text:
"Beautifully researched and written, Into the Black tells the true, complete story of the Space Shuttle better than it's ever been told before."

—Colonel Chris Hadfield, astronaut, space station commander, author of You Are Here and An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

"This remarkable book describes the final (and unpublished) chapter in the race to the moon! Between 1961 and 1963, four groups of astronauts were selected—three groups were comprised of those pilots who were assigned to NASA and were highly publicized as men who explored the moon. The fourth group disappeared into the black world of the CIA, the NRO, and the top secret Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory. This is the exciting first-told story of these exceptional pilots who only became known publicly during the development and first flights of the Space Shuttle—flights into the real black of space."

—Dave Scott, commander, Apollo 15

"Rowland White has written an unforgettable book, one destined to become a classic in the emerging field of space history. A work of transcending importance, it will inform specialists and laypersons alike."

—Dr. Richard P. Hallion, former US Air Force historian and chief historian, Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB

"Rowland White has magnificently laid bare the unknown dangers and unseen hazards of that first mission. He has also given us amazing insight into a world of science and engineering, the victories and defeats, for the first time. It's the perfect tale that educates as it entertains. Once read, not forgotten."

—Clive Cussler

"There are stories of courage and heart-accelerating fear in these pages that even I, as an astronaut, was unaware of. If you have even a casual interest in the space program, read this book!"

—Mike Mullane, former astronaut, pilot, and author of Riding Rockets

"In this gripping, real-life thriller, Rowland White introduces us to the engineers, test pilots, and astronauts who created the Space Shuttle and executed the 'boldest test flight in history.' Into the Black lives up to the legacy of the ship I flew and loved."

—Tom Jones, astronaut, pilot, scientist, and author of Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir

"Centuries from now the Space Shuttle program will be regarded as mankind's first mighty leap into space, not in a rowboat but in a truly useful spaceship. Rowland White tells it as the great, magnificent adventure it was. A superb book."

—Stephen Coonts

"Into the Black is an extraordinary, carefully researched tale of the evolution of America's space program. Rowland White has unearthed a treasure trove of formerly highly classified facts and combined them with an insightful look at the people who developed and flew America's early human spacecraft and the first Space Shuttle flight. Anyone who has ever dreamed of being an astronaut will find themselves feeling they are indeed in the orbiter Columbia with Bob Crippen and John Young on that first flight."

—Hugh Harris, former director of public affairs for NASA's Kennedy Space Center and broadcast commentator for Space Shuttle Launch Control for STS-1

"Into the Black isn't just spectacularly researched, it's told like a thriller, unfolding the edge-of-death tale of the Space Shuttle Columbia's maiden voyage in riveting fashion. White performs a rare feat here, stitching together comprehensive research—countless interviews, declassified files, flight documents—into a tale of courage and daring as streamlined and elegant as the spacecraft herself. Buckle in and hold on tight—this thing's got rocket propulsion."

—Gregg Hurwitz, author of Orphan X

"Into the Black told me stuff I never knew before—and I worked at NASA for thirty years! The story pulls together many concurrent threads of space flight history, which ultimately led to the flight of the Space Shuttle and that wonderful opportunity it presented me. I found Into the Black to be a deep and enthralling read."

—Michael Foale, former astronaut and International Space Station commander

"Into the Black reveals fully for the first time the nail-biting suspense and extraordinary technical and human drama that lay behind the first flight of the hugely ambitious NASA Space Shuttle."

—Alex Kershaw, author of The Bedford Boys

"A drama of flight and raw human courage, with the luster of myth. Into the Black is a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed. You'll feel like you made the flight yourself. Strap in."

—Stephen Baxter, author of Voyage and Titan

"Vivid and gripping, Into the Black rekindles the awe and wonder of spaceflight. Rowland White seamlessly blends science and technology with the story of human daring behind the first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia. What a great ride."

—Meg Gardiner, author of Phantom Instinct

"Into the Black is a tour de force. Rowland White blends hard-core science and history with colorful characters of the Tom Wolfe Right Stuff mold and a taut countdown to produce a genuine, real-life, edge-of-the-seat thriller."

—Nick Cook, author of The Hunt for Zero Point and writer and presenter of Billion Dollar Secret
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## CONTENTS

Foreword by Richard Truly

Author's Note

Prologue: The Next Generation

Part One: In and Out of the Shadows

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Part Two: Mojave

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Part Three: In the Balance

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Part Four: Ignition!

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Epilogue: Brought Down

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Appendix: STS-1 Graphics and Location Maps

Picture Acknowledgments

About the Author

Bibliography

Index
For my brother Matthew

## FOREWORD

Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, with the Space Shuttle programs now shut down and firmly in the history books, we all know how it turned out. In over 130 flights more than 350 men and women from many nations flew into orbit, the International Space Station was built, the enormously successful Hubble Space Telescope was placed on orbit, planetary explorers such as Cassini, Galileo and Magellan were sent to the planets, entire communication satellite constellations were created, important defense payloads were deployed. We also remember the high costs and of course the dramatic failures as well, the tragic loss of two crews and the Challenger and Columbia spaceships. Today Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour and Enterprise all reside in museums across the United States.

But Rowland White's book Into the Black goes way back before all that.

This book is actually several fascinating narratives in one, some of which have never been told before, set in a time when Apollo's triumphal flights to the moon were still very fresh in the world's mind. America was setting out, in the very depths of the Cold War, to develop an unheard-of capability: an enormous, mighty flying machine whose size was driven by classified national security payloads, and which would launch from Earth over and over again. She would operate in orbit doing many different jobs, first as a delicate spacecraft. Then, during a reentry that would begin at Mach 25, she would slowly morph like a butterfly from a spaceship into an airplane, a gigantic glider; there would be one opportunity, and only one, for a nice landing. Nevertheless, there would be no crew escape capability: survival of the crew would rely on her ability to land safely on a runway. This new "Space Shuttle" was to operate for several decades, and she would be built using many utterly new technologies, from complex computer systems to powerful but compact engines and lightweight thermal protection systems; the list went on and on.

And this enormous system, for the first time in the history of spaceflight, would launch on its very first mission with astronauts aboard at her controls, without the benefit of all the unmanned test flights that had preceded previous new manned space vehicles.

Of course, this book is a personal story of the test pilots, the engineers, the managers and, yes, the politicians who came together to pull off the first flight of this iconic program. Before the maiden flight, thousands and thousands of Americans all across the country, in manufacturing facilities and simulators and control centers, worked on the program.

But Into the Black also tells the intriguing story of how two entire national space cultures meshed with each other, and sometimes collided. One, NASA, prided itself on operating in, and even inviting, the searing light of public visibility; the other was completely invisible to both the American and the Soviet public, operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. Although the NRO was cloaked in secrecy and its very existence was totally hidden from public view, it had played a vital daily role since the beginnings of the space program in the strategic struggle with the Soviet Union and was developing and flying billion-dollar spacecraft with secret code names such as GAMBIT, HEXAGON, and DORIAN. It was out of this classified netherworld that several astronauts came to NASA from the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory, after MOL was canceled by President Nixon just weeks before the first Apollo landing on the moon. Eventually, these "MOL guys" would become an important part of the backbone of the early Shuttle flights, most especially the first.

But most of all, this is a bang-up flying story. On a brilliantly bright, sunny Florida morning in April 1981, after years of training and waiting, two astronauts rode up the launchpad elevator, climbed aboard the mighty Columbia on launchpad 39A and proceeded to attempt what no one had done before. One, a grizzled space veteran of both Gemini and Apollo who had previously landed on the moon, the other a space rookie who had emerged from MOL. Both were veterans of at-sea carrier operations and were experimental test pilots. They had ridden this very elevator before, only to be frustrated by a launch scrub. This day had eventually come following years of delays due to failing test engines, and thermal tiles and software redesigns. But finally, to them, this looked like the day.

With thousands of support personnel monitoring their every move and examining every bit of the telemetry streaming from the Shuttle on the pad, John Young and Bob Crippen were about to fly the first flight. For all their experience, neither had ever done anything like the first flight of the Shuttle was going to demand. For those of us who were somehow involved in that endeavor, we would eventually regard the Shuttle as the world's greatest flying machine. At the time, we, and all of America's friends and foes, were watching, but not a soul knew how it was going to turn out!

Richard H. Truly

Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

## AUTHOR'S NOTE

Like most large organizations founded for a specific purpose, NASA loves an acronym and is fond of a contraction. Mostly this makes sense. It's quicker and easier to talk about SRBs instead of solid rocket boosters, FRSI rather than felt reusable surface insulation, TPS as opposed to thermal protection system, and CapCom not Capsule Communicator. Sometimes there's humor in an acronym: TFNGs was more polite than describing the 1978 astronaut intake as The F**king New Guys. Sometimes it can get a little excessive. PLT instead of pilot is the one that springs to mind. To a general reader it can quickly become overwhelming. And so, while I've included a glossary, I've also made an effort not to use acronyms as freely as they appeared both in NASA literature and in the conversations I've had with NASA personnel.

Halfway through the story that follows, the home of NASA manned spaceflight in Houston changed its name from Manned Spacecraft Center to Johnson Space Center. Needless to say, that meant it also changed from MSC to JSC. As often as possible, I've done my best simply to refer to it as Houston.

Similarly, there is often confusion around Kennedy Space Center. Geographically, KSC is located on Merritt Island and not on Cape Canaveral, which lies adjacent. An attempt to change the name of Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy never took root and further confuses the issue. And yet the popular term "the Cape" has become so synonymous with NASA and rocket launches that, although technically incorrect, I've chosen to use it and terms Kennedy, Kennedy Space Center and KSC fairly interchangeably. Apologies to those readers for whom this feels a little fast and loose.

Students of the Space Shuttle program will also be aware that technically speaking the term Space Shuttle refers not just to the familiar white and black space plane but also to the whole launch assembly, including the big fuel tank and twin rocket boosters. The space plane alone is correctly labeled the orbiter. However, given that pretty much everyone understands the Space Shuttle to be the space plane with wings that lands on a runway at the end of the mission I felt maintaining this distinction was both pedantic and confusing, and have used the terms Space Shuttle and orbiter interchangeably.

I've taken the same approach to dialogue as in my previous books. Where it appears in quotation marks it's either what I've been told in interviews was said by those who were there, from contemporary recordings, or what's been reported in previous accounts, official, unofficial, published and unpublished. Where speech is in italics—often drawn from places like standard operating procedures—it represents genuine dialogue taken from a general source to lend authenticity to a scene. Given the ceaseless training that ensured procedures were followed, I hope those involved will agree that it's an accurate reflection of what was said at the time. Also in italics are characters' internal thoughts. As with speech, these represent direct transcriptions of what I've been told by participants—or have read—that they were thinking at the time.

Much of the material in the latter part of the book remains deeply classified. Those with the required security clearances to tell the story are not permitted to talk about it. I've pieced together events from a wide variety of sources to produce an account that is the fullest and most accurate yet published. I've been reassured that this is the case; however, any mistakes are my own.

Nant-y-Feinen, 2015

# PROLOGUE

# The Next Generation
The Shuttle is to space flight what Lindbergh was to commercial aviation.

—Arthur C. Clarke

### Houston, 1969

Dottie Lee's mother thought it was unusual for her ten-year-old daughter to display such a love of classical music. That, though, seemed positively conventional next to Dottie's keen interest in astrophysics. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1930s, Dottie had known that there would one day be men on the moon. Now, thirty years later, she was working as an engineer at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center and the prospect of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realizing that goal was just months away. After graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1948, Lee had trained on the job under Houston's chief engineer, Max Faget. Part of the team working on the heat shield that would protect the Apollo 11 crew as they returned to Earth, she was already anticipating the celebrations that would mark their safe return.

On April 1, 1969, Lee took a phone call from Faget's office asking her to report to a room on the third floor of Houston's Building 36. She was told not to tell anybody where she was going. Lee arrived to discover around twenty other people gathered in a large room untidily stacked with chairs, boxes and other bits and pieces it seemed no one knew what else to do with. Alongside Lee, with her discipline of aerothermodynamics, there were representatives of all the center's different engineering departments. No one from this team, which had with Apollo 8 already successfully flown a manned mission around the moon, had any idea what they'd been invited for. The best guess was that it was some kind of ambitious April Fools' Day practical joke.

The group weren't waiting for long before Max Faget walked into the room. Carrying a garment bag, the impish chief engineer, five feet six inches in his bow tie, jumped up on a desk in front of them. Lee had seen this kind of thing before from her boss. Faget was prone to performing headstands whenever and wherever he thought he needed to get the blood flowing to his brain, seemingly unconcerned about his pockets emptying noisily onto the floor. Standing on the desk, Faget unzipped the bag and pulled out a handmade balsawood and paper model airplane. Hand-finished spars ribbing the cigar-shaped fuselage and straight wings were visible beneath the model's translucent pale brown skin. At the front was an upturned snub of a nose; at the back a pair of vertical fins mounted at each end of the horizontal tail. It was a shape unfamiliar to those watching the performance, and Faget was keen to explain it to them.

"It's stable in two attitudes," he declared in his syrupy Cajun accent. "Zero degrees angle of attack . . ."

The designer raised the model in his hand then launched it from on top of the desk, watching it fly gently across the room before skittering over the hard floor. One of the audience retrieved the model and returned it to Faget. So far, so unremarkable.

"And," Faget continued, lining up his creation by eye before launching it again, nose high and tail low, "sixty degrees angle of attack."

Instead of flying horizontally, nose first, the glider presented its underside to the direction of travel, not so much flying as falling forward through the air. But it was doing so in as settled and undramatic a fashion as it had when it was flying more conventionally. To a gathering of NASA engineers, Faget's point was clear: this was a winged airplane capable of reentering the atmosphere from space as safely as the blunt-bodied capsules that had so far returned America's astronauts to Earth.

"We are going to build the next-generation spacecraft," Faget told them.

### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

After the violence, fire and thunder of launch, there was no wind noise, or engine noise, no force or acceleration. But Columbia, the world's first reusable spacecraft, was traveling three times faster than any other winged flying machine in history, orbiting over 100 miles above Earth at a speed of 17,500 mph.

Inside it was quiet, except for the reassuring hum of cooling fans. Bob Crippen, the Space Shuttle's pilot, made his way back to the aft crew station, the control panel built into the rear bulkhead of the flight deck, to test the mechanism of the big payload-bay doors that ran the length of the spacecraft's back from flight deck to tail. Here we go again, he thought as he anticipated a job he'd repeated to the point of tedium in training; but then, slowly propelling himself backward, careful to keep his head level and feet on the deck, he realized he wasn't really walking at all. He reached his position on the starboard side of the crew station and turned to John Young, Columbia's commander, standing next to him. "You know," Crippen said, "this feels like every time I've done it in the simulator, except my feet aren't on the floor . . ."

Young smiled. A veteran of four previous spaceflights including command of the Apollo 16 moon mission, Young may have been NASA's most senior astronaut, but he'd lost none of his enthusiasm for space travel. He loved the feeling of weightlessness. Who wouldn't? he thought, convinced that if there was no danger of breaking bones, everyone would be whirling around their living rooms.

Young floated forward again as Crippen monitored the slow progress of the payload-bay doors on a pair of fore-and-aft-pointing closed-circuit TVs. Nearly a minute after the doors cracked uncertainly into action, Crippen was afforded a clear view aft through the big windows in the rear bulkhead of the flight deck. Looking across the payload bay toward the back of the orbiter, he noticed an ugly peppering of black on the otherwise smooth white curve of the rocket pod that flanked Columbia's vertical tail. Uh-oh, he thought.

"Hey, John," he called to the mission commander, "come and take a look at this."

To protect her from the blast furnace heat of reentry, Columbia was covered in a dense mosaic of lightweight silica tiles, each unique, each fitted tightly against its neighbors. The integrity of the tiled heat shield was critical to the spacecraft's survival. If it was lost or compromised, there was no way home. When they plunged back into Earth's atmosphere, neither Columbia nor her two-man crew could hope to survive temperatures of nearly 3,000°F—hot enough to melt steel.

And Crip had just discovered there were tiles missing from the heat shield.

• • •

In Houston's Building 13, home to the Structures and Mechanics Division responsible for Columbia's heat shield, Dottie Lee was watching the first television images beamed back from the new spacecraft with a small group of colleagues. They stared at the black scars on the Shuttle's rocket pod. At first people were too shocked to say anything. Then there was just one question on people's lips: "Can they come back?"

And Dottie realized she was crying.

# PART ONE

# In and Out of the Shadows
There wasn't going to be a British space program. The Russians weren't going to put people on the moon, and it was putting people out there that was important. We understand environments through experience, not robot telemetry. All my hopes for a science fiction future, for performing the exploration the human being is hardwired for, were pinned on the American space program.

—Warren Ellis

## ONE

#### February 21, 1962

Lieutenant Commander John Young was strapped into the cockpit of the McDonnell F-4H-1 Phantom II. His breath condensed into thick clouds as he exhaled into the cold, dry air. It was just 8°F. The bitter temperature was no accident, however. The average in Brunswick, Maine, in February sat well below freezing. Cold air, though, meant denser air. And that gave the thin wings and spinning turbines of the big Phantom's two turbojet engines more to bite on. Cold air gave Young the leg up he needed if he was going to be able to add to the clutch of world records already held by the Navy's impressive new interceptor. Not that he was relying solely on the weather. To save weight he was flying the two-seat jet alone. The weapons systems had been stripped out along with many of the cockpit instruments. Parts of the aluminum airframe—including the speed brakes—had been replaced with balsawood, and the F-4s two General Electric J79 engines had been uprated to provide extra thrust. That, though, came at a cost in fuel consumption. And to further save weight, Young would begin his takeoff roll with just 1,800 pounds of fuel in the tanks. In full afterburner, those two J79s were going to guzzle that in barely thirty seconds. But that was all the time Young needed to streak to a height of 3,000 meters (a little under 10,000 feet) faster than any aircraft had ever done before.

After closing the canopy, Young started the engines, scanning what remained of the instruments for any signs of trouble. It all looked good. Ahead of him, through the cockpit glass, was a mile and a half of asphalt runway more used to the comings and goings of the Navy's lumbering propeller-driven patrol aircraft. He was barely going to need a fraction of it.

With his gloved left hand, he advanced the two throttle levers to full military power, then on through the gate to light the afterburners. Cold fuel sprayed into the exhausts and the Phantom, spears of flame shooting backward from beneath the tail, strained against the holdback bolt. Instead of wasting fuel as she accelerated down the runway, the Phantom was being held until, with the engines throwing out a maximum 32,500 pounds of thrust, the fuel levels fell to 1,800 pounds. Young watched the fuel gauge until, when the needle hit 1,800, the jet, released, leapt forward like a bullet from a gun.

Thirty-three and a half seconds later, as the Phantom soared through the 3,000-meter mark, still climbing steeply at an angle of 60 degrees, the thirty-one-year-old US Navy test pilot in the cockpit wrote his name into history for the first time.

• • •

Young was brought up poor. His father, Hugh, a civil engineer, was laid off during the Great Depression and moved his family back to Georgia, where he pumped gas at a filling station for a few dollars a day. When John was five the family moved to Orlando after his father found new work. But then, a family that had already endured its fair share of hardship was struck again.

Halfway through his first school year in Florida, John's mother, suffering from schizophrenia, was taken away in a straitjacket to Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee. He hadn't even known she was unwell, but she never returned from the asylum. Yet despite permanently losing his mother to illness, Young prospered, inheriting an intuitive talent for engineering from his father. And he lived and breathed airplanes, reading obsessively about heroes like Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker and Jimmy Doolittle, augmented by science fiction such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Edgar Rice Burroughs's influential John Carter of Mars. A straight-A student at Orlando High School, Young seemed to excel in whatever he put his mind to, from athletics to physics. It was to take him to Georgia Tech on an ROTC scholarship and a BSc in aeronautical engineering, before he joined the Navy, which, in its wisdom, instead of sending him to flight training, informed him he'd be joining the crew of the destroyer USS Laws as a gunnery officer.

Bitterly disappointed, he endured a frustrating tour aboard the Laws firing 5-inch shells into North Korean positions before finally being assigned to flight school in 1953. After earning his wings of gold as a naval aviator he joined a fleet fighter squadron before going to test pilot school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland—a site, as a naval aviator, he regarded as hallowed ground. When he graduated second in his class in 1959, he was singled out for the Navy's new F-4 Phantom. A hot ship, the F-4 had already been setting new speed and altitude records for a couple of years before Young was chosen as one of the five pilots for Project HIGH JUMP, the US Navy's attempt to seize a raft of time-to-climb world records from the Air Force. He thought such an impressive demonstration of the fighter's performance might give the Russians pause for thought about invading Western Europe. Soon HIGH JUMP would give him an opportunity to assert his country's superiority in an entirely different arena.

• • •

With the 3,000-meter record in his pocket, Young landed back at Naval Air Station Brunswick and climbed out of the cockpit. Afterward, the range trackers told him that the whole thing had happened so quickly they thought it had probably been easier to fly the Phantom than try to track it. In a southern country-boy drawl, Young told them: "It's not like flying as much as it's like riding a rocket!"

It was a notion fresh in the minds of everyone involved in Project HIGH JUMP as they worked through the bitter cold to prepare the Phantom for a second flight, an attempt on the 6,000-meter record. Just a day earlier, on February 20, a Marine Corps fighter pilot named John Glenn had blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on top of a man-rated Atlas missile to become the first American to orbit the Earth. The space race was in full cry. And, despite the success of Glenn's mission, the United States was playing catch-up.

• • •

The Soviets had been first out of the blocks when, in October 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched a small satellite called Sputnik into an orbit that saw it fly over the continental United States several times a day. To the American public it was both a humiliation and a threat. It felt as if the race had already been lost. And what had been a relatively leisurely pursuit of spaceflight by all three branches of the country's armed forces became a national priority. On October 1, 1958, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) became NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Before the end of the year the United States launched an orbiting satellite of its own and a Space Task Group was set up within NASA at Langley; their job was to direct a manned spaceflight program. With thirty million dollars' worth of funding they began work on developing a small, one-man space capsule they christened Mercury. In April 1959, John Glenn and six other military test pilots were introduced to the world as the men who would be America's first astronauts. The Mercury Seven. A half-million-dollar deal with Life magazine was to see them become some of the most famous people in the country. It seemed as if, after the disappointment of Sputnik, the American program was back on track. Until, in April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, completing a single orbit of the Earth inside his tiny Vostok 1 capsule.

In reply, NASA just managed to poke its nose into space by firing Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard above the atmosphere in a brief, fifteen-minute suborbital flight before, on May 25, 1961, the new president, John F. Kennedy, stood up in a special joint session of Congress to announce the goal of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. The excitement that surrounded John Glenn's orbital flight in February 1962, followed by the president's visionary speech at Rice University later that year, in which he again sold the idea of a moon shot, seemed to reassure the public that NASA was on its way.

• • •

John Young wanted to be part of it. Not only did he believe that joining the space program would be the best way to make use of his considerable skills as a test pilot, he was also curious about what they'd find when they got there. He applied to NASA and was called to Houston for an interview in June 1962. Asked by the selection panel what he thought astronauts needed to study before traveling to the moon, he answered, "Geology." It was the kind of response that illustrated, to those who knew him, that there was a good deal more to Young than that laconic drawl might suggest.

Three months later he got a call from NASA asking if he was still interested in becoming an astronaut.

"Yes, sir, I am," he said.

## TWO

When Sputnik captured the world's imagination, Robert Laurel Crippen couldn't help but feel a twinge of envy. He was in his sophomore year at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Crippen was fascinated by the Soviets' achievement. As a freshman, he'd written an English paper on rockets and space, but now, still at college, he was frustrated at the timing of the little satellite's launch. Manned spaceflight would surely follow, and there were others just a few years older than he was, he realized, who would get to fly in space before he was ready.

Crippen's father was an oil worker who, after losing a couple of fingers in an accident, used his insurance money to buy a chicken ranch in the small town of Porter, Texas. In time, he and his wife added a service station and beer joint, called it Crippen's, and hung a neon sign outside. He'd been up in an airplane once, but decided it wasn't for him. His reluctance didn't stop him from driving his five-year-old son out to the perimeter fence at Houston's Hobby Airport to watch the airliners take off and land, however. On one occasion a stewardess spotted them and asked, "Do you want to take a look?" She invited father and son through a gate to a parked DC-3. They climbed through the rear door and walked up the tail-dragger's sloping floor to the cockpit. The boy sat in the captain's chair and took it all in. Bob Crippen wondered if it had been that first encounter that spurred his interest in aviation.

After high school, the young Crippen worked as a railroad switchman and served meals in a boardinghouse to help pay his way through college. But by now he had very clear goals in mind. He was studying for a degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas when the names of NASA's Mercury Seven astronauts were announced. I'd like to do that, he thought and, noting that all were test pilots, decided to join the Navy because he believed it would make him the best pilot he could possibly be. At least, he figured, if I can land on one of those aircraft carriers, I certainly wouldn't be too bad.

He climbed aboard a plane for only the second time in his life when he took a seat on a Trans Texas DC-3 going from Austin to Dallas to join the Navy. This time, though, it was going to take off. He'd imagined it often enough, now Crippen was going to fly.

• • •

While Sputnik had inspired Bob Crippen's thoughts of spaceflight, the reaction of the Air Force to the Soviets' pioneering efforts in space was rather more belligerent. As the Navy taught Crippen to fly in a little piston-engine Beech T-34B Mentor with a maximum speed of just 188 mph, the Air Force, stung by Sputnik, was issuing the country's aircraft manufacturers with a flurry of increasingly ambitious requests for proposals (RFPs). Among the first was one for a Strategic Orbital System. The study was completed and submitted before quickly being followed by a request for proposals for a Strategic Lunar System. Again, competing bids were submitted. But when that was followed with an RFP for a Strategic Interplanetary System, engineers at the Hughes Aerospace Company were incredulous. The whole idea of projecting power from deep space seemed so absurd that Hughes chose not to produce a proposal, only to prompt a phone call from the Pentagon demanding that they take part. Across the Atlantic, even the Royal Air Force were discussing their own plans for Near Space Control and Far Space Control. As far as the free world's military were concerned, Sputnik had created a new battleground upon which they must now be ready to fight.

They were swimming against the tide. In January 1958, three months after the launch of Sputnik, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested a bilateral agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union "that outer space should be used only for peaceful purposes." Then, in February the same year, he appointed a Science Advisory Committee to define the nation's space program. In the committee's report, "An Introduction to Outer Space," while there was an acceptance that defense was part of the jigsaw, the emphasis was on exploration, science and prestige. NASA, a civilian agency "devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of mankind," was the result.

But the creation of the new agency did nothing at all to dampen the ambition of the Air Force to carve out its own place in space. And if Sputnik had sparked the flying branch's nascent space efforts, Yuri Gagarin's first manned spaceflight in April 1961 fanned the flames. In the same month that Kennedy first talked of putting a man on the moon, the Air Force published a detailed 200-page proposal for their very own military moon mission, dubbed LUNEX. Inside were designs for lunar landers and reentry vehicles, flowcharts mapping out the route from "Preliminary Design" to "First Operational Launch," flight-testing schedules, comprehensive equipment manifests, and personnel requirements from aerospace pilots to diet supervisors. The training of the crew required a program "unique to the Air Force." The foreword to the Lunar Expedition Plan pointed out the "dire need for a goal for our national space program." The country now had that. And it didn't need the threat drawn by the Air Force that by the early seventies Soviet "military facilities may have been established on or in orbit around the moon" for it to embrace that goal.

Yet the Air Force's interest in space was not entirely unreasonable. In 1961, it remained essentially uncharted territory. And, in a speech to the American Ordnance Association in October of that year, the cigar-bothering Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay explained why:

Looking back at the history of airpower, you will recall the first use of the airplane in World War I was for reconnaissance. For a time air operations were conducted politely and with chivalry. Opposing pilots waved and nodded to each other as they passed. Both sides had equal access to the sky. But once reconnaissance began changing the course of battles, the rules changed. It didn't take long before commanders realized that it was necessary to deny the opposition this aid from the sky. Soon opposing airmen were engaged in battle. First it was air-to-air bombs and small arms. Then they graduated to the machine gun. After this came bombers and aerospace had become another area of conflict. I think we will be very naive if we don't expect and prepare for the same trends in space.

• • •

Thoughts of war in space were far from Bob Crippen's mind when he joined Attack Squadron VA-72, the "Blue Hawks," in the summer of 1962. It was enough of a challenge closer to Earth. Not long after joining the unit, the young naval aviator took off wearing a thick rubberized immersion suit for the first time. The "poopy suit" was designed to protect pilots who were forced to eject over cold water. The four Douglas A-4 Skyhawks climbed out from Naval Air Station Oceana with ordnance slung under their wings and headed out to sea—the division was practicing its bombing. Crippen rolled into a dive toward the floating target. Tracking the pipper in the little jet's bombsight, he pressed the bomb release and pulled up, but, made hamfisted by the heavy, unfamiliar poopy suit, he snatched back on the stick too forcefully. He was immediately mashed back into his ejection seat, the Skyhawk pulling 8.5 gs as her nose came up over the horizon. It was too much, ripping a slat off the starboard wing. He nursed the shaken jet back to base, but got saddled with the nickname "Slats." (He was luckier than "Leaky," the squadron mate who, caught short in the cockpit, managed to pee into his leather flying glove without spilling a drop.) In the end, though, "Slats" didn't stick. Everyone just knew the tan, brown-eyed Texan with the crewcut as Crip.

After his first night landing aboard an aircraft carrier he thought, I can do just about anything. For a while, as he flew from the deck of the Navy's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it looked like that might include war. Test flying, though, remained his goal, and he filled in the application form in 1964. It offered him a choice: Do you want to go to the Navy's test pilot school at Patuxent River? Or would you be prepared to go to the Empire Test Pilots School in the UK, or train with the Air Force instead? He figured the odds of getting in were better if he said yes to all three of them. When his orders came through telling him he'd been posted to Edwards Air Force Base, he was surprised to discover he'd be a student at an outfit called the Aerospace Research Pilot School—I thought I was going to test pilot school. The syllabus, he learned, included spaceflight. And his instructor on the space dynamics and control course was a young Navy pilot who, like Crip, had only just over a year before been flying off carriers during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His name was Lieutenant Dick Truly.

## THREE

#### Edwards Air Force Base, 1963

When Dick Truly arrived at Edwards with his wife, Cody, two young sons and the family dog after a long cross-country drive, he felt like a cowboy just arrived at IBM. There were few places in the world that were more glamorous than Edwards. Like Peyton Place, thought Truly. The vast air base, scratched onto the Mojave Desert alongside the endless runways provided by Rogers Dry Lake Bed, was teeming with young couples glowing in the face of their illustrious profession: flying and testing the world's most advanced, high-performance aircraft. Instead of training at the Navy's own test pilot school at Pax River, an exchange program saw Truly chosen as one of two Navy students at the Air Force's new Aerospace Research Pilot School. After feeling top of the heap flying supersonic F-8 Crusaders off pitching carrier decks, Truly knew he was back at square one; a nugget, as the Navy put it. Even putting aside the exotic flying machines—nearly every one of which had at some point claimed a world record—everything at Edwards was newer and more state-of-the-art, from the blue trucks that ferried people around to the "bricks," walkie-talkies possessed by everyone on the flight line. The F-8 had been the best the Navy had to offer, but this was something else. He had come a long way from Fayette, Mississippi, the segregated town of just one thousand people where he'd grown up.

Dick, Cody and the rest of the students of Class 64A and their wives were greeted in the school's lecture theater by the commander. It wasn't a sight to inspire confidence in choosing "test pilot" as a vocation. Colonel Chuck Yeager strode on stage wearing full dress uniform, his chest adorned with colored ribbons in recognition of an extraordinary flying career. Beyond that, though, he was looking pretty beat up. America's most famous test pilot welcomed the group to Edwards while sporting a fresh bandage around his neck. The left side of his face was still raw from a month spent in the hospital having scabs scraped off it every four days to prevent scarring. His left arm was suspended in a sling. His audience soon got to see what had done the damage.

From the auditorium, they were taken to the school's hangar. On the floor lay the crumpled wreckage of the Lockheed NF-104 AeroSpace Trainer in which, just weeks earlier, Yeager had lost control while trying to add the world altitude record to his résumé, alongside "WWII ace" and "first man to break the sound barrier." After he'd punched out, Yeager's rocket ejection seat had smashed through his helmet visor, igniting the oxygen he was breathing. Suffocated by smoke and well-nourished fire, he hung beneath his parachute trying to shovel air in through the broken faceplate using his gloved hand. He succeeded only in setting that on fire too. Not until he managed to push open the visor was he able to shut off the oxygen and extinguish the flames. But by the time he hit the ground he was a mess. When the rescue helicopter reached him, the black rubber lining of Yeager's helmet had bonded to his face, and in removing the remains of the glove from his burned hand with a penknife, he had also managed to pull off the broiled tips of two fingers.

America's most celebrated test pilot had been attempting to soar beyond 120,000 feet, a height at which a normal airplane has long since ceased to be controllable because of the thinness of the air. Built specially for the school, the AeroSpace Trainer was half aircraft, half spacecraft, though. A standard F-104 Starfighter, fitted with a 6,000-pound thrust LR-121 rocket in the tail to provide power as the jet engine struggled for breath, and small puffer jets to provide attitude control in the stratosphere, the NF-104 could be flown where aerodynamic flight controls no longer functioned. But then it didn't feel like flying anymore, and Yeager's accident had highlighted that. The great aviator's legendary feel for an airplane was no longer of any use to him. To equip them to succeed in test-flying's emerging new world, Yeager's students needed to be taught new skills. The syllabus of the yearlong course was designed first to teach the students to be test pilots. Then to be astronauts.

• • •

The Aerospace Research Pilot School had come into being in 1961, just months after Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom had between them accumulated a grand total of just fifteen minutes in suborbital space. There were reminders everywhere that this was still largely an unknown area. The students had no printed textbooks. Instead, typed, sometimes handwritten, study notes were collected in ring-bound files. Much focus was placed on biomedical research and the potential effects of spaceflight on the human body. Before being accepted by the school, each of the students had spent a week at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, being prodded, probed and measured. As students they returned to Brooks to endure capillary-bursting rides in a centrifuge designed to replicate the g-loads astronauts were expected to be subjected to on reentry. They began with two minutes at 8 gs, then thirty seconds at 12 gs, during which each part of their body weighed twelve times what it should—forces that would rip the wings off an airplane. As they spun, the students used a hand controller to move lights on the instrument panel to the center of a display to prove they were still conscious—a task complicated by the effort to make sure they didn't swallow their tongues. They finished with a run to 15 gs and back. It earned each of them membership in the Order of the Elephant and a certificate illustrated with a picture of an elephant standing on a man's chest. That gave a pretty good idea of what it had felt like.

They trained at the other extreme, too, in a zero-g environment, for the weightlessness they would experience in space. Inside a modified Boeing KC-135 tanker-transport, twenty airline-style seats were separated with cargo netting from an empty section of cabin at the back lined with thick crash pads. The big four-engine jet was flown in a series of climbs and dives, and as it bunted over the top of each parabola the passengers in the back would enjoy the sensation of zero gravity for thirty to forty seconds before a series of flashing lights triggered by the pilot signaled that the KC-135 was pulling out of the dive. Before their first flight, the instructor warned them that they would fall into two groups: those who'd been sick and those who would be. Not for nothing was the jet known as the "Vomit Comet." In the end, though, they were having too much fun floating around, bouncing off the walls and each other, to remember to puke. Since arriving at Edwards, flying as a passenger had become a novel experience for Class 64A.

When he arrived at Edwards, despite being certain that the F-8 Crusader was the best flying machine there ever was, Dick Truly soon discovered there was a good deal more on offer. The rule was that you could only be current on five types of airplane. The reality was that if there was another machine you wanted to fly, the paperwork could be done the night before: one in, one out, though the total never exceeded five. Truly and the other students flew and flew. During the first half of the course it was often T-33 and T-38 trainers, but Truly also added powerful Century-series fighters like the F-100 Super Sabre, F-101 Voodoo and F-106 Delta Dart to his burgeoning logbook. There was bigger iron on offer too in the form of a twin-engine NB-57 Canberra bomber, a piston-engine B-26 for stability and control training, and even the C-130 Hercules four-engine turboprop cargo plane. By the end of six months' flight-testing the F-8 still had its claim on Truly's affections, but he now understood its strengths and weaknesses. Then, as he and his fellow students moved from test-flying to space training, there was one machine which, while it may have failed to impress the USAF as an interceptor, was practically tailored to the requirements of training Air Force astronauts: the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the only aircraft ever to have simultaneously held the world records for both speed and altitude.

On the ground, the class studied orbital mechanics, the mathematics of calculating satellite movements, biomedicine, spacecraft design and aerothermodynamics. They also "flew" the school's ground-based GPS T-27 simulator, in which they could practice orbital maneuvering, rendezvous and docking in a facsimile of a spacecraft.

It seemed to be doing the trick. Ten graduates from the Edwards test pilot school had already been accepted into the ranks of NASA's astronaut corps. Another, Captain Joe Engle, USAF, would soon be earning his astronaut wings elsewhere.

## FOUR

Joe Henry Engle loved airplanes. Really loved airplanes.

His first memory of growing up in Chapman, Kansas, in the thirties was of his sister building him a model plane out of a tin can. He dug sandpits for cockpits, kitting them out with cans for instruments and a branch for a control column. His weapon of choice was the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. After watching a movie about the exploits of the Flying Tiger Squadron in China he decided that was all he ever wanted to do. Joe was still a boy when the war ended and, as happy as he could see that made people, tearing at him was the thought that he'd never get to be a fighter pilot and shoot down Japanese Zeroes. But he could still fly.

Fair-haired and hazel-eyed, Engle chose to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Kansas while during the summers he worked as a draftsman at the Cessna Aircraft Company in Wichita. That was where he learned to fly, buying an hour of flying time for every eight hours' work he did clearing up at the local airport after he'd finished his day at Cessna. After graduating, Engle had to wait nine months before getting a slot at Air Force flying school. He used the time predictably enough: building an airplane with the Cessna supervisor who'd taught him to fly. They constructed the wings in the garage, the fuselage in the living room and the tail in the spare bedroom; the kitchen was used for engine testing. When the whole thing was finished, they rolled the fuselage outside, attached the wings, and took off from the street.

By the end of the fifties, Engle, a lean, loose-limbed six-footer, was a fighter pilot. Assigned to a new squadron, the 474th, based at George Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, he was flying a former world air speed record holder in the shape of the North American F-100 Super Sabre, the first fighter in the world capable of traveling faster than sound in level flight. The squadron's primary mission was air defense and, even as a young second lieutenant, Engle's talent was sufficiently evident that he was made a designated flight leader. Whenever he could, he'd lead a flight of F-100s up into the skies over Death Valley to practice dogfighting. He might have missed out on the Flying Tigers but Joe Henry Engle was doing the things he'd dreamt about day and night his entire life.

The icing on the cake was that the 474th shared the George flight line with another F-100 squadron commanded by a pilot Engle had previously only admired from a distance: Colonel Chuck Yeager. Engle would sit in the squadron ops block just watching the way Yeager walked out to his jet with his parachute. He tried to emulate Yeager's fearless rolling gait, and if he knew Yeager was briefing his squadron he'd slip into the back of the room just to hear his distinctive drawl. Nobody, thought Engle, can talk like a West Virginian, but it didn't stop him trying. Growing increasingly confident, Engle once made the mistake of attempting to bounce an unsuspecting Yeager in the air. Spotting two Super Sabres returning to George from the northeast, the young fighter pilot set up his own four-ship flight to attack. Following his lead, the four 474th jets rolled in, only to have their asses handed back to them by Yeager and his wingman. It was a lesson learned, but it got Engle noticed.

Engle's logbook needed to show 1,500 hours of flying before he was eligible for test pilot school. On days off, at weekends, he made it up any way he could, pulling gunnery targets in P-80 Shooting Star jets and prop-driven B-26 Invaders, or ferrying gunnery range officers to and from their observation posts at dawn in George's old high-winged de Havilland Beaver bush plane. In Engle, Yeager recognized something of a kindred spirit. "For the best pilots," he maintained, "flying is an obsession, something they must do continually." Yeager recommended Engle for test pilot school at Edwards.

After graduating, Jovial Joe stayed on at Edwards, assigned to the Fighter Test Operations Division, where he took part in an evaluation of a new subsonic attack jet designed for close air support: Cessna's YAT-37 Dragonfly. He was loving every minute, but in the wake of Gagarin's first spaceflight it seemed clear where the future of the Air Force lay and so Engle applied for a place at Chuck Yeager's Aerospace Research Pilot School. And when NASA announced a new astronaut selection, he submitted his application.

Soon afterward, he was called in to see Major General "Twig" Branch, Edwards's commanding officer, who told him, "I'm pulling your application to NASA." Engle wondered what he'd done wrong. Then Branch asked him, "Did you really want to go?" The truth was, Engle did have mixed feelings about it. The idea of exchanging real stick-and-rudder flying for the controls of a capsule didn't thrill him.

"Well, I thought it would be a career thing," Engle replied weakly.

"We've got something else in mind for you," Branch said, "but I can't tell you right now . . ."

Engle soon discovered that the gods had blessed him with a slot on the X-15 program: a joint USAF/NASA hypersonic flight research project. He couldn't have been more thrilled. The rocket-powered North American X-15 was the ultimate winged flying machine, the pinnacle of stick-and-rudder flying. For the next three months the training was as intense as he had ever known. By day he'd replicate the high-speed gliding landings made by the X-15. In the evenings, at weekends, whenever he could persuade any of the operators to come in, he'd ride his Lambretta scooter across the Mojave back roads to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and sit in the simulator, imagining the flight just as he had as a kid sitting in a sandpit in Chapman.

• • •

NASA's Mercury capsule was not the first American manned spacecraft to fly. That honor belonged to the X-15 (even if, ultimately, the capsule was first into space). In September 1959, North American's experimental rocket plane lit its engines for the first time and crested at a height of 52,341 feet. It was still a long way short of spaceflight, but it marked the beginning of perhaps the most successful flight test program ever undertaken. It was December of the following year before NASA successfully lofted an unmanned Mercury capsule into suborbital space atop a Redstone rocket launched from Cape Canaveral. On May 5, 1961, NASA's Alan Shepard was strapped into the same combination to become the first American in space. He was followed by Gus Grissom, John Glenn and, in May 1962, Scott Carpenter. Then on July 17, 1962, USAF test pilot Robert White flew the X-15 to a height of 314,000 feet—above the 50-mile limit, where the Air Force considered Earth's atmosphere ended and space began. The flight earned White his astronaut wings from the Air Force, but, although he was the fifth American in space, his achievement was entirely overshadowed by the fanfare and circus surrounding NASA's Mercury Seven.

• • •

Engle's first X-15 flight was just for familiarization. But even using only 50 percent of the available engine power, the North American rocket plane was still going to fly him twice as fast as he'd ever traveled before. He nearly didn't launch at all, though. Engle had already called for an abort when an instrument failure corrected itself and allowed him to go. The stub-winged black needle dropped away from beneath the wing of NASA's NB-52 mothership, "Balls 8," and Engle lit the Reaction Motors XLR99 engine. As he accelerated away, an electrical malfunction caused him to lose all his flight instruments except the g-meter. Having practiced and memorized the flight profiles in the simulator, though, Engle was completely unfazed by the inconvenience. In fact, being forced to fly the world's hottest ship by the seat of his pants was Engle's idea of fun.

