posted 06-08-2004 02:40 PM
And the longer piece:Last commercial astronaut brings spaceflight to Earth
Robert Cenker, who flew aboard the shuttle Columbia in 1986 as an RCA Payload Specialist, appeared on the “Astronomy Forum” programme of Staten Island (New York) Community Television’s Channel 35 on June 7, 2004.
Cenker talked about his selection as a Payload Specialist whose job was to observe the deployment of an RCA satellite and his experiences on board Shuttle. “If anything were to have gone wrong, I could have been helpful to resolve the problem,” he said. He’s been quoted as saying, “Of all the people I have spoken to of space only those closest to me can understand. My wife knows what I mean by the tome of my voice. My children know what I mean by the look in my eye. My parents know what I mean because they watched me grow up with it. Unless you actually go and experience it yourself you will never really know.
“It’s head and shoulders above anything I have done,” Cenker said on the programme. Once he reached orbit and zero gravity, he thought, “This is not a carnival ride. I am here [in space], and I am going at least one orbit.”
Cenker’s flight, Mission 61-C, lasted six days, from Jan, 12 to 18, 1986, and was the last flight before the Challenger accident. “I was closest to Christa McAuliffe,” the teacher-in-space, “as we were both payload specialists. She wanted to know what it was like to be in space. We were going to exchange photos when she got back.” Speaking of the Challenger crew, he said, “They were a fine people.”
Cenker spoke of the wonders of visual acuity, and of how so much of what is familiar is due to gravity and gravitational references. “The shuttle flies upside-down, with its tail pointing to the Earth,” he began. “Because the global reference is important to many people, they suggested that we change perspective so that we were aligned in the same direction as the Shuttle. I couldn’t do that; the local reference was more important to me.”
He suggested an experiment. “Next time you’re in an airplane, sit with your head firmly against the headrest, and don’t move it. When the airplane banks to the right, the cabin will also move to the right. But how? Your head didn’t move. It’s all due to your eyes following and tilting in the same direction as the plane.”
In addition, “I had a serious case of SAS,” space adaptation syndrome, “and it bothered me a lot.” As he notes in “Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years,” “The sensory deprivation of floating weightless, the fact that I wasn’t touching anything, drove me nuts at first. When I slept the first night, I actually put my arm inside of the foot restraints so I could feel the floor against my shoulder.”
For a while, Columbia was accompanied by a piece of thermal tile, and Cenker said no one expressed any concern over it. “A piece that size didn’t bother us,” and he noted that pieces of tiles always come off of orbiters. “I was afraid of something similar to what happened” with STS-107, he admitted. Drawing a comparison over the decisions made on that flight to his work, Cenker said, “I’ve got a stack of memos on my desk, and at times I’ve had to say, ‘We’re ready to go. Let’s just go and do it.’ You just have to make a decision based on what you have.”
Though they had hit turbulence at 150,000 feet, the actual landing was the smoothest he had ever felt. “But that’s what happens when you have one of the best pilots under perfect conditions. I didn’t know when the main landing gear touched down.”
Comparisons will be inevitable between Cenker, who is now 56, and who is from East Windsor, New Jersey, and Gregory Olsen, 58, the next “space tourist,” who is from West Windsor. According to fellow Payload Specialist Bill Nelson’s book “Mission,” “RCA was NASA’s ‘customer’ on the mission – paying NASA seventeen million dollars to launch its satellite.”
Olsen, like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth before him, will be paying the Russians $20 million for a flight aboard a Soyuz to the International Space Station.
Cenker also worked on some RCA experiments, as well as one involving an infrared imaging camera. Olsen plans to use infrared sensors to analyze pollution and the health of ground agricultural systems.
“I would like to see spaceflight be a ticket that everyone can afford,” Cenker commented. “Gravity is such a drag. I’d move in space tomorrow with my wife and kids. Everyone should see what it’s like – it’s unbelievable.”
Cenker is still involved in the space programme, though not as an astronaut. “I work for various firms for various satellites, mostly commercial satellites,” he said. “In fact, about a year and a half ago, I worked on a robot that would service satellites. If they needed someone in place of that robot, I’d volunteer.”
He had applied twice for NASA’s astronaut corps, and was turned down. He noted that he had helped Don Thomas, who was to have been on the Expedition 6 crew, become an astronaut. “They told me what to do the next time if I applied again, and Don was a friend of a friend of mine.”
As for himself, “In college, my advisor suggested I work for RCA, and my reaction was, ‘I don’t know anything about televisions.’ I didn’t know that they had built many of the early satellites.”
Of the selection process, he commented, “In 1978 there were 10,000 people applying for 40 positions. Some of those who made the selections also made the selections for Project Mercury, and they said they had no problems making those cuts.
“In 1978, only 2,000 were not qualified, and they had a harder time. I majored in aerospace engineering, and I don’t have a scientific background that I could bring to the table.
“Those are the breaks,” Cenker said. “I understand their logic. And I’m fortunate to get the one flight I did. I’ll take 185 (nautical miles, Columbia’s altitude) any day.”
posted 05-11-2004 10:05 AM
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