10 Space Walker

The goal of the program is to provide a commercial business that utilizes the resource of space.

Charlie Walker

The maiden flight of Discovery carried the third payload specialist, Charles David Walker, into orbit on 30 August 1984. Unlike the Spacelab 1 mission, the prime focus of STS-41D was not strictly science. Three satellites were deployed, and a solar array was tested by the NASA astronauts. Walker, from Bedford, Indiana, brought the same enthusiasm for scientific research that Byron Lichtenberg and Ulf Merbold championed on STS-9 but perhaps for different motives. Walker was the first industrial payload specialist and operated a continuous flow electrophoresis (CFES, pronounced “see-fess”) device on this mission, which created a product that held great promise to serve the needs of millions of people and for pharmaceutical companies to reap huge earnings.

Walker, an engineer employed by McDonnell Douglas, was not chosen in the same manner as the Spacelab payload specialists. Instead, he finagled a ride on Discovery via a change in NASA policy. According to the press kit, the policy allowed “major Space Shuttle customers to have one of their own people onboard to operate their payloads.” Previously, a customer was required to pay for at least half a mission to be awarded the opportunity to place one of their own crewmen on the shuttle, but NASA eased the requirements to include any company that had a significant cargo on board.

Walker, born on 29 August 1948, took his bachelor of science degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue University in 1971. He held a variety of jobs—a civil engineering technician, land acquisition specialist, and U.S. Forest Service firefighter—prior to becoming a design engineer with the Bendix Aerospace Company. Following a stint with the Naval Sea Systems Command, he was employed in 1977 by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where he was assigned to test components of the shuttle OMS pods. Later, he moved to the space manufacturing group at McDonnell, which was investigating continuous flow electrophoresis, a purification process for biological cells and proteins. Walker eventually changed the group’s name to Electrophoresis Operations in Space, which went by its acronym, EOS. Walker recalled thinking, “We need a name. I mean, electrophoresis, nobody can even spell it, much less pronounce it, so we’ve got to have something else that we can call this thing.” He was the chief test engineer and payload specialist for the EOS project from 1979 to 1986.

Hank Hartsfield commanded this twelfth flight of a space shuttle with Michael Coats as his pilot. Mike Mullane, Steven Hawley, and Judy Resnik were mission specialists. Only Hartsfield had previously flown into space, as pilot on STS-4. McDonnell Douglas did not provide a backup to Walker for the STS-41D flight. Therefore, Resnik was assigned as Walker’s backup, although Hartsfield had also been trained to operate the CFES equipment. According to Walker in February 2017, there were “limited knowledgeable personnel to choose from” at McDonnell Douglas. Additionally, the added complication to train another payload specialist played a role in not selecting a company backup. Ultimately, Walker was confident that the NASA “crew member backups were accepted by company management as able to provide the limited, basic payload functions on orbit if necessary.”

The crew of STS-41D was known as the Zoo Crew, and each astronaut was given a nickname. For instance, Mullane was Tarzan, Hawley was Cheetah, and Resnik was Jane. The names were decided by the crew and chosen because of something unique and personal. The NASA crew didn’t really know Walker very well, so they called him “CFES Charlie.” With all due respect to Walker, that moniker sounds like an outcast carrying an infectious disease, accentuating the belief of many NASA astronauts that the payload specialists were different. Names aside, Walker would prove himself in orbit and earn the respect of the NASA astronauts.

The CFES device was the outcome of years of planning to take advantage of the shuttle program’s capability for research in microgravity. Simple and smaller electrophoresis experiments had been carried out with success on the Apollo 14 and Apollo 16 missions to the moon and on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. McDonnell Douglas Astronautics and the materials lab at MSFC had worked together since 1975 to determine what research opportunities might exist in the microgravity environment. They looked at a variety of materials that could be “tested or produced in space” and then returned to Earth for the benefit of humankind and to turn a profit. They determined that pharmaceuticals were an area likely to fill this bill, and researchers concluded that electrophoresis held the greatest promise.