As he gained altitude, he kept a close eye on the g-meter spooling up—his only way of measuring the accuracy of his flying—but pushing over the top of the climb at 77,000 feet and four times the speed of sound, he looked out of the flat plate glass of the cockpit to see the lake bed he had to land on disappearing behind him. Instinctively, Engle rolled the rocket ship onto its back and gently pulled the nose down to head for denser air at lower altitude and avoid overshooting. As the X-15 descended, Engle completed the 360-degree roll, leveled the wings, and opened the speed brakes to bleed off his excess velocity. The X-15 felt satisfyingly crisp and responsive. Boy, he thought to himself, this thing really is a nice flying airplane.

On the ground, the engineers monitoring the telemetry in the control room thought that Engle had lost control. After a safe landing, one of them quizzed him at the debriefing, "Hey, you didn't roll that airplane, did you?"

"Who me?" Engle replied, all innocence.

"I didn't think so." It was inconceivable to the technician that a rookie would perform aerobatics in a machine that had, in just its previous mission, flown a man into space and back. On his first flight.

Now he was flying rocket planes at Edwards, Engle became good friends with Chuck Yeager. The ARPS commander invited his protégé on long hiking trips he led up in the Sierra Nevada. The two men shared a love of hunting. Fishing too. When, because of a change to the X-15 flying program, Engle was unable to join Yeager on an expedition up to the Kern River to catch golden trout, he thought he'd give the camping party a little variation to their otherwise all-fish diet. He packed thick steaks into a helmet bag and tucked them behind one of the airbrakes of a Starfighter. Beneath the other he placed a bag filled with frozen fish sticks. As he flew low over the camp, Yeager flashed him with a signal mirror. Engle pulled the F-104 around for another pass, low and slow. He popped the airbrakes, and one of the bags dropped to the ground; the other got caught up for a few seconds before ripping loose and tumbling down a ravine. Yeager opened the bag with the steaks, and, unable to resist the temptation to double up, climbed down the canyon to search for the other bag. After a long hike, he found it. And the fish sticks. It was a gotcha Engle couldn't have pulled off any better if he'd tried.

Joe Engle earned his astronaut wings flying the X-15. Three times in 1965 he flew beyond the 50-mile limit, the threshold of space. Beneath him, as he traveled weightless over the top of the X-15's ballistic arc, the soft blue curve of the Earth's horizon cut across the deep black of space. On one of the flights he lost, and had to reset, a flight control circuit critical to his ability to safely reenter the Earth's atmosphere twenty-one times in ten minutes. Again, Engle was unperturbed, regarding it as a minor distraction. While he flew a precise profile to a height of 271,000 feet with his right hand, with his left, he calmly reset his yaw damper switch every time it tripped. After the first time it happened, he didn't think it was worth even mentioning again. At the postflight debriefing, the engineers were again left scratching their heads.

Or marveling.

There was no doubt about it, Jovial Joe was doing the best job in the world. But as a serving Air Force pilot he knew it would come to an end when he was handed a new assignment over which he'd have no say. And Engle wanted to go to the moon, a journey that he regarded, through the eyes of a test pilot, as a tremendous envelope expansion. He applied for NASA and was accepted.

But, as Bob Crippen was about to discover, for an aspiring astronaut, NASA was not the only show in town.

## FIVE

#### Edwards Air Force Base, 1966

Bob Crippen was encased in a full pressure suit, his helmet secured to its torso with a locked metal ring. The zoom climb was the climax of his Edwards syllabus—a flight to as close to 90,000 feet as a Lockheed F-104A Starfighter could take him. It was a test of both the nerve and the ability of Yeager's students in an environment that was usually the sole preserve of exotica like the X-15. Crip checked his suit and switched off the cockpit pressurization. At the height he was ascending to, the air-breathing General Electric J79 engine would be starved and, without it, the Starfighter's own system couldn't function. If the pressure suit failed, Crip's blood would boil in the thin air of the upper stratosphere.

He leveled off at 35,000 feet, glancing at another F-104 flying chase off his shoulder. Checking his heading, he advanced the throttle through the gate to full afterburner and felt 15,800 pounds of thrust push him from behind. He scanned his instruments—temperatures, pressures, fuel—and watched the Mach meter spin up as he accelerated. He let the height creep up from 35,000 feet as he urged the silver-skinned Starfighter past Mach 2—twice the speed of sound. Then he pulled back gently on the stick, loading on gs as he raised the nose to 45 degrees above horizontal. Rocketing away from Earth, higher than anyone else in the sky above the Mojave, Crip and the Starfighter kept climbing. The altimeter recorded his progress. 50,000 feet . . . 55 . . . 60 . . . The J79's afterburner—which sprayed raw fuel into the jet pipe to augment the engine's thrust—suffocated and extinguished. Crip kept climbing, his eyes checking that the airplane was on a knife-edge angle of attack and g-load, scanning the rising engine temperature . . . 65,000 feet. He shut down the engine to prevent it from overheating. With that, the cabin pressure was lost and he was glad of the embrace of the pressure suit as he soared past 70,000 feet, nudging the stick forward a touch to keep her from stalling. But from here on he was traveling like an artillery shell, the jet's momentum carrying her up and forward, trading speed for height. As the Starfighter carved a ballistic arc to near 90,000 feet he felt himself rise out of the seat, a few seconds of weightlessness—and silence—before the razor-winged jet pointed her nose back toward the ground and gathered the speed he needed to get her flying again. Zero-g, the indigo blue-black of the edge of space, a hint of the curve of the Earth. He wanted more.

Both NASA and the Department of Defense were asking for astronaut applications. The forms gave him the option to choose NASA, DOD, or not express a preference. I'll take either, he thought. He figured the more bets you place, the better your chances. But when he graduated from Edwards, the Navy asked him to jump one way or the other. From where Crip was sitting, NASA appeared to have a lot of astronauts. By contrast, he knew the military had just eight. Maybe, he figured, my chances of flying are better in that direction. DOD, he told the Navy. And so in June 1966, Bob Crippen was named in a second selection of astronauts for a classified military space program. He was looking forward to working with his friend Dick Truly again.

• • •

Truly had been listening to the car radio when it was announced that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had approved an Air Force space station. At the time, it hadn't registered, but he'd soon learned that his commander at the Aerospace Research Pilot School was eager to see the Air Force claim what he regarded as its rightful place in space. Having glimpsed the curvature of the Earth on his own high-altitude flights, Chuck Yeager now looked forward to Air Force space stations, shuttles armed with particle beam weapons and lasers. "No bluesuiter," believed Colonel Yeager, "wanted to surrender space to NASA." He wanted to make sure that his students led the charge, and to that end Yeager traveled to the Pentagon to make his case. Rather than invite applications for a military astronaut corps, he argued, it would save time and money simply to select them from the existing pool of graduates from his school. The Air Force agreed. Including Truly's Class 64A there were sixty-six pilots to choose from, minus those who had already been accepted into NASA's civilian Astronaut Office. Working on the assumption that anyone who'd graduated from ARPS wanted to be an astronaut—in any case, they had to do what the Air Force told them to do—Yeager didn't actually tell those whose records he was poring through that their hats were in the ring.

By the autumn of 1964, however, Truly and his friend and fellow US Navy student Jack Finley knew something was up. The rumor was spreading throughout the class of thirteen that some kind of selection was going on. It finally dawned on them that they were in contention, yet it still never really registered with Truly that he was in with a chance. Yeager whittled down his list of sixty-six names to a shortlist of fifteen. Then, at last, the commander shared the news of the selection process with those who'd made the cut. And that included Truly and Finley. They would be off to Brooks AFB again for further medicals, interviews and psychiatric assessments. None of that did anything to dampen Truly's excitement. In November, Yeager flew to Washington again to make the final selection. Six USAF pilots made the final eight. Two Navy: Truly and Finley. I'll be damned, thought Truly. He'd been chosen to be an astronaut.

A year later, on his birthday, November 12, 1965, Truly was introduced to the world alongside the seven other men chosen for a program the Air Force called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL. Clustered around a model of the Titan IIIC rocket they were expected to ride, the eight astronauts smiled for the camera. Al Crews, Mac Macleay, Mike Adams, Jim Taylor, Greg Neubeck and Dick Lawyer wore their Air Force uniforms; alongside them, Truly and Finley were in the dark blue of the Navy. It was the first and last time any of them were ever invited to talk to the press about their new assignment. They couldn't even tell their wives the details of it. With a nod to both Yul Brynner and NASA's Mercury Seven, the group dubbed themselves "the Magnificent Eight," but they would enjoy none of the fanfare that attended their NASA counterparts. They joked that when they finally got to fly, the Air Force might put out a statement announcing: "An unidentified spacecraft left from an unidentified location carrying an unidentified crew on an unidentified mission."

On November 13, the day after their introduction, they disappeared into the black world: the highly classified shadows of the US Department of Defense that it chooses not to share with the public.

• • •

Bob Crippen joined the program seven months later alongside Air Force pilots Gordon Fullerton, Hank Hartsfield, Karol "Bo" Bobko and, from the US Marine Corps, Bob Overmyer. A year later, a third selection was made when Jim Abrahamson, Bob Herres, Don Peterson and Bob Lawrence joined the program. Lawrence, who'd earned a PhD in nuclear chemistry two years earlier, looked set to become the first African American in space. Ultimately, two of the MOL pilots chose to leave the program. Mike Adams left to take up a much-coveted slot on the X-15 program, while hard-charging Jack Finley decided that, with the country at war in Vietnam, he belonged on the front line, leading a Navy squadron in combat. Those who remained were, as Bob Lawrence's doctorate illustrated, anything but your average collection of fighter jocks.

Growing up, Don Peterson read German science fiction in translation because he thought it more realistic than the American stuff. When the Air Force was looking for pilots to fly a nuclear-powered bomber then under development, they sent him back to college to study for a master's in nuclear engineering. He would later go on to write scientific papers with titles like "Principal Sources and Dispersal Patterns of Suspended Particulate Matter in Nearshore Surface Waters of the North East Pacific Ocean and the Hawaiian Islands" and "Fatigue and Fracture of Ultrahigh Strength Steel and Titanium Roll Bonded and Diffusion Bonded Laminates."

You didn't get that from Chuck Yeager.

When he approved the MOL program, President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed it would "bring a new knowledge of what man is able to do in space." But even the men who'd been chosen to acquire that knowledge were yet to discover the real nature of the job they'd been selected to do.

On the day the Air Force introduced the first group of MOL astronauts to the world they played their hand carefully. To avoid any possibility of a slip, none of the men meeting the press had yet been read into the real substance of the program. What was made public was that the Manned Orbiting Laboratory was a two-man space station, designed to perform thirty-day missions exploring the utility of men in orbit, from which the astronauts would return to Earth in a modified version of NASA's new two-man Gemini capsule. No more was ever said.

The following day, though, the crews, all now enjoying high-level security clearances, were briefed on the true nature of their new assignment. It was, from the outset, going to be an operational mission. For public consumption, Laboratory sounded wholesome enough, but as Hank Hartsfield, one of the second group of MOL pilots, pointed out, "Even though it was called a laboratory, it was different kinds of experiments."

As the Air Force struggled to make a case for MOL, it produced a document labeled Candidate Experiments for Manned Orbiting Laboratory, vol. 1. Included in the list of possibilities were "encapsulation and recovery of space objects, changing the orbital trajectory of enemy satellites and a projectile firing RMU—remote maneuvering unit—for neutralization of enemy satellites." The space station was being pitched as a means to capture enemy satellites, knock them out of orbit, or shoot them down. This didn't cut it with Secretary McNamara. America's restraint in choosing not to complain to the Kremlin over Sputnik and its successors orbiting overhead the nation's capital established a precedent: satellites could fly unopposed and unprotested over whatever and wherever they wanted. Placing a weapons system in space threatened to change that, opening up space as a new front in the Cold War in exactly the way Curtis LeMay and Chuck Yeager had anticipated. When, instead, the Air Force reframed MOL as a dedicated reconnaissance platform—a system that wouldn't upset the status quo—McNamara became more receptive. The key to his change of mind lay with the introduction of two systems: a high-resolution camera code-named DORIAN and a powerful radar capable of surveying and tracking activity on the Earth's surface.

The MOL space station was a 10-by-55-foot cylinder capped with a Gemini-B capsule, from which the astronauts entered through a 26-inch hatch placed between their little spacecraft's seats. But barely a third of the space station's total length was given over to the two-man crew. The front of the 400-cubic-foot living area was devoted to the "laboratory," the systems, controls and displays, while against the rear bulkhead was basic accommodation including sleeping bags, galley and lavatory. There was no shower and, lacking the photovoltaic solar-panel wings carried by later craft, the Air Force space station was powered by alkaline fuel cells that generated electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce water. MOL's endurance was limited by the quantity of the hydrogen and oxygen it carried on board. There was also an exercise bike. At the time of the program's inception, little was known about the physiological effects of long-duration spaceflight. The bike might at least prevent the possibility, as Hank Hartsfield put it, that the crew would "come back jelly."

Launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, into sun-synchronous polar orbit at 96 degrees to the equator, the MOL space station would, because of the Earth's rotation beneath it, overfly the whole planet passing below, meaning that in any twenty-four-hour period the crew saw everything; once in daylight, once in darkness—or dawn and dusk, depending on the time of the launch. From the laboratory, aided by the brand-new IBM 4Pi digital computer connected to cathode ray displays, they were able to reposition the space station or, using joysticks, train their camera to zoom in or out to improve the quality of the imagery. Their presence on board—and the judgment they could exercise—meant limited quantities of film wouldn't be wasted taking pictures of targets obscured by cloud. Furthermore, if targets were hidden by overcast, the crew could use the radar to see through it—a capability that was of particular interest to the Navy.

Behind the small crew compartment—which zero gravity at least allowed them to make full use of—and occupying the rear 41 feet of the space station was the MOL's raison d'être: the massive, trailer-sized DORIAN camera system that operated along the same principles as an astronomical telescope, but pointing down, not up. At its heart was a large curved mirror that collected the available light, then focused it on the camera lens. The power of any reflecting telescope is directly related to the size of the primary mirror. The bigger the mirror, the farther the telescope can see and the larger it can make the image. The DORIAN system carried a primary mirror built by Perkin-Elmer in Connecticut that was just shy of six feet in diameter. Larger than the mirrors inside many ground-based telescopes, the silica glass blank—the unfinished disk from which the mirror was made—would require thousands of hours of precision grinding, polishing and testing. But when it was finished, its performance was expected to be extraordinary. From low Earth orbit at an altitude of between 150 and 160 miles, MOL's DORIAN camera was, on paper at least, capable of focusing on an object as small as a softball. Operationally, because of the distortion caused by moisture in the atmosphere, that figure might double. But that still meant that MOL could zero in on any single square foot of the globe. Or, rather, any single 8-by-8-inch square.

With its mission clear, MOL, although still led by the Air Force, was assigned the code number KH-10 and became part of the KEYHOLE program, which covered the activities of all America's spy satellites. And that meant it came under the wing of an organization whose very existence was classified: the National Reconnaissance Office.

## SIX

In thriller writer Alistair MacLean's 1963 bestseller, Ice Station Zebra, American and Soviet forces race to recover the secrets of a US film capsule, dropped from a spy satellite, that's come down in the Arctic. MacLean's book—and the film starring Rock Hudson that followed—perfectly captured the hair-trigger potential in any Cold War encounter. It was also based on a true story.

In February 1958, the Air Force announced a satellite program called Discoverer. Its primary purpose, it was said, would be biomedical research into the effects of space on everything from seeds to human bone marrow. The Air Force had been working to develop a satellite capability since 1955. Designated WS-117L, the program had lacked urgency until the launch of Sputnik. Four days after the Soviet satellite flew over Washington for the first time in 1957, President Eisenhower was asking the Department of Defense about America's plans for a reconnaissance satellite.

The result was Discoverer. But while that was the name shared with the public, it was a cover for the project's classified name: CORONA (so named because the CIA's director for plans happened to catch sight of a typewriter branded Smith-Corona when deciding what to call the project). Responsibility for the program, designed as an interim project to provide the earliest possible space reconnaissance capability, was split between CIA and the Air Force. A classified DOD document listed among its aims the "testing of techniques for recovery of a capsule ejected from an orbiting satellite." Transmitting images from space to the ground was beyond the state of the art; the capsule would return exposed camera film to Earth for developing on the ground. CORONA was to be the nation's first spy satellite.

The program's early years were plagued by failure. Discoverer 1 blew up on the pad after mistakes made during prelaunch checks caused all sorts of chaos. That one didn't count, it was decided, and so it became Discoverer 0. The second Discoverer 1 made it into orbit, but not the one intended. As the bird tumbled end over end through space, the sporadic telemetry that was picked up meant that the Air Force was only able to announce with any confidence that she was aloft four days later. Discoverer 2 did reach the right orbit but, because of a malfunctioning radio link, failed to drop the capsule over the Pacific, where, as it fell beneath a parachute, it could have been plucked from midair by the specially equipped recovery planes of the 6594th Test Group. Instead, it ejected the capsule over Spitsbergen, an island in the Norwegian Arctic. The Air Force colonel responsible for its recovery jumped on a C-54 cargo plane from Edwards to Thule in Greenland. From there a C-130 flew him to Spitsbergen, where he directed a fruitless six-day search using Norwegian skiers, search planes and helicopters. All that was found was a set of snowshoe tracks leading from where the bucket had landed to a coal-mining concession held by the Soviets since the thirties. The colonel persuaded the island's governor to send a telegram to the boss of the Soviet mine asking if he'd seen the capsule. In his reply, the Russian said his people "had not seen that container . . . we got no information about this." Four years later, Alistair MacLean spiced up his fictional version of the story with the addition of a nuclear submarine and a British secret agent.

To lend weight to CORONA's official cover story, Discoverer 3 carried four mice with radios attached to their backs. They were said to be trained. But that couldn't prevent them from being pronounced dead before launch. Four replacements were found but suffered a similarly meaningless death when the satellite's booster fired while its nose was pointing toward Earth, rather than space. It was a short flight.

The disasters continued unabated to the point where canceling the program was considered. But with the successful recovery of a payload from Discoverer 13 the tide turned. Then, on August 18, 1960, Discoverer 14 was launched. Six days later, just after 8:15 a.m. on August 24, Edwin Land, the chair of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, unspooled a reel of developed film from the satellite across the floor of the Oval Office for the president. "Here's your pictures, Mr. President," he said as if he were a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Eisenhower was stunned. As he prepared for the National Security Council meeting that followed, it was immediately clear to him that they were living in a new world. In just seven orbits, Discoverer 14 had captured images of over 1.65 million square miles of Soviet territory with a resolution of less than 50 feet. The take, revealing scores of air bases, surface-to-air missile batteries and a previously unknown ballistic missile site, offered more than the sum total of four years' worth of U-2 spy flights.

Concerned that knowledge of the satellite imagery would provoke a response from the Soviets that might limit further reconnaissance from space, Eisenhower quickly decreed that none of it was ever to be publicly released. It was the first step on a path that saw the country's spy satellite program disappear into the highly classified "black" world.

In an effort to claim satellite reconnaissance as its own, the Air Force had done its best to associate itself publicly with the nascent Discoverer program, sanctioning the release of a nine-page document that sailed dangerously close to revealing the satellite's true purpose. In the end, the pamphlet was counterproductive. It reinforced the administration's doubts that the Air Force couldn't (or wouldn't) manage a completely covert program. More importantly, Eisenhower was determined that satellite imagery should not be allowed to serve the interests of the Air Force, nor for that matter the CIA. It was an asset of such importance to the nation that it should not be controlled and directed by a single service or agency. The result was the creation of a civilian office reporting to the secretary of defense, which, in September 1961, became the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. The new spy agency had no headquarters building, but was instead found behind an unmarked metal door on the fourth floor of the Pentagon's C-ring. Beneath the umbrella of the NRO, the Air Force, CIA and Navy fought for influence.

The initial reaction to the photographs from Discoverer 14 was simply uncritical amazement. "Like a dog that walks on its hind legs," one general suggested, "it's remarkable that it happens at all." Almost immediately, though, the intelligence community wanted more. What form that might take highlighted the different requirements of the Air Force and the CIA.

CORONA—labeled KH-4 by the KEYHOLE coding system used by the NRO to identify its photographic reconnaissance assets—functioned as a "search" satellite, its job to look for what was not known. In imaging large swathes of "denied area"—enemy territory—it provided a strategic overview. From KH-4 imagery—classified TOP SECRET RUFF—the NRO could glean answers to the big questions like "Is there a bomber gap?" or, in the wake of Sputnik, "Is there a missile gap?" A search capability, though, which gathered exactly the kind of intelligence the CIA was after, was only one part of the equation. The Air Force, by contrast, needed a surveillance capability; that is, a system that could look more closely at what was known. Once a search bird like CORONA uncovered evidence of enemy installations and equipment, the Air Force had to assess it in detail. They needed a satellite, equipped with a spotting camera, that could focus on a particular location or object. In contrast to the CORONA with its resolution of 50 feet, they wanted an agile, maneuverable bird with a resolution, from an altitude of 95 miles, of just 2 to 3 feet. The Air Force program, which would ultimately sit within the NRO, was approved just a month after Eisenhower first studied Discoverer 14's photographs in the Oval Office. It was code-named GAMBIT, and known within the NRO simply as "G."

Given the KEYHOLE designation KH-7, the first GAMBIT was launched into a polar orbit from Vandenberg on July 12, 1963. The pictures from early flights showed promise, with the best of them meeting the ambition of 2- to 3-foot resolution. On the third test flight, color pictures of a game of football were returned. They were of no value to the intelligence community, but they showed at least that GAMBIT was capable of being pointed accurately. It turned out to be a rare reassurance. Like Discoverer/CORONA before it, GAMBIT's gestation was painful. But it was the performance of the spacecraft, not the KH-7 camera it carried, that was at the root of it. A problem diagnosed early was that the satellite's heat-seeking control sensors couldn't tell the difference between winter in Antarctica and outer space. The confusion would send it tumbling out of control. Nagging problems, a later NRO history disclosed, "transformed a healthy-looking GAMBIT into a zombie—a stupid creature circling the earth in unauthorized orbits, totally disinterested in attending to its assigned duties."

For the general running the program, the frustration of watching a bird "go gypsy" was agonizing. On the ground at the Air Force's Sunnyvale Satellite Control Facility, it was often difficult to diagnose the problem, let alone do anything about it. It lent weight to the Air Force argument that one of the purposes of placing its personnel in space was "to correct malfunctions."

In 1967, at a time when both CORONA and GAMBIT had overcome their teething problems, events in the Middle East suggested that, as well as being on hand to fix anything that went wrong, military astronauts might play a more critical role.

On June 5 that year, Israel launched a devastating attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan. By noon on day one, Israel's lightning strike had destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground, her tanks smashing Egyptian and Jordanian armor, before doing the same to Syria's. Six days after hostilities began, Israel had won. The CIA had expected the war. But despite the NRO having both CORONA and GAMBIT satellites on orbit during the fighting, it was all over before either bird was able to deliver a single image.

The Six-Day War highlighted the critical failing of the KEYHOLE program: it was incapable of delivering real-time intelligence from space. The MOL crews were briefed on what CORONA and GAMBIT could do. And they knew that their manned program offered something more. They could rotate the DORIAN camera's reflecting mirror as they passed over a target so that pictures could be taken from two different angles. Combining the pair made stereo imagery possible. And they could also look down from low Earth orbit with their camera and sensors and tell Washington what was going on now.

## SEVEN

#### 1966–67

Like those from GAMBIT and CORONA, the pictures taken by the Manned Orbiting Laboratory's KH-10 DORIAN camera had to be physically returned to Earth. There were two options: use one of either a limited number of reentry buckets similar to those used by the National Reconnaissance Office's unmanned spy satellites or, at the end of their thirty-day mission, the two-man MOL crew could suit up, then pull themselves through the 5-foot-long tunnel linking the lab with their Gemini-B spacecraft, carrying with them a data capsule of the take. After powering up the Gemini, they'd separate from the MOL, then fire their retro-rockets to initiate their return to Earth. After splashing down in the Pacific beneath parachutes, they'd be picked up by the Navy. On the face of it, this was an even more cumbersome way of gathering intelligence from space than employing the 6594th to snatch CORONA and GAMBIT buckets from Pacific skies. The difference, though, was what the MOL crew could do while on orbit. In the absence of a capability to transmit real-time imagery from space, the Air Force planned to make use of "man's unique capabilities as a broadband multiple sensor." A trained flight crew could not only exercise their judgment about what to photograph to ensure that pictures were taken of "the right target at the right time" but could also develop and interpret photographs on board, then communicate their findings via encrypted radio. They offered a measure of real-time intelligence, using the most capable high-resolution photographic system available. A conversation with the ground was possible. They could double-check, look again, draw conclusions, or easily focus attention elsewhere—a process that, relying on unmanned systems, could last weeks. Air Force studies suggested that MOL crews would capture as much as three times as many photographs of "active" targets per day than an unmanned spy satellite. In order to maximize their contribution, the MOL crews were exposed to existing TALENT and KEYHOLE imagery, the former code name applying to imagery taken from high-flying Air Force and CIA spy planes. They pored over detailed satellite photographs of facilities in the Soviet Union and China, while a camera simulator was built to help train them to operate the DORIAN system under development. Once operational, it promised to deliver images that were better than anything they'd seen so far.

By November 1966, the Air Force was ready to flight-test MOL hardware. Of particular interest was the performance of the spacecraft's heat shield. A number of different options had been considered for moving the astronauts from their Gemini-B capsule to inside the space station. Spacewalking was a possibility, as was an inflatable tube linking the capsule hatch to that of the MOL crew quarters. Both methods seemed a little unsatisfactory. Instead, manufacturer McDonnell-Douglas proposed cutting a hatch into the capsule's crucial heat shield. No one was absolutely certain it would work, though. To test it, an unmanned capsule—a veteran of a previous unmanned test flight—was fitted to a reduced-length mock-up of the MOL space station, attached to a Titan IIIC stack and prepared for launch from Kennedy Space Center. Instead of NASA's familiar red "United States" running down its length, the Titan bore the words "United States Air Force" beneath the well-known insignia that identified the country's combat aircraft.

The test launch went without a hitch. Lobbed into a punishing reentry profile after a brief suborbital flight, the capsule splashed down safely near Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. The modified heat shield proved its worth. When it was examined after the flight, not only was there no burn-through, but the heat had fused the hatch to the rest of the heat shield. And in the process of validating the design, the capsule became the first spacecraft ever to have been reused.

The MOL crews greeted the news with relief. Invited down to the Cape in August 1966 to observe an earlier launch of one of the big Titan IIIC rockets similar to the one they would be riding, the astronauts had watched as the 140-foot stack rose quickly from pad LC-41, its two Aerojet LR-87 engines in the rocket's core augmented by a pair of UA-1205 strap-on boosters, each adding over a million pounds of extra thrust. On board was a clutch of communication satellites. As it accelerated away, streaming fire and smoke, the sound of the engines tearing at the air, it was hard not to feel a sense of exhilaration. Until, seventy-eight seconds into the flight, the shroud covering the payload in the rocket's nose ripped off. Five seconds later, the broken rocket was destroyed by the range safety officer.

The sucker blew up! Dick Truly said to himself as he watched the aerial catastrophe. For the whole group, it was a sobering reminder of what could go wrong, and how quickly.

In the end, Bob Crippen, frustrated that he would be absent from the launch after his jet developed a fault en route to the Cape, was lucky to miss it. It was Crip's job, though, to try to establish whether or not they had any chance of surviving a similar disaster, or "malfunction." The combination of the Titan IIIM booster and Gemini-B was unique to the Air Force. Like NASA's Gemini crews, the Air Force astronauts were strapped into ejection seats, but complicating their possible escape was the use of two solid-fuel boosters secured to the sides of their rocket. Unlike the Titan's liquid-fuel engine, the solids, once fired, couldn't be throttled back or turned off. Instead, the boosters were provided with a more conclusive way of terminating their thrust. By blowing the tops off them while they still burned furiously until the fuel was expended, they were effectively neutered, turned into little more than fiery toilet paper rolls, the speeding air blowing straight through them.

Crip flew down to the Ling-Temco-Vought Company plant in Dallas, where an abort simulation had been set up. His challenge was to see whether, in the split seconds available following a terminal fault in the rocket, the pilot's reactions could be sufficiently quick to select and abort and eject the capsule from the dying stack.

• • •

While the MOL program headquarters was based inside the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Organization in the unprepossessing surroundings of Los Angeles Air Force Base, the crews traveled around the country visiting the contractors working on different aspects of the program.

While none worked in isolation, each of the MOL pilots had particular areas of responsibility. After witnessing the Titan explode after launch, Gordon Fullerton, "the booster guy," discussed the fault with the rocket's manufacturer, Martin-Marietta, in Denver, Colorado. Hank Hartsfield worked closely with Douglas in Huntington Beach, California, on the spacecraft; Lawyer was assigned to pressure suits; Bob Crippen collaborated with IBM on the computers; Jim Abrahamson concentrated on the simulators; while Dick Truly and Mac Macleay were often found at General Electric in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, focused on the systems controlling the space station's giant camera.

When traveling around the country visiting the program contractors, the MOL flight crews left behind their military IDs and wore civilian clothes. Their efforts to be inconspicuous weren't always convincing.

Visiting the East Coast in winter, Don Peterson and Bob Lawrence, wrapped up in trench coats against the cold, pulled into a gas station. The attendant looked them up and down, approached as inconspicuously as he could, and asked, "FBI?"

He's been watching Bill Cosby and Bob Culp, thought Peterson. "No," he replied.

The attendant thought for a moment. Peterson could almost see the guy's mind turning it over: crewcuts, suits and ties, trench coats . . .

"CIA?"

Getting pegged as G-men or spooks by kids pumping gas was the least of Peterson's and Lawrence's concerns. It was relatively easy for most of the MOL crews to travel incognito. Not so Lawrence. At a time when it was sometimes a struggle to find a restaurant that would serve them both, Lawrence, a black astronaut, was a novelty. He shunned the attention, but the press learned to recognize him, causing a nagging anxiety inside the program office that his whereabouts would leave a trail of crumbs for reporters who were otherwise forced to cover MOL on scraps.

The crews were also frequent visitors to Houston, where they'd compare notes and take advice from the Apollo astronauts. While they relished the opportunity to come to grips with the particular technical challenges presented by MOL's military mission, aspects of their training overlapped with their civilian counterparts' at NASA. Because, like them, the Air Force pilots had to prepare for the possibility that their capsule might not return to Earth where it was expected to.

The Panama Canal Zone was home to the US Army's Jungle Training School. Throughout the sixties, increasing numbers of American soldiers passed through Fort Gulick to learn the skills they needed to live and fight in Vietnam. Astronauts, under the watchful eye of the USAF's Tropical Survival School, shared the forests with them. To keep them alive, they had Air Force Manual 64-5. Its title was self-explanatory: Survival. It assumed nothing about its readers' ability to stay alive. "Dangerous beasts," it warned, "Tigers, Rhinoceroses, Elephants, are rarely seen and best left alone." There was desert survival training in Nevada, and even, because the MOL's high-inclination orbit created the possibility of their coming down in the polar regions, rudimentary arctic survival. They were briefed on contingency plans for using military force to extract them from hostile territory, or capture by armed rebels, but in the end, it was the water survival training for returning in one of the three designated recovery zones—the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans—that nearly killed one of them.

• • •

So far the water survival had been fun. Dick Truly hadn't made it out to Buck Island in the Caribbean like some of his colleagues, but he'd learned to scuba dive in the Douglas Aircraft Company tank at Huntington Beach. Now, trussed up in a full pressure suit, he was standing on a little deck at the aft end of a boat bobbing on the Gulf of Mexico swell. Ahead of him, a powerboat dug into the water as it accelerated away. Truly was straight away hauled off the deck beneath a parasail. Above him, the flexible wing scooped in air through its leading edge. A few hundred feet up, he disconnected from the tow and drifted back down toward the Gulf of Mexico. After splashing into the sea, he flopped into the life raft.

An hour later, they came to pick him up. Truly slipped into the sea in preparation for being winched up. He immediately knew something was wrong. Not zipped up, the neck of the pressure suit was letting in water, but with the space suit's visor closed, Truly began to suffocate. He waved frantically at the crew on the boat, but they just waved back, unaware he was fighting for breath. His struggles to get the visor open became increasingly desperate as his lungs began to scream. I'm going to die, he thought. At this time, every American astronaut to lose his life had done so during training. Truly was lucky not to join them.

The MOL astronaut group had so far escaped tragedy, but that was about to change. Flying a stub-winged F-104 Starfighter with one of the Edwards instructors, Bob Lawrence had already successfully completed two steep approaches when they poured on the coals and climbed out to a position 10 miles from the end of Runway 04. They cut the power at 25,000 feet and lowered the undercarriage, before descending in a steep 30-degree unpowered glide to the runway in a profile designed to simulate a returning spacecraft. No one knows for sure why they crashed into the runway nearly 3,000 feet short of their aiming point—the instructor pilot screwed up, Crip figured—but on impact the Starfighter's gear buckled and flames burst from the jet's belly before it bounced into the air again. The instructor ejected first. Lawrence followed him out, but he was too low, the angles too severe. He died on impact less than 100 yards from where the broken jet tumbled to a dusty halt. His chest was smashed, his heart sliced open. He was still harnessed to the seat.

Thirty-two years old, Lawrence left behind a wife and child. It was the flying game, Crip reflected. You go to the memorial service and that's about it. You don't linger. But Bob Lawrence was one of the good guys. It was a real shame, he thought. And the tragedy of Lawrence's death was deepened because it followed so soon after that of another pilot the MOL crews regarded as one of their own: Mike Adams, one of the original MOL "Magnificent Eight."

Three weeks earlier, Adams had been launched above the Mojave in the X-15, the experimental rocket plane that had lured him away from the MOL program. As he descended from a height of 266,000 feet, the X-15 began to yaw dangerously before entering a hypersonic spin that led to its destruction.

Adams's fatal flight had taken him to a height of over 50 miles. He was awarded his astronaut wings posthumously. Adams was the first of them to fly in space. And the first of them to die for it.

The deaths of Mike Adams and Bob Lawrence stained 1967 darker: they had not been the first astronauts to die that year. On January 27, while conducting a launch test on Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy, the crew of Apollo 1—Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee—were killed when a combination of faulty wiring and a pure oxygen environment turned their capsule into a furnace.

## EIGHT

#### Houston, 1968

Eighteen months after the Apollo 1 tragedy, John Young still had to swallow hard when he thought of the deaths of Grissom, Chaffee and White. And yet, for all his anger at the mistakes that led to the unnecessary deaths of the three astronauts, fond memories of "that old rascal" Grissom couldn't help but raise his smile. Grissom and Young had been firm friends. It was a bond formed in space. On Young's first mission, the maiden voyage of the two-man Gemini capsule, he'd flown with the veteran Mercury astronaut, even sharing with him a contraband corned-beef sandwich he'd smuggled aboard the capsule in his space suit.

After he'd come to Houston following his record-breaking ascents aboard the Navy's Phantom jet fighter, Young was by the summer of 1968 on his way to becoming NASA's most experienced astronaut. A trim five feet nine inches, with green eyes and a flick of neatly parted brown hair, he would be described by the professor teaching lunar geology as the "archetypal extraterrestrial." And there was something other about Young. He had an economy of movement that could lend him an almost reptilian stillness, as if, perhaps, he was conserving his energy for mulling over thorny engineering problems or considering humanity's place among the stars. But Young was also self-deprecating and funny; his aw-shucks tones and bone-dry sense of humor masked that sharp intelligence and thoughtful nature.

As commander of Gemini X in 1966, Young's second flight saw him twice rendezvous without the aid of radar and travel farther from Earth than anyone had previously ventured. In July 1968, he was named as command module pilot for Apollo 10, designed to be a dress rehearsal for the first moon landing. But he was becoming concerned that, after the American space program had clawed its way back ahead of the Russians following the scalding shocks of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, it was in danger of losing the race to be first to the moon. It was Michael Collins, his crewmate on Gemini X, who helped fuel his concern. After meeting cosmonauts at the Paris Air Show, Collins reported that they'd talked of an imminent manned flight around the moon. It didn't matter, Young thought, whether they planned to land or not. In August, he wrote a memo to NASA headquarters in Washington arguing: "If the Russian cosmonauts beat us to the moon, if only in lunar orbit . . . the Russians will win the moon race."

A month later, a Proton-K rocket launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying a Zond 5 probe bound for the moon. On board was a pair of Horsfield's tortoises, which became the first earthlings to circumnavigate the moon.

By then, though, before a single manned Apollo flight had launched, an audacious decision to reorganize the Apollo flight schedule to send Apollo 8 swinging around the moon had already been made. Young liked to feel that he'd played his part in making that happen.

Yet even before the mission that brought home the famous Earthrise photograph was launched, thoughts inside Houston were already turning to what might follow the moon missions. And that meant that the men whose vision and leadership had got NASA to the brink of a crew flying to the moon were going to have to more or less tear up everything that had got them this far and start from scratch.

## NINE

#### Houston, 1969

"In my lifetime," Max Faget emphasized, "all spacecraft will land on parachutes." Faget, director of Engineering and Development at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, was so confident of his assertion that he was prepared to bet a bottle of whisky on it being true. He had good reason to feel confident. It was Faget who, weeks after Sputnik flew in 1957, had argued that, as he put it, "scrunching" a man into a blunt-bodied capsule like those he'd helped develop for the US Navy's Polaris missile warheads was the best way for a returning manned spacecraft to cope with the heat of reentry. The simplicity of his idea—not to mention the capsule's light weight, which meant it could be launched on top of existing Air Force missiles—meant his arguments won the day. The result was the Mercury capsule, an angular teardrop-shaped craft that swung down to Earth beneath parachutes rather than gliding back to a runway.

Faget called himself "a conceptualizer," which captured the essence of what he did. A brilliant, ideas-driven engineer, he made up for his lack of stature with an energy and vitality few could match. Born in British Honduras to American parents, his father, a doctor employed by the British government as a replacement for men sent to the World War One trenches, came up with the first practical treatment for malaria. A streak of ingenuity passed from father to son was combined with a love of air and space fueled by model airplane building and reading Astounding Science Fiction magazine. A founding member of NASA's Space Task Group, he'd moved to Houston in 1962 when his boss, Dr. Robert Gilruth, became the first director of NASA's new Manned Spacecraft Center.

Now, after attending a presentation in early 1969 at which the Air Force had extolled the merits of a reusable winged spacecraft, Gilruth gently seeded the idea with Faget, conscious that, with the Apollo program perched on the edge of success, NASA had to plan for what followed. Over lunch, Gilruth mentioned what he'd heard from the Air Force: "Max, these guys are talking about a crazy thing. Why don't you look at it and see what it's about."

Unable to resist the challenge, Faget started kicking the idea around with his colleague Caldwell Johnson, who since prior to the move to Houston had lent precision and elegance to Faget's freewheeling invention. Faget told Gilruth, "Bob, you know it may be feasible." Back home in his garage, away from prying eyes at Manned Spacecraft Center, he and Johnson constructed a beautiful scale model of their winged spacecraft design out of balsawood, paper and glue. The trouble was, it flew like crap. Two weeks after Gilruth had first planted the seed, and still unable to get their model to glide with any composure, Faget and Johnson took it in to show him. He immediately diagnosed the problem: a strut connected to the model's tailplane that was generating turbulence. "You guys should have known that would give you terrible flow distribution," he teased them. He was right, and yet it was a reminder that when it came to building airplanes, NASA had no experience. If they were going to build one, they first had to work out what they needed to know. And that meant gathering together experts in every field.

• • •

Engineer Dottie Lee got the call on a Friday afternoon. She was with contractors from Avco in Building 13, working on analysis of the Apollo command module heat shield. In May, Apollo 10 would all but land on the moon before returning home; then in July, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were due to fly the big one: Apollo 11. Lee's boss called her up to his office.

"Monday morning," he told her, "you're to report to Building 36. You don't tell anybody where you're going or what you're going to do. Read this document." He handed her a sheaf of paper that elaborated on Gilruth and Faget's ideas and concepts for a vehicle that could reach orbit then glide back down to Earth and land horizontally.

Since Lee had witnessed Faget's theatrical introduction to the concept of a winged reusable spacecraft when he threw around his balsawood model, the chief engineer had added flesh to the bones. Now he was assembling the team of experts he wanted to develop it. Lee returned to the men from Avco and told them, "I'm going to be out of pocket for a little while," then added, conspiratorially, "I cannot say anything of where I am . . ."

Over the weekend, Lee studied the document she'd been given. On Monday morning, she arrived at work and walked to Building 36. Working alongside her in the windowless high bay was a group of around twenty engineers, each specializing in a different aspect of the design, covering bases like structures, materials, aerodynamics and thermal protection. It became known as the Skunk Works after the secret Lockheed facility that had given birth to both the country's first jet fighter and the U-2 spy plane. Inside Building 36, the group looked at different configurations and shapes. Three designers worked at drawing boards, making changes as they were suggested. A new design would be passed throughout the group in hours, annotated by different members of the team before being handed back to the draftsmen.

They were working with a blank piece of paper. Still unknown were the size and weight of the vehicle, its launch configuration, how long it would stay in orbit, and its propulsion, but between them they established a foundation. And, as hoped, their study revealed areas in which NASA's expertise was lacking. So far, for instance, none of NASA's spacecraft had used hydraulic systems. To cover that they'd need to train or hire people who understood hydraulics. Potential problem areas were uncovered: with a cluster of heavy rocket engines mounted in the tail, it was near impossible to get the vehicle's center of gravity far enough forward for it to be aerodynamically stable.

While they worked, Max Faget largely left them to it, but like a tooth fairy, he would visit unseen at night, leaving evidence of his presence in the form of changes and suggestions to their drawings.

Throughout, security at Building 36 was tight. A guard stood by a locked door, allowing members of the group in and out but barring entry to anyone else. If Lee needed to run numbers by contractors, she could only identify the project she was working on with a fictional job number. Returning from off-site visits, she'd have taxis drop her off at a different building to hide the location of the group.

After a decade of skepticism about returning to Earth in a winged vehicle to land on a runway, Faget was now becoming an evangelist for it. Or at least it looked like that. The design being defined in the Skunk Works had wings and wheels, but what really characterized the effort was that Faget didn't really plan to fly back through the upper atmosphere, but fall in much the same way as a Mercury or Apollo capsule. What Faget's team were really doing was designing a blunt-body reentry vehicle in the shape of an airplane. It was designed, like his capsules, to present as large and unstreamlined a surface in the direction of travel as possible. His point, in "flying" his balsawood glider at that 60-degree angle of attack to the direction of travel, had been to demonstrate that. Using Faget's tried and tested approach to reentry would ensure that the new spacecraft—even if it was shaped like an airplane—would decelerate and lose altitude more quickly, both of which meant less time subjected to the very highest temperatures.

