After a brief introduction from Don Puddy, who’d just come off shift, Tom Moser was given the floor to deal with the issue that was on top of the media’s agenda. Sitting alongside the two veteran flight directors, in front of a packed auditorium, he provided a full account of the work done by his team and their conclusions, always conscious that he was talking to a particularly well-informed group, many of whom had covered the space program since its inception.
The tiles missing from the maneuvering pods would not, Moser said, “have any effect on the safety of the vehicle on entry.” But while he could be unequivocal about what was known, what was still unknown about more critical areas of the heat shield dominated the rest of the briefing.
Gene Kranz was asked what measures might be taken if damage to these more critical areas of the thermal protection system was discovered. His answer revealed the limits of the options available. The astronauts could, he told them, purge and depressurize any of Columbia’s tanks and systems that might be at risk from burn-through; there was room to slightly alter the reentry profile, except that, he admitted, it was already planned to be about as benign as possible. Reentering with even a fraction of a degree more sideslip in an effort to reduce the thermal stress to a damaged area of the heat shield would only increase the danger elsewhere by shifting the point of peak heating from the reinforced carbon-carbon nose cone to a less resilient part of the airframe.
At first glance, the presence of Salyut 6 in orbit might have looked like a potential lifeboat, but the harsh realities of celestial mechanics meant it was no such thing. Circling in an orbital inclination of 51.6 degrees, the Soviet space station would have needed around 20 tons of propellant to move her into the same 40.3-degree orbit as Columbia—as much as the total mass of the space station itself. The change in velocity—the delta-v—necessary to make the maneuver would have been around eight times the speed at which the average airliner flies. A shift in its orbital plane was about as thirsty a maneuver as any spacecraft could be required to perform. And in this situation it was impossible.
That left the possibility of keeping Young and Crippen on orbit until some plan for bringing them home could be improvised. And while, through careful conservation of the resources on board, Columbia’s time in space could be extended, it was anything but indefinite; days not months.
The only realistic option was confirmation that the critical areas of Columbia’s heat shield were undamaged. As Kranz stressed throughout, “We have no hard evidence at this time that leads us to suspect that we have any problems with the underside of the orbiter.” The trouble was, neither did he, Puddy and Moser have any hard evidence to the contrary.
Asked whether the Air Force had yet successfully managed to take pictures that determined there was no tile loss from the underside of the Shuttle, he could only admit they had not. The most recent effort to capture the orbiter using the TEAL AMBER telescope at Malabar on orbit twenty-one had failed to yield any useful data. “Officially, and organizationally, operationally we have no usable photos obtained from the ground stations,” Kranz said, but that statement didn’t shut the door completely. And it was clear that some of the reporters in the room had sources suggesting that, while ground-based telescopes may have drawn blanks, the Department of Defense might still be in a position to provide imagery of Columbia.
“We’re working with the Air Force in using available resources,” Kranz explained, declining to expand on what those DOD assets might be. “Any further discussion of this subject,” he said, “is classified.”
As he spoke, there were still hopes that the classified efforts of the Air Force controllers at Sunnyvale might yet provide the photographic reassurance NASA wanted, even if the details of how they might do so had to remain off-limits to the public.
• • •
“Columbia, Houston. Can you listen now?”
“Okay, Hank, I guess I can listen up,” replied Crippen.
“Okay. Our management has met and talked about this DFI problem and we have concluded that the data that we could get on that is very important to have.” Hartsfield emphasized the significance of the development flight instrumentation recorder that was proving so profligate with its supply of tape. It was supposed to be recording the thermal data from the point at which Columbia began her reentry from space through to when she emerged, after a communications blackout, in atmospheric flight. Impossible to test properly in ground facilities, it was the most elusive and uncertain part of the Shuttle’s envelope.
As the date for the first flight launch had approached, Bob Crippen had lobbied hard for an in-flight maintenance capability to be carried aboard the orbiter. Now, providing Mission Control could reorganize the flight plan to give him the time to do it, he was enthusiastic about his chance to road test the tool kit. John Young was more skeptical. It didn’t make sense to go messing around changing out big components on the vehicle unless, he thought, they were flight critical. And the flight recorder, as much as the information it captured was valuable, had no bearing on whether or not Columbia and her crew were going to make it home in one piece. It was not a flight safety issue.
While Young stayed up on the flight deck, Crippen floated down through the hatch to the mid-deck to get to work.
From CapCom, Hank Hartsfield read through the details of a task that hadn’t been practiced on the ground. “On step eight,” he said, “what we want to do is change the order of removing those connectors so that we don’t . . . so that we reduce the possibility of pulling the pins and the wires, and the order we want is as follows: eight . . . seven . . . six . . . one . . . three . . . four . . . five.”
It sounded as if he were transmitting the step-by-step instructions for defusing a bomb.
“Henry,” John Young cut in, “you want me to give torquing angles now?”
