Alumnae NASA astronauts explore orbit in satellite missions, discuss space flight program
By Sarah Khan
Nov. 17, 2010 1:04 a.m.
With space shuttle Discovery’s nose pointed at the stars, a crew of five astronauts wearing modified jet pilot suits ascended more than 200 miles above the earth on Nov. 8, 1984. UCLA alumna Anna Lee Fisher was in the crew cabin.
The mission was to bring back two international communication satellites, said Fisher, who earned a bachelor’s in chemistry, doctor’s in medicine and master’s in chemistry from UCLA.
The satellites were fragile and not meant to be handled by machinery, and it was the first time a space crew had designed a procedure to retrieve them, she said.
Add to that a crew of only five, which seemed inadequate for the tasks at hand, Fisher said.
“On the days we did the space walks, I felt like we were one person short,” she said.
Regardless of setbacks, the mission went smoothly.
But two years later, the shuttle Challenger exploded. NASA’s human space flight program has since worked on improving safety regulations and taking missions in a different direction.
UCLA alumni astronauts like Fisher have seen the human space flight program change over the years.
Satellite missions, like those taken on by Discovery and Challenger, are now reserved for un-manned spacecrafts.
Today, astronauts are assigned to more complex tasks, said K. Megan McArthur, a 1993 UCLA aerospace engineering alumna who went up in space in May 2009 to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.
“You have to hit the ground running,” McArthur said.
“You get up there and you’ve got a completely full mission for the next few weeks.”
Other changes include updated flight gear, Fisher said. The old jet pilot flight suit was replaced with a 91-pound pressurized flight suit that can make moving in the shuttle cumbersome despite the safety advantages, Fisher said.
On board with a crew of seven instead of five, McArthur helped to replace key parts of the fragile telescope, including the main computer tucked inside it.
“We had to remove 111 tiny little screws to get to the scientific instrument, all while wearing a suit that makes you look like the Michelin man,” McArthur said.
McArthur operated a 50-foot-long robotic arm with a control panel inside the shuttle, moving the other astronauts to work on the telescope with only computer monitors, video cameras and the communication between her and the other astronauts to ensure nothing went wrong.
But the crew trained for more than a year before the mission and once spent a week together in the wilderness as a part of the training program to get used to making decisions in stressful environments, she said.
“As we learn more as an astronaut office, we’ve learned how to be more efficient, how to train people to do more,” McArthur said.
McArthur and Fisher said they hope NASA can build on the experience and knowledge from past missions to put astronauts outside of Earth’s orbit for the first time in 38 years. Fisher said she is looking forward to one day seeing a crew on the moon researching ways to sustain life on other planets.
But cost will always be a deciding factor, said Edward Wright, professor of astrophysics at UCLA, who has been working with NASA since 1976.
Astronauts have not been on the moon since 1972 because of the amount of money it takes to send them there, Wright said. Just keeping a space shuttle in earth’s orbit can cost $6 billion, he added.
However, there are some things about the space flight program that may always stay the same. For Fisher, seeing the Earth without country boundaries and against the backdrop of space was a humbling experience.
Twenty-five years later, McArthur found beauty in the same thing while staring out the windows of the shuttle Atlantis.
“We start to see how dynamic the earth is. For me, lightning storms were incredible to watch,” McArthur said. “We go around the Earth every 90 minutes, so we get a repeat show every hour and a half. It was pretty phenomenal.”
