Spacelab Work Goes Smoothly After Repairs

The astronauts aboard the shuttle Challenger repaired an experimental device in the Spacelab research module Friday, and the mission manager in West Germany said the space flight was going so well that “it’s unbelievable.”

Scientists at the control center near Munich said the eight crew members were back on schedule with experiments that had been delayed by earlier problems, and were working at close to 100% efficiency on their third day in orbit.

“We’ve got a clean table in front of us,” said Ulf Merbold, a European Space Agency scientist and astronaut who flew on an earlier Spacelab mission. “For those who are flying, we must give big compliments.”

The research work was interrupted when a fire alarm sounded aboard the shuttle six separate times. The astronauts found no flames, and mission controllers in Houston confirmed that there was no evidence of smoke in the cabin.

No More False Alarms

“They are very confident they were false alarms,” Shannon Lucid, in Houston, told co-pilot Steven Nagel and Henry Hartsfield, the commander.

Much of Friday’s research was concentrated on materials sciences that are expected to have important industrial applications. The research included making alloys that cannot be formed under the conditions of gravity on Earth and growing ultra-pure crystals that can form only in weightlessness.

The crew repaired a crystal-growing furnace by dismantling the complicated apparatus aboard the laboratory in Challenger’s cargo hangar and cutting a wire to a faulty sensor.

Reinhard Furrer of West Germany and Wubbo Ockels of the Netherlands did most of the repair work, following instructions from Germany.