Shuttle Crew Strikes Out---- $80-Million Satellite Lost : Lever Not Source of Problem

A valiant effort to save a stranded satellite ended in failure today when the space shuttle Discovery got no response after whacking a lever on the side of the satellite that was believed to have been stuck.

It was a profound disappointment for the seven-member crew of the Discovery, as well as scores of engineers on the ground who had worked for four days to bring off a spectacular rescue.

“You did everything you could,” David Hilmers at Mission Control in Houston told the crew. “It was a great job.”

The depth of the disappointment was clear, however, in the muted conversations between the Discovery and Mission Control that contrasted sharply with the cheerful exchanges of the past couple of days.

Seemed Most Logical

Analysis of televised pictures of the effort showed that the lever, which activates the satellite, wasn’t the problem after all. Engineers with Hughes Communications, Inc., which built and owns the satellite, had thought that the lever was the most logical problem because it starts the first series of events aboard the satellite after launch from the shuttle--none of which occurred after the satellite was released from the Discovery on Saturday morning.

“If the lever were movable, we hit it with enough force to move it,” flight director Jay Greene said.

“The lever was open to the position that we would expect to activate the satellite,” added Steven D. Dorfman, president of Hughes Communications. The lever was not the problem, he concluded, and no one is sure now what caused the satellite to fail.

After the satellite refused to respond to the effort, the Discovery dropped back, and the crew began preparing for Friday’s landing at Kennedy. The satellite will continue in its low earth orbit, an $80-million piece of space junk that will probably never be rescued, according to sources with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The seven-ton satellite’s rocket, which is essentially the same rocket used on Minuteman ICBMs, would make any rescue attempt extremely tricky.

Unrehearsed Space Walk

The Discovery’s crew had worked all day Monday building crude tools to facilitate the impromptu attempt to activate the satellite. On Tuesday, astronauts Jeffrey A. Hoffman, 40, and David Griggs, 45, made the first unrehearsed space walk in American history to attach the tools to the end of the shuttle’s robotic arm.

Early this morning the Discovery pulled alongside the satellite, and M. Rhea Seddon, 37, the only woman member of the crew, maneuvered the shuttle’s arm to get a close look at the lever through a television camera on the end of the arm. That gave the crew their first clue that the analysis of the failure was probably wrong.

“It’s hard for us to tell if it (the lever) is fully extended, but it looks like it’s pretty near the perpendicular position, and I’m not sure that’s what you wanted to hear,” Hoffman told Mission Control.

The position indicated that the lever had functioned properly and that something else had caused the failure.

‘Extraordinary Orbit’

Seddon eased the makeshift tools against the side of the spinning satellite, catching the lever twice. The force was hard enough that “if it wanted to go, it would have gone,” Greene said.

Hughes Communications’ Dorfman termed the rescue attempt “an extraordinary effort” and said the lack of success should not be blamed on anyone associated with the rescue.

“I don’t think the mission could have been better if it had been planned for a year, and it was done in four days,” he said.

“Naturally, we were disappointed” with the final results, he added.