“Okay,” came the message from Columbia. “We’re all healthy, so if you need that Hawaii pass for something other than medical you got it.” All communication between the crew and Mission Control was conducted over an open loop with CapCom, with one exception. As they passed over the Hawaii ground station there was a ten-minute private medical communication scheduled with the flight surgeon. Three seconds later they lost the signal from the Indian Ocean station.
In Mission Control, after the discovery of the missing tiles and the approach made to the Pentagon for assistance, there had been an animated discussion over whether or not to tell the crew. And how much. Hans Mark listened as people aired different positions, but was in no doubt whatsoever that they owed it to the astronauts to be straight with them. “We’ve got to tell them,” he said. Anything else was unthinkable. He wasn’t alone; the decision was taken to bring Young and Crippen fully into the picture.
At Young’s suggestion, the private conversation between Columbia and Houston through the Kokee Park tracking station as she crossed 147 miles above Hawaii was scrubbed. Young thought it had been a waste of time to schedule it in the first place—they hadn’t bothered with them during the Apollo missions when they were flying to the moon and back. But without the opportunity for any radio communication over a secure channel, whatever needed to be shared with the crew offline would have to be conveyed via the teleprinter that chattered through reams of folded, stacked paper on the mid-deck. And it was clear, when the ground relay was next restored as Columbia acquired the UHF radio signal from Santiago, Chile, that the missing tiles had been at the forefront of people’s minds.
On CapCom, Hank Hartsfield conveyed some of the detail of what had so far been learned from the analysis into the OMS pods. He painted a reassuring picture. “We don’t think it will be a concern during the entry,” he told Crip, “and the structural integrity will be maintained.” In a still thick Alabama accent, Hartsfield explained the work being done by Tom Moser’s team studying heat transfer and skin surface temperature data. “Anyhow,” he wrapped up, “the bottom line is that we think there is no real problem at all with the pieces of tile or tiles that there seem to be missing off the pod and we don’t plan to make any changes to the entry flight plan because of the tile loss.”
“Okay, Henry, you could have saved all that for your end-of-mission press conference,” Crippen responded, sounding pointedly unconcerned. “Sounds good enough,” he added, “we don’t think it’s a problem either . . .”
They moved on. However, the situation with the tiles wasn’t yet quite as final as the brief exchange between the two MOL veterans had made it sound.
• • •
Inside the Structures and Mechanics Division, Tom Moser’s engineers working the problem may have come up with some preliminary conclusions, but they were far from finished. Much of the work was done by the aerothermodynamics team, of which Dottie Lee was a member, running computer models in conjunction with arc jet test data. Of particular concern was trying to establish the extent to which the disruption to the smooth air flow caused by the missing tiles might generate greater than expected local temperatures in exactly the area where the heat shield had been compromised.
But alongside what needed to be done to analyze the impact of the tiles they knew were missing was the fact that NASA was still uncertain about whether or not that loss represented the full extent of the damage to Columbia’s heat shield. To establish that still required help from the military.
Unable to discuss, over open channels, the details of the Air Force effort to illuminate the situation, NASA relied on the teleprinter as a means to inform the crew of what was being done to help them and, crucially, what they needed to do to facilitate it. Back in Houston, as the requirements of the Blue Cube operators reached Mission Control, the carefully worked out and well-rehearsed flight plan for day two of Columbia’s mission was being pulled apart and rewritten.
• • •
Before loss of signal from Santiago, Hank Hartsfield drew Bob Crippen’s attention to a written message being sent up from Houston. “We have a teleprinter message coming up to you,” he said, “that we would like for you to take a look at at your earliest convenience.” Through messages like this, the Shuttle’s crew was informed of what the public wasn’t privy to. Both crew members knew what was now going on. And while Columbia’s commander didn’t share the same top-level security clearances as his pilot, all that mattered was that John, as Crippen put it, had enough. The Air Force, though, did guard this sort of information jealously.
• • •
While Columbia sped east in the direction of the Botswana ground station, Mission Control anticipated contact through the Indian Ocean station, which was to follow. “Indy comm check, Houston comm check,” a female voice requested, “air to ground UHF.” Greeted with nothing but static, she tried again: “Sunnyvale comm check, Houston comm check, air to ground one.”
“Houston comm check,” one of the Air Force controllers replied, speaking low and fast, “Sunnyvale comm check on one.” In contrast to the brightness on air from NASA, the Blue Cube controller was terse, speeding through messages and acknowledging, military style, with a click of the transmit button rather than speaking.
“Houston,” reported Sunnyvale, “I’m not copying you on air to ground two.”
“Okay, stand by . . . you’re not copying me on air to ground two at this time?”
“Affirmative.”
Even with this brief exchange, NASA, in trying to establish the line to the Indian Ocean station, relayed via satellite through the Blue Cube, was forcing the Air Force space facility into greater public prominence than it was entirely comfortable with, and at a time when it actually seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. Just a month earlier, Sunnyvale had had its security status upgraded from “controlled” to “restricted.” That had followed the earlier removal of 3-foot-high chrome letters announcing “US Air Force Satellite Test Center” from Sunnyvale’s entrance in an effort “to reduce visibility.” How effective this was, given the Blue Cube’s unusual and conspicuous appearance, was debatable. Initiatives in other areas were more successful. In setting up what was known as control-mode operation for the Department of Defense missions, command and control was ring-fenced from NASA’s unclassified activities using discrete computer networks, secure rooms within Mission Control, codebooks allowing open communication between CapCom and the Shuttle, and encrypted on-orbit video feeds. There were even attempts to avoid any open utterance of the name Sunnyvale. In years to come, astronauts preparing for Shuttle missions carrying DOD payloads would file false flight plans from Ellington to an airfield they had no intention of flying to, only to find some reason to divert en route from their stated destination to Moffett Field, a couple of miles north of the Air Force space facility in Sunnyvale.
