By the time Air Force major Mike Adams strapped into his X-15 on the morning of November 15, 1967, the experimental aircraft had been flying for eight years with only a single serious accident and a handful of major emergencies. The engineers and pilots at Edwards Air Force Base considered the rocket plane “mature,” its flights so frequent that they saw them as routine.
Earlier generations of experimental high desert aviation had been conducted in secrecy, and witnessed only by a small handful of technicians and military personnel. Ten years before, the rate of attrition among test pilots had been so high that almost every week a new replacement seemed to arrive at Edwards following a crash. In the event of an accident, wives and relatives had been notified only after the fact. But now death no longer seemed to linger so close at hand, and Adams’s wife, Freida, had made sure to be present for each one of his flights aboard the X-15. It was a little frightening, but exciting—like Flash Gordon—and now she found herself getting caught up in the moment as she watched him walk across the arid runway to climb into the cockpit of the sleek, black rocket plane for the one hundred ninety-first flight of the program.
Stoic and reserved, Adams, thirty-seven, had wanted to become an astronaut since graduating from test pilot school, and had narrowly missed being selected as part of the group by then preparing to go to the moon. Although later chosen as one of the eight military pilots training to fly in the Pentagon’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, he grew impatient with lengthening delays in the program, and dropped out to volunteer for the X-15 research project; it seemed like the next best thing to going into orbit. In October 1966, Adams had become the twelfth and final pilot selected to fly the experimental plane, and less than a year later had completed half a dozen missions in the cockpit. By November 1967, he still had his mind set on space.
As her husband reached launch altitude, fell away from beneath the wing of the B-52, and ignited the engine of his spaceplane, Freida Adams was standing in the control room at Edwards with Mike’s mother, listening in as his reports came over the radio. With an abrupt punch of acceleration that pinned Major Adams back in his seat, within half a minute the X-15 was traveling at 2,000 feet per second and ascending rapidly through the stratosphere. In the control room, Adams’s fellow test pilot Pete Knight called out his altitude: 83,000 feet, then 110,000 feet; at 150,000 feet, Adams shut down the engine, but the X-15 kept ascending, as the designers intended, toward the blackness of space. Just over a minute later, Knight called a new reading: 261,000 feet, or 49 miles above sea level.
Part of the purpose of Adams’s flight was to conduct a series of atmospheric experiments, including one to collect micrometeorites, and use an electromechanical probe to gather data on solar radiation. Yet when activated—and unbeknownst to either Adams or the team monitoring the flight from the ground—the probe began creating electrical interference, which disabled the computer and automatic control systems of the X-15. By the time Adams reached the planned apogee of his trajectory, the plane’s computer was repeatedly shutting down and restarting, and the nose of the aircraft was drifting from its intended flight path. Under normal circumstances this might have been a minor problem, easily corrected. But Adams—distracted by the malfunctioning computer, almost certainly disoriented by his severe and undiagnosed vertigo—misread his instruments and compensated in the wrong direction. As it began its descent into the atmosphere, the nose of the X-15 continued to wander from its flight path, rotating until the aircraft was falling back to Earth first sideways, then backward—and kept turning, whirling through one complete revolution after another; Adams had lost control. At an altitude of around forty-three miles, and traveling at five times the speed of sound, he radioed to the ground.
“I’m in a spin, Pete.”
This was a previously unheard-of phenomenon. Uncontrolled aerodynamic spins were a well-known and potentially deadly part of conventional airplane flight, and one for which pilots had developed practiced recovery techniques. But no one had ever conducted wind tunnel studies or experiments on their potential in research aircraft like the X-15. There were no known ways to recover from one. Indeed, to Pete Knight and the experienced engineers manning the ground control station, the idea that a hypersonic plane could enter a spin in flight seemed impossible. Perhaps unable—or unwilling—to comprehend the situation, Knight didn’t immediately acknowledge Adams’s message. Instead, he told him to terminate his experiment and turn on the cockpit camera.
