of the vehicle.And this vehicle can poi nt just about any way you want it toin space. We ha ven't taugh t it to dance yet, but it can do justabout anything else. When you get into these attitude holds youhav e a situation where you are in the -- attitude hold where onepa rt of the vehicl e is point ed toward the Sun, one par t of thevehicle is pointed toward deep space, and other parts of thevehicle are alternately viewing space and the Earth's albedo.

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So you have different conditions depending upon the attitudeyou s et -u p for the vehicle. We hold these at ti tu de s for vario ustime periods on orbit, depending on the particular objective ofthe particular thermal test.Some of the thi ngs that are happ enin g when you do thesethermal tests is you can get in th in gs like the cold payload

attachments. You know, the payloads themselves are held in bytie-down mechanism.The temperatures of the tie- down mechanism affect the slid-ing coefficien t of fr ic ti on between the payload trunions and theOrbiter. The sliding coefficient of fric tion affects the loadsthat are induced both in the Or bit er and on payload, and theloads that are induced on the payloads obviously affect eitherfuture design or the performance of the payload itself. So thesethings kind of have a "snowball" effect as far as the kinds ofthing s you are doi ng and the kinds of results you get.And we are also doing thi ngs here like firing the RCS (reac-tion control system) engines whil e we have the certain thermalattitudes in order to get maxi mum heatin g back through the struc-ture to see what long du ra ti on fi ri ng s do as far as heat -- backthrough the structure.And we are doi ng other tests on the payload bay doors. Wouldyou go to the next slid e, please. - O h - , - - ! - - a m s - o r - r - y - these willgo real quick.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: This just give s you an example of the diff er-

ent attitudes I was talking about with respect to the Sun andinertial state. We wil l just kind of ski p over those and you ca nlook at them at your leisur e.But as I said, the vehicle can fly a variety of attitudesand each one. of these at ti tu de s has a totally di ff er en t inpu t tothe vehicle. Go to the next slides, please.(Slides)MR. WHITACRE: We do tests that are part of the thermaltests of the payload bay doors. The payload bay doors are madeof a gra phi te epoxy. The vehic le is made of an alu min um struc-ture. Du ri ng ascent and entr y the doors are closed, but on orb itthe doors are open.As a res ult, on orbit you have a situation where the vehiclecan and dqre.s d i s t o r t in a d i f f e r e n t manner than the doors do. Ifyou try to close the doors, you have a situ ation where the doorsof the vehicle don't necessarily exactly fi t.We have planned for this in the design of the latch mecha-

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nisms for the doors. There has been a lot of tes ti ng done toverify that that is the proper design,, but is virtually impos-sible to test a full-scale Orbiter in thermal vacuum conditionsand take into account the 1-G effects on Earth and figure outexactly what's really going to happen in Zero-G in space.So as a part of the thermal test, we do a series of testsopening and closing the doors to make sure that when the daycomes that we have to close those doors in a hurry regardless ofwhat attitude we are in, that we can in fact close them and thencome back home safely.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: Another series of tests on orbit are those ofthe PDRS. I already menti one d the ma ni pu la to r on them. The armis for putting payloads in and out of the payload bay.We are doing a series of tests in OFT, first with the arm

just^as a single arm, unloaded. We go out there and we test allof the control modes , to ve ri fy that all of the software wo rkswith the real arm, with the real vehicle dynamics that it is sup-posed to do.article on fli ght three andit in the dif fer ent posi-We then take the payload testli ft it in and out of the bay, puttions. The payload, the PDR's-test ar-ticXe -has-seve-ral differentgrapple points on it so you can move it around and get d i f f e r e n tinertial responses.

One of the things it is designed for is to allow you to sim-ulate the inertias of large payloads. So we do that kind of test-ing. One thing we can't get done in OFT is the approach-and-cap-ture testing with a payload, and we do that with the German weare plan ning to do that with the Germa n payload called SPAS 01(Shuttle pallet satellite), presen tly sched uled for fli ght six.That sch edule, of course, is flexi ble.

In,that test we will be verifyi ng that we can release pay-loads and pick them back up and approach payloads, and this kindof thing.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: There are other tests -- I am going to skipover these very quickl y. We also are verifying the performanceof the ele ctr ica l power system in terms of things like stratifi-cation of cryogenics in the tanks, whic h you get in Zero-G, theeffects that has on your boil-off and your feed of cryogenics tothe fuel\cell; verification of the heat loads into these tanks,and verification of the performance of the electrical system withthe actual loads to the vehicle in actual flight.(Slide)

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MR. WHITACRE: The same is true here of the environmentalcontrol system where you have all of the radiators, the coldplates, the var iou s cooling systems, the water and ammoniaboilers. Well, we won't be verifying the ammonia boilers inorbit but we will be verifying the water boilers, and things,to show that the total complex systems works as planned.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: Okay. We are down to 20 I am going to skipover 23, 24 and 25, and just let you look at those on your own.Those are just the fu rt he r li st in g of some of the tests that aredone in orbit, to verify vehicle performance. Would you go ondown to 26, please.(Slides)MR. WHITACRE: Once again, I have up here a little matrixwhich shows the entry fli ght test. I am only going to talk abouta couple of these. We have also a series of testing to be doneon entry -- the major ones of which are the aerodynamics, thermaland the autoland system. iAnd I will point out once again that we cannot get all ofthese done during the four flight OFT program. There is a largeamount of testing that is done, particularly in the aero area,and I will show you more about that. .i.n_:just_amomeat(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: In the aerodynami cs area, what we are tryingto do during entry is to show that thi s vehicle flies as planned.

