Abstract
“Madam Robotics Expert” was the name that Shuttle Commander Pamela Melroy gave to Stephanie Wilson, when she was key in saving the STS-120 mission from what could have been a new mini-Apollo 13 tragedy.
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Notes
- 1.
Judy Resnik was the first Jewish American in space. The first Jew in space was Russian cosmonaut Boris Volynov, in 1969.
- 2.
Resnik’s relationship with her mother, who enforced a strict code of conduct, was fraught with tension, and “left some marks she never got over,” according to some of her close friends.
- 3.
In his book, astronaut Mike Mullane reported that Resnik’s first exposure to the space program and the idea of becoming an astronaut appeared that same year, when she first saw an announcement on the Xerox bulletin board. “I had already heard several times of other women say the same thing in various press interviews. Only Shannon Lucid had a different answer. She had a copy of a letter she wrote to Time magazine in 1960, challenging NASA’s men-only astronaut corps. She had dreamed of spaceflight as a child, as I had. Only recently had I matured enough to give Judy, Sally and the others some slack for their lack of lifelong zeal for the astronaut title. If I had been raised in a society that told me I could never be an astronaut because of my gender (or color) would that dream have ever taken root in my soul? Probably not. How, I asked myself, could I hold against this woman if she had not carried the dream from her childhood? I could not. Judy and the other women were teaching me the meaning and consequences of discrimination”. (Mike Mullane, Riding Rockets, pp. 123–24).
- 4.
In the winter of 1985/86, Halley’s Comet was making its closest approach to Earth since 1910. Two weeks earlier, CHAMP had been carried aboard the Columbia mission STS-61C, but the crew had been unsuccessful in observing the comet. The device had failed due to a battery problem, and not a single image of the comet was acquired. CHAMP would have been the primary responsibility for 51L MS Ellison Onizuka, but with the destruction of Challenger and the suspension of the Shuttle program, NASA lost its chance to view and photograph the comet from space.
- 5.
As reported by Mike Mullane in his book, anomalous heat damage had already been recorded in the right-side booster of STS-2 as early as in November 1981 (Mike Mullane, Riding Rockets, pp. 101–102). NASA and Morton Thiokol’s top management were therefore aware of problems with the O-ring seals, but agreed to launch STS-51L against the recommendation of Thiokol’s engineers, who had already alerted management a year before, in a report dated January 1985, referring to several Shuttle launches that had been approved without correcting the hazard (see Russels P., Boisjoly et al. “Roger Boisjoly and the Challenger Disaster: the Ethical Dimension”, in Journal of Business Ethics, Vol.8, no. 4, April 1989, p. 217–230). As the astronaut Walter Cunningham summarized in his book “Complacency and overconfidence, in spite of numerous instances of exhaust gas leakage through a solid rocket booster seal, were factors in the Challenger disaster during launch... There is no room for complacency or overconfidence in human spaceflight. The current attitude… is that good intentions, or lack of malice, or trying their best, are acceptable substitutes for good judgment and satisfactory results. They are not! In manned spaceflight, only results count, not efforts”. Walter Cunningham, “The All-American Boys”, p. 471.
- 6.
As proclaimed by Cheryl Schrader, Dean of the College of Engineering
- 7.
McArthur is married to Robert L. “Bob” Behnken, a fellow member of NASA’s Astronaut Group 18. They have a son, Theodore, born in 2014. Behnken was Chief of the Astronaut Office from 2012 to 2015 and became one of the first two astronauts in space history to launch aboard a commercial orbital spacecraft when he flew on Crew Dragon Endeavour during the historic Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission on May 30, 2020. Behnken stayed aboard the ISS for 62 days. For McArthur’s mission, SpaceX reused both a Falcon rocket and the Endeavour capsule for the first time on this launch. If the mission had gone awry or needed help, Behnken was assigned to the rescue spacecraft.
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Cavallaro, U. (2023). Madam Robotics Expert. In: To The Stars. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19860-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19860-1_4
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