“Electrophoresis is simply a purification technique wherein a liquefied substance is purified using an electric field,” Walker explained during a premission press conference. “Electrophoresis, a big Greek word which is really applied to a pretty basic process as it’s been used in laboratories around the world for the past hundred years, in which a compound like a gel or a liquid that has a[n] electrical conductive nature to it.” For example, he explained that “blood is a complex mixture of proteins and cells, and every protein molecule has a resident electrical charge to it—very small, but it’s different from every other chemical type of protein or a cellular body within that mixture.” When an electric field is applied to fluids, the proteins “all move as a group toward the attracting electrical pole, and they’ll move at different rates, and so if you expose that sample to an electric field for a period of time, when you shut the field off, you’ll have groups of compounds all separated from one another,” culminating in a purified product.

Walker would be using the same basic equipment that had already purified small amounts of the substance on four previous shuttle missions, and those four flights met 100 percent of the flight objectives. He speculated that through the process of electrophoresis, selected materials could be purified “hundreds of times more efficiently” in microgravity than on Earth.

For the STS-41D mission, the CFES equipment was modified to produce large enough quantities of a biological substance—a hormone—that Walker said could be used “to complete a testing program in the laboratory, animal testing and eventually clinical testing toward Food and Drug Administration approval to market materials which we hope to obtain beginning in 1987 from a large-scale automated system which will fly on the space shuttle in the cargo bay. So this flight is a very important step to us in seeing this program advance toward a commercial goal.”

NASA was not staffed to pursue electrophoresis, which meant that McDonnell Douglas was left to progress the technology. According to Walker, they were confident that if all went as planned, they would have a product that could be marketed—with “purities of four and five times what could be done in the best processes here on Earth.” They could potentially increase the amount of product by up to five hundred times. If successful, NASA would be able to tout their role in facilitating a medical breakthrough for the benefit of humankind; plus, they’d reap precious funding from McDonnell Douglas for ferrying their equipment into space and then back home again. McDonnell Douglas would turn a profit.

Sue Butler, representing Time magazine, asked Walker during a May 1984 preflight press conference if he could tell her the kinds of disorders that could be treated if his research were successful. Walker responded with a simple “No.” Fielding a question by Harry Rosenthal with the Associated Press, Walker enlightened everyone by saying, “We can’t or won’t say at this point. The material we are working on falls back directly upon that word ‘commercial.’ The pharmaceutical industry is a very competitive industry, and as in any competitive business, you don’t really want to let your competitors know what it is you’re working on until the last possible moment.”

Walker was happy to explain in 2005; the hormone they were evaluating was erythropoietin, which is produced in the adrenal glands of the kidneys. Human bone marrow uses the hormone to produce red blood cells, and “without this hormone, the disease condition known as anemia develops . . . a disorder which affects tens of millions of people on a chronic basis in this country.”

The Ortho Pharmaceutical Company of the Johnson & Johnson companies was very interested in the opportunity, and in 1977 an arrangement was signed in which they and McDonnell Douglas would agree to develop the laboratory equipment on the ground to verify in a one-g environment this CFES process for pharmaceuticals purification. Johnson & Johnson happily invested their own money in what they believed to be a sound business venture, estimating in 1980 that there was a potential market of a billion dollars per year for a pure form of the hormone. It was at this time that Walker hired on with McDonnell Douglas.

Walker remembered years later that McDonnell Douglas was excited about the prospect of the shuttle being used to apply the process in space and invested significant capital in the venture, about $20 million from 1978 to 1986. Discussions were held with NASA for the test project, leading to McDonnell Douglas and NASA signing a joint endeavor agreement in 1980 with a quid pro quo arrangement whereby there would be no exchange of money.

The joint endeavor agreement provided for NASA to investigate sample concentration on STS-4 and to process two samples on STS-6 flown in April 1982. Additional samples were flown on STS-7 and STS-8 in 1983, building on previous results. Walker was assigned to train the astronauts on those missions to operate the experiment, notably working closely with Hartsfield on the STS-4 mission.