Faget's design had short straight wings, like the X-15, he thought. At reentry, and for much of the descent through thin air, wings served no purpose. In fact, they were an unwelcome encumbrance, but keeping them short and straight was the next best thing to not having them if you wanted to fall like a stone from 400,000 feet. Where they came into their own, though, was low down in the thicker air. Once his spacecraft had fallen to lower altitudes, Faget's design would simply lower its nose to gather forward speed, resulting in air over the wings and, with that, lift. Down low, those straight wings would generate enough lift for Faget's design to land like an airliner pretty much anywhere it wanted. "Ordinary international airports," he enthused, "Houston Intercontinental, or Kennedy . . . carrying less cargo it could even come down at such smaller fields as Houston's Hobby Airport or at LaGuardia." His enthusiasm was infectious. The work done inside Building 36 was labeled "the DC-3 Study" in honor of an earlier pioneering flying machine.

With its classic 1935 DC-3 design, the Douglas Aircraft Company created the world's first modern airliner, helped win World War Two, and ushered in the age of commercial air travel. Houston's live-wire chief engineer thought his new design just might have the potential to do the same thing for space. NASA management were already referring to the new spacecraft as a Space Shuttle.

## TEN

On August 21, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. A first bucket drop of images taken by a KH-4 CORONA satellite launched two weeks before the invasion showed no sign of a buildup of Russian men and matériel. A second set of photographs, taken just days before, was unambiguous: the Red Army was massing on the border. But because of the time taken to recover, transport, develop and analyze the film, this imagery wasn't seen in Washington until after the event. It was a miss that cut deep inside the National Reconnaissance Office. It's little wonder, then, that in early 1969 the secretary of the Air Force said of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory that its development was "an urgent need."

There had been slips in the program. Budget constraints had seen the scheduled first flight pushed back from 1967 to 1970, then, ultimately, April 1972. The crews treated it with predictably black humor by holding an annual "three-years-to-first-launch" party. Like the speed of light, three years to launch seemed to be a constant.

With each cut, they were forced to spend months rephasing the program, asking contractors to soft-pedal until further funding came on tap. Ultimately, though, delays, while they might reduce the cost in the short term, only added to the total cost: even if you saved $100 million in year one, three years at $500 million a year was always going to be more expensive than two years at $600 million a year. At a point when costs were supposed to have peaked, they continued to grow. In 1969, MOL accounted for a quarter of the USAF's total research and development budget.

There had been costly technical challenges too. Lessons learned from the 1967 Apollo 1 fire forced McDonnell Douglas to make changes to the Air Force Gemini-B capsule. Work on the high-resolution KH-10 DORIAN camera was proving to be more costly than anticipated. But in other areas, work was progressing well. Major difficulties with the avionics were behind them. The software development was now on track; so too the communications systems. And the crews could now touch real flight hardware. The hull of the first space station had been shipped from Douglas's Huntington Beach plant to General Electric in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where the vehicle's systems were being installed; what Hank Hartsfield called "the guts of the lab." Closer to home, the facilities needed to both launch and support MOL on orbit were nearing completion.

The command and control of Air Force satellites had come a long way since the Ballistic Missile Division first opened a field office in a motel in Palo Alto in 1958. In 1960, an interim control center was set up inside the grounds of Lockheed's Sunnyvale facility. In order to fit in alongside Lockheed's own workforce, Air Force personnel wore civilian clothes. To avoid mistakes they were advised: "A business suit, shirt, and tie compose the normal attire worn by businessmen. The coat may be removed within the office of work." The facilities consisted of just two rooms, one barely larger than a closet. The larger of the two, the control room, was home to a table, folding chairs, a blackboard and a radio. Unencrypted telephones and one-hundred-words-per-minute Teletype machines were used to communicate with white-coated technicians at the Vandenberg launch site and tracking stations in Hawaii and Alaska. The latter consisted of a van on a hill dubbed Readout Ridge. After a test, controllers there parceled up their magnetic tapes, strip-tape and handwritten notes and posted the data back to California.

By mid-1965, things had changed out of all recognition. Building 101, the Air Force Satellite Control Facility's purpose-built site at Sunnyvale, had a control room at its heart containing over thirty computer terminals and employed nearly 750 military and civilian personnel. But in 1966, with the decision that Sunnyvale rather than Houston would handle MOL mission control, the workforce needed to nearly double. To house them, an ambitious construction program was also funded. Once complete, the new four-floor building, a large windowless box, would contain twelve new mission control centers. To accommodate it, traffic was rerouted, streets and sidewalks demolished and a new power plant built. Officially, the striking-looking sky-blue Satellite Control Facility was labeled Building 1003. Surrounded by a jumble of skyward-facing dish antennas, it was more often known simply as the Blue Cube. The Air Force was no longer relying on a van on a hill in Kodiak to track its spacecraft.

• • •

On July 1, 1963, a ship reached the island of Mahé in the Seychelles after sailing from the United States. On board was everything needed to build a satellite tracking station. The cargo took five days to unload, but by the end of August the new site was declared ready for business. For over a decade it was supplied by a single Grumman HU-16B Albatross amphibian operated under the auspices of Pan Am International. Apparently unhindered by isolation, illness—on one occasion, polio—and coups, the Indian Ocean tracking station provided telemetry in support of the Air Force space program as an integral component of the satellite control network. There were similar stations in New Hampshire, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska and Thule in Greenland. Each, like Mahé, faced its own set of environmental challenges—except, perhaps, the one in New Hampshire. The final piece of the jigsaw was Vandenberg.

Since the pioneering early days of the space race, rockets flying from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had placed more than three hundred satellites in orbit, including every one of the NRO's KEYHOLE birds. Apart from the inconvenience of having the Southern Pacific Railroad running right through the middle of the base, it was the perfect location from which to do so because it offered a trajectory south into polar orbit that didn't make landfall again until it hit Antarctica. It wasn't just the safety of those beneath the flight path that made this so attractive, but also security. The NRO could be certain that a launch malfunction would not gift their most precious secrets into someone else's backyard.

By spring of 1969, the construction of a new launchpad at Vandenberg, SLC-6—"Slick Six"—was substantially complete. Located in the southwest corner of the base, the twin-pad complex was custom built to support the Air Force's manned missions. MOL crews had become increasingly frequent visitors to Vandenberg, looking for base housing and familiarizing themselves with the new crew facilities. The training building was finished and in the process of being equipped, while fourteen pale blue space suits, each bearing the name of one of the MOL pilots on the left side of the chest, were manufactured. For Crip, Dick Truly, Gordo Fullerton, Hank Hartsfield, Don Peterson and their comrades it was tangible evidence that the program was real. They were yet to be given flight assignments, but Crip was looking forward to moving to Vandenberg from LA. Just a few months away, he thought.

• • •

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 7, 1969, the secretary of the Air Force was invited to the White House to brief President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the secretary of defense on the status of the MOL program. In the Oval Office, he outlined the progress that had been made and the vital contribution to the nation's security that he was certain MOL and its KH-10 DORIAN camera was going to make. On Monday, Kissinger phoned to tell him that his presentation had been excellent. The future seemed assured.

And space was a boom industry. NASA had sent men around the moon on Christmas Day, 1968, shown us photographs of Earth from space, and prompted Time magazine to describe a Utopia composed of "social justice, peace, an end to hypocrisy." They went on: "The moon flight of Apollo 8 shows how that Utopian tomorrow could come about." To the public, NASA was as glamorous, capable and sure-footed an organization as it was possible to imagine; yet on the verge of achieving the thrillingly ambitious goal laid out by Jack Kennedy in 1961 of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth," this was deflecting attention from what lay beneath. The race to put a man on the moon was essentially a stunt; a single, narrowly focused effort leading nowhere except to success or failure. The Apollo program had a ravenous appetite for money, expertise, manpower and attention. There was little opportunity given to what might follow the program's conclusion. The only thing on the books at this time was a plan to use leftover Saturn V components as the basis for a space station called Skylab.

In early 1969, President Nixon had set up a Space Task Group chaired by the vice president, Spiro Agnew, to consider "the direction which the US space program should take in the post-Apollo period" and make recommendations. NASA proposed large space stations, space tugs and nuclear rockets, and underpinning it all, a reusable space transportation system—a Space Shuttle. The latter, it struck the military representative on the task group, offered considerable military potential.

Perhaps caught up in the euphoria surrounding the Apollo moon missions, the vice president began to bang the drum for a mission to Mars. And he didn't stop. "Would we want," he asked, "to answer through eternity for turning back a Columbus or a Magellan?" Agnew envisioned a Mars mission as nothing less than an "overture to a new civilization." Clearly the vice president was a subscriber to Time magazine.

NASA's representative jumped on it, claiming that it had been the plan all along. Unsurprisingly, Agnew's enthusiasm took hold at NASA. Wernher von Braun, the visionary German rocketeer behind both the V-2 rocket and, once he'd settled in the United States after the war, the Saturn V rocket used for the voyages to the moon, was invited to a meeting of the Space Task Group to explain how a Mars mission could work. He outlined a plan for twelve astronauts to set a course for Mars on November 12, 1981. After two months exploring Mars, they would swing past Venus on their journey home to return to Earth orbit on August 14, 1983.

It was heady stuff. And it was all pie in the sky. But while, as the Space Task Group's report was drawn up, NASA still had a few months to savor the prospect of their dreams becoming real, the men working in secrecy on the Air Force space station program were about to have theirs shattered.

## ELEVEN

The tenth of June 1969. They called it Black Tuesday.

Bob Crippen was getting ready for work at his house near the Long Beach naval yard. It was just a half-hour drive to the program office in El Segundo, but his secretary called him at home because the news couldn't wait.

On the other side of the country, in King of Prussia, Dick Truly was working inside one of the classified areas of the General Electric plant. He was arguing with one of the contractor's software engineers over a portion of code. It was small but important. Worth getting right. Truly felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mac Macleay. Absorbed in the discussion, he shrugged it off. "Go away," he told his friend. Insistent, Macleay pulled him up and, out of earshot of the contractor, told him quietly, "The program's canceled." Macleay himself had the news straight from GE's president. It was solid. The company boss had had his secretary with him, and it was clear to Macleay that she'd been crying her eyes out. Truly looked back at the computer tech with whom he'd been haggling, his mind blank, purged by the shock of what Mac had just told him. He couldn't even remember what they'd been arguing over. It didn't matter anymore.

The program's head, General Joseph Bleymaier, was incensed. No one gave a damn. He'd fought through the night to get the announcement pushed back from 10:30 Eastern Standard Time so the news wouldn't break early in LA. "Let me tell my people first," he'd asked.

"Well, [Deputy] Secretary Packard's got a busy day," he was told by the Department of Defense in Washington, "and that's the only time he can do."

Dick Truly's wife, Cody, called Mrs. Bleymaier at home to see if it was true. Cody had a chance to speak on the phone to her husband later in the day. Suddenly, Dick's dreams were nothing. He flew home to LA the next day. By the time he'd managed to get through to the program office on the day of the cancelation, he and Mac had already had too much to drink to fly themselves home.

• • •

Throughout the first six months of 1969 there had been a battle waging within the National Reconnaissance Office. And for much of the time, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and the Air Force were poised for victory.

Since 1966, the CIA had been fostering the development of a replacement for its KH-4 CORONA satellites. The new spacecraft, labeled the KH-9 HEXAGON, or often simply "H," was going to be a monster. Fifty-four feet long and weighing nearly 25,000 pounds, it was a robotic orbital spy the size of a Greyhound bus. It soon acquired the nickname "Big Bird." Instead of the single film-recovery capsule carried by CORONA, the new design carried four. But any comparison with the earlier bird stopped there. At its heart was a camera system capable of scanning millions of square miles of territory in minutes. In two minutes, HEXAGON could give you Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Cyprus as a single contiguous area. In a crisis, by altering HEXAGON's orbit the NRO could have that daily. Capable of staying aloft for six months, HEXAGON carried enough film to provide color pictures of the world's entire landmass in just two missions. Although "Big Bird" was designed as a search satellite, the KH-9's cameras would be able to deliver images with a resolution of less than 3 feet—a figure approaching that of the high-resolution GAMBIT surveillance satellite. That the system also employed two cameras was key to the dramatic leap forward in capability. HEXAGON would take pictures in stereo. Small differences in perspective between the two images meant that, by combining them, photo interpreters would be able to view the take in 3D.

None of this came cheap, though. And, in addition, all the contractors working on the program were behind schedule. Richard Nixon's new administration concluded that the country couldn't afford to pursue two such enormously expensive space reconnaissance systems as MOL and HEXAGON together. And on April 9, 1969, the president jumped in the Air Force's direction and canceled the CIA's KH-9 program. But it wasn't as simple as that.

• • •

From the earliest days of the spy satellite program, the value of a system that could deliver real-time intelligence was obvious. Equally clear was that it was not technically feasible. A single test of a system that would have developed its film in space and photocopied the result before converting it into an analog signal and transmitting it to Earth produced little more than a blur. It was like trying to convey the sound of an orchestra using walkie-talkies. All that was about to change, though.

By day, Dr. William Baker was head of the Bell Laboratories Research Division. Set up in 1925 by the telecommunications company AT&T as a stand-alone research and development facility, the scope of Bell Labs' work was kaleidoscopic. Within it, Baker's own department covered "the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and meteorology." But alongside his work at the place Arthur C. Clarke had described as a "factory for ideas," Baker was also embedded deep within Washington's intelligence elite. Invited, in 1956, to examine how the United States might stay ahead of the Soviet Union's efforts to confound its intelligence gathering, the influential Baker Report he produced the following year urged an overwhelming concentration on emerging digital technology. Four years later, as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Baker helped bring the National Reconnaissance Office into existence. Before long, his day job presented him with an opportunity to bring these two strands of his working life together.

When in 1969 Bell Labs announced that two of its researchers, while studying computer memory, had discovered a sensor capable of converting light into electronic signals, it was already two or three years since Baker had shared the breakthrough with the NRO. The invention, known as the charge-coupled device, or CCD, was in essence an electronic eye and was to become the foundation upon which the digital camera revolution was built. Eventually.

By the time Bell Labs went public with the new technology, the NRO's head start had already begun to bear fruit. It was appreciated that a new KEYHOLE satellite using CCDs would require a very large mirror to compensate for the loss of image sharpness offered by film, and that huge bandwidth would also need to be developed, but the prize was irresistible.

The prospect of building an operational digital-imaging satellite was years off still, but while it might have been beyond the state of the art in 1969, when the CIA formally objected to the cancelation of their KH-9 HEXAGON "Big Bird," they had, as part of their arsenal, the tantalizing prospect of a revolutionary new technology in the not too distant future.

Forced to consider which of the two rival KEYHOLE systems, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory DORIAN or HEXAGON, would offer the best tool for monitoring arms control, the president reversed his decision and canceled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.

Ironically, MOL's own 70-inch mirrors, ground and polished by Perkin-Elmer for the DORIAN camera's huge telescope, scored an own goal, helping to put the Air Force's manned space station built to carry them out of business. By demonstrating the feasibility of fabricating mirrors of a sufficiently large diameter for a digital spy satellite to be effective, they'd shown that MOL itself, five years late, was being overtaken by technology.

MOL's own lavishly produced mirrors, like healthy organs taken from road-crash victims, were donated to science, and transplanted into ground-based telescopes. And with the program's cancelation the Air Force, after trying to get its men into space for over a decade, had finally to face the reality that it had been pushing water uphill. It was over.

• • •

The shock announcement broke hearts in El Segundo. Many of the MOL pilots, faced with a choice between applying for NASA or the Air Force astronaut program, had jumped the wrong way. Boy, thought Bob Crippen, I really screwed up with that decision.

For nearly a month, the redundant astronauts cried into their beer. During a period they called the MOL Wake they talked over their options. Two of them, Bo Bobko and Don Peterson, decided to go back to college to study for master's degrees. Dick Truly and Bob Crippen, the two naval aviators on the program, flew to the Navy Annex in Washington to see what they could offer. The two grounded astronauts were warmly received and, despite an absence from the front line of five years or more, the detailers told them they could have their pick of assignments—whatever they wanted to fly. That, Truly knew, just doesn't happen. And, it turned out, there were strings attached. Both had their eye on combat in Southeast Asia. Despite deploying with frontline squadrons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, choosing test-flying meant both had suffered from a nagging sense of guilt that the fighting in Vietnam had been the preserve of friends. But so sensitive was the classified information they'd enjoyed access to on MOL, they were subject to a two-year duty and travel restriction. There was no way the Department of Defense was going to countenance the risk of having them shot down over enemy territory, and being captured and interrogated. Neither Crip nor Truly was going to be allowed anywhere near the Yankee Station. The Air Force pilots in the group faced the same problem. Informed he could deploy to Southeast Asia to work in a Saigon command post, Hank Hartsfield reacted angrily. "Baloney, I'm a pilot," he told them, "I'm not going to sit in a darn command post and ride a chair." He figured he might as well study for a master's too. By the time he was done, at least they'd let him fly.

Running out of ideas, Crippen's thoughts turned to Patuxent River, the Navy's flight test center, and a return to work as a test pilot.

Then Bo Bobko raised the idea of approaching NASA. "Why don't we call?" he asked during a morning pilots' meeting. "See if they could use us . . ." Initially, the others dismissed it out of hand. "NASA doesn't need more astronauts," they told him. "They've got lots of astronauts!" It was a potential lifeline, though.

And, when they asked the question, all fourteen were invited to Houston.

• • •

After flying down to Houston from LA, they were shown around by Colonel Tom Stafford, commander of the recently returned Apollo 10 mission that had just a few months earlier all but landed on the moon. NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center was modern and purpose-built, laid out like a college campus on land donated by Rice University seven years earlier: three-story concrete and glass office buildings set in landscaped gardens, lined with paths, shrubs, man-made lakes and lawns surrounded by parking lots. The tallest office, Building 1, housed administration and senior management; Building 2, the auditorium. But Building 4 was the prize: the Astronaut Office.

"Well, you know, if you do get here . . ." Stafford began, offering a glimmer of hope as he talked through plans for the Apollo missions 13 to 19 and Skylab beyond that. Stafford's words were powerfully reinforced by action. As the MOL group pressed their case in interviews with Deke Slayton, the director of Flight Crew Operations, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin were already on their way to the moon aboard Apollo 11.

## TWELVE

#### Houston, 1969

With Neil Armstrong's descent to the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, NASA, after an extraordinary eight-year campaign, had succeeded in "putting a man on the moon."

Inside Mission Control, John Young wasn't sure anyone was following the journey with deeper interest than he and his Apollo 10 comrades were. Been there, done (almost) that, he thought as he layered his own insights and feelings over what was unfolding. He regarded the Apollo 11 crew as very atypical. The command module pilot, his good friend Mike Collins, whom he'd flown with on Gemini X, he regarded as one of the Astronaut Office's outstanding characters. Lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, who never missed an opportunity to discuss the subject of his MIT doctoral thesis in orbital rendezvous, was not, Young reckoned, as smart as he thought he was. Then there was Neil Armstrong, the measured, remote Apollo 11 commander who, by his own admission, was more interested in ideas and things than people. In Armstrong, though, Young saw something of himself. Test pilots and astronauts, he maintained, tend to be doers and not thinkers, but that wasn't so true of Armstrong.

And maybe not so true of me, he thought, as he considered the crew's return.

• • •

After a little over twenty-one hours on the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin blasted off from the moon to rendezvous with Collins in the command module before returning home. Landing men on the moon, of course, was only half the challenge set by Jack Kennedy in 1961. They also had to be returned safely to Earth. And, understated as ever, John Young described the job of safely returning a crew from the moon as no simple matter. On his journey back from orbiting the moon in May with his crewmates Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, Young had added to the clutch of world records he'd won flying with the Navy. At the point of reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, the Apollo 10 crew's capsule was traveling at 24,760 mph. At over thirty-seven times the speed of sound, it was the greatest speed ever reached by human beings. Young was acutely aware that the journey home always carried the potential for surprise. And so it was proving with Apollo 11's return, which was more complicated than had been expected.

A few days earlier in Hawaii, a young Air Force meteorologist, Captain Hank Brandii, called up Fleet Weather Center at Pearl Harbor and spoke to the Department of Defense's chief weather officer, Captain Sam Houston, USN. "There's going to be a real problem," Brandii told him. "I want you to meet me in the parking lot of the 6594th Test Group hangar at Hickam Air Force Base." As soon as he'd got out of his car, Brandii pulled Houston through the door and into the "vault" to look at a set of classified pictures showing a major tropical storm building over the splashdown site. Because of the TALENT/KEYHOLE classification that applied to the pictures, Houston was the only person Brandii could tell.

Brandii's job was to use the National Reconnaissance Office's 417 satellite system to track and forecast the weather in support of the CORONA spy birds. But on this occasion, he realized that his images revealed that the Apollo capsule was on course for disaster.

The first indications a storm was forming were high-level vortices tracing patterns in the sky that had an almost birdlike appearance, but Brandii knew they heralded the onset of a violent thunderstorm generating vicious high-altitude winds rising to 50,000 feet. Such was the intensity of the storms that he called them "screaming eagles." And on this occasion, the Apollo 11 capsule was heading right for one. He knew it had the power to shred the capsule's parachutes on which the astronauts' lives depended.

To an extent Sam Houston's hands were tied too. He couldn't share the source of his information, yet he had to persuade NASA and the US Navy of the need to reroute both the spacecraft and the recovery fleet. Early in the morning on July 23, Rear Admiral Davis, commanding Task Force 30, ordered his prime recovery ship, USS Hornet, 250 miles to the northwest. "You'd better be right, young man . . ." he told Houston.

In Mission Control, John Young wasn't cleared to know the provenance of the information that had forced them to change the capsule's splashdown point, but he was impressed to see that, even with the late correction to the capsule's trajectory, the spacecraft had descended into the Pacific just 13 miles from Hornet's new position. After sweating anxiously through the mission, Young was just relieved to see them home. Safe and sound.

• • •

Also heading home were the refugees from the MOL program. It looked as if their trip to Houston—and the opportunity to experience the achievement of Apollo 11 from inside the tent—was going to be the end of the line. Sadly, Crippen, Truly and the rest of the MOL crews had been right about their initial reaction to Bo Bobko's suggestion. When it came to the crunch, Deke Slayton hadn't varnished it. "Hey, guys," he told them, "I got more astronauts than I know what to do with. I really don't need you." Slayton didn't even have flights for all the astronauts he already had.

## THIRTEEN

#### Houston, 1969

When Deke Slayton told George Mueller, the man with responsibility for manned spaceflight at NASA headquarters in Washington, that he'd turned away the redundant MOL astronauts, Mueller asked him to think again. "I know and you know that we don't really need them," Mueller told him, "but we're gonna need the Air Force one of these days, and it won't hurt to make them happy just this once."

When Mueller took over as administrator in Washington in 1963, he'd immediately drafted in a brilliant Air Force program manager General Sam Phillips, who'd previously earned his spurs successfully ushering into service the Minuteman ballistic missile. Phillips had proved to be a crucial hire. Mueller was quick to see that he was going to need Air Force help again. "One of these days" meant now. In achieving its goal of putting men on the moon, NASA appeared to the outside world to be at the peak of its powers; but, cruelly, success meant that at the same time it was in danger of putting itself out of a job. Mueller knew that if he couldn't win Air Force support for the embryonic Space Shuttle program it was entirely possible that Apollo, or at least Skylab, the space station being developed using leftover Apollo hardware, would mark the end of NASA's participation in manned spaceflight.

• • •

Even before the Space Task Group presented their report in September, they were warned by one of Richard Nixon's closest advisers not to make a recommendation that the president couldn't sign up to. Reluctantly, they were persuaded to row back from actually recommending a manned mission to Mars. And yet for a document that was trying not to do so, it made a pretty good job of it. The possibility of a manned mission to Mars is mentioned repeatedly and suggested as a "long range goal." Alongside it, they recommend continued lunar exploration, a space station for fifty to a hundred occupants, and a reusable, nuclear-powered spacecraft to transport "men, spacecraft and supplies" to and from the moon and beyond. All of this exotic gear was, once in space, supposed to stay there. And so also included was a Space Shuttle designed to travel to and from Earth orbit to get to it all. While the country fought a major war in Southeast Asia and faced civil unrest at home, the naive, ambitious recommendations of the Space Task Group were completely misjudged and were rejected out of hand. All that survived was a trickle of funding to allow studies into both a much smaller ten- to twelve-man space station and the Space Shuttle.

• • •

With so little prospect of spaceflight, Deke Slayton thought bringing the MOL crews into the NASA Astronaut Office was disingenuous. He certainly had no shortage of work for them; there was just no chance of them flying for about a decade. Mueller suggested Slayton just level with them. If any of them weren't happy with that, then no one was forcing them to come to Houston. He tried that, but only Bob Herres took him up on it. And one departure didn't do enough to trim the numbers. Instead, Slayton looked at their birthdays. Thirty-five was the upper age limit for a normal astronaut selection. If he applied that to the MOL group, then just seven made the cut. That meant jobs for Bob Crippen, Dick Truly, Bo Bobko, Gordo Fullerton, Hank Hartsfield, Bob Overmyer and Don Peterson. For the rest it was the end of the road.

Dick Truly was the only member of the original MOL selection to make the cut. He'd been chosen for the USAF's astronaut program without even knowing there'd been one to apply for. Now he'd made it into NASA through the back door. He was sure he was the only astronaut never to have actually applied to become one.

In the stifling midsummer heat, Truly and his family once again squeezed themselves into the car to relocate. The long drive south turned out to be a test of endurance that not all of them were to emerge from intact. As they crossed Arizona, their much-loved pet dog died in the car. And all along, nagging away in the back of Truly's mind, was the thought that he was only on his way to NASA on the back of a failed program.

As he had in LA, Bob Crippen found a house near the sea. He, his wife, Ginny, and their three girls, Ellen, Susie and Linda, moved into a new development in Shore Acres near the yacht club. Although his career in the US Navy hadn't so far reflected it, Crippen had a passion for the sea, devouring books which brought to life the golden age of sail and the square-rigged naval battles of the early nineteenth century. When time allowed, C. S. Forester's Hornblower novels had offered a welcome break from the cactus and dust of the high desert at Edwards. As well as somewhere to live, Crip also needed to sort out his wardrobe. Since leaving Porter, Texas, for the Navy he'd spent his life in uniform. Now, as part of a civilian space agency, he had to actually think about the clothes he wore to work.

• • •

The MOL guys started work at Houston in August, and Deke Slayton was quick to remind them of the reality they faced. "Guys," he said, "I've got lots of work for you to do, but I don't have any flights until they've built this thing called the Shuttle." That, he told them, was unlikely to be before around 1980. Nor was it, at this point, even an approved program. While there were briefings on NASA hardware, there was no training program, nor any kind of indoctrination. Instead they were simply given a desk and an office and told: "You just find out what you want to do, or make suggestions."

Dick Truly was offered a slot on the support crew for Apollo 15, but as tempting as it was, he just didn't think it was worth trying to hold on to what was left of the lunar program. At the same time, though, he saw the Skylab team developing a space station being more or less ignored next to the glare of the moon missions. Truly had done so much work on the Air Force space station before its cancelation that he felt certain that Skylab was the program to which he could best contribute. For similar reasons, Bob Crippen also opted to join the Skylab program. And while there was the prospect of more technical work to look forward to, among his first assignments was one to test the Skylab potty in zero-gravity conditions, flying parabolas aboard NASA's KC-135 Vomit Comet. It wasn't entirely unfamiliar as it was a device designed for MOL by helicopter manufacturer Fairchild Hiller. Asked to perform on cue, Crip and the other test subjects were able, over a couple of days, to deliver nine good "data points." It was a pretty long way from Corvette Stingrays and the cover of Life magazine.

At least what they were doing was real and useful. That was more than it appeared could be said for the Shuttle. Soon after arriving at Houston, the MOL guys (as they got labeled) were sat down in front of an overhead projector and briefed on the emerging Space Shuttle project. Since Max Faget's Skunk Works began work on it earlier in the year, the configuration of the whole stack had become more certain. In pursuit of lower operating costs, NASA hoped to launch the Shuttle from the back of a fully reusable winged booster—in essence a giant rocket-powered airplane. Unlike the stages of the current Saturn V rocket, which, once their fuel was spent, fell back to an ocean grave, Faget was proposing a vertically launched, piloted rocket with wings that, after carrying the Shuttle high enough and fast enough for the space plane to reach orbit using its own engines, then flew back horizontally to land on a runway to be serviced and prepared for its next flight. It was a machine that was, broadly speaking, a scaled-up version of the orbiting Shuttle itself; a father carrying his son on his back. And it was a behemoth. At 204 feet long, the machine Mueller and Faget were suggesting would have the hypersonic performance of the little X-15 rocket plane, but be built on the scale of Boeing's new 747 jumbo jet—the world's largest airliner.

As if that wasn't enough, NASA even commissioned a study to explore the possibility of using Faget's winged Space Shuttle design for ferrying payloads to and from the moon. To do so, a report concluded in October, would require twenty-nine Shuttle launches. That seemingly took it into the realms of the ridiculous, but frequent flying was key to the case being made for the Shuttle. If it flew as often as NASA suggested it would, NASA's Shuttle fleet would be capable of notching up those twenty-nine launches in just six months. By not throwing anything away and by flying frequently—which depended on the Air Force committing to use it—the stated aim of George Mueller, the boss of manned spaceflight, was for the Space Shuttle to bring the cost of launching a payload down from the $10,000-per-pound figure of a Saturn V to "between $20 and $50 a pound."

Dick Truly viewed the wilder schemes, ambitious designs and completely unrealistic cost projections with a sense of disbelief. It was all, he thought, a bunch of crap.

• • •

NASA's real problem was that the Air Force just didn't want or need a Space Shuttle. While they might have joined in on outlining what they would in theory require from a reusable space plane, they were in fact quite happy to continue as they were, using reliable, relatively affordable, expendable rockets launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. As one bluesuiter made clear: "Sure, NASA needs the Shuttle for a space station. But for the next ten years, expendables can handle the Air Force job." What's more, he said, they didn't think it was important enough to them to pay for. NASA's position couldn't have been more different. With the door firmly shut on ambitious new space stations, a lunar program and deep space missions, NASA needed Air Force support in order to present the Shuttle as a vehicle with a purpose and as a national asset, rather than simply a Trojan horse for the agency's interplanetary ambitions. If a Space Shuttle were to shoulder responsibility for carrying Air Force payloads into space, it would greatly enhance its chances of gaining political support.

The future of US manned spaceflight seemed to depend on keeping the Air Force on the team. Yet when it came to space planes, the Air Force had history. It still bore the scars.

## FOURTEEN

On June 22, 1970, a British naval test pilot named Eric Brown was conducting blind landing trials in a Westland Whirlwind helicopter at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Bedford. It was the weekend, so the airfield was quiet. Only he and one other pilot were flying. After finishing for the morning, Brown shut down the aircraft and was picked up in a van to return to the mess for lunch. On the way they stopped to collect the other flier. Wearing a flight suit and carrying his helmet, the pilot climbed in, leaned over and offered his hand. "Hello," he said, "I'm Neil Armstrong."

Over lunch, Brown was surprised to learn that he was already well known to the first man on the moon. Throughout the forties and fifties the Fleet Air Arm flyer was unarguably one of the preeminent test pilots in the world, establishing records for number of deck landings and sheer variety of types flown that would never be beaten. And in taking up the German Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet he was also the first Allied pilot ever to fly a rocket plane. They had never met, but Armstrong didn't mind admitting that Brown had been something of a role model to him as a young pilot. So when, in 1960, Brown—at the suggestion of his superiors at the RAE—approached the Americans about the possibility of securing a place on the X-15 program, Armstrong, already chosen to fly the hypersonic rocket plane, had supported the application. Such was Brown's reputation in the test-flying community that his request was looked on favorably. At the controls of the X-15 Brown would have been in a position to become the first Briton to earn his astronaut's wings. But there was a catch: in order to take up the proffered slot on the program Brown was required to become a US citizen—something he was not prepared to do. So, instead of punching holes in the skies above Edwards AFB together in the early sixties, Armstrong and Brown's mutual admiration remained remote—until their chance encounter at an otherwise deserted British airfield.

The commander of Apollo 11 was in the UK to fly a research aircraft called the Handley Page HP.115. Armstrong had first hoped to fly it back in 1962. The HP.115's highly swept delta wing, he'd realized, flown at very high angles of attack, might offer useful insights into the flying characteristics of the space plane then being developed by the USAF. Armstrong had been one of the first pilots assigned to the program the Air Force christened Dyna-Soar.

When, in the weeks that followed the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Max Faget had successfully argued that capsules were the quickest, simplest and cheapest way to get a man into space, the Air Force jumped in a different direction. They pursued a single-seat, reusable, delta-winged space plane designed to launch on a rocket then glide back to Earth to land on a runway. Its name was a contraction of "dynamic soaring," the term being used to describe its hypersonic, unpowered return to Earth from orbit. In June 1959, Boeing was awarded a contract to build it, and a series of twenty test flights conducted out of Mayaguana, in the Bahamas; Fortaleza, in Brazil; and Saint Lucia, in the Windward Islands was scheduled for the second half of 1963. When a full-scale mock-up of Dyna-Soar was displayed for the public in Las Vegas during the autumn of 1962 it offered a glimpse of the sort of future promised by science fiction. Reader's Digest described the black-painted Air Force space plane as "looking like a cross between a porpoise and a manta ray." In a good way. It would be a triumph, they went on to say, that would rank alongside the Wright Brothers'." Kennedy's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, didn't agree. At the root of it was a belief that the Air Force was more concerned about how it traveled to and from space than what it did when it got there, and in 1963 he canceled it in favor of the similarly ill-fated MOL program.

Six years later, as Armstrong, one of the original Dyna-Soar pilots, was flying the experimental British jet he'd thought might have contributed to the space plane's development, the Air Force held the cards over plans for a new winged spacecraft. For there to be any possibility of them lending their support to NASA's Space Shuttle, they required a capability far in excess of what Faget's emerging design could offer. The Air Force wanted a machine that, after flying a single polar orbit out of Vandenberg, California, could land back where it had taken off. To achieve this it had to be capable of covering a distance of over one thousand miles to the right or left of the point it reentered the Earth's atmosphere because, as it circled the poles, the Earth was rotating beneath it. By the time the Space Shuttle had completed its single orbit to return to a point overhead the launch site, that site would no longer be directly below but would have moved over one thousand miles to the east.

Because Faget's straight-winged Shuttle was designed to fall from the sky until a point below 40,000 feet where it dipped its nose to pick up flying speed, it only had a cross-range capability of a couple of hundred miles or so. Small, straight wings were useless in the thin upper atmosphere. By contrast the large expanse of a triangular delta wing would mean a returning Shuttle could start producing lift in higher, thinner air and therefore fly a greater distance from the point of reentry. The disadvantage of the delta was that it demanded a much higher landing speed, but the Air Force didn't care about that. If they knew where the Shuttle was coming down, they could just make sure the waiting runway was long enough. Faget countered that his Shuttle could land anywhere; it didn't need a special supersize airfield. But ultimately it wasn't an argument Faget could win. Physics saw to that. The only safe, secure and feasible site in the continental United States from which the Air Force could launch heavy spy satellites into a polar orbit was Vandenberg. And on completion of a single ninety-minute orbit after launching from the California pad, a spacecraft—any spacecraft launching to the south—was always going to find itself out over the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If, from that point, your Shuttle only had a cross-range capability of a couple of hundred miles, it was going to get wet.

But cross-range was not the Air Force's only demand. The other was payload. Faget's initial designs were capable of carrying a 15,000-pound payload in a small cargo bay measuring 15 by 30 feet. Alongside the work being done by Faget's team at Houston, NASA had also commissioned studies from private industry. From the country's leading airplane makers it required designs for a Space Shuttle capable of carrying a 50,000-pound payload into a low-inclination, equatorial orbit. By the summer of 1970, though, it was clear that even this wouldn't be enough to accommodate the huge new KH-9 HEXAGON and its projected successors.

The Air Force said it needed a Space Shuttle capable of lifting 40,000 pounds into a polar orbit. And this was quite different from lofting 50,000 pounds in an easterly direction from the Cape. Launching east out of Florida, a rocket was gifted a nearly 1,000 mph running start thanks to the speed of the Earth's rotation. Instead of having to generate its entire orbital speed of 17,500 mph, it only had to make 16,500 mph; Earth made up the difference. The closer you flew to an equatorial orbit, the more speed you gained and the more weight you could carry for the same level of thrust. A 50,000-pound payload from the Cape was equivalent to just 30,000 pounds launched south out of Vandenberg. And while that might more or less accommodate HEXAGON—and even that was uncertain as the first "Big Bird" was yet to fly—it wouldn't, necessarily, be enough for its successors. The Air Force requirement for a machine capable of launching 40,000 pounds into a polar orbit from Vandenberg equated to 65,000 pounds from Florida—an extra 7 tons. It was a massive additional burden which, if NASA were going to enjoy Air Force backing, had somehow to be achieved. In 1970, there wasn't a single design from Faget or the aerospace industry that came close; a problem compounded when NASA's management found something upon which they and the Air Force could agree: the size of the payload bay.

While NASA had scaled down its space station plans after the rejection of the Space Task Group report, there were still hopes of a twelve-man, four-deck space station launched on a Saturn V rocket. By July 1970, it looked unlikely that both this and the Shuttle could survive. It was estimated that, over ten years, servicing and expanding the space station would require over ninety Shuttle flights. If only one project was to survive, then it could only be the Shuttle. That meant that future space stations would have to rely on being assembled from modules carried inside the Shuttle's cargo bay. NASA now needed the 60-by-15-foot payload bay the Air Force required just to hold on to the possibility of one day building any kind of space station at all.

## FIFTEEN

Fred Haise should have been the first man to walk twice on the moon.

After a military flying career in which he'd flown for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps—and washed out of each, ragged his colleagues—Haise became a civilian research pilot at NASA's Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, eventually graduating from the Aerospace Research Pilot School as one of Chuck Yeager's students in the same class as Dick Truly. After that, the X-15 was a possibility, and he flew chase as part of that program, but he could see he was too late to the party to have a really good shot at winning a slot. Instead, he applied to be an astronaut and was rated number one in the nineteen-strong 1966 selection that also included Joe Engle.

Dark-haired and lantern-jawed, Freddo had the appearance of the archetypal all-American hero. But while his track record, which included dogfighting gliders over the High Sierras and flying a wooden, wingless glider towed behind a souped-up Pontiac Catalina V-8 convertible, saw him easily measure up against a group once described as "hyperthyroid, superachieving first sons of super achievers," there was no arrogance or edge to Haise. Combining outstanding technical ability with an easygoing, genial nature, Freddo was a dependable, popular figure inside the Astronaut Office.

To his delight, he was assigned the job of lunar module pilot on Apollo 13.

The launch on April 11, 1970, wasn't entirely uneventful. The second-stage center engine experienced an unstable fuel flow which caused it to pogo, sending a powerful, persistent vertical chug resonating through the stack. It was enough to trip out an accelerometer that shut down the engine before the vibration could do any more damage. But soon that was behind them. Still able to make orbit, Apollo 13 was on its way to the moon.

Haise was alone in the lunar module, Aquarius, packing away equipment he, Jim Lovell (the mission's commander) and Jack Swigert (the command module pilot) had used to film a TV broadcast back to Earth. When he'd finished, Haise pushed off toward the tunnel connecting the LM to Odyssey, the command module, to join his colleagues. It was time for them all to get some sleep. As he floated back toward Lovell and Swigert, a heavy whump thudded through the spacecraft. Haise saw the hull move around him. He pulled himself through the tunnel, drifting into his position on the right-hand side of the capsule. He was confronted by an inexplicable display of warning lights. The instrument panel—electrics, cryogenics, fuel cells, comms and environmental systems—swarmed angry red and yellow. The master alarm provided a soundtrack through his headset. The computer restart light was on. None of it made sense. No plausible scenario they'd trained for in the sim had caused anything like the terrifying display he was looking at.

Haise forced himself to focus. Temperature, pressure and quantity on one of the oxygen tanks were shot, the needles showing empty. These are different sensors, he thought. It was unlikely to be a false reading. And outside the window, he could see debris.

"Okay, Houston," reported Swigert, when he realized that half Odyssey's power—from a fuel cell dependent on a supply of oxygen—was gone, "we've had a problem here."

There was still a second oxygen tank, though. Still not life threatening, Haise told himself. But he felt sick to his stomach. Haise enjoyed an uncanny ability to ingest and memorize checklists and procedures. He knew, without having to check, that mission rules dictated this was the end of their moon landing. Then the crew discovered that the second oxygen tank was leaking.

• • •

In the glassed-off VIP area at the back of Mission Control, John Young had been watching the television footage beamed back from the spacecraft with the Apollo 13 wives. Young was commander of the mission's backup crew. Watching Jack Swigert had not been part of the plan. Until just three days earlier, Swigert had been Young's own command module pilot until a fear that the Apollo 13 primary CM pilot, T. K. Mattingly, might have contracted German measles had, despite Young's resistance, seen the two crewmen swapped. At the end of the broadcast, Young had said good-bye to Jim Lovell's wife, Marilyn. But while she drove home to Timber Cove, ten minutes away to the northeast of the space center, Young was still in Building 30 when Lovell confirmed Swigert's message: "Houston, we've had a problem."

The backup commander made his way straight down to the second of the four rows of consoles ahead of him, to where controller Sy Liebergot was monitoring the crew's environmental and electrical systems. The picture presented by the readouts would have been rejected in the simulator as far-fetched. Liebergot felt nauseous. "It could be the instrumentation," he offered hopefully. At his shoulder, as he watched the oxygen bleed away from the second tank, Young told him, "This doesn't look like instrumentation to me."

• • •

Lovell, Swigert and Haise were already 200,000 miles from Earth. That distance increased by 400 miles with every passing minute. And their last maneuver, while allowing them to reach their lunar destination in the required lighting conditions, had also removed them from a course that would provide a free return to Earth after a single slingshot around the moon. If the crew of Apollo 13 continued on their current trajectory, they would never again come any closer than 45,000 miles from home. But out of oxygen and electricity, the three astronauts would be dead long before then unless they abandoned the dying command module for the safety of the undamaged lunar module, a vehicle equipped with its own oxygen, electricity and water supply. Racing through a checklist that normally required two hours to complete in less than an hour, Fred Haise powered up the LM and, with Lovell, began transferring control of the stack from the CM to inside the little landing craft. It was a procedure neither had previously completed in the simulator with any great confidence.

• • •

With the crew's retreat to the LM, their short-term survival was more secure. The priority in Mission Control turned to how to bring them home. Using the service module's big Aerojet AJ10 rocket engine to perform an immediate U-turn and return was quickly dismissed. So too was the possibility of using it to bring them back to a free return trajectory. The effect of 20,500 pounds of thrust kicking into the damaged spacecraft was unknowable; but with the fuel cells starved of oxygen, there was insufficient electrical power to operate it in any case. That left the crew reliant on the less powerful descent engine used by the LM which, fueled by hypergolic propellants that ignited on contact, could be used without demanding so much of what remained of the spacecraft's electrical supply. But before any burn of the descent engine, the crew would have to be certain they were pointing in the right direction—and that was providing problems of its own.

• • •

Inside the lunar module, Jim Lovell was struggling to stabilize the stack, the LM's carefully calibrated controls completely thrown by its attachment to 30 tons' worth of command and service module. As he wrestled with the hand controller, Lovell pressed Haise for advice. "Is there any way I can control this thing, Freddo?"

