Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (18 page)

“Everybody wanted to get the bird in the air and show that it would fly okay, but the delays really provided us with more time to get ready for contingency situations,” recalled Engle, who was in line to command the second shuttle mission. “I remember very distinctly not having the impression of idling or spinning our wheels or treading water during those delays. We were engrossed in always new things to look at. . . . But we were very, very busy getting ready for things, overpreparing, I think in retrospect.”

According to Engle, the delays also helped the astronauts and Mission Control develop further into an effective team.

Because of the launch delays, we did have additional time to prepare for the flights and we got to work very closely and come to know and have a rapport with the controllers and, in fact, all the people in Mission Control, not just flight control, but all the people that were on the console, all [the] experts on the various systems. We knew them by voice, when we would hear transmissions. Of course, in the real flight, we only would talk to either the CapCom [capsule communicator, the astronaut in Mission Control who communicated with the crew], or sometimes pass information on to Don Puddy, the flight director. But we got to know pretty much who was on the console by what kind of response or direction we were given for certain simulated failures that we’d had during simulations. And
that was good; that was really good. We worked as a very, very close-knit team, almost being able to think and read each other without a whole lot of words said.

Bob Crippen, the astronaut assigned to be pilot of the first shuttle launch, recalled touring
NASA
and its contractors during that period with
STS
-1 commander John Young to encourage the teams that were preparing their vehicle for flight.

The Space Shuttle is a pretty complicated vehicle, and certainly it was breaking some new frontiers, which, John and I being test pilots, it was a great mission for us. But when you have something that complicated, literally hundreds of thousands of people made
STS
-1 possible. You have to be depending on those folks doing their job right, because you can’t check everything yourself. John and I spent a lot of time going to the various contractors and subcontractors, if nothing else, to try to put a human face on the mission; that we were flying it, and we appreciated all the work that they were doing.

Everywhere we went, the people really felt in their heart that they were doing something important for the nation, and that’s what John and I wanted them to feel, because that’s what they were doing. It doesn’t take but one person to do something wrong that can cost you a mission and cost lives. So when John and I climbed aboard the vehicle to go fly, we had been eyeball to eyeball with, I would say, maybe not all hundred thousand, but we had been eyeball to eyeball with thousands of folks.

The visits not only served to encourage the workforce responsible for preparing the vehicle for flight, they gave the shuttle’s first crew a unique, up-close look at what went into what the astronauts would be flying.

“We knew the vehicle pretty good,” Crippen said.

We knew its risks, but we also knew that it had a great deal to offer if it was successful. So when we climbed aboard, I think both of us felt very confident that the vehicle would fly and fly well.

So when I say that we literally rode on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of people, that’s what we did, and I felt good about it. . . . I did have the opportunity after the first mission to go around again and thank a lot of the people that made the mission a success. Signed lots of autographs and did those kinds of things, to hopefully make them feel good about the work they had done. That continues today with the program of Spaceflight Awareness, because it’s impor
tant that they get feedback about how important their work is. . . . We’re proud of what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is something great for the nation, and not only the nation, for the world, in my perspective. I’m proud of the shuttle. I’m proud to have been a part of it since almost its inception. . . . I think all the people that have been part of it ought to be proud of the job they’ve done.

5.

First Flight

Well, we were just finally glad to get it started. Geez, we’d waited so long. . . . We’re finally getting back into the flying business again.

— Astronaut Owen Garriott

STS
-1

Crew: Commander John Young, Pilot Bob Crippen

Orbiter:
Columbia

Launched: 12 April 1981

Landed: 14 April 1981

Mission: Test of orbiter systems

It was arguably the most complex piece of machinery ever made. And it had to work right the first time out. No practice round, just one first flight with two lives in the balance and the weight of the entire American space program on its shoulders.

The Redstone, Atlas, and Titan boosters used in the Mercury and Gemini programs had flight heritage prior to their use for manned
NASA
missions, but even so, the agency ran them through further test flights before putting humans atop them. And thankfully so, since their conversion from missiles into manned rockets was not without incident. There was the Mercury-Redstone vehicle that flew four inches on a test flight before settling back onto the pad. Or the Mercury-Atlas rocket that exploded during a test flight before the watching eyes of astronauts who were awaiting a ride on the launch vehicle in the future.

Unlike those used in Mercury and Gemini, the Saturn rockets used in the Apollo missions were newly designed by
NASA
for the purpose of manned
spaceflight and had no prior history. When the first unmanned Saturn V was launched fully stacked for an “all-up” test flight in 1967, it was a major departure from the incremental testing used for the smaller Saturn I, in which the first stage was demonstrated to be reliable by itself before being flown with a live upper stage. The decision to skip the stage-by-stage testing for the Saturn V was a key factor in meeting President John F. Kennedy’s “before this decade is out” goal for the first lunar landing, but it was not without a higher amount of risk.

