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Author
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Topic: Payload Specialist as outsider
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Chris Dubbs
Member Posts: 145
From: Edinboro, PA USA
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted 04-15-2008 03:45 PM
   
While reading an oral history interview with Charlie Walker, I came across a section where he was talking about the early days of being a Payload Specialist (PS). He said that they were seen as outsiders and that there was no clearer indication of this than the physical arrangements of office space. The PS office was in Building 39 and the Astronaut office was in Building 4. (In another interview he refers to the PS office being in Building 32.)Can anyone expand on the significance of that or add additional details?
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Jay Chladek
Member Posts: 2272
From: Bellevue, NE, USA
Registered: Aug 2007
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posted 04-15-2008 04:26 PM
Well, if you want a perspective of the Payload Specialist from a Mission Specialist, pick up a copy of Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane as he relates a few things that happened among some of the Payload Specialists. He relays one story (without naming names) about how one PS in orbit pretty much shut down in orbit and withdrew from everyone else when his equipment broke. Another apparently took too much of a liking to the side exit hatch in orbit, so much so that the rest of the crew were fearful that he might accidentally open the hatch and kill them all. Then of course there were the "Congranauts" (Senators Garn and Nelson) and the rumors associated with their flights in terms of how much upchucking they did.Big thing about the Payload Specialists is they were part time astronauts on specific assignments. Some were there for political purposes while others had more scientific purposes. The Mission Specialists, PLTs and CDRs were different as they were full time astronauts. During the early days, some considered the PSes to be mere "payload" as opposed to fully integrated members of the crew since they were late comers to the party and didn't have the levels of training that the full timers did. Some of the PSers did endear themselves to their crews though and were considered full members of the team and a few even went on to become MSes (mainly ESA and CSA members). Ilan Ramon, who to date was the last PS to fly, was apparently almost as fully trained as an MS (probably no EVA or shuttle systems training though) due to the number of years he spent in the training cycle with the crew before he flew on STS-107. |
Delta7
Member Posts: 1505
From: Bluffton IN USA
Registered: Oct 2007
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posted 04-15-2008 10:02 PM
I remember reading something years ago about Jean-Loup Chretiens complaint about how Payload Specialists were treated, back when he served as backup to Patrick Baudry on STS 51-G. He was pretty vocal about what he considered second-class status and treatment of the PS's, especially since he was already a spaceflight veteran from his Soyuz/Salyut 7 mission. |
John Charles
Member Posts: 339
From: Houston, Texas, USA
Registered: Jun 2004
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posted 04-15-2008 10:04 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Chris Dubbs:
...The PS office was in Building 39 and the Astronaut office was in Building 4. (In another interview he refers to the PS office being in Building 32.)Can anyone expand on the significance of that or add additional details?
It was Building 32. (No Bldg. 39 at JSC, as far as I know...) Building 32 is the site of the large space chambers, but the PS's were allocated small offices in the office section of the building. I visited with Charlie and Greg Jarvis in 1985, during STS 51-D preparations. Didn't know Greg, but Charlie was and still is a class act, and acts like he remembers me when I see him at meetings. In those days, PS's were definitely not at the same level as "real" astronauts. That got better later. ------------------
John Charles
Houston, Texas |
eurospace
Member Posts: 2610
From: Brussels, Belgium
Registered: Dec 2000
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posted 04-16-2008 09:36 AM
French payload specialist Patrick Baudry (on STS-51G in 1985) shares similar stories whenever asked about the subject. He's a test pilot, a fighter pilot, and had full training as a cosmonaut when he served as a backup for Soyuz T-6, yet he was treated as a sort of a travelling parcel when preparing for 51G. Where he got full briefing on the Soyuz systems, on the shuttle had only been told "don't touch this" and "don't touch that", and little else.
