What happens when an astronaut in orbit says

  

A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade as an American scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had come crashing down around him.

Wang was the principal investigator of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. He had largely built the experiment, and he then effectively won a lottery ticket when NASA selected him to fly on the 17th flight of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-51-B mission. Wang, along with six other crew members, launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1985.

On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.

After initially being told no, Wang pressed a bit further. "Listen, I know my system very well," he said. "Give me a shot." Still, the flight controllers demurred. Wang grew desperate. So he said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission.

"Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back," Wang said.

Exactly what happened after that may never be known. But thanks to new reporting, we may finally have some answers. And though this is an old story, it still reverberates today, four decades on, with lasting consequences into the era of commercial spaceflight as more and more people fly into orbit.

Space Shuttle missions fulfilled various tasks in the vehicle's early years, such as deploying satellites, but one of its primary functions was conducting research in microgravity. Working with the European Space Agency, NASA developed and flew a pressurized module called Spacelab on some missions for this purpose.

The STS-51-B mission was the second time this Spacelab module flew, and it carried 15 different experiments ranging from astrophysics to the behavior of fluids in microgravity. Due to the nature of these specialized science experiments, NASA had started to fly "payload specialists" who were not designated to operate the Shuttle but rather complete the experiments on board.

With this mission, flying on board Challenger, the two highest priority experiments concerned materials science and fluid mechanics. Accordingly, the two payload specialists—Lodewijk van den Berg, a Dutch-born American chemical engineer, and Taylor Gun-Jin Wang, a Chinese-born American physicist—were chosen because of their expertise in these areas.

Wang was born in Shanghai in 1940 but moved to the United States in 1963 to study at the University of California, Los Angeles. He later earned a doctorate in low-temperature superfluid physics from UCLA and joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1972. He became a US citizen three years later. His research involved the behavior of droplets and other sphere-like objects in zero gravity, and he eventually flew on NASA's zero-g flights. He developed the "Drop Dynamics Module" experiment to take this work to the next level in space.

Space Shuttle Challenger launched for its weeklong mission on April 29, 1985. Because there was so much research to conduct inside Spacelab, the crew was broken into two groups, each operating a 12-hour shift. Wang was on the "Gold" team, led by the mission's commander, Robert Overmyer, who was making his second and final flight. Mission specialists Don Lind and William Thornton joined him on the Gold team. Challenger's pilot, Fred Gregory, led the "Silver" team along with mission specialist Norm Thagard and van den Berg.

Wang went to operate the Drop Dynamics Module on the second day, when the experiment failed. He later described his feelings at this moment for a Smithsonian book published in 2002 titled Space Shuttle, which featured lots of photos and snippets of interviews with astronauts from the first 20 years of the Shuttle program. Although Wang's remarks in this book comprise only a few hundred words, they are by far his most extended public remarks on the incident."When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation."

It was at this point that Wang became severely depressed and started to haggle with flight controllers on the ground, making his comment about "not going back."

So what happened after that?

Unfortunately, since this mission flew four decades ago, a majority of the crew members have passed. The commander and leader of the Gold team, Overmyer, died in 1996. The other members of the Gold team, Thornton and Lind, died in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Only Wang, 83, remains alive. Ars tried to reach Wang in multiple ways to describe the incident, but all were unsuccessful.

Gregory, 83, did speak with Ars about it. After piloting the Shuttle in 1985, Gregory became the first African-American to command a spaceflight in 1989. Later, Gregory served as the deputy administrator and briefly administrator of NASA. He wanted me to know that Wang had been a "fantastic" person and a good crew member.

As a member of the Silver team, Gregory said he was asleep when Wang tried and failed to operate his experiment. However, he does have one distinct memory from the flight 39 years ago.

“I remember waking up at the beginning of a shift and seeing duct tape on the hatch," Gregory told Ars. "I did not know what the origin of it was, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. I may have, but I don’t recall asking Overmyer about it.”

There were three flight directors during Challenger's time in orbit, each working an eight-hour shift. Only one of them, Bill Reeves, is still alive. In email correspondence, Reeves told me that he was not on console during the time that Wang grew deeply despondent.

"Overmyer told me about this after the flight in a personal conversation," Reeves said. "All he said was how upset Wang was. Bob said he sat up most of the night trying to console Wang."