Category BOLD THEY RISE

After John Young and I made the first flight of the Space Shuttle aboard Co­lumbia all those years ago, people would sometimes ask me what the best part of the flight was. I would always use John’s classic answer: “The part between takeoff and landing.”

Now that it’s all said and done, I think that describes what the best part of the Space Shuttle program was: the part between our first launch in April 1981 and the last landing in July 2011.

There were some low points in between, particularly the loss of both of the orbiters I had the privilege to fly and their crews, but as a whole I think the shuttle has been one of the most marvelous vehicles that has ever gone into space—a fantastic vehicle unlike anything that’s ever been built.

The Space Shuttle has carried hundreds of people into space and deliv­ered hundreds of tons of payloads into space. The shuttle gave us the Gali­leo and Magellan probes, which opened our eyes to new worlds, and it let us not only launch the Hubble Space Telescope but also repair and upgrade it time and time again, and Hubble has revolutionized our understanding of not only our solar system but the entire universe. The shuttle carried a lot of classified military payloads early on that probably helped the United States win the Cold War.

The Space Shuttle let us build the International Space Station. The Space Station is an incredible accomplishment, a marvelous complex, but it was the Space Shuttle that taught us that we could build a complicated space vehicle and make it work very well. The Space Station would not have been possible without the Space Shuttle.

But in those early days, I think the shuttle did something else, a little less concrete but just as important. The late ’70s and early ’80s weren’t re­ally a great time for the United States. We’d basically lost the Vietnam War. We’d been through economic hard times, through the hostage crisis in Iran.

President Reagan was shot just before our flight on STS-i. And morale for a lot of people in the country was really low. People were feeling like things just weren’t going right for us.

And that first flight, it was obvious that it was a big deal. It was a big thing for NASA, but it was a big thing for the country. It wasn’t just our ac­complishment at NASA; it was an American accomplishment. It was a mo­rale booster for the United States. It was a rallying point for the American people. And the awareness may not be as high now as it was then, but I think that’s still true today. I think you saw that when the shuttle made its last flight; the pride people had in what it had accomplished and the fact that a million people watched it. When I talk to people, they think space exploration is something we need to be doing, for the future of the United States and humankind.

The retirement of the shuttle was kind of bittersweet for me. I’m proud of all it’s accomplished, and I’m sorry to see it end. But I believe in moving on. I’d like to see us get out of Earth orbit and go back to the moon, and to other destinations, and eventually to Mars.

John and I got to see a lot of the development of the Space Shuttle first­hand. As astronauts, we were involved from an operations standpoint, and as the first crew, John and I visited the sites where they were working on the shuttle, getting it ready to fly. We had an outstanding, dedicated team, people who really believed they were doing something important for the nation. When we finally got into the shuttle for that first flight, meeting those thousands of people gave me a lot of confidence that we had a good vehicle to fly on.

I never expected to be selected for that first flight. I thought they would pick someone more experienced to fly with John. I was excited that they picked me, and I was honored to be a part of that flight. All told, that flight was the beginning of something truly amazing, and I’m honored to be one of the thousands of people who made it happen.

Bob Crippen

When I (David) first became involved in the Outward Odyssey series, working on the Skylab volume, my coauthors and I were shown a list of proposed titles for the first eight books in the series. As authors working on our first book, coming up with a title seemed like one of the more ex­citing parts of the job. We were thus somewhat pleased to be disappointed with the working title the publisher had provided: “Exemplary Outpost.” It was an accurate title, but it lacked the poetry of the other titles on the list—titles like Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow ofthe Moon. I’m not sure that we quite lived up to that standard with Homesteading Space, but we made our best effort.

Even though it meant giving up the privilege of titling this volume, Heather and I were quite happy to go along with the name the publisher had suggested for this book: Bold They Rise. It was, quite literally, poetic, taken from the poem by series editor Colin Burgess that appears as the epigraph.

When we first read the poem, very early on in the process of writing this volume, we pictured the title as being about the Space Shuttles themselves, reflecting the poem’s reference to “winged emissaries.” As the book took shape, however, we realized that was no longer true; the title had taken on a new meaning for us. Rather than being about the hardware, it was about the men and women who risked their lives to expand humankind’s frontiers.

And in that vein, this book owes an incredible debt of gratitude to the NASA Johnson Space Center (jsc) Oral History Project, without which it quite literally would not exist.

With Homesteading Space, it was relatively easy to create a book that filled a unique niche—with a few notable exceptions, such as a handful of official NASA publications and David Shayler’s Skylab, very little had been written about America’s first space station. Breaking new ground was not a particular challenge.

With this book, the challenge was a little greater. There are more books about the Space Shuttle program, so it was somewhat harder to create some­thing unique. Most of the previous works, however, fall into one of three categories—technical volumes, which span the entire program but include none of the human experience; astronaut memoirs, which relate the hu­man experience, but only from one person’s perspective; or specific histories, which are more exhaustive but focus on only a limited slice of the program.

Based on the overall goal of the Outward Odyssey series, a new niche we could address became clear—a book relating the human experience of the Space Shuttle program, not limited to one person’s story but including a variety of viewpoints and spanning the early years of the program. Origi­nally the goal was to create a “Homesteading Space of the shuttle program,” but it quickly became apparent that was a misdirected goal. Homesteading had only three manned missions to cover, and thus we could delve much deeper and more broadly in covering them. To attempt to write about the subject of this book in that manner would be to do either the subject or the reader a grave disservice; we needed to narrow our approach to create something that was both relevant and readable.

When we began reading from the jsc oral history interviews early in our research, the ideal approach for the book became apparent. Here was a wealth of first-person experience, describing in detail what it was like to be there—what it was like to involved in the design of a new spacecraft, what it was like to risk one’s life testing that vehicle, what it was like to do things that no one had done before in space, what it was like to float freely in the vacuum of space as a one-man satellite, what it was like to hold thousands of pounds of hardware in one’s hands, what it was like to watch friends die.

This book almost exclusively offers the astronauts’ perspective on the early years of the Space Shuttle program, and, while research for the vol­ume drew on several resources, the extensive quoted material draws heavi­ly from the jsc Oral History Project. It’s the astronauts’ story, told in their own words, about their own experiences.

Bold They Rise is not a technical volume. We would love for this volume to inspire you seek out another book that delves more deeply into the tech­nical aspects of the shuttle. There are parts of the story that we had to deal with in what seemed like a relatively superficial manner; even dedicating an entire chapter to the Challenger accident and the effects it had seems woeful­ly insufficient. Entire books could, and have, been written about the Chal­lenger accident. If this book leaves you wanting to know more about that incident or other aspects of the shuttle’s history, we encourage you to seek out those volumes. And of course, individual astronauts have told their sto­ries in memoirs with more personality than we were able to capture here. The subject of this book is such that it can’t be covered by any one volume exhaustively, but hopefully we have provided a unique, informative, and engaging overview here.

The chronological scope of the book was also set by the publisher to fit within the Outward Odyssey series. (Another volume, written by Rick Houston, picks up the Space Shuttle story where this one leaves off.) Ini­tially, the ending point of the book was a bit discomfiting; the Challenger accident seemed a rather low note on which to end a book. There were any number of successes both before and after Challenger. Why would one pick the lowest point of the early years as a place to end the story? But, in a very real way, it was the best possible way to turn this history into a story arc.

As astronaut Mike Mullane wrote in his memoir Riding Rockets,

The NASA team responsible for the design of the Space Shuttle was the same team that had put twelve Americans on the Moon and returned them safely to Earth across a quarter million miles of space. The Apollo program represented the greatest engineering achievement in the history of humanity. Nothing else, from the Pyramids to the Manhattan Project, comes remotely close. The men and women who were responsible for the glory of Apollo had to have been af­fected by their success. While no member of the Shuttle design team would have ever made the blasphemous claim, “We’re gods. We can do anything," the reality was this: The Space Shuttle itself was such a statement. Mere mortals might not be able to design and safely operate a reusable spacecraft boosted by the world’s largest, segmented, uncontrollable solid-fueled rockets, but gods certainly could.

That, then, is the story of this book—a Greek tragedy about hubris and its price. It’s a story of the confidence that bred some of the most amazing achievements in human history but also led to overconfidence.

But make no mistake, this book is also a love letter. Both authors of this volume were born after the end of the last Saturn-Apollo flight; the Space Shuttle is “our” spacecraft. The Challenger accident occurred when we were still children; it was our “where were you” equivalent of the Kennedy assas­sination. In our “day jobs” as NASA education writers, we wrote extensively about the shuttle, its crews, its missions, its accomplishment and ultimate­ly its retirement. We write this with a fondness for the shuttle, even when that means telling the story with warts-and-all honesty.

It’s been an honor and a pleasure to tell this story. We hope you enjoy reading it.

David Hitt

Heather R. Smith

As mentioned in the preface but bears repeating, this volume owes a great deal of gratitude to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, with­out which it would not exist.

In addition, we are grateful to the University of Nebraska Press, and in particular to senior editor Rob Taylor, for their dedication to chronicling the history of space exploration through their publication of the Outward Odyssey series and specifically through their help and support with this vol­ume. In addition, the authors wish to express their substantial thanks to Outward Odyssey series editor Colin Burgess, who has been a loyal shep­herd, a wise counsel, and a good friend during the process.

It was an incredible honor to have astronaut Bob Crippen agree to write the foreword for this volume. For David, the journey to writing this book begins in a very real way in front of a television set in 1981 watching Bob Crippen and John Young make history, and to conclude that journey with Crippen being a part of this project is a surreal bookend to the experience.

Astronaut (and Homesteading Space coauthor) Owen Garriott provided much assistance early in the project, making contacts and helping to get things moving, and that assistance is much appreciated. In addition, astro­naut Bo Bobko was also involved in the early stages of the book and pro­vided insight into its direction and helped open some doors. Astronauts Hank Hartsfield and Joe Kerwin and nasa legends Chris Kraft and George Mueller also provided us with material for the book.

Phillip Fox, Jon Meek, Jordan Walker, Rebecca Freeman, Lauren McPher­son, and Suzanne Haggerty read early portions of this book in progress and pro­vided feedback.

On a personal note, the authors wish to acknowledge Finn and Caden Smith, ages seven and five at the time the original manuscript was finished, for their sacrifices during deadline work on this book.

In addition, David would like to thank the following:

Heather, who for years has made my writing better and without whom I could not have written this book.

As per last time, my father, Bill Hitt, for engendering my interest in spaceflight that set me on the path to, among other things, writing this book. Jim Abbott, for giving me my first break and being a brilliant editor and a wonderful mentor and for shaping the man I am today. Holly Snow, for opening the door for my new involvement with nasa.

Owen Garriott and Joe Kerwin, for sponsoring me through Olympus and for sharing their stories, their insight, their knowledge, their expertise, and their friendship.

All of those who traveled with me on multiple road trips to Kennedy Space Center, which occasionally involved successfully watching shuttle launches.

Heather would like also to thank the following:

David, for offering me the opportunity to coauthor a book and for shep­herding me through the process.

Mrs. Hughes, for seeing potential in the writing skills of a young, tenth – grade Heather and inviting her to write for the school yearbook staff, spark­ing an interest in writing and communication that led me down this career path. Mr. Sandy Barnard, for believing that I could write and write well whatever I put my pen to.

The Times-Mail in Lawrence County, Indiana, the proud home to three astronauts, including Charlie Walker, who is quoted extensively in this book, for giving me my first professional writing job and an occasional space-related assignment that made a big difference in me ending up writ­ing at NASA and thus ending up writing this book. I was blessed to work in a community that adores its hometown astronauts and that still gets ex­cited about spaceflight.

Starbucks locations in Huntsville, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and the Flint River Coffee Company in Huntsville, Alabama, for hospi­tality and tasty coffee. Portions of this book were written and edited there.

And most important, God my Father. Any writing talent that I possess is a gift from You, and You have shepherded my life and career. May You get any and all glory for this volume.

Bold They Rise

On the one hand is the idea. On the other, the reality.

Sometimes the latter fails to live up to the former. The reality of expe­rience doesn’t always measure up to the way we picture it. So often in the case of space exploration, however, it is the idea that utterly fails to do jus­tice to the reality.

For example, countless descriptions of the Space Shuttle document its specifications to the smallest of details. But knowing that the vehicle stands 184 feet tall and weighs 4.5 million pounds fueled for launch doesn’t begin to capture the experience of standing at the base of the vehicle as it towers on the launchpad.

“I wasn’t intimidated by it,” recalled astronaut Mike Lounge of the first time he saw the fully stacked vehicle. “Well, that’s not exactly true. The first time we went down to the Cape on our class tour, my reaction when see­ing the pad, at seeing the orbiter and all that, is, ‘My God, this stuff’s too big. It can’t possibly fly.’ I think that’s a common reaction. I knew how big it was, but it’s different when you actually see it and you’re walking under­neath the orbiter and all this stuff. But having gotten over that, it was kind of fun to be there with the hardware. Everyone enjoys hardware over sim­ulations and paper.”

If the vehicle itself transcends expectations, NASA’s astronauts found that so, too, did the experience of actually flying aboard the Space Shuttle. Those expectations would have gradually mounted during months of mis­sion preparation and training, but the experience would truly begin in ear­nest when the highly anticipated launch day arrived.

For an astronaut, that first launch day comes only after years with NASA. Since 1978 astronauts have first been selected as “candidates” and must com­plete an initial orientation period, replete with training in almost every as­pect of the agency’s work, before becoming official members of the corps.

Then there are ground assignments supporting the program in ways that have nothing to do with getting ready for a mission.

And then, finally, years after selection, there’s the crew assignment. Fol­lowed by more training and preparation. There’s practice on the gener­al things that will occur during the mission, like launch and landing, to make sure everyone is ready. There’s practice for all the things that theoret­ically could occur during the mission but shouldn’t, the potential anoma­lies and malfunctions the astronauts have to be ready for. There’s training on mission-specific tasks, the unique things each astronaut will have to do on this particular flight. There’s preparation, working with the scientists or engineers or companies or countries responsible for the mission payloads to make sure that those, too, are ready to go. So when launch day finally arrives, it’s a long-awaited culmination of a great deal of time and effort.

Astronaut Terry Hart recalled his launch day at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (ksc) in Florida, home of the Space Shuttle’s launch complexes: “It was a clear, cool morning there and we went through the whole morning, going through the traditions of having breakfast together, and there was al­ways a cake there for the crew before they go out. And then going into the van and realizing that all the Mercury guys went on that van, it was really a very heady experience.”

For three-time shuttle veteran David Leestma, that experience of wav­ing to people while walking out to the Astrovan, suited up and ready for launch, was a memorable moment. “We always called that the last walk on Earth,” Leestma said. “There’s always crowds of people there to see you in case you never come back or something. It was one of those little bits of kind of gruesome humor. And then you go out to the launchpad, and you’ve been through this. You’ve been there many times before, because you train in the orbiter a few times and you have countdown demonstra­tion tests and things. And this time you get to the pad and there’s nobody there. You go, ‘Ooh.’ And the vehicle is steaming and creaking and groan­ing and you go, ‘This is for real.’”

On the launchpad, the Space Shuttle is positioned vertically, its three major components having been stacked together in the enormous Vehi­cle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center before having been rolled out—slowly—to the launchpad atop a huge crawler. Standing tallest is the orange-brown external tank. The external tank has no engines of its own but carries the liquid fuel for the launch in two separate tanks, one con­taining liquid oxygen and the other holding liquid hydrogen. The tanks are supercooled to maintain the fuels at the cryogenic temperatures need­ed to keep them in liquid state—below minus four hundred degrees Fahr­enheit in the case of the hydrogen. Fully fueled, the external tank weighs about 1.7 million pounds.

On either side of the external tank is a slender, white solid rocket boost­er (srb), the two of which together provide the bulk of the power for the first two minutes of the launch. Once ignited, they together provide 6.2 million pounds of thrust. Their name comes from the fact that they carry their propellant—consisting largely of aluminum mixed with an oxidizer to cause it to burn—in a solid, rubbery form.

And then there’s the orbital spacecraft itself, the winged, white-and-black orbiter. Near the nose of the orbiter is the crew cabin, where the astronauts fly the vehicle and live during their mission. Farther aft is the payload bay, with its two large doors. And in the rear are the three Space Shuttle main engines, fueled by the external tank, each capable of generating a thrust of almost half a million pounds.

By launch day, the launch complex’s servicing structure has been rotated back, revealing the orbiter. The shuttle is ready for its crew. The entrance to the orbiter is through a hatch in the side of the crew cabin, near the top of the vertically stacked vehicle, almost 150 feet above the launchpad.

Leestma recalled the process of boarding the vehicle via an elevator in the launch tower and a gantry arm near the top of the structure:

As usual, people don’t say much in elevators. It’s true whether you’re in a hotel or on the launchpad. You kind of watch the numbers tick by, and instead offloors, they do everything in feet in the elevators, so you’re so many feet above sea level. And then across the gantry, and when you walk across the gantry you’re looking down into the flame trench. And you’ve been there before, but the obvious thing that’s striking you is that this is for real, we’re going to go. At least you hope we’re going to go today. . .. You get up to the White Room, the access arm, and there’s only two, maybe three people there and that’s it. There’s nobody else on the pad and everybody’s blocked off for four or five miles away. This is for real. And it’s groaning and moaning and you know that it’s going to launch, and it’s fueled and ready to go. It’s a big bomb there, sitting on the pad. And you hope that all the fire goes down and you go up, and let’s go, let’s get on it with it. It’s great…. We got strapped in, and again, the guys strapping us in were a lot of the same guys that strapped in Al Shepard on his flight [to become the first American in space during Project Mercury]. So it was a very heady time. . . . You get in and you just cant wait for it to happen.

Astronaut Jerry Ross, who was the first to launch into space seven times, said journeying out to the launchpad when the vehicle is fully fueled and ready to go is quite different than going out there any other time, not only because of the reality of the situation, but because the shuttle itself is different.