There is no other vehicle of this type and we are trying to showthat the vehicle really flies the way we want it to fly.The questions that came up -- how do you do that with outperturbing the vehicle in any way that is unsafe du ri ng entry,and we looked at what kinds of programs did it take to do thatand whether or not we had to have CG control on the vehicle, CGbeing gra vit y control on the vehicle, in order to allow it toaccomplish this.And also it was known that we had to do this, do that, in aseries of differen t parts of the entry profile, the hypersonicregime, the supersonic, transsonic and the subsonic regime, to

get a very good data base that shows the controlability of thisveh icl e. Go to the next two slides, please.(Slides)

" * - '

MR. WHITACRE: Now, the way it was determined that it wasbest to approach this, first off it was concluded from the test-ing and from the analysis that had to be done that you could notvery effectively determine the entry aero characteristics of this

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vehicle simply by flying it and g e t t i n g that data back with ou thaving an excessively large number of fligh ts required.What you had to have is some clean control surface inputsand some clean vehicle responses to those control surface inputs.The way we do this is we put in what we call PTIs or ASIs, PTIsbeing progr am test input s whic h are put in by computer, and ASIs

which are control stick in put s whi ch are put in by the crew.So what we are doing is while we are flying the 40-degreeAlpha Profile, we push over and pull up so we get a data base onheating and on vehic le response, wha t happens when you go intothese other Alpha Profile regimes.At the same time we are doing that, for the various flightsthat you see here, we set up di ff er en t Elevon (ph.) schedules.The reason we do is by setting up dif fe re nt Elevon schedules andallowing the body flap to fall as it wishes to control the ve-hicle, we in effect simulate different CGs on the vehicle.And so we have a variety of Elevon profiles that are usedfor fli ght s one, two, thre e, four and several post-OFT flights.Go to the next slide, please.MR. WHITACRE: Now, this gives you an example of how this isbeing accomplished du r in g OFT. All of these littl e dots alongthese charts show that when we are -perfor.~i.ag--each--of these .pull-over push-ups.Individually we have run these on computer simulations withthe crew involved and have shown tha t ind ivi dua lly the maneuversare safe to perf orm and do giv e the kind of responses, the kin d

of dat a that you want.And we have also simulated total ent ry profiles wit h thosemaneuvers being introduced into it, so we are not using up toomuch prop ella nt, that the crew can in fact handle all thosemaneuvers that the vehicle is goi ng t hr ou gh at the time, so wedon't have any kind of problem.We do not get it all done, by a long shot, in OFT: and youcan see the kin ds of t hin gs that are lef t over from the post-OFTflights. I will comment more abou t that in just a moment. Nextslide, please.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: One other thing that should be said about theaerothermal aspects of this is, this is one of those sit uat ion swhere you.,.."can't ha ve your cake and eat it, too." We h ave a ve-hic le .where we had two basic li mi ts on it; one is the surfacetemperatures and the other is the bondline temperatures.And as the surface temperature goes up, the bondline temper-\

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ature goes down, or vic e versa. If you try to hold the surfac etemperature down, you let the bondline temperature go up.So, very judiciously, our people have worked to try to pickout some points on OFT which allows us to gradually progress upin both of these areas. And you can see here the curves whichexplain what I am talking about.We hold them down as much as possible on STS-1 and STS-2.These lit tle dots her e represent what's expected to be the tem-peratures. We allow them to go up a little bit on STS-3, get agood solid data base, and then on STS-4, we go to a differentAlpha Profile so we get a dif fer ent kind of entry heat ing, andyou can see that those jump up dramatic ally and our mar gin s godown dramatically. That is what is intended. We are trying tofind out, aga in, how the vehicle is perfor ming.(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: The next slide, which is page 35,

isotherm of the kind of temperatures we are expectinging entry, and every isotherm is diff eren t, dependingfile you are flying. This is just a typicalreprese nt any single OFT fl igh t or any otherter, but it does give you a pretty good ideaperature d i s t r i b u t i o n you are get tin g across

is just anto get dur-on the pro-isotherm, it doesn'tflight for that mat-of the kind of tem-the vehicle.

(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: Again, slide 36 is similar to the previousone wher e we just list some of the thing s we are doing. In th iscase, I want to mention autoland. In autol and, we plan to landthe OFT fl ig ht manually. And on fli ght two, go to the

autoland where it is controlling down to the flareflight three we use autoland to roll out , and thefour , except that in flig ht fourway, or at least thi s is our we are nowpresent plan.

partialpoint. Onsame on fl igh tlanding on the run-

Andautolandrollout.in post-OFT, when we go to KSC, we again go back to thethrough flare, first, and then the autoland through

(Slide)MR. WHITACRE: ^he last thing I wan t to say is we

nized, as "Deke" sai d, a long time ago that we were n'tget through this all during OFT and that we were goingcarry on int o the post-OFT period.

recog-going toto have to

We have planned according ly. We have inst rum ent ed the 102vehicle, cand it is planned that the 099 will also have a smallerbut adequate set of instrumentation. Once you have instrumentedthe vehicle and you have that capabilit y, it means you can do thetesting pretty much on a non-int erfere nce basis in most cases,

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with payloads.Now, it may very well take you several fli ght s to completethis testi ng, several more. For example/ in the aerodynamics, Ishowed we need fi ve more fli ght s. This does not mean it is goi ngto be the first five post-OFT flights. It will be the first fiveflights where we can carry the instrumentation package and per-

form the -- as we need to.So t his is goi ng to allow us to con tinu e our te stin g on intothe operational period and f inis h up our veri fic ati on program.And that .is pretty mu ch what I have to say about the overall OFTplanning. I will now turn it over to Larry Keyser.VOICE: Now again, for the record, Mr. Keyser isMission Staff Engineer for the Johnson Space Center. the STS-1

MR. KEYSER: Does everybody have a copy of the missingcharts? Did you make some extra copies?VOICE: We have what you gave us.MR. KEYSER: Okay. It turns out that the last 17 pages inmy presentation somehow got inad vert entl y left off and there isa separate package up here for those who didn't get them. Andthose of you on the Net, I hope I can adequately ref er to themwhen we get to that page.I am an old school teacher and I am goin g to use t his woodenpointer and not the electronic one.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: I am g oing tofile for the first mission. Edjective s for the whole progr am.(Slide)

talk to you abou t the fli gh t pro-has gone over the flight test ob-Next slide, please.

