STS-75 Mission Control Center 
Status Report # 5

Saturday, February 24, 1996, 10:30 a.m. CST

STS-75 mission managers Saturday morning decided to delay deployment
of the Tethered Satellite by 24 hours to give flight controllers time
to gain additional confidence in the operations of a data relay that
provides satellite system information during deploy and science
operations.

The Smart Flex data relay box has been stable since early this
morning, but mission managers wanted additional time to understand its
previously observed behavior.  The relay box had experienced several
unexpected "restarts". It has been performing without incident,
however, since early this morning.

The 24-hour delay also gives flight controllers the opportunity to
enhance any contingency procedures that might be used in the event the
Smart Flex develops problems during the deploy operations.

Late this afternoon, the astronauts will begin a standard
one-day-before-deploy timeline, allowing them to catch up on some
activation steps which were omitted during the compressed timeline
which would have been required if TSS were deployed as originally
scheduled this afternoon.