The vehicle really does give you this sense that it’s an animal that’s awake and just ready to go do something. When you go out there and the vehicle’s not fu­eled, it’s not hissing, it’s not boiling off vapors, it’s not making noises that you don’t hear, that you do hear when it’s fueled. And there’s the tremendous amount of anticipation. My first flight was the twenty-third flight of the shuttle, and I had listened to every crew come back, and I took very detailed notes of their debriefings, which were quite exhaustive early on. I listened to everything they said, and they would give us a very detailed description of what it was like, what the sensations were of launch. I put that into my databank, and I would daydream about that when I’d go running or work out at the gym or something like that. I knew it was going to be a pretty exciting ride.

The crew cabin of the shuttle has two levels. The “upper” deck is the flight deck, where the commander and pilot sit at the vehicle’s controls, with a bank of large windows in front of them. The flight deck has room for up to two more astronauts to sit during launch, and behind them are windows looking into the payload bay and the controls for the orbiter’s robotic arm.

Below the flight deck is the mid-deck, where the rest of the crew sits during launch. Once in orbit, the mid-deck serves as the primary living area for the crew, with storage lockers and the orbiter’s kitchen and bathroom and main sleeping area. The mid-deck also provides access to the vehicle’s payload bay. During launch, the mid-deck has very limited visibility, and the astronauts sitting there depend largely on word from the flight deck and the very ob­vious physical sensations of launch to know what’s going on during ascent.

Prior to launch, once the crew members have boarded the orbiter and been strapped into their seats, the waiting begins. Traditionally, the astro-

nauts board about three hours before the scheduled launch time, lying on their backs in their chairs until launch.

Very often, this is as far as things get. Any number of issues, from unac­ceptable weather conditions to a technical glitch with the vehicle and more, can result in the launch being scrubbed and pushed back. In those cases, the astronauts are helped out of the vehicle, and work begins to prepare for the next launch attempt. “Probably one of the most frustrating things is when you get near your takeoff time, your launch time, and then you know there’s a problem, and you go, ‘Please solve it. We don’t want to wait here. Get us off the pad,’” noted Leestma. “The last people you want to have to make the real technical decision whether you go or not is the crew, because they’re always, ‘Go.’ ‘Yeah, we’ll be fine. Let’s go.’ That’s why you’ve got a whole team of folks in the launch control room doing that.”

But on other occasions, the weather does what it’s supposed to, the ve­hicle is operating properly, any number of other factors come together as they should, and launch preparations continue to proceed. Finally, as launch nears, the Space Shuttle main engines “gimbal,” or tilt, to test that they will move properly, and at five seconds before launch they are ignited to make sure all three engines are functioning properly. The vehicle contin­ues to sit on the pad, but the firing of the engines causes it to pitch slight­ly. It then rocks slightly back, a process called the “twang,” and when the stack is vertical again, at T minus zero, a spark at the top of the fuel casing of the solid rocket boosters ignites the propellant. With more than seven and a half million pounds of thrust pushing the Space Shuttle upward, it begins to move.

Shuttle pilot and commander Fred Gregory recalled the feeling of the main engines first firing, describing it as almost a nonevent. “You could hear it; you were aware of it. It sounded like some kind of an electric motor at some distance, but you looked out the window and you saw the launch tow­er there and the launch tower moved back. At least that’s what you thought, but then you realized the orbiter was moving forward and then back, and when it came back to vertical, that’s when those solids ignited and there was no doubt about it. You were going to go someplace really fast, and you just watched the tower kind of drop down below you.”

At the very beginning of the ascent, there’s the brilliant light of the en­gines, which no photograph or video can truly capture: a brightness that seems to puncture the sky. The brilliance of the flames from the engine is dramatic during the day, and far more so when they light up the sky at night. Payload specialist astronaut Charlie Walker recalled the experience of launching on the Space Shuttle in the dark:

At night, you look outside, and this launchpad is a blue gray from the xenon light reflections bouncing off of it, with a completely black background behind it. All of a sudden the launchpad brightens up with the solid rockets igniting. The launchpad brightens up to a yellow gray, but then the whole background, suddenly there’s like a sunrise that’s happened over Florida. You can see the Flor­ida landscape for miles back that way. Sure, the sky is still black, but suddenly Florida has been illuminated by a new sunrise. I can see the Florida country­side, and it’s a yellow, white-yellow-orange color, the coloration of the brilliant, hot flame from the solid rocket boosters.

Like Gregory, Jerry Ross recalled that, while he was aware when the main engines first ignited, things didn’t really get exciting until the solid rocket boosters fired.

As the shuttle’s main engines came up, you could really feel the vibrations starting in the orbiter, but when the solid rocket motors hit, when they ignite, it’s somebody taking a baseball bat and swinging it pretty smartly and hitting the back of your seat, because it’s a real “bam!" And the vibration and noise is pretty impressive. The acceleration level is not that high at that point, but there is that tremendous jolt as the solid rocket motors ignite, and you’re off I’ll never forget the vibrations of the solid rocket motors. As we accelerated in the first thirty seconds or so, the wind noise on the outside ofthe vehicle just became really intense, like it was just scream­ing. It was screeching on the outside. I was already thinking about “what am I do­ing here" before then, but [it was] just a sheer, incredible experience ofthe energy.

In many ways the flight deck, with its large windows, is the superior seat­ing for experiencing the launch. In one way, however, the mid-deck has the advantage. Since the pilot and commander are busy with the tasks of mak­ing sure the vehicle is operating properly during ascent, they don’t have the luxury of stopping to really take in the experience of the launch. While the astronauts on the mid-deck don’t have the same view as those on the flight deck, they have the freedom to focus more on the sensations. Hart, for exam­ple, recalled being able, as a mission specialist, to really enjoy the experience.

You talk a lot [to other astronauts about what launch is like], obviously, and you see a lot of pictures, and you think about it a lot, so you think you’re pret­ty well prepared and you probably wont have too many surprises, but I had a couple of surprises. The shake, rattle, and roll for the first two minutes, that was about what I thought, maybe even a little bit less than what I thought it would be, because the solid rockets kind of have a “whoof-whoof" [rumble]. You don’t really hear it; you more feel it. It’s like a very low-frequency rumble, and just a tremendous sense of power as you lift off and all.

Another part of the experience that simply cannot be replicated on the ground is the pressure of the g-forces during ascent, according to sts-6 commander P. J. Weitz: “The value of our simulators ends when those en­gines light and you lift off. They try to fake you out a little bit by tipping the Shuttle Orbiter Simulator and that, but it doesn’t compare with three shuttle main engines and two solids going. As I tell people, I said, ‘You know you’re on your way and you’re going somewhere and you hope they keep pointed in the right direction, because it’s an awesome feeling.’”

Weitz compared the launch of the Space Shuttle to the launch of a Sat­urn IB, which he took into space on the first Skylab mission. The Saturn, he said, produced about half again as much acceleration force as the shut­tle’s three gs, and the force was felt in somewhat different ways on the two vehicles. In the Saturn, the thrust was “actual,” or directly in line with the vehicle, so the crew was pressed directly back into the couches. With the shuttle, on the other hand, because of the way the orbiter is stacked on the external tank, the thrust from the main engines is offset from the ve­hicle’s center of gravity, meaning that the crew members aboard felt the pressure pushing them not only into the back but also into the bottom of their seats.

After clearing the launchpad, the shuttle begins to roll so that the orbit – er is below the external tank, to better allow its engines to offset the tank’s weight. Around one minute into flight, the shuttle encounters “Max Q,” the period in which the increasing velocity of the vehicle produces the max­imum amount of pressure on the shuttle before the decreasing resistance of the atmosphere reduces that pressure. To reduce the strains of the pressure of Max Q, the vehicle throttles down its engines and then, seconds later, past the point of maximum pressure, throttles back up.

Just over two minutes into the launch, the solid rocket boosters separate from the vehicle, and the orbiter and external tank continue toward orbit. The solids deploy parachutes and land in the ocean, where recovery ships locate them and bring them back for refurbishment and reuse.

“At the solid rocket motor separation. . . there was this brilliant orange flash, orangeish-yellow flash across the windscreen, and then the solid rocket motors are gone,” Ross recalled. “As the solid rocket motors tailed off, like at a minute forty-five or so, it almost felt like you had stopped accelerating, almost like you’d stopped going up. At that point we were already Mach 3-plus and well above most of the sensible atmosphere at that point, some twenty miles high or so. And at solid rocket motor jettison, then you’re at four times the speed of sound and twenty, twenty-five miles high.”

Hart also recalled the separation of the solid rockets as a memorable ex­perience. For the first two minutes of ascent, the g-forces that the crew ex­periences have been building up, and then, at srb separation, they drop off dramatically.

Very quickly, then, the solid rockets taper off and separate, and that was the first surprise I had. . .. The sensation that you have at that point I wasn’t quite pre­pared for, because you go from two and a half gs back to about one and a half. Well, when you get used to two and a half, and it feels pretty good. You’re going somewhere, you know. When you go back to one and a half, [it] feels like about a half. So you don’t think like you’re accelerating as much as you should be to get going. And, of course, I had worked the main engine program anyway, so I was very familiar with what the engines could do or not do. And I think in the next minute, every five seconds I checked the main engines to make sure they were running, because I swear we only had two working, because it just didn’t feel like we had enough thrust to make it to orbit. But then gradually the ex­ternal tank gets lighter, and as it does, of course, then, with the same thrust on engines, you begin to accelerate faster and faster. So after a couple of minutes I felt like, yes, I guess they’re all working.

Ross also had the experience of worrying that all main engines were not working when they actually were.

I literally had to look to see that the three main engines were still working, be­cause it became so smooth, and it almost felt like you weren’t going anywhere;

you weren’t accelerating at all. . . . At one point I can remember looking back behind me out the overhead windows again. In artists’ renditions of the flames coming out of the three main engines, it’s a nice, uniform cone of fire back there and stuff. Not true. The fire was all over the place. It was not static. It was dancing. It was not uniform. And again you go, “Is this thing working okay?" You don’t know what to expect.

As the shuttle nears the end of its powered ascent, with the bulk of the atmospheric drag behind it, it begins to accelerate dramatically. “As we got up to about the seven-and-a-half-minute point, then, is when you get to the three gs of acceleration, and that’s a significant acceleration,” Ross said.

It feels like there’s somebody heavy sitting on your chest, and it makes it pret­ty hard to breathe. I mean, you kind of have to grunt to talk, and you’re just waiting for this three gs to go away. . . . You’re accelerating at 100 feet per sec­ond, which is basically like going from 0 to 70 miles per hour every second. So it’s pretty good. And then at the time that the computers sense the proper condi­tions, the main engines. . . shut off and you’re in zero g. And for me, the first flight, sitting in the back seat, I had the sensation of tumbling head over heels, a weird sensation. And it was the three-g transition, from three gs to zero gs…. But as soon as I got out of the seat, then I was okay.

The main engine cutoff, or meco, comes around eight and a half minutes into the launch, and shortly thereafter the external tank sepa­rates from the orbiter and reenters Earth’s atmosphere. As the only ma­jor component of the shuttle stack that isn’t reusable, the external tank burns up on reentry.

Gregory explained how he felt in that moment, when the main engines cut off and he was floating in the microgravity of space: “The first indica­tion that this was not a simulation was when the main engines cut off and we went to zero g, and though [Steven] Hawley, I think, had been attrib­uted with this comment, it was a common comment: ‘Is this space? Is this it? Is this real?’ And it was an amazing feeling. I’d never sensed anything like this before. So this sensation of zero g was like a moment on a roller coaster, when you go over the top and everything just floats.”

Hart described being surprised once in orbit, but unlike Ross and Greg­ory, not by the experience of zero g.

The zero g I was pretty well prepared for. As a fighter pilot and the experience at NASA in the zero-g trainer, you’re pretty familiar with what it feels like to be weightless. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the first look out the window. You don’t know what black is until you see space. I mean, I was startled with just how black it was. You don’t see stars. You could barely see the moon; it’s be­cause there’s so much light coming off the Earth and off the tiles of the shuttle, that there’s a tremendous ambient light from all those sources, so your eyes are constricted greatly. And then because of that constriction, when you look into space you can’t see the stars or anything. I mean, it’s like really black. It’s pal­pable. You think you can almost reach out and touch it. I don’t know quite how to describe it. It’s sort of like black velvet, but it’s just totally palpable. . . . I guess I knew that I wouldn’t be able to see the stars when we were on the day side of the Earth. But still, when you look out there and see the blackness, it re­ally was striking to me.

While most astronauts report experiencing an overwhelming excitement or elation upon their first arrival in orbit, Fred Gregory jokingly recalled an odd bit of disappointment stemming from his first ascent. “Since we had trained constantly for failures, I anticipated failures and was somewhat dis­appointed that there were no failures, because I knew that any failure that occurred, I could handle. It was where I slipped back into an ego thing. I anticipated failures that I would correct and then the newspaper would say, ‘Gregory Saves Shuttle,’ but heck, none of that happened. It just went up­hill, just as sweet as advertised.”

As pilot, Gregory said his main job once the vehicle was on orbit was to make sure it was working properly. Since there were no major issues, he found that he had frequent opportunities for looking out the window. Said Gregory,

You immediately realize that you are either a dirt person or a space person. I ended up being a space person, looking out in space. It was a high-inclination orbit, so we went very low in the southern hemisphere, and I saw a lot of star formations that I had only heard about before and never seen before. I also saw aurora australis, which is the southern lights. I was absolutely fascinated by that. But if you were an Earth person, or dirt person, you were amazed at how quickly you crossed the ground; how, with great regularity, every forty-five min – utesyou’d either have daylight or dark; how quickly that occurred, about seven miles per second; how quickly you crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

Although he was a self-described “space person,” Gregory still enjoyed occa­sionally gazing down on Earth below him and found it a fascinating experience.

The sensation that I got initially was that from space you cant see discernible borders and you begin to question why people don’t like each other, because it looked like just one big neighborhood down there. The longer I was there, the greater my “a citizen of" changed. The first couple of days DC was where I con­centrated all my views, and I was a citizen of Washington DC. I was confused because I thought everybody loved DC, but [Bob] Overmyer was from Cleveland [Ohio], and Don Lind was Salt Lake [City, Utah], and Norm [Thagard] was Jacksonville, Florida, and Lodewijk [van den Berg] was the Netherlands, and Taylor Wang was Shanghai [China], so each had their own little location for the first couple of days. After two days, I was from America, looked at Ameri­ca as our home. Taylor, China. Europe for Lodewijk. And after five or six days, the whole world became our home.

During his flight, Gregory developed a sense not only of Earth as a whole being his home but of just how interconnected the global community truly

is, and the extent to which all people are sharing one planet.

You could see this kind of sense of ownership and awareness. We had noticed with interest the fires in Brazil and South Africa and the pollution that came from Eastern Europe, but it was only with interest. After five or six days, then it was of concern, because you could see how the particulates from the smokestacks in Eastern Europe, how that circled the Earth and how this localized activity had a great effect. When you looked down at South Africa and South America, you became very sensitized to deforestation and what the results of it was with the runoff how it affected the ecology. Then you’d have to back up and say, well, this is not an intentional thing to destroy; this is something that they use coke as part of their process, and in order to get coke, you’ve got to burn. So you be­gan to look at things from different points of view, and it was a fascinating ex­perience. So that was the science that I was engaged in, but never anticipated

it. And it was a discovery for me, so as each of these other great scientists who were with us discovered something that they had never anticipated, I also did, and I think the whole crew had.

In order to live and work in space during their missions, astronauts must learn to adapt to the microgravity environment, and that adaptation varies from individual to individual. Part of the adaptation is simply learning to get around; moving through the vehicle without gravity is an entirely dif­ferent process than walking through it on the ground. For many other as­tronauts, adaptation involves a physical unease as the vestibular system ad­justs to the lack of the orienting influence of gravity.

While it may take different amounts of time for astronauts to be back to 100 percent, most are at least functioning fairly quickly, Gregory said.

Whatever the adaptation was, within a day, everybody had adapted to it and so it was just a matter of working on all the programs and projects of the proj­ects that you had. The body very quickly adapted to this new environment, and it began to change. You could sense it when you were on orbit. You learned that your physical attitude in relation to things that looked familiar to you, like walls and floors and things like that, didn’t count anymore, and you translat­ed [from thinking about] floors and ceilings and walls to [thinking]your head is always up and your feet are always down. That was a subconscious change in your response; it was an adjustment that occurred up there. You also learned that you didn’t go fast, that you could get from one place to the other quickly, but you didn’t have to do it in a speedy way. You always knew that when you started, you had to have a destination, and you had to have something that you could grab onto when you got there. But, again, this was a transition that occurred, perhaps subtly, but over a very short period of time. I can remember we all kind of joked up there that we had become space things, and we were no longer Earth things anymore. The first couple of days, a lot of bloated faces, because there was no gravity settling of the liquids. But after a couple of days, you lost that liquid in your body, and you looked quite normal. So it was a fas­cinating experience. I think it was surprising to us how quickly we adapted to this microgravity environment.

With launch complete and their bodies adapting to space, the astronauts would go about their mission, spending days on any variety of different tasks carried out by shuttle crews during the early years of the program. Finally, though, the time would come to return to Earth. The orbiter would turn backward relative to its velocity and fire its engines to slow itself down, be­fore rotating back to begin its descent.

The experiences of launch and landing are very different, Gregory said. Ascent is relatively quick and marked by rapid changes in the g-forces ex­perienced by the crew. Landing, on the other hand, is far more gradual.

On reentry, it is entirely different. Though it takes eight and a half minutes to get up to orbit, it takes more than an hour to reenter, and it feels very similar to an airplane ride that most people have been on. You get an excellent view of the Earth. If it’s night when you reenter the atmosphere, then you see a kind of a rolling plasma over the windows. . . . But other than the onset of g that oc­curs at less than 400,000 feet above the Earth, it is like flying in an airplane. The sensations that you have are very similar to a normal domestic airplane flight. You’re going pretty fast, but you are not aware ofit because you’re so high.

