Discovery clears the tower; NASA flies again
For thirty-two months, no American had left the ground. On September 29, 1988, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:37 a.m., delayed nearly two hours by light winds and a fuse problem in two crew members' flight suits. Commander Rick Hauck led an all-veteran crew of five, the first such crew since Apollo 11, wearing pressure suits with a new bailout system NASA had not required since STS-4 in 1982. Six hours later, they deployed the TDRS-C communications satellite. The redesigned booster joints that had doomed Challenger held.
Challenger had grounded the nation's only path to orbit and forced NASA to answer, in public, whether it could be trusted with astronauts' lives again. STS-26 was that answer: redesigned booster joints, escape suits, and an all-veteran crew. The mission was built to restore confidence, not just orbit a satellite. It reset the shuttle program's risk culture for the seventeen years of flights that followed.
QWhy did NASA give STS-26 a secret second name?
Officially, the mission carried the designation STS-26R, not the plainer STS-26 most people remember. The R existed purely for tracking data: NASA had already assigned the original STS-26 slot years earlier to a mission that flew under the confusing STS-51-F numbering (Spacelab-2), and reusing the plain number risked scrambling flight records. STS-26 was also the first mission since STS-9 in 1983 to use NASA's original sequential Space Transportation System numbering, after years of the byzantine STS-51-F style labels.
QHow badly did the shuttle's new voice-command system fail before it worked?
Discovery flew the first Voice Control Unit ever installed on a spacecraft, letting crew members steer cameras and monitors watching the Canadarm just by speaking. It nearly didn't work. During initial testing, the system recognized less than 60 percent of one crew member's commands and less than 40 percent of another's, numbers useless for a device meant to help fly a spacecraft. NASA engineers retrained the voice templates before flight and pushed recognition above 96 percent, and the system flew on future missions.
QWhat almost stopped the countdown ninety seconds before launch?
With Discovery already fueled and the crew strapped in, controllers at T-minus 90 seconds flagged a cabin air pressure reading serious enough to consider halting the countdown entirely, on top of a delay already caused by light winds and swapped fuses in two flight suits' cooling systems. Rather than scrub, the team resolved it by activating oxygen systems built into the crew's new pressure suits, the same suits designed for bailout scenarios NASA hadn't required since STS-4 in 1982. The clock kept running, and Discovery lifted off less than two minutes later.