Back in Houston, his backup commander was trying to answer the same question.

• • •

During geology training for the mission in Hawaii, John Young had watched as Lovell and Haise ran from an erupting volcano. He'd joked that their fiery demise might have seen him promoted to prime crew. Now his focus was on saving their lives. Young had been working in the simulator since soon after Apollo 13 had got into trouble. And while Lovell was slowly getting a better feel for piloting the unfamiliar stack, he and Haise, surrounded by a cloud of twinkling sunlit debris from the blast that had damaged their ship, were unable to get a fix on the stars they needed to align their navigation computer. In the sim, Young and his own LM pilot, Charlie Duke, tried unsuccessfully to position the windows of the LM in the shadow of the command and service module to stop the jetsam from reflecting sunlight. In the end, Lovell, Haise and Swigert were just going to have to fire the engine on the assumption that the guidance systems were still aligned. Young and Duke's work at least suggested that the Apollo 13 autopilot would keep them stable during the thirty-second burn.

Keenly aware of the demands on the crew of preparing for the course-correction maneuvers, Young and Duke worked to find a way of reducing the number required from five down to three. There was just no way, Young thought, that the crew would have time for five maneuvers before entry back into the atmosphere.

• • •

Jim Lovell pressed the PROCEED button, and at 08:42:43 GMT, a little over five and a half hours since they'd first radioed in news of the problem, the computer fired the descent engine to bring the crew back on course for a return to Earth. There was a pause from Mission Control after Lovell confirmed the end of the burn; then CapCom came through static to tell them, "You're go, Aquarius. No trim required." The burn had been perfect.

Now Fred Haise turned his attention to whether or not their lifeboat, the fragile, lightweight lunar module, which had on board the resources to support two men on the lunar surface for two days, was capable of keeping alive three men for the duration of the four-day journey home. The LM pilot pulled out a checklist and began to scribble down some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Oxygen was fine. And, if they switched off all but the essential systems, the batteries would last. But the water needed to prevent the computer, navigation and guidance systems from overheating was, he figured, going to dry up five hours before reentry. Then Haise remembered they were carrying data from Apollo 11. Before leaving the LM following their return to the command module from the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had turned off the water just to see how long the spacecraft would last without water before the first system failure. It was eight hours. On that basis, even if they ran out of water five hours before they reentered, Haise and his crewmates were going to make it home. An exhausted Haise was told by Lovell to try to get some sleep.

But Apollo 13 was hardly out of the woods. Ahead lay two further engine burns, course corrections, half an hour in a communications blackout on the dark side of the moon, near freezing temperatures and, critically, the construction of ad hoc air filters to scrub poisonous carbon dioxide from the cabin—a job not finished before CO2 levels had risen high enough to trigger a master alarm. And yet the crew of Apollo 13 eventually splashed down safely around one thousand miles southeast of Fiji on April 17. In surviving their eight-day mission, Lovell, Haise and Swigert traveled farther from Earth than anyone before or since. At no point had their return been guaranteed.

• • •

When John Young had first stood at the console in Mission Control looking at the readouts coming back from the crippled spacecraft, as the magnitude of the situation in which the crew found themselves became apparent, for sure, he'd thought, we've lost them. But the safe return of the crew of Apollo 13 using the lunar module as an improvised lifeboat joined the first lunar landing as a high-water mark of the entire Apollo program. The encyclopedic knowledge of the LM's systems possessed by Fred Haise was a crucial factor in the crew's survival. Undeterred by the drama of Apollo 13, Haise jumped right back into training for a return to the moon. As lunar module pilot on 13, Deke Slayton's crew selection system would cycle Haise through Apollo 16 as backup commander, then give him command of Apollo 19.

But by the time Lovell, Haise and Swigert blasted off from the Cape, the Apollo program had, in landing men on the moon, already done exactly what it was intended to do. Apollo 13 was a sobering reminder of how fine the margins were. Apollo was never a system designed for persistence and as a result each mission to the moon carried a significant risk of losing a crew. Some inside NASA were questioning whether it remained a risk worth taking. The knife-edge of Apollo 13 made the final decision easier. On September 2, 1970, NASA, facing the budget cuts that forced them to choose between space station and Space Shuttle, pulled the plug on the last two lunar missions. Apollo 17 would be the last flight to the moon.

Instead of twice walking on the surface, the closest Freddo was going to get was that single, perilous slingshot around the moon that gifted his wounded spacecraft the energy it needed to return home. A good soldier, Haise agreed to stay on as backup commander to John Young for the Apollo 16 mission, but as far as flying was concerned, it was a dead end. After that, he'd have to pin his hopes on the Shuttle getting built.

Nor was Freddo alone. Another member of his 1966 astronaut intake was about to taste even more bitter disappointment.

• • •

Since he'd arrived in Houston off the back of the X-15 rocket plane program as the first new recruit to have already earned his astronaut wings, Joe Engle had trained as a lunar module pilot. He'd been on the backup crew for Apollo 14, and in August 1971, despite pressure to replace him on the crew of Apollo 17 with geologist Jack Schmitt, Deke Slayton included him alongside Gene Cernan and Ron Evans in the crew selection he sent to Washington. It would be nice, Slayton agreed with headquarters, to send a geologist to the moon, but that wasn't the way the straight-as-an-arrow Flight Operations boss made his decisions. Engle was more qualified.

The crew's commander, Gene Cernan, was on vacation in Acapulco when he took the call from Slayton: "Congratulations, Geno, Apollo 17's yours." Cernan was elated, thanking Slayton excitedly, before catching himself.

"Does this include Ron and Joe?" he asked.

"Well, not exactly . . ."

To make sure that on NASA's last manned mission to the moon there would be a scientist on board, Slayton's crew selection had been overruled for the first time. To a bitterly disappointed Engle it wasn't a complete surprise. There'd been plenty of internal speculation that Schmitt would get the slot, but telling himself it makes perfect sense or it's the best thing for the program wasn't going to make it any easier to tell his kids that he wasn't going to the moon.

Deke Slayton invited him into his office to talk things through. Engle could tell Slayton wasn't enjoying the conversation much more than he was. The Flight Operations boss was sympathetic, as helpful as he could be, but he didn't have many places to turn. Slayton already had nearly twenty guys working on Skylab. He couldn't promise Engle a flight on that, but if it interested him, he made it clear he'd give Engle's claim proper consideration. There was also an as yet unconfirmed prospect, agreed earlier in the year, of an orbital rendezvous with the Soviets, but again, he wouldn't commit to including Engle on any crew for that. The only other option was the Shuttle. So far it had been little more than a study, but Slayton told Engle that it looked like it was going to happen. That was the one. "If it's got a stick and rudder and wings," Engle told him, then that was the program which he could bring the most to. If a PhD in geology was going to get Jack Schmitt to the moon, then it made sense to assign an X-15 pilot to the Space Shuttle.

Slayton looked pleased, or perhaps just relieved. "That was my opinion," he said, "but if you'd wanted to fly sooner than that, I was ready to help out."

He took it better than I would have, thought Slayton, as Engle left his office. For both Engle and Haise, any future hopes of spaceflight now rested with the Space Shuttle. And while the prospect of that was years away, there were increasing signs that it would at least become real.

## SIXTEEN

#### Houston, 1971

Since the first DC-3 design for the Shuttle had emerged from Building 36 in the spring of 1969, at least seventy-five further variations on the theme had been drafted inside Max Faget's "garage." There were orbiters with straight wings, swept wings, delta wings and double delta wings. Designs with one, two, three or four main engines in the tail. Or none. Early designs carried all their fuel on board—which increased their size at the expense of the payload they could carry. There were big ones and small ones. Some were not at all easy on the eye while one, a design labeled MSC-036A, was notably rakish looking. There were twin-tailed shuttles and orbiters with canards projecting from either side of the nose. Some had jet engines (in the wings or in the nose) for landing, others were given swing-down rocket engines for launch, and one or two had solid-rocket engines for use in an abort. Then, on August 10, 1971, a design labeled MSC-040 was produced by Faget's design and engineering team. And with this one, his Skunk Works nailed it. A few nips and tucks aside, with MSC-040 NASA now had their template for the Space Shuttle. But even before the successful design emerged from Building 36, it was already clear it was going to need more power. Quite a lot more.

From the earliest days of the Space Shuttle program it was understood that there were particular aspects of it that would dictate the development schedule of the new spacecraft. The main engines, three of which were to be mounted in a triangle below the tail, were top on this list. To try to get a head start, NASA commissioned detailed proposals from engine manufacturers before it had even secured funding to build the Shuttle itself. Then, in January 1971, they agreed to give the Air Force everything it wanted. As well as those big delta wings Max Faget had so resisted, the agency was also committed to building a Space Shuttle capable of heaving 65,000 pounds into orbit inside a payload bay large enough to carry a house trailer. And so, in the same month, the two companies competing for a contract were told by NASA that the goalposts had moved. They needed to increase the thrust delivered by each engine by over a third. It was an extraordinary jump. Even before demanding more power, NASA had been asking for an engine stretching the boundaries of what was possible. They wanted the highest-performance rocket engine ever built; something little short of an engineering masterpiece.

• • •

At the Rocketdyne plant in California's San Fernando Valley, company vice president Paul Castenholz knew he was at a disadvantage. In its heyday, building engines for Wernher von Braun's Saturn V rockets, Rocketdyne had employed over 23,000 people. With the Apollo hardware now built, that number had dropped to under 2,000. On top of that, rivals Pratt & Whitney had been working on an engine for the Air Force of exactly the type NASA had specified, while his own firm had devoted its energy to developing a radical new kind of rocket engine, the Aerospike, which NASA had now ruled out of contention.

NASA had specified an engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen capable of delivering 415,000 pounds of thrust, 14,670 feet per second in exhaust velocity, and 3,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. And, unlike any other rocket except the 57,000-pound-thrust XLR99 used in the X-15 rocket plane, they wanted it to be reusable. It would be like, thought one Rocketdyne engineer, inventing an Indy 500 car with a 50,000-mile warranty.

Pratt & Whitney already had an engine called the XLR129. Developed for an abandoned classified Air Force program to build a hypersonic rocket glider code-named ISINGLASS, the Pratt & Whitney engine was capable of delivering 250,000 pounds of thrust at the required pressure. They had something upon which they could build. But with Aerospike out of the race, Rocketdyne had nothing. Castenholz was quick to appreciate that drawings and promises had no chance of winning the prize. To leapfrog their rivals, Rocketdyne were going to have to show NASA that they could build them the engine they wanted. And he managed to persuade the company to stake $3 million of corporate funds to do it. Rocketdyne's engineers worked around the clock, sleeping in the factory's on-site hospital night after night while they built a full-scale test bed. Using what knowledge they could bring from the J-2 they'd built for the Saturn rocket, by late 1970 they were able to light their engine in their Nevada field lab near Reno. They were unable, at this point, to cool it, so their test rig could run for no more than five seconds before it would self-immolate and destroy itself. But by 1971, the Shuttle's Rocketdyne main engine thrust chamber, in its final, brief full-power burn, delivered 505,700 pounds of thrust, an exhaust velocity of nearly 15,000 feet per second, and a chamber pressure over 3,172 pounds per square inch. In just months, they'd built an engine that smashed NASA's requirements.

And when, after agreeing to build the Shuttle the Air Force said it wanted, NASA raised the bar from 415,000 pounds of thrust to 550,000, Pratt & Whitney were nowhere near. Armed with film of the Nevada test runs and over ninety volumes of documentation, in March 1971, Castenholz delivered the Rocketdyne proposal to managers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the center responsible for the Shuttle's engine development. He also took with him the thrust chamber itself. He wanted everyone on the evaluation board to see and touch it. Four months later, Rocketdyne was awarded the contract.

There was just one critical component missing from their demonstrator, however. Castenholz's team had simply not had time to develop and build the turbopump the engine needed to generate the high propellant pressures required. For the purposes of their demonstrator, Rocketdyne had fed liquid hydrogen and oxygen directly into the engine using a powerful external pump. Rocketdyne had only shown their engine could deliver if they could build a working turbopump. It was a big if. Not much bigger than a healthy-sized lawn mower engine, the turbopump had to spin at a rate of 36,000 revolutions per minute, at pressures of 8,000 pounds per square inch, and at power levels of 75,000 horsepower. By comparison, the engines that drove the Titanic generated just 55,000 horsepower and were spread over an area around the size of fifteen tennis courts. Justifiable elation at beating off the competition from Pratt & Whitney had to be tempered by the reality of the task that now lay ahead of them.

• • •

As Rocketdyne contemplated the chasm that existed between their demonstrator and the production of a reliable, reusable rocket engine certified for human spaceflight, NASA was still waiting for the president to greenlight the development of the flying machine that the new engine was designed to propel into space. Yet, while a decision on NASA's Space Shuttle remained beyond the horizon, Richard Nixon had shown he was quite prepared to commit large sums of money to America's future in space. But when, in September, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger gave word that the president had authorized development of an ambitious, revolutionary new spacecraft, it was not the country's civilian space agency who would be the beneficiaries. Instead, it was the black world of the National Reconnaissance Office.

The charge-coupled-device technology developed by Bell Laboratories in the late sixties was now sufficiently mature to allow the NRO to pursue their long-held ambition to build a digital spy satellite capable of providing real-time photographic intelligence from space. To be built in complete secrecy by defense contractor TRW in California, the new spacecraft was known, initially, as Program 1010. It soon acquired the code name KH-11 KENNEN and was projected to be operational by the end of 1976. Not many people working for NASA enjoyed the high-level security clearance that knowledge of the new NRO program required, but MOL veterans like Bob Crippen and Dick Truly, taken in by Houston after the promise of digital spy satellites had put their military space station program out of business, were among them.

So too was the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, Dr. Hans Mark. And, over the next decade, it would be Mark more than anyone else who provided the bridge between the country's military and civilian space programs. And at the heart of it all would be the Space Shuttle.

## SEVENTEEN

#### Ames Research Center, 1971

When asked how he was getting along with Hans Mark, a former colleague once replied, "It's mind-boggling having to deal with a genius."

Mark's interest in space was inspired on his twelfth birthday in 1941 when his parents gave him a copy of a book by P. E. Cleator, the first head of the British Interplanetary Society, called Rockets Through Space. In it, his father had inscribed the message "The phantasy of today is the reality of tomorrow. For Hans, from Herman." Mark determined that he would like to live his life on that basis.

His father was well qualified to consider the advance of science. In 1927, he had taught Edward Teller quantum mechanics at the University of Karlsruhe. The Mark family escaped from Austria when the Nazis invaded in 1938. After an arduous journey west, they settled in New York. Hans shared his father's aptitude for science, but the atom bombs that brought an end to World War Two suggested that it was nuclear physics, not space and rocketry, that offered him the brightest future. By 1959, as an assistant research physicist at Berkeley in California, Hans was helping Teller teach his advanced quantum mechanics course to graduate students. In 1956, Teller, the self-proclaimed "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb," employed Mark as a researcher at the university's Livermore National Laboratory. Rooted in their experience in prewar Europe, both men shared a common interest in maintaining their adopted country's military strength. Through the early sixties, Mark ran a division of 150 people in support of the design and development of nuclear weapons. Central to his work strengthening America's atom bomb arsenal was an effort to monitor and detect advances in Soviet weaponry and, as a result, since his arrival at Livermore, Mark had enjoyed the highest TALENT/KEYHOLE security clearances. When, after deciding that there were limits to how much he could do to make nuclear bombs any more militarily useful, he moved to Mountain View to take up a new post as director of NASA's Ames Research Center, he retained them.

Tall and urbane, his face framed by a steel-gray crew cut and thick, dark eyebrows, Mark had just the faintest trace of the Austrian accent he'd brought with him to America as a boy. He started work at Ames in February 1969, a month before Richard Nixon set up his Space Task Group.

In a parallel effort it hoped would inform the Space Task Group Report, NASA created a committee made up of the directors of the agency's different centers. At the first meeting, Hans Mark found himself sitting next to the director of Marshall Space Flight Center, Wernher von Braun. The charismatic rocketeer had come to America from Germany in very different circumstances than had the Mark family. After leading the development of the V-2 ballistic missile that assaulted London in the latter days of World War Two, von Braun's expertise and passion had been spirited to the United States at the war's end, where they had since provided both the foundation and vision for America's space program. And it was von Braun, the country's greatest advocate of manned spaceflight, who proved crucial in rekindling Mark's childhood enthusiasm for human space exploration.

At the time he joined NASA, Mark was no cheerleader for the Space Shuttle. In fact, after his time at Livermore had opened his eyes to the capabilities of unmanned spacecraft like CORONA and GAMBIT, he couldn't help feeling that perhaps adding human passengers to the equation was only piling on unnecessary complication and expense. Von Braun argued persuasively that only the on-the-spot judgment, creativity and resourcefulness provided by a manned crew allowed for genuinely sophisticated and flexible space missions; but it was the invitation to Mark to join the Apollo 13 Accident Board that really proved it to him. While on that occasion the astronauts' intelligence, knowledge and ingenuity had been applied in the service of saving themselves, it was evident that the same qualities could be brought to bear on any mission that demanded it. Mark's conversion was sealed on board a yacht, during the downwind leg of a race in San Francisco Bay.

Mark and von Braun shared a love of boating. Whenever the Marshall director visited Ames, Mark took care to ensure a sailing trip was on the itinerary. With the yacht trimmed and the wind behind them, the crew were able to relax while von Braun, dressed in a white cricket sweater, his hair tousled by the sea breeze, held court. Asked whether or not there would be a return to the moon following Apollo, von Braun compared the journeys of astronauts to those of Scott and Amundsen to the Antarctic. After the explorers' 1911 heroics in reaching the South Pole, little had been done to capitalize on their pioneering efforts until the availability of what von Braun called "enabling technology." Just as more substantial exploration of the Antarctic was dependent on the airplane, he explained, our proper understanding of the moon would follow the construction of a space station. And that, von Braun was certain, would first need a Space Shuttle. By the end of 1971, Mark was persuaded. Soon after that, he would be seen proudly wearing a tie patterned with the orbiter's silhouette. He was a believer, and belief, in the end, was what drove NASA's pursuit of the Shuttle. Mark recognized that. "I do not know," he wrote, "how to quantify the value of putting people in space."

• • •

While NASA continued its wait for the president to make a decision on whether or not to build the Shuttle, it employed the services of an organization it hoped could do just that.

The consulting firm Mathematica Inc. was the creation of economist Oskar Morgenstern. As with Hans Mark, Morgenstern was resident in the United States as a consequence of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. A professor of economics at the University of Vienna, Morgenstern was visiting Princeton when the Nazis seized Vienna. He remained at the American university, where he met the Hungarian-born mathematical genius John von Neumann. A prodigy who as a child could memorize and recite the phone book, von Neumann had earned his PhD in mathematics at just twenty-two. Still in his twenties, he took up, alongside Albert Einstein, one of five professorships at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann's polymathic brilliance ranged from quantum mechanics to the hydrogen bomb. In 1944, along with fellow émigré Morgenstern, with the publication of the landmark Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, he created game theory, a mathematical model for the prediction and analysis of rational decision making. When von Neumann went on to invent the architecture of the modern computer, his coauthor founded Mathematica, a company that, given its family tree, seemed plenty smart enough to perform the kind of voodoo economics necessary to make the Space Shuttle look like financial good sense.

After NASA hired them in 1970, they did. Over twelve years, between 1978 and 1990, Mathematica concluded, the Space Shuttle would save the country over $14 billion compared to simply continuing with the then current generation of expendable rockets. There were plenty of beautifully plotted graphs whose lines illustrated the numbers. It was impressive stuff. The problem was that the Office of Management and Budget thought the Mathematica report was pure fantasy. One member of a committee set up by Nixon in the summer of 1971 to assess the Shuttle program thought the figures showed evidence that NASA and Mathematica must be smoking marijuana. The accountants' disbelief was not without justification. Mathematica's promised $14 billion saving was based on an assumption that the Shuttle would fly 736 times in twelve years. Sixty flights a year; more than one a week. Just to match the cost of the expendable rockets would require thirty-nine flights every year. But in the end the cold cost-benefit analysis didn't matter. Or rather, as Hans Mark had decided, "it was almost certainly beside the point."

Fortunately, there were powerful allies in Washington who understood this.

In August 1971, Caspar Weinberger, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, learned that proposed cuts to NASA's 1972 budget would signal the end of America's participation in manned spaceflight. Faced with this stark reality, Weinberger wrote to the president. "I believe," he told Nixon, "this would be a mistake." Going on to address the further possibility of canceling the last two remaining Apollo moon missions, Weinberger explained his position more clearly. Stepping away from manned spaceflight would, he wrote, "be confirming, in some respects, a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad: that our best years are behind us." Nixon's response, handwritten in the margin of Weinberger's original memo, was succinct: "I agree with Cap."

If the president had any lingering doubts about approving the development of the Shuttle they were perhaps put to bed in December 1971 when he flew to the Azores for a two-day summit with the French president, Georges Pompidou. Nixon flew to the Portuguese mid-Atlantic outpost aboard a Boeing VC-137, a specially appointed presidential version of the 707 airliner known as Air Force One. Painted in an elegant sky-blue and white livery, the jet usually bestowed bragging rights upon the US president in any company. But that Sunday, December 12, Pompidou arrived in Lajes aboard Concorde 001, the first prototype of the needle-nosed Anglo-French supersonic airliner. The appearance that America was lagging behind the Europeans embarrassed the US president, who had been disappointed a year earlier when Congress had strangled the country's own supersonic transport project. At dinner on Monday night Nixon observed that Pompidou's journey to the Azores had been three times quicker than his own. "I do not speak in envy," he claimed, "I only wish we had made the plane ourselves." When he returned to the United States, a decision on the Space Shuttle was imminent.

• • •

NASA had tried, without ever being entirely convincing, to justify the Shuttle on the grounds of cost, national security and jobs, but in the end perhaps it was simply that Nixon wasn't prepared to preside over either the end of US manned spaceflight or, following the abandonment of Boeing's supersonic airliner, a further retreat from the country's world-leading position in aerospace technology. America would have a Space Shuttle because America should have one. And on January 3, 1972, NASA were told to draft a statement for the president. The Space Shuttle had been approved.

Two days later, at the Western White House in California, NASA's new administrator, James Fletcher, met with Richard Nixon. As the two men sat in armchairs flanking a low table carrying a large lamp, they passed a model of the Space Shuttle between them while Fletcher explained how it worked. A fifteen-minute meeting quickly turned into a half-hour conversation with Nixon's advisers looking on, wondering whether or not Fletcher was going to get his model back.

"I have decided today," Nixon began the announcement that followed, "that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system, designed to help transform the space frontier of the seventies into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the eighties and nineties . . . It will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical cost out of astronautics." Prior to the statement, Nixon had admitted to Fletcher that "even if it were not a good investment, we would have to do it anyway, because spaceflight is here to stay . . . and we'd best be part of it." The president finished his public announcement with a flourish that perhaps better reflected his real reason for approving the program: " 'We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,' said Oliver Wendell Holmes, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. So with man's epic journey into space—a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead."

Earlier drafts of the president's statement had referred to the new vehicle as the Space Clipper. Of a number of suggestions provided by NASA, including Astroplane, Hermes, Pegasus and Skylark, it was the one favored by White House staff. Nixon himself dismissed them all. Instead of gracing the new space plane with any kind of romance or style as earlier spacecraft like Mercury, Gemini or Apollo had enjoyed, the president decided NASA's new bird would be known by the name by which it had always been known: the Space Shuttle.

• • •

For all the excitement that greeted the presidential announcement, not everyone was so happy. Two weeks later, the National Reconnaissance Office's second KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on top of a USAF Titan IIID rocket. Given the reliability and, more importantly, self-sufficiency offered by the Titan, the president's words were not particularly welcome within either the Air Force or the CIA. The generals and spooks who had until this point offered no more than a reluctant commitment to using the Shuttle as a launch vehicle now had to contemplate the reality of having to do so. Designed to be launched on top of a rocket, none of their satellites was compatible with the Shuttle.

Weeks after Nixon's statement, the NRO completed a study into "the minimum modifications required" to make HEXAGON and its ground systems compatible with the Shuttle. The document explored the possibility of the Shuttle retrieving the hugely expensive satellite from orbit and returning it to Earth for refurbishment. It afforded a glimmer of what manned spaceflight might yet offer the military. For the time being, though, NRO's concerns were more immediate and practical.

Hans Mark's old friend John Foster, the director of defense and engineering inside the Pentagon, summed up the feeling within the NRO succinctly. With the Shuttle decision confirmed, he said to Mark, slightly incredulously, "We're going to have to put HEXAGON in that thing . . ."

## EIGHTEEN

#### Descartes Highlands, the Moon, 1972

April 21, 1972, 11:57 a.m. Houston time. Urged on from inside by his crewmate Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 commander John Young stepped down the ladder of the lunar module Orion toward the surface of the moon. After three previous spaceflights, including Apollo 10, which had taken him to within 61 miles of the moon, it was where, he felt, he was supposed to be. "I'm sure glad they got ol' Brer Rabbit here," he drawled, in a reference to the Joel Chandler Harris stories he'd enjoyed as a boy, "back in the briar patch where he belongs."

After completing four final items on the checklist, Duke was ready to leave the lunar module to join Young. "Here I come, babe!" he said.

The crew's almost childlike excitement was as clear as it was understandable. It was also a pale echo of the exuberance they'd shared inside the lunar module, in private, after touching down. A fault with the gimbal motors of the command module rocket nozzle had threatened to force a mission abort. Analyzed on the ground at Houston before a decision was made to proceed, it had still delayed Young and Duke's descent to the Descartes Highlands by six hours. As a result, by the time the commander had safely brought the lunar module in to land among the craters, he'd been working at capacity for thirteen hours. An immediate moon walk, as scheduled, would have raised that to near thirty. As eager as the crew were to leave their spacecraft, they had no complaints when Mission Control decided to postpone the EVA (extravehicular activity) until after Young and Duke had got some sleep. Young, seemingly entirely at home on another world, slept "like a brick" on a hammock hung at head height inside the lunar module. With assistance from a Seconal barbiturate, so too did Duke, lying in a hammock strung beneath his commander's.

"Hey, John, hurry up!" Duke said as Young climbed slowly down the ladder.

"I'm hurrying!" replied the commander, amused by his crewmate's impatience.

With both astronauts finally outside Orion's claustrophobic interior, they deployed the Lunar Rover buggy and offloaded the experiments they'd conduct during nearly three days on the moon, before Young set up the flag. "Wait a minute," Duke said as he bounded back to the lunar module to grab the camera. "You're not getting away from there without me getting your picture." With the lunar module, the Rover and Stone Mountain in the background, Duke lined up the perfect shot. "Come on out here and give me a salute, a big Navy salute," he said. Still displaying an ebullience for which he was not well known, Young crouched down as far as the thick white space suit would allow, then, in one-sixth lunar gravity, sprang one and a half feet into the air and snapped off a sharp salute. Nearly a second and a half later, he landed again.

After Young returned the favor, Mission Control told them, "This looks like a good time for some good news here . . ."

"Okay," Young encouraged.

"The House passed the space budget yesterday, 227 to 60, which includes the vote for the Shuttle." With Congress supporting the president's commitment to the Shuttle, it was on its way.

"Beautiful," purred the two moon walkers, "wonderful, beautiful." As Duke skipped ahead of him, back toward the lunar module, Young added, "The country needs that Shuttle mighty bad, you'll see."

• • •

John Young might have been a committed supporter of the Shuttle, yet it was not the machine he had hoped for. Like Max Faget, he'd wanted a fully reusable Space Shuttle made up of an orbiter and winged booster that could fly back to land on a runway, before being prepared for their next flight. Instead, primarily because of the need to save on development costs at the expense of higher costs per flight, NASA was building the machine represented by the model that had so captivated Richard Nixon when he'd first announced the program. It was an awkward-looking cluster of space plane, fuel tank and strap-on booster rockets that looked unlike any other rocket ever built. There were good reasons for this, the physics of which had been understood for hundreds of years.

In July 1687, sixty copies of a freshly printed new book were dispatched from London to Cambridge by horse and cart. The volume's title was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and its author, Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. A fellow of Trinity College, Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and Principia was his masterpiece, establishing laws of motion and gravity that have both underpinned classical physics and provided the foundation for all rocketry and spaceflight ever since. His three-volume Principia was deliberately not presented as a work of popular science. In fact it quickly gained a reputation for its inaccessibility, but in writing a book for a narrow, specialized readership, Newton hoped "to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematicks." Despite this approach, Principia included a brilliantly simple thought experiment, which became known as Newton's Cannon, to illustrate the requirement for sufficient speed in achieving orbit.

First, Newton suggested, one should imagine a cannon placed upon the peak of a mountain so high that it projected beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Then imagine firing cannonballs horizontally from the barrel. With every increase in the amount of explosive charge used, the speed of a cannonball fired from the gun grows. With each increase in muzzle velocity, the cannonball falls to the ground farther from where it was fired. But the Earth is round, so its surface curves away from the cannonball as it falls. If the cannonball is fired fast enough it will take longer to arc down toward the ground than the Earth's surface does to curve away from it. Launched from the mountain peak above the atmosphere, not subject to drag from air resistance, the cannonball will simply continue to fall at a constant speed without ever getting any closer to the Earth's surface beneath it. Orbit, rather than being an escape from the effect of gravity, is dependent on it.

Of course, Newton didn't know about tetherball, which illustrates the whole thing even more clearly. Hit the ball with insufficient force and it won't go round and round, instead falling back toward the pole in the center. Enough of a wallop will send it circling around the pole attached by its string (gravity). But hit it too hard and the string will snap, allowing the ball to fly off into the bushes (outer space).

The principle was straightforward, and yet constructing a vehicle capable of traveling fast enough to achieve orbital velocity was not as easy as it would seem. The challenge was in building a machine that could carry sufficient fuel to keep the engines burning long enough to propel it to the 17,500 mph needed to reach orbit. The first person to describe this was another pioneering scientist, working two centuries later and half a world away, who, using the physical laws established by Newton, worked out how it might be done.

Born in a remote Russian village in 1857, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was largely self-taught. After contracting scarlet fever at the age of ten he became hard of hearing; then, after the death of his mother when he was thirteen, almost completely deaf. Isolated and humiliated by his affliction, he came to regard time spent in the company of other people as "torture." He withdrew into a world of books. And in search of approval—or simply "not to be despised," as he wrote in his autobiography—he turned to study. Aged sixteen, he moved to Moscow, where he divided his time between the rented corner of a room and the public library. He read voraciously and, inspired in part by Jules Verne's classic From the Earth to the Moon, he became hooked on aviation and space. It was to find some expression in his own science fiction.

But it was in 1903, with the publication of The Exploration of Space by Means of Reactive Devices, that he produced his landmark work. Through a single equation that would one day bear his name, Tsiolkovsky described the relationship between the empty mass of the rocket, the mass of its fuel, the rocket's speed, and the specific impulse of the fuel—that is, the amount of thrust produced by one pound of fuel in one second. Through calculation, rather than speculation and imagination, Tsiolkovsky was able to show that in order to achieve orbital speed a rocket would have to shed dead weight as it climbed and accelerated. To do this would require construction from multiple stages. At the point when the first stage expended its fuel it was jettisoned, giving way to a lighter, smaller second stage. This was powered by its own rocket engine that was, in effect, launched at altitude, with the benefit of a rolling start. The result was rockets assembled like layered wedding cakes of which only the smallest, uppermost section would ever reach orbit. Based on existing fuels and materials, Tsiolkovksy concluded that it wasn't possible to reach orbit without what became known as "staging."

As NASA decided on the configuration of the Space Shuttle, Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation remained the single greatest constraint on their ambitions. It was no more possible for them to build a space plane that, without staging, took off and flew itself into orbit before returning to Earth than it had been in 1903.

• • •

When President Nixon christened NASA's new spacecraft the Space Shuttle he may well have thought he was just talking about the space plane on top, but of course technically the term referred to the whole assembly: the space plane (the orbiter), the big fuel tank and the two boosters.

Unable to afford the flyback booster John Young and others had favored, NASA constructed the Space Shuttle stack around a huge disposable external fuel tank shaped like a cannon shell and filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. In coming to a decision about the nature of the Space Shuttle's main engines already being developed by Rocketdyne, NASA opted for liquid hydrogen as the fuel that offered the greatest specific impulse. It was the most powerful fuel available. And it was light: a gallon of water weighs over fourteen times more than a gallon of liquid hydrogen. The trouble was that this came with a cost as liquid hydrogen is also the lowest density fuel. While it weighed relatively little, it took up a lot of space. By contrast, the liquid oxygen used as the oxidizer needed for the hydrogen fuel to burn in the vacuum of space weighs more but requires less volume, but room still needed to be found for both. Carrying the liquid oxygen and hydrogen inside the orbiter itself, and finding room for a substantial payload bay, would have made it unacceptably large. The external tank that sat beneath the belly of the orbiter was the result. Once empty, it was jettisoned and thrown away, consumed by fire on its reentry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Riding the tank was the orbiter itself, the winged space plane that has since become synonymous with the term Space Shuttle. The three rocket engines in its tail, gulping propellant and oxidizer from the external tank at a rate that would empty an average family swimming pool in twenty-five seconds, between them contributed over 1.2 million pounds of thrust at launch, but they were not, on their own, capable of lifting the Space Shuttle from the pad even a few inches. That required the help of the two large strap-on boosters that used solid fuel technology developed for America's nuclear missile arsenal.

Attached to either side of the external tank the two solid rocket boosters—the SRBs—were the largest ever built. They were designed to burn for a little over two minutes before being jettisoned, parachuting back into the sea, then being towed back for refurbishment and reuse. Together, the two 150-foot-high boosters delivered 6 million pounds of thrust—more than 80 percent of the total liftoff thrust.

The result of these various pieces of hardware, their conflicting demands and limitations, was the now familiar configuration of orbiter, external tank and solid rocket boosters that at the time looked so strange alongside the tall, slim rockets that had preceded it. The whole effect was an assembly that's been memorably described as akin to "bolting a butterfly onto a bullet."

• • •

A program as complex as the Space Shuttle was always going to require an unprecedented level of cooperation between NASA's different centers. As responsibility for the Apollo command and lunar modules had belonged to Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, so too did that for the orbiter. Houston was also given overall responsibility for managing the integration of the entire Space Shuttle program. That meant working hand in hand with Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, which under Wernher von Braun had developed the Apollo program's giant Saturn V booster. Marshall was charged with the development of the main engines, external tank and solid rocket boosters. But there would be plenty of work for Hans Mark's Ames Research Center too.

From the outset it was clear that such a lumpy, awkward assembly of shapes, sizes, struts and protuberances was going to present a unique set of aerodynamic challenges as the Space Shuttle accelerated through the lower atmosphere. To test this, the facilities at Ames would be vital. With the program approved, Max Faget's deputy at Houston, Milton Silveira, told his boss, "We need to go to Ames and make him a friend, because we're going to need his wind tunnels." Not only that, they'd need Ames's state-of-the-art simulators to develop the orbiter's flight control software, and its high-temperature arc jets to test the thermal protection system, for which Ames itself had primary responsibility for developing. Of all the areas in which Ames was involved, it was the latter, the heat shield, that had given Mark and his engineers most cause for concern.

After the program's approval in January, each of the center directors was invited to give an assessment of both the contribution they might make to the building of the Shuttle and the risks and challenges as they saw them. In his letter, Mark cautioned that developing a reusable thermal protection system—the heat shield that would protect the Shuttle from the fierce heat of reentry—was going to require "a concentrated effort." Furthermore, he warned, there were likely to be problems around the bonding of thermal protection tiles to the orbiter's airframe, and "particularly with the inspection of the bonds to determine that they are indeed secure after manufacture."

His comments would prove to be prescient.

The challenge of building a heat shield for the Space Shuttle joined the development of the main engines as one of the long poles of the program. No previous flying machine had ever had to contend with the extremes of performance and environment faced by the orbiter.

• • •

As it was for Hans Mark, heat—and making sure the Shuttle was built to cope with it—was an overriding priority for engineer Tom Moser. Just weeks before Apollo 11's flight to the moon, Moser had been asked to design a flag for the astronauts to plant on the moon. His ingenious, lightweight, space-saving design survived the journey intact, but as he watched Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon, trying to open up the telescopic rod from which the flag hung, he could see it was getting stuck and wasn't going to extend fully. It created the appearance that, in the vacuum of space, the flag was flapping in the breeze. While Moser cringed, others were so taken by it that they decided to replicate it on every subsequent mission and, in the process, inspire a thousand conspiracy theories.

Moser's embarrassment over the sticky Apollo 11 flag had done nothing to impede his progress through the engineering hierarchy at Houston. After first producing sketches of possible Shuttle configurations in 1969 while still attached to the Apollo program, he was now working out of Building 13 at Houston, responsible for the orbiter's structural integrity.

He began by looking backward.

## NINETEEN

#### Houston, 1972

Tom Moser traveled from Houston to Burbank, California, home of the Skunk Works, the top-secret division of the Lockheed Corporation that had designed and built the legendary high-flying U-2 spy plane. But it was the U-2's successor, a blazingly fast CIA reconnaissance jet called the A-12 OXCART, that was of interest to the bearded NASA engineer.

When it first flew in 1962, the A-12 was unique. Shaped like the flat blade of a broadsword extending forward from a pair of delta wings, each housing a long cylindrical engine that ran from the leading edge to trailing edge, the A-12 not only looked and flew like nothing else in the sky; it was built like nothing else. To endure the heat generated by flying at over three times the speed of sound, the OXCART and its Air Force counterpart, the SR-71 Blackbird, were built largely from titanium. Only titanium combined sufficient lightness and heat resistance to enable the spy planes to operate at an altitude of 80,000 feet and stand up to temperatures that in places exceeded 1,000°F. The problem was that the only US source of the metal, the Titanium Corporation of America, couldn't supply it with sufficient purity. US titanium was so brittle it could shatter if dropped. Lacking a homegrown source of high-quality titanium, the CIA looked for an alternative and found it in, of all places, the Soviet Union. Using third parties and front companies, the titanium needed to build a replacement for the U-2 spy plane was imported covertly from the Soviet Union by the CIA.

As a result of his success in building the A-12 and SR-71 Blackbird, Kelly Johnson, the jet's chief designer and boss of the Skunk Works, was top of Tom Moser's list of people to see.

The two things that most concerned the man from NASA were, as they had been for the OXCART design team, weight and heat. It's relatively easy to make a strong, heat-resistant airplane, but you risk it being too heavy to fly. It's also straightforward to make a very light airplane, but the challenge is then to ensure it has adequate structural strength. Compounding that, all aircraft designs tend to gain weight as they evolve. Moser decided he was going to allow for that from the outset. Commercial airliners are one and a half times stronger than they need to be, built to endure stress loads 50 percent greater than any they would ever expect to encounter in everyday use. Moser decided that for the Shuttle a 40 percent margin was enough. Uncertain of the wisdom of this, NASA had Moser's plan checked out by engineers from Boeing to "make sure you really know what you're doing." He was fine, concluded the experts.

The first hurdle cleared, Moser then set out to come to grips with the more complex issue of the thermal stress the orbiter would face during a mission that took it from the warmth of subtropical Florida to the freezing vacuum of space, before plunging back into the Earth's atmosphere in a maneuver generating enough heat to liquidize steel. With its metal airframe sheathed by the heat shield being developed under Hans Mark at Ames, the Space Shuttle skin and structure wouldn't have to contend directly with those melting extremes, but it would need to cope with variations in temperature that were more than enough to ensure that the airframe would expand, contract, soften and harden throughout every mission.

At the Skunk Works, Moser was welcomed by Kelly Johnson before being briefed by Lockheed engineers. Moser crawled in and around SR-71 Blackbirds brought into the facility for deep maintenance. On the shop floor, he saw engineers machining, forming and processing titanium. Moser kept asking questions. Titanium, he learned, had been nightmarishly difficult to work with. Bringing the metal to full strength took seventy hours. The hardness that was in so many ways advantageous also meant that new processes for machining and milling the metal had to be worked out; drill bits and tools designed to work with aluminum had simply disintegrated and snapped. At the same time, the new metal was extraordinarily sensitive, especially to chlorine. Ink from a Pentel pen could eat a hole through a sheet of titanium in twelve hours. Instead of the chlorinated municipal water that flowed from the Burbank taps, only distilled water could be used to wash the metal. At the end of his visit, Moser asked them, "Bottom line, if you were NASA and you guys were responsible for the Shuttle structure, would you build it out of aluminum or titanium?"

"Aluminum," they answered without pause.

Next, Moser traveled to England, where he visited the British Aircraft Corporation factory at Filton, near Bristol, to be briefed on the Concorde, an aircraft he thought was perhaps the most beautiful piece of engineering he'd ever seen in his life. In contrast to Lockheed, the British and French engineers had built their supersonic airliner from aluminum-copper alloy. Because of a lower top speed, the Concorde didn't have to contend with the same absolute temperatures as the American spy planes Moser had studied. Instead, the challenge for designers was to accommodate extreme temperature differentials of the kind that cause a cold glass to shatter on first contact with boiling water. In order to maintain stability as fuel was burned, the cold fuel that remained in the Concorde's tanks was pumped around the hot airframe to redistribute the weight. To deal with the thermal stress this caused, along with an airframe that at high speed and high temperatures was several inches longer than it was on the ground, Concorde's designers had incorporated complex expansion joints throughout the aircraft. They built in room for her to breathe, but the engineering necessary was expensive, elaborate and difficult to do.

To hell with it, Moser decided, we're going to tackle thermal stress head on. After talking to Lockheed and BAC, he decided on brute force. They were going to build a light aluminum structure and they were simply going to make it robust enough to accommodate the combination of flight loads and thermal stresses flying to space and back would generate. Back in Houston, he and his structures team modeled their plans mathematically and the numbers worked. "Okay," Moser said, "we can do that."

• • •

Everything learned by engineers like Moser as they polished and whittled NASA's paper plane was fed back to the manufacturer given the task of making it real. And in July 1972, NASA announced that this would be North American Rockwell.

As plain old North American Aviation, the company's track record in aircraft design couldn't have been more illustrious. Rolling out of factories in Ohio, Kansas, Dallas and El Segundo, over 15,000 of the company's T-6 Texan training aircraft were built. Alongside them were the B-25 Mitchell with which Jimmy Doolittle had bombed Tokyo from the deck of the USS Hornet in 1942, and the legendary P-51 Mustang, the appearance of which over Berlin had convinced Hermann Goering that World War Two was lost.

After the war, from a new plant in Downey, California, their hot streak continued with America's first swept-wing jet, the record-breaking F-86 Sabre. There was the B-45 Tornado, America's first jet bomber, then the F-100 Super Sabre, the world's first supersonic fighter. In 1959, the unparalleled X-15 rocket plane first flew, and just five years later the extraordinary six-engine XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic jet bomber was towed out of the hangar at Downey. Designed to carry 25 tons of nuclear weapons at three times the speed of sound and an altitude of 19 miles, the Valkyrie was, at the time of its first flight, the heaviest, most powerful, most costly aircraft ever built. There was nothing, it seemed, that North American's design team, led by a brilliant, hard-charging maverick named Harrison "Stormy" Storms, could not accomplish.

