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HAIL COLUMBIA!At long last, a spaceship for real pilots.BY PHIL TRUPP |
The neon billboards along Highway A1A would have told even an alien from another
planet what was happening up the road at the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on
that stickywarm Florida night in April.
"Go Young & Crippen!"
"Go Columbia. God Bless America!" "Russia Kiss Our Grits!"
The best-selling T-shirt around showed a conceptualized blast-off of the space shuttle
Columbia and proclaimed "shuttlemania" to be a glorious pass into heaven; and, on the
AM radio, Flora Purim gave us space music: "500 miles high . . . highhhh. . .
Everyone loved Columbia.
Poised between megawatt search lights on the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's launch pad at KSC Complex 39A, this strange-looking hybrid machine
was going to put America back into the manned-spacecraft race after a layoff of nearly
five years. Columbia was a super event, and KSC was the world's stage.
In the audience were 80,000 super players: world leaders, jet setters, selfconsciously
hip cuties in jump suits and gold-braided NASA caps, squares and freaks-like the man
in green whose nametag read Buck Rogers. And there was the electricity of big press-
3,200 correspondents from everywhere, who sought out the VlPs who were there to be
seen, heard, quoted, photographed.
Governor Jerry Brown of California was there, saying he was "really into this." And
Paula Hawkins, recently elected Republican senator from Florida, all smiley and
big-eyed, said, "Ah jus cain't imagine what lahs ahead." The ubiquitous Pat Boone was
there, in off-white linen: "It's a boost to our national esteem-and to all of us." Florida
Governor Bob Graham conceded, "I don't think there are very many cynical people
here." John Denver, rubbing his beads and stringing gollies and goshes together, said
Columbia was "bringing us together." Director Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters)
wanted to sign up for a "fly away special," one of the experimental canisters to be
flown aboard some future shuttle; he wanted to put a camera in his. As Spielberg
explained how, helicopters chopped through the night-before-launch sky, playing circles
of light on the crowd, as still another VIP arrived to add yet another quote among the
quotables.
But as cosmic as the crowd may have been, it was only incidental color compared to the
star of the show-Columbia. Bathed in wide beams of light, ornamented by flashing
yellow bulbs mounted on its gantry, it was almost hallucinogenic, sparkling like a
galaxy that-just happened to land out there across the lake at KSC. In a short while
(we hoped), it would depart the earth, bound for that compelling destination called outer
space.
There never had been anything quite like Columbia: an 80-ton aircraft/spacecraft
mated to a cigar-shaped fuel tank and sentried on either side by two solid-fuel rocket
boosters. By its very concept, the space shuttle stated the spirit of adventure that had
overtaken KSC-and America.
In such circumstances, who in their right mind would pick at budgets and argue that
Columbia was, in that grim epithet of the sixties, a boondoggle. If it cost $5 billion and
just so happened to be two years behind schedule-so what? Better late than never.
Man, Columbia was America at its inventive best. It was a call to the world that the
U.S. of A. was back in action. If Tass did not like it, well, they could go tell it to the
Chinese.
The space shuttle sparked perhaps more national chauvinism than even the Apollo Xl
mission, which blasted off from this spaceport July 20, 1969, taking three men to the
moon. In those days, lots of people said the $20 billion or so it took to make it happen
might better have been spent to solve some of our pressing domestic problems.
But Columbia, on April 9, 1981, on the night before blast-off, produced only one visible
protest. At the gates of the space center, workers from a large West Coast aerospace
company carried placards, in English and espanol, protesting unfair working conditions.
But the protectors did not want to see Columbia grounded. No. It was one thing if their
company was just awful to work for, but the space shuttle launch stood above mere
labor disputes. This was their kind of bird, because, damn it, it'll show them Ruskies
what America is all about!
Columbia was red, white and blue. And, yes, pilots John Young and Ed Crippen even
may have smuggled an apple pie into orbit. It was okay, because their flying machine
had the common touch, a true sympathetic connection to those mere mortals of us who
were on the ground.
Apollo was mysterious and a little forbidding, but Columbia was a goodtruckin' space
bus. It would go up and come back again, like a commuter airplane, and one day it
would carry non-astronauts, civilians, into space.
It was not a missle-it was an airplane, with stubby wings and a tail section. It would be
flown back to earth by astronauts-turned-pilots. And they would accomplish a hands-on
landing, dead stick, at none other than Edwards Air Force Base, that Vatican of
aeronautical skill and eloquence that had produced the first cadre of astronauts- The
Holy Seven-who were all military test pilots.
There was a strange irony in the selection of Edwards as the landing base. In the
fifties, when a newly formed NASA came here looking for volunteers, the hardened
test pilots thought it incredible that anyone with panache would give up flying advanced
aircraft to be sealed in a tin can called Mercury. Mercury was a capsule, the
equivalent of the old human cannonball. Man, they had come to Edwards to fly-to be in
full control-not to be fired helplessly into space like Spam in a can.
What did the boys at Edwards think of this bird? Did they grumble when Astronaut
Gene Cernan said, "These fellows [Young and Crippen] are aviators. They come in
heads up and feet down, not lying on their backs."
