Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3026
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted 06-08-2020 11:39 AM
   
On June 8, 1995, 25 years ago to this day, the space shuttle Discovery and its launch vehicle "stack" were transported from Launch Pad 39B back to its servicing-protective hangar, the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the shuttle program's ninth "rollback" of a fully assembled shuttle vehicle.The liftoff of shuttle Discovery on mission STS-70, the 70th shuttle mission and 21st flight of Discovery, was first targeted for June 22, 1995. But due to Russian space program scheduling delays during that same month, the earlier planned STS-71 Shuttle-Mir docking mission would flip-flop the STS-70 and 71 launch dates. Discovery with her five-astronaut all Ohioan crew would launch first in early June with Atlantis and her seven U.S./Russian crew to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) later that same month. That schedule, though, was completely thrown off following an extended Memorial Day holiday weekend. But the change wasn't anything to do with the shuttle itself as there were no technical nor engineering problems whatsoever, either on the vehicle itself or with any ground support issues involving STS-70, and the weather was fine thus far. So what happened? Believe it or not, a single Northern Flicker Woodpecker bird, that's right -- you heard me correctly -- was in the launch pad area around the shuttle vehicle about a week before the second scheduled launch of Discovery on Mission STS-70, later to be known as the "woodpecker mission." As mission specialist astronaut Don Thomas said in his book, "Orbit of Discovery; The All-Ohio Space Shuttle Mission," first released in 2013, the astronaut crewman explained: A love-crazed male woodpecker grounded our flight for a month. He'd mistaken the 154-foot tall external fuel tank for a dead tree limb and proceeded to tunnel into the foam insulation in order to create a nest and attract a female. Northern Flicker nests typically run more that a foot deep, and the insulation was only 3" thick. When his beak hit the metal, he'd just move to another part of the tank. The pesky-feathered woodpecker, a common bird in the U.S. and Canada, had poked 205 holes in the tank's foam insulation. Attempts to repair the damage at the pad were unsuccessful, and the shuttle Discovery "stack" had to be returned to the VAB on June 8th. The holes created by the red-headed fowl ranged in size to large excavations about 4" to smaller single pecks and claw marks. The crew even adopted Woody Woodpecker as a mission mascot, Thomas said, in that everybody managed to find the humor in it.Just over a month later, STS-70 was able to launch on July 13, 1995, only 6 days after the shuttle landing of STS-71/Atlantis, making it the fastest turnaround between flights in history. The crew was able to deploy the sixth and final first generation series of Tracking & Data Relay Satellites (TDRS-G) from Discovery's payload bay six hours after liftoff. That same TDRS-7 communications satellite is still in use today for both the Hubble Space Telescope and the ISS program.  Depicted in the display panel are some special "woodpecker" bird cachet covers, with appropriate U.S. postage "bird" stamps affixed, created by my firm along with some personal STS-70 memorabilia, cloth patches included, given and signed by astronaut Thomas, a NASA materials engineer-scientist and shuttle astronaut of four shuttle flights from 1994-97. He has logged more than 1,040 hours in space since his astronaut selection in 1990. There's even a "rollout carried cover" for STS-70/Discovery's first move to the pad from the VAB on May 11, 1995. To my knowledge, it was the first rollout that could not make it up the hill or launch pad ramp when approaching Pad 39B with its 11 million-pound load and multi-billion dollar cargo. "They got part way up the hill twice and had to go back down the slope," it was reported in Don's book by Florida Today newspaper writer Todd Halvorson. Added further in the book, Thomas said: Evidently, as the crawler begun its slow climb, engineers driving it noticed that a gauge indicated they weren't going fast enough to make it up the hill. They backed down, tried again, and got the same result. They decided to replace the speedometer and, on the third attempt, the crawler's twin 2,750 horse power engines had no trouble getting Discovery atop the launch pad. The trouble was the faulty speed gauge, not the transporter. Another special cachet cover, "Freedom 7 / STS-70 human space flight / 1961- 1995," was in commemoration for the upcoming 100th U.S. human space flight. The colorful cachet covers and insert cards were printed for shuttle orbiter builder Rockwell International's Space Transportation & Systems Group by my own SpaceCoast Cover Service company. But as it turned out, with the flip-flop of shuttle missions between STS-70 and 71, that distinction went to STS-71/Atlantis that flew to the ISS on June 27, 1995, which had became the first Shuttle-Russian Space Station Mir docking and joint on-orbit operations.The depicted Woody Woodpecker patch was an unofficial version of the original STS-70 patch design. As Thomas explains in his book, "That version, designed by JSC employees Paula Vargas and Andrew Parris, featured Woody Woodpecker standing behind the shuttle in our official patch with arms outstretched as if to say, "Here I am, folks!" The STS-70 crew received a few of the special patches after the astronauts had landed at KSC on July 22 after nearly 9 days in space and 143 Earth orbits. I've also included some NASA photographs of the fuel tank's "hole" damage along with a few other related photos of the only shuttle mission delayed "by the birds," or should I say, by a single love-sick determined "attack" woodpecker! |
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