Walker and his CFES equipment were originally planned to fly on Spacelab 3, but that mission soon fell behind its launch schedule. McDonnell Douglas made it clear to Glynn Lunney, NASA’s manager of the Shuttle Payload Integration and Development Program, that they could not tolerate continued delays. Lunney was sensitive to their problem and suggested that instead of flying the CFES on Spacelab, they might be able to fit the apparatus into the orbiter middeck on an earlier flight. As Walker recalled, “Glynn was very innovative in his idea. He knew the design of the systems and areas within the space shuttle orbiter very well, and his thinking was, ‘There’s a galley on the port side in the middeck of the crew compartment of the orbiter. That thing is about the same size as these electrophoresis program folks are telling me they’re going to need to fly. Why don’t we on a few flights . . . take the galley out, put in this electrophoresis materials processing device.’ So it was Glynn Lunney that came up with the concept.”

This innovative idea allowed the next CFES to be flown eight months earlier than would have been possible had they waited to fly it on Spacelab 3. Unfortunately, that left the crew without a galley to prepare their food; instead, they carried portable food warmers that seemed to work just fine.

But what Walker really wanted to do was operate the CFES equipment in orbit himself, a coup eventually realized from years of calculatedly planning a ride into space. About the same time he was seeking employment with McDonnell Douglas, Walker put in his application for NASA astronaut group 8, but he wasn’t selected. “There was just the talk of maybe a dedicated scientist payload specialist that would be selected by peer groups of the researchers,” but he realized, “I obviously don’t work for a university. I’m not a PhD in any one specialty, so maybe the industrial part; maybe the private-sector researcher-engineer” might just provide a path to flying in space. So when Walker began interviewing with aerospace companies in 1977, he was “looking for that project that might actually produce in their design and development something that NASA would be willing to fly, in hopes that it might lead to the need for a researcher to fly with it.” Electrophoresis fit the bill.

Walker didn’t beat around the bush concerning his wish to work on an industrial project that could potentially get him a ride on the shuttle. While interviewing for a job, he responded to questions about career aspirations with his wish list: “technical work, design development for a few years, opportunity to move into management, and oh, by the way . . . if anything I’m working on has the opportunity to fly into space, I’d like the opportunity to approach NASA to go fly with it.” Years later he marveled at his audacity: “Why didn’t you kick me out the door?”

According to Walker the joint endeavor agreement held language that allowed, “at the discretion of NASA management in concurrence with McDonnell Douglas management, to fly a payload specialist if needed.” The cost associated with the payload specialist on board as well as training costs was to be covered by McDonnell Douglas. This fee was expected to be marginal, because the cost to add one additional astronaut was minimal—additional food, water, oxygen, and other basic necessities. Plus, NASA already had trainers at JSC.

On the way to a meeting to update Glynn Lunney on the CFES results to date, Jim Rose of McDonnell Douglas indicated to Walker that if Lunney liked the results, he was going to petition for a payload specialist opportunity for Walker. Walker remembered that Rose asked him if he was “okay with that.” Surely Rose knew what Walker’s response would be. Walker had to be smiling inside; his plan was coming along nicely. Lunney liked the results, and according to Walker, Rose informed Lunney that they would learn more if they were able to fly their own payload specialist. Walker recalled, “Glynn chewed on his cigar a little bit and said something like, ‘Well, we’ve been wanting to move into this payload specialist thing, so if you’ve got somebody that is qualified, can meet all the astronaut selection criteria, put in the application. We’ll run it up individually as a special case, up through Headquarters, and it will obviously be Headquarters that will make the final determination. . . . Do you have somebody in mind?’” The rest is history. Walker would live his dream of flying into space!

