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VD.National Space Transportation System (NSTS) Mission Operations

Introduction

   This report was compiled by a review of working group briefs to the Presidential Commission Panel on Mission Planning and Operations and draft reports in the areas of program base, procedure state, range safety, weather, NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) landing considerations, and crew escape systems. The Space Transportation System (STS) 51-L Flight Operations Team Summary Report of February 18, 1986, (app. G) was also used as a source of information for this report.

1. Flight Operations Capability

   The operations capability demonstrated to date, as shown in table 1, is satisfactory with the thrust of first time activities occurring in the 1983-84 timeframe. The demonstrated capability was scheduled to be further expanded in 1986 with two Centaur flights and the first launch from the Western Test Range (WTR).

2. Transitioning to an Operational System

   The conclusions drawn in this section are based on an overall assessment of the data contained in multiple areas of this report. The original STS Operations Baseline Operations Plan (BOP) of November 20, 1978, defined required capabilities for the STS system before it was designed. It defined what the meaning of an operational system was at that time. This operational system would fly 6 flights the first year, 15 the second, 24 the third, and by the sixth year a total of 60 flights. To meet this flight rate, turnaround was to be completed in 14 days. The vision of the operational Space Shuttle was clearly much larger than the resource base eventually established to create the real capability.

   As the Space Shuttle system was developed, with numerous changes and compromises from the original baseline, a comprehensive set of requirements was developed to ensure the success of a Space Shuttle mission. What evolved from the process in 1981 was a system where the turnaround, flight planning, flight control, and flight training were accomplished with extreme care applied to every detail by a large number of experts in all areas. This process checked and rechecked everything to ensure its accuracy and was both labor and time intensive. It was slow, but was both appropriate and necessary for a new system still in the developmental phase. After the first series of flights, the system had developed basic plans and templates to accomplish required flight support functions. The challenge was to streamline these so that they could be accomplished more quickly.

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