When, in 1961, NASA awarded them the contract to build the Apollo spacecraft they were on their way to the moon. Then, on January 27, 1967, during training, the crew of Apollo 1, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, were killed by fire inside the capsule designed by North American. Storms was made the scapegoat for the tragedy and fired from the company he, perhaps more than anyone, had made preeminent. In the midst of the political fallout following the fire, North American, its reputation mangled, merged with Rockwell-Standard, an auto-parts conglomerate based in Pittsburgh. But as North American was hauled over the coals, there were plenty in senior management at NASA who understood that the causes of the fire were not as simple as the sacking of a single aerospace executive suggested. It was clearer still that the Apollo design was, fundamentally, a good one. So when, five years later, North American Rockwell was one of four aerospace companies to submit a detailed bid to NASA to build the Space Shuttle—a machine that had the potential to be the crowning achievement of America's postwar aviation industry—they were at no disadvantage. Not only did Storms's old design team submit a bid that was $40 million cheaper than the next cheapest, it also beat Lockheed, Grumman and McDonnell Douglas on the basis of NASA's confidence in its program management.

In drawing up their proposal, the company had one other ace up its sleeve. Uncredited and out of sight, "Stormy" Storms had worked on the North American Rockwell bid as a consultant.

In February 1973, armed with a stylish new corporate logo designed by Oscar-winning animator and graphic designer Saul Bass, the management of the new, merged company divested themselves of any mention of North American. The Space Shuttle would be built by a company simply calling itself Rockwell International.

But just two weeks before that, NASA had gifted Storms and North American's earlier-generation spacecraft one last dance when they announced the crew for the final flight of their iconic Apollo capsule on a mission to meet their Soviet counterparts in space.

## TWENTY

#### Houston, 1972–73

As Deke Slayton heard it, Marooned, a 1969 movie starring Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman, helped inspire the mission that finally gave him a shot at spaceflight. The film, featuring cosmonauts coming to the rescue of a stranded American crew, had apparently impressed the Soviets. It certainly wouldn't have harmed NASA's cause when they reached out to their Russian counterparts in 1970 to suggest a joint mission. With political support from both sides of the Iron Curtain, an agreement was signed by Richard Nixon and the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, on May 24, 1972, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was scheduled for 1975.

As one of NASA's original Mercury Seven, Slayton was disappointed not to be given command of the American crew. But after being cleared to fly again after more than a decade grounded by a heart arrhythmia, he took the view that flying was flying and Apollo-Soyuz, whether he was commander or not, was his only chance.

After signing the Apollo-Soyuz agreement, Nixon addressed the Russian people over Soviet TV and radio. He pointed out that the United States and the Soviet Union had never been at war and that the two great nations "shall sometimes be competitors, but . . . need never be enemies." Just days after NASA announced Slayton, Tom Stafford and Vance Brand as the American Apollo-Soyuz crew, however, the Soviet Union announced that an antisatellite weapon it had been testing since 1963 was now operational. Seven test interceptions had seen five specially launched target satellites destroyed in a sleet of shrapnel. Some competition.

• • •

Inside the Air Force Satellite Control Facility—the Blue Cube—in Sunnyvale, the Soviets' success caught the attention of a group of young Air Force officers assigned to the Special Projects Office. If the new Soviet space weapon should ever close on a US spacecraft, they wanted, at the very least, to be able to take pictures of it. The Air Force had not previously tried using their reconnaissance birds to capture images of other spacecraft. Given the speeds, distances, angles and timings involved, the challenges of taking a photograph of one orbiting object from another in a different orbital plane were substantial. But presented with the threat of the new Soviet weapon the team of Air Force technicians thought that, with the enhanced capability of the new KH-8 GAMBIT-3—or "G3," as it was referred to inside the program—just entering service, it was worth trying. They immediately got to work on developing new computer algorithms with which to control the G3 spy satellites.

• • •

In every area of space endeavor, computers were taking center stage. And none more so than in the development of the Space Shuttle, where the computers, alongside the main engines and the heat shield, were deemed to be the third of the three long pole items that would determine the success or failure of the program.

In 1960, his senior year at the University of Texas, Bob Crippen took the first class in computer programming ever taught there. During his time at college, IBM had announced it would no longer be using vacuum tubes in its computers. It was progress. The previous year the company had proudly unveiled the IBM 305 RAMAC, which needed a room of at least 30 feet by 50 feet to accommodate it, and weighed a ton. There were just two thousand computers of any description in the whole of the country, but it was clear, Crip thought, that computers were the coming thing. Using mainframes and punch cards, he developed an interest in computing when it was still a field in its infancy. Even better, he thought, it was fun.

Naturally enough, while assigned to the MOL program, Crip, alongside Dick Truly, had opted to work on the programming for the IBM 4Pi computer that lay at the heart of the Air Force space station's systems. In March 1969, just months before MOL was canceled, NASA decided to follow suit, agreeing on the IBM 4Pi for their own Skylab.

In choosing what was essentially an off-the-shelf machine they were taking a wholly different approach to the path they'd followed for Gemini and Apollo. With weight and space so critical in those two smaller spacecraft, NASA had bespoke computers designed and built. Without room for duplicate backup systems, the safety of the spacecraft depended on the reliability of the single computer. With so much at stake, a tailor-made computer—the Apollo Guidance Computer—was created by MIT in which the possibility of failure was simply designed out. Each component of the new processor was tested at every point in its manufacture. In the words of one NASA engineer, "every piece of metal could be traced to the mine it came from." It was an unprecedented undertaking, but it resulted in a computer which simply refused to fail: 1,400 hours of operation produced not a single in-flight failure. Following the lunar program's conclusion, a test conducted at MIT that saw one of the Apollo computers run continuously, cycling through endless commands in the hope of provoking a malfunction, was eventually abandoned. Everyone simply got bored waiting for something that was clearly never going to happen. But building, testing and qualifying the bespoke computer for manned spaceflight had been dauntingly expensive in terms of time, money and effort. Beyond the free-spending Apollo years, such a specific solution would be out of reach.

For Skylab, thankfully, NASA was able to take another approach. With space available in inverse proportion to money on the more austerely funded program, an off-the-shelf computer was chosen. Already flight-rated, radiation-hardened and combat-proven in Vietnam aboard Air Force jets like the Republic F-105 Thunderchief and the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, NASA went for the 4Pi. Two of them. NASA built in redundancy: if one of the computers failed, the other took over.

The first 4Pi was delivered to the Manned Spacecraft Center in December 1969, four months after the MOL pilots first arrived at Houston. Assigned to work on the Skylab program, Bob Crippen and Dick Truly felt immediately at home. Off the back of MOL, Crip looked at Skylab and saw similarities. I can contribute here, he thought. And he jumped in.

• • •

While Crip and Truly worked on the Skylab computers, the Space Shuttle Office faced a far more demanding computing challenge in which redundancy was just one part of the puzzle. As significant was the fact that the Shuttle was going to have a wholly digital flight-control system. There would be nothing connecting the pilot's stick and rudder pedals to the airplane's flight control surfaces but binary code passed through the wires of electrical circuits.

It was untried technology until, on May 25, 1972, a white-painted Vought F-8C Crusader taxied out to Runway 04 at Edwards. At 10:14 a.m. the jet, decorated with a kinked, lightning-effect blue cheat line and bearing the legend "DIGITAL FLY-BY-WIRE" along the fuselage, accelerated along the lake bed and into the air. Apart from the gleaming NASA paint scheme, the jet looked the same as the F-8s Dick Truly had so enjoyed flying during his time with a frontline naval fighter squadron. Inside Truly's jet, though, cables ran directly between the cockpit and the control surfaces. When he pulled the stick, his own effort was directly responsible for deflecting the ailerons. In NASA's jet, all of that had been removed. Instead, the pilot's control inputs fed straight into a computer which then told the ailerons what he intended them to do.

The flight marked the beginning of Phase I of the fly-by-wire program. Using a single Apollo computer, NASA knew they could expect 99.9 percent reliability. But their ultimate goal was more ambitious than that: the aim was to achieve reliability of 99.9999999 percent. Even as the fly-by-wire F-8 flew for the first time, the team at the Dryden Flight Research Center, NASA's facility at Edwards AFB, were thinking ahead to a system that might get them to that figure. And that had them circling back toward the family of IBM computers so familiar to Crip and Dick Truly from the MOL and Skylab programs.

• • •

By the time Skylab was ready for launch on May 14, 1973, Bob Crippen had spent so much time down at the Cape that he was catching flak in the Astronaut Office as the "Mayor of Cocoa Beach." After three and a half years commuting between Houston, Huntington Beach and Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, he, along with Hank Hartsfield, was part of the team taking the spacecraft through the final phases of integration and prelaunch checkout. And as members of the Skylab support crew, he, Hartsfield and Dick Truly were also working CapCom (Capsule Communicator) for the launch. It was their job to talk to the astronauts. NASA's first space station was ready to go and MOL pilots, using experience gained on the doomed Air Force program, had been instrumental in helping get her there. Having worked so hard to prepare Skylab, Bob Crippen looked forward to finally seeing her go, then to manning CapCom once the crew joined the space station on orbit. By the end of the day, though, his keen anticipation of what was to come had gone.

## TWENTY-ONE

#### Houston, 1973

One thousand miles to the east of Mission Control, in a storm of fire and thunder, Wernher von Braun's great Saturn V rocket cleared the tower of Pad 39A for the last time. At the top of the stack, the familiar shape of the Apollo spacecraft, capped with its probe-like escape tower, was absent. In its place was a thicker, blunter aerodynamic shroud covering the Skylab workshop beneath it. As the rocket slowly cleared the tower, control of the mission passed from Launch Control in Cape Kennedy back to Houston.

Dick Truly, sitting at the CapCom console, monitored the vast rocket's progress. Although plugged in at his station, today's mission, Skylab 1, offered little opportunity for him to contribute. The space station itself was launched unmanned. Truly would be fully involved the next day when Skylab 2 launched on board a smaller Saturn 1B, carrying her crew, Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz, to their orbital home. For the second flight, Truly was CapCom for ascent, rendezvous and docking.

As the Saturn V accelerated skyward, telemetry inside Building 3, home of Mission Control, suggested that the space station's micrometeoroid shield had deployed early. Initially it was dismissed as a false reading by flight controllers, then signals reached Houston that there was also a problem with Skylab's large solar panels. Further telemetry from ground stations in Madrid and Carnarvon, Australia, confirmed the worst: Skylab was in serious trouble. Just how much remained unclear, but it looked as if both the solar wings needed to supply the bulk of the spacecraft's electrical power were gone. Alongside this, the micrometeoroid shield appeared also to have been lost. And while the chance of Skylab being struck by a meteoroid was remote, the shield, lined with gold foil, performed a more important function as a sunshade. Without it, the temperature inside the space station was expected to rise as high as 170°F. While NASA tried to interpret the data coming in, the launch of Conrad, Kerwin and Weitz was pushed to the right five days and the next launch window on May 20, and then again to May 25. From the ground, controllers maneuvered Skylab to try to reduce its exposure to the sun. Sleep became scarce as engineers at Houston, Marshall Space Flight Center and McDonnell Douglas worked round the clock to produce a solution to the heating problem.

• • •

At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, engineers were dealing with technical problems of their own. Operation number 4338, the latest G3 spy satellite mission, had been scheduled for launch on May 14, but because of a fault with the power supply to the bird's camera-focusing mechanism, on May 15, when America woke up to newspaper headlines flagging NASA's woes, the Titan 3-B launch vehicle was still on the pad. Inside the Air Force's Blue Cube Satellite Control Facility, the launch of the NASA space station had stoked a few regretful memories of the MOL program. But when Captain John Earl Essing, working for a program control division within the GAMBIT program office, read the reports about Skylab, the thought struck him that, once they got 4338 flying, they might be able to help. The work to develop a satellite-to-satellite—"sat-squared"—imaging capability prompted by the Soviet announcement of its antisatellite weapon was ready.

Initially, Lee Roberts, the colonel in charge of the GAMBIT program, said no, he wasn't prepared to risk compromising the 4338's primary intelligence-gathering mission. The sat-squared team persisted, though, and in the end were able to persuade the colonel to share the proposal with Major General David Bradburn, director of the Air Force's Special Projects Division at the Blue Cube. If Bradburn said yes, the colonel told Essing and his comrades, he would eat his hat.

• • •

At first, Max Faget's design team at Houston planned to fly the Apollo spacecraft in close formation with Skylab while one of the astronauts, standing in the hatch, rigged a sail-like sunshade, made from orange parachute nylon, to the space station. Under intense media scrutiny, the team worked on their design in the old centrifuge building, but in the end, their efforts were usurped by rival effort. Also conceived inside Houston, the successful design was for a device that worked like a parasol. Four spring-mounted arms supported a silver shade made from a Mylar, nylon and aluminum material used to make space suits. With the arms folded around a central pole, the parasol could be pushed through one of Skylab's small-diameter scientific airlocks before, arms extended, the square sunshield was lowered back down into position.

As intense as the effort to improvise the sunshield had been, it still left unresolved the issue of Skylab's electrical supply. Skylab 2, the first twenty-eight-day mission, would be able to just about get by on power from the distinctive windmill-like solar array that was used to power the solar telescope and the fuel cells in the Apollo CSM. But without power from the main workshop's solar wings, the longer missions planned for Skylab 3 and 4 just weren't possible.

Engineers in Houston and Huntsville explored ideas for portable solar arrays and even the launching of a specially designed solar module that might be docked with the space station. But there was also a glimmer of a chance that the first Skylab crew might be able to fix her up themselves. Data suggested that part of the micrometeoroid shield was preventing one of the solar arrays from extending. If that were the case, the astronauts, using tools, could maybe free it. Rick Nygren, an engineer who'd worked alongside Dick Truly and Bob Crippen at McDonnell Douglas during the space station's development, was in Building 5 at Houston, trying to assess the merits of various tools, including large bolt cutters, that might be launched with Conrad and his crew. It was a frustrating process, hampered because he and his colleagues didn't fully understand what had actually caused the malfunction. In wrestling with it, the difficulty faced by engineers was that it was unclear, based solely on the telemetry, just what sort of a tangle of wires and broken machinery would face the astronauts arriving at Skylab for the first time.

• • •

In his office at Sunnyvale Air Force Base, Major General Bradburn listened to the pitch made by his junior officers. If they took the decision to lose nine days from the first part of the planned GAMBIT-3 mission and drop one of the two film capsules early, then assuming that Blue Cube mission controllers were successful in bringing the bird's Eastman Kodak camera to bear on Skylab, it would be possible to get the images to NASA before the first crew launched on May 25. Bradburn liked it. Skylab, he thought, was a national asset, its success inextricably linked to America's position in the world. To get the pictures, though, would mean flying the satellite outside its design limits. To forestall any possibility of protest from the bird's manufacturers, angry at seeing an Air Force decision jeopardize the financial incentives they earned from successful missions, Bradburn brought them inside the tent. All said they'd waive their right to protest. And Bradburn made the case to John McLucas, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.

At 4:40 p.m. GMT on May 16, 1973, Mission 4338 began with a successful launch from Vandenberg that placed the satellite into a 110-degree inclination orbit. With a perigee—the point closest to Earth—of 86 miles and an apogee—the farthest point—of 247 miles, there was no stage at which the reconnaissance satellite's orbit would pass outside that of Skylab. It meant that to capture an image of the space station, mission controllers would have to point their bird's cameras away from Earth and toward outer space. For one day only, a KEYHOLE satellite was going to play the part of space telescope. It seemed a fitting challenge for the Air Force Satellite Control Facility, whose unit crest, beneath an orbiting eagle, carried the Latin motto Inveniemus viam vel faciemus—"We will find a way or we will make one."

• • •

By May 21, Marshall's Space Simulation Branch had done their best to vandalize an underwater model of Skylab with flailing cables and twisted metal. With four days to go until the launch, Paul Weitz, one of the space station crew, donned a space suit before being lowered into the neutral-buoyancy tank at Marshall to test the tools being evaluated for the imminent repair mission. Of the hopes that the astronauts might be able to effect a repair, Skylab's program manager said, "We're not too optimistic." But as Weitz practiced freeing the model's trapped solar array in the water tank, the Air Force was ramping up its effort to help.

• • •

At 9:20 in the morning on the twenty-first, John McLucas telephoned the director of the CIA and left a message saying that unless he heard otherwise he would authorize the recovery of Mission 4338's first film bucket that afternoon. Its early return would cost the NRO about 15 percent of the expected imagery of what he described as low-priority targets. But with the closest passes between Skylab and the GAMBIT-3 having taken place on the eighteenth and nineteenth, David Bradburn needed to see what, if anything, his men had managed to capture.

• • •

Before lunchtime on the twenty-first, a Lockheed JC-130B of the 6594th Test Group took off from its home base, Hickam AFB in Honolulu. It flew east before circling over the Pacific. High on the big turboprop's back, behind the cockpit, was a distinctive blister containing the direction-finding equipment it needed to perform its mission, which was one of the most classified and specialized roles in the Air Force. Since 1959, the 6594th had been retrieving film recovery capsules ejected from orbiting US reconnaissance satellites as they descended toward the Pacific by parachute. The unit's crest bore the motto "Catch a Falling Star."

At 4:01 EST, trailing a recovery loop from the ramp at the rear of the aircraft, the JC-130B crew lassoed what they referred to only as "the system" and reeled it into the airplane's cargo hold. En route back to Oahu, they locked their prize into a specially built shipping container.

After returning to Hickam, with "the system" already flying east on board an Air Force C-141 jet, the JC-130B's captain bought two rounds of drinks for his crew, one at the officers' club and another in the enlisted men's club. Twelve hours later the undeveloped film arrived for despooling, developing and inspecting in Eastman Kodak's lab in Rochester, on the shores of Lake Ontario. Seven hours after the spooled film had arrived at the lab, hopes that Mission 4338 had captured Skylab were beginning to fade. Then, as two photo interpreters hunched over light tables scanning a 2-foot-long frame from the satellite's take using small magnifying loupes, the mood changed.

• • •

In an effort to try to cover all eventualities, the collection of tools Rick Nygren and the team in Building 5 were assembling was starting to look like a weight problem. Then two men in dark suits and ties came in, escorted by a NASA engineer. One of them was carrying a manila envelope. Nygren and his colleagues were ushered over and invited to look through the sheaf of 8-by-10-inch photographs it contained. All NRO satellite imagery carried the security classification "RUFF." These pictures bore a more exceptional label, "RUFF SENSITIVE," meaning they were spy satellite pictures of another spacecraft. All the prints showed the damage to Skylab in detail. For the struggling engineers it was as if someone had turned on a light.

As they pored over the images, the nature of what was causing the problem became immediately clear. It looked like good news. A single piece of aluminum strapping had snared one of the solar arrays. Some kind of telescoping tool, like those used to work on power lines, Nygren thought, with a jaw cutter on the end was all they needed.

The men in suits returned the photographs to the envelope and, before they left the room, elaborated on the nature of their contribution to treating Skylab's sickness. "You never saw those photos," they said, "and we've never been here."

• • •

Back in California, at the Air Force space HQ where the MOL astronauts had enjoyed such high hopes of establishing a manned Air Force presence in space, it was as if, thought David Bradburn, the unmanned world sent a salute to the manned world.

• • •

Three days after the NRO shared the images of Skylab with NASA, the Skylab 2 mission launched from the Cape carrying the space station's first crew. By the time the men from the Department of Defense arrived in Houston, the plan to repair Skylab was already well advanced, and while the photographs had only confirmed visually what NASA's telemetry was already telling them, they provided useful detail. Enough, at least, to give Nygren pause for thought. It would be interesting to know, he wondered, what would have happened if we'd never seen those pictures.

The Air Force effort was significant in other ways. First of all, of course, it demonstrated that Blue Cube controllers had developed the ability to take sat-squared images; but at the same time it also underscored the continuing lack of a real-time photo-reconnaissance capability from space. Even with the decision to sacrifice part of the planned intelligence mission, it had taken days for the pictures to get to NASA. If DOD needed to know what was happening in the Soviet Union now, it still couldn't be done. Ironically, that kind of urgent, real-time intervention was exactly the kind of capability that might have been offered by a crew of military astronauts flying aboard the Air Force's canceled Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Had Mission 4338 not already been waiting on the pad, had NASA required information more immediately, and had that information been more critical, the NRO would have been powerless to help. It was clear that if RUFF SENSITIVE pictures were going to be available whenever they might be needed, a satellite capable of delivering real-time imagery was still a necessity.

• • •

The first Skylab crew blasted off from Pad 39B at Kennedy on board their Saturn 1C rocket in the early hours of May 25. Seven and a half hours after launching they at last had the space station in their sights. "Tally-ho the Skylab," reported Conrad, "we got her in daylight at 1.5 miles, twenty-nine feet per second."

"Roger, Pete. Copy," acknowledged Dick Truly at CapCom. But the day's fun had barely started.

As the Apollo spacecraft held formation with the space station, Conrad described the damage. "As you suspected," he told Truly, "solar wing one is completely gone off the bird." The second solar array appeared to be partially deployed but trapped.

Trying to capture decent television footage, though, was proving to be a headache. "A worse possible frigging place to point this thing . . ." Paul Weitz complained as he tried to manipulate the camera from within the confines of the command module.

Yet despite the difficulty, the astronauts' inspection and the glimpses they'd conveyed to Mission Control suggested it might be possible to release the remaining solar wing.

The crew pulled on their helmets and gloves, and from Mission Control Dick Truly cleared them for a "local flight" tucked in alongside Skylab. Inside their own cramped spacecraft, all three astronauts were now enclosed in full space suits.

Three hours after they'd first joined on the space station, Conrad carefully maneuvered the CSM close enough for Weitz, with his legs held by Joe Kerwin, to reach out of an open hatch to attempt a repair using a cable cutter and universal tool. As they passed across the northern Pacific, out of reach of NASA's relay stations, the public affairs officer in Houston explained that "they should be, according to the timeline, just in the process of closing the hatch." But when the crew were reacquired by the California tracking station it was immediately obvious that things were not going according to plan.

"Is there a black piece that's curled up due to the lip next to the green?" asked Conrad from inside the command module.

"I don't understand what you're talking about," replied Weitz.

Conrad was stumped: "Hell, I can't see it," he told his crewmate, "the fucking hatch is in the way."

Listening to Conrad and Weitz from the CapCom console, Dick Truly chuckled as he reminded them, preoccupied as they were with the task, that the world was once again listening in. They might want to tone it down a bit.

After struggling on for another ten minutes without success, Weitz conceded defeat: "I hate to say it, but we ain't going to do it with the tools we got . . ."

Forced to abandon the repair, Kerwin pulled his crewmate back in through the hatch before they repressurized the capsule in preparation for an attempt to dock with the space station.

Two hours later they were still trying. Four attempts to hard dock with Skylab had been unsuccessful, the mechanism failing to engage and lock. Running out of ideas, Mission Control hastily worked out plans to have the dog-tired crew back away from Skylab, park the CSM in an identical orbit 20 miles behind the space station, and get some sleep. But there was one final option, and Pete Conrad thought it was worth trying, "because," he told Dick Truly, "if we ain't docked after that, you guys are out of ideas."

If Conrad's crew once again donned their helmets and gloves it was possible to crawl up into the tunnel hatch of the CSM and start snipping wires—a procedure to bypass the automated latching sequence that they'd had explained to them on the ground just once. The job done, Conrad guided the CSM in to mate with Skylab a fifth time. "Give it ten seconds," Truly had told them. The crew counted to an agonizing seven before, with the rat-a-tat of a machine gun, the twelve latches finally engaged, connecting their spacecraft to the space station. They'd rolled a six with their last throw of the dice.

From the moment the Saturn 1C cleared the tower, every word of Houston's communication with the crew had been spoken by Dick Truly. Over twenty-two hours of it. Given what the crew themselves had endured, he knew he was hardly in a position to gripe, but he was exhausted. With the completion of a successful rendezvous, though, he was off duty, finally relieved after a marathon stint on CapCom.

With Bob Crippen, he grabbed a six-pack of beer and headed outside. Getting away from the space center's buildings, the two friends made their way to a bench overlooking Clear Lake, adjacent to the center, and talked.

After the time he'd spent on the workshop up at Huntington Beach, Truly had felt at one point that he was in with a chance of winning a place on one of the Skylab crews. They'll come to their senses and let me fly, he thought, but it had turned out to be a pipe dream. Both he and Crip had now been astronauts for over seven years without getting anywhere near orbit. Inevitably, there were occasional low points, but they enjoyed the work and, more importantly, the math was clear enough. Crip may still have felt like they were second string next to the Apollo astronauts, but with the end of the lunar program, that group's number was becoming increasingly depleted as they retired from NASA in search of new challenges. The Astronaut Office was small and shrinking, and as a result the MOL guys were moving up the ladder.

Of their fellow MOL veterans, Hank Hartsfield, Don Peterson and Bo Bobko had switched their attention to the Space Shuttle as soon as their support of the Apollo program came to a close. All three were assigned to work on developing the orbiter's groundbreaking flight control systems. At the end of 1972, Gordo Fullerton was down at the Cape to shut the hatch on Apollo 17, the last moon mission, before being given responsibility for the layout of the orbiter's cockpit. The Apollo capsule, he thought, the worst cockpit ever designed by man, and he relished the prospect of doing better. When the last crew returned home from the Skylab program, Crip and Truly would be working alongside him at the heart of the Shuttle program. In on the ground floor, thought Crip.

But that was for another day. A shattered Dick Truly managed to finish only a single beer before hitting a wall. He just about had the energy to get home before crashing out.

• • •

The next day, after entering the space station, the Skylab 2 crew successfully erected the ad hoc parasol, which slowly began to bring the temperature inside the workshop down to manageable levels. For nearly two weeks they struggled with the lack of power caused by the absence of the two solar wings, switching off lights, eating food at room temperature and restricting their scientific work until, on June 7, Conrad and Kerwin climbed into their space suits and left the space station. Armed with tethers, hooks, the cable cutter and even a dental saw taped to the front of one of the space suits, they worked for three hours to free the trapped solar panel. It was hard physical work. At one point, Conrad's pulse raced to 150 beats per minute with the exertion. But after Kerwin managed to gain real leverage by standing on the hull of the space station secured by a rope, they overcame the big wing's resistance and it suddenly came free. Thrown from Skylab by the force of his own effort, Kerwin floated out into space attached to an umbilical line. He looked back and smiled with relief. They'd done it. Seeing that solar panel fully deployed and beginning to warm up in the sun was, he thought, the prettiest sight I've ever seen in my life.

• • •

In California, at NASA's Ames Research Center, Hans Mark had followed the Skylab crew's labors with a keen interest. If his time spent on the Apollo 13 Accident Investigation Board had been a turning point for Mark in his appreciation of the value of manned spaceflight, the job done by Conrad, Weitz and Kerwin had reinforced his change of heart. Once skeptical, the Ames director was fast becoming a champion. Looking forward to the Space Shuttle program, Mark would be more than just a convert to the cause; he would become a powerful advocate for what humans might add to the nation's future space endeavors.

• • •

In nurturing and manhandling Skylab to life, NASA had pulled triumph from near disaster. It was a worthy companion to Apollo 13 in any list of the agency's greatest hits. But less than a month after the second crew were launched, the Astronaut Office was forcibly reminded of the inherent risks of leaving terra firma when news spread that one of their best and brightest was fighting for his life in intensive care at the University of Texas Hospital. This time one of the crew of Apollo 13 had really hurt himself.

## TWENTY-TWO

#### Houston, 1973–74

Fred Haise knew he'd made his break on the lead airplane early. Now, as the two aircraft approached the Galveston field in formation, he was too close. As he lost sight of the leader below the nose of his own machine he decided that, rather than risk overrunning the runway, he'd best take the old Vultee BT-13 Valiant around the circuit for another approach.

From inside the cockpit, the "Vibrator," as she was known to a generation of World War Two American airmen trained to fly in them, felt familiar enough. From the ground, though, it was a different story. The little piston-engine trainer was one of nine BT-13s bought by Twentieth Century-Fox to impersonate Imperial Japanese Navy "Val" dive-bombers in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! Sporting Japan's distinctive red rising sun insignia and wearing spats around the fixed undercarriage, the old warbird looked the part. Now she belonged to the Confederate Air Force, and Haise, along with his friend Joe Engle, was one of a handful of volunteer pilots who flew reenactments of the Pearl Harbor attack at air shows around the country. Flying mock dogfights was what astronauts did for fun.

Haise advanced the throttle and felt the familiar buzz of the twin-bladed propeller as his machine accelerated along the track of the runway. Then, just as he approached the end of the strip, the 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine quit on him. In an instant, he was processing his options. He was too late to put her down on the runway. Ahead there was shallow water which he knew would catch the airplane's fixed undercarriage and flip her straight onto her back, submerging the cockpit. Drowning didn't appeal. Trading speed for height, he banked to the right toward what looked like a cattle pasture surrounded by trees. To avoid them he decided to eke out his glide to reach a dirt field beyond. From here on it was straightforward. Haise had flown unpowered landings in everything from gliders to F-104 Starfighters. The old trainer settled into her approach with Haise, relaxed and on top of the situation, gently guiding her in. No drama. But what had looked from the air like an empty field was actually a construction site. Because of the angle of his approach, Haise was unable to see the deep foundations already dug into the ground. As he gently dead-sticked the BT-13 onto the deck, one of the main wheels dropped into a trench and threw the little plane into a cartwheel before it landed upside down, skidding backward along the surface. Then it caught fire. And the cockpit was jammed shut.

He was lucky not to have broken any bones, because now, with flames licking around him, Haise had to kick his way through the Plexiglas canopy to get out of the burning aircraft. By the time he was free he'd suffered second- and third-degree burns across 65 percent of his body. Ahead lay three months of agonizing treatment in the University of Texas Hospital as Dr. Larsen, an Army-trained specialist from the next-door Shriners Burns Hospital for Children, kept him swathed in bandages twenty-four hours a day, removing them only to scrape off the scabs to prevent immobilizing scarring from forming. During the critical first three weeks, friends, family and the Astronaut Office worked a three-shift system to make sure that Freddo was never on his own. For Haise himself, throughout it all, the worst of it was the thought that he might not fly again.

• • •

Without an engine, as Freddo's crash landing illustrated, an airplane cannot stay in the air. It's coming down, it's just a question of when. Every aircraft design has its own glide ratio, which represents the relationship between the height it will lose over a given distance of forward flight. A modern, lightweight, long-winged competition glider might achieve a glide ratio of as much as 50:1. If it were launched from a mile-high mountain, it would land 50 miles away. An airliner like the 747 would glide to a point 15 miles away, while a puddle jumper like the Cessna 172 could cover 9 miles before running out of sky. In the lower atmosphere, the Space Shuttle, a marriage of a big slab-sided fuselage with a short wingspan, would manage a glide ratio of just 4:1. Those large-area delta wings the Air Force wanted, while they might provide extra lift at hypersonic speed and on the fringes of space, meant that as she approached an airfield the orbiter lost height like a winged brick, and without engines there was no possibility of a second chance if a first attempt to land went wrong.

That seemed like a big risk to take with a returning Space Shuttle, and there were early plans to equip the orbiter with air-breathing jet engines that could swing down after reentry and allow her to fly like a normal airplane. It felt as if that added an obvious margin of safety. But it also added weight. Too much. Chris Kraft, the hard-nosed, tough-talking director of the Houston space center, described the problem succinctly. "With jet engines," he said, "we couldn't lift a damn pound into orbit." The orbiter would be unpowered.

• • •

In the opening credits of the hit TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, pilot Steve Austin, played by Lee Majors, sustains massive injuries in a plane crash. "We can rebuild him," the voiceover intones, and Austin emerges better, faster and stronger from his experience. But the footage used at the beginning of each show of an aircraft tumbling across the ground was real, and the test pilot in the cockpit, Bruce Peterson, didn't have access to the technology enjoyed by his fictional counterpart. He suffered a fractured skull and serious facial injuries, and would ultimately lose the vision in his right eye as a result of his 1967 crash at Edwards in a "lifting body"—an aircraft without wings that used lift generated by the aerodynamic properties of the fuselage alone to glid, unpowered, safely back to the ground after being dropped at height from beneath another aircraft. Peterson's accident was the exception in what had otherwise been a long and successful program. Inside NASA, and especially within the Astronaut Office, there was confidence that jet engines were a belt-and-suspenders luxury the Space Shuttle could do without.

A decision on how the orbiter was to land, though, addressed only half the problem. Without engines of her own, there was still the question of how she was supposed to get from Rockwell's California factory to Florida, where she was to be launched. Transportation by sea was a possibility, but each fourteen-day journey was costed by Rockwell at $20 million. Nor did it offer any solution to getting an orbiter to and from the high desert where Edwards was located. NASA's Langley Research Center supported a proposal for a vast, specially designed transport aircraft called Virtus that would have been the largest heavier-than-air flying machine ever built, with a wingspan nearly two and a half times greater than that of a 747, but this was dismissed as too big, too ambitious and too costly, even putting aside the time it would take to develop. It was unnecessary in any case. Anticipating the requirement to air-launch a prototype Shuttle in a series of unpowered flight tests in 1976, John Kiker, a NASA engineer and self-confessed aviation enthusiast, had already been hard at work on an alternative. And his inspiration came from an unlikely source.

In the late thirties, the range of Britain's new Imperial Airways Short Brothers C-class flying boats was insufficient to provide a transatlantic airmail service. The airline's technical manager, Major R. H. Mayo, realized that if he could mount another, smaller aircraft on top of the big C-class, then launch it off the back at the limit of the bigger airplane's range, he might have a combination that was capable of bridging the gap. The resulting Short-Mayo Composite, as peculiar a concept as it seemed, worked as advertised.

Air-launched American aircraft, like Yeager's X-1 or the X-15, had always been dropped from beneath the carrier aircraft, but, inspired by Mayo, Kiker started to explore whether the major's concept could be successfully adopted by the Shuttle program. He corresponded with Major Mayo's widow, who was only too happy to share her late husband's reports. There were just two contenders for the job of giving the orbiter a piggyback: the USAF's new C-5A Galaxy transporter, then the biggest airplane in the world, and the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, the world's biggest airliner. Kiker was given data from both companies and realized that in all three key areas, propulsion, aerodynamics and structural strength, both of the heavies were up to the job. Encouraged by Houston's engineering boss Max Faget, Kiker took his proposal to the orbiter program manager, Aaron Cohen, whose reaction was straightforward. "This," he said, "is absolutely the dumbest idea I've ever seen in my life."

Kiker was undeterred. And, although his hands were tied, Faget remained encouraging. It was exactly the kind of uncomplicated engineering solution he liked. "I can't give you any money, but," he suggested, "if you can do it with the models . . ."—and he authorized Kiker to take home whatever materials and instrumentation he needed. As an internationally respected radio-controlled model maker and pilot, Kiker had also had the same thought. He was already hard at work on a radio-controlled version of the Shuttle using a one-fortieth-scale plastic foam model which he planned to launch from the back of another radio-controlled plane.

Fortunately, Kiker didn't just have Faget on his side; there was also Hewitt Phillips, a model-making friend, who just happened to be head of Flight Dynamics at NASA's Langley Research Center. In frustration at Cohen's resistance, Kiker called Phillips and urged him to intervene. Although reluctant to get involved, Phillips knew Kiker was right, and shortly after he sent a message to Houston a smiling Chris Kraft told Kiker, "Well, I think you're crazy, but we've been directed to do it. Apparently we'll do it." It worked like a dream. And NASA got to work on a full-size version.

Boeing and Lockheed were commissioned to produce studies on using the 747 airliner and C-5 military transport, respectively. While in the summer of 1974 NASA requested a pair of C-5s from the Air Force, the decision was soon reversed. There were worries that bolting a Space Shuttle to the back of a C-5 would block its high tailplane and make it uncontrollable. At the same time, the Air Force would always have had first call on the C-5s and, in the event of war, could have pressed their jets back into military service. But in the end, money made the decision easy. The midseventies oil crisis had forced a downturn in commercial aviation which put NASA in a position to buy not rent. Lack of demand meant nearly new jumbos were being mothballed in lines at aircraft boneyards like Roswell. As a result, NASA picked up a nearly new 747-100 from American Airlines at the knockdown price of just $16 million. One careful owner, not many miles on the clock.

In Seattle, Boeing brought a member of the big jet's original engineering team out of retirement to oversee the work of converting her from an airliner into what NASA had imaginatively christened a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft—or rather, of course, an acronym of that: SCA.

Meanwhile, Astronaut Joe Engle—still Houston's go-to guy for a stick-and-rudder job—traveled to Seattle to fly the orbiter off the back of a 747 in Boeing's simulator. It provided further proof of concept. Yet despite all the evidence, there were still people inside both NASA and Boeing who just couldn't quite bring themselves to believe that trying to fly and launch an orbiter off the back of a 747 wasn't going to result in a fireball.

## TWENTY-THREE

#### Houston, 1974

It wasn't the kind of request you often heard in the Astronaut Office. So when, after moving to the Shuttle program, Crip said, "Hey, I'd like to work on the computers," his boss, T. K. Mattingly, wasn't going to say no. Mattingly, bumped off the crew of Apollo 13 after being exposed to German measles, had subsequently flown as John Young's command module pilot on Apollo 16. Now he was putting his workaholic tendencies to good use running the engineering and development side of the Astronaut Office.

"Go ahead, Crip," Mattingly told him.

His eagerness to have Bob Crippen devote himself to interface between man and machine reflected a degree of unease among the pilots that the Shuttle's flight control would be handled entirely using fly-by-wire technology, which was still very much in its infancy. But in Crippen he had the right guy on the job. The IBM AP-101 computer chosen for the Shuttle may have been, Crip thought, essentially obsolete, but it was also familiar, being the latest iteration of the 4Pi computer that had been at the heart of both the Air Force MOL space station and Skylab. What the old processor lacked in sophistication it made up for in robustness and dependability.

The key to achieving the required levels of reliability using an affordable, off-the-shelf computer like the AP-101, though, was redundancy. NASA calculated that if they used three synched computers, they could expect computer failure to cause the loss of a Shuttle three times every 1 million flights. If they added another, however, the odds against a catastrophic failure looked dramatically more favorable. Harnessing four computers together pushed that probability back to 1 in 250 million flights. Still not entirely happy to trust in the machines, NASA also included a fifth, backup computer, programmed not by IBM but separately by Rockwell. If a fatal software bug, endemic to the work done by IBM, somehow slipped through the net, the uncontaminated Rockwell machine would bring the Shuttle home. It all served to underline just how dependent she was on those computers. But at the same time, she had to be. The orbiter was unique in being at once a launch vehicle, a spacecraft and an airplane. There had never been such complex control requirements combined in a single vehicle, and it put her beyond the capabilities of unaided human pilots. Without those computers, the orbiter was unable to function, fly or survive—a dodo.

With the selection of the AP-101, it was unlikely that the reliability of the hardware was going to be a major issue. Instead, software engineering was thrust into the spotlight.

The complexity of the programming task that lay ahead was compounded by the limited memory they had to play with. It was a story that was familiar enough to Crip and Truly from their work on Skylab when the 16K memory available across both computers continually hampered the programmers' efforts. Forty years later, an average smartphone would offer around 65,000 times the memory available to Skylab's software engineers. Recognizing that it had underestimated in the past, NASA tried to be smart when it came to anticipating the requirements of the Shuttle. When the orbiter's manufacturer, Rockwell, said in its winning bid that its space plane would need 32K of memory, NASA doubled it: across the four primary computers, NASA expected the orbiter to have 256K of core memory. It was soon apparent that even this wasn't close to being enough. As the software requirements grew, so too did the capacity of the computers until each of the AP-101s offered 104K of memory. It still wouldn't have got you far trying to play Grand Theft Auto. Nor, as it turned out, was it enough to get the orbiter into space and back. The three-hundred-strong team of IBM programmers working on the Shuttle's flight control software would eventually need over 700K of memory, stored on magnetic tape mass-memory units and loaded onto and dumped by the AP-101s as required for different phases of flight.

The coding language they used to sap that precious storage was called HAL/S. Given the challenges involved, it was little wonder that some drily speculated that it had been named after HAL, the evil, sentient computer star of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• • •

While work progressed on the computers in Houston, in California, NASA's Ames Research Center was making a crucial contribution to another of the Space Shuttle program's long-pole items: the heat shield. At the program's inception, Hans Mark had drawn attention to the challenges posed by the development of a thermal protection system for the Shuttle. Now much of the responsibility for tackling them lay with the engineering teams at Ames, and that was just the way their ambitious director wanted it.

Prior to his arrival, there had been rumors that the center had been earmarked for closure. As the new boss, he had no compunction about using concerns over that to force through his own agenda. His aim was to ensure Ames became indispensable. He led by example, creating an air of urgency. Displaying a prodigious capacity for hard work, Mark was at his desk by six every morning, firing out memos known as Hans-o-grams that left no one in any doubt about his attention to the detail of their work. He set the pace with twelve-hour days, and seven-day weeks, determined to foster a more robust, forceful approach to the way Ames went about its business. Plugging gaps in his own knowledge, he learned to fly to better understand the work being done by his people and read the classics on the red-eye special to and from Washington in order to have at his fingertips the killer literary reference or aphorism that might win a debate.

Mark instigated a plan to make Ames's unique collection of wind tunnels, simulators and mainframe computing power into, in all three cases, the best in the world. All were vital to the development of the Space Shuttle. Since 1973, the center's 3-foot hypersonic wind tunnel, capable of generating airflows over scale models of the Space Shuttle of up to ten times the speed of sound, had been operating two shifts per day, every day, in pursuit of the tens of thousands of hours of tests that were necessary. The simulators allowed different flight controls and configurations to be explored and the new computers meant a leap forward in the country's ability to predict complex fluid dynamics—a capability that was, again, critical to understanding the Shuttle's aerodynamics beyond where they could be physically tested.

It was the center's thermal protection branch, though, that had the primary responsibility—as they had for the Apollo capsule—for establishing the best way to protect the Shuttle from the heat of reentry. It would make the job of safeguarding the returning lunar spacecraft look like child's play.

The bottom of the Apollo capsule was the size of a large dining table. The area needing protection on the Space Shuttle was more akin to a tennis court. And when it came to reentering the Earth's atmosphere, that made a vast difference in the numbers NASA had to contend with.

The kinetic energy carried by the 85-ton orbiter orbiting at 17,500 mph was roughly the same as that of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier displacing 100,000 tons. If it were traveling at over 500 mph. When, on reentry, the spacecraft made contact with the atmosphere, most of that staggering amount of energy would be converted to heat, generating temperatures that, in a compression shock wave pushed out ahead of the orbiter's passage, would be similar to those found on the surface of the sun.

Just to compound the problem, the Shuttle's heat shield had to be reusable, and that precluded the use of the kind of one-shot ablative shield used for Apollo. The process of ablation harnessed the furnace of reentry itself to burn the outer surface of the heat shield into a carbon-rich, low-conducting layer that then protected the material below. Hot gases generated in the process provided an additional layer of protection, as well as carrying away heat. In successfully doing its job, though, it was destroyed. That wouldn't work for a reusable spacecraft.

In Houston, the possibility of using some of the exotic metal alloys was quickly abandoned when tests revealed the extent to which the metal buckled and flexed when subjected to extremes of temperature. Not only would that have led to gaps in the integrity of the heat shield, but, equally important, it would have disturbed the smooth flow of air over the surface of the Shuttle at hypersonic speeds.

