Discovery lifts off at last; woodpecker damage and a mid-count signal flag had held it back
About six weeks before launch, woodpeckers had drilled roughly 71 holes into Discovery's external tank insulation, forcing a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building on June 8 for repairs. On July 13, 1995, Discovery finally lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, holding briefly at T-minus 31 seconds when engineer Tod Gracom flagged a signal fluctuation in the tank's safety receiver. Six hours into the flight, the crew deployed TDRS-G, the last first-generation Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, which was later raised to geostationary orbit by the Inertial Upper Stage. Discovery landed about nine days later, having launched just six days after sister ship Atlantis landed, the fastest turnaround in shuttle program history.
TDRS-G was the sixth operational satellite added to NASA's relay network, a system designed to let Mission Control communicate with orbiting spacecraft without relying solely on scattered ground stations worldwide. STS-70 also marked the first flight run entirely from the newly opened Mission Control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston, a facility that would direct every subsequent shuttle and station mission.
QWhat souvenir did the STS-70 crew carry into orbit?
Tucked among the mission's flown items was a membership patch from the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, the well-known Coney Island group famous for its winter ocean swims. NASA crews have a long tradition of flying small personal or novelty items in their limited personal preference kits, and the patch made the trip from Kennedy Space Center to orbit and back aboard Discovery. It is a small, odd detail buried in the mission manifest, the kind of thing that never makes a highlight reel but shows up in the flight records all the same.
QWhy did only one of Discovery's three main engines matter for engineers watching this launch?
STS-70 flew with a mismatched set of engines on purpose. The new Block I engine, serial number 2036, sat in the number one position, featuring a redesigned high-pressure liquid oxygen turbopump, a two-duct powerhead, a baffleless main injector, and a single-coil heat exchanger. The other two engines were the older Phase II design already in service. Flying one new engine alongside two proven ones let engineers gather real flight data on the redesign without betting the entire mission on unproven hardware in all three positions.
QHow close did NASA cut it between Atlantis landing and Discovery launching?
Six days. Atlantis landed, and less than a week later Discovery was sitting on the pad ready to fly its own mission, the fastest turnaround between two shuttle flights in the program's history. Processing a returned orbiter for the next flight normally took weeks, involving inspections, payload swaps, and fuel system checks. That six-day gap remains recorded as the fastest turnaround between flights in the history of the shuttle program.
