Excerpt from:
"NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Transcript: Bryan D. O'Connor, 20 April 2006" (
full document)
JOHNSON: I read on that flight [STS-40], also--there was an article that talked about the fact that one of the hatches was padlocked. Do you want to just talk about that for a second? Was that something that was normally done?
O'CONNOR: Well, for me it was. We had done that on my first flight [STS-61B] --Brewster [H.] Shaw [Jr.] being the commander and me the pilot--padlock on the hatch, the rationale being that you've got a couple of people on this flight that you don't know that well. They're the "payload specialists." They're not career aviators. They haven't been through all the training we have. We try to make sure they don't hurt themselves or anybody else. It was a due diligence thing, because, in theory, although it would be tough to do it inadvertently, there was a button and a turn of a knob that could actually open up that hatch, and the hatch was very dangerous, because it was an out-opening hatch.
