Space Shuttle

Shuttles are the highest, fastest airplanes, but they
can’t break the image barrier back on the ground.

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By Brian Welch

There were a quarter of a million people on the dry lake bed that morning of April 14, 1981, awash in a sea of Winnebagos, blue bunting, American flags and network anchormen. But most of the half-million eyes were trained on the sky.

Although they couldn’t see the spacecraft just yet–Columbia was still far out over the Pacific Ocean–the onlookers had been able to hear the exchanges between the mission control center and the two pilot-astronauts, thanks to loudspeakers positioned out on the high desert floor of Edwards Air Force Base.

“OK, understand, go for the deorbit burn,” Commander John Young had said when the time came to fall out of orbit. “Thank you, now.”

Clad in bright orange pressure suits, sitting atop ejection seats, Young and pilot Robert Crippen were about to exercise the one capability that made their spacecraft truly revolutionary: they were going to bring it back in one piece. All of it. And then they were going to land it on a runway. But first, there was entry interface to get past, the point at which the spacecraft began to plunge through denser and denser layers of the atmosphere, trailing heat and a plasma sheath as it went. Because this descent had never before been done with such a machine, because the avionics were new and highly challenged by what was to come, because of fragile heat-shield tiles and predictions of a “zipper effect” that could rip a number of those tiles away from the airframe, millions of people on the planet below were watching and waiting. It was an edge-of-the-seat moment.

“Nice and easy does it, John,” astronaut Joe Allen radioed from mission control. “We’re all riding with you. We’ll see you about Mach 12.” And then the crackling transmissions receded, the airwaves grew quiet, and many of the spectators on the lake bed talked about how this must be the radio blackout from re-entry. They were about to witness an event unique in history, and part of its allure was that no one knew what to expect next.

Still out over the ocean, Columbia was tripping down through the high Mach numbers now, nose high, in a state of equipoise amid the fireball, while the avionics bays hummed with automatic flight controls at work, firing off thruster pulses and steering through regimes of flight never before navigated by a vessel with wings. Until now, it had all been theory, this business of balancing opposing forces along a sliding scale of altitudes, velocities and pressures, where every one-tenth of a Mach number was a distinct and separate place, a different aerodynamic address.

But in those moments of apprehension while exploring new concepts, the technical heritage of American high-speed flight research and the practical experience of sending men to the moon somehow came through to help create the granddaddy of all plane rides. Author Tom Wolfe observed in 1981 that the flight of Columbia closed a circle, bridging the aeronautics programs of the 1950s and ’60s with the space program of the ’80s. Wolfe contended that sending people into space atop expendable ballistic missiles was an anomaly, “the human cannonball approach,” an expedient in the drive for prestige and dominance in the Cold War, and not the result of any long-range aeronautical vision. The first shuttle mission, he wrote, returned the American space program “to where it started–which was not Cape Canaveral but the throwback landscape of Edwards Air Force Base, a terrain that evolution left behind, a desert decorated with the arthritic limbs of Joshua trees and memories of Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, Iven Kincheloe and other pioneers of manned rocket flight.”

Indeed, the original name for Project Mercury, the nation’s first manned space-flight enterprise, was “Man in Space Soonest,” and the fastest way to get an American into space was on top of a rocket. At the time, the U.S. Air Force was moving ahead with the X-20 Dyna Soar project, a reusable winged orbiter, but development would take too long under the circumstances. Even Wernher von Braun, who supervised the crescendo of American rocketry with development of the Saturn V, originally envisioned in a Collier’s Magazine series of the early 1950s that astronauts would ride to orbit and back on winged, reusable vehicles. A generation later, when the moment finally came to Edwards with Columbia, the people who built the shuttle could only watch and wait, like everybody else.

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