With Columbia, the line between aeronautics and astronautics formed a circle. Of
course, the shuttle carried five computers and the attention of the biggest
ground-control system in the world; but in the end, it would fly home to Edwards, as if
to say to the early skeptics that here, by virtue of brains and guts, the world's first
outer space landing strip was christened.
CBS played it up with its "Wings in Space" television coverage. There were experts
who told us about the first winged rocket, invented in 1929 by a Swedish engineer, and
how it was natural that the X-15 rocket plane should evolve, and the piggyback Navajo
rocket, and about the N2-F2 lifting bodies (the flying bathtubs of the six ties). History,
history, history. The message was etched in stone when Commander John Young, upon
reentering the earth's atmosphere on April 14,1981, informed Mission Control in his
aw-shucks voice, "Man, you can't believe what a flying machine this is."
But first, we had to endure the letdown of Friday morning's scrub. To the old-timers at
KSC, it was nothing extraordinary; the disagreement between computers was just
another triumph of software over gray matter and of Murphy's Law: If anything can go
wrong, it will. Bleary eyed after being up all night, they opted for a cool drink and a
long sleep.
The new generation of space reporters and on-lookers refused to let the excitement go,
even for a day. One of the never-say-dies was a young, Florida television reporter. He
had been up all night with the rest of us, but meantime had taken an opportunity to
inspect the space center. He stood along the main drag, Saturn Causeway, visibly
awed, studying an Apollo moon rocket that had been placed on its side, a great
dinosaur with its stages neatly separated for intimate inspection. This mind-boggling
beast did not seem real to him; it was like something out of a Stanley Kubric epic, with
miles of wiring and convoluted connections obviously dreamed up by mad geniuses.
"Can you imagine betting your life on that thing?" he asked.
"A little," l said. I told him that once I had applied to NASA hoping to be a civilian
astronaut, the first writer in space (Scott Carpenter had been the first poet), but that
fantasy died with Grissom, White and Chaffe in 1967 when a flash fire burned them
alive inside their Apollo spacecraft.
He looked at me for a long moment, but said nothing.
Later, on the way back to the press section, he said, "Now, Columbia-it's an airplane.
Bet I could fly 'er."
He had religion. He identified. No way was the scrub going to bring him down. Maybe
he had missed the heyday of the dinosaur out there on Saturn Causeway; but Columbia
was his kind of baby, and, scrub or no scrub, he told his audience it was going to fly.
"Sunday. Right, gang?"
Okay, but Sunday seemed a long way off. There is not a whole lot to do along Highway
A1A if you do not know the turf. And even if you do, options are pretty limited. An
antsy press corps and the industry reps took mainly to cocktails and reflections- back
to 1957 and Sputnik, the Pearl Harbor of the space age.
Sputnik, 184 pounds of beeping tin launched by the Soviet Union, helped create the
multi-billion dollar aerospace industry, shook up military thinking, elected John F.
Kennedy president and brought the eyes of the world to Cape Canaveral and to a new
kind of hero-the astronaut. It was an era of energy and ideals, of "vigor" and peaceful
goals.
But the newly formed cosmic community was well aware of a prediction offered by
General Curtis LeMay: "War in the future may be waged and decided without a
weapon being applied against an earth target." LeMay said a nation with
maneuverable space vehicles and "revolutionary armaments" could indeed rule the
world.
Ergo, the West's fear and trembling over Sputnik. Not only had the Soviets gained an
outstanding propaganda coup, they also demonstrated a large technological
breakthrough: They had a rocket that could hurl nuclear warheads more than 5,000
miles, when the U.S. commanded less than a fifth of such capability.
The space race was on, and President Kennedy, diverting our attention from our
military disadvantage, cleverly made the moon the big, peace-loving apple-in-the-sky.
We started with Mercury, essentially an automated machine, a fact rudely noted by
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev: "The Americans," he said, "do not launch. Their
men only jump upward and fall into the ocean."
Nasty, nasty. And it made us blush. But by the time NASA got around to the Gemini
program, the concept of a maneuverable, winged spacecraft was developing. We were
gaining points and orbital hours.
Gemini 111, flown by Gus Grissom and John Young, danced gracefully around the
earth, but Gemini V111, the first orbital docking mission, was a real cliff-hangar. Neil
Armstrong and Dave Scott rendezvoused with a spent Agena rocket when a thruster
went wild, jolting the Gemini/Agena combination into an end-over-end spin of one
revolution per second: "It's a roll, and we can't seem to turn anything off," Armstrong
told Mission Control.
It took some pretty cool flying to disconnect from the Agena and stabilize the
spacecraft. From that moment on, astronauts were no longer Spam in a can, and the
USSR was not so cocky.
And, of course, we finally took Tranquillity Base on the moon, hands down. One giant
step for mankind, one big slab of crow for the Soviet Union.
So, while we waited for Columbia's second try, old arguments were poured into new
bottles at the bars and motels along Highway A1A. Was it an instrument of peace, like
Apollo, or was it really the cutting edge of war?
President Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen, the White House envoy to
KSC, said Columbia's "greatest potential" was in the sphere of national security.
