Saudi, French Astronauts Lead Shuttle TV Tours

HOUSTON —  The space shuttle Discovery plucked a free-flying observatory from space Saturday, accomplishing the final major operation of a nearly perfect flight, and the craft’s two foreign astronauts rounded out the day by taking their countrymen on televised tours of their living and working areas.

First to speak was Saudi Arabian Prince Sultan ibn Salman al Saud, who told his countrymen that the shuttle is “being guided through stars, just like our Bedouins used to navigate in the desert.”

A devout Muslim and member of a royal family that is also the traditional guardian of the Islamic holy places, the prince described the view from one hatch window and noted: “It only shows God’s might in creating all of this.”

Prince Sultan also told his countrymen: “When I do my prayers, I’m not able to do a complete sujood, because it may cause sickness.” (The sujood is one of four Islamic prayer positions in which forehead and nose are touched to the floor.)

Prince Sultan said his first two days in space “were not easy” because, like half of all astronauts, he had difficulty adjusting to weightlessness. “Some sickness is just like sea sickness,” he said.

Affairs of the stomach, though of a different sort, were also a feature of the tour led by French test pilot Patrick Baudry, 39, who showed off Discovery’s kitchen and the special rations he took into space to supplement the bland fare American astronauts eat.

“Here is the sanitary corner and the galley,” he told the French television audience. “It is equipped with many lockers. I open this locker and what do I find? Lobster, crab meat, dried peaches. . . . Let’s take the lobster, the French-made one,” he said, reaching for a can.

“Open it. After that, you take the lobster toward the galley. You open the oven. Slide it into the oven. While the lobster is cooking, you can prepare something to drink, for instance, lemonade.”

Wine Disallowed

Baudry had attempted unsuccessfully to persuade NASA to allow wine aboard for the mission.

While Frenchmen watched Baudry’s orbital cooking class, American space officials here expressed pleasure at the Discovery crew’s successful completion of the mission’s major tasks.

“I believe we’ve completed 100% of our major objectives,” said Larry Bourgeois, a Mission Control flight director here. That included the launching of three communications satellites, all of which are working properly at this time.

The only significant slip-up during the entire flight came Thursday, when the shuttle was in the wrong position as it passed over a Hawaiian laser tracking station for a “Star Wars” experiment. That experiment was repeated Friday and the results were so satisfactory that the Air Force passed up an opportunity to do the experiment again on Saturday.

The crew was scheduled to hold an early morning press conference today, but the main operations of the flight ended Saturday with the retrieval of Spartan, a compact X-ray observatory that the Discovery dropped off Thursday 220 miles above the Earth.

Black Hole Sought

The self-contained unit, about the size of a telephone booth, recorded data from several instruments in an effort to learn more about the violent activity at the center of clusters of galaxies, and possibly even about the black hole that is believed to be at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. A black hole is an extremely dense object with gravity so powerful it devours nearby stars. Even light cannot escape its gravity, thus making it invisible.

X-rays, however, are released by the violent activity, and Spartan should offer astronomers a significant step forward in their understanding of this phenomenon. Providing, of course, that the instruments worked as planned, something scientists will not know until they analyze their data over the coming months.

The fact that all of the data was collected by recorders on board the Spartan made retrieval extremely important. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had even planned for astronauts to go outside the Discovery to recover the observatory if it had not been possible to grab it with the shuttle’s robotic arm. That, however, turned out to be unnecessary when the recovery operation went off almost exactly as planned.

‘Most Important Thing’

“Getting it back was the most important thing in the whole mission,” said David Shrewsberry, mission manager for the project.

The Discovery, commanded by Daniel C. Brandenstein, 42, will spend most of today getting ready for Monday’s landing at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The landing is set for 6:14 a.m.

Crewmen aboard the shuttle and engineers at the Johnson Space Center here will spend part of that time trying to determine what caused two primary jets in the rear of the shuttle to fail during maneuvers Saturday. The loss of the jets was not considered important, however, in that the redundant design of the shuttle makes it possible for three other jets to take over the role of each of those that failed.

This was the first tri-national flight in the history of the U.S. space program. Along with Brandenstein, Prince Sultan and Baudry, the crew includes John O. Creighton, 42, the pilot, and mission specialists Steven R. Nagel, 38, John M. Fabian, 46, and Shannon W. Lucid, 42.