In O.C., Mission Accomplishment

When astronaut Kathryn C. Thornton reached for a wrench in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavour, the excitement level in a dimly lit conference room at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Division rose.

“Did she say spanner wrench?” design engineer John Black said, as Thornton’s voice was transmitted from the shuttle streaking above Africa on Thursday.

“We made that wrench special to fit her hand,” Black explained. The spanner is a tool designed with a smaller handle specifically for Thornton to give her additional leverage for assembly of equipment in space during the Thursday mission. “She was pretty adamant about it. . . . Her hand is small, and she can’t get enough torque if she can’t get her hands around the handle.”

Black and about 30 other engineers at McDonnell Douglas were riveted to a wall-size television broadcasting the NASA space mission, which utilized an array of custom equipment and tools they had designed and manufactured in the past few years.

“It is really exciting,” said Bac Pham, a design engineer on the space project. “Some of that stuff was practically sitting on my desk last week and now it is up in space.”

One of the final phases in the Endeavour mission was to test the giant truss known to these engineers as the ASEAM project--Assembly of Station by Extravehicular Activity Methods. The truss is a series of rods and connecting joints which form a trapezoid framework from which astronauts can assemble heavy equipment in the weightlessness of space.

This mission hundreds of miles above Earth was only a rehearsal of the technique for connecting a large object to the truss. This procedure will be employed repeatedly by astronauts when they begin assembly of the Space Station Freedom scheduled for sometime in 1995. The truss is the foundation that that will tie the pieces of the Space Station together. The McDonnell Douglas engineers in both Orange County and Houston had teamed up with the Johnson Space Center since 1990 to design the truss running the width of the shuttle’s cargo bay.

After more than two years of design, construction and testing, the engineers Wednesday could only watch the astronauts assemble their truss. Some said they had even saved small scraps of the structure in their desks as souvenirs.

“I was the first one on the project when it was unpopular,” Pham said while watching the progress of the mission. “I worked in ASEAM for two years, and now it is finally being used. It is like waiting two years to see the Super Bowl.

“This thing really has to be over-designed. We have tested and retested it many times.” Black said. “It would be simple to design the truss alone but we had to plan for the contingencies.”

Wednesday during the dramatic rescue of the Intelsat 6 communications satellite, a contingency arose. A portion of the truss was assembled by the astronauts to help in tethering themselves to the spacecraft while manually reining in the errant satellite.

“It was not designed to do that,” Black said. After watching their equipment perform well Wednesday, the engineers patted themselves on the back, reveling in the fact that their truss played a role in saving the mission.

“There is a lot of pride up there,” said Mark Rysdam, a manufacturing engineer.