“I’m in a spin,” Adams repeated.
“Say again.”
“I’m in a spin.”
“Say again.”
For a few seconds, no one in the control room spoke. But the intercom remained silent, and Freida Adams felt the atmosphere in the room curdle; then she knew. A technician took her by the arm and led her away.
From his console, Pete Knight could see that the X-15 was falling fast. He began calling the altitude once more.
“OK, Mike, you’re coming through about 135 now.… Let’s get it straightened out.… Coming up to 80,000, Mike.”
There was no reply.
Plunging earthward at more than three thousand feet per second, the X-15 at last stopped spinning—through some combination of Adams’s struggles with the aircraft, its own inherent stability, and the actions of its automatic attitude control system. But as the X-15 continued hurtling toward the ground, this same automated system took hold of the aircraft, rolling it from side to side, oscillating with increasing violence. Within seconds, each motion reached the equivalent of 13 g’s—an invisible fist wrenching the plane with thirteen times the normal force of gravity. The X-15’s steel fuselage buckled, and the aircraft began to come apart in the air. When it reached 62,000 feet, and was still traveling at Mach 4, ground control lost all telemetry from the rocket plane. For almost another minute, Pete Knight continued trying to raise Adams over the radio. He was still trying as the first fragments of the plane hit the ground. Then a report came in from a chase plane pilot.
“Pete, I got dust on the lake down there.”
“What lake?”
The wreckage of Mike Adams’s X-15 was scattered over an area of the Mojave Desert twelve miles long and two miles wide. The central part of the fuselage came down among low hills a few miles south of China Lake Naval Weapons Center, near the town of Johannesburg, California. An emergency team arrived by helicopter within minutes. They found Major Adams’s body, still in the cockpit.
Afterward, NASA conducted its own investigation into the crash and published a three-hundred-page report, finding evidence of equipment malfunction and oversights rooted in complacency. The experimental probe that had failed during Adams’s ascent employed an electric drive that had never been tested for use at high altitude—but had been flown before, so technicians assumed it would be okay to fly again. Although, years earlier, Adams had participated in a centrifuge test that had revealed he suffered from vertigo so acute that it might incapacitate him in flight for minutes at a time, the information was never shared with the medical staff at Edwards.
The lack of public interest in the X-15 extended even to the death of one of the program’s pilots. In contrast to the way the tragic fire on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral had transfixed the world just ten months earlier, Mike Adams’s crash received scant attention: the New York Times printed the news on page 14; the Sacramento Bee carried a front-page report—below the fold, reported as the death of a local man.
But among the anomalies of Major Adams’s last flight was the duration of his rocket engine burn, which had continued for four seconds longer than planned. Instead of the projected height of 250,000 feet—around 47 miles above sea level—Adams had ascended an extra 16,000 feet, or just over 3 miles, and across what the US Air Force then regarded as the official boundary of space. In January 1968, Freida Adams drove from her new home in Louisiana to Barksdale Air Force Base, where she accepted the award of her husband’s silver astronaut wings, distinguishing Adams as the first American to die in spaceflight. The remains of the X-15 that killed him were buried at an unmarked site in the desert.
The rocket plane program—already winding down before Adams died—continued for just one more year. Of the three rocket planes in the fleet, by then only one remained airworthy, and support for the program in the Air Force, NASA, and Congress had dwindled. Fear of another fatal accident only hastened its end, and on December 20, 1968, the aircraft’s final mission was canceled.
Yet the X-15 had far surpassed its initial goals. And, despite the shadow cast over its record by Adams’s death, it came to be regarded as the most successful flight research project in history. The aircraft proved so far ahead of its time that some of the speed and altitude records set by its pilots would remain unbroken for more than fifty years; its journeys beyond the reach of Earth’s atmosphere made it the world’s first operational spaceplane. Although some of the experiments flown on the X-15 went on to be used as prototypes for the Apollo moon missions, much of the experimental technology it proved in flight would lie dormant for decades. But the most important discoveries made by the pilots flying the rocket plane were among the most obvious: with the X-15, NASA had established practical design principles for a winged spacecraft that could return to Earth from orbit.
