NASA Abandoned A Spacecraft in Orbit for 5 Years. When It Came Home It Surprised Them!

I feel that passive orbit stabilization deserves an exhaustive explanation video.

I worked many months of 60 hour weeks on Pad A activation to get that thing back on STS-32. It was close; a schedule that couldn’t be delayed because payload was going to re-enter but we barely made it.

Hi Scott! FYI: Lockheed Martin has one of the few space environmental effects labs in the world in Palo Alto, including 2 atomic oxygen chambers, one of which was designed and built by yours truly. We also do UV, ESD, and electron/proton radiation in that lab. Hit me up if you'd like to know more or look into arranging a tour!

I was in the B-2 test team at Edwards when the Shuttle landed there with LDEF aboard. When the Shuttle Transporter 747 and Shuttle (still carrying LDEF) taxied out for takeoff we were watching from our taxiway gate about midway down runway 22. It was the heaviest Shuttle ever carried. When we saw the dust kick up as the pilot went to takeoff power we were shocked how slow the acceleration was at brake release. When that pair went by us it still looked way too slow. We knew that 747 was totally committed, fly or die. They'd already stopped all vehicle traffic on the main road off the end of Rwy 22. That 747 used every inch of the 15,000ft runway when the mains finally left the ground. The gear immediately began retraction and the pilot brought it up to only like 200 ft or so then kept it there. Skimming the bushes just gathering speed for a few miles. Finally almost out by Rosamond Lake we saw it finally start gaining altitude and beginning the turn to swing around to the east. That was the wildest Shuttle carrier takeoff we ever saw.

Looking at the "after" photos, this was probably one of the most important orbital experiments ever done. The delay was a big bonus.

Can definitely put this mission in the "Things Kerbal Space Program Can't Teach You" file.

I was the project manager for a payload that was in the cargo bay for the recovery flight. It was called the Interim Operational Contamination Monitor. It was there because they were concerned about any contamination IDEF received after recovery. One thing that I have never heard mentioned was what happened to the remaining foil after the Mylar was gone. The bay had a positive pressure in it to keep out any "dirt" after landing. They had a technician put some equipment in the bay to measure the humidity and such on the flight back to Kennedy. She entered through the airlock. When she opened the door a lot of the foil broke into tiny pieces and flew all over the place. My payload had pieces all over it, maybe because it was in the front of the bay close to the door. This stuff was really thin. If you tried to pick it up with your fingers it just disengaged.

The deterioration looks much like Walmart garden furniture after a season or two.

My dad is one of many scientists who would thank you. He had the Thiokol solid rocket propellant experiment, which I think I saw a photo of towards the end (the rubber matrix was dyed green if it was "safe" — they left out one of the chemicals so it wouldn't burn in order to perform physical stress tests like twisting, squeezing, shear force, or, in this case, longterm storage in space.) Dad's sample came back with some impressive micrometeorite craters. Come to think of it, that data was probably used for Magellan, one of the last missions he worked on before retiring: it had a big ol' star 48 solid rocket motor that had to sit idle for a year and however many months it took to get to Venus, and I think Dad said he helped design the redundant firing system— another small charge —that would fire it up when the time came.

The passive orbit stabilization stuff is really cool.

"Presumably by the time it came home it was the longer term exposure facility" ya nasa has that kind of dry sense of humor

In college I worked summers at Space Camp and watched the I-Max film, “The Dream Is Alive”, many times. This film featured the release of the LDEF satellite. I got pretty good with my Walter Cronkite impression saying, “The LDEF satellite WEIGHS 10 TONS, and IS the SIZE of a SCHOOL bus.” A couple of years later, I was in the Air Force doing some environmental monitoring experiments around launch pads in Cape Canaveral. We had some space in an old hanger at Cape Canaveral AFS, and we noticed this big enclosed trailer in the hanger bay. Since the trailer had some windows we peered inside, and to our amazement, it was the LDEF satellite sitting inside. Since the others were familiar with "The Dream Is Alive" we were joking around saying things like, "Wow! That's the size of a school bus!" and "I bet that thing must weigh 10 tons!"

This video makes me so happy. As a young kid, I would watch the IMAX movie The Dream is Alive on repeat. I will never forget Walter Cronkite's narration about LDEF... "The LDEF satellite weighs 10 tons and is the size of a school bus. It carries 57 experiments - the work of more than 200 scientists from 8 countries. LDEF will stay up here for more than a year exposing various materials to the vacuum of space." That movie helped inspire me to work in aerospace.

A friend has a piece of the LDEF. Gifted to him by a relative who was a researcher at NASA in the 60’s and 70’s. It was always an interesting object but to think it led to the ISS really makes it extra special.

My PhD was all based on the retrieval of LDEF. I was doing the preliminary work in anticipation but there was a graph on the wall showing altitude vs time with a line at the point at which it would probably be impossible to retrieve. The extrapolation did not look good so I was very happy when it was successfully retrieved. I then had the wrinkled silver thermal protection panels that you see in many photos plus our actual experiment of layered aluminium foils which are the rectangles split into triangles (Micro Abrasion Package). My PhD was determining the probability of penetrating a aluminium sheet of a specific thickness per unit time in a specific orientation. Predictably the leading side (running into the rain) had far more impacts, the sides less, back even less but the space facing and earth facing least of all as there were no orbits that these could come from so they required a one off source. The wrinkled silver panels were not of much use as they were a multi layer plastic + metal layer which had different behaviour with temperature and degraded with time. Also the multi layers caused some complicated impacts and when taken together I could not get much useful data from them.

Thank you for mentioning the outgassing from LDEF. I was responsible for analyzing some Gallium-Arsenide semiconductor samples that had been on it post-recovery, and if there had been any changes in their composition or electro-optical properties during their time in space they were masked by that.

So glad you covered LDEF. My first science job involved cataloging micrometeorite impact craters on one of the forward facing panels and measuring them so we could characterize the mass distribution of micrometeorites and help with meteorite risk analysis for the space station. I thought it was really neat just to carefully disassemble, section off, and examine something that had been in space so long.

Awesome demonstration of the versatility of the Shuttle... it could take this giant thing up to space, leave it there for several years, launch another satellite then rendezvous with it on the same trip to bring it back down to earth safely.

Just a perfect example of why your channel is great. Super interesting yet obscure space history!

Currently designing a CubeSat with a tether and we are really having to worry about micrometeoroid impacts, and space debris as well as erosion from the plasma that’s up there. Some pretty wild ideas getting thrown around for how to deal with those right now in our mission.