MR. 'KEYSER: There will be a short overview and then I wantto talk about the nominal ascent, some ascent abort, then whatsome of the on orbit act ivi tie s are, then the descent profile.Next slide, please.(Slide)

' M R .George. K E Y S E R : And here is the o v e r v i e w . N e x t slide, please,(Slide)

v *'MR. KEYSER: Okay. We are going to have a 54 1/2 hour fligh tin 150 naut ical mil e circu lar orb it. Ed mentioned the 40.3 degreeInclination. .The Launc h Date for this pa rti cu lar set of data was

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taken from March 10th.borhood of March 14th. Right now I understand it is in the neigh-

These times will vary slightly depending on which launchdata we pick. Th e launch window is 3 hours and 42 minutes, andthat is determi ned by launch and land in g lig hti ng requirement.And the cut-off of the launch, sun- runwa y azimuth/elevation con-straint, and the launch lighting is such that we need to takesome pictures of launch phase and we can't get it too early inthe morn ing. So that is dete rmi ned at 7:23 in the mor nin gEastern Time.

10 And with;53 a.m en that partic ular lift-o ffat Edwards Air Force Base. we are going to land atNext slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: This is an overview of the sequence of eventsthat happen during the ent ire missi on. There will be several QMS

burns. Now, the QMS is self-contained in the Orbiter propulsionsystem which is used to get into orbit. And we refer to this asthe first QMS burn. The first one is OMS-1, the second one isOMS-2, and so forth. I am go in g to talk in a litt le bit moredetail on each of these in the next slide , or in futur e slides.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: As far as the ascent is concerned -- we havetwo of them here -- okay, the num ber s here correspond to thenum ber s over on the world map. And I would like to say, fir st,this part icula r vehicle gets into or bi t a little bit differentlythan all of the previous ones.On previous programs we have gotten into orbit while westill had communica tions to the Berm uda Trackin g Station, theywere around 10, 11, 12 minutes, something like that is when wewere i nto orbit. But we are not goi ng to get into orb it unti laround 47 minutes with the Shuttle, so therepeople holding thei r brea th for a longerfinally get into a safe orbit.

are going to be someperiod of time unti l we

You will notice the perigees here are after we -- well, are13 miles and 57 miles which... we consider a safe orbit for a 24-hour (in audib le) time, is 80 miles. So we are not in a safe or bituntil we have the OMS-2 cut-off and we are in a 150 circular.

What is dict at in g doing these two OMS b urns and takinglonger to get in orbit is our desire not to have the externaltank in qrbit with us, and then we have the problem we had onSkylab, p.r:bital de br is , and so f or th , wher e we are unable topredi ct where it is going to come down.So we inten tiona lly cut of the ma in engine bu rn early andthen it comes on a ballistic trajectory into the Indian Ocean,'

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and then we proceed on to separate from it. We separate about 18seconds after we have MECO at 3:50 and then do the OMS-1 burn twominutes after MECO.SRB sep occurs two minutes and 12 seconds into the flight.Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: And this is just show you wheregoing to land, about 140 miles off the coast; andretrieved and reused. Next slide please.

the SRBs arethey will be

(Slide)MR. KEYSER: This is just to show the relative separationdistanc e between the extern al tank in the Or bi te r as it goes fromhere down thr ough to here in about two mi nu te s, which is about400 feet and 200 feet, in that nei ghb orh ood , away from the exter-nal tank. And then the exte rna l tank goes on its way and doesits ballistic trajectory, and right here is where we do the OMS-1burn and proceed to get up into or bi t. Ne xt slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: Here is where we ant ici pa te the external tankis going to impact -- right here in t h e . _ _ I _ n _ d _ i _ a n _ _ O c e a n _ . _This par-ticular darker line extends from here to here, is where some ofthe pieces could fall in a worse case. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER:the abort options(Slide)

Okay. I wouldwe have during like to talk a little bit aboutascent. Next slide please.

MR. KEYSER: The ascent aborts, we like to have an intactabo rt ca pa bil it y, and we are going to do that to protect forsingle ma in engine or OMS engi ne failures. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: We are on slide number 14 right now. As far asthe intac t abort modes are concerned, these are done to a pre-

planned l andin g site, not like a bal lis tic s trajectory like theprevious mis sio n. This thi ng can fly and we are goi ng to try toget it back to launch site. It is called a RTLS, return to launchsite, as long as we can.J%

And -that capability runs out as soon as you run out ofenou gh propellant to run aro und and fly back. And then you haveto nex t stage where you would press on i nt o trying to get intoorbit with whatever fuel you had remaining.

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There are two dif fer en t types of abort with in it, after thepress call this is determined by -- you keep building to get intoorbit even after you have lost one main engine, one of the threemain engines. That determines the start of the press to MECO.And the two abor t modes are: ab or t once around and abort toorbit. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR KEYSER: Here is a composite of the three abort modes.This is * sl id e 15, and thi s is the last s lide that some of you onthe net have.The arc to your left has the SRBs separate here and the SRBsfall .into the Atlantic. It goes on, and roughly right in here isthe last point where you could turn around and come back, and youturn the thing around and come back, to separate from the exter-nal tan k, that fall i nto the water and you fly back to KSC. I

have- a couple of slides on each one of these modes just a littlebit later so I will go on to a little bit more detail.The exte rnal tank, you stay on it and you get up to MECO,and you are a little short of getting into the orbit you want,you are going to do a couple of slides on each one of these modesjust a little bit later so I will go on to a little bit moredetail. . - . . . _ -The external tank, you stay on it and you get up to MECO,and you are a little short of getting into the o r b i t you want,you are going to do a couple of OMS burns, in either case in theAOA or ATO. In the AOA bur n, it will get you to a landin g atNorthrup Strip in New Mexico.The reason we are la ndin g there is we don't have enoughcross-r ange to get to Edward s.The arc to your left lasts about 22 minutes, and the AOAwill b e ^ a b o u t 107 minutes. Now, if we get into abort-to-orbi t --that is simply terminol ogy, because we may continue the entiremission if we get into doing abort-to-orbit. I will explain thatin a min ute . Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: Hold it just a moment. Slide 16, you don'thave on the net? All I wanted to show here is where the latestRTLS time -- I guess you would call that the point of no returnwhere you cannot come back to the Cape, and that is about fourminutes and 23 seconds into the flight.And coincidentally, that is the ti me , 4:23 is the time whereyou have your fi rs t press to MECO capablility. In other words,if we lose one of the main engines rig ht here, we could still get