It’s an amazing vehicle, because you always know where you are in altitude and distance from your runway. You know you have a certain amount of en­ergy and velocity, and so you also know what velocity you’re supposed to land, and you can watch this amazing electric vehicle calculate and then compen­sate and adjust as necessary to put you in a good position to land. We normal­ly allow the automatic system to execute all the maneuvers for ascent and for reentry, but as we proceed through Mach 1, slowing down for landing, it is customary for the pilot, the commander, to take command of the orbiter and actually fly it in, using the typical airplane controls. But, you know, as I look at it, the ascent is very dramatic. It’s very fast, a lot of movement, but quick. The entry is more civilized but exposes the orbiter to actually a greater danger than the ascent, as far as the influence of the atmosphere on the orbiter. The temperatures on the outside of the orbiter really get hot on reentry, and that’s not the case on ascent.

Astronaut Charlie Bolden flew on the Space Shuttle four times, two of those as commander, and became nasa administrator in 2009. A former naval aviator, Bolden described landing the Space Shuttle as a unique experience. “The entry and landing is unlike almost anything you ever experience in any other kind of aerospace machine because it’s relatively gentle,” Bolden said.

In terms of g-forces and stuff like that, it’s very docile. Unless you do something wrong, you don’t even get up to two gs during the reentry, the entire time of the reentry. When you bank to land, you come overhead the landing site, and then you bank the vehicle and you just come down like a corkscrew. . . . It feels like you’ve got gorillas sitting on your shoulder because you’ve been weightless for x number of days. And so it’s just a really different feeling. You have to hold your head up because you’ve got this big old heavy helmet on and it probably weighs [a few]pounds, but it feels like it weighs a hundred. It takes a little bit ofenergy to get your hands up offthe console, because once you start feeling gravity again, your hands just kind ofgo down and they want to stay there; everything does. So the two pilots on board are doing a lot of isometric exercises all the way down.

Even when an astronaut lands the shuttle for the first time after a mis­sion, Bolden said, it already feels very familiar because of all the training in preparation for the missions. “It’s like you’ve done it all your life, because you have,” Bolden said.

You’ve done it thousands of time by now in the shuttle training aircraft for real, and you’ve done it probably tens of thousands of times in the simulator. So it doesn’t look abnormal at all; it’s just something that you ’re accustomed to. When you touch down, if you do it right, again, you hardly know you touched down. As big as the orbiter is, the way that we land it is we just get it into an extreme­ly shallow approach to the landing, and so it just kind of rolls out on the run­way, and if you do it right, you all of a sudden notice that things are starting to slow down real quick and you’re hearing this rumble because the vehicle’s rolling down the runway on this grooved runway. So you know you’re down, put the nose down and step on the brakes and stop. That’s it. And then you go, “Holy G. I wish it hadn’t been over so quick. " I don’t think it makes a difference how long or how short you’ve been there, it’s over too quick. You’re ready to come home, but once you get back, you say, “Boy, I wish I had had a few more days," or something like that. And for me, my last two, being the commander and actu­ally being the guy that had the opportunity to fly it to touchdown, was thrilling.

Once the landing is completed and the orbiter is safely back on Earth, the crew begins the process of reacclimating to the planet’s strong gravity after days of feeling weightless. Charlie Walker, the first commercial pay­load specialist, who flew on the shuttle three times, recalled waiting in the orbiter at the end of the mission.

The guys on the flight deck were going through the closeout procedures. Ground crews were closing in. We sat unstrapped, but we would sit in our seats for anoth­er ten, fifteen minutes as the ramp was brought up, the sniffers checked for am­monia leaks and/or hypergolic propellant leaks, found none, and put the stairway [up to the hatch], and opened the hatch. All that time, all of us are beginning to get our land legs back, unbuckle, start to try to stand up. “Ah, this doesn’t feel good yet. Wait a little bit longer." So you kind of move around, move your arms first, your feet first, your legs first, then stand up, make sure you’ve got your bal­ance back. The balance is the one thing that you just don’t have. Again, the brain hasn’t been utilizing the inner ear or senses of where the pressure is on the bottom of feet, for instance, to use as cues to balance itself against gravity. It hasn’t done that for a week. So you’ve got to carefully start through all that and consciously think about balance and consciously think about standing up, and we very con­sciously do that, because the last thing you want to do, in front ofhundreds ofmil – lions of people watching on television, is to fall down the ramp leaving the orbiter.

Normally, on Earth, the body works hard to make sure the brain is ad­equately provided with blood. From a circulatory perspective, the brain, the part of the body that most needs blood, is located inconveniently at the top of the body, so the heart has to pump blood against gravity to get it there. In orbit, on the other hand, blood flows much more easily to the head, but it doesn’t fill the legs the same way without gravity pulling blood into them. Astronauts develop bloated heads and “chicken legs” due to the body’s confusion over how to distribute blood without gravity. The body takes the increased fluid flow to the head as a sign that it is overly hydrat­ed and begins to shed what it sees as excess fluid. After the return to Earth, fluid redistributes again, which can cause problems.

“The body adapts by, among other things, letting go of a lot of fluid, about a liter of liquid, which makes you clinically dehydrated while you’re in space, except the whole condition of the body is different up there, so you’re really not dehydrated in that environment,” Walker said.

But if you come back without replacing that liter of fluid, then you are dehy­drated. You try to stand up with not so much fluid to go to the head, and so you literally could pass out. Nobody did that, but I know I had sensations of light­headedness for the first few minutes until I just literally worked at getting my balance back and focusing attention, and the body was adapting all that time, too. But leaving the spacecraft, I was holding onto the handrail as I went down the stairway. Got to the bottom of the stairs, and I was walking like a duck, because I was trying to keep my balance.

Once they’ve adjusted enough to walk, crew members board the Astrovan, which takes them to the medical quarters for postflight medical exams and a shower. Walker said it felt good to take a shower after days without one.

Every sensation for the next many hours, normal sensations of water running over you in a shower, [felt] strange. Because again, here this water’s hittingyou, and it’s running down. And hours later, I found that I still could at any mo­ment just think about the sensations in my body, and it was odd to feel this pull down toward the surface of the Earth, to be stuck to the surface of the Earth. [When I flew], it was still fairly new to hear comics or some wag note that this or that “sucks." [Coming back] the astronauts were saying, “Well, the Earth re­ally does suck." So it keeps me drawn right down to the surface. Gravity is real­ly real, and it stands out in your mind to, again, the freedom of weightlessness when you’ve had that opportunity. And that was just very much on my mind. I remember even a day, two days later, probably like a day later at a meal, I was sitting down, and I could not easily figure out whether I should sit back against the back of the seat or lean forward, because my head was telling me I was leaning forward at an angle, and, in fact, I was sitting almost straight up and down. So the inner ear is still adapting to its own senses and the body’s cues to orient itself and still doesn’t have itself figured out completely yet.

Even if an astronaut spends only a few days in orbit after a lifetime of living in the gravity of Earth, habits developed during those few days of weightlessness can persist for a little while after the mission. “I also remem­ber waking up the next morning back here in Houston, waking up and go­ing into the bathroom and wanting to brush my teeth, and I did that, and I remember letting go of the toothbrush, and it fell to the sink top, and I probably laughed,” Walker noted.

Then I pick up the cup of water to rinse my mouth out, and then proceed to let that cup go again. It’s like, again, you’re still thinking weightlessness, and you’re really used to that. Finding the situation where gravity is ever-present is just such an interesting experience, because now, again, you’ve had that contrast of a dif­ferent place where that wasn’t part of the environment and you note when you get back how remarkable and how constraining gravity is. . . . We’ve all grown up for some decades, before we go fly in space, in gravity, and it’s just natural. Except it is programmed in, and that programming is submerged with new habits that you gained to work in weightlessness, and you have to pull that pro­gramming back, or the brain does, and it does so at different rates, I think. So within tens of minutes, you can walk comfortably. You may look a little odd, because you’re not walking as expertly as you had done for twenty, thirty, forty years before. It takes a few more hours, maybe a couple hours to do that. But you can walk, so balance comes back pretty darn quickly. But it’s probably the nonautomatic stuff like I’ve remarked about just automatically leaving a glass hanging in the air, thinking it’s going to stay there. You just get into habits there that are semiconscious, and it takes a little while for the body and the brain to let go of that and to relearn that, no, I’m stuck here again to the surface of the Earth. I’ve got to put the glass right up here on the table directly.

Arguably, it could only have happened when it did.

Astronaut John Young, who would go on to become the commander of the first Space Shuttle flight, was standing on the surface of the moon dur­ing the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972 when he heard the news that Con­gress had approved vital funding for the development of the shuttle in its budget for fiscal year 1973. He reportedly jumped three feet into the air on the lunar surface upon hearing the news.

The Space Shuttle would be the most complex piece of machinery built by humankind. It was an incredible challenge and a daunting undertaking. At another point in history, a decade earlier or even a decade later, it might have seemed too challenging, too ambitious. But the project was born when men were walking on the moon. From that perspective, anything was possible.

It would be, far and away, the most versatile spacecraft ever built. But to many of the early astronauts who were involved in its creation, it was some­thing even more fascinating—an aircraft like no other. Talk to the astro­nauts brought in as pilots during the 1960s, and there’s a fair chance they’ll refer to the orbiter as “the airplane.” Many of them will talk about its de­velopment not in terms of rocket engines and life-support systems but in terms of avionics and flight control systems. They had been pilots, many of them test pilots, and they had come to NASA to help the agency fly capsules through space. But now—now they were aircraft test pilots again, helping to design an aircraft that flew far higher and far faster than any aircraft before.

Since the selection of the first astronauts, members of the corps had been involved in the development of new spacecraft and equipment, providing an operator’s perspective. These were the people who would have to use the things that the engineers were designing, so it was their job to give the en­gineers feedback on whether the things they were designing were actually usable. For much of the time the Space Shuttle was being developed, most

of the astronaut corps was grounded, with only a dozen flying between the last moon landing in 1972 and the first shuttle flight in 1981. As a result, there was plenty of opportunity for astronauts to be involved in the devel­opment of the shuttle, and they participated more in the development of this vehicle than any before.

Even so, there were some at nasa with the idea that the moon would be just the first step into the solar system, who were concerned about what the shuttle wouldn’t be able to do—go beyond Earth’s veritable backyard.

In January 1973 astronaut T. K. Mattingly was assigned to be head of As­tronaut Office support to the shuttle program. This was around the same time that the contracts were being awarded to the companies that would be responsible for making the shuttle’s various components. Mattingly, who had orbited the moon on Apollo 16 while Young was walking on it, recalls talking to Deke Slayton, the head of flight crew operations at nasa’s John­son Space Center (jsc) in Houston, Texas, about the assignment. “When I got back from Apollo 16, Deke asked me, he said, ‘You know, there’s only one more flight, so if you really want to fly again anytime near-term, you might want to take the backup assignment on [Apollo] 17,’ he said. ‘Chanc­es aren’t very good, but we do know that we replace people occasionally. So if you would like to have that chance, you can do it, or you could work on the shuttle program.’ Really, I hadn’t paid much attention to it,” Mattingly said of the shuttle program at that point.

I kind of knew the work was going on, but I didn’t know what it was, because my ambition had always been—I didn’t think I would go to [walk on] the moon, but I was really hoping that I’dget to be on the Mars mission, which I was sure was going to happen the following year. To a young kid, it just seemed obvious that the next step is you go to the moon, then you sharpen your tools and you go to Mars, and I thought, “Boy, that’s where I’d like to go. ”

Even by then it was becoming obvious that that wasn’t really a likely propo­sition. I wasn’t enthused about the shuttle because I still thought going to Mars was the next step. I believe that we needed to build a space station first so we could have hardware, which would gather years oflifetime experience while we could get to it and fix it, and we could build the transportation system while we’re gaining the experience with a space station. All of that architecture was obviously politically driven, and they were having to fit into a tighter budget.

There really was not a great swell of emotion or enthusiasm for things follow­ing Apollo in the political arena, nor in the public arena, for that matter. So I think they had to walk some very, very tight lines in order to keep the program going, and so they chose the Space Transportation [System] as the way to go.

George Mueller, the head of manned spaceflight at NASA during the Apollo program and the man many recognize as the father of both the Sky – lab space station and the Space Shuttle program, said that, even with the development of the shuttle, human exploration of other worlds remained the ultimate goal. “It became clear that the cost of getting into orbit was the driver for all future programs. I began to think about, how do you get the cost down. In air travel, you can’t fly from here to London and then throw the plane away when you get to London. What we came up with was a completely reusable vehicle. We had every intention of going back to the moon. What we were doing was going into low Earth orbit and estab­lishing a base there; it was a requirement for reaching our long-term goal.”

Former Johnson Space Center director Chris Kraft recalled the approval of the shuttle as “a real come-down for NASA.”

We, the powers that be at NASA, had grand visions of going back to the moon, having bases on the moon, and on to Mars. They made very significant reports on what the future of NASA could and should be. But when the Nixon admin­istration decided that the limitations of the budget in his [thepresident’s] mind would not allow us to do those kinds of grand things in space, that’s when the powers that be in NASA decided, well, what is the one thing that we need to start the next generation of spaceflight? And that is we need a cost-effective launch system. That’s the first thing we need. If we’re going to go into orbit and do grand things, or if we’re going to put things in orbit and rendezvous and go other places, what we need is a good truck. We called it a truck, at times. And so that’s how we arrived at that being the next step in the space program being a reusable, therefore fly-back vehicle. We signed a fixed-price, seven-and-a-half – billion-dollar contract to build the Space Shuttle, and that was to be provided with annual increases in the budget for inflation. We never got the first piece of inflation at any time in the history of the budget of the shuttle. They welshed on that guarantee immediately, and furthermore, they delayed the program a year and did not give us any relief on the total cost, on the total fixed cost. They didn’t want the money in the budget that year, just that simple. So in the his­tory of the shuttle program, up until we made the first flight, we were always pushing a bow wave of being behind budget.

Many in the astronaut corps had doubts as to what the shuttle decision would mean for the future of exploration. Mattingly considered leaving nasa completely, believing he would probably never leave Earth orbit again.

I went up to pay courtesy calls to the navy after we got back, and John War­ner was then secretary of the navy, and we made a courtesy call to him. He was all enthusiastic. He says, “You navy [astronaut] guys need to come back, and we’ll give you any job you want. You pick it. Whatever you’d like. You want a squadron? You want to do this? Just tell me. It’s yours. ” Boy, my eyes lit up, and I thought, “Wow. ” One of my escort officers was a captain in the Penta­gon. He went back and told his boss, who was the chief of naval aviation, what Warner had said, and very quickly I had an introduction to the chief of na­val aviation, who made sure that I understood that despite what the secretary had said, in the environment we were in, I was not going to come in and take over his squadron. He’d find a place for me, he’d give me a useful job, but don’t think that with the Vietnam War going on and people earning their positions the hard way, that I was going to walk in there and do that. He says, “The sec­retary means well, but we run the show. ”

So armed with that piece of information that if I went back on real navy duty at that point I was probably not going to find a particularly rewarding job, I thought the opportunity to get in on the shuttle at the beginning and go use some of the experience we gained would be useful, so I told my sponsor I’d do whatever the navy preferred I do. After all, they gave me my education and everything else that mattered. “So you tell me, but if I had a vote, I would say why don’t I stay because the shuttle program’s only going to take four years. ” That’s what we were advertising. You know, four years, that’s not all that long. So after a significant amount of discussion within the navy side ofthe Pentagon, they said, “Okay. Well, we agree. You probably can contribute more if you stay there. ” So that lead me to stay with the shuttle program, and so the beginning of that was a period of a great deal ofthe turmoil of getting started.

Step one of designing a Space Shuttle was deciding exactly what a Space Shuttle should be designed to do. Its official name, the Space Transporta­tion System, summarized a basic part of the requirement. The shuttle would transport astronauts and cargo from the surface of Earth into space and back. It also was to be, as much as possible, reusable. The idea was that cre­ating a spacecraft that was as reusable as possible would cut down on what had to be built for each launch, and thus on the cost of each launch. Low­er the cost of putting a pound of material in orbit, and you can put more pounds of material in orbit. The space frontier opens up.

“We had a general idea of what specifications the shuttle was supposed to be, but in those days it was substantially larger and more aggressive than what we know today,” Mattingly said. “So we went through this require­ments refinement where everybody broke up into groups to go lay out what they had to do, and it evolved into something we called design reference missions. Rigidly, the idea was, we knew the shuttle was going to last for decades, and we knew nobody was smart enough to define what those mis­sions that would come after we started were going to evolve into. So we took great pride in trying to define the most stressful missions that we could.” Mattingly said the program initially outlined three types of possible mis­sions. One was for the shuttle to be used as a laboratory. “We laid out all the requirements we could think of for a laboratory—the support and what the people need to work in it, and all that kind of stuff,” Mattingly recalled. A second type of mission was defined as deploying a payload on orbit. “That was to be one that launched and had the manipulator arm and cradles and all of the things necessary to do that.”

Then there was the idea of a polar mission. Such a mission would involve putting the shuttle in a polar orbit—leaving the launch site and heading into a north-south inclination that would cause it to orbit from one pole to the other. A satellite in polar orbit would be able to fly over any point on the surface of Earth—a valuable capability for intelligence gathering. “The polar mission was really shaped after a DoD [U. S. Department of Defense] requirement,” Mattingly said.

The original mission, as I recall, was a one-rev mission. [A “rev" is essentially one orbit around Earth.] You launched, got in orbit, opened the payload bay doors, deployed a satellite, rendezvoused with an existing satellite, retrieved it, closed the doors, and landed. And this was all going to be done in one rev or maybe it was two revs, but it was going to be done so that by the time anyone knew we

were there, it was all over. Well, we worked on that mission and worked on it and worked on it, and finally it became [two different design reference missions]. We just couldn’t figure out how to do it all on one short timeline.

