The Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1), on the launch pad. The initials STS stand for Space Transportation System.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MISSION OF ALL
When the Space Shuttle Columbia was launched in 1981, it ended a six-year period during which no American had gone into space. In that time, however, there had been 21 Soviet missions. The Soviets had, at last, reached their stride and were operating almost routinely, plying between the Earth and their series of space stations. However, the Americans could hardly have chosen a more dangerous mission to mark their return to space travel.
So far in the story of manned spaceflight we have seen many remarkable successes, as well as some disasters and near-disasters. Most accidents involved Soviet spacecraft and were caused by inadequate technology, poor manufacturing standards or pressure from politicians. But now we encounter American astronauts embarking on what many regard as the most dangerous spaceflight in history. For the first time, and unlike on all previous missions, they are using hitherto untried technology. There has never been a mission as risky as the first flight of the Space Shuttle. When Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and all the other American astronauts were launched on a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, they did so knowing that these rockets had been tested and approved before they climbed aboard. They also had escape systems, so that if anything went wrong they stood a good chance of survival. Things were different with the Space Shuttle. The first crew, veteran astronaut John Young and rookie Bob Crippen, would make spaceflight history by riding a rocket into space on its very first launch.
The Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1), on the launch pad. The initials STS stand for Space Transportation System.
Bob Crippen, 43, had been selected as part of the second group of astronauts for the USAF Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, but when that project was canceled he moved to support the Skylab missions. He wasn’t sure why he got picked for spaceflight’s most dangerous mission.
Crippen: Beats the heck out of me. 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. But one day we had the Space Shuttle Enterprise (an engineering test vehicle not designed to go into space) coming through on the back of the Boeing 747. It landed out at Ellington Field, Houston, Texas. 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?”
Almost everything about the mission was new and risky. It would have been relatively straightforward to make the first few flights of the Space Shuttle unmanned—even today, if all goes well, the only thing that the commander of the Shuttle must do during liftoff and ascent into orbit is throw one switch; the rest is automatic. But neither NASA nor the astronauts wanted that. Perhaps it was because it was so long since an American had been in space, or perhaps it was because so much could go wrong on the flight, that an astronaut was needed. Nevertheless, there were some who wondered if a six-year gap had led to complacency. It is true to say that many fellow astronauts feared for the lives of the crew of STS-1.
The only thing that had been tested on the Space Shuttle was the latter part of the landing. Four flights off the back of a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft from 7620 meters (25,000 ft.) had been successful. The rockets of the Space Shuttle’s main engines (SSMEs)—three of them on the rear of the Orbiter (the part that returned to Earth), as well as the two on the side-mounted, strap-on solid-fuel boosters (SRBs)—had only been tested on the ground, never in action with a crew on board. Furthermore, the SRBs had only ever been tested lying on their side; they had never been fired standing up. The massive external tank that holds liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel had never been through the stresses of a launch. The Orbiter’s heat shield, a 24,000 mosaic of silica tiles glued to its underbelly, had never experienced the 17,000 miles per hour (27,360 km per hour), 1600 °C reentry. Many astronauts called it a fragile, glass spacecraft.
What’s more, the Space Shuttle relied on its computers and hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code. Could all that be tested properly? The Space Shuttle was something new: a partly reusable spacecraft system, validated by computer.
Once the reusable twin SRBs fired, there was no way to throttle them back. In the words of one astronaut, it was then not a question of if you go, just of which direction. The SRBs, along with the SSMEs burning four million pounds of propellant in just over eight minutes would, according to the ground tests and computer models, propel a quarter-million-pound Orbiter into space to an attitude of 200 miles (322 km) and at a speed of 5 miles (8 km) a second. On its return it would reenter the atmosphere half a world away from the final landing point and, without using power, fly through the ever-increasing air, decelerate due to friction, perform elongated S-bends, and then line itself up at the right heading, altitude and speed with a 4572-meter (15,000-ft.) runway for a single-attempt landing.
But what if something went wrong? What would the crew do? The options were limited—very limited—and although no NASA PR official would admit it, then or now, the astronauts knew the score. The Orbiter was outfitted with SR-71 Blackbird ejection seats for its initial two-man crew. Theoretically they could be used during the first two minutes of flight, and again at the end of the mission when the Orbiter was below Mach 3 and at 3048 meters (100,000 ft.), about ten minutes before landing. But in reality few believed they would be of any use.
Well people felt like we needed some way to get out if something went wrong; in truth, if you had to use them (the ejector seats) while the solids were firing, if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids, I don’t believe 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.
If a SSME failed it would be possible to land in Spain or Africa after a trans-Atlantic abort, but a failure during the two minutes when the SRBs were firing was a different matter. There were procedures, of course—so-called mission profiles flown in simulators. They had checklists that some astronauts referred to as something to read while you are dying.
The first attempt at launch was postponed due to a computer hitch.
