Sherwood C. Spring

Sherwood C. Spring: The Man Who Built in Orbit

In late November 1985, a US Army colonel floated out of the payload bay of the shuttle Atlantis and began assembling a truss out of aluminium tubes and joints, by hand, in a vacuum, at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Nobody had built a structure in space before. The question NASA needed answered was blunt and unglamorous: could an astronaut in a pressurised suit, wearing gloves that fight every finger movement, actually put a large thing together in orbit — or would the Space Station remain a drawing? Woody Spring spent more than twelve hours over two spacewalks finding out.

Harmony, Rhode Island

Sherwood Clark Spring was born on 3 September 1944 in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up regarding Harmony, Rhode Island, as home. He graduated from Ponaganset High School in North Scituate in 1963, reaching Life Scout rank in the Boy Scouts along the way. From there he went to West Point, taking a bachelor's degree in general engineering in 1967 — a commission and a degree that placed him, at twenty-three, on a direct path to Vietnam.

Two Tours

He served two of them. The first, from 1968 to 1969, was with the 101st Airborne Division. The second, in 1970 and 1971, he flew as a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division. The awards accumulated in those years — the Distinguished Flying Cross, two Bronze Stars, nine Air Medals, the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm — are the ones that most reliably get skipped when an astronaut biography is summarised, and they describe a very different kind of flying from the sort that made him famous.

Afterwards came fixed-wing training and a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona in 1974, then the US Naval Test Pilot School in 1976 and four years as an experimental test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. He would eventually log more than 3,500 hours of flight time across twenty-five types of military and civilian aircraft, over 1,500 of those hours in jets.

EASE and ACCESS

NASA selected Spring as an astronaut candidate in May 1980. His flight came five years later: STS-61-B, aboard Atlantis, launching 26 November 1985 and landing on 3 December, a mission of six days, twenty-one hours and four minutes. It deployed three communications satellites — MORELOS-B for Mexico, AUSSAT-2 for Australia, and SATCOM KU-2 — which was the paying work. The experiment that mattered historically was the other thing.

EASE and ACCESS were two structural assembly experiments, and their full names give away exactly how experimental the whole business was: Experimental Assembly of Structures in Extravehicular Activity, and Assembly Concept for Construction of Erectable Space Structure. Spring and Jerry Ross took them into the payload bay and built. Both were designed to test the assembly of erectable structures in orbit, to evaluate frameworks for larger orbital construction, and — in NASA's careful phrasing — to improve space construction productivity. Which is to say: to find out how long it takes a person in a suit to put a large object together, and what goes wrong while they do it.

The finding was the point: large structures could be assembled in orbit by human beings, and the techniques could be taught. Every subsequent assumption about building the International Space Station rests on data gathered in those two spacewalks.

Spring logged 165 hours in space across the single mission, and more than twelve of them outside.

After the Payload Bay

Then Challenger. In the aftermath, Spring led the Astronaut Office's EVA programme until 1988, working on the spacewalking capability the agency would need whenever it flew again. He retired from NASA in August 1988 and moved to direct the Army Space Program Office in Washington, holding it until he retired from the Army as a colonel in July 1994.

He did not leave the field. He worked as an aerospace consultant and defence contractor, and later became a professor at the Defense Acquisition University. He married Debbie Cooper, a University of Arizona classmate and an elementary school PE teacher; their son Justin Spring competed as a gymnast at the 2008 Olympics and went on to coach at collegiate level. Spring's own listed interests run to flying, scuba diving, river running, skiing and carpentry — which, for a man whose historical contribution was construction work, has a certain symmetry.

His awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the NASA Space Flight Medal, the Victor A. Prather Award for 1985, and three honorary doctorates.

Why Sherwood Is Called a Genius

The claim here rests on applied engineering judgement and physical craft rather than theoretical brilliance, and the record supports the former without pretending to the latter. Nobody quoted in the available sources calls Spring a genius. What he was is something the space programme needed more: an engineer who could also do the job with his hands, in the suit, and report accurately on what he found.

That combination is rarer than it sounds. EASE and ACCESS were not tests of strength or nerve. They were tests of whether a specific human capability existed, and the value of the result depended entirely on the person performing it being able to distinguish between "this is hard because I am tired," "this is hard because the tool is wrong," and "this is hard because the concept does not work in microgravity." Spring arrived at that task holding a West Point engineering degree, an aerospace master's, test pilot school, and four years at Edwards spent professionally characterising machines that misbehaved. Test piloting is precisely the discipline of flying something imperfect and then explaining, in engineering terms, what was wrong with it. He applied it to a truss.

The honest counter-case: he flew once. One mission, 165 hours, in a career that otherwise consisted of exceptional but conventional military aviation and, later, programme administration. He did not design EASE or ACCESS. He was the instrument that validated them — an outstanding instrument, chosen well and performing under conditions where failure would have been unrecoverable, but an executor rather than an originator. Genius overstates it. Indispensable does not.

Legacy

The International Space Station was assembled across more than a decade of spacewalks by astronauts who never had to ask the fundamental question, because Spring and Ross had answered it in 1985 over the Pacific. That is the shape of his contribution: invisible in the finished thing, load-bearing underneath it. He spent the rest of his working life on the acquisition and management side of American military space, and then teaching it — the same instinct, applied to institutions rather than trusses.

Achievements

• Affiliated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Educated at University of Arizona, United States Military Academy and United States Naval Test Pilot School
• Worked as astronaut and engineer