That left just one game in play: ceramics. Rockwell proposed to cover the Shuttle in tiles made from an aluminum silicate called Mullite, found almost exclusively on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland. Rival manufacturer Lockheed had a similarly unlikely-sounding suggestion: they wanted to use sand.

In the early sixties, the company had begun research into heat-resistant materials made of compacted silica fibers. In contrast to metal, silica offered lightness, low heat conductivity, and was as indifferent to extremes of heat and cold as the surface of the Sahara Desert. To find silica sand of the necessary quality, Lockheed turned to Johns-Manville, the largest fiberglass manufacturer in the world. Using sand from Missouri, Johns-Manville produced 99.9 percent pure silica fibers which Lockheed then mixed with water to produce a slurry. Contained in molds, it was then fired in kilns to produce ceramically bonded blocks of a material that weighed just 9 pounds per cubic foot. Ninety percent of each block was porous. Just one-seventh the density of water, its extreme lightness was, like balsawood or pumice stone, unexpected, but this wasn't its only remarkable characteristic. Within seconds of being removed from a kiln, and while the center was still glowing red hot, the tiles could be picked up by their edges with unprotected fingers. Similarly, they could be plunged straight from a furnace into a bucket of cold water without damage.

Five months of competitive evaluation produced a clear winner in Lockheed's silica tile, which survived all that testers at Ames could throw at it, emerging intact. And yet even the silica tile still didn't offer sufficient protection for the parts of the Shuttle exposed to the greatest temperatures: the nose cone and the leading edges of the wings. For these, something of Dyna-Soar, the old Air Force space plane canceled a decade earlier, survived.

Faced with the same need to protect Dyna-Soar, a material called reinforced carbon-carbon was developed. A composite made of graphite and carbon, it was hard and lightweight but brittle, although it had the unusual—and useful—quality of increasing in strength as it got hotter. It was happy to endure temperatures above 3,000°F.

With silica tiles on the bottom and reinforced carbon-carbon protecting the nose and wing leading edges, the only remaining area for concern was the top of the orbiter—the leeside in terms of exposure to air friction. And here, Chief Engineer Max Faget didn't think it needed anything at all.

Faget had said the same thing about the Apollo capsule. The designer kept hold of a small piece of blue wrapping plastic to remind him. Gut instinct had told Faget that the leeside of the capsule wouldn't need heat protection during reentry, but he was persuaded to play it safe by adding a thin layer of thermal protection. When the capsule returned from space, however, the fine Mylar dust sheet covering that had protected it prior to flight was still happily in place.

Faget was wrong, though, about the Shuttle. In March 1975, the Air Force would share the classified results of test programs that showed that heating on the top of the vehicle would be greater than expected. While the temperatures on the leeward side would be far less severe than those suffered by the bottom, they would still be more than the 350°F that could conceivably be handled by unprotected aluminum. As a result, the least vulnerable areas of the Shuttle's airframe, like the tops of the wings or the payload bay doors, were blanketed in a heat-resistant Nomex felt.

When construction began of the first, prototype orbiter in Rockwell's Downey plant it seemed that, with the materials for the Shuttle's heat shield settled, at least one of the program's long poles was well on track. What no one was paying attention to, though, was another issue highlighted by Hans Mark in his 1972 letter: that of bonding the heat shield to the Shuttle's airframe. Nor would they until there was an airframe they could use to actually try putting it to the test.

Construction of that first, prototype Space Shuttle orbiter started on June 4, 1974. It would be another year before final assembly began.

## TWENTY-FOUR

#### Houston, 1974

To practice landing on the moon on Earth, John Young and the other Apollo commanders had trained using a vertical takeoff machine called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. To simulate lunar gravity, the thrust of a single jet engine created the impression that the vehicle weighed only a sixth of its Earth weight and allowed the pilot to use smaller peroxide thrusters to control its descent from 300 feet. It was a triumph of function over form, its unshrouded pipes and plumbing suggesting someone had found a way to allow the engine room of a ship to take to the air. Nicknamed the "Flying Bedstead," John Young just called it "the Thing." But, in tandem, the simulations provided by the LLTV and the ground-based lunar module simulator ensured that by the time Young touched down in the Descartes Highlands in Orion, the Apollo 16 lunar module, his technique was so polished and familiar that his heart rate never exceeded ninety beats per minute.

Other than that, though, and the suborbital spaceflights of the X-15, and the moon landings themselves, there had been no occasion on which any astronaut had needed to practice landing. They fell back to Earth in capsules, hoping for the best, before splashing down into the sea beneath a trio of colorful parachutes. With the introduction of the Shuttle, the crews were going to have to land every time. And perfectly. NASA needed to find an airplane that could pretend to be a Space Shuttle in which the astronauts could become as familiar with landing it as Young had been with Orion on the moon.

• • •

Training to fly one aircraft by using another to mimic its flying characteristics wasn't an entirely new idea. While early efforts to manipulate the feel of the way an aircraft flew had begun during World War Two, it was 1957 before Cornell University's Aeronautical Laboratory first flew an aircraft that would go on to become the longest-lived test aircraft in history. The variable-stability Lockheed NT-33 was a simple straight-winged jet trainer fitted with an analog computer and additional flight controls that allowed it to emulate the flying characteristics of nearly anything. By the midseventies the little jet had provided convincing impersonations of aircraft as wildly diverse as the rocket-powered X-15, the British BAC TSR-2 strike bomber, the Fairchild A-10 tank-buster, the McDonnell Douglas F-15 and F/A-18, and the General Dynamics F-16. Ahead lay impressions of the F-117 stealth fighter and even the F-22 Raptor. Not bad for an aircraft designed in the forties. That all this was possible using a single superannuated jet trainer didn't help NASA narrow down their choice for a flying Space Shuttle simulator.

While a tandem-seat jet like the T-33 or T-38 could be made to perform like the orbiter, its slim cockpit could never provide any sort of facsimile of the spacecraft's flight deck. The Shuttle was the size of an airliner. It made sense, maybe, to try to employ one. Both John Young and Joe Engle flew up to Seattle to fly Boeing's 737, the company's now practically ubiquitous short-haul workhorse. The Shuttle, big, draggy and low on lift, plunged to Earth in a way that was entirely at odds with the requirements of a passenger jet, but the astronauts found that, if they flew the 737 in as dirty a configuration as possible with the wheels and drag flaps down, then applied reverse thrust to the two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-15 turbofans in flight, they could reproduce the steep descent of the orbiter. The Boeing jet might have been ideal, but, unlike the big 747 bought to carry the Shuttle on its back, it wasn't available at a knockdown price. That put it out of reach.

An entirely different proposition was the Grumman A-6 Intruder, a two-engine all-weather US Navy attack jet. Unlike most of its peers, the A-6 was unusual in seating its crew side by side like the Shuttle. Built like a tank, there was no doubt that the big carrier-based jet was robust enough to stand up to the stress of the repeated 30-degree dives ending in a 2-g pullout that the Shuttle landing training required. Some inside NASA had their doubts about whether anything but a military fast jet would be up to it. But despite the pilots sitting next to each other, the relatively cramped cockpit of an A-6, with all-round visibility from its big glasshouse canopy, again didn't feel much like the flight deck of the orbiter.

The choice, ultimately, came down to one of two different executive jets: the twin-engine Gulfstream G-II or the four-engine Jetstar proposed by Lockheed. In some respects, the latter held the advantage. Lockheed had already converted a Jetstar into a variable-stability flying simulator, but where it fell down was in its inability to deploy reverse thrust in flight. Short of trailing a parachute behind it, there was no other way of simulating the high drag of the orbiter. And so NASA selected the G-II and, wearing nothing but green primer, a pair of the jets flew from the Gulfstream plant in Savannah, Georgia, to Grumman's factory on Long Island for conversion.

• • •

Soon, John Young had plenty more to worry about than choosing a Shuttle training aircraft.

With the retirement of America's first man in space, Alan Shepard, in 1974, the mantle of chief astronaut passed to Young. He wasn't sure he was NASA's first choice as Shepard's replacement, but then self-aggrandizement had never been John Young's style. Even his high school yearbook had suggested that, "with your quiet poise, you seem a bit modest." Young himself just put it down to age. "If you're the oldest guy there, they let you run it."

Certainly the astronaut corps was becoming increasingly depleted as Apollo and Gemini veterans moved on, but for all his deflections, Young was the perfect candidate. No sooner had he returned to Houston after his first spaceflight aboard Gemini III than he was asking Deke Slayton to put him on the next available flight. Now a veteran of four space missions, his desire to fly in space remained undimmed. So too did a deep conviction that the first job of any astronaut, whether on the ground or on orbit, was to preserve the life of other astronauts. Young brought a characteristically forensic eye to the detail of the Shuttle program. In his new role, he wanted the Astronaut Office to have a say on every aspect of the Shuttle's design and construction, and he would lead by example, picking and probing with sharp, droll memos at anything he thought was a cause for concern.

Before he could devote his complete attention to the Shuttle, however, Young first had to oversee the success of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. From behind the desk of his new corner office in Building 4 he couldn't help a wry smile as he considered the $100 million price tag for American and Russian engineers developing a new androgynous docking system. It had been deemed important that the new device avoided either side having to, as he put it, "get the business" from the other when the two spacecraft mated—in the toe-to-toe standoff of the Cold War this really mattered. While that problem was worked at—and considerations of who was getting screwed by whom aside, the docking module did need to be able to harmonize the different atmospheres used by US and Soviet spacecraft—Young's astronauts embarked on a series of exchange visits.

For the MOL guys it represented another step closer to the heart of things. Bob Crippen, Dick Truly, Bo Bobko and Bob Overmyer were named as support crew for the Apollo-Soyuz mission. And for a group whose experience was so firmly rooted in the Cold War, it was a tantalizing prospect.

## TWENTY-FIVE

#### Moscow, 1975

Each of the astronauts had made his own preparations for the visit to the Soviet Union. Without much hope of success, Dick Truly and Gene Cernan asked whether their wives, Cody and Barbara, could join the delegation on what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to travel behind the Iron Curtain. After weeks of silence following the request, Truly had more or less given up when, shortly before the trip, it was suddenly approved. Meanwhile, Bob Overmyer had more material concerns. Alarmed at the prospect of being fed caviar for breakfast he packed a suitcase full of all-American snacks and peanut butter to take with him to the USSR.

In fact, the Soviets had done all they could to make the Americans feel at home, building a sort of replica Holiday Inn for them at the Star City training base. It was a welcome gesture, although there were occasional gaps in the standard of service. And evidence of much closer attention in other areas. While unpacking after arriving at the hotel, Cody Truly opened the room's closet to find it bare. "There are no coat hangers," she told Dick. Five minutes later there was a knock on the door and a maid handed over a stack of hangers. From then on, before bed, Cody circled around the room talking to the furniture, unsure of where the bug was hidden. "Dasvidanya, lamp! Dasvidanya, bed!"

After Cody returned home, the four ex-military astronauts saw with their own eyes locations like Star City and the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan that, within the confines of the NASA Astronaut Office, they alone had studied in detail from classified National Reconnaissance Office satellite imagery while assigned to the Air Force MOL program. So familiar were they that Dick Truly was convinced he could have sketched the layouts of the Soviet's launch complex from memory.

At the conclusion of their official duties they were invited to stay on for the May Day celebrations. The MOL crew jumped at the opportunity. As they walked across Red Square before the parades, Overmyer—still, while detailed to NASA, on active duty with the Marine Corps—turned to Air Force pilot Bo Bobko and said, "I never doubted that I'd be here. I just always thought it would be at two hundred feet and in full afterburner . . ."

• • •

During a visit to Houston by the cosmonauts, Apollo-Soyuz crew member Deke Slayton invited his new friend Alexei Leonov—who, after Gagarin, was the USSR's most celebrated spaceman—to look at the work being done on the Space Shuttle ground-based simulator. It was a chance for the Russian to learn more about what was the most advanced, exciting manned spaceflight program in the world. Much to Slayton's surprise, though, Leonov displayed no interest whatsoever. His reaction struck Slayton as strange and off key. He could only speculate that the cosmonaut was under orders not to get involved in any conversation about the Shuttle so as to avoid awkward questions about Soviet plans.

At dinner, John Young asked the delegation's chief engineer more directly. "Aren't your engineers working on building a Shuttle?"

"Of course," he replied.

Young noticed a man sitting to the other side of the engineer—KGB, guessed the American astronaut—dig his elbow into the man's ribs.

"Well, maybe we are," the engineer backpedaled.

• • •

In Moscow, the reaction to NASA's pursuit of the Shuttle had, at first, been curious and skeptical, but it soon became paranoid. Nor were Soviet concerns entirely without foundation. The idea of an orbital space plane had originally gained prominence as a bomber.

Austrian engineer Eugen Sänger first pitched the idea of a rocket-powered intercontinental bomber to the Austrian military in 1933. Just three years later, the Luftwaffe invited Sänger to set up a rocket research laboratory to rival that of Wernher von Braun's equivalent Wehrmacht facility. While von Braun poured his efforts into developing the V-2 missile, Sänger aspired to build a machine he called Silbervogel—"Silverbird"—which, with the United States' entry into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, acquired the name "Amerika Bomber." Launched by a rocket sled along a 2-mile monorail, Silbervogel was to be hurled to a height of 12,000 feet before lighting its own main engines. After accelerating to a speed of 14,000 mph and a cruising height of over 500,000 feet, it was then supposed to skip off the edge of the atmosphere to extend its range across the continental United States to a landing site in Japanese territory in the Pacific. Sänger even highlighted potential targets and annotated maps with the projected destruction from a bomb dropped at hypersonic speed by the Silbervogel. In truth, the Amerika Bomber was never more than a pipe dream, and had it been properly developed it would have faced—among other things on a long list—insurmountable thermal problems. But Sänger's rakish-looking Silverbird became the starting point for any postwar discussion of orbital space planes.

After the war, Walter Dornberger, the ex-head of the rival Peenemünde rocket research facility, tried to tempt Sänger to the United States. Employed by the Bell Aircraft Company, Dornberger was working on a top secret project known as BoMi, a contraction of "Bomber Missile," for the USAF. All Dornberger's early designs drew on Sänger's Silbervogel research. Sänger declined the invitation to move to the United States, deciding that he'd rather stay in Paris, where he was feted by the French and appointed the first president of the International Astronautical Federation. The Americans, though, weren't the only ones who'd got their hands on Sänger's work.

Enthralled by the idea of the Silbervogel, Joseph Stalin directed the NII-I design bureau to explore the possibility of developing the idea as a means of delivering Soviet nuclear weapons. Such was Stalin's impatience, however, that while that study was ongoing, he dispatched his son Vasily, along with an Air Force officer, to kidnap Sänger and spirit him back to Moscow. The operation fell apart because of Vasily's distraction by Parisian high society and the defection of his Air Force comrade to the UK. Blissfully unaware that his abduction had even been a possibility, Sänger stayed put.

The failure to capture Sänger didn't end Soviet interest in space planes. In the late sixties, the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau, better known as MiG, conducted work on a small space plane—or Kosmolyot—similar in concept to the USAF's canceled Dyna-Soar design. Known as "Spiral," four different versions of the vehicle were envisaged, including one capable of carrying a 3,500-pound space-to-surface nuclear missile. While some work on the program continued into the seventies it was effectively sidelined in favor of establishing a permanent lunar base, considered by its supporters to be a proper riposte to the brief visits to the moon achieved by the Apollo program. As the Communist Party's secretary for defense matters, Dmitry Ustinov, pointed out in 1974, "the task of conquering the moon remains especially important to us . . . our main general task."

But the Shuttle kept nagging away at the Soviet leadership. First of all, a June 1974 study calculated that there would be no cost savings from choosing a reusable Shuttle over expendable rockets. Compounding this, Mstislav Keldysh, now president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, then concluded: "We do not see any sensible scenario that would support the shuttle for scientific uses." The goals of the Shuttle program announced by NASA seemed to make no sense, so they drew their own conclusions.

It clearly, decided a senior figure in the Ministry of General Machine Building that had responsibility for any Soviet shuttle, had a focused military goal. The generals convinced themselves—largely on the basis of the USAF requirement that their shuttle be capable of launching from Vandenberg and returning after a single orbit—that this goal was to deliver a first-strike nuclear weapon. The idea of a Communist moon base was soon rapidly losing ground to a Soviet shuttle that would be capable of doing whatever the US Shuttle could do, whatever that might be.

In the summer of 1974, Valentin Glushko, the new head of the USSR's leading rocket design bureau, NPO Energiya, reluctantly set up a department dedicated to studying Shuttle-type reusable space planes, knowing full well that to build one would likely end his own hopes of a permanent Soviet presence on the moon. Such was the way Cold War decisions got made.

• • •

Back in the United States, at a party at Bob Overmyer's house, Bob Crippen was talking with Vladimir Dzhanibekov, one of the cosmonauts assigned an Apollo-Soyuz support role similar to his own. After becoming a cosmonaut in 1970, the Russian had enjoyed some involvement with a training group set up at Star City in 1966 in anticipation of the development of the Spiral space plane. Dzhanibekov kept that piece of information to himself. Instead, he raised his glass and proposed a toast: "Crip, may our guns never cross!"

Just in case they did, though, on June 25, 1974, the Soviets had launched a space station into orbit, Salyut 3, armed with a 23 mm rapid-fire antiaircraft cannon capable of firing 850 rounds per minute.

• • •

The Cold War, as much as it had given birth to Apollo in the first place, drove the decisions made by East and West in the seventies. The threat of the now canceled Mach 3 North American B-70 Valkyrie bomber had prompted the design of a new Soviet interceptor, the MiG-25 "Foxbat," capable of similarly high speed and altitude. This brutally powerful airplane quickly claimed one of the time-to-climb world records set by John Young back in 1962 during Project HIGH JUMP. In response to the big MiG, the USAF in turn demanded even greater performance from their new fighter, the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. And, in early 1975, the F-15 seized back for America honors won by the Foxbat, reaching a height of over 98,000 feet from a standing start in less than three and a half minutes. But the "Streak Eagle," as the modified, bare-metal F-15 was dubbed, was already something of an anachronism. The Eagle was the last new American frontline military aircraft design to set outright world records with its flight performance alone. For a generation of pilots and engineers who'd been cast in the heat of the fifties and sixties, when every new design that tumbled out of an American factory—Skystreaks, Sabres, Skyrays, Super Sabres, Crusaders, Voodoos, Delta Darts, Starfighters, Phantoms—seemed to fly higher and faster than what had come before, only the Shuttle, yet to fly, offered to raise the bar again. Almost a distillation of everything that had been learned over the course of an exhilarating quarter of a century, it was still as big a challenge as the American aerospace industry had ever faced.

At seventy-five major subcontractors spread throughout every state except Alaska, tens of thousands of people were busy working to meet it. Alongside them, NASA facilities across the country saw the Shuttle occupy ever greater resources in personnel, time and effort, and Ames Research Center in California was no exception.

In the early days of the space program, the resistance of material to extreme heat was tested by placing it in the path of a rocket engine exhaust. By the time of NASA's decision to use silica tiles for the Space Shuttle's heat shield, Ames Research Center was using arc jets: small, hot-gas wind tunnels that used an arc of electricity to superheat the air to above 10,000°F. In effect, they were generating their own lightning. And to do it, their 20-megawatt arc jet used enough electricity to supply a town with a population of 7,000 people. It had been possible to test the Apollo heat shield using samples little bigger than a postage stamp. The Shuttle needed more. In 1971, Hans Mark secured funding for the construction of a brand-new 60-megawatt arc jet capable of testing full-scale tile panels at Mach 6 for half an hour at a time—twice as long as they'd be subjected to heating by a returning Space Shuttle. Once it came online four years later, it, like the wind tunnels, was soon running double shifts.

At Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama—made famous under Wernher von Braun's leadership—work continued on the development of the Space Shuttle main engines. Just building test facilities for the new engine had cost Paul Castenholz, the Rocketdyne engineer who'd led the successful bid for the contract, his job when major cost overruns and delays pushed back the start date for testing. Although 1975 saw the first ignition of the advanced new engine, the test firing lasted just half a second. As for delivering an operational, man-rated rocket engine that in a split second would transform liquid hydrogen from a temperature near absolute zero into a flame hot enough to boil iron? They were still at the foot of the mountain. More obvious progress was being made elsewhere on the two other elements that completed the Shuttle stack: the external tank, or ET, and the solid rocket boosters, always known as SRBs.

In Michoud, Louisiana, nine miles east of New Orleans, at the Martin Marietta plant building the Shuttle's huge external fuel tank, the first money spent was on a mural. James Odom, the program manager, commissioned a $7,000 full-sized painting of the tank on the wall of the plant. He regarded it as money well spent.

Of the three elements that made up the Shuttle stack, the ET was the easiest to take for granted. It neither spewed fire during the ascent, nor did it return to Earth. Instead, tracked by the Department of Defense, the disposable tank burned and broke up on reentry, depositing what remained from its blazing descent in the Indian Ocean. It was also going to be the biggest single structure ever launched into space. Over 150 feet long and, at 27 feet, 6 feet wider than the fuselage of a Boeing 747, it could more or less have engulfed the Saturn IB rocket being prepared to carry the Apollo-Soyuz crew into orbit. In commissioning the painting, Odom wanted to remind the Michoud workforce of the size and complexity of the job they had to do. Not only did the tank have to carry the liquid hydrogen and oxygen that slaked the main engines, it also acted as the backbone of the whole stack. As well as being lightweight, it had to be strong enough to cope with the complex, asymmetric loads generated by the two SRBs attached to its sides with explosive bolts and the orbiter itself. And unlike the similarly large Saturn V first stage, which, with its five engines mounted directly underneath, had a clean, simple, vertical thrust vector that ran straight along the length of the whole rocket, the ET had to accommodate the thrust of the orbiter's three main engines, coming in from the side, offset diagonally from the centerline. As an additional challenge, Odom's team also had to engineer a structure that could cope with extremes of temperature. Beneath the skin, the liquid hydrogen and oxygen were stored at cryogenic temperatures below their boiling points of –297°F and –423°F, respectively, and yet the surface of the tank had to endure the temperatures generated by its acceleration to hypersonic speeds. It would require a third of an acre of thermal protection to insulate it.

Odom soon followed his $7,000 investment in art with rather more substantial spending. As the only element of the Shuttle configuration that would be used once, then thrown away, he needed a production line. Around $1 billion was invested in tooling early in the program to generate the capability to build ten to fifteen tanks a year. If flight rates required more, he had the space to ramp it up. At least he didn't have to worry about trying to load it onto the back of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and flying it around the country. While a study by Boeing had concluded that it was feasible to strap an ET to the back of a jumbo jet, the decision, in the end, was taken to carry the big tank from Michoud to the Cape by barge.

With the orbiter being ferried by air, that just left the job of getting the two solid rocket boosters to the Cape. And the relationship between this last element of the Shuttle stack, and their chosen method of transportation, was a subject often explained with what was purported to be a history lesson.

Even members of NASA's senior management liked to tell people that the 12-foot, 2-inch diameter of the boosters—the biggest ever built—was dictated by the width of a horse's ass. As they told it, America's railroads used the same gauge as those in Great Britain, where the distance between the tracks was based on the width of a cart track, which in turn was based on the width of two horses. It was a good story, and it didn't really matter whether or not it stood up. What was certain was that the big solid rockets were going to travel to Florida by rail from their manufacturer, Thiokol, in Utah.

The SRBs were made up of four separate segments, each given its own railroad truck, that were then assembled one on top of another like cylindrical building bricks, into a finished nearly 150-foot-tall booster rocket. Long lead items for the SRBs were ordered alongside the design and engineering of the tooling needed to build them. The previous year, drop tests had been conducted from B-52 bombers to test the parachutes that would carry the spent boosters down into the Atlantic, where they were to be retrieved by boat and towed back for refurbishment and reuse.

• • •

Houston, meanwhile, remained the lead center for the orbiter itself. And they were happy to welcome back one of their own, now also repaired and returned to work.

When Fred Haise rejoined the Shuttle program office after his accident, there was little outward sign of his ordeal, but beneath his pants he now looked as if he permanently wore socks. The protection from the fire afforded him by his thick leather flying boots had created a clear line between where he had been burned and where he had not. Freddo's return was a welcome one. Without him around, Houston was just a touch less energetic. People would have to remember once more to be mindful of the possibility that, as they reached for a door handle, Freddo might burst through in the other direction, but his humor and committed approach to everything he did was good to have around again. So too was his capacity to absorb, learn and process information fast. In the program office it was coming at him from every direction.

Each morning at 7:30, Haise met with Orbiter Program Manager Aaron Cohen, and the two of them would cycle through the progress of every one of the subsystem divisions contributing to the development of the orbiter. Everything funneled through Cohen's office and nothing could be changed without his say-so. Decisions made had to be binding or they would lead to increased cost or delay. What Haise and Cohen filtered through were called RIDs—review item discrepancies—passing only those they deemed likely to impact schedule, budget or safety up the line to Bob Thompson, the Space Shuttle program manager, and John Yardley, the associate administrator for manned spaceflight at NASA HQ in Washington. The final Critical Design Review undertaken prior to Rockwell cutting metal on the first orbiter prototype produced around 15,000 RIDs. Not for nothing did Cohen sit below a sign on the wall of his office reminding people that "better is the enemy of good." It was certainly proving to be the case with the software.

A fellow astronaut once claimed Bob Crippen had "the best memory of any man I've ever known." Then one day, as the two of them made their way to the simulator, Crip, poised to enter a PIN number on a keypad to get in the building, just stood there at a loss. Eventually he admitted, "It's gone."

"What are you talking about?"

"That number's gone," Crip said. "I'll never remember it again."

His colleague figured he'd just pushed too much stuff into his head. Crippen was enduring a similar problem with the computers. Along with Gordo Fullerton, focusing on the orbiter's cockpit, he worked with the pilots to establish what they wanted to see on their displays, then he and the software team did their best to accommodate them; but it often proved too much for the limited memory available from the computers. The way T. K. Mattingly boiled it down, the crews wanted video games, the engineers needed the memory required to actually make the vehicle fly. There was only one decision to be made.

As much as anyone else in the Astronaut Office, Crip wanted the displays on which he was working to show comprehensive, easy-to-read schematics of the orbiter's systems. You wanted to see at a glance how current was flowing from the three fuel cells, or where valves in the hydraulic system were opening and closing. But when the effort to illustrate it caused the software design to outgrow the computer's memory, it was Fred Haise who managed the scrub to get the software back within the capabilities of the computers, while Crip had to work out what was possible. The two of them worked through the problem together. Too often the solution came down to having to display the raw data numerically, pushing the burden of interpretation back on the astronauts. Every time, Crip and Haise then had to sell that to the crews. "This," Haise told them, "is what we're going to have to live with." Unless they did, they weren't going to fly. And that meant that once the imminent Apollo-Soyuz mission had been and gone, American astronauts would be grounded.

• • •

On July 15, 1975, a flawless launch from Pad 39B at Kennedy seemed to be a fitting way to end the fourteen-year career of Wernher von Braun's Saturn rockets. And on CapCom duty in Houston, it was Dick Truly who talked to Tom Stafford, the commander of the NASA crew, as the American and Soviet spacecraft circled the globe in formation.

"I've got two messages for you," Truly began. "Moscow is 'go' for docking, Houston is 'go' for docking. It's up to you guys. Have fun."

With that, he'd initiated the last major act of the Apollo program. The immediate future of American manned spaceflight now lay with, and only with, the Space Shuttle. And more than any other group within the Astronaut Office, that program belonged to the MOL guys.

# PART TWO

# Mojave
The hangar doors opened, this wonderful ship came rolling out, and the Air Force band played the theme from Star Trek . . . I want to thank NASA for giving us the Enterprise, Gerald Ford for naming it the Enterprise, the Star Trek fans who insisted that it should be named the Enterprise. To the scientists and engineers who make these wonderful things happen, I say to all of them and the Enterprise: live long and prosper.

—Leonard Nimoy

## TWENTY-SIX

#### Houston, 1976

Chris Kraft had never been shy of asserting his authority over the Astronaut Office. At the heart of mission control since the earliest days of the US space program, he'd made sure that men like Scott Carpenter or Wally Schirra, once they'd incurred his ire, never flew in space again. Since taking over as director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston in 1969, Kraft had remained as irritated as he'd ever been by what he saw as the astronauts' inclination to play their cards too close to their chests. He understood why, on occasions, test pilots might be reluctant to ask for help or open up—to relinquish control to nonfliers outside the fraternity—but spaceflight demanded total transparency. If you don't tell me everything, Kraft thought, there's not a thing I can do to help. Kraft had always admired the way Deke Slayton performed his role as director of Flight Crew Operations, but he was also a test pilot, and with the conclusion of the Apollo-Soyuz mission and Slayton's long-awaited and well-earned spaceflight, Kraft saw an opportunity to move his own man into position.

First, he gave Slayton the job of managing the upcoming Approach and Landing Test program at Edwards, the flight test program that would see the prototype orbiter launched off the back of the 747 currently undergoing conversion at Boeing. With Slayton moved on, in January 1976 Kraft told George Abbey, his technical assistant, "You're the new director of Flight Operations."

For an ex–Air Force pilot inspired to get into the space program because he liked Buck Rogers, Abbey's roots were unusual. Although born in Seattle, George Abbey considered himself Welsh American. His mother was from Laugharne in South Wales, home of Dylan Thomas. Her cousin, the local milkman, used to drink with the poet every afternoon at Brown's Hotel. Dick the Milk was a pallbearer at Thomas's funeral. Abbey's mother and father met in London before emigrating to Seattle, where Abbey watched planes fly in and out of the Boeing plant. After training as an Air Force pilot he studied for a master's in electrical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology, then, on graduating, returned to Seattle, assigned to the canceled Air Force Dyna-Soar space plane program before a detail to NASA followed. He never left, impressing successive bosses with the depth and breadth of his insight into the work being done at Houston.

As technical assistant, he'd been Kraft's eyes and ears; before that, he had performed the same job for Kraft's predecessor as center director, Robert Gilruth. Abbey, Kraft reckoned, knew "where all the bodies were buried."

In his new role, it was now Abbey's job to make the final decision, alongside Chief Astronaut John Young, on flight assignments. It's unlikely that meetings between the two men were characterized by too many wasted words. Neither had a reputation for being garrulous. At the top of their list as they began work together was choosing the crews for the upcoming Approach and Landing Test program being run by Deke Slayton.

They discussed the possibilities at length, considering the merits of every member of the Astronaut Office, but in the end only two criteria drove their decision: who was most qualified to command and who would best complement them.

Young and Abbey were quick to agree that the two obvious commanders, because of their track records as test pilots at Edwards prior to becoming astronauts, were Fred Haise and Joe Engle. No one else could offer their depth of experience in aerodynamic flight testing, and with Freddo now returned to Class 1 flight status after his accident, it was time for him to get back on the horse. To sit in the right-hand seat as pilot—NASA had chosen to label the Shuttle crews commander and pilot, rather than bruise egos by calling anyone a copilot—they chose Dick Truly and Gordo Fullerton, because of their familiarity with the orbiter's systems. Two other MOL veterans, Bo Bobko and Bob Overmyer, were picked as support crew. Over the year ahead they'd work hand in hand with the two primary crews and, during the test flights themselves, man CapCom or fly chase planes alongside the orbiter as she swooped down from 25,000 feet toward Rogers Dry Lake Bed.

After the desperate disappointment of losing his seat on Apollo 16, Joe Engle was thrilled. Anxious to see what he could apply to the Shuttle program from his experience flying the X-15, he couldn't quite suppress a feeling that this—developing a first winged orbital spacecraft—was what he had always been at NASA to do. Inevitably, there were some who felt shut out. After Hank Hartsfield's having worked so closely on the orbiter's flight control system, his unhappiness at not winning a place on one of the crews was extreme. He couldn't understand why he hadn't been selected. His frustration didn't come as a surprise to Dick Truly, as delighted at his own selection as Hartsfield was downcast. All of them had been at NASA for the same length of time. I lucked out and got it, thought Truly. But it wasn't luck.

In Engle and Haise, Young and Abbey had a pair of test pilots whose track records made them demonstrably among the best in the world. But they could only fly the test program if the Shuttle's computers, electronics and hydraulics were working. Those systems, as Joe Engle put it, "needed to be nursed and cared for during the flight." Truly and Fullerton could do that. With that requirement in mind, perhaps only Bob Crippen had real cause for feeling he'd missed out, but he didn't see it like that at all. He was surprised enough to see his friends Truly and Fullerton get the nod, and happy for them. Not least because it seemed to bode well for when the time came to pick crews for the Shuttle's first flight into space.

• • •

Under Deke Slayton's management, Haise, Engle, Truly and Fullerton parceled out the work that needed to be done in preparation for the first glide back to Edwards in the summer of 1977. Joe Engle took the lead on the flying aspects of their preparation, working on the hardware and flight profiles they'd need to train for the flights. He was also helping prepare Houston's new Shuttle Mission Simulator. Essentially a cockpit mounted on hydraulic pistons, it reproduced the movements of the Space Shuttle in flight, lending an extra layer of realism to the simulation. Truly, with Bob Crippen, followed the software development. Haise and Fullerton, meanwhile, ferried to and from the Rockwell plant in Palmdale, California, in T-38s, working with the company's engineers to prepare the orbiter herself. And she was something. Her vertical tail towered near 60 feet above the ground, requiring modifications to the Palmdale facility just to get her in and out. Unlike previous spacecraft, it seemed clear that she'd been built to do a job—to work—not just provide the bare minimum required to get astronauts from one place to another.

Three weeks after NASA announced the crews, Rockwell finished final assembly of the prototype that Haise, Engle, Fullerton and Truly would launch off the back of the big 747 carrier aircraft. Just four years on from Richard Nixon's announcement, NASA had something to show for its efforts. And two of the MOL guys had their first flight assignments.

• • •

In the same week that NASA announced the names of the crews for the Approach and Landing Test program, the Kremlin gave in to their nervousness about America's motives for building the Shuttle. In a decision that amounted to little more than a desperate state-sponsored effort to keep up with the Joneses, they finally committed to the development of a Soviet "Reusable Space System." The decree issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Council of Ministers stressed that special importance was attached "to increasing the defense capabilities of the country." The first three reasons for developing a Soviet Shuttle were given as:

• counteracting the measures taken by the likely adversary to expand the use of space for military purposes;

• solving purposeful tasks in the interests of defense, the national economy and science;

• carrying out military and applications research and experiments in space to support the development of space battle systems using weapons based on known and new physical principles.

"Purposeful tasks" may have been vague in the extreme, but there was no doubting that the Soviets anticipated the main role of their Shuttle to be military, a reflection of their belief that the US Shuttle, launched from Vandenberg, would, through performing a fleeting "dive" into the atmosphere before recovering to orbit, deliver a first strike against Moscow or Leningrad more quickly than Soviet forces could respond.

• • •

Just over a week before the first American orbiter emerged from the hangar at Rockwell's Palmdale plant, President Ford changed her name. In recognition of the country's 1976 bicentennial celebrations, the new prototype was to be called Constitution. Then an orchestrated campaign by Star Trek fans deluged the White House with over 100,000 letters arguing that Constitution should be named Enterprise in recognition of Captain James T. Kirk's iconic starship. Faced with what appeared to be the will of the people, Ford went with it. And on September 16, in front of a banner announcing that she was ushering in a "New Era in Transportation," the finished prototype, christened Enterprise, emerged into the California sun, towed behind a squat tractor that seemed overdressed in a special Stars and Stripes bicentennial paint job. Nearby, NASA displayed an Apollo capsule, highlighting just what a dramatic advance the new machine represented.

Fred Haise, Joe Engle, Gordo Fullerton and Dick Truly, all wearing crisp blue NASA flight suits, posed for photographs. Also there for the occasion were Mr. Spock, Mr. Sulu, Bones, Lieutenant Uhura, Mr. Chekov and Scotty—or at least the actors who played them—sporting the finest in safari suits and seventies fashion that dollars could buy. The occasion may have helped capture the imagination of the public—and with Enterprise's first flight still nearly a year away, NASA needed that—but within the Astronaut Office, the decision to name her after a spacecraft in a TV show was, for those who cared, the source of a good deal of eye-rolling and skepticism. Fred Haise wondered whether the Trekkies had realized that this Enterprise wasn't ever going to go into space. Dick Truly, who'd flown F-8s with the Navy's Fighter Squadron VF-33 off the deck of the real USS Enterprise, couldn't help but feel slightly annoyed by it. And so he just decided not to accept it, instead sticking to his own story that she was simply the latest vessel in a long, illustrious line. The third USS Enterprise had, after all, fought with distinction against Barbary pirates and, later, the Royal Navy. Truly's denial at least gave him a welcome opportunity to tease his Air Force crewmate Joe Engle with impromptu quizzes on naval history during dead time in the simulator. There was certainly plenty of that.

• • •

Unlike the Apollo simulators, the Space Shuttle sim used the same flight computers and software as the real thing. If a problem revealed itself in the sim, it also existed in the vehicle itself and needed to be isolated and fixed. There was no shortage of them. The crews could usually bank on getting no more than about two hours' flying into any four-hour sim session before they heard "Sorry, guys, we gotta stop; one of the computers has died and it's going to be fifteen minutes . . ." At least the simulator cockpit was warm. Sitting twenty-five feet away within the three-story-high bay, the simulator supervisors—known as SimSups—who ran the training were wrapped up in winter coats at their consoles even as the Houston summer was delivering 100°F and 100 percent humidity outside. To keep the banks of computers cool, it was always 55°F inside Building 5. Such was the frequency with which the simulator crashed that Engle and Truly christened her "Lucille" after a recent Kenny Rogers hit. With each new glitch or freeze, the sound of the two idle astronauts massacring "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille . . ." crackled through the SimSups' headsets.

It was frustrating for all concerned, but the simulator also offered Engle the chance to fly the orbiter in ways it would never be possible to do while sitting in the commander's seat of the real thing. If the SimSups tinkered with the simulator's settings, Engle could fly circuits, landing, taking off and landing again, something the unpowered orbiter was incapable of doing. And when asked if Jovial Joe ever repeated the trick he pulled in the X-15 by rolling the Shuttle through 360 degrees, other astronauts would just smile admiringly. It wasn't for them, perhaps, but they liked the idea that someone had the audacity to do it.

Nor was this the only way the simulator gave Engle the opportunity to demonstrate just how exceptionally gifted a stick-and-rudder pilot he really was. It was possible to detach the rotational hand controller—the joystick—from its mount in front of the pilot. Engle could pick it up, turn it backward and upside down, then continue to fly and land the orbiter so smoothly and precisely that the SimSups could barely tell the difference. It had them shaking their heads in awe, unable to understand how he managed to process something so counterintuitive. One of them, Jerry Mill, reckoned Engle could have brought a claw-foot bathtub back to a safe landing. Gene Cernan, who should have been Engle's commander on Apollo 17, claimed his former lunar module pilot "could probably have flown a lawnmower." There's no doubt that Engle would have relished the chance to give either a go. They just wouldn't, along with his stints flying around the hangar at the Bell Aircraft Corporation with his personal jetpack strapped on, have been recorded in a logbook. Engle stopped keeping one when the volume of flying he was doing just made it impractical to try to keep up. As far as he was concerned, flying the sim was a breeze.

The trouble was that his ability was actually masking a potentially serious problem with the orbiter's flight controls, which only the development of a new Shuttle Training Aircraft was beginning to reveal.

## TWENTY-SEVEN

#### Houston, 1976

Those at the meeting remembered it well. The first day of April 1976. The Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) program was running near six months late and 50 percent over budget. Houston Center director Chris Kraft was furious, angry enough to cuss like a docker as he bawled out the Grumman vice presidents responsible before throwing them out of the room, promising them that if he had anything to do with it Grumman would never get another contract out of NASA.

The main challenge had been the software needed to get a digital autopilot borrowed from a big McDonnell Douglas DC-10 jet airliner to make the two ten-seater business jets fly like Space Shuttles. The Gulfstream G-IIs that had been chosen for the job were heavily modified. The most obvious external evidence of this was a pair of large rectangular vertical fins bolted underneath the airplane to help reproduce the sideways forces the Shuttle could generate. Inside, the left-hand half of the cockpit was rebuilt to look like the Shuttle flight deck from the commander's seat, while behind the cockpit in the main cabin a console was installed for the computer tech running the simulation. The G-II's wing flaps, which normally extended backward and down to provide drag and lift on approach, were engineered to hinge up instead, providing the same drag, but dumping lift. Operating the Rolls-Royce engines' thrust reversers in flight at 90 percent power was causing worrying levels of vibration. It had some wondering whether the Gulfstream jet was going to be up to the job until further modifications managed to bring it under control.

There was something else though. Despite Joe Engle's lack of concern, the modified Gulfstream was displaying a worrying tendency to get trapped by a control problem called pilot-induced oscillation, or PIO. And there was a growing feeling that this was potentially serious.

Up at Edwards, someone once labeled PIO "the JC maneuver," because "Jesus Christ!" was the involuntary exclamation from pilots when it happened to them. It was a characteristic aggravated by the emerging fly-by-wire technology and amplified by pilot pressure.

If a pilot concentrating intently on, for instance, performing a perfect landing makes a control input and doesn't feel its immediate effect, he's likely to repeat the action. If there's any delay between his inputs on the stick and the action of the airplane's flight surfaces, then in repeating himself he'll have doubled up before the first demand's been carried out. Then, having commanded the plane to change its attitude twice as much as he had intended, he's got to respond just to bring it back to where he wanted it. If he feels no immediate response to this correction, he's going to double up on that too. Soon, like a driver trying to wrestle a fishtailing car on a skidpan, he's losing track of which control input is having what effect. He's behind the plane.

In the Shuttle, and the Gulfstream training aircraft that was designed to mimic it, the tendency to suffer from PIO was exacerbated by the characteristics of the delta wing and the huge barn-door-sized elevons required by the orbiter to grip the thin air at very high altitudes. At approach speed, when you pulled back on the stick, the effect of the elevons deflecting up to raise the nose was also to deprive the wing of a substantial chunk of its overall area and lift. And this meant that, before the orbiter climbed, as commanded by the pilot, it fell.

It was a combination that might have been designed to provoke PIO, and yet, while Joe Engle was aware that the STA might have a tendency toward it, it never caused him any trouble. In fact he was convinced it was an issue with the simulation, not with the Shuttle's own flight control software. In the ground-based sims in Building 5, which after all were using exactly the same software as the orbiter, he'd simply never provoked it.

Engle was a low-gain pilot. Like Charles Lindbergh or Chuck Yeager, he barely moved the stick, anticipating the need to do so and making small, necessary corrections in plenty of time. His inputs were smooth and progressive, never snatching at the controls. And in the relaxed environment of the simulator it was even less likely he would do that. In order to try to prove that the STA—and any PIO it suffered—was an accurate simulation, the program manager analyzed and compared control stick movements on three different simulators: a fixed-base cockpit that was bolted to the floor, the motion-based sim on hydraulic rams at Houston, and a vertical-motion simulator that moved through hundreds of feet in a hangar at Ames. With every extra dose of realism—and with it stress—the level of gain from the pilot, the firmness of his flying, increased. The simulation provided by the Gulfstream was valid. But if that was the case, then flaws in the way the Gulfstream flew were also going to be shared by the Space Shuttle itself. Left unchecked, this had the potential to lead to the loss of a Shuttle. For now, though, a workaround was concocted that kept the STA program on track. And that meant the astronauts could get a taste of what the new machine could offer them.