At the moment the last of the X-15s was finally grounded, the crew of Apollo 8 were preparing for their audacious Christmas trip into lunar orbit. Senior figures at NASA were becoming confident they could land men on the moon before the end of the following year and—belatedly—their thoughts had turned to what might come afterward. Yet, even as they anticipated their greatest triumph, there was little agreement about what their next steps should be.
NASA Administrator Jim Webb, a wily Washington, DC, insider who had led the agency since the inception of the Apollo program, had maintained an unswerving focus on fulfilling President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade promise for every moment of his more than seven years on the job. But, in part because he feared distracting public attention—and congressional funding—from the race to beat the Soviet Union to the moon, for most of that time Webb had refused to commit the agency to serious planning for any project beyond that goal. When asked to answer questions about NASA’s long-term intentions in a letter from President Johnson written soon after his election in 1964, Webb had taken a year to deliver a full reply, and then did so with a report of elaborately contrived bureaucratic circumlocution.
But by 1968, with much of the costly hardware necessary to take the Apollo astronauts to the moon designed, built, delivered, and paid for, Webb’s dedicated evasiveness had also left NASA without a dynamic purpose for the future. In the absence of a new goal—and just as the financial cost of the war in Vietnam was escalating ruinously—Johnson and Congress began cutting the agency’s budget. They slashed NASA’s overall funding for 1969 by a quarter, and the army of staff at the agency’s contractors—North American, Grumman, Rocketdyne, and the rest of the aerospace companies who had worked on the moon shot—was cut almost in half, from 377,000 people to 186,000.
In part due to the pork barrel politics that had seen congressmen jostling to bring a part of the lunar bonanza into their districts, NASA facilities had ended up being constructed at sites scattered across the country in a network of semiautonomous “centers”: it was no coincidence that the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, soon to be renamed in Johnson’s honor, had found a home not only in the President’s home state, but close to the districts of the handful of local politicians with seats on key congressional committees. Other NASA centers—including the launch and assembly facilities at Cape Canaveral, the Langley aeronautical research center in Virginia, and the rocket engine test site in southern Mississippi—each brought national attention, and jobs, to the regions around them in the boom years of the space race. But when Congress shut off the spigot of Apollo funding, those same communities felt the consequences.
In Huntsville, Alabama, Wernher von Braun had built his own fiefdom of rocketry at the Marshall Space Flight Center, among 1,800 acres of lush forest and rich ocher dirt carved from the middle of the US Army’s sprawling Redstone Arsenal. From his hilltop office in Building 4200 he presided over a complex of workshops, laboratories, and test stands where a team of more than seven thousand men and women developed the family of powerful rockets that had taken every astronaut since Alan Shepard into space. And while the glamour and the news cameras went to Mission Control in Houston and the launchpads at the Cape, it was from Marshall that the technology emerged to bring the moon within America’s grasp—and von Braun who received the lion’s share of NASA’s funding. Under his direction, the center had expanded to include its own post office, day care, and internal taxi service; armies of contractors flooded the area, bringing new roads, schools, and a jet airport. In less than twenty years the population of the small southern town nearby—until recently known as the Watercress Capital of the World—grew nearly tenfold, and became so identified with its influx of German scientists that local wits referred to it as “Hunsville.”
But once the last of the Apollo hardware had shipped and the layoffs began, the bubble burst: in Huntsville, unemployment rose, restaurants fell quiet, and apartments emptied out in a city that had only recently seen waiting lists for motel rooms. The city was a bellwether of what was to come elsewhere: within a few years, the post-lunar blight would arrive in Houston, and strike the beachfront towns around Cape Canaveral. And if NASA was to save itself from wasting away to nothing, its leaders had to come up with a new idea, one as simple and bold as Apollo, with which to seize hold of the nation’s imagination again.