Ditto, said Navy Secretary John Lehman Jr. Allen said a slowdown in the space shuttle
program could put us behind the Soviets militarily, "And that's something we just can't
afford." And as he spoke, two Soviet cosmonauts were breaking orbital endurance
records in Salyut-6, and the Russians were celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the
first manned space flight by the late (he was killed in an airplane crash) Yuri Gagarin.
But, not to worry. There were no indications they had anything like Columbia, and here
at last was phase one of a lying machine once envisioned by senator Barry Goldwater
to be a nuclear, outer-space juggernaut.
NASA, with what amounted to touching sincerity, denied Columbia was a military bird.
Justly, NASA's spokesman pointed with pride to the space telescope to be launched on
a future flight and to the satellites of peace to be carried into orbit and to the civilian
scientific teams that will use the shuttle as an outer-space research habitat.
It was noble, and it was all true. But so was the bottom-line vibration of a strong
America and of America prepared to exploit its technological advantage as a coin of
power. Sure, we will put brine shrimp and gold fish into zero-G, but we have not
forgotten General LeMay.
Columbia is precisely the maneuverable machine he envisioned 20 years ago. Maybe
now we will know if the Soviets really do have a "killer satellite" up there; and, if they
do, maybe we can just ease on out there and have a look-or turn off the switch. After
all, the United States is in its knuckledusting season; it's ready to come out at the bell
and tell the Ruskies: "We've got this reusable, extraordinarily maneuverable
spacecraft called Columbia, and you don't! To you, this is a signal as dramatic as
Sputnik was to us!"
The USSR got the message well in advance. Tass ran hot with declarations about
American military pollution in the peace-loving realm of outer space, which the Soviets,
for their part, would not dream of polluting.
Throughout the launch weekend a Soviet trawler, bristling with antennas, hovered off
the coast of Cape Canaveral-just to make sure.
The uptightness was a hoot at the A1A parties. Gene Cernan, with classically
understated machismo, said the USSR's space flights always indicate a military
presence, "But, honestly, I can't understand their concern. Columbia's mission isn't
destruction."
Right, very statesman-like. So, let's not talk about Project 7969, circa 1956: an Air
Force study of a spacecraft capable of recovering-and/or snatching-another spacecraft
out of orbit. Columbia was not Project 7969, but it was not that far away, either.
All discussion ended at the moment of launch, April 12. Smoke and steam billowed and
Columbia trembled. Seconds later, it parted its moorings and vibrated in the obscuring
curtain of gas and heat; and as the cigar-shaped fuel tank rumbled above the gantry,
the shock wave of ignition roared across KSC with numbing impact.
Starry-eyed witnesses were momentarily silent, transfixed, necks arching as they
followed the shuttle into the morning sky. "My God...my God...." Seconds later it
became a gospel chorus, and then the all-American cheering: "Go, baby! Whee, go for
it!"
Clear of the tower, the shuttle's speed increased by multiples of 10. Like that-it pierced
the clouds, its main and booster engines going full blast like a three-eyed fireball.
Silence, then FunuummmmF-separation of the fuel tank and boosters, miles above us.
And she was going, going, gone.
Three days later, on April 15, the return and landing at Edwards marked one of the
most prophetic aeronautical landmarks of the century, up there with the Wright
brothers and Apollo Xl.
The actual flying phase began a little more than an hour before touchdown, over the
Indian Ocean, when Young turned the spacecraft (soon-to-become aircraft) with its
small steering rockets, so that Columbia was flying tail first. To brake the speed, two
bigger rockets were fired; and, again, it was spun around, with the nose pointed slightly
upward to establish the proper angle of attack, with the insulated bottom taking most of
the 2,700 ° F reentry heat.
A very critical phase came half an hour later. Over the Pacific Ocean at 400,000 feet,
Columbia, still at orbital peed of 17,500 miles-an-hour, approach the upper layers of the
atmosphere. At this point Young and Crippen were computer watchers, monitoring the
angles. It had to be just right. They could not afford to head down to fast or drop into
the top of the atmosphere too slowly; too fast and they would burn up, too slowly, and
they would "skip" back out into space.
Once into the atmosphere, they aimed the shuttle at a point slightly north of San Luis
Obisbo. The steering rockets were not useful any longer, and the two former Navy test
pilots switched to more familiar controls- the seven movable surfaces on the wings and
tail-flaps and ailerons.
"You're coming right down the chute," said Mission Control.
Now it was sheer eloquence, dead stick, an art that dated back to the time of Icarus.
Who among the hard core could miss the precision of the landing, right on the money?
Columbia had perfect energy, perfect track: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1-it touched down at 215 mph.
Hail Columbia! Hail Yankee Ingenuity! This strange bird started out as a rocket, spent
nearly three days as an orbiting space station and completed its journey as a glider.
"I tell you," John Young said as he inspected his baby after the flight, "this is an
all-record flying machine. It don't fly like anything I ever saw before. It is really
super."
And back in Washington, Senator Jennings Randolph was moved to ask, "Is this the
beginning of peace or war?"
Someone standing nearby replied, "It's neither, senator. It's a beginning. Only a
beginning."