Dr. Sumners assigned Williams a paddleball as one of his toys, and he found that it worked just about like it does on earth because of the elastic attachment.

Williams chose juggling as an additional activity on his own initiative.

 

Sumners predicted before the flight that weightless juggling would present timing problems, and Williams proved her right. Initially, he took a half-dozen pieces of fruit and tried simply putting them from one place to another in space. "It's more easily said than done," he reported. "You have to place them with no rates and forces. I found it somewhat difficult to position them and have them stay in place. They tended to drift off and so I was constantly grabbing for one or the other."

 

Williams joined the Navy through an ROTC program immediately after graduation from Purdue University. He flew A-4 and A-7 aircraft for the Navy, and was twice deployed for combat in Vietnam.  In 1978 he was "loaned" by the Navy to NASA through 1987. It took the veteran pilot a year of training to learn to fly the shuttle, which he described as "possibly the most complicated plane ever built."

He hopes to be assigned to another flight in about a year, and plans to attend the IJA summer convention if NASA scheduling permits.

 

Ed. Note - Astronaut Williams is now definitely planning to attend the IJA convention Friday and Saturday. He will conduct a workshop in zero-g juggling.

The flight was the first for 43-year­old Williams. Given his experience at space juggling, he said he would jump at the chance to go to the moon and try his act in the 1/6 gravity there. "Put me in, coach!" he said. enthusiastically . Because there is some gravity there, cascade juggling could be done as on earth.

 

The renowned mathematician Claude Shannon once postulated that a person capable of juggling seven balls on earth could handle 15 on the moon. He based his conclusion on a mathematical formula for juggling where: b/h=(d+t)/(d+e), where b=balls, h=hands, d=dwell time of a ball in a hand, f=flight time of a ball between hands and e = length of time a hand is empty.

 

Consideration of juggling in the zero-g atmosphere of space prompted Williams to explain orbital mechanics. If, for example, he were to foolishly try to begin a space juggle in the shuttle's open cargo bay with a three-ball flash upward, the balls would,

of course, continue to rise as they were released from his hands. But how far would they travel, and what would happen to them?

 

"If you threw them out toward space, they wouldn't continue forever," Williams explained. "They would eventually fall into another orbit, higher from earth than that of the spacecraft and moving faster. Objects thrown toward earth fall into a

lower orbit, moving slower and behind the spacecraft. "