While leading Crip through trying to change out the flight recorder, Hartsfield still had a job to do helping the commander fly the Shuttle. “Yes, sir,” he replied without breaking his stride, “we’ve got fifty-five seconds. Shoot ’em to me.”
Young just had time to pass his message before Columbia lost the signal from Botswana.
On the mid-deck, Crip was having a hard enough time of it to stop whistling the tunes with which he’d set about the job. For all the discussion of precision disconnection, the problem facing him first demanded brute force. Most of the twelve fasteners holding each panel to the bulkhead just wouldn’t budge, and without the help of gravity to root him to the spot, he was struggling to gain the purchase he needed to make inroads on the stiff Allen-head screws. With the temperature in the cabin now restored to a comfortable level, he was beginning to work up a sweat.
As Columbia tracked northeast across the Himalayas en route to Hawaii, Crip called up to his commander to see if he might have any more success in moving the screws and shifting the panel. Young drifted down headfirst through the hatch, completely at home maneuvering around in weightlessness, but after trying to plant himself in front of the bulkhead, his efforts to loosen the screws were no more successful than his crewmate’s. Young imagined they’d been tightened up and painted in by some 300-pound guy. No chance, he thought, that they could expect a pair of astronauts that only weigh nothing in zero gravity to get the thing off.
After wrestling with it for nearly forty minutes, when they reacquired a radio link to CapCom, they broke the bad news. “Okay, Hank,” Crip said, “we’ve got a small problem, or a big problem, depending on how bad you want DFI.”
If it had been mission critical, if they’d said, “Change out the computer,” Young maintained, he and Crip would have worked all night to get the job done. If that panel had to come off, we’d have sawed it off with a bone saw.
But even that might not have been enough. In deciding that the mission wouldn’t fail on account of his work, the technician responsible for installing the panels had used Loctite glue to seal it shut. There was no way his panel was going to be the one that shook itself loose. The astronauts would have been lucky to be able to drill them out.
“We’d better give up on it,” Hartsfield agreed, “unless somebody here comes up with a Eureka in the next few minutes.”
The failure to change out the recorder was a frustrating end to a day that had borne almost no resemblance to the flight plan. And yet it had also been encouraging. Columbia had shown herself to be abundantly capable and flexible, responding with alacrity to all that had been expected of her and more.
Bob Crippen returned the panel hiding the flight recorder to the condition in which he’d found it, stowed the tool kit and flight procedures file which he’d had to hand as he worked, then pushed himself back up through the companionway to the flight deck. After three-quarters of an hour without a view outside, he was drawn to the sight of the stars through the cockpit windows. Previous astronaut groups had used a planetarium to study the heavens—knowledge of which was necessary as a backup for the spacecraft’s inertial navigation and guidance systems. Crippen and the rest of the MOL guys hadn’t been so lucky, relying instead on the simulator. John Young, though, as with lunar geology, had pursued astronomy with enough fervor to become expert. As he and Crip had trained for STS-1, the veteran astronaut had shared his understanding of the stars with his pilot. Throughout the mission, during the time they’d spent beyond the range of the ground-station network, Young had been pointing out stars to his rookie crewmate. Now, gazing out from Columbia’s cockpit at a constellation he recognized as the Southern Cross, bright and unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere, Crip was moved by how dramatic it looked. Fifteen years after the Air Force had selected him to be an astronaut, it was a small moment of wonder that would from here on color his memories of his first spaceflight.
With the timeline compressed because of the attempt to change out the recorder, there was little more to do than eat and prepare for their second night’s sleep on orbit.
“We all look forward to seeing you tomorrow,” Hank Hartsfield told them, “we’re excited about it. We understand you’re buying.”
“Well,” Crippen laughed, “you might be right . . .”
Seconds later, the crew lost the signal through Santiago. Because of the ground track of orbit twenty-five, it would be nearly an hour and a half before, returning to Chile, they could have any contact at all.
• • •
The astronauts’ sleep period began at one day, thirteen hours MET. As Young and Crippen settled in their ejection seats, blinds drawn over the deep cockpit windows, in Houston, Flight Director Neil Hutchinson’s Silver Team replaced the Bronze Team at the Mission Control consoles. After plugging in and shadowing the last minutes of Hank Hartsfield’s shift, Dan Brandenstein sat down at CapCom for what he anticipated would be a quiet shift. There were ongoing efforts to come up with a solution to the flight recorder problem. One possibility was simply to trip the master switch and shut down all three recorders until just prior to reentry. Aaron Cohen and the program management were weighing up the pros and cons of that. At the same time, a team of astronauts were expecting to work through the night in the sim to see if they could jury-rig an appendage for the swizzle stick that might give Crip the reach and control he needed to operate the circuit breaker from his seat.
On board Columbia, Young and Crippen turned down the ground-to-air comms link. For the next seven hours, they just had each other, and the silence of space, for company.