The military design reference missions were a response to a political exigen­cy NASA had learned to deal with during the 1970s. Most notably, in develop­ing the Skylab space station, nasa found itself competing for funding against the air force, which was seeking money at the same time for its Manned Or­biting Laboratory program. Although the two programs were very different in their goals, they shared enough superficial similarities that Congress ques­tioned why both were necessary. With the shuttle, nasa hoped to avoid a re­peat of this sort of competition, and have an easier sell to Congress, by gain­ing buy-in for the idea from the military. According to astronaut Joe Allen,

Leadership in the early 1970s decided the only way the Apollo-victorious NASA would be given permission to build a reusable space transportation system is that there be identified other users for the system other than just the scientists. This na­tions leadership identified the other users as the military. The Space Shuttle would be used to carry military payloads. The military has its responsibilities, and they said, “All right. If our payloads are going to go aboard, we do have one require­ment; that is that your Space Shuttle be able to take the payloads to orbit, put them there, and land back at the launch site after making only one orbit of the Earth. ”

The need for quick, polar missions greatly affected the design of the shut­tle, yet interestingly the Space Shuttle never flew a polar-orbit mission. “At face value, that doesn’t seem all that difficult to do,” Mattingly said of the polar-orbit missions,

but what it meant was, the shape of the orbiter went from being a very simple lifting body-type shape, with very, very small wings, to a much larger vehicle with delta-shaped wings. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the wings that go to orbit and come home again [make up a large portion of] the weight of the vehicle, and they’re never fully used; only the outermost wingtips are used. All that vast expanse—with all that tile, and all the carbon-carbon [carbon-fiber – reinforced carbon] along the leading edge—is never used. It would be used if it were to go to space in a polar orbit and then come home. It would be used to gain the fifteen hundred miles of cross-range that one needs because the Earth moves fifteen hundred miles in its rotation during the time you’ve gone once around. So you have to have some soaring ability. That’s what these large wings are for. The Space Shuttle would have cost much less money. It would cost much less to refurbish each time. Still, it would not be an economic wonder, but it would be economically okay, were it not for these huge wings. Of course, that requirement, in hindsight, was never used, was never needed, but the current Space Shuttle will forever be burdened with these wings.

Mattingly also said that the design missions established the capabilities that the Space Shuttle system would need to have. Each specification let to a variety of trickle-down requirements, and gradually the vehicle began taking shape.

These requirements we set really had some interesting things. Some of them were politically defined, like you’ll land at any ten-thousand-foot runway in the world. That’s all it takes. In selling the program, they had to appeal to just every constituency you could find to cobble together a consortium of backers that would keep the program sold in Congress. People don’t recognize how that rip­ples back through a design into what you really get, and, of course, by the time you know what you’ve got, the people who put those requirements in, they’re history. So it’s interesting. But that ten-thousand-foot runway requirement set a lot of limits on aerodynamics and putting wings on the airplane. The cross­

range—that was the airforce requirement for this once-aroundpolar mission abort—that sized the wings and thermal conditions. That precluded us from using a design called a lifting body that the folks out at Edwards [Air Force Base, California] had been playing with and had demonstrated in flights. It was structurally a much nicer design, but you just couldn’t handle the aerody­namic characteristics that were required to meet these things. So we had a ver­tical fin on this thing and big wings, and it’s a significant portion of shuttle’s weight, and the maintenance that goes with it is attributed to the same thing.

Mattingly had the unique vantage point of watching the shuttle program evolve from a concept through logistical support into its mature state, he recalled. “I look back and I say, ‘Well, we know what we started to do, and we know what we have, and they’re not always the same. Why?’ Because it was an extraordinary job. Apollo was a challenge because it was just so big and it was audacious, and time frame was tight, and all of those things.” But in many ways, Mattingly said, the shuttle was even more challenging.

Essentially, it was so demanding that all of the engineering and ops [operations] people. . . generally stayed on. We didn’t have a lot of technical attrition after Apollo. At least that’s my impression. At least the middle-level guys all stayed, and they kept working it because they recognized that the shuttle was a far more challenging job than Apollo in many technical senses.

The part ofthe shuttle that was different was Apollo was a collection of boxes. If you had a computer, you could build it, you could test it, you could set it out and do it all by itself. You had a second stage. You could build and test the whole thing by itself. Well, with the concept of this reusability and integration, you didn’t have anything until you had everything. There was no partial thing. There was nothing that was standalone. I remember we were trying to buy off-the-shelf tacans [Tac­tical Air Control and Navigation systems], an airplane navigational system, and as part of this integration process, rather than take the tacan signal that an airplane generated in those days and used for navigation, we stripped it all out and put in all our own software so that this off-the-shelf tacan box was absolutely unique. There was nothing else. And it was part ofthe philosophy of how we built this system.

Despite the areas where the shuttle fell short of the original requirement – based specifications, Mattingly said NASA ended up with a very robust and versatile vehicle because of how ambitious the original discussions were. “At

the time we were doing this and putting all these requirements on there, we were actually, I think, quite proud of having had the foresight to look at all of these things. Today you can hardly think of a mission. . . you’d like it to do that it can’t do. It is an absolutely extraordinary engineering piece, just unbelievable. The shuttle really did fulfill almost all of the requirements that we were tasked to put into it.”

The shuttle went through a variety of widely different configurations during its early development. An inline version would have had the orbiter on top of a more traditional rocket booster, which would use parachute recovery to make it reusable. Another version would have had the orbiter launched atop essentially another space plane that would fly back to a ground landing site.

Discussions were held as to whether the primary fuel tank, which ended up being the external tank, should be inside the orbiter or not. There were trade-offs, according to Chris Kraft, the Johnson Space Center director at the time. Putting the tank inside the orbiter would have required that the orbiter be much larger but would have greatly increased the reusability of the shuttle system. However, Kraft said, the ultimate limitation was the dif­ficulty of designing an integrated vehicle that wouldn’t suffer substantial damage to the fuel tank during landing.

Another major issue that had to be figured out early on was what sort of escape system should be provided for the crew. The Mercury and Apol­lo capsules both had powerful solid rocket motors in the escape towers at the top of the vehicle that would have been capable of lifting the space­craft away from the booster in case of an emergency. “From the get-go, we tried desperately to put an abort system on the shuttle that would allow us to abort the crew and/or the orbiter off of a malfunctioning solid rocket or malfunctioning ssmes [Space Shuttle main engines],” Kraft said.

Originally we tried putting a solid rocket booster on the ass end of the orbiter, and the more we looked at that, the more we could not come up with a struc­tural aerodynamic qualification and weight that would accomplish that job. We looked at putting a capsule in the structure of the crew cabin, making it some­thing that would separate. We looked at the possibility of putting a capsule in the orbiter, at the structural problems of attaching a capsule, getting rid of the front end, making it strong enough, making it aerodynamically sound, building a control system that would allow it to descend under any and all Mach num­bers. And we decided if we do that, we can’t build a Space Shuttle. We cant af­ford the mass, and we don’t think we could build it in the first place.

So the answer to that question was, we will use the solid rockets that we have as our escape system and fly the orbiter back to the launch site if we have an abort. So we said to ourselves, the solid rockets have to, once you release them from the pad, bust those bolts on the pad, it has to be 100 percent reliable. And

SPACE SHUTTLE VEHICLE

SOLID

ROCKET

[booster!

5. An early depiction of the Space Shuttle identifies major components as the orbiter, the three main
engines, the external tank, and the two solid rocket boosters. Courtesy nasa.

we always assumed it was, and any decision we made could not screw around the reliability of those solids. So our abort system was the solid rockets and a re­turn to launch site, rtls;you could fly that orbiter back.

Kraft said critics gave nasa a hard time about the shuttle not having an escape system. “I always thought that was unfair as hell,” Kraft said. “I don’t think they understood the system. And if you ask them over there [at nasa] today, I guarantee you won’t find five people who understand that’s what we did. But we did have an escape system, we had the solid rockets and the fly-back capability. Now, it didn’t save the Challenger, and nothing would have saved Columbia. But those two accidents were created by the fallacies of man, not by the machines.”

Recalled astronaut Charlie Bolden of the rtls abort:

While a lot of us flew a lot of them in [simulation], I’m not sure any of us ever believed that that’s something you really wanted to do. This was a maneuver in which something goes wrong shortly after liftoff, and you decide you’re going to turn the vehicle around and fly it back to the Kennedy Space Center. And the computer’s got to do that, so the software really has to work. It’s crazy, because

you’re going upside down outbound, and all of a sudden you decide you’re go­ing to go back to Kennedy. And while you’re still flying downrange, you take this vehicle and you pitch it back over so that it’s flying backwards through its own fire for several minutes. What has to happen is the computer has to calcu­late everything precisely, because it’s got to flip it over, have it pointing back to the Cape while it’s flying backwards, so that just before the solid rocket boost­ers burn out, it stops the backwards downrange travel and starts it flying back to the Cape. And then once that happens, then the solids cut off They separate; they go their way, and then you fly back for a few minutes, for another six min­utes, and the main engines cut off and you separate from the external tank. And that became a very tricky maneuver, because what you’re worried about was re­impacting with the tank, and if you did that, you were dead. So it’s a maneu­ver that. . . nobody ever wants to fly it, because just, it’s like, boy, this is really bad if you have to do this.

Once the general requirements were outlined from the mission base­lines and the general type of vehicle was decided, work began on figuring out how exactly to design a spacecraft that would meet the requirements. Making the process particularly interesting was the fact that the shuttle was a collection of very diverse elements that had to be designed to work as an integrated system. The orbiter, for example, ended up with engines that, by itself, it couldn’t use because they had fuel only when the orbiter was con­nected to the external tank. The diameter of the external tank is another example of the integrated approach used in designing the entire shuttle sys­tem, according to retired NASA engineer Myron “Mike” Pessin, who spent the bulk of his career working with the external tank. Taken as a single el­ement, there is no reason for the tank to have its 27.6-foot diameter. There was a constraint to the diameter of the solid rocket booster, however—it would have to be transported by rail from Utah to Florida, and so it was designed with a train’s dimensions in mind. That diameter determined the length of the boosters, which in turn established the range of locations for the explosive bolts that connected the boosters to the external tank. Given that engineers wanted to keep the connecting bolts off of the liquid hydro­gen and liquid oxygen tanks inside the external tank, they were able to es­tablish exactly how long the structure would need to be to make that pos­sible. Since they knew how much fuel the tank would need to hold, they could use the volume and the length to determine the needed diameter. Thus the diameter of the external tank was indirectly determined by the dimensions of the train that would be carrying the solids.

Another important part of the shuttle system design process involved computer technology that had evolved substantially since the development of nasa’s earlier manned space programs. “Now we get into the hard part of, okay, now we know the requirements, how do you make this all hap­pen?” Mattingly said.

And that all settled down certainly after Skylab, and maybe even after astp [the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project]. Then we started working. I remember Phil Shaffer was designated as the lead for pulling together all of our software and stuff. Be­cause the shuttle is such a highly integrated vehicle, it has the [software] archi­tecture that makes the system run, and then it’s got all of the applications which are the heart of the vehicle. And so we were building all of this from scratch, and in Apollo we were astounded we had computers. I guess Gemini had a lit­tle computer, and then Apollo had something which, by today’s standards, your wristwatch is far more powerful than what we had those days. But we were still astounded with what you could do with these things. Now we were going to build this shuttle with these computers and they’re going to be its lifeblood. There wont be a lot of direct wire. Everything goes on a data bus, and this was all relatively new for most of us.

It meant learning a whole new design process, and we learned that the software was the pacing item. We blamed it on software. When we think ofdeveloping soft­ware, we think of it as coding, “if/or " statements and counting bits, but in fact the massive amount of energy went center-wide into collecting the requirements— what does it have to do, write it down, and then see if you can package it, be­fore anybody could start worrying about building. That was an extraordinary operation. Phil drove that thing. I’m sure if Phil hadn’t been there, there would have been somebody that could have done it, but I have a hard time imagining anybody that could have done it the way he did. He just had the extraordinary personality and insight. He knew all the key players from the Apollo days, and they just set out and they went to work, and they really made the program go.

In spite ofall the delays that the shuttle program experienced—and we generally tended to blame that on truncated budgets, maybe some more money would have held the schedule a little better—the best I could tell, we were working as fast as that group of people [could]. It was such a massive job, and it just took so long to get everybody educated up to the same level, because it was all integrated. I don’t think when we started anybody knew that it was going to be such a challenge, and so we learned to do those things and went through it. This doesn’t sound like a CB [Astronaut Office] perspective, but. . . a little more than half[of the astronauts] were working the engineering side, working on the development ofthese things and trying to look ahead to see what was going to be required as part ofgetting started.

“We not only wanted to land on ten-thousand-foot runways, but we were going to be an airline,” Mattingly said, explaining that since the shut­tle would be a reusable aircraft with, ideally, a short turnaround time, nasa decided to turn to airline officials for help with how to do that.

So people went out and got contracts with American Airlines to teach us how to do maintenance and training, and we had people come in and start giving classes on how you give instructional courses and how we do logistics [in] the airlines. For a couple of years, we studiously tried to follow all that, and finally after a good bit it became clear that, you know, if there is anybody that’s going to ex­plain this to someone, it’s going to have to be us explaining it to ourselves. That’s where it evolved back into the way we had done things in the earlier programs.

Developing the systems was very much a group effort, Mattingly recalled.

I remember when we first started building the flight control schematics. Those are the most magnificent educational tools I’ve ever seen. I’ve never encountered them in any other organization. I don’t know why. I used to carry around a cou­ple of samples and give them to people and say, “This is what you really need." And they’d say, “Oh, that’s all very interesting," and then nothing ever seemed to happen. But working with people to put those drawings together, and then un­derstand what they meant and develop procedures and things from, was a mas­sive effort. During those days the Building 4 [at Johnson Space Center] and the building behind that, where flight control teams had some other offices, the walls were just papered with these things. People would go around, and they’d walk by it and look at it, and they’d say, “That’s not right. "They’d draw a little red thing on it and say, “See me. "And it was an evolutionary process going on continuously.

The shuttle was built with redundant systems. The idea was it should be able to suffer loss of any piece of equipment and still be able to fly safely. It was called “fail op, fail safe,” meaning that one failure wouldn’t affect nor­mal operations and that a second failure could affect the way the vehicle operated but not its safety.

That generally led to a concept offour parallel strings of everything. And that was great, but now how do you manage it, and what do you do with it? Now, a sche­matic has all of these four strings of things, sometimes they’re interconnected, and you could study those things, you’d pull those long sheets out, and you go absolute­ly bonkers—“Oh no. This line’s hooked to that. I forgot that." Trying to figure out how this all works. So you’d go get your colored pencils out, and you’d color-code them. By now the stack of these things is building up, and I’m really getting frus­trated in doing this dog-work job just before—I had to spend many, many hours for each drawing to get it sorted out before you were ready to use the drawing. So I said “We’ve got to take these things and get them printed in color, right offthe bat."

And so my friends in the training department said, “Well, you’re probably going to have to talk to Kranz about that. He’s not that enthusiastic about it." I thought, “Oh God." So I got an audience with Gene and went over and sat in his office and explained to him what we were doing in trying to get the train­ing program started and how we were trying to get ready to do that, and I re­ally wanted to get these things printed in color so that it would make it easier for people. I knew color printing would be a little more expensive, but it would sure save a lot of time. He said, “No. We’re not going to do that." I was just over­whelmed. I said, “Gene, why?" He didn’t say a word, he just turned and looked at his desk, and there on his desk, right in the corner, was this big mug filled with colored pencils. And he says, “That’s how you learn." And so that was the end of the story. I don’t know, I’ll bet today they’re still black and white. But that was Gene’s method of learning, and he figured that by having to trace it out, he had learned a lot, so he felt that others would benefit from that exercise. Even if they didn’t appreciate it, they would benefit.

The process of how the orbiter cockpit was designed would produce rath­er interesting and, in some cases, counterintuitive results, Mattingly said. He was part of a working group on controls and displays with fellow astro­naut Gordon Fullerton, which made decisions about the center console.

If you sit in the orbiter, the pilot and commander are sitting side by side in the center console. It was one of the few places when, if you put on a pressure suit, . . . you could see and touch. I mean, you can see the instrument panel. Stuffup here gets really above your head, gets really hard to see. It’s in close, so it’s diffi­cult for some of us older people to focus, and you cant see a lot. You have to do it by feel, which isn’t a good thing to do with important things. So the mobility was small, and this was prime real estate. We all knew it. As we went on with the program, every time someone said, “Oh, we’ll just put this here [in the cen­ter console]," we’d say, “No." We’d have a big office meeting. We’d all agree that, no, that’s not that important. We can put that here, we can do this. Well, after working on this thing for years, there’s practically nothing that’s important on the center console. We kept relegating everything to somewhere else, and it’s now the place where you set your coffee when you’re in the [simulator]. We protected that so hard, and poor old Gordo fought and fought for different things, and we’d think something was good, and then after we’d learn about what it really did and how it worked, we’d say, “No. You don’t need that."

Then there was the question of how the Space Shuttle would fly. Each airplane flies slightly differently, or feels slightly different to a pilot flying it, and the only way to really understand exactly how a plane flies is to fly it. Further, a pilot’s understanding of how airplanes fly is, to some extent, limited by the variety of airplanes he or she has flown. Those differences are rooted in the physical differences in the airplane’s control systems, a factor that means something entirely different with the computer-aided fly-by­wire controls of the shuttle. “There is a military spec that publishes about flying qualities, handling qualities of airplanes,” Mattingly said.