Crippen: You know, the vehicle is so complicated, I fully anticipated that we would go through many, many countdowns before we ever got off. When it came down to this particular computer problem, though, I was really surprised, because that was the area I was supposed to know, and I had never seen this happen; never heard of it happening. It was where the backup computer couldn’t hear what the primary computers were saying. There were four primary computers and one backup computer, and we considered the backup absolutely essential to have, but they weren’t communicating properly. I know John and I spent an extra three hours out on the pad strapped in on our backs, for a total of six hours strapped in, before we finally gave up. In fact, that six hours is still used as the max to put people through, because it does get pretty uncomfortable strapped in on your back for that long a period of time. But we climbed out, and I said: “Well, this is liable to take months to get corrected,” because I didn’t know what it was. I’d never seen it. It was so unusual, and the software so critical to us. But we had, again, a number of people that were working very diligently on it. In fact, they proved what the problem was, which was an initialization thing. We just happened to catch a minute window when we started up the backup computer that caused the problem to occur. So it was rapidly concluded that: “Hey, if you go do it again, the odds are it’s not going to happen.”
The next launch attempt was on April 12.
Crippen: About one minute to go, I turned to John. I said: “I think we might really do it,” and about that time, my heart rate started to go up. I think they said it was—because we were being recorded, and it was up to about 130. John’s was down about 90. He said he was just too old for his to go any faster. And sure enough, the count came on down, and the main engines started. The solid rockets went off, and away we went. First you want to make sure that the solids would do their thing, that the main engines would run, and that the tank would come off properly, and that you could light off the orbital maneuvering engines as planned; that the payload bay doors would function properly; that you could align the inertial measuring units; the star trackers would work; the environmental control system, the Freon loops, would all function. So John and I, we were pretty busy.
Once the Space Shuttle was successfully in orbit, many astronauts back on the ground now believed, perhaps with a high degree of confidence for the first time, that they and the Space Shuttle had a future. The first task for Young and Crippen was to open the payload bay doors.
Crippen: I opened up the first door, and at that time I saw, back on the orbital maneuvering system’s pods that hold those engines, that there were some squares back there where obviously the tiles were gone. They were dark instead of being white. So I went ahead and completed opening the doors, and when we got ground contact we told the ground: “Hey, there’s some tiles missing back there,” and we gave them some TV views of the tiles that were missing. Personally, that didn’t cause me any great concern, because I knew that all the critical tiles were the ones primarily on the bottom. But, of course, the big question on the ground was, well, if some of those are missing, are there some on the bottom missing? So I know there was a lot of consternation going on on the ground about, hey, are the tiles really there. But there wasn’t much that we could do about it if they were gone, so I personally didn’t worry about it, and I don’t think John worried about it.
We did our de-orbit burn on the dark side of the Earth and started falling into the Earth’s atmosphere. It was still dark when we started to pick up outside the window; it turned this pretty color of pink. It wasn’t a big fiery kind of a thing like they had—with the Apollo Command Modules and those kinds of things, they used the ablative heat shield. It was just a bunch of little angry ions out there that were proving that it was kind of warm outside, on the order of 3000 °F out the front window. But it was pretty. I’ve often likened it—it was kind of like you were flying down a neon tube, about that color of pink that you might see in a neon tube.
The autopilot was on. It was going through the S-turns. John was somewhat concerned on that first flight that when we got down deeper into the atmosphere, whether those S-turns were going to work right. He ended up taking over control at around Mach 7. I deployed the air data probes around Mach 5, and we started to pick up air data. We started to pick up TACANS (Tactical Air Control and Navigation System) to use to update our navigation system. And we could see the coast of California. We came in over the San Joaquin Valley, which I’d flown over many times, and I could see Tehachapi, which is the little pass between San Joaquin and the Mojave Desert. You could see Edwards, and you could look out and see Three Sisters, which are three dry lakebeds out there. It was just like I was coming home. I’d been there lots of times. I did remark over the radio: “What a way to come to California.”
The first shuttle mission was judged a success, and preparations were in hand for the second flight of Columbia—the first time a spacecraft had ever been reused—in six months’ time. The success had not been lost on the Soviets, who noted the intention to launch Space Shuttles from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California from where they could go into polar orbit and overfly every square inch of Soviet territory, carrying weapons in their payload bay. The Soviets decided they needed a space shuttle as well. In fact, they decided to copy the US one. The Soviet space shuttle flew once, on an unpiloted mission in 1988, orbiting the Earth twice and making a perfect landing. The project was canceled shortly afterward.
In the meantime the Soviets had launched a seven-day mission to the Salyut 6 space station by two cosmonauts, Leonid Popov and Dumitru Prunariu of the Romanian air force. It was to be the last standard flight of the Soyuz spacecraft, which was to be replaced by the more capable Soyuz-T series. In reality, however, the Soyuz spacecraft, then and now the cornerstone of their manned spaceflight effort, had been undergoing a continuous evolution since its introduction. The Soyuz-T variant had a revised rendezvous system, uprated solar panels and allowed its crew of three to all wear spacesuits, something which had not been possible before.
Columbia returned to space on November 12, 1981, commanded by Joe Engle with Richard Truly as pilot. Unknown to the media or the public, it was to shock many astronauts and engineers.
TIMELINE
| 1981 | 20 February Space Shuttle Columbia fires its three engines in a 20-second test, clearing the final major hurdle to its maiden launch |
| 10 April Maiden launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia is scrubbed because of a computer malfunction | |
| 12 April Space Shuttle Columbia launched, carrying astronauts Robert L. Crippen and John W. Young | |
| 14 April Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base, California, completing the first flight of America’s operational Space Shuttle | |
| 14 May Russian Soyuz 40 mission to Salyut 6 space station marks the last flight of Soyuz spacecraft |