Fortunately, Thomas Paine, who replaced an exhausted and disappointed Jim Webb as NASA Administrator in October 1968, had just such an idea. Paine, forty-six, was quite unlike his predecessor: a Washington, DC, neophyte who had little enthusiasm for space travel before arriving at NASA to serve as Webb’s deputy; his name had been chosen from a list of company executives interested in taking any senior position in the federal government. The son of a US Navy commodore, and a veteran who had served on a submarine in the Pacific during World War II, Paine had spent much of his career working at General Electric. He was an exuberant and visionary technocrat who continued to see the world through a maritime lens. If a meeting ran too long, he might fill the time doodling a sketch of his boat, the USS Pompon, steaming across the surface of the ocean.
In 1969, with President Nixon newly elected to the White House, Paine pressed the administration to support a new phase of exploration for NASA: even more extravagant than Apollo, embracing the United States’ destiny in the stars. The moon landing, Paine declared, “started a movement that will never end, a new outward movement in which man will go to the planets, first to explore, and then to occupy and utilize them.”
At the center of these plans was a space station built in Earth orbit, the staging post from which to establish permanent bases on the moon and to launch teams of astronauts on a two-year mission to visit Venus and land on Mars. The Martian explorers would embark from Earth in 1981, propelled by nuclear rocket engines, which were already at an advanced state of development, at a test site specially constructed by scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory at Jackass Flats, Nevada. As the space station and the moon bases took shape, the astronauts would operate a three-part “Space Transportation System”: including a “space tug” to ferry them down to the lunar surface, a nuclear-powered transport craft; and the keystone of the arrangement, a reusable vehicle that could launch from the ground like a rocket and land like an airplane, to move astronauts and equipment between the ground and Earth orbit.
But Paine, for all his vision and ebullience, had badly misread the political climate. Nixon had little interest in the space program, and was alert to the danger that NASA might ride a wave of global euphoria over the moon landing into an ever-more spendthrift future. And, even amid the patriotic enthusiasm surrounding the lunar triumph, the American public had scant appetite for sending men to Mars, an exploit that one congressman told the press could cost as much as $200 billion. In a Gallup poll taken immediately after the Apollo 11 mission, 53 percent of respondents said they opposed a Mars landing; a Newsweek survey revealed that more than half of the public wanted the President to spend less on space exploration. When Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were feted at a celebrity-packed gala dinner in Los Angeles less than a month after returning from their flight, and hosted by Nixon himself, protesters hung a banner from the office building opposite the venue that simply read: FUCK MARS.
As the President made it clear that he wouldn’t pay for any further interplanetary adventures, Paine abandoned plans for bases on the moon, the nuclear-powered transport, and the space tug. He focused instead on winning support for funding a space station—and the reusable vehicle necessary to build it and resupply it once complete. This craft would be a “space shuttle” with which to realize a long-held dream of cheap, routine access to Earth orbit, an orbital delivery vehicle operated along the same budgetary principles as a commercial airline: a vehicle that erstwhile Nazi general Walter Dornberger described as “an economical space plane capable of putting a fresh egg, every morning, on the table of every crew member of a space station circling the globe.”
Dottie Lee got the call one Friday morning in early 1969. When she arrived in his office, her boss in the Structures and Mechanics Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was brief. “Monday, you’re to report to Building 32. You don’t tell anybody where you’re going, or what you’re going to do,” he said. He handed her a document: “Read this.”