• • •

Although sitting in the left-hand commander's seat, John Young was just a passenger as he accelerated down the runway at El Paso International Airport in the Shuttle Training Aircraft for the first time. Next to him, Dave Griggs, the instructor pilot, was flying the Gulfstream from the right-hand seat, facing the half of the instrument panel carrying the jet's standard dials and displays. Griggs took off and turned north toward White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. Ten minutes later, at 35,000 feet above the lake bed landing point, Griggs lowered the STA's main landing gear, sending a low rumble through the airframe. Next he engaged reverse thrust and set the rpm at 92 percent, provoking a more forceful shudder as the two Rolls-Royce Speys fought the direction of travel. Griggs activated the hand controller on Young's side of the cockpit and told NASA's senior astronaut that the simulation was running.

In a steep glide, holding his airspeed at 280 knots, Young steered the jet down to a point 12,000 feet up and 7 miles out from the strip and rolled out onto long finals on a flight path toward the centerline of the runway. A little forward pressure on the stick and he bunted over into a 20-degree dive, using the attitude of the G-II to settle at 300 knots. The picture ahead was not one he was used to. Although Young had shot these steep approaches into White Sands in the T-38, its gear down and airbrakes flared to slow her progress, in the cockpit of the little jet trainer it was easier to get your bearings. Now, through the letterbox of glass provided by the Gulfstream's flight deck, he could see no sky, just the desert floor as they speared toward it. Then Young's approach came unstuck, forcing Griggs to take back control and climb out.

Chris Kraft credited his chief astronaut with "incredible flying skills," but in his first fifty flights in the new training aircraft Young aborted nine times. It was a measure of how singular and unfamiliar the Shuttle approach was even to seasoned test pilots. When Haise, Engle, Truly and Fullerton separated from the 747 aboard Enterprise there would be no option to abort. Young's initial batting average of four out of five wasn't good enough in an airplane with no engines. By the time the Approach and Landing Test program took flight at Edwards, landing the orbiter had to be second nature. But with the modified Gulfstream finally operational in spring 1977, the two crews had the tool they needed to ensure it was.

• • •

Joining NASA's squadron of T-38s and the two Gulfstream STAs was the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, the SCA, which, after its conversion from a standard 747, first took to the air after emerging from Boeing's Seattle plant on December 2, 1976. NASA, though, wasn't the only organization introducing new machinery to its fleet. Seven hundred miles to the south, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, December also saw the first flight of another brand-new vehicle.

There was no press release sent out to mark the occasion, but the launch of the new vehicle was no less significant for that. For the National Reconnaissance Office, it represented a revolution. Their new spacecraft was lofted south into a polar orbit of 96.93 degrees aboard a Titan IIID rocket from Vandenberg's SLC-4E launchpad on the nineteenth of that month. At first, those who took note of such things assumed it was the launch of another KH-9 HEXAGON. Then veteran space observers pointed out that the new spacecraft's orbit was a good deal higher than "Big Bird" had so far flown. In fact it was flying higher than any previous American spy satellite.

Five years after President Nixon had authorized development of the KH-11 KENNEN digital spy satellite, the first of the new birds was on sentry.

A month later, at 3:15 p.m. on the day after his inauguration, the new president, Jimmy Carter, was being briefed in the White House Map Room by the CIA's acting director, Hank Knoche. Knoche had brought with him a sheaf of 6-by-6-inch black-and-white photographs captured by the KH-11. He spread the pictures out on the big map table in the middle of the room for the president to examine. Although Carter had been briefed on the capabilities of the new satellite after winning the election the previous November, this was the first time he'd seen evidence of what it could do for himself. In fact, what he was looking at were the first images taken by the KH-11 KENNEN since, after a month of testing and checkout, it had become operational. The president leaned in and looked at the pictures in silence before a wide smile played across his face. The significance of the imagery was immediately clear. Taken just the previous morning, it had already been in the CIA's possession for over twenty-four hours. The NRO was now capable of showing the president what he needed to see, when he needed to see it. The American intelligence community finally had the access to real-time intelligence from space it had so craved. The danger that a Six-Day War might be fought and won before the NRO could respond was over. America's new commander-in-chief laughed approvingly and requested more imagery to share at the first meeting of his National Security Council the following day.

• • •

Since coming to Ames, Hans Mark had hardly become removed from the black world of classified military programs into which he'd first been inducted while at Livermore National Laboratory. The Ames wind tunnels had been used to test early stealth fighter designs for Lockheed's Skunk Works. There was a highly classified program to mount a high-intensity laser on a Boeing KC-135 for which Ames worked on fire control, systems engineering and, again, wind tunnel testing. And since 1971, when the first KH-9 HEXAGON spy satellite was launched, they had all been flown to Moffett Field for integration at Lockheed's Sunnyvale facility before being carried by road to Vandenberg AFB.

At the time of the MOL space station's cancelation in favor of the unmanned "Big Bird," Mark had been of the firm opinion that human involvement in space science and exploration was an unnecessary complication. He now advocated manned spaceflight with the zealousness of the convert he happily admitted to being. He'd even managed to add a now iconic human dimension to two unmanned spacecraft built during his time at Ames.

Deep space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in December 1972 and 1973 respectively; the former, after a journey that would take it past Jupiter and Pluto, was on course to reach Aldebaran, an orange giant star, in approximately eight million years' time. The program had been led by a team at Ames, and in the eyes of one of Mark's former students at Berkeley, Carl Sagan, the two spacecraft presented a unique opportunity.

Mark had followed Sagan's career with great interest, admiring both his ascent to a position as perhaps the world's best-known communicator of space science and his abilities as a scientist. With Pioneer 10 already at Kennedy being prepared for launch, Sagan telephoned him at Ames to pose a question: "What if somebody finds it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, what if somebody finds it?" Sagan repeated.

Soon, Mark was smiling, happy to go along with the suggestion that, in case it was discovered by intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the probe should include a message telling them who we are and where we come from. Sagan produced a design that included a line drawing of an unclothed man and woman alongside celestial maps and representations of the spacecraft itself, which Mark then had made up on lightweight metal plates at a local engraving shop in LA. Knowing that any formal request to NASA HQ would see the idea smothered by paperwork and analysis, Mark simply flew down to the launch site and attached it to Pioneer 10 without asking the question.

Mark had come to believe that mankind's destiny was to colonize space. His conviction, first sown in conversation with Wernher von Braun, was germinated by a study, funded by NASA and conducted at Ames by Princeton University physicist Gerald O'Neill, into the feasibility of vast, wheel-shaped space stations similar in appearance to those seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick's movie, delta-winged Orion III space planes wearing Pan Am logos shuttle people between Earth and space like airliners crisscrossing the Atlantic. Spaceflight is no longer the exclusive preserve of test pilots.

The Shuttle offered a step in that tantalizing direction and it was an aspiration which Mark himself had been directly involved in advancing. As a member of a committee identifying flight crew requirements, he'd successfully argued for a new category of astronaut, the payload specialist, for which years of dedicated training as part of the NASA Astronaut Office would not be required. When a report by two of his researchers at Ames later concluded that, unlike Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, medical requirements for a Shuttle flight were only that someone should be in "reasonably good physical shape," it confirmed Mark's belief that the Shuttle would dramatically broaden access to space. His wife, Marion, he imagined, might quibble at the idea of him being described as a romantic, but when it came to space, he was prepared to concede that he was. "Even poets," he wrote, could travel into space, "then share the experience with everyone." He certainly hoped that he would one day fly aboard the Shuttle himself.

• • •

At Dryden Flight Research Center, NASA's facility at Edwards Air Force Base, the Enterprise Approach and Landing Test program remained firmly the preserve of men with the Right Stuff. Fred Haise, Joe Engle, Gordo Fullerton and Dick Truly were all graduates of Chuck Yeager's Aerospace Research Pilot School, while leading the program was Deke Slayton, the last of the original Mercury Seven still working at NASA. There was no danger of any of the men who flew the Shuttle having to endure the taunts once leveled at Slayton and his comrades that they were just "Spam-in-a-can." The winged orbiter they were testing was a machine of which Joe Engle knew even the famously dismissive Yeager approved; not one from which, as the veteran test pilot put it when talking about NASA's capsules, you had to sweep out monkey shit before climbing in. There were no plans to fly Enterprise using chimpanzees.

## TWENTY-EIGHT

#### Edwards Air Force Base, 1977

Mojave's dry lake beds could be deceptive. Twelve years earlier, in the days before each X-15 flight, Fred Haise had raced up and down them on a motorcycle, looking for anything that might prohibit their use as alternate landing sites. After flying in on board an old Air Force Douglas C-47 "Gooney Bird," he and his fellow members of the support team—chase pilots and engineers—hammered spikes down through the crust of the lake bed to make sure it wasn't soft and muddy beneath the surface. They had a heavy steel ball that they'd drop at points along the length of the strip, then check the depth of the indentation. If the surface cracked or deformed it might also tear the gear off a landing rocket plane. All being good, though, they'd finish by laying asphalt stripes to mark out the boundaries of the runway. These days it was done by radar. While Haise and the other Approach and Landing crews had trained to fly Enterprise using the Shuttle Training Aircraft and sim, the support crews, led by Bo Bobko and Bob Overmyer, scanned the Edwards lake bed looking for water running below the surface, checking the geology beneath the friable skin of the ancient salt pan.

Now, on the morning of August 12, 1977, Bobko was 1,400 miles away from the high desert, manning CapCom in Mission Control back in Houston. Alongside him, the rest of the Flight Control team sat at consoles ready to monitor the telemetry relayed from Enterprise as she took wing for the first time. Like a space mission, the Shuttle's Approach and Landing Tests would be directed from within Building 30 at Houston.

It was dawn up at Edwards. Inside NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, three of Bobko's MOL contemporaries were in their flight suits, preparing to get airborne in support of the Shuttle's first flight. Using the call sign Chase One, Bob Overmyer, flying with Dick Truly in the backseat of his jet, would lead a small squadron of T-38s. Hank Hartsfield was on the team too. Keeping a watchful eye on it all was Chief Astronaut John Young, flying another one of NASA's six-strong chase fleet.

In the pale, brightening light of the early morning, Enterprise and the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft beneath her cast long shadows across the Dryden ramp, the sun catching and reflecting off the 747's bare aluminum fuselage. Still visible, like old foundations from the air, was a ghost of the old American Airlines logo that had once been painted on her side.

The main briefing had taken place the night before. Now, with takeoff scheduled for 8:00 a.m. local time, Fred Haise and Gordo Fullerton were going to fly the orbiter for the first time. After a short weather briefing alongside the chase pilots, Haise and Fullerton walked outside onto the Dryden ramp. For this, her maiden flight—and for the two that would follow—Enterprise wore a streamlined white shroud, a bulbous white fiberglass duck's ass, to reduce the turbulence and drag caused by the rocket nozzles at her rear.

A little over an hour before the flight, the two astronauts stepped off the high platform of a hydraulic cherry picker and into the open crew hatch on Enterprise's port side. Wearing blue NASA flight suits, Haise and Fullerton climbed up from the mid-deck into the cockpit and strapped in with help from ground crew. From the orbiter's flight deck, perched nearly 60 feet from the ground on top of the 747, Haise and Fullerton had a commanding view of their surroundings.

Any lingering doubts about this outrageous-looking combination—described by some as the world's biggest biplane—had been assuaged earlier in the year by a series of captive flights in which Enterprise had remained firmly bolted to the back of the SCA. Crowds had gathered to watch those earlier sorties, but now they were like nothing Edwards had ever seen before. One thousand reporters and as many as 70,000 spectators, who had clogged the roads since well before dawn, claimed their positions on Rogers Dry Lake Bed and waited in anticipation.

Haise and Fullerton removed the pins from their ejection seats, stowed them, and confirmed to the ground crew that the seats were now armed. The technicians wished them luck and stepped back across the high gap into the cradle of the cherry picker, then closed and locked the crew hatch before being lowered to the ground.

From the cockpit of the SCA, unable to see the Shuttle mounted above and behind them, pilots Fitz Fulton and Tom McMurtry started the 747's engines, gently dipped the brakes, then taxied out to the threshold of Runway 22. Riding the brakes, Fulton advanced the throttles. As the engines spooled up toward full power, the stack began to tremble. The roar from the four 50,000-pound-thrust Pratt & Whitney turbofans rolled across the dry lake.

In Houston, Bo Bobko counted down to the beginning of the takeoff roll: "Five, four, three, two, one . . . release."

Fulton came off the brakes. Cleared for takeoff, he asked for full power and the SCA and its 150,000-pound piggyback passenger began to accelerate slowly down the runway.

On the flight deck of the orbiter, Haise and Fullerton were still getting used to the unfamiliar feeling of moving seemingly unaided and looking down from so lofty an eyrie along the path of the runway. From their seats inside Enterprise it was impossible to see any part of the airplane carrying them. Like a magic carpet ride, thought Haise. The first time he'd experienced it, during one of the series of captive test flights, he'd thought, as Fulton had pulled the nose of the 747 into the air to rotate, We're not going fast enough to make it off the ground . . .

At 8:48 a.m. and a little over 30,000 feet, Fitz Fulton bunted the SCA over into a shallow dive, accelerating to 240 knots, then, chopping the power to idle and extending the airbrakes, configured his jet to release the Shuttle. Mounted at such a high angle of attack on the big airliner's back, the orbiter's thick wings bit greedily at the air. With the 747 sloughing off as much lift as possible, now Enterprise was actually carrying it beneath her rather than being held aloft. The 32-feet-per-second separation produced as a result would ensure the clean getaway that, at first glance, looked so unlikely.

"Carrier ready," declared Fulton.

Above him, on Enterprise's flight deck, Haise reached forward and mashed the SEP button. With a report that shuddered through the orbiter's airframe, seven explosive bolts blew to set her free for the first time.

"Chase One, sep," reported Bob Overmyer from the T-38 flanking the SCA's starboard wing as Enterprise, relieved of the burden of the 747 underneath, seemed to leap into the air, white trails of condensation streaming off her wingtips drawing lines against the clear blue sky.

• • •

In Enterprise's cockpit, before the blast of the separation had even finished resonating through the fuselage, an ugly green "X" flashed up on the CRT 2 display between the astronauts, signaling the failure of one of the Shuttle's flight control computers. As Haise flew her for the first time, the harsh tone of the master alarm provided a soundtrack. In the center of the orbiter's instrument panel, a red light flicked on in the middle of the matrix of warning lights.

• • •

Oh my God, thought orbiter Program Manager Aaron Cohen, following the flight test from a control room in nearby Palmdale, as the telemetry recorded the computer crash. And he bit his pipe in half.

• • •

In the cockpit, Fred Haise concentrated on flying the vehicle. Next to him, Gordo Fullerton got his head down, flipping quickly through his cue cards to find the correct procedure to follow. He twisted around to pull circuit breakers on rate gyros and turned off accelerometers feeding the toppled computer, manually reconfiguring the flight control system in case of further failures.

"Chase Two, clear."

"Roger, pushing over."

Having been told by the chase plane to his left that he was no longer in close proximity to the carrier aircraft, Haise nudged forward on the hand controller, lowering the nose and using gravity to accelerate to 300 knots. As he rolled gently away to the right, the silver 747 banked and dived away to port, putting further distance between them. Haise, using the three remaining computers to fly the airplane, was struck immediately by the feeling that, in flight, Enterprise felt crisper than the simulator.

In the five minutes it took for the orbiter to glide to Rogers Lake Bed Runway 17, he didn't have long to enjoy it. Gordo had missed most of the first minute of the flight, but with the computer malfunction contained and Enterprise performing well, Haise handed him control as they flew the downwind leg of the circuit into Edwards.

This thing is flying good, thought Fullerton as he descended toward the turn on to the base leg. Moving the stick to the side to pull Enterprise into the 90-degree turn, the airplane's nose suddenly lurched to the side, nearly banging Fullerton's head on the wall of the flight deck. Son of a gun, he thought, they were right after all. Because the cockpit was so far ahead and above the orbiter's center of rotation, a steep turn had the effect of flicking the nose around at a greater speed than that of the turn itself. It had been predicted in the simulator, but still caught Gordo by surprise. Thankfully, as Freddo took back control to bank onto finals to land, it was the last of them.

Flanked by a T-38 jet on her port wing, Enterprise touched down gently on her main gear after a free flight of just five minutes and twenty-two seconds. As they rolled to a halt along the lake bed under light braking, the tip of the long white air data probe attached to the orbiter's nose vibrated through two or three feet like a giant angry white tuning fork.

• • •

During this first free flight of the Enterprise, Bob Crippen was on the ground upholding a NASA tradition by watching the flight with the crew's wives, answering their questions, explaining and reassuring. When, following the return to Houston, the failure of the computer was investigated, he was relieved to discover it had been a broken solder inside the processor, not a software failure, that had led to it falling over. At the same time it had also shown that the redundant computer sets worked as advertised. Losing one was entirely manageable and was hardly remarked on in the press coverage that followed. The headline news was that the orbiter flew. And that she flew well.

## TWENTY-NINE

#### Edwards Air Force Base, 1977

Delayed for two weeks because rain had turned the lake bed to mud, Joe Engle and Dick Truly flew the second free flight a month after the first; then, just ten days later, after engineers had worked nights and weekends to repair a hydrazine fuel leak, Haise and Fullerton flew a third flight.

With everything going according to plan, and under pressure from headquarters to bring the Approach and Landing Test program to a successful conclusion, Deke Slayton took the decision to fly the next flight without the low-drag tail cone. As reassuring as Enterprise's performance had been with the shroud on, it wasn't representative of how the orbiter would handle when returning from space, with the collection of rocket bells that protruded from her tail exposed. Free flight four fell to Engle and Truly. This was the one the two of them had been looking forward to. Their job was to try to confirm a mass of aero data predictions in a minute and a half of what amounted to a steep dive. It would be test-flying at its most intense.

Engle had prepared by asking his friend, fellow Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford, now commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards, if he could beg a flight in the new General Dynamics YF-16 fighter prototype being tested at Edwards. Stafford was happy to help. Flying the lightweight jet, still sporting a distinctive red, white and blue paint scheme, Engle realized that its digital fly-by-wire flight control system allowed for a technique that could make all the difference to the task he and Truly had to perform. Not only that, it was something the two of them had already explored in the sim in Houston.

Along with singing to them when the simulation crashed, Engle and Truly had found another way to wind up the SimSups. If, while Engle was flying from the left-hand seat, Truly pushed the Flight Control Power button to activate the controls on his side of the cockpit, both then had equal authority over controlling the Shuttle. With practice, they were able to act as one. With Engle taking responsibility for rolling left and pitching up and Truly for rolling right and pitching down, they could land the Shuttle together without the SimSups even noticing. And if, with sufficient feel and care, Engle moved his stick to the left while Truly pulled his in the opposite direction, the net effect was that, canceling each other out, the Shuttle continued to fly straight and true until the moment Engle piped up to say to SimSup Jerry Mill, "Jerry, look at my stick," by now fully deflected left without any apparent effect on the airplane's attitude, "something's not right . . ."

If they used the same technique in Enterprise, by flying her together and at the same time they could get far more done in the short time available in a single flight. Rather than having to let the Shuttle settle between each maneuver, Truly, from the right-hand seat, could set the required angle of attack and hold it, while Engle pulsed the hand controller from the left-hand seat, overlaying his own control inputs on Truly's. In both the simulator and Gulfstream training aircraft, they repeated their brief flight over and over again, leaning over each other's shoulders to try out different ideas. By the time they were scheduled to fly they had it worked out second by second. Truly likened it to choreographing a ballet.

At dinner in the "O" Club at Edwards the night before the flight, Engle and Truly had been urged by Flight Surgeon Lon Bergman to quit drinking and go to bed. When the doc himself finally headed off back to his room, the astronauts stayed behind, assuring him that they'd pick him up at six the next morning.

The two astronauts called it a night and went to bed a few minutes later. After a good night's sleep, Engle and Truly met before dawn. They needed to be up early to set the trap. Before driving off, they opened cans of beer and scattered empties around the car before deliberately approaching to pick up Bergman from a direction that suggested they were pulling up following an all-nighter in the nearby town of Lancaster. They lurched to an untidy stop alongside the medic, who was waiting for them outside the Edwards Bachelor Officer Quarters.

"Get in, Lon!" they slurred loudly from the car's open window. "We're late. Come on!"

Bergman climbed into the front seat, immediately inhaling the strong musty tang of beer. As they sped off toward Dryden Flight Research Center to prepare for the flight, the doc was speechless.

In reality, Engle and Truly couldn't have been better prepared for the flight. The major concern was that, by removing the tail cone from the back of the orbiter, air churned up by those rocket bells would cause such turbulence over the tail of the big Boeing that the buffeting and vibration could be potentially destructive. The configuration had been tested in the wind tunnel, but fluid dynamics remained hard to predict. As a precaution, the comms loop between the 747 flight deck, Enterprise and Mission Control was kept open throughout the takeoff roll. At any sign of trouble, Fitz Fulton, the Boeing's captain, could hit the brakes.

Just having Fulton at the controls of the carrier aircraft inspired confidence. By 1977, he was perhaps the most experienced large airplane test pilot in the world. He'd flown the B-29 mothership for Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1; ushered both the B-52 and the supersonic, delta-winged Convair B-58 Hustler into Air Force service; dropped the X-15 from beneath the wing of NASA's B-52; and flight-tested the six-engine Mach 3 North American XB-70 Valkyrie bomber prototype. On exchange in the UK, he'd added two British bombers, the Avro Vulcan and Vickers Valiant, to his logbook. And the Concorde.

When Fulton and his copilot, Tom McMurtry, received the "go for takeoff" call from Houston, they were looking down the length of Runway 04. Not only did it offer 15,000 feet of hardtop, but a further 9,000-foot extension onto the lake bed. Four and a half miles. If, as the SCA took flight, Fulton judged the vibration to be unsustainable, he'd have the option of a straight-ahead landing on what remained of the long runway in front of him.

The curtain went up on Engle and Truly's performance at 3:49 on October 12, when Fitz Fulton put the 747 into a shallow dive 25,000 feet above the Mojave. Oxygen masks clamped over their faces, Engle and Truly prepared themselves.

"On speed . . ." Fulton called.

"Three, two, one . . ." As he spoke over the radio, Joe Engle reached forward and, at 20,300 feet above Highway 58, he punched the separation button. "Sep."

This time, as Enterprise and the SCA parted company, Truly resisted the temptation to call "Fitz away!" as he had during his first free flight with Engle. It may simply have been the view from the flight deck that stopped him. He and Engle had practiced hot and cold separations from the SCA in the simulator, so they were prepared for leaving too steep and fast or too shallow and slow. But this one was something else. At the end of Engle's pushover, they were pitched down at 28 degrees. Holy shit, thought Truly as he looked down through the cockpit glass at the lake bed. But as Joe Henry Engle always said: "It doesn't get to be fun until we drop the 747 . . ."

As the speed increased to 210 knots, Truly applied gentle back pressure to the stick, pulling Enterprise out of the steep dive and setting her up at a medium 7-degree angle of attack. As soon as they were stable, Engle pulsed his own controller, layering his own commands over those of his pilot. With precision and an almost rhythmic beat, he followed one movement with another, ticking off points on the aero-data graphs with each stick input. Once complete, Truly relaxed the pressure on his stick, unloading the airplane, checking her progress, then holding her at the planned 4-degree angle of attack. Again, Engle worked fast through a carefully sequenced progression of stick inputs, each one confirming the orbiter's real-world performance against predictions. In the seconds before Engle had to set up Enterprise to land, the crew ran through a final set of stick inputs with the speed brakes extended.

A minute and a half after leaving the back of the 747, Truly lowered the landing gear as Engle held her steady before flaring to land. Enterprise touched down at a speed of 189 knots. After gently lowering the nose, Engle pushed his feet hard against the rudder pedals to test the orbiter's response to heavy braking. An alarming chatter that had prompted Gordo Fullerton to tell Haise, "Get off the brakes—we're going to break something!" when they first tested maximum braking during their second flight had been corrected. Enterprise slowed smoothly, allowing Engle and Truly to test her nosewheel steering as they rolled toward wheels stop.

An unqualified success, free flight four had at every test point confirmed the predictions of the aero-data book. As they emerged, laughing, from the Shuttle's crew hatch onto the ramp stairs, Engle and Truly were wearing Snoopy-style leather flying helmets and goggles. The only thing missing from the ensemble was an aviator's white scarf.

All that remained was for the program to show that the orbiter could be brought in to land at a predetermined point on one of Edwards's concrete runways. Six months earlier, Deke Slayton, thinking about the history of landing X-planes on the lake bed, pointed out to the press that "twenty-four research aircraft made thirty-eight landings before we had enough nerve to come down on concrete. I'm not sure we have enough guts to land the orbiter on concrete on flight five." But that's exactly what they were going to do, with responsibility for the last flight swinging back to Fred Haise and Gordo Fullerton. Dick Truly wasn't sure that the objective this time was a particularly smart one. The secret to landing a glider, he knew, was energy management, not spot landing.

• • •

Before Haise and Fullerton got the chance to test the theory at Edwards, however, the Astronaut Office played host to a royal visitor to Houston in the shape of an immaculately dressed Prince Charles. After a tour of Mission Control, the prince, a pilot himself, was given the chance to fly in the Shuttle motion-base simulator. At the instructor's console in Building 5, he took off his suit jacket, handed it to one of his entourage, and climbed into the flight deck. Sitting in the commander's seat alongside him, Fred Haise told the SimSups: "Just a regular session. You don't have to not have any failures."

It was an opportunity, then, thought the instructors, to show off the Shuttle's ability to cope with things going wrong and keep going. Carrying out a simulated launch and ascent, the SimSups began with a flight computer crash then followed it with the loss of an engine. As they heaped failure upon failure, Haise was faced with such an overwhelming task that even his formidable flying skills couldn't save the Shuttle from destruction. The instructors apologized, but the damage was done.

"I guess a kill's a kill," replied Haise with a wry smile.

Given the opportunity to try his own hand at landing the Shuttle, the twenty-eight-year-old prince twice let the orbiter get away from him, porpoising wildly as he struggled in vain to regain control. Crashing into the ground, the heir to the British throne was embarrassed by his failure.

"Naw, it's 'cos you're not used to the stick and everything," Gordo Fullerton reassured him.

"Everyone does it," Joe Engle chipped in.

And it was true: at some point the Shuttle's distinctive flying characteristics had bitten them all.

Over the lunch that followed it was realized that the prince's schedule took him to California at the same time as the final Approach and Landing test flight. Someone suggested that he might like to come to Edwards and see how it was done. He jumped at the chance. Joe Engle was asked to escort him on the day.

Two days later, Engle showed the prince around the Dryden hangar. Relaxed and engaged, the royal visitor was clearly fascinated by the exotic hardware on display. And perhaps a little envious, having himself only enjoyed the briefest career as a frontline helicopter pilot with the Royal Navy. You're lucky, he told the astronaut, "because you don't have to do any of this royal stuff." But that, of course, was the price he paid to get a ringside seat next to the runway. It only remained for Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton to kiss the runway in Enterprise and bring the ALT program to a successful conclusion.

• • •

Diving in formation with the orbiter, Bob Overmyer, John Young and Dick Truly flew chase aboard a trio of T-38s.

From the commander's seat on the Shuttle's flight deck, Haise could see he was hot and high. Enterprise was proving to be a little more slippery through the air than predicted. Determined to hit the bull's-eye marking the touchdown point, he opened the airbrakes to 80 percent to scrub off speed and pulsed the elevons to try to pitch the nose down.

On board Chase One, Overmyer thumbed the transmit button to call the altitude as Enterprise passed through 2,500 feet.

In the cockpit of another T-38, Bob Crippen was at a holding point on one of Edwards's web of taxiways, his engines idling, waiting for Enterprise to land before he headed home to Houston. He watched as the orbiter flared at 2,000 feet, her flight path flattening, trading speed for height, in anticipation of a smooth 185-knot touchdown.

Haise was still too fast and high. In an effort to make sure he didn't overshoot the mark, he tried the speed brake again and made small inputs on the controller to correct his approach. Then he felt the starboard wing dip a touch. Instinctively, he nudged the controller to the left to level the wings. There was no reaction. He nudged the stick again. Nothing.

Haise faced a convergence of problems. There was an inherent lag in the fly-by-wire control system between the commands of the pilot and the reaction of the control surfaces. A quarter of a second at most, but enough for a pilot under pressure to notice. The position of the Shuttle's flight deck relative to the center of rotation meant it was harder to feel the aircraft's movements through the seat of the pants. Most importantly, the orbiter's computers didn't have the capacity to cope with every input made by the pilot. The software prioritized pitch—up or down—over roll; if it was busy with the former, the latter had to wait its turn. Enterprise's flight control system was saturated.

Crippen watched as Freddo nearly got her down, 10 knots fast, just beyond the aiming point, then saw Enterprise balloon 10 feet into the air again. It looked like classic pilot-induced oscillation, the flight control problem that had plagued the development of the Gulfstream Shuttle Training Aircraft. Haise was making further corrections before the plane had responded to his last ones. And as he got behind the Shuttle's movements, Haise's inputs were becoming increasingly firm-handed, pushing the hand controller hard through 50 percent of its arc of travel.

Three hundred yards farther down the strip, Enterprise came down hard on her starboard main gear, the heavy hydraulic oleo compressing under the load, then she bounced back 10 feet into the air, before pitching down. Haise was getting behind her.

Sitting alongside him, Fullerton, not, unlike Haise, completely absorbed in wrestling the controls, saw the problem. "If you get off the stick, maybe it'll damp," he advised his commander. Just letting go would desaturate the computers and allow the orbiter to settle. Haise relaxed his grip on the stick. Another 300 yards down Runway 22, Enterprise touched down safely and rolled to a standstill.

After the flight, a smiling Prince Charles pointed out that much the same thing had happened to him in the simulator. "You made me feel good," he told Haise and Gordo. "You did as badly as I did."

It didn't help Fred Haise's mood much. Deke Slayton ribbed him, suggesting that he could log an extra landing for the flight. That evening, at the postflight drinks in Lancaster, a representative from Rockwell presented the astronaut with a model of a broken-winged orbiter. It was better than sympathy, at least.

Pilot lore has it that a good landing is any landing you can walk away from, but Haise was disappointed not to have put her down on the spot as planned. Gordo Fullerton was quick to point out that it wasn't anything he hadn't seen a hundred times during commercial flights. There was an upside, though. Haise's messy effort to touch down on the mark had given grateful engineers working on the landing gear valuable data that none of the other landings had provided. More importantly, it had exposed a potentially catastrophic problem with the flight control software. The last seconds of the fifth and final flight of the program had served a more critical function than simply proving the orbiter's ability to land on a dime.

• • •

Between them, Haise, Fullerton, Engle and Truly had amassed just twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds of flight time in Enterprise. It was enough to win them the 1977 Iven Kincheloe award, the highest prize for flight-testing given by the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. For their unpowered flights above the Mojave, they were also made honorary members of the National World War Two Glider Pilots Association. And although she would tour the United States and even, in years to come, visit Europe on the back of the big Boeing carrier aircraft, those short minutes represented the sum total of Enterprise's career as an independent flying machine. Although never to fly free again, in proving the predictions of the aero-data book, she had given NASA huge reassurance that the work they were doing was on track. The 150,000-pound orbiter had muscled her way to the ground untroubled by the ripples, eddies and shears that could unsettle the long-winged Shuttle Training Aircraft. All that was encouraging. But during the Approach and Landing Test program, Enterprise descended from a maximum altitude of 26,000 feet and reached a top speed of 294 knots. Her successors would return to Earth from an altitude of over 140 miles more than twenty-four times the speed of sound. When it came to pushing the envelope, Enterprise hadn't even come close.

For public consumption, despite the wobble at the end, NASA announced that the final flight had gone "exactly as planned." At the same time, however, they instigated a major flight-test program to tackle the issue of the orbiter's susceptibility to PIO. Using Dryden's digital fly-by-wire F-8 Crusader, test pilots replicated the effects of saturating the Shuttle's flight control system as Haise had, eventually solving the problem by filtering out the extreme control inputs from the pilot. The software, however, was hardly the only serious challenge faced by NASA engineers in responding to an exhortation from John Yardley, the manager in Washington with overall responsibility for the Shuttle's development, to "get that son of a bitch in space. Get that thing in space or we're going to lose the program."

# PART THREE

# In the Balance
We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance.

—James A. Michener

## THIRTY

#### Houston, 1978

Bob Crippen was in his office in Building 4 when the phone rang. He picked up to hear George Abbey's laconic voice on the other end of the line. "Hey, Crip," the Flight Ops boss began, "the Enterprise is coming through; why don't we go out there and take a look."

With the conclusion of the Approach and Landing Test program, Enterprise was on her way to Marshall for a series of vibration tests, but with an orbiter on her back, a direct flight from Edwards to Huntsville was beyond the range of the 747 carrying her. Instead, the 700,000-pound combination staged its way across America, guzzling a gallon of jet fuel every time she flew the length of her own fuselage, and took pit stops along the way. On March 10, 1978, she landed at Houston's Ellington Field.

Crippen and Abbey jumped into his old pickup and drove to the nearby Air Force base. As the two of them walked around beneath the big carrier aircraft, they looked up at the orbiter towering above them. It was a more familiar sight now, but when he'd first seen it, bolted up there, Crip's immediate thought was, We've screwed up; this is the most awkward-looking aviation configuration I've ever seen.

Then Abbey got to the point. "Crip," he asked flatly, "how would you like to fly the first one?"

The Flight Operations boss, ever inscrutable, didn't smile. He hadn't even assumed Crippen would say yes. But, starting with Crip, he'd decided he would always assign flights by posing a question, just to make sure that an astronaut was comfortable taking it on. No one ever said no.

Crip's broad grin was enough for both of them. The astronaut's only discomfort was in trying to suppress an urge to perform cartwheels and handsprings on the tarmac. He'd not had any inkling that this was the purpose of Abbey's invitation to see Enterprise. Now the feeling was almost overwhelming. Mind-blowing. He'd be flying with John Young, Abbey told him. That made sense. He'd always imagined that Young would command STS-1—Space Transportation System 1—as the first flight was labeled by NASA, but he'd expected there would be an experienced astronaut like Fred Haise sitting alongside him. Crip never asked why they'd picked him as pilot, but Bob Thompson, the Shuttle program manager, did.

Abbey and Young had had Crippen in mind for over a year. Young, with a record of spaceflight firsts behind him, was, even seniority aside, the obvious candidate. Alongside him Abbey wanted someone who knew the orbiter's systems, and no one else in the Astronaut Office was more deeply immersed in them than Bob Crippen. The "Tiger Team" leading the software effort had been headed up by a much-respected Apollo flight director by the name of Phil Schaffer. But when stress-related illness forced Schaffer to leave NASA, it was Crippen who took up the reins. When Thompson asked, "Why him?" the answer was clear.

"Crip," Abbey told him, "knows the avionics better than any other person."

• • •

"They said I could go fly the first one!" Crippen was still bubbling when he got back to the Johnson Space Center, his joy infectious. He discovered Joe Engle and Dick Truly had been chosen as the reserve crew for STS-1. The two friends congratulated each other, Crip detecting no hint of Truly's initial disappointment at not winning a seat on the first flight for himself. It hadn't lasted long and, in any case, once Truly had processed it, he knew Crip's selection made sense. There were no hard feelings when an elated Crippen invited everybody to the bar after work to celebrate. One of the MOL guys was going to fly at last. He wasn't going to be the only one.

• • •

On March 22, in front of royal blue curtains and the Stars and Stripes, NASA introduced the crews of the first four orbital test flights (OTFs) to the press. The eight men sat at microphones behind a long wooden desk emblazoned with the triangular Space Shuttle program patch. At the right of the line, in a fashionably cut light-gray suit and vest, Bob Crippen sat next to John Young. The crew cut Crip had worn in his first few years at NASA had now grown out into a smooth side parting. Tan and relaxed, he looked like the kind of space plane pilot Hollywood might cast. To the right of the STS-1 crew were Joe Engle and Dick Truly, then Fred Haise, chosen as commander of the third crew, alongside his pilot, Skylab veteran Jack Lousma. Vance Brand, who'd flown with Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton on Apollo-Soyuz, America's last manned mission, had command of the fourth crew. His pilot was Gordo Fullerton. Three of the first four Space Shuttle flights would have MOL veterans on board. More specifically, it would be those who had worked most intimately with the orbiter's systems, displays and computers. The seating plan at the press conference seemed to suggest a pecking order, but in fact, only Young and Crippen were officially attached to a flight. There was the possibility that there might still be a need for some chopping and changing. Especially as the mission NASA had earmarked for Fred Haise and Jack Lousma came with a deadline that couldn't be extended.

• • •

Two weeks before the Shuttle astronauts were announced, NASA had revisited a program many in and out of Houston had thought was finished. Since February, an eight-man team from Johnson and Marshall had been based at Kindley Field, a US naval air station in Bermuda, preparing to reestablish contact with America's first space station, Skylab. Prior to returning to Earth after eighty-four days aloft, the spacecraft's last crew had boosted her into a higher 237-nautical-mile orbit. Since then she'd been hibernating, her systems shut down, circling the Earth in an endless 50-degree inclination orbit. Except it wasn't endless. Far from it. Since 1974, Skylab had descended to an altitude of 215 nautical miles. Now, because of exceptional levels of sunspot activity, that fall was accelerating. The solar turbulence heated the Earth's outer atmosphere, causing warmed gases to rise to an altitude where they clung to Skylab, dragging her toward an uncontrolled reentry that had the potential to rain chunks of what remained of the 85-ton spacecraft on towns and cities below. In September 1977, NASA had taken the decision to try to save her. And on March 6 the following year, the team in Bermuda, using NORAD air defense radar to find her, pointed a UHF radio signal in her direction that brought her back on line. Back in Houston, Fred Haise and Jack Lousma began training for the rescue mission.

A handful of different options were examined, including pushing or towing Skylab into a higher orbit, from where she could either be safely de-orbited over the Pacific or reactivated for use with the Shuttle. The latter was gaining momentum among the Skylab team, who drew up a plan that might ultimately see the space station recharged, refurbished and expanded to accommodate a crew of as many as eight astronauts. Either way, though, they first needed to arrest and reverse her orbital decay. The method chosen was an inelegant-looking dump-truck-sized assembly of fuel tanks, thrusters and engines, controlled from the flight deck of the orbiter using closed-circuit TV for guidance. A machine designed with just one function: to provide thrust.

The mission required Haise to maneuver the Space Shuttle to within a few hundred feet of Skylab before the radio-controlled booster, ejected from the payload bay by springs, was then remotely piloted by Lousma to dock with the slowly turning space station, its docking port describing circles in the sky. Tricky, for sure, but it was doable, reckoned Lousma. Furthermore, neither he nor Haise could resist the flight's inherent appeal. Classic space rendezvous, enthused Freddo, who likened it to the lunar orbit rendezvous he'd trained for on Apollo 13. Haise said no to the chance of a flight on Apollo-Soyuz because, for all its historical significance, it was not, as far as he was concerned, a real challenging or exciting, testing mission. Not like this one. It was his pilot, though, who best summed it up. The Skylab rescue, Lousma had to admit, "was kind of Buck Rogersish." Nothing this complicated had been expected to be part of the Shuttle's repertoire at this early stage in the program. And the two astronauts were in a race against the sun.

Every morning Haise and Lousma arrived at work to be greeted with a picture of the sun and one of Skylab. With every solar event, they could see a corresponding decline in the space station's altitude. Commander and pilot divided responsibilities.

At Houston, Haise focused on rendezvous procedures and proximity operations needed to orbit so close to the space station. Without a rendezvous radar on board the orbiter, Haise had to plan the rendezvous with Skylab through old-fashioned calculation—a combination of orbital mechanics and dead-reckoning navigation in which a single degree of inaccuracy would lead to a separation between two orbiting objects of a mile in just twelve seconds. If that wasn't complicated enough, the only way to catch an object orbiting ahead is to slow down; speeding up will only have the effect of moving you into a higher orbit, and farther away from the object that you're trying to run down. Haise anticipated it would take days of phasing to synchronize orbits with the space station.

Lousma, meanwhile, had lead on the remote-controlled booster, traveling between Martin Marietta, who had the contract to build it, in Denver and Marshall Space Flight Center, where engineers had built a rudimentary simulator out of a TV monitor and hand controller.

If the astronauts pulled it off, the Shuttle would, at a stroke, prove its versatility and usefulness. It was exactly the kind of mission it was always envisioned she might perform. But NASA was in danger of getting ahead of itself. As Haise and Lousma trained for a mission they relished, there were sharp differences of opinion about the levels of solar activity that were expected—and with that, when Skylab would fall to Earth. NASA was criticized for drawing on data stretching back to the seventeenth century to make their solar predictions, and the first flight of the Shuttle would come no sooner than the summer of 1979. In an effort to try to square the circle, Haise and Lousma were told their rescue mission was going to be bumped up the flight roster to become STS-2—the second Shuttle flight.

• • •

The success of the Approach and Landing Test program at Edwards had been headline news around the world. They looked great on television. The message inferred by many was that the Shuttle's first spaceflight was just around the corner. That was misguided. Enterprise might have looked like the real thing, but in reality she was a long way from being a spacecraft, let alone a starship. The tiles of the heat shield were entirely absent; the parts of Lockheed's silica tiles were played by polystyrene facsimiles, and the reinforced carbon-carbon nose cap and leading edges by fiberglass. The flight control software loaded onto Enterprise's four computers covered just a fraction of what the orbiting Shuttle was going to have to do. Most conspicuously, the big cluster of rocket bells at the back were fakes, and there was ballast in the rear of the aircraft to compensate for the absence of the three heavy main-engine powerheads. It was the areas in which she was not representative of the orbital Shuttle—heat shield, flight control software and main engines—that had been identified, from the outset, as being the biggest challenges faced by the program, and so it was proving. None more so than the engines.

Just successfully completing the first five-second ignition sequence for one of the groundbreaking new Space Shuttle main engines had taken five years since Rocketdyne had won the contract in the spring of 1971. Twelve weeks after that, the engine test rig at Marshall Space Flight Center was able to run an engine at 50 percent power—the engine's minimum power setting—for a shade over three seconds. It was another year before an engine reached full power. By the time of a review of the engine's progress in the autumn of 1976 it had been hoped that they would have amassed a total of 8,000 seconds of running time. They'd managed a little over 2,000. And by the end of 1977, when a schedule laid out in 1973 had expected the engines to have accrued a total of 38,000 seconds, Marshall and Rocketdyne had managed to claw their way to just over a third of that. The struggle so far, though, paled in comparison to what lay ahead.

• • •

The sight of Enterprise swooping down from cloudless skies over Edwards had provided a welcome and necessary boost for the program. It was just as well, because, as alluded to by John Yardley after the completion of the Approach and Landing Test program, the Shuttle's challenges weren't just technical. In Washington, the program really did have a fight on its hands.

## THIRTY-ONE

#### Washington, DC, 1977

After the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Hans Mark, whose résumé combined long experience of classified defense research and cutting-edge aerospace technology with being a lifelong Democrat, was offered the post of under secretary of the Air Force. When he accepted in spring 1977, Mark assumed the most senior civilian position in the flying branch. As had his predecessors in the role, he also became director of the National Reconnaissance Office.

