STS-3: Realtime Flight Planning

Abstract

Because the STS-3 crew, Jack Lousma and Gordon Fullerton, suffered from space adaptation syndrome, Mission Operations Director Gene Kranz ordered the first woman Flight Activities Officer, Carolynn Conley, and the author who was the lead Timeline for the flight, to “swap” two days of the Crew Activity Plan. The only way to transmit the changes to the crew was via a primitive teleprinter machine onboard Columbia. New formats were invented to accomplish this task, and the new Crew Activity Planning System used to generate the preflight and as-flown timelines was honed for use tracking the changes to the timeline during the flight. The orbiter thermal tests showed that the payload bay doors would not close under some conditions. NASA became the “butt” of jokes when the space toilet quit working. The author and her husband hardly saw one another during the flight in March 1982 because they were controllers on different shifts.