Lee, forty-two years old, a formidable technician with coiffed flame-red hair and a taste for vodka martinis, was one of the few female engineers working in Houston, and perhaps the only one supervising a team of men. A math graduate who had once imagined becoming a high school geometry teacher, she had instead been hired straight from college by NACA to work as a “human computer,” making the complex aerodynamic calculations necessary for the early days of hypersonic flight. Lee was eight years into her career there, and had been promoted to Senior Mathematician, when she was asked to fill in as a temporary replacement for Max Faget’s secretary, who was leaving on her honeymoon. Lee didn’t know how to type, and spent most of her time at her desk in Faget’s office calculating a triple integral. At the end of two weeks, Faget asked her to work for him full-time, as a project engineer. She learned on the job, first on the design of experimental rocket flights at NACA and, after the creation of NASA, in the Apollo program, specializing in the esoteric discipline of aerothermodynamics. By 1969, she was supervising a group of contractors at work on the heat shield protecting the Apollo command module on its return to Earth from the moon.
After the meeting with her division chief, Lee had to explain to the contractors that she had been reassigned, but gave them no details. “I’m going to be out of pocket for a little while,” she said. “I cannot say anything of where I am.” The document Lee had read outlined the principles of a reusable spacecraft that could fly into orbit and then land on a runway; the project was secret. On Monday morning she arrived at Building 32, a windowless hangar-like space in the northeast corner of the Houston campus, to discover a guard at the door with a clipboard in his hand. Only those whose names were on his list were allowed to enter.
Inside, a clandestine team of draftsmen and engineers representing each of the major disciplines of spacecraft construction—including aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, and thermal protection—set to work on the design of the Space Shuttle, under the supervision of Max Faget. The balsa-wood model that Faget had built in his garage was at the heart of these initial plans—for a fully reusable spaceplane system made up of two separate winged vehicles, each flown by its own crew, but piggybacked together for launch. The first was a booster craft, as large as a Boeing 747, which would carry the second—a lighter vehicle the size of smaller airliner—on its back to an altitude of fifty miles. There, the booster would release the smaller craft—the orbiter, the straight-winged spaceplane of Faget’s design—which would carry on under its own power into space. The booster would then fly back to land on an airstrip at the launch site, ready to start again. The orbiter would carry out its mission in space before reentering the atmosphere and landing on an airstrip like a conventional airplane.
At first, the new spacecraft was planned on an even more ambitious scale than Apollo, with technology fit to carry American astronauts into the twenty-first century. Tom Paine called for a $14 billion project that would be ready to fly by 1975, powered by fourteen massive cryogenic engines and large enough to lift the components of a space station into orbit.
But long before President Nixon agreed to sign off on the creation of NASA’s next-generation spacecraft, the agency’s seamlessly futuristic aspirations were dashed once again on the unyielding economic realities of the 1970s. When funding for the combination of a space station and shuttle received congressional approval only with the narrowest of margins, Paine recognized that, by asking for both, he risked getting neither. So he shunted plans for the space station off into the distant future, on the understanding that the shuttle was the only remaining element of the once-complex Space Transportation System that could exist without any of the others. And if—in the absence of a space station, or moon bases, or the staging of interplanetary rocket missions—the proposed shuttle no longer had any specific destination to reach, then surely plenty of reasons could be found for it to visit low Earth orbit.
Even then, Congress and the White House balked at the extravagant price tag for the shuttle. Instead of $14 billion, Congress and the hard-headed bureaucrats of Nixon’s new Office of Management and Budget agreed to allocate just $5.5 billion for development of the new vehicle. Based on NASA’s existing calculations, this amount was far too little money to create an experimental machine that would require the research and development of so much untried technology. But the NASA chiefs—who had come to believe that the future of US manned spaceflight, and the agency itself, depended on committing to an ambitious new spacecraft—agreed, regardless. It was the first of many fatal compromises.
