Shuttle Success Hailed at Halfway Point

HOUSTON —  The space shuttle Challenger’s astronauts passed the halfway mark Sunday in their West German-sponsored weeklong voyage for science, and experts said the mission’s success rate was “bigger than we expected.”

West German astronaut and scientist Ernst Messerschmid said crew members were working so hard on the 76 experiments in the European-built Spacelab module that sometimes they forgot where they were.

“The only pity is you’re curving over the Earth and sometimes you forget you are in space because of all of the experiments,” he told the science control center near Munich, West Germany. “Nonetheless, you cycle back and forth between science and the feeling of being out (in orbit).”

Corrected Problems

Officials said the eight-member crew, the largest ever, had corrected problems with processing furnaces and with an atomic clock and was on schedule.

“The success rate of the experiments is bigger than we expected, despite some problems,” Hamsulrich Steimle, director of the West German science center, said.

Challenger was scheduled to land at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Wednesday after 7 days and 39 minutes in space.

Some West German scientists had expressed hope that the mission could be extended, but officials at the Johnson Space Center here, control center for Challenger’s flight operations, said that not enough hydrogen was on board for an additional day in orbit. Hydrogen is combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity for the spacecraft.

The science control center said the astronauts had completed all planned experiments in materials processing, biology, fluid physics, navigation and human adaptation to weightlessness.

140 Monitor Studies

Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center is managing operations of the shuttle, but the science experiments are being controlled by the West German center, where 140 scientists are monitoring the studies. This marks the first time that a shuttle cargo has been controlled by another country.

Messerschmid gave a report about a fruit fly that had escaped earlier from a colony that was carried into orbit. He said it was buzzing around the weightless laboratory.

“They don’t fly,” he said of the insect. “They just float like we do.”

The fly’s antics earlier were watched on live television with great amusement at the science control center.

“We found that the clever and smart Willie had escaped from prison and is now in freedom,” an official said at a news conference at the West German center.

Flight director Larry Bourgeois in Houston was asked by a West German reporter if any attempt would be made to retrieve the fly “dead or alive” when the shuttle lands. “We haven’t resolved that,” Bourgeois replied.