It started back in World War II, I guess, maybe even before. It tells you all of the characteristics that have to go into making a good airplane, like how many pounds of force do you put on a rudder pedal to push it. Well, even dumb pi­lots finally figured out that with an electric airplane this maybe isn’t really rel­evant. Then the engineers wanted to just throw out all of the experience and say, “Hey, we’ll just make it cool and you’ll like it." So we went on a crusade to rewrite this document, which turned out to be one of the most interesting proj­ects I’ve ever been in, because it required rethinking a lot of the things that we all took for gospel. Every airplane that a pilot flies is the Bible on how airplanes fly. Fortunately, in the office we had people who had flown a lot of different kinds of airplanes. But nevertheless, that shapes your image. And now you get into something that’s totally different, and there’s a tendency to want to make

this new airplane fly like the one you like the most. The software guys contrib­uted to this bad habit by saying, “Hey, it’s software. You tell us what you want, we’ll make it fly." I remember one time they gave us a proposal that had a lit­tle dial and you could make it a P-51 or a T-33 or a f-86 or a 747. “Just tell me what you want." We had a lot of naive ideas when we started.

While the computer for the Space Shuttle allowed many things that were groundbreaking at the time in the world of avionics, Mattingly pointed out that they were still quite primitive compared to modern standards.

I don’t remember the original size of the computer, but it had a memory that was miniscule by today’s standards, but it was huge compared to Apollo. By the time we finished this program, we had this horrendous debate about going to what we called double-density memory that would expand it. It was still nothing, and the only reason management did not want to change to it was for philosophic rea­sons. And IBM finally said, “Look, you guys said you wanted to buy off-the-shelf hardware. Let me tell you, you are the only people in the world with that version of a computer. So if you want to stay with the rest of the world, you’re going to have to take this one." And fortunately, we did, and still it was miniscule. Today I think they’ve upgraded it several more times so that it isn’t nearly the challenge. But that caused us to partition the functions in prelaunch and ascent and then get out of orbit and do some servicing things and then another load for reentry.

Don Peterson, who was selected as an astronaut in 1969 and flew one shuttle mission, said the orbiter computer systems were quite complicated.

My little desktop computer at home is about a hundred times faster and it has about a hundred times more capacity than the computers that were flying on the orbiter. They were afraid to change the computers very much because part of the flight control scheme is based on timing. If you change the computer, you change the timing, and you’d have to redo all the testing. There are thousands of hours of testing that have gone into there, and they know this thing works, and they’re very loathe to make those kinds of changes. They cant change the outside of the vehicle for the same reason; that affects the aerodynamics. So they can change some things in that vehicle, and they [improved] some of it. But they’re not going to make big, drastic changes to the control systems. It’s just too compli­cated and too costly. The flight control system on the orbiter is almost an experi­mental design. In other words, they built the system and then they tested it and tested it and tested it. They just kept changing little bits and pieces, primarily in the software, until it all worked. But if you went back and looked at it from a theoretical point of view, that’s not very pretty. You know what I mean? It’s like, gee, there doesn’t seem to be any consistent deep underlying theory here. It’s all patchwork and it’s all pieced together. And in a sense, that’s true. But that’s why they would be very loathe to try to make big changes to that, because put­ting all that stuff together took a long, long time.

Working on a project with so many systems that all had to be integrated but that were being developed simultaneously was an interesting challenge, recalled Mattingly. “Within the office, we were all trying to stay in touch with all these things going on in each of these areas to keep them some­what in sync from the cockpit perspective. So that gave us a lot of insight into all of these tasks that people were doing,” he said.

We even found, for instance, that as part of this development program, people working with thermal protections systems, the structure guys found that they were discovering limitations that were going to be imposed on the vehicle down­stream that we weren’t thinking about—if you fly in the wrong regimes, you will get yourself into thermal problems. Yet nothing in our flight control work or displays was considering that. We had never encountered anything like that before. So the guys, by working all these different shops, were picking up these little tidbits and we were trying to find ways to look ahead.

Another major change, Mattingly said, was developing and testing the flight control software for the shuttle. “We learned quickly that the man – machine interface is the most labor intensive part of building all this soft­ware,” he said, explaining that the code dedicated to computer control of the vehicle made up less of the software—and less of the time it took to develop it—than the code related to the interface that would allow the as­tronauts to control use of that software to control the vehicle. In addition, he said, a conflict arose because of the computer use needed to develop and test that software. To the engineers who were using those computers to de­sign the vehicle, the time the astronauts spent testing and practicing with the flight control software seemed like “video games.”

We ended up building a team of people: Joe Gamble, who was working the aero­dynamics; Jon Harpold, doing guidance; and Ernie Smith, who was the flight control guy. They all worked in E&D [Engineering and Development]. We all got to going around together in a little team, and we would all go to the simu­lators together, and we would all study things. We built a simulator from Apol­lo hardware that was called. . . its, the Interim Test Station. We had a cou­ple of people—Roger Burke and Al Ragsdale were two sim engineers that had worked on the cms [CommandModule Simulator] and the lms [Lunar Mod­ule Simulator]. They were very innovative, and they took these things before we had the Shuttle Mission Simulator that was back in the early part of the design and went to the junkyard and found airplane parts and built an instrument panel out of spare parts and had a regular chair that you sat in and had dif­ferent control devices that we had borrowed and stolen from places. These folks were so innovative; they could hook it all up.

“They took the initial aerodynamic data books and put them in a file so we could build something that would try to fly,” Mattingly said.

We even took the lunar landing scene television. In the Lunar Module Simula­tor they had a camera that was driven by the model of the motion and it would fly down over the lunar surface, and so you can see this thing, and that was por­trayed in the lms as what you’d train to. So they adapted that to a runway. We tried to build a little visual so we could have some clues to this thing, put in a little rinky-dink CRT [cathode-ray tube] so we could play with building displays. And we got no support from anybody. I mean, this wasn’t space stuff And it is probably one of those things I was most proud of, because we were able to get this thing into someplace where we could actually tinker with how were going to fly the vehicle and what we’re going to do and what the aerodynamics mean. It was only possible because we had these two simulator guys who were wizards at playing with software and this team from e&d who joined us.

We ended up realizing that we had built an electric airplane that had essen­tially only one operating flight control system. So we said, “Well, what if we’re wrong? No one has ever flown a Mach 20 airplane. This whole flight envelope is something that nobody’s ever had the opportunity to experience. So what do you suppose our tolerance is to this?" Because wind tunnel models for the as­cent vehicles, they fit in your hand, because the tunnels that were able to han­dle these things were small. The wind tunnel models for the orbiter were larger, but they’re still not all that big, and going through this tremendously wide flight regime where the air density is going from nothing to everything, and it’s just high speeds to low speeds, I said, “What’s the chance of getting all that right?" And yet as we played in these simulators, … we proved to ourselves that, boy, if you’re offon that estimate of the aerodynamics, you can often play with the soft­ware to make it right, but if the real aerodynamics and the software you have don’t match, it’s a real mess. I know I worried a lot about that.

So we came up with a concept that we would have some tolerances on the aerodynamics, and we would try to make sure that the flight control system could handle these kind of uncertainties in aerodynamics. We did something which is not typically done—we decided to optimize the flight control performance to be tolerant on uncertainties rather than the best flight control system they could build. The whole idea was, after we’ve flown and we have some experience and we know what the real world is, now we can come back and make it better, but the first job is to make ours as tolerant as possible to the things we don’t know.

While Mattingly was working with the computer models of the flight dynamics of the shuttle, astronaut Hank Hartsfield was on the other side of that research, working with the wind tunnel models and encountering the same concerns about the scalability of the data coming out of those tests.

As I recall, the shuttle program had over twenty-two thousand hours of wind tunnel time to try to figure out what it flies like. Because the decision had been made, there are no test flights. We were going to fly it manned the first flight, and an orbital flight at that, which demanded that, the best you can, [we] un­derstand this. Well, hypersonic aerodynamics is difficult to understand, the un­certainty on the aerodynamic parameters that you get out of the tunnel are big. The things that we were looking at in the simulations were if these uncertain­ties in the different aerodynamic parameters stack in a certain way, the vehicle could be unstable.

What we were looking for, for those combinations, statistically were possi­ble, but hopefully not very probable they’d happen, but if they did, that was the kind of things we had to plan for. It’s just an uncertain world. You can’t predict, because in the wind tunnel, you have to put in scaling factors. If you’re doing wind tunnel things off a small model, it doesn’t really scale to the big model per­fectly, and you have to make assumptions when you do that. The scaling ratios have a big factor, a big effect on what the real numbers are. So if you could fly a full-scale orbiter in the wind tunnel and it would go Mach 15 or something, it would be great, but you cant do that. You have a little-bitty model, and it’s a

shock tunnel or something. You’d get a few seconds of runtime at the right Mach numbers and then try to capture the data off of that.

Astronaut Don Peterson was involved in studying the redundancy of systems on the orbiter, and particularly the flight control computers. In the report he pointed out that failure rates on some of the avionics could be high. On Apollo and earlier vehicles, nasa built “ultra-reliability com­ponents,” components that were overdesigned and tested to make failures less likely.

Failures on Apollo, for that reason, were pretty rare. But that’s very expensive. That’s a very difficult thing to do. I was told that after the lunar program ended, MIT had two of the lunar module computers left over, spares. So they just turned them on and programmed them to run cyclically through all the programs. I think they ran one of those computers for, like, fifteen years, and it never failed. It just kept running, and finally they turned it off They just said, “It’s not ever going to fail. ” That’s the way that equipment was built. But that makes it very

expensive. So when they built the Shuttle, they said, “We can’t do that. So what we’re going to do is, instead of ultrareliability components, we’re going to rely on something called redundancy. " They were going to have four computers, and they were going to have three tacans, and they were going to have four of this and two of that and so on. That way, you could tolerate failures. But as a result of that, the failure rate on some of that equipment was fairly high, compared to Apollo.

They also made the multiple units interdependent. “On a typical auto­mobile you have five tires, but that’s not five levels of redundancy because you need four of them,” Peterson explained.

So you can really only tolerate one failure. You can have one tire go bad and you can take care of that. But we got into that same situation on the shuttle because of the way they did the software. The shuttle, when it’s flying, the computers all compare answers with one another, and then they vote among themselves to see if anybody’s gone nuts. If a computer has gone bad, the other computers can over­ride its output so that it isn’t commanding anything. But to make that scheme work, you have to have at least three computers working. Otherwise, you cant vote. You could have [two systems voting], but if they vote against each other, you don’t know which one’s the bad one.

The decision was made to put five of the computers on the orbiter, with four of them active in the primary system, with the idea that this would create a system that could tolerate three failures. However, Peterson said, this produced much higher failure rates than expected. While the system provided a high amount of redundancy in theory, the reality was that be­cause of the way it was designed, the system actually could tolerate only one failure safely. The four primary computers were not truly redundant for each other; only the spare provided redundancy. If one computer failed, the spare would take its place. After that, however, further failures would endanger the cooperative “voting logic” between the computers that veri­fied the accuracy of their results.

But the complexity of the way the thing was put together kind of defeated the simplistic redundancy scheme that they had. It’d be like driving a car that had two engines or three engines, and any one of them would work. Well, that way you could fail two engines and you’d still drive right along. But if it takes two engines to power the vehicle, then you don’t have that, and if it takes three en­gines to power the vehicle, you don’t have any redundancy at all. It gets to be a game then as to how you trade all this off. When I looked at all that and we put the study together, we said, “You know, you’re going to have some failures that are going to really bother you because you’re going to lose components. ” For example, you’re on orbit and you’ve got four computers and one of them fails. Well, now you’ve got three computers left in the primary set. But do you stay on orbit? Because if you suffer one more failure, your voting algorithm no lon­ger works. Now you’re down then into coming home on a single computer and trusting it. And nobody wanted to do that.

So they said, “Gee, I’ve got four computers. I can only tolerate one failure, and then I’ve got to come home. ” We had four of some of the other components, and it was kind of the same sort of thing. If one of them fails, we are no lon­ger failure tolerant. We’ve lost the capability to compare results and vote, and so we don’t want to stay on orbit that way. So now, all of a sudden, the fact that you’ve got four of them causes more aborts because the more things you have, the more likely you are to have one fail. You’d get more failures and more aborts with four computers than if you’d gone with some other plan. That was pretty controversial for a while. We predicted—and there were some people that were really upset about that—we predicted a couple ofground aborts due to computer failures. Essentially we’d get chewed out for saying that, but in the first thirteen flights, we hit it right on the money. We had two ground aborts in thirteen flights.

When the shuttle was built, the air force was also using redundancy sys­tems, Peterson recalled. Then the air force built what it called confederat­ed systems, in which each component was independent. “They cooperated with each other, but they shipped data to each other, but they weren’t re­ally closely tied together,” Peterson explained.

The shuttle was tightly integrated. It runs on a very rigid timing scheme. The computers on the shuttle actually compare results about a little more than three hundred times a second. So it’s all tightly tied together. Well, when they decided to build the [International] Space Station, NASA said, “We’re not doing this in­tegrated stuff anymore. Boy, that was a real pain. We’re going to use a confeder­ated system. ” The air force, on their latest fighter, said, “This confederated stuff doesn’t work worth a damn. Were going to build a tightly integrated [system]. ” So they both went along for ten years or twelve years, and then they flip-flopped. The military’s going the way NASA originally went, and NASA’s now going the way the military went originally. I think the answer is, there is no magic answer to all that. Probably one concept is maybe not that much better than the other. It’s how you implement it and how much money you spend and how much to test. What do they say? The devils in the details. I think that’s right with all this stuff.

Mattingly recalled excellent cooperation between the engineering staff working on the shuttle and the Astronaut Office. “I seldom have seen that integration of the people that were going to fly it with the designers and people who were doing the theoretical work and the operators from the ground,” Mattingly said.

All of that stuff was converged in parallel, and I think that’s one of the reasons that the shuttle is such a magnificent flying machine. It does all the magic that we set out to do. I’m ignoring the cost because the shuttle, in my recollection, by the time it was sold to Congress, it was probably different than what the peo­ple in the trenches remember, but we had to do all these technical things, and it was a matter of faith that if you build it, it will be cheap. I mean, it was just simple. If you could reuse it, it saves money, and so you’ve got to make it reus­able. If you fly a lot, that will be good, and we’re going to fly this thing for $5.95, and we’re going to fly it once a week and that’s how we’re going to do this. And none of us were ever told to go build a vehicle that we could afford to own. And had we been told that, I doubt if we would have been able to do it. I think the job was so complex, you had to build one that flies in order to learn the lessons that say, "Now I know what’s important and what isn’t. ” I just think it would have been asking too much, but that’s just personal opinion, but it’s from hav­ing struggled through ten years of this development program. It was an extraor­dinary experience to do that.

The role of the Astronaut Office during the development of the Space Shuttle was quite different from what Mattingly experienced during the Apollo program. “Our involvement was far more extensive and pervasive, and a heck of a lot more fun,” he said.

I mean, this was really cool stuff. There was a problem every day, and you got to learn about all of these little things that were interesting. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the stress loads and the thermal characteristics on the tps [thermalprotection system], and how do you get it to stay on, and all of those things were things that came through the office as experiences that really were just extraordinary opportunities to go see that. As we moved down the stream and we got into some of these development programs and started turning out hardware, we started splitting people up to go follow different components of hardware, whether it be the engines or the SRBs or the orbiter.

The decision to have the orbiter be an unpowered glider rather than a jet during its return to Earth and the various ramifications of that decision were also among the things that had to be considered during development. “Some­where earlier in this development stage, we went through a series of activities where the first orbiter was going to have air-breathing engines, and it had some solid rockets that were on the back that were for aborts,” Mattingly said.

Right off the pad you could fire these two big rockets, and they would take you off in a big loop so you could come back and land. We had these air-breathing engines that were going to—after you come down through the atmosphere, you open the door and these engines come out, and you light them and you come around and land. They had enough gas for one go-around. The other thing we had was the big solids were to have thrust terminations and ports that blew out at the front end so you could terminate thrust on them if you needed to in an emergency. Every one of those devices was something which had a higher prob­ability of killing you by its presence than it would ever have in saving you. I’ll put that ejection seat in the same boat. Everybody was willing to get rid of the air-breathing engines. They were really, really not a very bright idea. And we got rid of the thrust termination and we got rid of the abort solid rockets. My guess is John Young was probably the most active stimulus in pushing those is­sues, and that was one of those cases where the flight crew perspective and the engineering perspectives converged. We all wanted to get rid of these things, and yet we retained the ejection seats for reasons which I will never understand. If anyone knew what the useful envelope of those ejection seats was and the price we paid to have them. . . . But it had become a cause: “You will protect these kids by giving them an ejection seat." So we had one, not that anybody wanted to ever use it, but it was there.

Astronaut Bonnie Dunbar was still an undergraduate student at the Uni­versity of Washington during the early portions of shuttle’s development, and she worked with the school’s dean of ceramics engineering, who had received a grant to work on the tiles for the shuttle’s thermal protection sys-

tem. nasa’s earlier manned spacecraft had used ablative heat shields, which absorbed heat by burning up, protecting the rest of the vehicle. Such a sys­tem was simple and effective, but for the new, reusable Space Shuttle, nasa wanted a reusable heat shield, one that could protect the vehicle without itself being destroyed. The solution that was settled upon involved a vast collection of tiles and “blankets” covering the underside of the orbiter and other areas of the vehicle that would be exposed to extreme temperatures.

“First of all, tiles are a ceramic material, so by definition they’re brittle,” Dunbar said.