• • •
Inside the Blue Cube, there was disappointment when personnel realized that one of the two operational KH-11 satellites was going to be of no use to them. The path of the newest KENNEN, designated 5503 and launched in February 1980, wouldn’t, during the remaining hours of Columbia’s mission, provide an orbital encounter giving any opportunity to try to capture an image of the Shuttle. Luck, as pointed out by Hans Mark, was a critical component in any sat-squared photograph, and it hadn’t been on the side of 5503. That left hopes resting on a single bird: 5502.
While Air Force officers narrowed down their options for imaging Columbia using the KEYHOLE satellites, operators at another Air Force facility 2,300 miles to the southwest were already trying to do the same thing from the ground—albeit from over 10,000 feet above sea level on the summit of Mount Haleakalā. As Young and Crippen began their ninth orbit, twelve hours into the mission, it was hoped that, as their spacecraft passed within range of the Maui Space Surveillance Complex TEAL BLUE telescope camera, the Air Force might capture the first usable images of her heat shield. The attempt, however, was doomed to failure. The Shuttle, as she passed Hawaii, was still on the flight plan as originally scheduled; there’d been no effort to maneuver her into a different orbital attitude. Traveling upside down and tail first, there was simply no way that her underside could be seen from Earth. It was no more visible to the Air Force telescope operators than the dark side of the moon.
• • •
Sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Shuttle Mission Simulator in Building 5, Dick Truly loosened his straps and leaned around behind himself, stretching for a circuit breaker with a swizzle stick—a telescopic aid designed to provide access to out-of-reach panels. As had happened throughout the Apollo program, NASA was trying to work through a problem aboard an operational spacecraft by working it on the ground in the simulator. While the risk posed to the already damaged heat shield from any further missing tiles may have been the main source of anxiety, it wasn’t the only concern over the Shuttle’s reentry. Because of the limits of the data provided by the hypersonic wind tunnels and arc jets used to test the Shuttle, Columbia’s first orbital test flight was itself going to be a crucial source of information. Only through her first reentry could data confirming the validity of all the preflight testing be gleaned in real-world conditions. And one of the machines set up to record that data was not turning on and off as planned. On orbit it had been possible to stop the jammed recorder running out of tape prematurely by turning it on and off using the circuit breaker to cut the power, but once Crip was strapped into his seat for the journey home, the back panel was going to be out of reach.
Twisting around in his seat, Truly found he was able to just stretch to the circuit breaker to operate it, but he was in shirtsleeves. Trussed up in the pressure suits Young and Crippen would be wearing for reentry, he wasn’t sure it was doable. For now, though, the faulty tape recorder remained a frustration rather than a worry.
“Perhaps,” joked the public announcer, the crew “should have carried the Pete Conrad Skylab hammer with them.” In referring to the Skylab 2 commander’s on-orbit repairs, he was unaware that he was also talking about the last occasion the National Reconnaissance Office had used its KEYHOLE spy satellites to help NASA assess the damage to one of its spacecraft.
• • •
At twelve hours forty-eight minutes’ mission elapsed time, Columbia picked up the signal from Santiago, Chile—the last scheduled communication with the ground before Young and Crippen turned down the volume of the comms link in order to sleep. At the beginning of the five-and-a-half-minute pass, Mission Control requested a brief private medical consultation. The flight surgeon reported that the conversation with the crew over a discrete radio channel revealed no medical concerns of any sort—just as Young had assured Mission Control had been the case two hours earlier. Back on an open channel, Hank Hartsfield flagged the imminent arrival of further written communication—“a teleprinter message,” he said, “that’ll tell you everything we’ve done”—and wished them a good night’s sleep. There was twenty seconds until loss of signal.
“See you mañana,” Crippen signed off from on board Columbia, while in Houston, Hartsfield’s Bronze Team leader, Flight Director Chuck Lewis, on finishing his shift, made his way to Building 2 and installed himself in Room 135 for the change-of-shift press conference—and another barrage of questions from reporters about the tiles. They were becoming more forensic, scratching harder at some of the suggestions Gene Kranz had made about possible orbits for taking pictures from ground-based systems.
“I’ll tell Mr. Kranz when I see him tomorrow,” Lewis joked, “that everyone’s anxious for him to come back over and talk to you.”
Kranz, not this time leading one of the Flight Control teams himself, was responsible for the offline effort to establish the integrity of the heat shield. For now, though, Lewis answered questions about Air Force efforts with the same careful mixture of transparency and evasion that Kranz himself had employed. But asked when NASA expected to draw their final conclusions about the risk from the tiles missing from the OMS pods, Lewis told them, “My guess is around three or four a.m.” Seven hours away. In fact, the teams working the problem in both Downey and Houston were closer than that to delivering their verdict.