That risk, however, paled next to the risk involved in the first flight of the Space Shuttle system. Not only could there be no incremental launches of the components, but there would be no unmanned test flight, no room for the sorts of incidents that occurred back in the Mercury testing days. The first Space Shuttle launch would carry two astronauts, and it had to carry them into space safely and bring them home successfully. Although it would be well over a decade before a movie scriptwriter would coin a phrase that would define the
Apollo 13
mission, it definitely applied in this case: failure was not an option.

Rather than being upset over the greater risk, however,
NASA
’s astronauts endorsed the decision, some rather passionately. Most of the more veteran members of the corps had come to
NASA
as test pilots, and they were about to be test pilots again in a way they had never before experienced as astronauts. In fact, some pushed against testing the vehicle unmanned because of the precedent it would set.

“Oh, we were tickled silly,” said Joe Engle, “because we didn’t want any autopilot landing that vehicle.”

Conducting an unmanned test flight would mean developing the capability for the orbiter to fly a completely automated mission, meaning that it would be capable of performing any of the necessary tasks from launch to landing. Some in the Astronaut Office were concerned that the more the orbiter was capable of doing by itself, the less
NASA
would want the astronauts to do when crewed flights began.

“We were very vain,” Engle added,

and thought, you’ve got to have a pilot there to land it. If you’ve got an airplane, you’ve got to have a pilot in it. Fortunately, the certification of the autopilot all the way down to landing would have required a whole lot more cost and development time, delay in launch, and I think the rationale that we put forward to discourage the idea of developing the autoland—and I think [a] correct one, too—was that you can leave it engaged down to a certain altitude, but always you have to be ready to assume that you’re going to have an anomaly in the autopilot and the pilot has to take over and land anyway. The pilot flying the vehicle all the way down—approach and landing—he’s in a much better position to affect the final landing, having become familiar and acclimated to the responses of the vehicle after being in orbit and knowing what kinds of displacements give him certain types of responses. Keeping himself lined up in the groove coming down to land is a much better situation than asking him to take over after autopilot has deviated off.

12.
Space Shuttle
Columbia
poised for takeoff of
STS
-1. Courtesy
NASA
.

According to astronaut Hank Hartsfield, one of the major technical limitations that made the idea of an unmanned test flight particularly challenging was that the shuttle’s computer system—current for the day but primitive by modern standards—would have to launch with all of the software needed for the entire mission already set up; there would be no crew to change out the software in orbit.

“We had separate software modules that we had to load once on orbit,” Hartsfield explained. “All that had to be loaded off of storage devices or carried in core, because, remember, the shuttle computer was only a 65
K
machine. If you know much about storage, it’s small, 65
K
. When you think about complexity of the vehicle that we’re flying—a complex machine with full computers voting in tight sync and flying orbital dynamic flight phase and giving the crew displays and we’re doing that with 65
K
of memory—it’s mind-boggling.”

Acknowledging the test-flight nature of the first launches, a special modification was made to
Columbia
—ejection seats for the commander’s and pilot’s seats on the flight deck. According to
STS
-1 pilot Bob Crippen, the ejection seats were a nice gesture but, in reality, probably would have made little difference in most scenarios.

“People felt like we needed some way to get out if something went wrong,” Crippen said.

In truth, if you had to use them while the solids were there, I don’t believe if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids that you would have ever survived, or if you did, you wouldn’t have a parachute, because it would have been burned up in the process. But by the time the solids had burned out, you were up to too high an altitude to use it.

On entry, if you were coming in short of the runway because something had happened, either you didn’t have enough energy or whatever, you could have ejected. However, the scenario that would put you there is pretty unrealistic. So I personally didn’t feel that the ejection seats were really going to help us out if we really ran into a contingency. I don’t believe they would have done much for you, other than maybe give somebody a feeling that, hey, well, at least they had a possibility of getting out. So I was never very confident in them.

Risky or not, the two crew assignment slots that were available for the mission were a highly desired prize within the astronaut corps.
STS
-1 would be the first time any U.S. astronaut had flown into space in almost six years, would offer the opportunity to flight test an unflown vehicle, and would guarantee a place in the history books. Everyone wanted the flight. Senior astronaut John Young and rookie Bob Crippen got it.

Crippen recalled when he learned that he would be the pilot for the first Space Shuttle mission but said he still didn’t know exactly why he was the one chosen for the job.

“Beats the heck out of me,” he said.

I had anticipated that I would get to fly on one of the shuttle flights early on, because there weren’t that many of us in the Astronaut Office during that period of time. I was working like everybody else was working in the office, and there were lots of qualified people. One day we had the
Enterprise
coming through on the back of the 747. It landed out at Ellington[Field, Houston]. . . . I happened to go out there with George Abbey, who at that time was the director of flight crew operations. As we were strolling around the vehicle, looking at the
Enterprise
up there on the 747, George said something to the effect of, “Crip, would you like to fly the first one?”

About that time I think I started doing handsprings on the tarmac out there. I couldn’t believe it. It blew my mind that he’d let me go fly the first one with John Young, who was the most experienced guy we had in the office, obviously, and the chief of the Astronaut Office. It was a thrill. It was one of the high points of my life.