January 1990

By Vincent Del Giudice

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (UPI) — Columbia’s five astronauts launched a Navy communications station like a giant Frisbee Wednesday and fired their ship’s rockets to zero in on a dying 11-ton science satellite for a dramatic rescue in space Friday.

Working from Columbia’s high-tech cockpit, rookie astronaut David Low released the last in a series of five Syncom IV satellites from its cradle in the shuttle’s payload bay at 8:19 a.m. EST as the ship sailed over the Atlantic Ocean east of Africa.

‘And Houston, we had a good deploy,’ Low, 33, radioed mission control in Houston as the 15,000-pound drum-shaped satellite rolled away, the first major objective of the 10-day flight, America’s 33rd space shuttle mission.

Forty-five minutes later, Syncom’s on-board solid-fuel rocket motor fired for 61 seconds, boosting it toward a final orbit 22,300 miles above the equator where it will relay voice and data communications for the Pentagon.

‘Syncom is headed toward a successful flight,’ the mission’s chief flight director, Granvil Pennington, said at a news conference. ‘So once again we’ve got them off to a good start.’

Besides conducting experiments and trying to fix a balky facsimile machine, the astronauts pressed on with their chase of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, a 12-sided satellite as big as a school bus that otherwise would plunge back into the atmosphere around March 9 and break apart.

Columbia was trailing LDEF by about 575 miles Wednesday night with the shuttle racing along in a slightly elliptical orbit allowing it to catch up with the falling science probe at 9:48 EST a.m. Friday, according to NASA’s rapidly changing estimates.