Is it accurate to say that the Space Shuttle smelt awful when ground crews arrived to clean and unload it after a flight?
During the 30 years of the Space Shuttle Program, NASA’s shuttle fleet accomplished numerous firsts and allowed more people to travel into space than ever before.
On April 12, 1981, Columbia roared off Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to start the space shuttle’s mission career. The space shuttle is now known formally as the Space Transportation System (STS). In July 2011, STS-135—the last space mission—was carried out by Atlantis.
Around 2 1/2 million moving parts make up this special vehicle system, according to NASA’s PDF Space Shuttle Era Facts.
The sole component of the shuttle “stack” that travels into orbit is the orbiter vehicle (OV), also known as the space shuttle and made up of the twin solid rocket boosters (SRBs), enormous external fuel tank (ET), and three space shuttle main engines (SSMEs). The boosters are launched into the Atlantic Ocean, caught, and then employed again. The only component of the stack that is not used again is the external tank. Instead, around nine minutes after launch, it re-enters the atmosphere and burns up over the Pacific Ocean. Unlike NASA’s Apollo capsules that came before it, the shuttle does not need parachutes to land when it returns to Earth. Instead, it returns by floating back to a runway on Earth on a set of wings.
But is it true to say that the Space Shuttle smelt really awful when ground employees entered it to clean and unload after a flight?
‘The answer to this question is a ‘YES!’ in all capital letters!’ Explains Dave Mohr, a NASA contractor, on Quora.
‘After landing, the operating capacity of the Environmental Control System was somewhat reduced by virtue of the vehicle no longer being in a vacuum. This reduced the effectiveness of the conditioning (and odor removal) of the cabin air.
‘All ‘fresh food’ and ‘wet trash’ stored in the vehicle (as well as other things) began to get pretty rank after a while.
‘In the cases that I am aware of the vehicle was completely powered down somewhere between 45 min and 1 hour after landing, due to exhaustion of the onboard coolant working fluid (ammonia). [The environmental system was run until ammonia was depleted. It did not interfere with the ability to detect hydrazine, as this detection was done by inserting a probe up into the throat of each thruster. The ammonia boiler would not have interfered with that. Having said that, the vehicle only had something like 1/2 hour of Ammonia remaining after coming to a stop on a typical landing.]’
Mohr concludes;
‘The stagnant air in the crew module was in really bad shape before very long.’
Photo by Carla Thomas, NASA
