The Wings in the Sun

1984 · Shuttle Remote Manipulator Arm · Work 1119 of 1,871

The aft flight deck of a space shuttle in orbit, pale grey panels of blank switches, two windows onto the open cargo bay, beyond them the long white jointed robot arm holding at its end a boxy satellite in gold and silver foil with two folded dark blue solar wings, turned into blinding sunlight, the blue curve of the Earth below, at the windows the woman, a woman of thirty-three with dark curly hair, in a plain pale blue cotton flight coverall, a headset wire over one ear, each hand on a black hand controller grip, her face in three-quarter view toward the window.

Who
Sally Ride (1951–2012) was a physicist and the first American woman in space. Born on 26 May 1951 in Los Angeles, she studied physics and English at Stanford and earned her doctorate in physics in 1978. In January 1978 NASA selected her as one of six women for the first class recruited specifically for the Space Shuttle. She helped develop the simulations and ground tests for the Canadian robot arm and served as capcom in Houston for STS-2, the first flight to test the arm in space. On 18 June 1983 she flew into space aboard Challenger, and a second time in October 1984. After the Challenger disaster of 1986 she sat on the presidential commission that investigated it, and in 2003 on the board that investigated the loss of Columbia, the only person to serve on both. She left NASA in 1987, taught physics at the University of California, San Diego from 1989 and in 2001 founded Sally Ride Science to draw girls and young women into science. She died on 23 July 2012. Her partner of 27 years was Tam O'Shaughnessy. In 2013 Ride was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The moment
On 5 October 1984 Challenger lifted off fifteen minutes before sunrise on mission STS-41G, with seven people aboard, among them for the first time two women at once. On the very first day of the flight Ride was to deploy the 5,087-pound Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, built to measure how the Earth absorbs the Sun's energy and radiates it back. From the aft flight deck she grappled it with the Canadian robot arm and lifted it out of the payload bay. But when she commanded the solar arrays to unfold, nothing happened. Mission Control suspected frozen hinges. Ride turned the satellite on the end of the arm into direct sunlight and shook it slightly, and the panels deployed. The satellite was released about 2 hours 50 minutes later than planned. Designed for two years, it returned data until 14 October 2005. The picture shows the moment before: both hands on the hand controllers, outside the satellite with its wings still folded in the glare.
The other side
Twice Ride had operated the arm from Challenger's aft flight deck. On 28 January 1986 Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven aboard were killed, among them the teacher Christa McAuliffe, and arm 302 was lost with the orbiter. Ride, who was training for her third flight, then investigated the disaster on the presidential commission. In 2003 she did so again, after Columbia had broken apart in flight.

What the sources leave open: The shaking of the satellite is described only in a NASA retrospective of 2019; the mission report mentions only that the arrays deployed after exposure to the Sun. Which of the five arms flew on this mission is not recorded. No photograph of the satellite on the arm was consulted; its shape in the picture is typified. The face follows the NASA portrait of June 1984, the station an onboard photograph of 1983.

Further reading

Sources