But the reason they have an advantage over metals is that they don’t expand ten times over their thermal exposure range. It’s called the coefficient of thermal ex­pansion. Also, they are an insulator; they don’t conduct heat. We looked at met­als, or what they call refractory metal skins, and there are two disadvantages. You still have to insulate behind them, because metals conduct heat. The other is that when you go from room temperature, let’s say seventy-five degrees Fahr­enheit, to twenty-three hundred [degrees], you have a large growth. It’s like your cookie pans, I guess, in the oven. So the airframe would distort. The ceramic materials [have] very small thermal coefficients of expansion, ten to the negative sixth, so you’re not going to see a lot of deformation. Also you could, on a very

low density tile, expose the surface to twenty-three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the backface, three inches deep, would not see even close to that, less than a couple hundred degrees, till after you’re on the ground. It’s a very slow coeffi­cient of thermal expansion and heat transfer. So ceramics had a definite advan­tage. We knew that from the work we’d done in the sixties, and in fact, ceramics were already being used as the heat shields on nose cones for missiles and so forth. So the next big challenge was to put them in a low-density, lightweight form that could be applied to the outside of a vehicle. Apollo vehicles, Gemini, Mer­cury, were all covered by ablators, which meant that they burned up on the re­entry to the Earth’s atmosphere and could not be reused. The tiles were meant to be reusable. They didn’t deform. They didn’t change their chemistry. We had to, though, shape them so that they were the shape of an airplane, so we had all the aerodynamic features there. So we sort of did a little reverse engineering, in that we said, “Okay, here’s what the shuttle looks like; got to maintain that shape. Here’s how hot it gets from the nose to the tail. Most of the heat’s at the nose, on the nose cone, and the leading edges of the wings. We want to make sure the aluminum substructure doesn’t get over 350 degrees Fahrenheit; that’s when it starts to change shape. So how thick does the tile have to be?" So we used all those limits and constraints, then you’d use the computer. . . to calculate how thick each tile had to be. Then we started looking at, well, okay, how big should each tile have to be? Could I just put large sheets of tile on there?

Well, we started looking at what the structure does during launch, and now we’re getting to something called vibroacoustics. There’s a lot of force pressure on the vehicle, a lot of noise, if you will, generated into the structure, and it vi­brates. We calculated that if we put a foot-by-foot piece of tile on there, the vi­bration would actually break it up into six-by-six-inch pieces. We said, “Well, we’ll design it six by six. " So you’ll see most tiles are six by six. Now how close do you put them? We thought, well, you cant get them too close, because dur­ing that vibration they’ll beat each other to death, because they’re covered with a glaze. You’ve got silicon dioxide fibers that are made into very low mass tiles, nine pounds per cubic feet, or twenty-two pounds, and to ensure they don’t erode in the airstream when you reenter, they’re covered with a ceramic glaze. So that’s also brittle, so you can’t get them too close or they’ll break the glaze. You can’t get them too far apart or, during reentry, the plasma flow will penetrate down in those gaps and could melt the aluminum. So that’s called gap or plasma in­trusion. So that then constrained what we called the gap. Then from tile to tile, how high one was compared to the next one, we called step. That became im­portant because if you had too large a step towards the leading edge of the wing, that would disturb the boundary layer, and you would go up the plasma, and instead of having smooth layers, it would start to transition to turbulent, from laminar to turbulent, and turbulent results in higher heating. So that controlled the step. So gap and step were very important to that as well.

“Those were all challenges,” Dunbar said. “We depended on advances in computerized machining capabilities, wind tunnel work with models to help us determine the requirements on step, the manufacturing, just every­thing. Firing a tile, a certain temperature and time was important to main­taining its geometry. . . . It’s, I think, a real tribute to the program that if you look at follow-on programs, even in NASA but also in Japan or in Eu­rope or even the Russians, who built the Buran [Soviet shuttle], you’ll find that the system on the surface is very similar to the shuttle tile system. It was a good solution.”

Dunbar said that working on the shuttle during that early time was an exciting opportunity.

This was the next-generation vehicle. Not only was it next generation, it was…

“transformational" is the word we use now. If you think about it, everything to that point was one use only. Couldn’t bring any mass back. We sent a lot of things into orbit that we had to test and leave there, and it became a shooting star, coming back to Earth. So this transformed our ability to do research. It’s why we have a space station now. We not only learned from Skylab, but we flew [on] Spacelab countless research projects that we could bring back to Earth, get the results out, diagnose problems with equipment. I think it saved the govern­ment billions of dollars, because we didn’t throw it away each time. So it was exciting, and we knew what it could do. New technology. It was leading edge on not only the thermal protection systems, but it was the first fully fly-by-wire vehicle, in terms of the computers and the flight control system. The main en­gines were also a pathfinder as well, and so it was exciting, even if it delayed till ’81. If you think about it, we baselined it to the contractor, to Rockwell, in 1972, I believe. So nine years later we have a vehicle, a reusable vehicle, flying.

Astronaut Terry Hart was the Astronaut Office’s representative in the de­velopment of the Space Shuttle main engines.

Since I had a technical background, mostly mechanical engineering, John Young had asked me to follow the main engine development. This was a couple of years before sts-1. In fact, it was ironic that we showed up [as NASA astronauts] in ’78, and everyone said we’re one year away from the first shuttle launch, and two years later, we were still one year away from the first shuttle launch, and it was really because of two main areas of technical difficulty. The main engine development was somewhat problematic, with some turbo pump failures that they’d had on the test stand, and the tiles. We had difficulty with the tiles be­ing bonded on properly and staying on. But the main engine was one that John Young wanted me to follow for him, and so I spent a lot of time going back and forth to [Marshall Space Flight Center in] Huntsville [Alabama] and to nstl, the National Space Technology Laboratories, in Bay St. Louis [Mississippi, cur­rently called the NASA John C. Stennis Space Center], where NASA tested the en­gines. And Huntsville, of course, was where the program office was for the main engines. And that was very exciting. I mean, I was like a kid in a candy store, in the sense that a mechanical engineer being able to kibitz in this technology, with the tremendous power of the fuel pumps and the oxidizer pumps, and the whole engine design, I thought, was just phenomenal. The hard part of that job was when we had failures on the test stand, which were, unfortunately, too fre­quent. I’d get the pleasure of standing up in front of John Young and the rest of the astronauts on Monday morning to explain what happened. And, of course, everyone was always very disappointed, because we knew this was setting back the first launch and it was a jeopardy to the whole program. But we got through that, and the engines have done extremely well all through the program here, where it was always thought to be the weak link in the design.

Astronaut Don Lind was involved in the early planning and development of the remote manipulator system, the shuttle’s robot arm.

I guess the first significant assignment I had [for the shuttle] was in develop­ing the control system for the remote manipulator system, the RMS. In the hinge line of the cargo bay doors, there is an arm that’s articulated pretty much like the human arm. It’s about as long as two telephone poles, and it’s designed for deploying and retrieving satellites. Again, somebody had to worry about the op­erational considerations of that arm. It was built by the Canadians with the agreement through the [U. S.] State Department, and I was assigned to work on that. So I made a lot of trips into Canada to work with those people. The peo­ple who were actually building the hardware were very, very compatible, very easy to work with, and we had a very nice working relationship.

Lind contributed to the development of the three different coordinate systems that were going to be built into the arm’s software.

One coordinate system, obviously, applied when you’re looking out of the win­dow into the cargo bay, and so you want to work in that coordinate system. If you wanted the arm to move away from you, you pushed the hand controller away from you. Also, if you’re trying to grasp a satellite up over your head and you’re looking with the TV camera down the fingers at the end of the arm, which is called the end effector, and you want to move straight along the direction the fingers are pointing, you don’t want to have to try to figure out which way you should go, so you shift to a totally different coordinate system. So if you’re look­ing in the TV picture with the camera that’s mounted right above the end effec­tor, you want to push the hand controller straightforward. You want it to move straight forward in the television picture.

Lind also helped answer the question of how the hand controllers were to be configured.

We wanted hand controllers where the translation [movement] motion would be done by one hand controller, which we decided would be the left hand, and the rotational motion controlled by a hand controller which would be handled with the right hand. We decided, as a joint decision, that the hand controller for translation should be a square knob.

Then I said, “Now, remember you’re floating. You’re floating, so you’ve got to hang on to something while you’re translating, and you don’t want your bobbing around to affect the hand controller. So you need to put a square bracket around it so you can hold on to the bracket with your little finger and can use the hand controller." “Oh yeah, we hadn’t thought of that. Well, how big do you want it to be?" We actually measured my hand and designed the controller and bracket to the physical dimensions of my hand. Obviously, when you make a decision like that, then you have five other astronauts check it out, and they say, “Yeah, that was a really good decision." I didn’t want the hand controller for the right hand to be mounted square on the bulkhead, because the relaxed position of your arm is not at a square angle; it’s drooping down to the side. And I wanted that position to be the no-rotation position. We set up a simulation, and I stood up there, and they measured the angle of my arm and then built a bracket to mount that hand controller just exactly the way my arm relaxed. And again, we had several other astronauts check it, and they said yes, that was a fine thing. So the hand controllers were literally fine-tuned to my design.

Other people were worrying about the software, how to implement these co­ordinate systems. Other people were doing all the very sophisticated engineering. But the human factor was my responsibility, and basically it was a very pleas­ant experience to work with the Canadians, with one exception. The arm has two joints: like the elbow, and like the shoulder; one degree offreedom in the el­bow, two in the shoulder, and three degrees offreedom in the wrist, so there are three literal components to the wrist junction. They had mounted the camera on the middle one. As you maneuver in certain ways, the wrist has to compen­sate for the rotations of the other joints, and every once in a while the TV pic­ture would simply rotate. Not that anything had actually rotated, but the wrist was compensating. I said, “That’s unacceptable. ” They said, “No, no, no, no, it has to be there. That’s the cheapest place to put it. ” The engineers were all in agreement that this was a mistake, because you could lose a satellite when sud­denly the picture rotates and nothing really has happened. But the management people said, “This meets our letter of intent with the State Department. We’re not going to change it. ” So in one meeting I had to be very unpleasant. I said, “Now, gentlemen, if we ever lose a satellite because of this unnatural rotation, I will personally hold a press conference and say that you had been warned, and it’s the Canadians’ fault. ” They looked at me like, “Ooh, you’re nasty. ” At the next meeting, they said, “Well, we’ll change it, and it doesn’t cost as much as we thought in the first place.” Usually you could get good cooperation, but occa­sionally, particularly with people up in the bureaucratic levels, you had to be a little bit pushy. I try not to be pushy, but that’s one time I did.

Astronaut George “Pinky” Nelson was involved in the development of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (emu), the spacesuit used for conduct­ing activities outside of the spacecraft. “The suit was one of the long poles in getting the shuttle ready to fly,” he said.

The folks in Houston who were in charge of it, [Walter] Guy and his group, were really working hard, and it was a difficult task to get it pulled together. The suit actually blew up shortly before sts-1. I was home working in my gar­den. I was playing hooky one afternoon, and I got a call from George Abbey.

He said, “Where the hell are you?” “Well, I’m home working in the garden.” He said, “Okay. Get in here. We just had an accident with the spacesuit. "They were doing some testing in one of the vacuum chambers in Building 7, and they had the suit unmanned, pressurized, in the vacuum chamber. They were going to do some tests and they were going through the procedures of donning the suit and flipping all the switches in the right order and going through the checklist. There’s a point when you get in the suit that you move a valve. There’s a slider valve on the front of the suit, and you move this slider valve over, and what it does is it pushes a lever inside a regulator and opens up a line that brings the high-pressure emergency [oxygen] tanks on line. You do that just before you go outside. You don’t need them when you’re in the cabin, because you can always repressurize the airlock. When you’re going to go outside, you need these high – pressure tanks. They’re two little stainless steel tanks about six inches in diam­eter, maybe seven. And it turned out that when this tech did that, he threw that switch and the suit basically blew up. I mean not just pneumatically, but burst into flames [and] got severely burned. It was pure oxygen in there. The backpack is made basically out of a big block of aluminum, and aluminum is flammable in pure oxygen. So this thing just went “whooff,” went up in smoke.

So then I was put on the Investigation Board for that, and spent I don’t know how long, a couple months at least, just focusing on what had caused this and could we identify it and fix it and get it ready so that it wasn’t the long pole for flying sts-1. So I learned even more about the design and manufacturing and materials and all ofthat in the suit during that process. It was fascinating. And the NASA sys­tem for handling that kind ofan incident really is very good. We’ve seen it with the big accidents we’ve had. They really can get to the bottom of a problem very well.

After that, Nelson said, there weren’t any major problems in the devel­opment of the suit. “There were lots of little stuff. The displays and con­trols on the suit are a challenge because, one, you have to see them from inside the suit, looking down, so a lot of these old guys in the office who were, you know, the stage I am in my life now, where I have to wear read­ing glasses, couldn’t read the displays because they were close to your face. So we worked on lenses and all kinds of ways to make the displays legible to people with old eyes.”

For all the capabilities built into the vehicle, one of the notorious dis­appointments of the Space Shuttle program is that launch costs ended up being much higher than promised. The original appeal of the shuttle was that its reusability would bring launch costs down dramatically, but those dreams were never fully realized. Explained Don Peterson,

The shuttles, unfortunately, are pretty difficult to work on. When the military builds an airplane, it tries to make everything in the airplane designed so that you can remove and replace parts quickly and easily. The shuttle is much more difficult to get to some of the stuff. Therere not big [easily opened]panels on it. You cant release a few latches and open a big panel on the side of the orbiter. You literally have to take it apart to get into it. You can go in through the in­side, through the bay, and get to some of that stuff, but even then you’re removing parts that aren’t designed [for that]. It’s not like opening doors and looking inside. The military builds a lot oftheir stuff to be easy to work on, and they really didn’t build the shuttle that way. So the shuttle is more expensive to operate. For exam­ple, the little jet engines, there’s, like, thirty-eight of them, I think, on the orbiter that control attitude when it’s on orbit. If one of those engines fails, you cant just unscrew some things and take it out. You have to cut it out with a torch, and you have to weld the new one back in, because they didn’t build it to be removed. The heat shield is [24,300] little individual tiles, and they’re all different shapes and different thicknesses, and so every tile is like a little individual item. When the shuttle comes back, they have to inspect visually, and with a pull device, every single tile. If any of them don’t pass, you’ve got to cut that one out and clean off the glue and go get the new one and put it all back. Those are very high mainte­nance items. So the shuttle really wasn’t built to be easy to maintain, and that’s because NASA has always had, as [former Johnson Space Center director] Gerry Griffin used to say, a standing army at the Cape that did all that, and nobody really worried about it. If you needed something done, you just called and they sent over four or five guys and they fixed it. But that’s expensive.

The shuttle was designed to fly, I think it was fifty flights a year, and they were going to have five shuttles to do that. So each shuttle would fly ten times in a year. Well, right now the whole fleet’s only flying about eight times a year. Well, you’re trying to amortize the cost of the whole program over eight flights. It’s like we’ve got all this capability to repair and replace and analyze and monitor things, and we’re not using a whole lot of it. If you were flying fifty times a year, the cost per flight would go way down because you wouldn’t add that much to the facilities and the maintenance costs. The facilities costs don’t change much if you never flew. You’ve still got to have all the facilities, and you’ve got to pay for all that. You have to keep this whole group of special­ists on, technicians and people, to do the work. With eight flights a year, some of those guys may only get used twice a year, but you’ve got to pay them and you’ve still got to have them there. If you were flying a lot more, the cost per flight would go way down.

George Mueller, the NASA head of human spaceflight who launched the Space Shuttle program, explained that there were several factors that drove the operational cost of the shuttle up, including many decisions, like the use of solid rocket boosters, that reduced development costs at the outset and pre­sented Congress a lower buy-in budget request to build the vehicle but that resulted in higher operational costs once the shuttle started flying. Howev­er, he said, the ultimate problem with the shuttle was that it ended up being designed to use far more people to process it than were absolutely necessary. “If you really want to know why the shuttle failed, it’s because they designed it to use all the people from Saturn and Apollo, to keep them employed.”

Countless technical problems had to be overcome, and ultimately the shuttle’s greatest limitation was that it was designed to be too nice.

Former jsc director Chris Kraft, however, still speaks highly of the shut­tle. “It’s the safest spacecraft we ever built.” Kraft noted that while shuttle crews have been lost because of problems stemming with the solid rocket boosters and the external tank, the orbiter itself has not been responsible for any fatal accidents. “The orbiter itself is flawless, since we’ve been flying. Absolutely flawless.” Rather than retiring the shuttle, Kraft argued, NASA should have continued to make it better and continued to fly it, adding that many ideas for improving the orbiter were never implemented. “That’s what we should still be doing. We still ought to be improving. We could improve the hell out of it. We could improve the hell out of the thermal protection system, we could improve the control systems, get rid of the apus [auxilia­ry power units]. All of that has been designed and is ready to be built. You don’t have to stop and redesign it, it’s done.”

By 1976 NASA’s astronaut corps had seen a large number of departures. Many of the early astronauts who had joined the agency as pioneers of spaceflight or as part of the race for the moon felt like they had accomplished what they had come to do. The last Saturn to fly launched in 1975, the next op­portunity to fly was still years away, and some in the corps decided they had no desire to wait.

Only one of the Original Seven astronauts, Deke Slayton, remained in the agency, as did only one member of the second group, John Young. Two members each remained of the third and fourth groups (although only one of those four astronauts would get the opportunity to fly on the shuttle). The fifth group was better represented—eight of the Original Nineteen were still at nasa—and the majority of the sixth group and all of the seventh were still at the agency, having arrived in the corps too late to be assigned Apollo flights.

With the number of astronauts dwindling, the ambitious plans for the shuttle program required new blood. So in 1976 NASA announced for the first time in a decade that it would be accepting applications for a new class of astronauts, to support the Space Shuttle program.

Astronaut Fred Gregory saw the ad for Space Shuttle astronauts on tele­vision. “I was a Star Trek freak, and the communications officer, Lieuten­ant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, showed up on Tv in a blue flight suit,” Greg­ory said. “As I recall, there was a 747 in NASA colors behind her; you could hear it. But she pointed at me and she said, ‘I want you to join the astro­naut program.’ So, shoot, if Lieutenant Uhura looks at me and tells me that, that got me thinking about it.”

Steven Hawley saw the NASA announcement on a job openings bulletin board while in graduate school at the University of California.

I remember there was this letterhead that said NASA on it, and I thought, “Wow, that’d be interesting. ” I looked at it, and it said they were looking for astronauts.

I had no idea how they’d go about hiring astronauts, and here’s an announce­ment saying, hey, you want to be an astronaut, here are the qualifications. You have to be between five foot and six foot four, and you have to have good eye­sight, and you have to have a college degree, and graduate school counts as ex­perience. You need three years of experience, and I’m thinking, “Well, I’m qual­ified. " I’ve also told kids that so were twenty million other guys.

