Animals Still Causing Woes Aboard Shuttle : Rat Food Disintegrates Again and Monkey Feces Float Through Cockpit

The space shuttle Challenger’s menagerie of two squirrel monkeys and 24 rats on Wednesday again proved to be a nettlesome irritation on a mission devoted to science.

For the second day in a row, a Granola-like bar that is fed to the rats came apart in a spray of dust as astronaut William E. Thornton was trying to clean the cages.

In addition, feces from one of the monkey cages escaped and somehow floated to the cockpit of the Challenger, more than 25 feet from the big Spacelab module where the animals are housed.

A Health Concern

“Feces in the cockpit isn’t all that much fun, guys,” said flight commander Robert F. Overmyer in an exasperated tone. “That really has me concerned. If we have monkey feces up here, we surely don’t have any health stabilization up in this area.

“How many years did we tell them those cages weren’t going to work?” Overmyer said in cabin communications overheard on Earth. “That’s really discouraging if we’re going to get monkey feces up here. Son of a gun.”

The monkeys and the rats were placed aboard the $1-billion Spacelab to test a new design of cages for taking small animals into space. After failing to block the flow of debris from the cages Tuesday, Challenger zookeeper Thornton asked engineers at the Johnson Space Center here Wednesday to develop procedures to solve the problem.

An Upbeat View

Prior to Overmyer’s fulmination, Thornton offered an upbeat view of the experiment, training a television camera on the monkeys and making no mention of the troubles in a brief transmission to earth.

On Tuesday the escape of rat food and droppings had caused the astronauts to wear surgical masks until filters cleared the air. On Wednesday, it appeared that one of the monkeys and one of the rats were not eating well.

Despite all that, Thornton talked Wednesday of how animals might someday be frequent space travelers.

“I would not be surprised in the future to see pets in space and everywhere man goes,” he said.

Rats Will Be Killed

The rats will be killed when they return to Earth, but Paul Callahan, animal project manager, said that the deaths will be painless. He said they will be put to sleep and “at that time, a blood sample is taken and then the animals are put to death and tissue samples are taken.” But Callahan said the monkeys will be spared.

“These monkeys are re-fly candidates,” he said. “Samples will be taken from them much the same way they are taken from the crew” to test for the effects of prolonged weightlessness.

In this third day of the seven-day flight, Overmyer and pilot Frederick D. Gregory shared duties in the cockpit, while the other Spacelab scientists--Don Lind, Dr. Norman E. Thagard, Lodewijk van den Berg and Taylor Wang--worked on more of the 15 categories of experiments in the 23-foot laboratory.

The experiments vary from crystal growth in space to re-creating the atmosphere of Jupiter. So far, only one, photographing the Earth with a wide angle camera, has been scrapped because of a mechanical malfunction. Another has not yet been started. But it has been a frustrating three days for Wang, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Effort to Make Repairs

His $3.5-million machine, intended to measure the effects of weightlessness on liquids suspended in space by sound waves, has a short-circuit.

He has been working since the beginning of the flight to get it started, but to no avail. The experiment, considered one of the most important on the craft, is given only an even chance of starting up, and officials on the ground said the breakdown probably happened at takeoff.

Wang, who helped develop the machine, must find the short among the 400 wires and repair it with electrician’s tape.

“I think we’ve got a 50-50 chance,” said JPL engineer Don McFarland.

The shuttle is scheduled to end its mission with a landing Monday at Edwards Air Force Base in California.