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into orbit with the other two.Now, you cannot get into orbit, the ATO orbi t, until aboutseven to 10 later; so there is about a seven to 10-second periodin here that you have AOA ca pabi lity only, but then after thatyou have both. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: You don't have this on the net. I have twoslides here , and the one on the left is just some words thattells that the RTLS is bro ken up int o two stages. One is what iscalled th'e powered phase, and the glid e retu rn phase.And an RTLS abort would be required when you have, like Isaid, a single engine out, prior to the time that you get thepress to MECO capability, or if something else was wrong and youhad to get back in less than 22 minutes or you are time-critical.The chart on the right is a profile of the RTLS, and the

numbers up at the top correspond to certain events. You do yourstaging and you can abort as late as 4:23 into the launch.The powered phase goes clear around to here until you haveET sep, after you have your main cut-off. But as soon as you doinitiate the abort, the vehicle changes att itu tde and loft andgoes a little higher to get more altit ude.And about ri ght here they start pitc hing around, and whenthey get over here they are actually fly ing backwar ds, andpointing back toward s the Cape still burning the main engines.And when they get down to here, they ha ve to get in the ri gh tattitude for separatio n, so they start pit chi ng down. And then

they have MECO and ET sep, and the external tank goes on into thewater there in the Atlantic, and the Orbiter follows this kind ofa profile.It has to pitch over to gain enough speed so that it canfollow an equ il li br iu m slide boundary on into landing. Thereason it has to pick up the speed is because the requirementsfor ET sep here are -- you've got to keep the dynamic pressure

down. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: As far as the abort-once-around is concerned,here are two more slides, a word chart on the left. If you haveenough energy to get at least one rev and land at Northrup Strip,and it requires tow man euv ers wi th the OMS-1 to set up an apogee,and an OMS-2 which is the orbit burn and gives you the normalentry conditions and you do this if you have a single engineout prior to being able to do an ATO, or if you are time-criticaland didn't want to go into orbit.

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The chart on the right shows a little bit of the geometry ofan ATO. You lift off, and you don't have to make the decisionthat you are going to do an ATO right away. You can do a normalOMS-1/ and then sometime in this time frame you determ ined thatyou were time-critical and had to come back, and you could turnaround and do an OMS-2 and enter at Northrup Strip in that par-ticular case.

But what OMS-1 does is it puts you in a 105-nautical mileapogee, and you do the OMS burn roughly at apogee, and comealmost to complete rev and land at Nor thr up Strip. Next slide,please..

(Slide)MR. KEYSER: The abort-to-orbit, two charts again, a word

chart on the left. What we try to do to abort-to-orbit is to getinto a 105 nauti cal mile circular orbit, which is safe for sev-eral days, but we don't have enough energy to go on into a normal150 mile orbit.So what we will do is similar to nominal mission, get up to105 instead of 150 for apogee, and then we will ci rcularize at105 instead of 150. And this is req uir ed only when -- you willonly do this type of an abort when we just don't have enough fuelto get into orbit . Next slid e, please.(Slide)MR.- KEYSER: This is a graphic of the geometry of an ATO.Getti ng into orbi t here shortly after MECO, you determi ne thatbefore OMS-1 you have to know very soon, within this two minuteperiod that you are going to do an ATO so you can target for 105here instead of 150, so then he burns this one to get his 105,and then over here he goes 150.Now, depending on what is wrong, if there is nothing wrong,and depending on how much fuel we have got left, what we will dois we will do two more OMS burns later on the first day to raisethis up' on ei th er and make it circ ular , as hi gh as we can wit hi nthe fuel we have got remaining.The reason we want to go a lit tl e hig he r is it gives usbetter communications coverage wit h the tra cking station. Nextslide, please.MR. KEYSER: In addition to these int act abort modes, thereare conting ency abort modes where if you lose two engines at aninopportune time or three engines at an inopportune time, or ifyou miss- the runway, you can just eject the -- crew has the capa-bility of ejecting from the Or b i t e r and letting it ditch. Nextslide, please.(Slide)

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MR. KEYSER: I have three slides on the on -o rb it timeline."Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: What I have done h ere is shown you the timeline

along the bottom in hours, and I have the orbit opportunities foreach or bi t. You no tice there is none right in here where we don'thave a capability, or cross-range capability to get to any ofthese sites.The 'primary landing site is Edwards in Californ ia, with the"E". What is going to happen on the first day is, after we getinto or bi t wit h the OMS-1 and OMS-2 burn, the first thing we aregoin g to do is get the payload bay doo rs open. If we don't getthe payload bay doors open, we have to come back in that sameday.We use up some water we have on board to do the cooling, and

if we-don't get the doors open, and radiators that radiate theheat to outer space are inside the doors, and this will be thefirst oppor tunit y for TV. This is goi ng to be about an hour anda half to two hours after lifto ff. They wil l have the TV camerason and you will be able to have a TV show.The next several events t hat are happening are just gettingthe Or bi te r set up to stay in orbi t"f r c r r r "th'e'^lmrrrch phase. Youwill have another TV show roughly at 8 hours and 9 1/2 hours, twoseparate ones. The fi rs t one is go in g to be of the pilot in thecrew quarters and the second will be the commander and pilot inthe aft flight deck.Afte r that, they will eat supper and go to sleep. Nextslide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: The second day is planned around a deorbit re-hearsal, 'which is going to begin roughly right in here, 23 hours,24 hou rs, and the end about 30 hour s. And t hi s par tic ula r se-quence of events that happen from be gi n d e o r b i t rehearsal to enddeorbit are the identi cal timeline that the crew is going to doon the next day when they really plan to come in. Now if thereis something wrong we will come in on this pa rti cul ar day, if we

don't choose to go past this par tic ula r time.Subse quent to the de or bi t reh ear sal, we will open the pay-load bay door again. We close them here to get ready for entry,and get the system set back up, the orbit set back up to fly foranother day, do a couple of QMS manuevers, and these are sometest burns that Ed talked about.There is a TV planned on this pa rt ic ul ar second day two ofthem as a mat ter of fact; about 24 hours (into the flig ht) there

