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Don Noah was the lead in charge of all shuttle integration for STS-74, including the Shuttle-Mir docking module that would reside on Mir for future shuttles dockings. In his Oral History, he described the challenges of the docking module:
"From the element itself, it's fairly simple. I mean, it's a big tube that's pressurized. It has a fairly complex mechanism on each end. The challenge on this was not so much the complexity. I mean, NASA's flown payloads or integrated payloads that had more complex interfaces with the orbiter and interplay with the orbiter than this did.
"The challenge on this was doing it in no more than a short period of time. Even if it had been an American company, no matter how simple it was, doing something that large, and it was complex, it had a lot of interfaces, in the short time frame is a big challenge. But then doing it with another country with a totally different language and a totally different culture in how they design and build hardware was the biggest challenge. . . A lot of people worked real hard to overcome those obstacles to make the hardware work as well as it did."
After STS-74, Noah was responsible for the integration analysis for all payloads that were included on shuttle missions.
He was also the logistics manager on STS-71. As logistics manager, Noah was responsible for writing the hardware requirements and developing interface control documents for the Russian hardware flown on the shuttle to Mir for transfer, and for Mir hardware then returned on the shuttle.
U.S. Mir Residents | Astronauts | Cosmonauts | Teams | Oral Histories | Shuttle-Mir Stories
Curator:
Kim Dismukes
Responsible NASA Official: John Ira Petty