The mission-independent training that Walker received began around June 1983, consisting of around 130 hours stretched over about eight months intended to familiarize him with orbiter and space shuttle systems. According to Walker, most of it focused on “how to live in a spaceflight environment: hygiene, food preparation, stowage, just how to live and work in zero-g.” He also believed that much of the training was “just to allow me to work into this fantastic crew that I’m flying with. And they’ll probably tell you that’s probably been the hardest part of the whole training activity.”

Although Walker didn’t get the emergency water or survival training, he did “go through all the systems, orbiter systems, subsystems, the spacecraft systems training, both briefings as well as stand-alone simulator training, so I knew what systems did, like the electrical systems, like the control panels that controlled the electrical systems on board, environmental systems. I knew the computer interfaces.”

Walker admitted, “I was there as a working passenger. I wasn’t a full-fledged crew member.” He also had to contend with some of the NASA astronauts who made it abundantly clear to him that he was an outsider. Astronauts are renowned for having a little fun at the expense of others, and a new payload specialist was ripe for picking. Hartsfield informed Walker that one of his assignments on STS-41D would be to prepare the meals for everyone. He was pulling Walker’s chain, but Walker didn’t pick up on the joke right away. Initially he thought that Hartsfield was serious, but he took it all in stride: “There was no belligerence, really, expressed openly, and no offense on my part taken.”

Walker also trained Resnik to be his backup for the CFES project. “If I should have any problems in the flight, I know that she will be amply able to perform the functions that I would be performing in that eventuality,” he said at the time. “And as a matter of fact, because of his extreme interest, Hank is, I think, equally capable.”

Walker did a lot of classroom mission-dependent training, read the available training materials, and received one-on-one training by an instructor. Fortunately, Walker had access to a research payload simulator at the cape, a ground-based model of the equipment, and design and development personnel. Much of the mission-dependent preparation to operate the CFES equipment was done in St. Louis at the McDonnell Douglas facility, which Resnik often visited while being trained as Walker’s backup.

Walker flew thirty to forty zero-g parabolas for the STS-41D flight in the KC-135 vomit comet and garnered a couple of backseat rides in the T-38 jet. With all the training costs plus the additional dollars for one more crewman on the shuttle, the approximate cost to cover Walker on this mission was a paltry $72,000—a pretty good deal for McDonnell Douglas.

Discovery was poised to make its first flight on 25 June 1984, but the launch was scrubbed due to technical problems and rescheduled for the next day. The next launch attempt, on 26 June, came ever so close to giving Walker his first ride into space, but again the stars were not aligned. Main shuttle engines 2 and 3 had already come to life, guzzling liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen from the external fuel tank. The crew could feel the tremendous vibration caused by the powerful engines, each generating over four hundred thousand pounds of thrust at launch. Amid the anticipation of finally getting off the pad, a master caution alarm sounded, and the vibration ceased. Engine number 1 had failed to ignite, causing the other two engines to shut down in a matter of seconds. It only took about thirty seconds for the launch director to confirm that the vehicle was safe. If a persnickety main shuttle engine was not enough to give the crew pause—frighten the hell out of them—there was still cause for concern. Had the SRBs been disabled, or were they going to suddenly light and tear the whole shuttle apart? Fortunately, the safeguards built into the shuttle had worked, and those giant boosters, each containing over a million pounds of explosive propellant, had been rendered impotent. If necessary the crew could now egress, cross over the service arm, and escape via the baskets located on the other side of the gantry. Fortunately, the wisdom of Hartsfield prevailed, and he told the crew to “sit sight,” according to Walker.

The commander’s decision to remain with Discovery proved to be one of the best decisions of the day. Walker explained, “The hydrogen and oxygen propellant that had gone unignited through the engines and out into the flame trench had been ignited by the one engine, and the fire of that engine-ignited propellant had ignited the rest of that, and there was literally a fire burning up and around the outside of the shuttle.” Had the crew egressed from the shuttle and taken the route to the escape baskets, Walker said it likely would have been a bad day for them, “because it was a hydrogen fire, and hydrogen fire is invisible to the eye. It’s very visible in the ultraviolet, but there weren’t any ultraviolet fire sensors on the pad at that time. Needless to say, there have been on every launch since that time.”