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is in the cockpit of the fli ght control system checkout, andabout 34 hours, TV of the mid -de ck over Hawaii . Next slide,please.MR. KEYSER: And then they will go to bed. And after theyget up on day three, they wil do the same thing they did the pre-

vi ou s day as far as the tim elin e is concerned that they havealready rehearsed, and come in and land roughtly 54 1/2 hourslater. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: And now a few words on the Descent Phase.Slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: Four different phases you might think of is thedeorb.it phase whi ch s tarts at the time they try to start theirattitude maneu vers to get into position to do the deorbit burn.And that is abou t 53 hours and 23 min ute s into the flight.And after they do the bur n, the second phase is entry inter-face which is about 400,000 feet, an d. is about 35 minutes later.Third phase is called TAEM, or ter min al aero energy management,and that is very close to the states -when-they ge-tthere. It isanother 25 minutes and they are at 3,400 feet and about sixminutes from landing.And five mi nu te s late r, they go int o the approach and land-ing phase when they are po in ti ng st ra ig ht down the runway, and

one mi nu te from touchdown. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: Here is a look at where they are going to be.They are going to be back in here at the start of the entryphase, when they do the attitude mane uvers to get into positionfor the burn right here.Then after they do the orbit bu rn , they will turn aroundinto entry att itu de. We will talk to them over Guam to find outhow well they did the burn, and the entry interface occurs ri gh there to TAEM Interfac e. Next slide, please.(Slide)MR. KEYSER: This fin al slid e shows how they are going toapproach and land at Edwards Air Force Base. They will be comingin from the west right over here, slide right over the runway,all the time dropping, turn around and then the TAEM phase endsright here. And they beg in the approach and landing phase aboutone minute from touchdown, and they will touch down right here.That is it.

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VOICE: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please wait for themicrophone and please identify yourselves and your affiliation.May I have the first question, please? At the moment we don'thave any questions Houston. How about at Headquarters? Standby, please.MR. COVAULT: This is Craig Covault, at Aviation Week.

Larry, can you di scuss the status of th ru st li mi ti ng in the pro-gram right now to avoid RTLS? MR KEYSER: No.

*MR. SLAYTON: I thin k, Craig, you are referring obviously toour problems with a nozzle on MPT and what that does to us in athrust limiting world. And I think we are not sure what thatmeans right this minute.MR. COVAULT: Say again, Deke. I couldn't hear you.MR. SLAYTON: I presume you are referring to the nozzlesplits on MPT and what that does to use in a thr ust li mi ti ngmaster plan. Is that correct?MR. COVAULT: Not so much on the MPT incidents as just thestatus of using it irregardless of the incident.MR. SLAYTON: Well, I don'.t k.now_._what_..tp_tell._yo_u/. either,about that other th an I think we are still planning to use it,and the detail techniques of how that is all computered. I don'tthink any of us here are any smarter than you are about that onein terms of giving you a detaile d de sc rip ti on of it. Al, haveyou got any...MR. ROSSITER: This is Al Rossiter wit h UPI. I would liketo know a little bit more about Monday's MPT problem and whetherthere is any poss ibi lit y at all that it could affect the move tothe VAB, the 23rd.MR. SLAYTON: I don't think you've got the right guys on theloop to 'give you the bottom line on that. I can tell you what Iknow abo ut it whi ch is second or third han d. We appear to havehad a failure in the nozzle which dumped hydrogen and ended upwith an over tempt on the pump because we were running LOX richand th at is what caused the shut-do wn.We think there is no damage to the basic engine. We thinkour problem is primarily a bad braze on our nozzle. We knew wehad a nozzle. We knew we had a nozzle that was out of spec atthe ti me , and we need to find another nozzle and go continue thatrun. "


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worse case maybe even the engines. But we can do that in thever tic al. But to answer your questi on, we don't thi nk that willhave any impact on rollout or mat in g.MR. COVAULT: This is Craig Covault again. Deke, an IMUques tio n on thi s turn- aro und of the IMU in the countdown if youneed to, has JSC decided how long you can hold on the IMU Iunder stand it went all the way up to about 50 min utes which could

really open th in gs up for you if you got that much hold time onit before recycling it?MR. SLAYTON: We got a hundred right now. We had anotherconstraint that was an ADI (attitude direct ion in dicator) con-straint. We need a "read-write" in the LCC (launch commit cri-teria) to fix that problem. That was giving us a 20-minute holdand we th ink we are g oin g to get that approved.Right now we can cope with a total of two hours in OPS-1, (acomputer software mode) which gives us 20 minute s for countingand a 100 minutes for hold. We know we are going to have some-thing^ (inaudible) at 50 or 60 minutes, we will obviously recycleback to 71 min ute s and pick up from there anyway. I guess inessence we've got almost unlimited capability right now.MR. ROSSITER: This is Rossiter again. Can you discuss thechange in you target from March 10th to March 14th? I understandsomeone just added anot her test and th at was the reason it wasstretched out four days. --MR. SLAYTON: That is exactly right. We had a series ofseven missions runs and SIT (Shuttle Integrated Test). There wasnot an LRV, a launch verification in after FRF. We put that inand that represents about the four days. The other mo di fi ca tio n

they did the progra m at the same time we did put in an APU (aux-iliary power un it ) hot fir e ahead of the FRF, but that is nosche dule impact. That is where the four days is.MR. COVAULT: This is Covault again. Deke, could you reviewany ma tur ati on or ma tu ri ng of the OFT Program that you may havedone as you looked at th ing s in the last several months? Andwhere are some areas in the OFT Program itself that you mightthink seriously about changing if th in gs wen t especially well onSTS-1?MR. SLAYTON: Well, if your question is: Do we have any"hip pocket" plan to cut back on the number of flights and do the

program quicke r, I don't think we do. We are based on a successschedule right now. And as you are aware of, we do have someperformance problems staring us in the face downstream, and weare goi ng to have to make some mod if ic at io ns , most likely one weunderstand all of that.I personally don't visu alize any great change in the struc-ture of it from four flights to three, two or that kind of busi-