Despite the budget cut, NASA continued to pitch the shuttle as a panacea for all of the nation’s future orbital transport, a space truck that could be robust enough for routine operation, with quick turnaround times making it available to launch every two weeks. Most important, the shuttle would be so cheap to operate that it would soon pay for itself: in contrast to the Saturn V rockets that were taking astronauts to the moon at the staggering price of $185 million per launch, the reusable shuttle might cost a mere $350,000 each time. But these numbers only made sense if the new vehicle could fly almost as frequently as a commercial airliner, spreading the huge cost of its development and construction over a great number of launches.
To make this argument, NASA commissioned a cost benefit analysis from Mathematica Inc., a consultancy cofounded by one of the original developers of game theory. The Mathematica study, which would soon become infamous for its fantastical accounting, predicted that the shuttle would indeed provide the United States with a cheap alternative to expendable rockets—so long as it made at least 736 flights between 1978 and 1990, or fifty-seven missions a year; more than one a week.
At the launch rate imagined by Mathematica, the new workhorse spacecraft could not only provide for every one of NASA’s own orbital needs, but also help the government turn a profit by taking on commercial satellite customers, and fly military missions, replacing all of the expendable rockets that the Pentagon used for launching its spy satellites. Nixon’s accountants examined the projections and spluttered in disbelief. “They start at a number that strains credibility,” wrote one, “and go up from there.”
To support its case and make the numbers more plausible, NASA sought support from the Air Force—and Pentagon backing proved decisive in finally winning presidential endorsement for the shuttle. But in exchange, NASA had allowed the Air Force to set two specifications for the orbiter that would profoundly complicate its design.
The White House had recently canceled the “black” Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, partly due to the fruits of work by the National Reconnaissance Office—a three-letter government agency so secret that it did not yet officially exist. Staffed by officers from the Air Force and the CIA, the NRO had no headquarters building, but operated from behind an unmarked door on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. The new agency had overseen a series of classified reconnaissance satellites of steeply increasing sophistication that rendered obsolete the idea of placing human spies with cameras in orbit.
Code-named Hexagon, the NRO satellites could capture images of objects on Earth as small as two feet across; with such fine definition, analysts could count the number of people sitting on a picnic blanket in Gorky Park—or of ground-to-air missiles on a military base in Kazakhstan. But the satellites, which the Pentagon had been sending into space on modified Titan missiles, carried cameras loaded with sixty miles of film, were each the size of a Greyhound bus, and weighed fifteen tons. To carry this enormous payload into space, the new shuttle was designed with a cargo bay sixty feet long and fifteen feet wide; to accommodate Hexagon and similar, even more powerful, spy satellites already in development, NASA’s new space truck would be required to lift up to twenty-two tons into polar orbit.
The Air Force also insisted that the shuttle be able to glide a thousand miles east or west after it reentered the atmosphere. This extensive “cross-range” ability would serve several purposes of interest to the Pentagon: it could avoid being forced down in communist territory in the event of an emergency in space; it would enable it to take off and land from its launch site after a single orbit, making it possible to undertake swift once-around-the-earth reconnaissance missions that would be back on the ground less than two hours after launch; and it would also make it possible to conduct offensive operations in space, including missions to snatch Soviet spacecraft from orbit and return to Earth before the owners of the kidnapped satellites had time to respond.
Yet such long-distance glides were beyond the capacity of Max Faget’s ingeniously lightweight and straight-winged design. As the secret drawings coming off the drafting tables in Building 32 multiplied—first into dozens, then scores, of variations—Dottie Lee and the other engineers began work on a design that would meet Air Force expectations. What finally emerged was a big triangular-winged vehicle the size of a DC-3 airliner; something that began to look a lot like an enlarged version of the old Dyna-Soar spaceplane. This delta-wing shuttle had the range that the Air Force wanted, but was so much heavier than Faget’s original concept that it necessitated saving weight elsewhere: it meant discarding the air-breathing jet engines the designers once considered for the orbiter, which would have allowed it to fly under its own power once it returned to Earth’s atmosphere. Now the orbiter would have to glide down to its landing strip, plummeting to Earth at the speed and angles of a fighter jet, but approaching the runway with total precision to execute a perfect landing at the first attempt.