Hawley recalled that this was the first time he thought that becoming an astronaut might really be possible for him, because of changes in the selection criteria. “I probably dropped everything I was doing at that mo­ment and set about filling out this application to become an astronaut. I didn’t realize till years later that it’s actually the same application you fill out to be any government employee, SF-171. You fill it out and send it in. I even remember sending it by, I think, return receipt request so that I could make sure that this thing got into the hands of the proper people at NASA.”

Realistically, Hawley said, he didn’t think he would be selected. He real­ized the pool contained many well-qualified applicants. But even with what he believed were slim odds, he applied anyway. “Why in the world would they pick me?” he said.

I still think perhaps they didn’t mean to, and one day they’ll come and tap me on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me. You’ve got this guy’s desk, coincidentally named Steve Hawley, and he’s the one we meant." I’ve told kids this, too, that the reason I applied, as much as anything, was because I knew that if I applied and didn’t get picked, and then I watched shuttles launch with people on them and building space stations and putting up telescopes in space, I could live with that, if NASA said, “Well, thanks, but you’re not what we’re looking for." But to not apply, to not try, and then wonder your whole life, could you have done it if you had tried, I didn’t think I could take that. So it was okay if they said no, but I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life wondering, had I only tried, would I be able to do it?

Before 1978 NASA had selected five groups of pilots and two groups of scientist-astronauts. The eighth group would be the first mixed class, in­cluding both pilots and a new designation, mission specialists.

The new designation was of particular interest to Mike Mullane, who at the time was a flight-test weapon system operator for the air force. “nasa announced they were selecting mission specialist astronauts, and this was the new thing, because now you didn’t have to be a pilot to apply to be an astronaut. So this dream of perhaps being an astronaut was now back open to me. In fact, I remember that night that they announced it. This was big news at Edwards, because virtually everybody at Edwards Air Force Base wanted to apply to be an astronaut.”

The new class would be the largest group of astronauts yet. More than eight thousand applications were received. In 1978 NASA announced the first class of shuttle astronauts, dubbed TFNG, an acronym given multiple meanings, most politely, “thirty-five new guys.”

Among the new class were, of course, test pilots from the navy and the air force, many of whom knew each other and had trained and served to­gether. Rick Hauck was on his second cruise as a navy pilot on the uss En­terprise when the announcement came out. “There was a flyer from NASA saying they were looking for applicants for the astronaut program to fly the shuttle and, in fact, four of us on the Enterprise wound up in my astro­naut class: myself, Hoot Gibson, Dale Gardner, and John Creighton. Three of the fifteen pilots were from that air wing. Dale Gardner was a mission specialist. Which is really kind of interesting, three of fifteen. What’s that? Twenty percent came from that ship.”

Hauck didn’t grow up with an interest in space, and as a child there had been no space program for him to aspire to. “The word Apollo didn’t even exist in terms of spaceflight when I was thinking about becoming a na­val aviator,” said Hauck, who was a junior in college when Alan Shepard made his first spaceflight in 1961. “Even before I became an aviator, while I was at [The U. S. Naval Test Pilot School in] Monterey, I had read that NASA was recruiting scientists to become astronauts, and I wrote a letter to NASA saying, ‘I’m in graduate school. You could tailor my education how­ever you saw fit to optimize my benefit to the program, and I’d be very in­terested in becoming an astronaut.’ I got a letter back saying, ‘Thank you very much for your interest. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.’ That was in ear­ly ’65, I think, so it was twelve years later that I was accepted into the as­tronaut program.”

Sally Ride, the United States’ first female astronaut to fly in space, saw the ad for a new class of astronauts in the Stanford University newspaper, placed there by the Center for Research on Women at Stanford. “The ad

made it clear that nasa was looking for scientists and engineers, and it also made it clear that they were going to accept women into the astronaut corps. They wanted applications from women, which is presumably the reason the Center for Research on Women was contacted and the reason that they of­fered to place the ad in the Stanford student newspaper.”

Another member of the eighth class, air force pilot Dick Covey, got to nasa by studying and following a career path similar to those of the early astronauts. “As I looked at what it looked like those original astronauts had done. . . that became a path for me to follow,” Covey said. He majored in astronautical engineering and participated in a cooperative master’s pro­gram between the Air Force Academy and Purdue University. According to Covey, fifteen of the selected Thirty-Five New Guys participated in the program at the same time as he.

We gave up our graduation vacation time. All my [other] classmates got two months to go off and party and tour the world and do whatever and then go to their flight training, while we all went immediately, right after graduation to Purdue and started school again. But in January following graduation in June, we all had our master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and those of us that were going to flight training already had our flight-training date, and we went immediately to flight training. So, for someone that wanted to be an as­tronaut, being able to go through the Air Force Academy, major in astronauti – cal engineering, and get a master’s degree from Purdue in aeronautics and as­tronautics within seven months and then go immediately to flight training was an extraordinary opportunity. I often wonder, if I had not done that, whether I would have ever become an astronaut. . . . One of the reasons Purdue has so many astronauts is there’s all these Air Force Academy guys who went through that program over time, and it added to their numbers then.

When the announcement was made, Covey applied through the air force. The air force had decided, as the other services did, that it would have its own selection of those it would nominate to nasa, and Covey was selected as one of the air force’s applicants.

Hauck and Dan Brandenstein were test pilot school classmates and squad­ron mates six years prior to their selection to the corps. Hauck said the two talked a lot back then about whether or not they would apply to the astro­naut program.

Part of the preinterview process was the folks in Houston took each folder. Some ofthe people were rejected immediately. Some, they said, “Well, let’s find out more about this person. ” They make a lot of phone calls. “Hey, do you know Rick?” or, “Do you know Dan? What do you think about him?” So I got a call one day in my office at Whidbey Island, Washington, and it was John Young. And John said, “I’m on the selection board for this astronaut program. ” He didn’t say any­thing about knowing that I was applying. He said, “Dan Brandenstein, he’s in your squadron there. What do you think about him?” And I told him, I said, “I think he’s a great guy. He’d be a super astronaut. ” He said, “Okay, thank you very much. ” And I said, “Excuse me, but I’m applying also. ” He said, “I know. I know. Thank you very much. ”

Covey said that his selection as one of the air force’s candidates for the new class of astronauts was the first of a series of milestones that made the possibility of achieving his goal seem a little more real. “When they start­ed [interviewing candidates] we knew they were doing it,” Covey said, re­calling that, at the same time, nasa was conducting glide-flight tests of the prototype orbiter, Enterprise.

So everybody’s getting excited about the shuttle now. . . . We knew that NASA was getting ready. I had a vacation planned. I had just taken my wife and kids and put them on an airplane. They were on their way to California, and I was supposed to join them within a day or two. I got a call, and it was from Jay Honeycutt. Jay was calling to invite me to come to Houston. . . . It was very short notice for an interview. That was the first day they were calling anybody. Finally had got their list down and alphabetically they started calling people to come. I’m sitting there. I just sent my wife out. I’m supposed to go join her on this vacation out here. I remember thinking—I mean, this was the hardest question I was going to ask. I said, “Jay, so if I said I couldn’t come next week, will you invite me back another time?”I later talked to Jay, and he said that he said, “Well, just a second. Let me check. ” So I go, “Oh, no. ”

Covey said that Honeycutt told him later that he had to go ask wheth­er they could schedule another time for a candidate, since it was a possi­bility that hadn’t been discussed. “They expect that everybody will say, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ you know. So he came back and says, ‘Yeah, we’ll in­vite you back.’ Well, so I go on my vacation, and I’m going, ‘Oh, my God. They haven’t called me yet. When are they going to call me?’ So it was a terrible vacation. It was a terrible vacation. Toward the end of it they fi­nally called; said, ‘Well, we’re getting our stuff together. We want you to come week after next.’”

The interview process lasted a week and included physical, psychiatric, and psychological exams. “The physical exams included lab work of ev­erything that they could measure,” recalled Hauck. The psychiatric exam, Hauck said, involved interviews with a “good-guy psychiatrist” and a “bad – guy psychiatrist,” each of whom played a different role in the test.

The bad-guy psychiatrist evaluated how you did under pressure. For example, “I’m going to read off a list of numbers. Tell me what they are in inverse or­der. ” And you start with two, five, and you say, “Five, two. ” And then three numbers, then four numbers, then five, then six, and you’re sitting there just thinking, “I cant do this. ” At some point, you make a mistake. Inevitably, at some point you make a mistake and the psychiatrist said, “That’s wrong, ” with a scowl on his face. “Cant you do better than that?” Blah, blah, blah. And, of course, he doesn’t care whether you did it with five numbers, three numbers, or eight numbers. He’s more interested in seeing whether you get flustered, wheth –

eryou get antagonistic. And as I recall, I might have said, “That’s the best I can do, yes.” “That’s okay.”

The role of the other interviewer, Hauck said, focused more on the can­didate’s emotions and interpersonal relationship styles. “The good-guy psy­chiatrist would ask you questions such as if you were to wear a T-shirt and there were an animal on the front of the T-shirt and you wanted that to sort of be your symbol, what would that animal be? I forget what I said, and I’m sure he drew some conclusions whether you said a tiger or a tur­tle or a rat or what.”

In another part of the test, he said, candidates were zipped up individu­ally into a fabric sphere.

In order to get into it, you had to get into a fetal position, into a ball, and the concept of the sphere was it was just small enough so that it could go through the crew hatch in the Space Shuttle in the event that you had to rescue people from one shuttle to another. The charter was, “Were going to put you in this. You have oxygen. You have communications. Were not going to tell you how longyou’re go­ing to be in there. At the end, we want you to write a flight report on what you think are the upsides, downsides, what more needs to be studied for this concept. ”

So that was fascinating. There was really two objectives there. One is, see how analytical you are about analyzing.. . a piece ofhardware or software. Number two is a claustrophobia test, because you literally couldn’t move very much, and it would be very clear ifyou had claustrophobic tendencies. As I recall, I found it most comfortable to sort of lie on my back with my knees up, and I almost fell asleep.

The “big deal” of the process, Hauck said, was the board interview with Johnson Space Center officials who made the selection decisions.

They’d say, “Tell us about yourself,” and just let you talk. I don’t remember getting any surprise questions, but some of the people got surprise questions. For example, President Carter was president at the time. He had just signed the bill that trans­ferred the Panama Canal back to Panama, and one of the questions was, “What do you think about the Suez Canal situation?” And of course, the person might have started commenting about the Panama Canal because that was what was in the news, and then one of the board members might say, “Why are you telling us about the Panama Canal? We asked you about the Suez Canal. ” And again, it’s an opportunity to see how people react under some level of stress and so on.

Interviewees were called to Houston in groups. John Fabian said his group comprised about twenty-two people, and he was convinced that any of them would have made fine astronauts. “It was all rather intimidating and awe-inspiring,” Fabian said, “but somehow, at the end of it, some peo­ple got lucky, and other people didn’t, and I was one of the lucky ones.”

At six feet one, Fabian was too tall for earlier astronaut selections, but with the Space Shuttle program came a new maximum height of six feet four. Before that, he’d not given it much thought, he said. “I’ve always had the philosophy that you shouldn’t try to be something you can’t. I couldn’t be an astronaut if I was six foot one, and that was above the height limit.”

The highlight of the interview week for Terry Hart was the selection com­mittee, led by Director of Flight Operations George Abbey, in part due to an unusual circumstance in another part of the interview. Hart’s blood tests early in the week were flagged for being outside the parameters for uric acid.

“The basic message I was getting was that that was going to be disqual­ifying,” Hart said.

And in a sense I think that really helped me, because I went into the interview just [like] I was down here for the experience and everything. I was relatively relaxed as you could be for such an interview and went through that interview process and finished the week up. I went home and told my wife that it was a wonderful experience, but I wasn’t going to make it, which is what I thought from the be­ginning. But I was a little disappointed at that point, because as you get into the process, your competitive juices start flowing and everything. You really want to be part of this very exciting adventure that was about to begin. Yet realistically, I’d met all these people that… seemed to be so much more qualified than I was.

On the flip side, Norm Thagard found himself feeling like he was in the hot seat during his interview, particularly over a comment he made about women.

You sit there at a table and there are people on all sides of you during the inter­view and they’re firing questions at you. . . . The question George [Abbey] asked me was, “Well, I see that you made a C in ballroom dancing. Why was that?" I said, “Well, our instructor was a woman who liked to lead." Which was true. “I found that very difficult to learn to dance with someone who was leading." But then the next question was, “Well, what do you have against women?" And, you know, they’re firing these questions from all over and you’re turning

this way and then you’re turning that way. [I heard] a little ruffle of move­ment and I see someone get up and leave. When I turn back, Carolyn Hunt – oon, who was the only female member on the thing, had gotten up and left. I said, “Well, this is just great." First of all, they’ve drawn this thing out, which to me, I thought was an innocent enough response, but now they’re making a big deal out of it. Now this woman is obviously a feminist and offended that I’ve said this, and so she’s left.

After the selection announcement, Thagard would find out what had hap­pened when he and the other new astronauts were brought to Johnson Space Center for media events. “Carolyn Huntoon was the one that babysat our kids, because we brought them along for that,” he said. “She took us in our car over to some of the events at jsc. I reminded Carolyn that she had gotten up and left during my interview and what I had thought was the reason why. She says, ‘Oh, no, I had to get up to leave because my babysitter had to go home.’ So it took me a long time to realize that, in fact, it hadn’t been all that bad.”

After the week-long interviews, it was time to wait. And wait. And wait. “I think I was [at Johnson for the interview] in August or something,” Covey re­called. “And so it was go home and wait for five months to see what happened. And nothing; there was nothing. It was real quiet during that time period.”

Finally, in January 1978 the phone calls started going out. John Fabian remembers where he was when he first heard that the new class had been selected, before he knew whether he had been chosen or not. “I was in bed that morning when my wife and I heard an announcement that NASA had selected thirty-five astronauts and among this group there would be six women,” he said. “And my wife said, ‘That’s too many,’ which sounds fun­ny today. But, of course, her concern was that, if there are six women se­lected, that’s six slots that my husband isn’t going to fill.”

It wasn’t until later that day at work that Fabian got the phone call from nasa as he was preparing to go teach a class. “Mr. Abbey was on the other end, and he said, ‘John, this is George Abbey; I’m calling from the Johnson Space Center. I’m interested to know if you’re still interested in becoming an astronaut.’ I said, ‘Yes, I certainly am.’ He said, ‘Well then, I’m pleased to tell you that your name is on this list.’ So I had to have somebody else go teach my class, because I was psychologically not prepared to go lecture at that particular time. It was a great thrill, a real honor.”

At the time Mike Mullane got his phone call, he was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida but was on temporary duty to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Mullane was phoned by his wife, who told him George Abbey had called their home to talk to him. Like several others, Mullane was aware the selection had been made because he had heard on the news about the women who were selected. Finally, he talked with Ab­bey himself and got the official word that he had been chosen. “I just went out and screamed with joy. I remember that night I bought some beer for the rest of the people that I was working with there at Mountain Home in the hangar there, and we had a little party. I remember. . . stopping out in the desert. This is out in Idaho. It’s like New Mexico. Go out in the des­ert; it’s like being in space. Black sky. I remember standing out there and just looking at the sky and thinking that I had this chance of actually fly­ing in space.”

Mullane said that, despite the news of his selection and that moment in the desert, he still had doubts that he would ever actually make it into orbit.

I’m one of these guys that tend to think of all the things that can go wrong, like a medical problem or the rocket blows up or whatever it is. . . . Even though Abbey called and told me that I’m an astronaut, I felt like there’s still a lot that could go wrong that would prevent me from actually flying in space, but I still had this overwhelming sense of joy that I had this shot at getting into space. It was a lifetime dream come true to be an astronaut. But again, I didn’t real­ly ever consider myself an astronaut until the srbs ignited on my first mission. All the rest of it I just thought it was name only. But it certainly was an over­whelming, joyful experience of the first magnitude.

We tend to set these goals and think that once we reach this goal, it’s going to make you happy for the rest of your life. . . . Of course, that never happens. I remember telling my wife that if I just flew one time in space, just one time in space, that’s all that I would need to be infinitely happy. And then I’ll bet with­in two days after landing from my first mission, I said, “I sure would like an­other mission. ” It’s just one of those things. It’s a joyful experience to be told that you’re going to get a shot at riding into space. So I was weightless at that point, I think. I was just floating around, already weightless.

Norm Thagard also had the yo-yo experience of assuming that finding out about the selection on the news meant that he hadn’t been picked, only to get the phone call the next day at work from George Abbey saying that he had been chosen.

I hung up the phone and turned to the group that was there and said, “I guess I’m an astronaut. "Then I went back in my room and put my head down on the desk and was real depressed for the rest ofthe day. That’s honest. I was depressed. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on, but I finally think I understood that I’d always had goals, I always wanted to do this, that, and the other, but I nev­er had really any goals beyond being an astronaut. So you’re all of a sudden faced [with] there’s nothing left to live for. Then you realize, well, yes, there is, because you still hadn’tflown in space. So life goes on. But my reaction really surprised me at first, because it was depression. I mean, I was not elated at all. I remember feel­ing, on the one hand, sort ofgratified, but on the other hand, just feeling real down.

The Thirty-Five New Guys were the first class of astronauts to come in as astronaut candidates, or AsCans. “In previous selections they had had some people that didn’t really particularly care for the job and maybe didn’t know what the job entailed and left,” Mike Mullane said. “I think to avoid whatever embarrassment that might cause NASA or the individual, they established this plan which you come in for a couple of years and you go through training and evaluation. Then at the end of that period you either become no longer a candidate, and now you’re an astronaut, or it’s decided either mutually or by one party or the other that, yes, this probably wasn’t the right move, so we agree to part company at this point. No hard feelings.”

Mullane said he was afraid that the new process might mean that he would never earn the official title of astronaut.