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ness. There probably will be some changing around of payloads aswe go. We are not prepared to discuss that in detail todaye i ther.MR GAVER: Okay. That is all the quest ions fromHeadquarters.MR. GORDON: Okay. Kennedy Space Center, do we have ques-tions from you?VOICE: Yes, we do; just one moment.MR. LEWIS: This is Dick Lewis, freelance. We don't have thelast 17 pages and consequently, we were lost when the briefertalked about "here" and "there" on the descent profile.I would li ke to ask the following question s: At whatapproximate geographica l po sition would the vehicle be at thetime of the reentry burn at entry or at the 400,000 foot mark?In o'ther words, where appro ximately does th is veh icl e reenter?MR. KEYSER: Okay. The de or bi t burn is going to occuraround 70 degrees east longi tud e and 40 degr ees south. That isin the Indi an Ocean almost equ id is tan t between Afr ica andAustralia.MR. LEWIS: Okay. That is fine.MR. KEYSER: And then the 400,000 interface is at 160 eastand 20 degrees north.. .MR. LEWIS: 20 north.MR. KEYSER: That is up the re west of Hawa ii.MR. LEWIS: West of Hawaii? Right. Okay. .When does black .end? Do you have a number on that or approximate position?MR.' KEYSER: A pos iti on for blackout. Roughly 125 westlongitude. That would be the end of blac kout. Now, you refer redto an altitude of 84,000 feet six mi nu te s from landin g. Wouldthat be approximately over Orlando, Florida?MR. KEYSER: No. .We are coming into Edwards.MR. LEWIS: Okay. I'm sorry -- in the Edwards descent,where would that be?MR. '-KEYSER: Probably a bo ut two , three hundred miles inlandfrom the coast.MR. SLAYTON: Probably picked the right place, thoug h, for aKennedy landing.

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MR.from the LEWIS: Yeah.Pacific Coast? Okay. Two or threeIs that correct? hundred miles inland

MR. KEYSER: That is correct; just a guess.MR. LEWIS: What happens then? Does he swing around and goback out west to land?MR. KEYSER: That is correct. He flies straig ht eastdire ctly over the runway/ turns aro und in big circle, comes backand lands.MR. LEWIS: Okay.MR. GORDON: Again, we are sorry about the foul-up on thesevugraphs. They got inadvertently left out of the package whenthey were sent yesterday afterno on.VOICE: We have one add it ion al questio n from KSC. For DekeSlayton: Would the possibility of up to 500 questionable tiles,

are there any plans to install tiles afte r the Shuttle, after theO r b i t e r has been tra nsf err ed to the VAB, or mus t all of the tilesbe in place before the transfe r from the OFT takes place?MR. SLAYTON: We would like to get them all installed beforewe move. That is our mast er plan. I am sure if we end up in as i t u a t i o n where we've got two or three close-outs or somethingand we have to wait for them to get rp.anufacTuY'ed, a"n~a~13elive red,and we are talking days or possibly weeks, where we are.VOICE: That is all from Kennedy.MR. GORDON: Thank you. Mars hall?VOICE: Yes. Stand by one second.MR. DOOLING: Dave Dooling with the Huntsville Times. Firstoff, for Public Affairs, if the transcript of the Aaron Cohenb r i e f i n g a couple of weeks ago was ever secure d, we did n' t getthem up "here.A couple of questio ns abou t payload. The SPAS payload fromGermany was mentioned as a test article for the RMS. I thoughtthere was special structure being built for use on OFT-3 for that

purpose.MR. WHITACRE: There is a special structur e being buil t forOFT-1. The SPAS. One test article is for the approach and cap-ture testing, and that is presently scheduled for flight six.MR. .DOOLING: So the PDRS artic le will not be released,then, during its test?MR. WHITACRE: The PDRS test article is not int ended to

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actually be released into free fl ig ht . We dowil l, the end of the grapple m echa nism but wego of the PDRS test article on flight three.unlatch, if youdo not actually let

The reason for that isany problems you don't haveyou really don't want to be

just so, frankly, in case you havesomething f loating free in orbi t thatthere.

MR. DOOLING: Okay. On the OFT-4 payloa d, I notice that youhave the OSS-1 pallet hooked in there. Is that firm now or isthe Air Force P80-1, I believe, -- is that still the priority?MR. WHITACRE: Both of them are still candidate payloads.MR. KEYSER: OSS-1. is our official payload on our currentmanifesting.MR. DOOLING: Okay. And on the fli ght numbering for theoperational flight, I notice that you have 0201. Does the referto t f i e Or bite r fuselage number and then the flight number?

fland

MR. WHITACRE: What chart are you looking at?MR. DOOLING: It is several of them after the four OFTights that has the operations! fl ig ht s desi gnat ed, 0201, 0202,d so on. And I wondering if .that i n.d i c a t i . n c i _ . _ f l.Lg.h.t__n.umber oner OV-102, and flight...MR. WHITACRE: No. I think the chart you are referring tois the one on the XCG .Expansion Plan, and those numbering referto DTO numbers, detai l test objective numbers. They.are not asso-

ciated with the specifi c f li gh t because they may not occur on thef i r s t or the second or the third post-OFT flight. Those are thenum ber s of the det ail test objectives.MR. DOOLING: Okay. No more question for now.MR. GORDON: Do we have questions from Houston? LouieAlexander in the back, sir.MR. ALEXANDER: Yes. I have two questions. First of all,for the first fli ght you are talkin g abou t hav ing the Northr upSt r i p available as an alternate or an emergency landing. Willany of those four other fields you mentioned be ready for that

first flight if they are needed?MR. KEYSER; Yes sirMR. ALEXANDER: And can the spacecraft land anywhere else onland or water if absolutely necessary?MR. KEYSER: Not water, but if you can find a runway of10,000 foot or so, we could land on it.