Other key parts of the original concept would soon be abandoned, too—including the rocket-powered escape system necessary to save the crew if the spacecraft faced imminent destruction, especially during launch. Another of Faget’s innovations, some version of this system had been built into every previous NASA manned spacecraft since the beginning of the program; but now weight—and cost—meant that it had to go.
Faget—who had designed the Apollo capsule in which Grissom, White, and Chaffee had been incinerated in January 1967, and served on the subsequent board of inquiry into the fire—was well aware of the cost of faulty design. He opposed the new configuration of the nascent spacecraft and persisted in producing variants of his own original concept long after drawings of the Pentagon’s choice had been sent out to contractors for production studies. The pugnacious engineer was a powerful figure within NASA, and answered directly to the head of the Manned Spacecraft Center. But when in November 1970 he wrote an internal memo attempting to assert control over the specifications for the shuttle, he was cut off by a relatively junior Air Force officer; it was clear where the power lay. “We’ve made a pact with the devil,” Faget later told a friend in the astronaut corps.
Another serious compromise in the design of the new spacecraft was yet to come. By 1972, congressional budget restrictions meant that Faget and the other engineers were forced to abandon their plan for an orbiter carried by a fully reusable piloted booster craft, complete with its own internal fuel tanks. Instead they drew up proposals for an only partially reusable and unmanned booster stage: constructed around a separate external tank to carry all the fuel for the vehicle’s main engines, and two powerful strap-on rockets that would provide the majority of the thrust to reach orbit. The expendable fuel tank, once emptied, would be jettisoned at the edge of space, falling back into the atmosphere and disintegrating before raining into the Indian Ocean in pieces. The exhausted strap-on boosters could descend on parachutes for recovery at sea, refurbishment, and reuse on future missions.
At first, the designers proposed that these boosters use liquid-fueled rocket engines like all previous manned spacecraft: these were not only powerful but could be throttled up and down, shut off and started up again, as required. But such engines were also expensive, and their delicate fuel tanks and plumbing might be too easily damaged to survive the impact of an ocean splashdown and immersion in seawater. So the technicians turned instead to solid rocket technology. Giant segmented metal cylinders packed with a rubbery compound of volatile fuel, solid rockets were not unlike massive fireworks: once lit, they could not be throttled or shut down, but continued firing until they burned out. As a result, they could not be flight-tested before launch—and had never before been used for manned missions; veteran engineers at NASA, including Wernher von Braun, believed they were too dangerous ever to be used to carry humans. And although Max Faget and the other designers favored the liquid option, they were overruled from above: years of experience using the solid rockets to launch missiles and carry unmanned missions into space had shown they were simple, cheap, and apparently reliable.
So it was that the designs at last left the drawing board and, with Nixon’s approval, by the end of summer 1972 NASA had awarded four main contracts for each element of the Space Transportation System. The orbiter would be built in California by the major contractor on the Apollo program—and builders of the ill-fated Apollo 1 capsule—the recently renamed conglomerate North American Rockwell; under the project direction of NASA’s propulsion experts at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Rockwell’s subsidiary Rocketdyne would handle the development of the vehicle’s liquid-fueled main rocket engines. Marshall would also take overall responsibility for the giant external fuel tank, fabricated by defense contractor Martin Marietta at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans; and the manufacture of the motors for the solid rocket boosters, by the Thiokol Chemical Corporation, at its sprawling Wasatch facility in the deserts of northern Utah.
Structural assembly of the first in a fleet of four orbiters—to be named Constitution in honor of the country’s impending bicentennial celebrations—began at Rockwell’s Air Force Plant 42 in June 1974. In the meantime, NASA set out to assemble the new class of astronauts who would fly the revolutionary spacecraft: an intake of pilots and engineers unlike any other in the agency’s history.