I realistically thought there was a chance in a couple of years they might get rid of me. So I was concerned about that. I knew this was going to be an interest­ing mix of people, and I knew that there were going to be people that knew a lot more about stuff that was important than I knew, and there were going to be these pilots and all that other stuff so I was a little concerned how we would all get along. But I think primarily I was just concerned about would I be able to really do the things that would be expected of me.

This first group of AsCans was so large that its members became the ma­jority of the Astronaut Office when they reported for duty in July 1978. Lo­ren Shriver recalled,

I think the folks who were still in the Astronaut Office, which, of course, had been between programs for several years of that period, were glad to see us there on the one hand, because they were all really busy doing the technical things that astro­nauts do while they’re waiting to go fly—various inputs to boards and panels and safety inputs and crew displays and all that kind of thing. They were all really busy, and I think they were happy to see us show up so that we would be able to help them and take some of the load. At the same time, I think there was a bit of the “Oh, no, all these new guys. How are we ever going to get them trained and up to speed? Will they ever be ready to go fly in space?” Well, that’s kind ofa nat­ural reaction to the group of people who has been there and done that a lot. That’s a bit ofa different aspect of “We’re happy to have them here, but I don’t know, it’s maybe just a little more work for a while until we get them all checked out. ”

Dick Covey said that the remaining veterans were quite welcoming to the large surge of rookie astronauts. “I never felt like they saw us coming in as ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got more people than we need,’” he said. “I’ve seen that since then, as the Astronaut Office has gone through huge swells and stuff, but I didn’t sense that from them. I got the sense that the twen­ty something of them that were still in the office were looking forward to some additional help. We seemed to be welcomed very graciously, particu­larly by the [previous class]. They really embraced our arrival, and I always felt like they felt like they needed more people to do the work for the of­fice and getting ready to fly.”

The warm welcome was also experienced by Rick Hauck, who agreed that the “real astronauts” were grateful for the extra hands.

They’d already started gearing up for shuttle and they needed help. So we were there to be helpful in any way we can. They wanted to get us as smart about the systems as soon as they could. . . . Everyone was very hospitable to us, bending over backwards to make us comfortable and telling us how much they need­ed us. We felt wanted, and contrast that with Dick Truly and Bob Crippen, [who] had joined from the mol program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, and when they arrived there, I forget whether it was Deke Slayton or someone else said, “We didn’t ask for you. We didn’t want you. Stay out of the way. ” Big difference. So I think that they were even sensitive to that kind ofa reception.

John Fabian said that he had also heard horror stories about how the last class—Group 7—had been treated when the recruits arrived in 1969. Un­like the other classes, Group 7 had not been chosen through an open se­lection. The air force had formed its own astronaut corps, independent of nasa, to support its Manned Orbiting Laboratory space station program. When that program was canceled, the air force closed its corps and asked nasa to take on its excess astronauts. At the time, nasa’s astronaut corps had more people than it needed for the remaining Apollo-era seats avail­able. There were reportedly multiple attempts at the jsc flight operations level to get rid of the new recruits, which were overruled by nasa leader­ship, eager to have the air force’s support as the agency sought funding for the Space Shuttle.

“We heard some bad stories about the way the mol guys were treated when they came in, as kind of a leper colony, and we weren’t treated that way at all,” Fabian said. “I think they were glad to see us come. The shut­tle program was just around the corner, we thought. It turns out it wasn’t quite just around the corner, but we thought it was, and there was a lot of work to be done, and there was a lot of legwork that needed to be accom­plished. . . . So I think they were glad to see us. They got some new hands and legs, and I think that they counted on us being somewhat motivated and somewhat capable. So it was a very pleasant thing.”

Steven Hawley was a little less sure what the veterans thought of his As – Can class.

We hadn’t really been flying a lot in ’78;. . . since we’d landed on the moon, there’d only been like four crews to get to fly, and here’s this new bunch of guys walking in the door. I could see how some of the guys that had been around for a while waiting to fly might have been a little resentful. If they were, that didn’t come across in any way, because our training was separate from what most ev­erybody else was doing. Everybody else was doing mainstream support of shuttle and development of everything that needed to be done before STS-1. We would cross paths at the Monday morning meeting or you’d run into them at the gym or something like that, but mostly we did our own thing.

Initially, Hawley said, the main interaction between the new class and the veteran astronauts came in the form of nasa history lessons during their training. “They thought it was important, and I think it is, that we hear from people that had flown Apollo and had flown Skylab and astp. So I remem­ber we got lectures from some of the guys that were still there, some of the

guys that had left but came back to talk to us about their flights and what

it was like back then. . . . These were my heroes, and to actually get to sit in a room and listen to them talk about their flights was pretty awesome.”

Veteran Apollo astronaut T. K. Mattingly confirmed that the corps was glad for the new class and the needed help it provided.

Once we got these folks on, the OV-101 [Enterprise] was rapidly approaching the time to get ready to go. So we put together the training program for the new folks and helped them get started on that. Then we split them up, .. .just spread amongst the few of us that had been around. [The shuttle’s robot arm] and a lot of these other activities were all getting sort of a lick and a promise instead of real attention till the ’78 group came on board, and once they went to work, then they really took hold and played very key roles in the development.

Of course, the “Thirty-Five New Guys” weren’t just “guys.” The veteran fly – boys of the astronaut corps also welcomed for the first time six women who were part of the new class. Sally Ride pointed out that her class presented a dou­ble whammy for those who had already been in the corps—not only were they now outnumbered by rookies, they were the minority in an office that was sud­denly much more diverse. “They seemed to accept us pretty well,” recalled Ride.

We had them outnumbered, so I’m not sure they had a choice. It was clearly very different for them. They were used to a particular environment and cul­ture. Most of them were test pilots. There were a few scientists, but most were test pilots. Of course the entire astronaut corps had been male, so they were not used to working with women. And there had been no additions to the astronaut corps in nearly ten years, so even having a large infusion of new blood changed their working environment.

But they knew that this was coming and they’d known it was coming for a couple of years. Well before the announced upcoming opportunity to apply for the astronaut corps, NASA had decided that women were going to be a part of it. So I think that the existing astronauts had a couple of years to adjust and come to terms with it. By the time that we actually arrived, they had adapted to the idea. We really didn’t have any issues with them at all. It was easy to tell, though, that

the males in our group were really pretty comfortable with us, while the astro­nauts who’d been around for a while were not all as comfortable and didn’t quite know how to react. But they were just fine and didn’t give us a hard time at all.

Ride said there was a lot of media attention surrounding the TFNG an­nouncement since it was the first astronaut selection in ten years and the first selection to include women. She said the attention didn’t affect her private life all that much, since the agency worked to keep the extra attention at a minimum so that it didn’t affect the astronauts’ abilities to train and work. “It wasn’t particularly burdensome after the initial flurry of interviews,” Ride said. “There was a fair amount of [attention], but it was still easy to have a normal life. . . . I think jsc worked hard to prepare for the arrival of women astronauts and female technical professionals. The technical staff at jsc— around four thousand engineers and scientists—was almost entirely male. There was just a very small handful of female scientists and engineers—I think only five or six out of the four thousand. The arrival of the female as­tronauts suddenly doubled the number of technical women at jsc.”

Joe Engle, who became an astronaut in 1966 as part of the “Needless Nineteen,” recalled that one dilemma with adding women to the corps was figuring out where to put the women’s locker room at the gym. “We just

had a guys’ locker room over there up to then,” Engle said. “So Deke [Slay­ton] had to figure it out. And of course, good old Deke, he said, ‘Well, hell, we’ll just put a curtain up and you can all use the same damn room,’ but he finally conceded that they would have a separate room.”

For some, this was their first time to ever work closely with women. “It was really all new to me, and I didn’t do it all right, either,” Fabian recalled. “That was a slightly different era. It was an era in which you would take the centerfold of Playboy magazine and post it up on the back of your office door, and that was thought to be totally acceptable as long as it was the back of the door instead of the front of the door. And people hadn’t yet thought of the word ‘harassment.’ We were all learning. We were all learning in those days.”

Mike Mullane said that working with his female classmates was a new ex­perience for him as well. “I’d be a liar if I didn’t say it was difficult to learn how to work with women,” he said,

and not because of the women; because I had no life experience in working with women. I tell everybody, there were two things that at age thirty-two I did that I had never done in my life, when I woke up to go to work for my first morning as an official astronaut at NASA. . . dressed myself, and worked with women.

I went to twelve years of Catholic schools, wore a uniform every day. Woke up, put on a uniform. Went to school. Went to West Point. For four years I don’t think I ever saw an article of civilian clothes. Didn’t have it in the closet. Wore a uniform all the time. Went into the airforce. Would wake up in the morning, go to work, put on a flight suit. Not one time in my life did I ever have to go to a closet, open it up, and pick a pair of slacks and shirt that matched. And that was a real struggle. In fact, a number of times that I walked out of the house or walked through the kitchen on my way to work, Donna, my wife, would look at me and say, “You’re not going to work dressed like that, are you?” In fact, she told me she was going to get Garanimals and put them on the clothes so that I could match the elephants with the elephants and the giraffe with the giraffe.

Mullane said that unfamiliarity with dealing with civilian clothes was a common struggle among the career-military astronauts. “I wasn’t the only one struggling in this regard, because I remember driving up one day to NASA with my kids in the car, . . . and there was one of the astronauts walk­ing around in plaid pants,” he said. “Plaid pants. I mean, even I, with my absolute zero fashion sense, thought that maybe that looked a little bit retro. In fact, to this day, my kids, they’re in their thirties now, if I’m with them and they see a golfer out in plaid pants, my kids will laugh and say, ‘Hey, Dad, check it out. There’s an astronaut.’”

Just as he’d never been in an environment where he didn’t wear a uniform, Mullane said, those environments also limited his contact with the female sex. “I had never in my life ever worked professionally with women,” he said.

In fact, my whole life, the Catholic schools I went to weren’t gender-segregated, but a lot of the classes were. .. . So I had very little interaction with females as a young person, and West Point had no females at the time I was there. In the air force, the flying community that I was in had no females when I was in there. So as a result, I was thirty-two years old when I was selected as an astronaut and I had never worked professionally with women, and I have to admit that I’m sure I was a jerk, in a word, because I just didn’t know how to act around them, tell­ing jokes that probably were not appropriate to tell and just doing dumb things that were inappropriate and probably would have gotten me a prison sentence in this day and age now with sexual harassment and all that. The women had to endure a lot, because there was a lot ofguys like myselfin that regard, I think, that had never worked with women and were kind of struggling to come to grips on working professionally with women, but we all made it. That’s for sure.

The camaraderie among the thirty-five was interesting, too, because of the extreme diversity and the introduction of the new mission specialists. There was a difference even in the aspirations that led each new astronaut to the corps. The TFNG class was announced almost nineteen years after NASA hired its first astronauts, and several of the pilot candidates in Group 8 had spent much of their career with the idea in the back of their minds of someday joining their ranks.

One of those was Dan Brandenstein, who had been interested in becom­ing an astronaut for a long time and had set himself milestones to accom­plish to get there. “But a number of the mission specialists, they weren’t pi­lots and they never had been pilots. I think Sally Ride is one that comes to mind. I mean, she was saying how she was just walking through the Stu­dent Union one day and saw a flyer that said NASA was looking for astro­nauts, and that’s really the first time she’d ever thought about it. A number of the mission specialists, that was their attitude.”

To Brandenstein, the new diversity his class brought to the astronaut corps was a good thing. Like others, he’d been in much more homogenous environments until then and was excited about having his horizons broad­ened. “The wide diversity of backgrounds that we had in that class was unique to NASA, and I personally loved it, because I’ve always been inter­ested in a lot of things,” he said.

I’m fascinated going into a factory where they make bubble gum or you name it, just to see how different machines and different things work. In my life­time, I took up skiing and I didn’t take lessons; I learned to do it through the school of hard knocks. I bought a sailboat and I made some sails because I thought it would be kind of fun to make a sail. So I was always interested in not just what I did, but kind of a wide variety of things. So being now in a group with people that were doctors and scientists and all, this was re­ally fascinating to me.

Mattingly said the new mission specialist category of astronaut required major adjustments that the Astronaut Office pretty much made up as they went along. For example, he said, he was involved in some discus­sion about who should command the Space Shuttle missions. Up to that point, only four NASA missions had included nonpilot astronauts—four scientist-astronauts had flown over the course of the last moon landing and the three Skylab missions. On those flights, the commander was still chosen from the pilot astronauts in the corps. Mattingly, who said that his experience on aircraft with larger, more diverse crews gave him a dif­ferent perspective, wondered whether that tradition should change with the new mission specialists.

We came up with these crazy ideas that since we’re going to be flying this “air­plane, " but the mission of the airplane is whatever is in the payload bay, may­be the mission commander should be a mission specialist, or maybe the mission commander is a separate position where both pilots and mission specialists as­pire to that being the senior position. The skipper of a ship doesn’t put his hands on a steering wheel; he directs the mission. I thought that was really good, and some of my navy buddies, “Yeah, that makes sense." Boy, that did not float at all, and there was a bigger division between mission specialists and pilots than I had ever guessed there would be.

Mattingly intermixed pilots and mission specialists on the teams develop­ing the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (sail), thinking the desig­nations wouldn’t matter much. “I just mixed them up,” Mattingly recalled.

I said, you know, “Bright people work hard. I don’t care where you go. ” So we sent mission specialists and pilots both to the sail, and the job that you had to do over there didn’t require any aeronautic skills at all; it was checking out the software and just going through procedures. Anybody who was willing to take the time to learn the procedures and has some understanding of how this com­puter system works is going to be fine.

We ended up having to put out all kinds of brush fires, you know, “He cant do that. He’s a mission specialist. ”. . . We had a sail group around the table when they were having a debriefing. We did this every week to go over all the things we’d done and what was open. Steve [Hawley] started it off with, “Did you hear about the pilot that was so dumb the others noticed?” I’ve told that to a lot of people, and I thought that was great. And at that point I think that Steve finally broke the ice, and everyone kind of said, “This is dumb, isn’t it. ” After that, at least it never came to my attention again if they had any prob­lems, but from then on, they really came together.

Brewster Shaw recalled that early on Kathy Sullivan commented to him that the pilots were going to be just like taxi drivers and that it was the mis­sion specialists who were going to do all the significant work on the Space Shuttle program. “Turns out, by golly, she was pretty much right,” Shaw said. “But at the time, being a macho test pilot, I was a little appalled at her statement.” Shaw saw just how true Sullivan’s statement was as pilot of STS-9, his first mission. “Our role was very minimal, John [Young’s] and mine, because we didn’t have to maneuver the vehicle very much, but we had to monitor the systems a lot. So we didn’t get to participate to a great length in the science that was going on. So, yes, pretty much, we got it up there and we got it back. In the meantime, the other guys did all the work.”

For training the TFNG group was split into two sections—the Red Team and the Blue Team, Brandenstein explained. Teams took turns in the class­room and flying, spending a half day on each activity and then switching off with the other team. “We broke in two parts because the classroom didn’t hold the thirty-five people,” John Fabian recalled, “and so you got to know the people that were in your class much better, in reality, than you got to know the people that were in the other class, particularly in the first three or four months. But what we found out very quickly was that all of these people, whether they were the youngest in the group or the oldest in the group, they were all extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily capable, and very, very eager to succeed in what it was that they were doing.”

The new AsCans brought a variety of interesting backgrounds to the ta­ble, according to Brandenstein.

There were a lot of neat people. . . that knew a lot about things I didn’t have a clue about, so you could learn a lot more. And that was kind of the flavor of the training. The first year of training, they try and give everybody some baseline of knowledge that they needed to operate in that office, so we had aerodynamics courses, which, for somebody who had been through a test-pilot school, was kind ofa “ho-hum, been there, done that," but for a medical doctor, I mean, that was something totally new and different. But then the astronomy courses and the ge­ology courses and the medical-type courses we got, all that was focused on stuff we’d have to know to operate in the office and at least understand and be rea­sonably cognizant of some of the importance of the various experiments that we would be doing on the various missions and stuff. So I found that real fascinating.

For example, he said, the astronomy course was a real standout for him in the training. “He’s passed away now, but the astronomy course was Pro­fessor Smith out of University ofTexas, and he was kind of your almost ste­reotypical crazy professor,” Brandenstein said.

I mean, he was just a cloud ofchalk dust back and forth across the blackboard as he went on. We had twelve hours of astronomy; he claimed that he gave us four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate astronomy in twelve hours. And it gave you a good appreciation of what it was all about. It didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, make me an astronomer, but the intent of it was to give you an appreciation and give you an understanding. And then also because of the very special instructors they brought in, it gave you a point ofcontact, so if somewhere later in your career you had a mission that needed that expertise, you had somebody to go up to and get the level of detailed information you needed.

Brandenstein said that he was very grateful that the format of the class­es was just to absorb as much as possible from the barrage of information; there were no written tests. “Everything was pretty much that way. It was just dump data on you faster than you could imagine. A common joke was that training as an astronaut candidate was kind of like drinking water out of a fire hose; it just kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. Prob­ably the good point of it was you weren’t given written tests, so they could just heap as much on you, and you captured what you could. What rolled off your back, you knew where to go recover it.”

Everybody in the class had their strengths at some point in the training, and Brandenstein said the pilots enjoyed when the training was on their home turf. The pilots in the group, he said, liked to take the mission spe­cialists up for what they referred to as “turn and burn”—loops, rolls, and other aerobatics. “We’d go out and do simulated combat and show them what it’s like to have a dogfight and all those sorts of things. So that was [as] fascinating to them as me sitting down with an astronomer or a doc­tor and finding out about the types of things they did.”

Brewster Shaw said he came into the corps with very few expectations of what the job entailed, beyond eventually flying on the Space Shuttle. “I soon learned that the percentage of the time you got to fly the Space Shut­tle was pretty miniscule, relative to the percentage of the time that you were here working for the agency, and that there was a lot of other things you were going to do that would take up all your time, and that was made clear to us pretty soon.”