Discovery was rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the faulty engine was replaced. The next launch attempt was on 29 August 1984 but again was scrubbed nine minutes before the scheduled launch due to a master events controller malfunction. The following day, Discovery finally made its majestic climb toward the heavens. Walker remembers the launch quite vividly. At T minus zero, “the vibration has started from those liquid-fuel engines firing.” Then, once the solid rockets light, Walker recalls,

Suddenly this roar is exaggerated by ten times. I see the tower out there suddenly turn from a white gray in sunlight to—it looks like it’s on fire. There’s a golden blaze around it as the illumination from the solid rocket boosters flares out there, and it’s twice as bright as the sun, and it’s yellowish, golden yellowish, and just as suddenly, instead of moving left and right, now the tower starts dropping away. I look out that porthole, and I could see the steel tower structure. It looked like the tower was moving. I’m sitting still. Whoa, boy, that is something to see, and that’s the way it feels, although you’re pushed back into your seat immediately with one and a half times the force of gravity.

Comparing liftoff to “driving a pickup truck with stiff shocks down a gravel country road at fifty miles an hour,” he continued, “So there’s this tremendous sensation of I’m not going up; the world is falling away from me out there, and now the world is spinning as the shuttle goes into its roll to the correct azimuth on flight path. And the window—I’m watching the tower structure go away. I’m watching central Florida and the VAB go by, and now the roll stops after a few seconds, and my window is looking south, and I can look down the Florida beaches to the south.”

Just a few seconds later, he expounded, “the world is falling farther and farther beneath me, and within a few minutes I can see down the coast, and I can imagine I can even see the curve of the Florida coast around toward the keys. And I’m arcing up, and now it’s disappearing out of sight. There’s nothing but blue sky out there.” Walker continued to pull superlatives from his engineering brain to describe what he was seeing, hearing, and feeling. He sounded more poet than engineer as he relived the launch experience, recalling that “a deep basal roar amplified through the vehicle. [It] sounds like a waterfall of air moving by the ship . . . the blackness starts eating the blue sky.”

Walker readily shared in his 2005 NASA Oral History interview what his first few moments were like in the weightless environment. Although he intentionally consumed very little at breakfast, “about a minute after the engines stopped and we went weightless, my little bit of breakfast showed itself again. I could tell it was coming, so I had a bag in place. . . . It really didn’t embarrass me too much or upset the rest of the crew too much, because I caught it.” Walker experienced flu-like symptoms and felt poorly for about three days, remembering that “space adaptation syndrome had me by the neck, and the symptoms were occasional nausea and what the docs call episodic vomiting, and then once I threw something up, I felt fine again.” Once in orbit, Walker was ready to vacate the confines of the middeck and take in the view from the best overlook on the shuttle—the flight deck. Someone asked, “You sure you feel okay?” Walker responded, “Ah, I’m feeling good enough. Let me go up and take a look.” It was good enough for them. “Okay, okay . . . Clear the flight deck. Walker’s coming up.”

The sightseeing was fun, but they were in orbit to do work. Walker’s CFES work was not the only game in town on this mission. The crew deployed three satellites: the Leasat 2 (Syncom IV-2) for Hughes Communications Services, the SBS-4 for Satellite Business Systems, and the Telstar 3 for American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). A 102-foot-tall, 13-foot-wide solar wing was also carried in the payload bay. It was “the first-time demonstration of large deployable solar power structures for future space stations.” The wing was successfully extended to its full size and retracted several times by the mission specialists. There were also a handful of additional experiments on board, as well as an IMAX camera.