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MR. ALEXANDER: The other question is: I see in this planno EVA Plan, no extra vehicular space walk. Is there any capa-bility for that if there is trouble on the flight?MR. KEYSER: Yes, sir. The capability will exist but we arenot going to plan it.MR. ALEXANDER: They will have the suits on available, andall the rest. Thank you.MR. SLAYTON: To clarify your question on landing sites, wedo have some preferred contingency landing sites. Larry is right;we can land anywhere we can get to or will try to. But we have a

base in Rhoda, Spain; we have a base in Okinawa; we have Hawaii-- that are all what we call our contingency landing sites, whichwould be our preference to dump into one of those places otherthan our prim e into missi on sites.One other clarification we ought to make on AOA first flight

we obviously prefer to go the No rt hr up Str ip because of thelittle cross-range. However/ if No rt hr up Strip ends up rainedout, or something, on the first flight, we can go to Edwards, andwould. It gives us a lot more cross-range. We prefer not to butit wouldn'be a "show stopper."MR. KEYSER: We would change the launch _P5fJ^l^_jh3St alittle bit for that to take away " seine" of ""fh"e"~c r"ds~Ta"nge .MR. GORDON: Carlos Byers, please.MR. BYERS: Yes. I misse d so met hin g somewhere on the tilessituation. You have 5-0 questionable. How else do you stand ontiles?MR. SLAYTON: Let me review my numbers again. We have got aknown 520 cavities as of to date, and we know of another 28 weare going to remove, which give s us a total of 548 known.On top of that we have a number of DRs (design reviews),IDRs (intermediate design reviews) .on tile that have to be dis-positioned. There is up to 500, in that "ball pa rk" of thosekinds. In a worse case, we 'could end up having to change out all500 of those. However, the last word I had they are very optimis-tic and believe that most of those we will be able to disposition

as is. That is the best I can tell you on that. We won't be anysmart er on that for anoth er few days, obviously.In any case, if we did have to do t hat, we are still g oin gto be in good shape to ma ke the 23rd rollout . We have been put-ting on, i:n the "ball-park" of 500 a week, so what we know of i tis li ke a week's work here.The prob lem, as you v/ould guess, is the closer we get to theend we end up with some very specialized ones, and we may have to

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take some splashes -- and there is no th in g in our pipe line tospeak of. Everything is there that we know of, and in some caseswe may have to take splashes back to Palmdale, get them built andbring them back to the Cape. That is the case I am ta lking aboutwhere we mig ht consider moving wit h a few missing.VOICE: (inaudible) Fli ght test summarizing --MR. SLAYTON: Yes, very nicely. We want to get up and getdown safely, and that is really the only objective. If we can getthrough a launch and into or bi t and get t hrou gh an entry and backon the ground, in my opinion we would have completed a very suc-

cessful ' flight.And what happens on orb it, obviously we would like to stayup for a couple of days, but the on orb it stuff is relativelyeasy and ben ign , comparatively. When people say, What is thetough part of the space flight? Well, that is it, get ing up andgetting down. Space flight is easy, and t hat is where our big ges tproblems may lie.Well, it is the amount of da ta we are try ing to get and wecan't get it on one flig ht. It is, ag ai n, we tried to "walk"through that wit h Ed's pr esen tati on, trying to do thing s sequen-tially. We can go back and review those charts, if you like butjust to pick a typical launch dyna mic pre ssur e, we want to workup on that gradually. We don't want to go to our design value onour first .flight because there a r e - t o o ~~ny-"uncert-a-inties. Wearen't that smart.We have a lot of wind tunnel data, we have a lot of struc-tural analysis, but you just don't really know what you've gotuntil you go fly it, so you try to make it as easy as you can andthen we work int o it gradually . It just takes a few fligh ts todo those things.We star ted in spread ing it over s ix , we now have it spreadover four; but .we think we can't squeeze it any more that that.Well, I don't even know how to compute that one. There are prob-ably 20 major systems and -- we can get you a count on that.VOICE: I believe we have one from Jeremy Rose over here.MR. ROSE: Ge tt in g back to the tile proble m, if I may ask avery basic question. What is the ma in problem with fixing them?

Have you actually solved the probl em with the fixing or are youjust patching up and hoping that the problem will resolve itselfand you wi ll be able to find out the proper answer once theflight has taken place?MR. ,SLAYTON: We don't think we have tile problem. We thinkwe understand the tile, v/e think that the ones that are on thereare there to stay. And the things I am talking about here are thetypical manufa cturin g type things where you have a little crack

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or little chip, or those kinds of things. We have a spec valuefor what is acceptable, we have a spec value for unevenness andwe have some that are outside of tha t, roughness c rit eri a.Each one of these has to be looked at by the experts indi-vidually and dispositioned. But a s far as a basic design prob-lem, we don't think we have one right now. We think we under-stand the system.MR. ROSE: How many tiles totally are there?MR. SLAY^ON: There are over 31,000, and I can't give youthe exact n umb er, again. If you want it we can get it for you.MR. GORDON: We have no more questions from Houston. Wewill check the net Headquarters? Okay. Marshall, are youfinished?

- VOICE: We ha ve one more her e at Marshall.MR. DOOLING: Dave Dooling again. Would you elaborate alittle bit on that extra test that was added to slip the launchto March 14, and could you give us what the crew assignments arefor OPT two, three and four?MR. SLAYT'ON: The answer to you - last-gue strop.isno . Wehave announced the crew for first flight, and I don't think weare prepared to talk beyond that today.The test we added is a launch ve ri fic ati on test, which issimilar to the in teg rat ed tests tha t we are run nin g in the VAB,

except it happens on the pad after FRF. And it is in there togi ve us the late ve ri fi ca ti on after we have run the flig htreadiness firing of our total systems, fairly close into launch.Ag ai n, I don't have the schedule with me and I can't tell youwhere it is in rel ati on to laun ch, but it is about T mi nus threeweeks "ball park."So v/e should be ver y close to our Launch con figu rati on atthat time and this is just a final verification test. I think wererunning a nominal ascent, a nominal descent and an RTLS -- arethe three ones that are planned there. T believe that is correct.VOICE: Okay. ^hat is all from Marshall.MR. GORDON: Kennedy, do you have any more? No more. Thankyou very much, Deke, Ed, Larry.

