STS-51-D (Discovery)

Background

By the spring of 1985, the Space Shuttle program had settled into what NASA publicly promoted as a new era of routine access to orbit. Discovery had already demonstrated its reliability on two previous flights, and STS-51-D was manifested as a commercial and scientific deployment mission carrying two communications satellites: Telesat's Anik C-1 (also identified as Telesat-I) and the Hughes-built Syncom IV-3, also known as Leasat-3. The flight also carried a continuation of McDonnell Douglas's Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System experiment, operated for the third time by payload specialist Charles Walker, an engineer flying as a commercial representative of his company. What distinguished STS-51-D most sharply from its predecessors, however, was a passenger whose presence had little to do with satellite hardware.

Senator Jake Garn of Utah, chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversaw NASA's budget, was manifested as a congressional observer and payload specialist. His selection was controversial in some quarters — critics characterized it as political favoritism — but NASA maintained that his presence served a legitimate purpose in demonstrating the shuttle's accessibility and building congressional support for the program. Whatever the political calculus, Garn's flight made him the first sitting member of the United States Congress, and the first elected politician of any nation, to reach orbit.

Crew and Preparations

Command of STS-51-D fell to Karol Bobko, a veteran astronaut making his second shuttle flight, with Donald Williams serving as pilot on his first spaceflight. The mission specialist corps included Rhea Seddon, Jeffrey Hoffman, and David Griggs, all of whom would go on to significant careers in human spaceflight. The combination of a veteran commander, a diverse mission specialist team, and two payload specialists — Walker and Garn — reflected the increasingly mixed character of shuttle crews in the mid-1980s, blending career astronauts with scientists and representatives of commercial and institutional interests.

Training for the mission incorporated the standard suite of contingency simulations, but nothing in the preflight schedule fully anticipated the improvisation that would come to define the flight's place in history.

The Flight

Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1985 — a date that held its own resonance, being the fourth anniversary of the first shuttle flight and the twenty-fourth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbit. With liftoff, Jake Garn became the first sitting politician to fly in space, a milestone that drew considerable media attention both before and during the mission. Garn reportedly suffered significant space adaptation syndrome — the nausea and disorientation that afflicts a substantial proportion of first-time fliers — and his experience became, somewhat wryly, a reference point among astronaut flight surgeons. The informal unit of space sickness severity, the "Garn," reflects this association, though it circulated more in crew humor than in formal medical literature.

The first major objective proceeded nominally. Anik C-1 was deployed and its perigee kick motor fired successfully. The problems began with Leasat-3. After deployment, the satellite failed to activate; a switch that was supposed to be triggered by the physical act of leaving the payload bay did not engage as designed. Leasat-3 drifted away from Discovery inert and unresponsive, its communications payload silent. Ground controllers and the crew worked through options, but the satellite was not designed to be retrieved or serviced by hand.

The crew and engineers at the Johnson Space Center conceived an improvised solution. David Griggs and Jeffrey Hoffman conducted an unplanned spacewalk — one of the few genuinely contingency-driven EVAs in shuttle history up to that point — during which they attached makeshift devices to the end of the remote manipulator arm. The contraptions, fashioned from materials available aboard the orbiter and quickly dubbed "flyswatters" by the crew and press, were designed to physically flip the activation lever on Leasat-3's exterior as Discovery made a close approach to the satellite. Rhea Seddon operated the robotic arm in the attempt.

The flyswatter approach was an extraordinary example of in-flight ingenuity under time and resource constraints, and it generated significant public interest. It did not, however, succeed. The lever was triggered, but Leasat-3 remained unresponsive. The satellite would eventually be retrieved and repaired on a subsequent mission, STS-51-I, later that same year — a testament both to the persistence of engineers and to the shuttle's unique capacity for on-orbit intervention — but STS-51-D ended with Leasat-3 still adrift. Discovery performed its deorbit burn and returned to Kennedy Space Center, concluding a mission of just under seven days.

Legacy

STS-51-D occupies a layered place in spaceflight history. On the surface it is remembered for Jake Garn's presence and for the improvised flyswatter EVA, two stories that together capture something essential about the shuttle era: its openness to non-traditional participants and its culture of practical problem-solving in the face of unexpected failure. Garn's flight inaugurated a brief but politically charged period during which congressional and other institutional figures were considered for shuttle seats, a practice that was curtailed after the loss of Challenger in January 1986.

The unplanned spacewalk by Griggs and Hoffman demonstrated that shuttle crews could respond adaptively to scenarios outside their trained profiles, and the willingness to fabricate tools in orbit and attempt a delicate mechanical intervention on a free-floating satellite previewed the kind of bold contingency work that would characterize later missions, including the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing flight. The failure to save Leasat-3 did not diminish that legacy; the attempt itself expanded the understood boundaries of what a shuttle crew could improvise under pressure.

Charles Walker's third consecutive commercial payload flight on the same mission underscored the degree to which NASA was, in 1985, genuinely attempting to transform low Earth orbit into a commercial operating environment. STS-51-D thus compresses within a single seven-day flight many of the defining tensions and ambitions of the mid-shuttle era: political symbolism, commercial aspiration, and the enduring human instinct to solve an unexpected problem with whatever tools are at hand.