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Jürgen P Esders
Berlin, Germany International Director (Europe), Space Unit
Vice President, Weltraum Philatelie e. V. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astroaddies |
kr4mula
Member Posts: 642
From: Cinci, OH
Registered: Mar 2006
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posted 04-16-2008 11:58 AM
I've gathered a similar impression from the few shuttle astronauts I've talked to. But in their defense, is it hard to blame them? Some of the "real" astronauts had been waiting for a spaceflight since the late 1960s. Most were newer, but were all still highly-trained professionals (pilots and MSs) who spent quite a bit of time preparing for a seat on the shuttle that might not come for years (especially in those days, with the somewhat arbitrary assignment process). But then there was the chance that a contractor could come in a relatively short time before the flight and take up one of those precious seats? I might be a little resentful, no matter how nice of a guy the PS was. And as one commander told me, they only got to know these guys under limited circumstances, for a limited time, so you didn't have the same kind of "in the foxhole" confidence in their performance as the rest of the crew. In that sense, the shuttle crews weren't much different than any tight-knit group (particularly under high stress) that receives a newcomer or outsider.Cheers, Kevin |
eurospace
Member Posts: 2610
From: Brussels, Belgium
Registered: Dec 2000
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posted 04-16-2008 12:41 PM
Kevin,Most of these people travelled on a ticket other than career astronaut. Baudry for instance was a guest astronaut in the framework of a French-American agreement. The Congress people again are an entirely different category. In other words: none of them would have taken away a seat from a career astronaut. They could have granted them better training, depending on their previous scientific and/or aviation experience. Actually, the staff policy has gone this direction later in the programme: foreign astronauts were then attached to the relevant AsCan groups, and received full mission specialist training. In that context, Schlegel (initially a payload specialist on STS-55) later became mission specialist, so did two of the three initial and both later Japanese astronauts (Mohri and Doi), similar for the Canadians, etc. So NASA learnt from the experience. Whether NASA should have done so earlier is of course up to anyone's guess and judgement .... but the situation is different today.
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Jürgen P Esders
Berlin, Germany International Director (Europe), Space Unit
Vice President, Weltraum Philatelie e. V. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astroaddies |
FFrench
Member Posts: 3161
From: San Diego
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 04-16-2008 12:52 PM
All of these good points, of course, can be set against the wider backdrop of differing perceptions of what the shuttle was supposed to be and do. It had been sold to the taxpayers and politicians, in many repects, as a simple truck that could take payloads, experiments and people to orbit safely, cheaply and frequently, so that allowing many non-career spacefarers to hop on and take a ride with an experiment or satellite was very much in the spirit of what the shuttle was supposed to be for. On the other hand, there were those who understood that the shuttle was always going to be a high-performance test vehicle in many ways, and the possibility of it truly becoming as routine and easy to fly as had been hoped were perhaps unrealistic. The Challenger tragedy changed a lot, and with it came the gradual shifts that Jürgen mentions. The discussion has much in common with discussions about space tourists visiting ISS. Many career astronauts will say that in theory they welcome space being opened up to new groups of diverse people - but that the ISS is perhaps not the place to be doing it, at least not yet. |
kr4mula
Member Posts: 642
From: Cinci, OH
Registered: Mar 2006
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posted 04-17-2008 12:37 PM
You're absolutely right about the perceptions of the shuttle. The PSs were conceived in that sort of environment where 100+ launches a year were going to go up to do all sorts of things. The "operational" enviroment of the shuttle, it's easy ride to space, reliability, etc., made it theoretically unnecessary to be highly trained in the vehicle - afterall, do airline passengers know how the environmental control system works? Since things didn't quite work out that way, the role of the Payload Specialists is debatable.Jurgen - my point was that though no seats may have been "taken" from career astronauts in reality, perception is always something different. There were at least a few astronauts who harbored some resentment toward the PSs who basically got a "free ride," but they clearly differentiated between ones like the foreign experts (Ulf Merbold was one example mentioned to me) and the Congra-nauts. Cheers,
Kevin | |
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