(Whereupon, the briefing and presentation was concluded.)


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O R B I T A L F L I G H T T E S T P R O G R A MN O V E M B E R 5 , 1 9 8 0

P R E S E N T E D B YD O N A L D K . I S L A Y T O N


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O R B I T A L F L I G H T T E S T P R O G R A M ( O F T )W H A T I S I T9 T HE " O F T I S A F O U R O R B I T A L F L I G H T T E S T P R O G R A M , W I T H L A U N C H E S A T K E N N E D Y

S P A C E C E N T E R A N D N O M I N A L L A N D I N G S A T E D W A R D S A I R F O R C E B A S E , W H I C H H A SB E E N P L A N N E D T O V E R I F Y A N E A R L Y O P E R A T I O N A L C A P A B I L I T Y O F T H E S P A C ET R A N S P O R T A T I O N S Y S T E M ,

O B J E C T I V E S9 C O N D U C T A T E S T P R O G R A M W H I C H C O N F I R M S T H E I N I T I A L D E S I G N A N D P E R F O R M A N C E

C A P A B I L I T I E S O F T H E S T S, R E L A T I V E T O D E S I G N O B J E C T I V E S W I T H T H E M I N I M U MN U M B E R O F F L I G H T S , : i

M A J O R C O N S I D E R A T I O N S ji ;

Q G R O U N D T E S T S A N D A N A L Y S E S R E S U L T S , !ie A C C E P T A B L E R I S K B U I L D U P O F F L I G H T T E S T E N V E L O P E ,9 A N A L Y S I S O F T E S T D A T A T O C L E A R N E X T F L I G H T , H A R D W A R E A N D S O F T W A R E A V A I L A B I L I T Y ,9 T U R N A R O U N D O P E R A T I O N S , ' D E M O N S T R A T I O N O F P A Y L O A D S S E R V I C E S C A P A B I L I T I E S ,


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O R B I T A L F L I G H T T E S T P R O G R A MO F T A P P R O A C H& P R O G R E S S I V E E X P A N S I O N O F T H E V E H I C L E F L I G H T E N V E L O P E T O M A X I M I Z E

V E R I F I E D O P E R A T I O N A L R E A D I N E S S I N F O U R F L I G H T S ,G R E C O G N I T I O N T H A T " F L I G H T T E S T " T O " O P E R A T I O N S " I S A G R A D U A L P R O C ES S

W H I C H R E Q U I R E S P O S T O F T I N S T R U M E N T A T I O N A N D T E S T S B U T W H I C H A L S OA L L O W S T H E A C C O M P L I S H M E N T O F S I G N I F I C A N T P A Y L O A D S O B J E C T I V E S D U R I N GO F T ,

D E F I N I T I O N O F R E Q U I R E D F L I G H T T E S T S B Y R E S P O N S I B L E E N G I N E E R I N G E L E M E N T SB A S E D O N G R O U N D T E S T S L I M I T A T I O N S , H A R D W A R E A V A I L A B I L I T Y , V E H I C L E

. O P E R A T I O N A L O B J E C T I V E S , E T C , |

/ A N A L Y S I S O F F L I G H T , S Y S T E M S , A N D C R E W C A P A B I L I T I E S T O S U P P O R T T E S T S

A S S I G N E D T O E A C H F L I G H T , I N C L U D I N G S I M U L A T I O N S A N D C R E W P R O C E D U R E SD E V E L O P M E N T ,


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SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAMOFT FLIGHT TEST PREPARATION

O V E R A L L S T A T U S "i MAJOR P A R T O F O R B I T E R T E S T A N D C H E C K O U T C O M P L E T E D W I T H G O O D R E S U L T So LAUNCH F A C I L I T I E S E S S E N T I A L L Y C O M P L E T E D F OR O P E R A T I O N A L A C T I V I T I E S LANDING F A C I L I T Y P R E P A R A T I O N S P R O G R E S S I N G S A T I S F A C T O R I L Y

- E D W A R D S A F B / D F R C F A C I L I T I E S E S S E N T I A L L Y C O M P L E T E D F OR O P E R A T I O N A LA C T I V I T I E S

-NORTHRUP S T R I P A I R F I E L D O P E R A T I O N A L L Y R E A D Y ; LANDING S U P P O R TA N D T U R N - A R O U N D F A C I L I T Y P R E P A R A T I O N O N - S C H E D U L E

FLIGHT C R E W , LAUNCH O P E R A T I O N S ; F L I G H T C O N T R O L O P E R A T I O N S A N DO R B I T E R T U R N - A R O U N D O P E R A T I O N S P R E P A R A T I O N O N S C H E D U L E

L O N G D U R A T I O N I N T E G R A T E D MISSION SIMULATIONS A R E S C H E D U L E D F O R D E C E M B E R ,i!iI

A MISSION V E R I F I C A T I O N T E S T W I L L B E C O N D U C T E D IN F E B R U A R Y 1981.jS T S - 1 O U T L O O K | ALL O P E R A T I O N S T E A M S AND T H E I R S U P P O R T E L E M E N T S W I L L B E MISSION R E A D Y

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M A J O R T E S T D R I V E R Ss A S C E N T E N V E L O P E A N D P E R F O R M A N C Ee E N T R Y A E R O D Y N A M I C S A N D F L I G H T C O N T R O L9 E N T R Y T H E R M A L P R O T E C T I O N S Y S T E M ( M A X . S U R F A C E A N D B O N D L I N E T E M P )@ T H E R M A L C O N T R O L S U B S Y S T E M ( O N O R B I T A T T I T U D E S ) O P E R A T I O N A L P E R F O R M A N C E O F V E H I C L E S U B S Y S T E M S ( Q M S , R C S , E C L S S ,

E P S , ) ;


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T H E O R B I T A L F L I G H T T E S T P R O G R A M

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The Orbital Flight Test Program

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