Perhaps it was the jolting launch or the weightless environment, but the CFES apparatus experienced some problems once Walker checked it out during the evening of 30 August. As flight director Randy Stone explained at the 31 August change-of-shift briefing, “Charlie performed an in-flight maintenance procedure which actually replaced [a component of] the device with a spare one . . . and the CFES started its activation on time even though we had to do that maintenance on it.” It’s likely that either Resnik or Hartsfield could have made the repair, but having the expert on board was a clear advantage.

Walker added, “In addition, there were some small anomalies in transducers, which are used to fine-tune the electrophoresis process. I also had indication that there was probably a programming [error] in terms of gain in the system; it was just that the software was not fine-tuned for operation in the spaceflight environment. But I think all of these things reflect back to my reason for being there.” These adjustments came at a cost, as about 15 percent of the material was not processed. It’s doubtful that Resnik or Hartsfield, as talented as they were, could have made these types of observations and modifications.

Walker ran the CFES continuously during the flight on days 2 through 5 and babysat it around the clock. During the 3 September change-of-shift briefing, Malcolm McConnell from Reader’s Digest asked Stone about Walker’s “watchkeeping on the CFES.” Stone responded, “Charlie is sleeping with an earphone, so when he hears CFES alarms, it doesn’t wake up the other crewmen. So, he is basically keeping a twenty-four-hour watch, but he’s sleeping the normal sleep cycle. He did wake up last night with that one alarm.” NASA is great at putting a positive spin on spaceflight. The device Walker had plugged into his ear while he slept allowed him to hear alarms from the CFES device, which would awaken him—all while orbiting Earth at over seventeen thousand miles per hour in a weightless environment—but he still maintained a normal sleep pattern.

Walker’s dream flight was quickly coming to an end, and in spite of some minor contamination problems with his equipment, he proudly boasted, “The accomplishments, I think, were as we expected in flight for my research.”

Discovery touched down at Edwards Air Force Base on 5 September 1984, rolling to a halt on runway 17. Later, James Fisher with the Orlando Sentinel asked Walker if he had experienced any surprises on orbit. Walker pondered, “Well, I think what I didn’t expect was what is only natural. That is the detail. The actual experience of zero-g, of trying to work and adapt to everyday functions in zero-g. You talk about it; you have people give you advice on the ground. You practice procedures that are proven. But, until you do it, there is nothing like that experience. And so, just actually going and doing it and experiencing the entire situation.”

Veteran space journalist Lynn Sherr posed a question to mission commander Hank Hartsfield at the preflight press conference: “Has there been any difference because there is someone flying who is for the first time not a NASA person?” Actually, Walker was not the first non-NASA person to fly on the shuttle; Lichtenberg and Merbold were the first, on STS-9. But Walker was the first private-sector and non-Spacelab payload specialist. Hartsfield made his position clear: “We haven’t had a problem. I think in Charlie’s case, since I’ve known Charlie since STS-4 and worked with the CFES at that time, he’s no stranger. And most of the rest of the crew knew him because he had spent a good bit of time at Houston with the other crews that flew the CFES, so I think in this case it’s been really easy for Charlie to fit right in with us.” Postflight, Hartsfield maintained his stance that Walker was a valuable crew member.

Pilot Michael Coats had nothing but superlatives to describe Walker’s contributions to the flight:

Well, Charlie worked really hard. We had no problem at all adopting Charlie, including him in the crew. . . . When we got up on orbit, he had lots of problems with the machine. . . . From the time he woke up until he went to sleep, [he] was downstairs working on that machine. We joked; I don’t think he got upstairs to look out twice the whole mission, just working his tail off. We had an awful lot of respect for Charlie and how hard he worked. He wanted that thing to work. . . . He was just really easy to get along with. Still is. Nice guy. We stay in touch.

Walker would fly into space twice more with his CFES apparatus on STS-51D and STS-61B, working hard to fine-tune the CFES procedures and equipment so that McDonnell Douglas, Johnson & Johnson, and a handful of other pharmaceutical companies could provide a product that might one day help millions of people suffering from anemia. And turn a profit. And allow Walker what he started out to accomplish—flying into outer space on the shuttle!