When he arrived at the Pentagon in 1977, Mark found the Air Force and CIA engaged in their traditional turf war, slugging it out between the East and West Coasts like rival rappers. In California, based at Los Angeles Air Force Station, was Major General John Kulpa, director of special projects for the secretary of the Air Force and deputy commander for space operations, Space Division. In Langley, fighting for the CIA, was Leslie Dirks. Mark had high regard for both men, but each wanted to retain control over his own slice of the NRO's pie. And both shared a reluctance, despite it being national policy to do so, to use the Space Shuttle as their launch vehicle. In 1973, a second study into using the Shuttle as the launch vehicle for the KH-9 HEXAGON "Big Bird" had concluded that it was too costly to make the necessary modifications to the satellite and plans to use the Space Shuttle were abandoned. With the Shuttle yet to fly and a new Titan 34D under development offering even greater lifting capacity than existing Air Force rockets, it was proving too easy for both spooks and bluesuiters to drag their heels.

As a result, the new KH-11 KENNEN digital spy satellite had not even been designed for launch on board the Shuttle. And yet the Shuttle offered a more substantial payload capability than the expendable rockets the Air Force were already using. So resistant were they to the Shuttle that, rather than build a next-generation spy satellite, known as Advanced KENNEN, that made full use of the orbiter's capacious payload bay, they'd chosen instead to compromise its size and capability so that they could use existing expendable rockets. Using the Shuttle, the new satellite had the potential to carry another 4 tons of the fuel it used for maneuvering in orbit, which would dramatically extend its time on station and operational flexibility. With the extra fuel on board the satellite became too heavy for a Titan IIID rocket to carry into polar orbit, but it was exactly what in 1971 the Air Force had told NASA they needed out of the Shuttle.

"Sorry, fellas," Mark told the two antagonists, "that's crazy. You deliberately compromised capability that you could have, because for reasons I don't understand you don't want to use this launch vehicle."

Ensuring that the hugely complex, sensitive and vastly expensive new reconnaissance satellites were compatible with the Shuttle was far more complicated than just being a question of moving it from on top of a rocket to the payload bay of the Shuttle. It was like redesigning a wedding cake to be supported from the side, rather than sitting on its base. It would come at a cost, they told him, but Mark forced Dirks to have the next-generation Advanced KENNEN spy satellite redesigned, amused by their futile resistance to his decision. It was their own fault, he thought; had they designed the goddamn things for the Shuttle in the first place . . . He wasn't going to allow them to approach the development of a new radar reconnaissance bird the same way.

First, though, he was forced to play Solomon. For all the advanced capability of the KH-11, its cameras were no more able to see through cloud cover than any previous generation of optical spy satellite. To do that, you needed radar. Leslie Dirks proposed adding radar to the existing KENNEN spacecraft. Mark liked the elegance of the CIA's approach. It's possible that John Kulpa did too, but he didn't let that stop him from arguing that the Air Force needed its own, stand-alone radar reconnaissance satellite.

That the KH-11 KENNEN was a CIA creation also had a bearing on the decision. Some had been critical of Mark's leadership at Ames for its lack of diplomacy, but he was more than capable of employing it when he needed to. There was certainly merit in not placing all the NRO's eggs in one basket, but keeping the Air Force involved also had value. The problem was the extra cost that giving the Air Force a stand-alone system would incur. And here, Mark drew on his experience at NASA.

While Mark was director of Ames, NASA had worked on the design of a vehicle called the multimission modular spacecraft (MMS). The idea was to produce a flexible satellite core, compatible with the Space Shuttle, that would mean each new satellite didn't have to be designed from scratch. If, he thought, the Air Force was able to use NASA's common bus as the skeleton of their new radar reconnaissance satellite it might bring the cost down to a level that was competitive with the CIA's proposal. From the outset, the new spy satellite, intended to complement the optical capabilities of KENNEN, was designed to fly on board the Shuttle. Although the program, code-named LACROSSE, didn't ultimately follow the route suggested by Mark, it was enough to get it greenlighted. And, initially at least, that meant a further, valuable tie between the Air Force and the Shuttle.

• • •

NASA had been sufficiently concerned about the USAF's commitment to building their own Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg to raise it directly with the secretary of defense in 1974. Three years later, with barely lukewarm support from an Air Force that had never been happy in its arranged marriage with NASA, the Shuttle was vulnerable to proposals from the Office of Management and Budget to trim the program. Just a month after Fred Haise and Gordo Fullerton brought Enterprise to a standstill for the last time, the OMB suggested building just three orbiters instead of the five proposed and ending the development of the West Coast launch site at Vandenberg. Taken with the latter idea, the General Accounting Office drew up a plan to launch the Shuttle into polar orbits from Kennedy Space Center by employing what it labeled a "dog-leg" ascent. If the Shuttle launched to the east, then rolled onto a northerly trajectory as it climbed, it would be capable of reaching the high orbital inclinations required by the Air Force. The GAO consultants argued that low numbers of Shuttle flights arcing over the mainland United States was a risk worth taking. In February 1978, Mark made it crystal clear that jettisoning two 90-ton solid rocket boosters near Cleveland, Ohio, was not in any way sensible or acceptable, and the plan was abandoned.

At the same time, he made the pursuit of the Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg a priority. In support of that, he argued that rather than rely on Houston, the Air Force should develop their own mission control facilities inside the Blue Cube at Sunnyvale Air Force Base. He believed that only if he could provide the Air Force with a greater sense of ownership, independence and control over the DOD missions might they learn to love the Shuttle.

On his desk in room 4C/1000 Mark reputedly displayed a model of a "blue" Shuttle—an Air Force Shuttle. There was no doubt at all about where he had staked out his own position. With NASA facing technical challenges, delays and cost overruns, they were fortunate to have such a staunch champion for the program inside the Pentagon. The ex-Ames director's advocacy hadn't been enough to retain a five-strong Shuttle fleet, though. While Vandenberg survived the budgetary mauling, only four orbiters—the minimum number required to keep the Shuttle alive as a viable military launch system—made the cut. It was better than the three the Washington bean counters had wanted.

## THIRTY-TWO

In the last few days before the launch of Apollo 16, command module pilot T. K. Mattingly liked to drive down to the pad to take a look at the towering Saturn V booster on which he'd begin his journey to the moon. Stuck in quarantine with little to do but watch TV and videotapes with his crewmates John Young and Charlie Duke, each night, after dinner, Mattingly would slip off to climb a little farther up the gantry to get to know their rocket. One night, after reaching the instrument unit near the top of the stack, he spotted a light glowing inside. Mattingly peered in, startling a technician who was working late. The astronaut introduced himself to the worker who, recovering from his surprise, enthusiastically explained the detail of the job he was doing. The two men talked about the mission itself. Responsible for just a tiny part of it, the tech was awestruck by the magnitude of the overall undertaking. "I really don't know how you're going to get back," he admitted to Mattingly, "it seems a long ways off. You know, I don't understand that, but you can bet it won't fail because of me."

The STS-1 crew, John Young and Bob Crippen, appreciated the importance of this. It didn't matter how big or small the job was, from the testing of the beyond-the-state-of-the-art main engine turbopump to the hand-sewing of the quilts used to provide insulation beneath the orbiter's thin aluminum skin, if every single person working on the Space Shuttle could say the same thing—it won't fail because of me—then the first flight would not fail. Built into the astronauts' schedules were grueling numbers of visits to contractors, where they met the men and women building the Shuttle and its systems. They called them "widows and orphans tours," but a visit from an astronaut was a powerful incentive to everyone working on the vehicle. It personalized the importance of each and every contribution. When Crip talked, encouraged and thanked them, reminding them, with a laugh, that "it's our butts attached to that vehicle," it made a difference. It cut both ways, though: the astronauts always came away feeling as buoyed by the experience as the people they met. Crippen left each plant knowing they're going to do their best to make it work right.

• • •

John Young and Bob Crippen flew to Hill Air Force Base, Utah, in a T-38 in October 1978. From there, an Air Force chopper flew them to the test range outside Brigham City. There had already been two successful development firings of the big boosters, but Young and Crip wanted to see it for themselves. Manufacturer Thiokol invited them to come out to their Wasatch Division facility to see their third live firing: DM-3.

The two astronauts, still wearing their royal-blue NASA flight suits, were bunkered at a safe distance along with members of Thiokol's management team. Then, in the lee of the mountain range behind, they lit the candle. Crip was wide-eyed at the power on display as over one million pounds of burning ammonium perchlorate, aluminum and iron oxide tore up the mountainside behind the test mount beneath an angry, toxic thunderhead of acidic hydrogen chloride exhaust that rapidly billowed hundreds of feet into the sky. The noise ripped across the scrubland, echoing off the slopes behind, heard more by their whole bodies than their ears. One of the contractors, proud of the awe-inspiring sound and fury just produced by his company, walked over to John Young, looked in the direction of the burning SRB and asked, "How'd you like to fly one of those?"

"I'd rather fly two," Young told him.

Each generating nearly three million pounds of thrust, the two solid rocket boosters that flanked the external tank delivered over 80 percent of the Space Shuttle's launch thrust. And the truth was, Young didn't entirely trust them. Nor was he alone in that.

• • •

Unless you count real or imagined pioneers like Chinese nobleman Wang Hu, who, legend has it, launched himself into the air on a chair powered by forty-seven black-powder rockets in AD 1500, solid rockets had never been used for manned flight. While the intention had been to use them to augment the thrust of the Titan IIIM rocket used to launch the MOL crews into orbit, that prospect evaporated with the program's cancelation. Partly, this lack of enthusiasm was because, compared to liquid-fueled rockets, they're inefficient, producing less thrust for an equivalent weight of propellant. But it was also because there's very little to distinguish them from fireworks except for their size. Once they're lit, there's no turning them off or throttling them back. Whatever happens, you're going somewhere. But if one of the Shuttle's big boosters were to fail to ignite, 2.8 million pounds of thrust from the other would send the Shuttle stack cartwheeling off the pad.

John Young knew better than most that solids had not always enjoyed the best reputation for reliability. His wife, Susy, had worked on the USAF's Minuteman ballistic missile program in the early sixties and remembered only too well their tendency to self-destruct. That the Shuttle would be using two only further complicated the situation. One of the biggest challenges in developing solids into dependable, predictable rocket motors was in getting them to ignite and fire evenly. Each SRB had to be capable of going from nothing to 1.9 million pounds of thrust in less than half a second. Beyond that, tolerances for any ebb and flow in thrust were measured in tens of milliseconds. Facing the same sort of issue, Wang Hu reportedly addressed the problem by employing forty-seven people to light his rockets in unison. Thiokol simply used another solid rocket as an igniter. The size of a garbage can, the igniter sprayed fire down the hollow center of the SRBs' tubes of fuel, torching the surface of all the propellant at once to ensure it burned evenly.

Young would be relieved once the SRBs had successfully served their purpose, had been jettisoned and were on their way back to the Atlantic beneath parachutes. They were an all-or-nothing solution that had been largely driven by cost. He'd signed off on them, but it didn't mean he had to like them. He was happier wrestling with systems to which he could bring more influence to bear. "If you don't like grungy engineering jobs," he maintained, "I don't think most people would care much to be an astronaut. You gotta like messing with systems." He did. As well as ferrying around the country visiting contractors, Young and Crip were putting in serious classroom time together for lectures and briefings by subsystems experts. While they and the other three named crews trained to fly, their colleagues each made their own contribution to the Shuttle's development; but with barely twenty-five astronauts left in the office, and faced with the complexity of the Shuttle, they were stretched thin and in danger of being overwhelmed. New blood couldn't arrive soon enough.

NASA, fortunately, was ahead of the game. In the summer of 1978 the first fresh intake of new astronauts since the sixties had arrived in Houston. And many of them were cut from the same cloth as their predecessors.

## THIRTY-THREE

#### Vietnam, 1972

As soon as they went feet dry—screaming in over the beach from the Gulf of Tonkin—the shooting started. The squadron boss had told him the sortie would just be a gentle introduction to the war, a chance to dip a toe in the water. Flying down low, escorting a North American RA-5C Vigilante on a reconnaissance mission, pilot Jon McBride gripped the stick of his big McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom and pushed on through the barrage of flak: antiaircraft artillery, small-arms fire and surface-to-air missiles. He'd never experienced anything like it. For thirty minutes he stayed with the speeding "Vigi," nudging the Phantom in and out of afterburner to keep up. Clean and unburdened by missiles, the big RA-5C slipped through the air, cruising near supersonic speed in military power, while McBride's fighter gulped fuel. We damn near got hit fifty times, he thought as they finally swept out of North Vietnam and back toward the USS Saratoga to land. If, that is, he managed to plug into a tanker before the two J79 engines gasped and expired when his tanks ran dry. McBride had been on the ship for just twenty-four hours. It was his first combat mission. "Skipper," he told the VF-103 squadron boss on his safe return to Yankee Station, "I really appreciate the warm-up . . ."

Getting to Vietnam hadn't been easy. After a career flying jet fighters, McBride was surprised to find himself assigned to fly low, slow Rockwell OV-10 Bronco twin props to provide close air support for troops on the ground. Right out of test pilot school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, though, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam, and the Bronco squadron was, at the time, the only route available. But when, before he deployed, the Navy disbanded it, McBride returned to the Phantom and the prospect of a Mediterranean deployment. Then the admiral called. "We've just lost a crew in Vietnam," he told McBride, "would you like to go?"

• • •

Dan Brandenstein was pushed back into his ejection seat as he was catapulted from the deck of the USS Constellation on another nighttime bombing mission. Brandenstein loved flying the Grumman A-6A Intruder. The jet was no beauty, but she was a tough old bird, capable of flying in foul weather that kept everyone else chained to the deck. The night launch was a bonus: Brandenstein always felt more comfortable knowing that the enemy couldn't see him. As his heavily loaded aircraft accelerated away from the ship, pushed through the dark by 18,000 pounds of thrust from the two Pratt & Whitney J52 turbojets, it suddenly lost all electrical power. Without hesitation, Brandenstein reached forward to pull a handle to release the ram air turbine, a little propeller that dropped out of the fuselage to generate power from the airflow. Brandenstein and his bombardier, sitting alongside him, didn't know what had caused their electrical failure, but the RAT seemed to have taken up the slack. They decided to press on with their mission over enemy territory.

• • •

You never went around again. That was the rule. But on this occasion, in the cockpit of his A-6 Intruder, Rick Hauck just saw red. Instead of the usually wayward fire that greeted them in the dark skies over Laos, tonight the North Vietnamese gunners were firing at him and his bombardier with worryingly accurate radar-laid antiaircraft artillery. They're trying to kill me. After completing his bomb run and climbing out of range, he thought, We've got two more antipersonnel weapons we can drop; let's go down and throw 'em. He tipped the A-6 on its wing and carved down toward the triple-A site. Then he switched on the Intruder's bright exterior lights in the hope he could provoke the enemy gun battery into revealing itself. Flying attack missions off the USS Coral Sea, Hauck thought he was bulletproof.

• • •

McBride, Brandenstein and Hauck applied for astronaut selection in the autumn of 1976, traveling to Houston in the summer of the following year after NASA had filtered a total of over eight thousand applications into a more manageable shortlist of around two hundred. For a week in that summer of 1977, the candidates were subjected to medicals, psychological tests—Have you ever wanted to kill yourself? Were you ever abused as a child? If you could be reincarnated what would you come back as?—formal interviews with a selection board, and the experience of being zipped, in a fetal position, into a small dark fabric ball designed to transfer crew on orbit from a damaged Shuttle to a rescue vehicle, then left without word of when they'd be let out. That would weed out the claustrophobics. And at the end of the day, they were invited to the Pour House for a beer with Dick Truly, Bob Crippen, Joe Engle and George Abbey. It was another chance to see how people fitted in. At the end of each selection week, in an effort to make the Navy applicants feel welcome, Dick and Cody Truly hosted dinners at their home.

Cody got good at talent spotting. "Rick," she said, pulling Hauck aside before he left at the end of the evening, "I'll bet you a fifth of Chivas Regal Scotch that you are invited to come down here."

He grinned. "How can I lose with that bet?!"

McBride, Brandenstein and Hauck were selected as astronauts in January 1978. They were exactly the kind of men Deke Slayton was hoping to recruit. Once it became operational, NASA planned to fly the Shuttle every couple of weeks. To ensure there were flight-ready crews, Slayton had argued for the creation of an elite cadre of around twenty Shuttle astronauts—a squadron—who could fly in rotation as many as six or seven times a year, growing in experience and skill and, as a result, he thought, reducing the amount of training. It was the only way, he reckoned, of treating the Shuttle like a truly operational vehicle. It didn't work out quite as Slayton had hoped.

When thirty-five new astronaut candidates, all of them interviewed over the summer of 1977, arrived at Johnson for day one of their new job in July 1978, there were plenty more with credentials similar to the three Navy Vietnam veterans. One Air Force pilot had flown 324 classified missions over Cambodia out of Bien Hoa Air Base in the little Cessna A-37 attack jet that Joe Engle once flight-tested at Edwards; another had flown top cover for the final evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon with the fleet's first frontline Grumman F-14A Tomcat squadron; there was an Air Force tanker pilot who'd listened to reports of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on Voice of America from the cockpit of a KC-135 over Laos; and a black Air Force combat-search-and-rescue helicopter pilot who'd been prompted to apply by a NASA advertisement featuring Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura—actress Nichelle Nichols. But while the astronaut corps had been, traditionally, made up principally of test pilots, NASA was not, this time, only looking for more of the same. Since NASA had actively encouraged applications from minorities and women, there were, alongside the men with the Right Stuff, physicists, astrophysicists, geologists, astronomers, engineers, surgeons, an oceanographer who'd previously had her heart set on piloting the Alvin submersible to the depths of the ocean, and an assistant professor of civil engineering who'd been equipping calves with artificial hearts. There was even an academic with a criminal conviction. And a beard. The oldest of them was thirty-nine, the youngest just twenty-six. The starting salary was $11,000, though most of them were no longer listening when, after learning they'd been selected for astronaut training, they were informed of the terms and conditions of government work. They'd have done it for nothing.

The new astronaut candidates, learning the NASA acronym habit early, christened themselves the TFNGs. For public consumption, this stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys," but in reality they reveled in the earthier appellation "The Fucking New Guys." At a stroke, their arrival changed the character of the Astronaut Office. One of the TFNGs noticed that within a month or so, the habit of calling everyone by their surnames was changing. Deke Slayton, labeled a GVA (grizzled veteran astronaut) by the irreverent new arrivals, had got more than a squadron—he had a university.

The TFNGs were welcomed by Chris Kraft, George Abbey and John Young in room 966 on the ninth floor of Building 1. Young, his eyes darting around the room, evidently not entirely at home standing in front of an audience delivering a speech, nonetheless left them with a few words of sage advice before he wrapped up: "Don't talk about nothing you know nothing about."

## THIRTY-FOUR

The cockpit shuddered as the Shuttle passed through Mach 1. Young and Crippen shook in their seats a little as the turbulence of passing through the sound barrier layered over the persistent vibration from the big solid rocket boosters.

You're go at throttle up.

Roger, go at throttle up.

With that, the three main engines returned to delivering 100 percent of their rated thrust. Prior to the point at which the Shuttle went supersonic, the three main engines were throttled back to 65 percent so as not to exceed the structural limits of the stack in the thick lower air. Past the point of maximum dynamic pressure, as the speed continues to grow, the air begins to offer less resistance until, all being well, it releases its grip completely. A minute after the Shuttle's main engines throttled up out of the thrust bucket, a line reading "Pc <50" on the screen displaying the backup flight software began to flash double bright. The pressure inside the boosters' combustion chambers had now fallen below 50 pounds per square inch, meaning their fuel was spent. The computers initiated the separation of the big solids.

You're go for SRB sep.

Roger on the sep.

Young and Crippen felt a firm thump through the cockpit floor as a series of small rockets propelled the two redundant boosters away from the stack. The ride became smoother. Until, less than thirty seconds later, the master alarm went off.

To the right, on the panel beneath the right-hand CRT display, one of the main engine shutdown lights blinked red. They'd lost a main engine. At this point, a little over two minutes into the ascent, they wouldn't make orbit with an engine down. Young reached forward with his left hand and stabbed at the master caution light on the coaming above the instrument panel. With his right he moved the rotational abort-mode controller one notch to the right to "RTLS," then punched the abort switch next to it. Return to launch site.

Now things got busy.

Crip flipped through the ascent checklist cue cards. With the RTLS abort sequence initiated, a pair of smaller rocket engines mounted in pods above the three main engines ignited to burn off their fuel. Without emptying the tanks, the orbiter's center of gravity would sit too far back for her to fly. At the same time, the flight control software increased the angle of their trajectory, in an effort to steal as much height as possible from the power of the two remaining engines.

The orbiter was flying upside down beneath the massive bullet-shaped external tank, arcing backward like a high-board diver. The flight profile was mainly to ensure the right loads and thrust vectors. But it also enabled the orbiter to perform the RTLS abort maneuver. In a nominal ascent, the higher they climbed, the flatter their trajectory became, trading rate of climb for acceleration, as they powered toward an orbital speed of 17,500 mph. But with the abort sequence initiated, the change in pitch had to become more radical. The nose of the Shuttle needed to pitch down through the arc of a circle in a maneuver called the powered pitcharound. From arcing elegantly into space, the astronauts needed to pitch the nose of the Shuttle over through 180 degrees so it was facing away from the direction of travel, then use the power from the remaining two engines to slow her progress. Traveling backward through the sky, her rocket bells and tail leading the way, she was no longer a flying machine but a projectile, only the sparsity of the upper atmosphere preventing her from being ripped apart by dynamic pressure.

Through the cockpit glass, the curve of the horizon swung away from view, replaced by the blackness of space as the nose of the orbiter pitched around.

Although still speeding farther away, her nose was now pointing back toward the launch site. And the two remaining main engines, now operating at a maximum 104 percent of their rated power, began to slow her progress as, nose pitched down, her horizontal speed came to a standstill. Stalled, she then began to gather forward speed from the thrust of the two big rocket engines as she fell toward 200,000 feet.

Next, Young had to shut down the main engines and jettison the external tank without it smashing straight back against the belly of the orbiter. At such a high angle of attack, the dynamic pressure was pushing the tank up against the belly of the orbiter. To ensure a clean separation, Young needed to jettison it as he pitched the nose down at a rate of 3 degrees per second so that the tank was actually shoved away from underneath them—"punched off," in test pilot speak. Young cut the two remaining main engines and called MECO—main engine cutoff—then applied forward pressure on the stick, to lower the nose. All three main engine lights glowed red. The orbiter bucked as a series of explosive bolts fired, severing the connection with the external tank. Immediately afterward, thousands of pounds of propellant remaining in the orbiter's pipes were dumped. Young, Crippen and the orbiter were now on their own, gliding to Earth. Young struggled to suppress the orbiter's yaw as he tried to settle the harassed Shuttle into a stable descent. The worst was over. The engine failure had come late, but they'd been lucky. This time they hadn't gone so far that they couldn't still make it back to the runway at Kennedy.

• • •

It worked in the simulator. It was supposed to—no point practicing it if it couldn't be done. But it was certainly more than possible to screw it up, and both Young and Crip had augered in often enough as they trained to fly the tough, high-speed semi-aerobatics demanded by the return-to-launch-site abort. If they got the procedures right, though, the sim said they would survive. Whether or not they'd enjoy the same outcome in the event of a real-life engine failure was a subject of great debate within the Astronaut Office.

From the outset, abort procedures had been high on the astronauts' list of priorities. In the Gemini capsule, the crew had ejection seats. For the Apollo missions, the capsule sat beneath a distinctive scaffold escape tower conceived by Max Faget, which, in the event of the Saturn V booster failing, pulled the capsule free of the stack and brought it out of harm's way before parachutes in the nose carried it to the ground. In the Shuttle, escape wasn't possible. The crew compartment and the rest of the orbiter were one and the same. Ejection seats were a possibility for the two pilots on the flight deck, but the Shuttle would carry crews of up to seven people, half of whom were on the mid-deck below. It was impossible to provide them with a means of rapid escape. They had to find a way of ensuring that the orbiter itself provided the crew's means of escape. Their vessel was its own lifeboat. They had to stay with her.

When suggested abort procedures first came in from the contractors bidding to build the Shuttle, Fred Haise and Joe Engle were among the astronauts poring through the piles of paperwork. Haise chuckled as he thought through the unlikely set of maneuvers one of the space plane builders had imagined the crew might perform to escape disaster. "You couldn't do that," he remarked. "You couldn't go off the booster, go over on your back, twist it around, come back and land."

Joe Engle looked up. "It's a piece of cake," he quipped. "I did it down at Galveston flying a T-38 down the beach the other night!"

"Bet you couldn't do it in a fog . . ." Haise chipped back.

Once the configuration of the Shuttle was finalized, the crews had to cope with the hand they'd been dealt. Much of the difficulty lay with the characteristics of solid rockets. Being able to throttle the engines had been considered a prerequisite for human spaceflight. When, during the ascent of Apollo 13, one of the Saturn V's massive F-1 engines developed a fault it was shut down immediately, ending any further danger its malfunction might have caused. While two solid fuel boosters strapped to the side of the Titan IIIC rocket earmarked for the MOL program had a facility to terminate the thrust by blowing the nose cones off the rockets, the Shuttle's SRBs did not. Not only would the system's inclusion have incurred a weight penalty, it was also feared that by triggering it and blowtorching the path ahead of the orbiter it might only reduce the crew's chances of survival.

Instead of trying to tame the blazing, unstoppable solids, NASA turned the problem on its head and began to regard them as the solution. The big boosters could actually provide the astronauts' means of escape. As long as the boosters were burning, the Shuttle would continue to climb to altitude, and, of course, if it had insufficient power to reach orbit, the winged orbiter was designed to return a crew safely from altitude. It was what it was for. In the event of a main engine failure preventing them from reaching space, the big solids themselves would perform the function of Max Faget's escape tower, propelling the crew to an altitude where they had, relatively speaking at least, time and options.

If they were high and fast enough when the main engines quit, there was the possibility of either an abort to orbit—ATO—in which the Shuttle was able to reach a safe orbit, even if it was lower than planned and perhaps meant the mission objectives were scrubbed; or there was the abort once around—AOA—in which the Shuttle, failing to reach orbit, had sufficient height and speed to complete a single revolution of the globe before reentering to land. But losing the engines too soon would leave Young and Crippen having to pull off the demanding return to launch site—RTLS—maneuver to get back to the Cape.

Joe Engle didn't like it at all. What he balked at was surrendering the orbiter to the mercy of the remaining main engines. In performing the powered pitch-around necessary to present the rockets in the direction of travel in order to slow down, you had voluntarily turned a good airplane into an unflyable, unaerodynamic ballistic missile. You'd relinquished control. Many of the other astronauts weren't even sure the maneuver was survivable. It would be a miracle, thought Dick Truly.

"Six miracles followed by an act of God," John Young called it.

It was sporty, for sure, Bob Crippen argued, but he tried to make a case for test-flying the RTLS maneuver to prove it actually worked beyond the cockpit of the motion-base simulator. He was on his own, though. Young thought the idea was nothing more than Russian roulette.

"We don't need to practice bleeding," he said, shutting down the conversation.

In the Pentagon, evidence was beginning to emerge that the Soviets might soon be facing similar dilemmas.

• • •

The National Reconnaissance Office had launched its second digital spy satellite from Vandenberg on June 14, 1978, the first since Hans Mark's appointment as the intelligence agency's director. But when Mark returned home from his office on the third floor of the Pentagon, news of the successful launch of the KH-11 wasn't something he could share with his wife, Marion. Being the director of an organization that was not even acknowledged to exist could present challenges. Fortunately, he maintained, he'd married someone smarter than he was. Presented with the ominous-looking red telephone that had been installed in their bedroom since the move to Washington, Marion simply teased him by asking, "Which one of your girlfriends are you calling now?"

Like the KEYHOLE satellites themselves, another crucial addition to the NRO's capabilities was similarly off limits at home. Mark's directorship also covered the Aerospace Data Facility East, a new NRO ground station that opened in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 1977—the site where the images taken by the KH-11 KENNEN satellite were processed after being relayed from space via a network SDS communications satellite. The top-secret two-story windowless block in Virginia was designated Area 58.

In 1978, the NRO's increasingly capable spy satellite network recorded evidence of new building work at the Soviets' Baikonur launch site. Not only was a pad that had last been used for the USSR's catastrophic attempts to launch a moon rocket to rival the Saturn V being redeveloped, but a long runway was also under construction nearby. Reports on a Soviet shuttle in respected magazines like Aviation Week and Flight International had begun to appear with increasing regularity and conviction, and the latest KEYHOLE imagery lent weight to them.

Between October 1977 and September 1978, the Soviets conducted flight-testing of a small space plane prototype built by design bureau Mikoyan-Gurevich. Launched from beneath the wing of a Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" bomber, the little MiG 105.11 "Lapot" was not itself capable of reaching orbit, but was instead a proof of concept. Enjoying much in common with the American lifting bodies flown at Edwards in the sixties, it was also an aerodynamic prototype of the Soviets' own canceled sixties space plane, Spiral. When the time came to make a decision about the configuration of a rival to the US Shuttle, there were powerful voices arguing that, with years of testing and research behind it, Spiral should form the basis of the Soviet orbiter. Former Mikoyan engineers produced a proposal for a scaled-up Spiral capable of carrying the same load into orbit as the NASA design, but in the end they were outvoted in favor of aping the Space Shuttle. "The Americans," those working on the program were told, "are not dumber."

It was hoped that by closely following the layout of the Rockwell-built Shuttle, they would save both time and money in achieving their goal. In order to do so, the KGB embarked on a large-scale and systematic campaign to acquire NASA documents and studies by contractors. The CIA would later single out the heat shield and avionics as being of particular interest to the Soviets, concluding that by the end of the decade they were prepared to pay over $140,000 for information on the latter. The company had also done what it could to feed the Russians with misinformation. When it came to the way the Soviet orbiter looked, though, there was nothing they could do to deflect them from pursuing a machine that, when the Soviets froze their design in the summer of 1978, looked strikingly similar.

Ironically, Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, the leader of the Mikoyan team behind the pitch for the "Big Spiral" development, would end up as head of the design bureau building the new spacecraft. Forced to explain the decision to follow the Americans so closely, he'd argue, "If you have the second design of a bicycle and it is a much superior bicycle, it would still look like the original bicycle." But there was one key decision made by the Russians that, by the end of 1978, was looking as if it might turn out to be a smart one: the Soviet shuttle would not, unlike the American spacecraft, include a trio of powerful, cutting-edge-technology rocket engines in its tail.

## THIRTY-FIVE

#### Pearl River, Mississippi, 1978

In late December a massive fire tore through the main engine test stand at NASA's National Space Technology Laboratories on the banks of the Pearl River in Mississippi. For over three minutes, the rocket appeared to be running normally until, without warning, sheets of orange and yellow flame erupted from the machine head, engulfing the engine and test rig more completely than any previous fire. Such was the damage that it halted further testing of the Space Shuttle main engines for a month while the test stand was rebuilt.

For two years NASA engineers had worked in parallel with their counterparts from Rocketdyne, conducting separate tests at a facility in Santa Susana, near LA, to try to build an engine that didn't rip itself to pieces. For the most part the problem lay with the turbopumps needed to deliver fuel to the engine's combustion chamber at the required pressure. The small turbines inside the pump had to cope with reaching 38,000 rpm from a standstill in a fraction of a second, and then endure the massive centrifugal forces that followed. They were cracking under the strain. And when they failed, the engine, basted in liquid hydrogen and oxygen, would self-destruct so completely that there was often little left to analyze but splashes of molten metal.

The Space Shuttle, the astronauts had been told, would be as "reliable as a DC-8" airliner. After hearing more about the challenges faced by rocket engineers, John Young and Bob Crippen didn't come away feeling entirely convinced that they were looking at DC-8-level reliability. Yet the Shuttle main engines were deliberately being tested to destruction. That was the very method through which points of failure—and those aspects of the design that needed fixing—revealed themselves. "We never learned as much," said J. R. Thompson, the engineer running the main engine program at Marshall Space Flight Center, "as we did during the investigation coming out of a failure." He was going to keep blowing up the engines, identifying the cause of the explosion, addressing it, then running the engines again until they stopped destroying themselves.

With the airframe itself, however, NASA made a decision to take the opposite approach.

• • •

On display in engineer Tom Moser's office was a ceramic eagle given to him by Program Manager Aaron Cohen, a thank-you for saving $100 million from the orbiter's development program. He'd earned it first by successfully making the case that the Shuttle did not need the same structural strength as the average commercial airliner or jet fighter, a conclusion that had been endorsed by aviation industry experts. But it still needed to be tested. Initially it seemed sensible to follow the methods airplane builders used to test new designs, and so, as was the case for any new commercial airliner design, two extra airframes were planned.

The first was to test for metal fatigue, a problem that had revealed itself through the tragic, puzzling losses of the world's first jet airliner, Britain's elegant de Havilland Comet, in the early fifties. At the time the cause of the accidents was unknown, but wreckage salvaged from the bottom of the Mediterranean revealed that the aircraft's cabin had exploded with such sudden violence that blue and gold paint from the fuselage was etched onto the outside of the wings. Tests at Farnborough's Royal Aircraft Establishment traced the cause to cracks forming in the corners of the airliner's square passenger windows. In the same way that a spoon bent forward and backward too often will eventually snap, the fuselage of an airliner, subjected to tens of thousands of hours of flying, will weaken.

The Shuttle was different. Designed to fly just one hundred times, fatigue was never going to be a problem. So Moser successfully argued that the airframe for fatigue testing be canceled.

Then Moser's Structures and Mechanics Division turned its attention to the other test article. Alongside fatigue testing, the aviation industry also provided an airframe specifically to test the ultimate limits of any new design's structural strength. Pressure was applied using hydraulic jacks until something snapped. It was an inherently damaging process, and when a fleet of only four orbiters was planned, the Shuttle program could scarcely afford the luxury of bending what was otherwise a perfectly serviceable airframe. In the hope of preserving it for possible conversion into an operational Shuttle, Moser proposed that, instead of actually testing it to destruction, they go only part of the way, then extrapolate their results to pre-predict whether or not it would survive the full loads it was built to withstand. This answer came back from the NASA chief engineer's office: "You guys are crazy as hell. We're not going to accept that."

Moser reassured them, providing the analysis done by his team to support the argument. Again, experts from commercial plane makers like Boeing and Lockheed were called in to go over the numbers. They were unable to find fault with Moser's suggestion. And so in August 1978, a bare aluminum orbiter was caged inside a 430-ton steel frame at Lockheed's Palmdale plant and tested to 20 percent less force than it was designed to cope with. There were no surprises. The test airframe emerged sufficiently unscathed to go on to form the basis of the second Space Shuttle, and the expected cost of building and then breaking two perfectly good orbiters was saved. Moser gratefully accepted the ceramic eagle from his boss.

There was just one cause for concern brought to light by the testing done at Palmdale: a structure in the nose supporting the propellant tanks for the forward reaction-control system (RCS)—the jet thrusters that were to be used to maneuver the Shuttle in space—failed. A redesign was approved, but it was a part of the spacecraft that was already a cause for concern elsewhere in the Shuttle program office.

• • •

Fred Haise felt that the stresses that might be endured by the forward fuselage of the Shuttle at launch were not sufficiently well understood. Unlike Tom Moser, though, he found himself on the wrong side of the argument. It wasn't structural loads that worried Haise as much as acoustic stress. The decibel levels experienced by the orbiter would be worse than those endured by Apollo. To try to replicate them, the test center at Marshall Space Flight Center had to acquire more powerful acoustic horns. The volume alone—the acoustic vibration—from the engines would be enough to kill anyone unlucky or foolish enough to be standing within 800 feet of a launch. When a decision was made to do without a vibracoustic test article for the front of the orbiter, Haise told Aaron Cohen that it should be reconsidered. He was anxious, not so much about the external structure of the orbiter, but about the vulnerability to acoustic stress of the computers and electronics in the lower part of the nose. While Cohen took Haise's objection up the chain, the decision not to test it was to stand. Haise remained uncomfortable about it.

It would turn out that he was right to be. But by the time the problem revealed itself again, Freddo was long gone. And it was nothing so mundane as battles with management that prompted his retirement from the Astronaut Office. It was the sun.

On December 15, 1978, NASA told the president that Skylab couldn't be saved. As the prospective date for the Shuttle's first flight moved, heightened solar activity saw the inevitable demise of the space station move until a point when the two schedules crossed. With that, the Buck Rogers mission that Haise and Jack Lousma had been training for so enthusiastically was gone.

Disappointed, Freddo hung on for a while, until in early 1979 he took a job running space programs for the Grumman Aerospace Corporation. Concerned that his departure might disrupt preparations for the early Shuttle flights, he suggested that George Abbey move his pilot, Lousma, into the commander's seat. Abbey and John Young agreed, and in the reshuffle that followed they assigned Gordo Fullerton to be Lousma's pilot, and lined up T. K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield as commander and pilot of a fourth crew.

There were now veterans of the old Air Force MOL program sitting in the right-hand seat for all four of the Space Shuttle's planned orbital test flights.

## THIRTY-SIX

#### Palmdale, California, 1979

She was christened Columbia. The first Space Shuttle orbiter built to travel into space was rolled out of Rockwell's Palmdale plant in March 1979. From the front, muscular and squat, her wide, blunt nose had the purposeful appearance of a catfish snout. She'd lost the long white aero-data boom that had extended from in front of the cockpit of Enterprise and instead gained a rakish Lone Ranger mask of black thermal tiles around the flight-deck window. She and the three orbiters that followed her were to be named after famous sailing vessels. Columbia, an eighteenth-century sloop, was the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe, her name (after Columbus) considered the female embodiment of the United States. Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis, all three sailing ships that had conducted pioneering scientific research, would follow. With the names made public, NASA at least forestalled any possibility of Star Wars fans, encouraged by the success of their Star Trek counterparts, mounting a letter-writing campaign to get one of them named the Millennium Falcon.

As Columbia emerged for the first time from the hangar into the California sun, though, she was like a ship without a keel. She may have looked the part but she was a very long way from being ready to fly. For now that didn't matter. NASA, determined to give at least the appearance that the program was still forging ahead on schedule, had ordered her premature delivery to Kennedy Space Center, the launch site, where there was a waiting army of Rockwell employees, hired to prepare the orbiter for flight, who now had the job of finishing her. But if public relations was behind the decision to move her from Palmdale, then Columbia's first flight across the country, attached to the back of the 747 carrier aircraft, was to have a calamitous effect.

As Columbia was flown over Houston, Deke Slayton took up a T-38 from Ellington Field to get pictures of her in the air. While a photographer in the backseat of the cockpit snapped away, Slayton cast an eye over the apparent wreckage of a heat shield he reckoned would crumble if you looked at it wrong. Thousands of tiles were missing. Of the nearly 31,000 that formed the major part of the heat shield, many had not been attached before the orbiter was ordered to Kennedy. A short test flight from Palmdale prior to embarking on the transcontinental journey had ripped off nearly all the polystyrene substitutes that had been stuck on in order that she look the part for her public. She was a sorry sight by the time she arrived at Kennedy. Damaged in transit. Even Crip, one of the two men training to fly her, had to admit she was in a pretty bad state.

• • •

In the Structures and Mechanics Division at Houston, it wasn't news to Tom Moser. He'd tried to have NASA's contractor add tests for the structural integrity of the tiles to those planned for their thermal properties. But, squeezed by budgets, they'd pushed back. In the end, he took the initiative himself, organizing in-house flight tests. He attached tiles, as they would be bonded to the orbiter, to the airbrakes of T-38 jets to subject them to high dynamic pressures in flight. And they came off. Oh Christ, he thought, that should not have happened. Nor was there any obvious reason why. Each element of the bonding process was, on its own, known to be strong enough. With Rockwell already applying the tiles to the first orbital Shuttle, the discovery had the potential to be a showstopper. It was exactly what Hans Mark's letter had warned of in the weeks that followed the Shuttle program's approval in 1972.

Throughout a Shuttle flight, the orbiter's metal airframe flexes and bends in response to heat and aerodynamic loads. In space, with one side heated by the sun, the other shaded and frozen, the entire structure bananas. The fragility of the silica compound used to safeguard the Shuttle from the heat of reentry ended any hope of building the thermal protection system out of large, unyielding sheets. Instead, the heat shield became a complex tessellation of 30,757 numbered tiles, each roughly 6 by 6 inches square and up to 5 inches deep. Each specially cut and shaped tile occupied a unique position on the surface of the orbiter.

Even assembling the heat shield like a jigsaw puzzle wasn't enough to ensure the tiles' integrity, however. They could cope with a deflection of just one-sixteenth of an inch before they shattered like glass, so it was understood from the outset that the brittle silica tiles couldn't be bonded directly onto the aluminum skin of the orbiter. Instead, to absorb the movement of the airframe beneath them, a layer of Nomex nylon felt, called a strain isolation pad (SIP), sandwiched by adhesive, sat between the tiles and the metal below, allowing the tiles to float above the source of stress. But it turned out to be the padding itself that was causing the problem. To add strength to the nylon felt, it was needled with perpendicular fibers. These caused stress concentrations that acted as a catalyst for failure. Subjected to forces as small as 2 pounds per square inch, the delicate silica tiles would fracture and tear off. Because of the aggravation from that stitching, the tiles were barely half as strong in practice as they had been on paper.

They would not survive spaceflight.

Engineering boss Max Faget stepped in, suggesting he should lead the search for a solution, but was told that he already had more than enough on his plate. Instead, Tom Moser got handed the job. He knew from the outset that he and his team had their backs to the wall.

• • •

NASA was now in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. By June 1979, with uncertainty over where and when Skylab would come down, entrepreneurs were selling beanie hats advertised as Skylab early-warning devices. When falling wreckage hit you on the head, you could consider yourself warned. Only getting the Shuttle into space offered to turn things around. And even as pieces of the space station began to come down in northern Australia in July, cinema audiences were being offered a glimpse of what an operational Space Shuttle might look like. Or at least that's what many assumed when, in June, Moonraker, the new James Bond film, was released.

Inspired by the success of Star Wars, Bond's producers decided to launch their super spy into space to thwart villain Hugo Drax's latest variation on the theme of taking over the world. Drax planned to release lethal spores from an orbiting space station, and then repopulate the Earth with his own perfect physical specimens. And Jaws, his giant, metal-mouthed henchman. To get to and from his space base, Drax employed a fleet of stolen laser-armed Space Shuttles, sporting yellow go-faster stripes and logos seemingly inspired by Rockwell's stylish Saul Bass creation, and launched them from inside the traditional hollow-mountain headquarters.

That no Shuttle had yet flown in space perhaps gave the filmmakers a license for some of their wilder speculation, but so much was wrong that, as entertaining as it might have been, the astronauts could only smile and shake their heads at the ridiculousness of it all. In at least one respect, though, it was evident that the filmmakers had done a little homework. In the movie, alongside 007's own mission to save the world, a military Space Shuttle is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, the site from which the Department of Defense planned to launch its own Space Shuttle missions once the real orbiter became operational.

Inside the Pentagon, Hans Mark remained both Vandenberg's and the Shuttle's most committed and powerful advocate, but he was no longer having to bang the drum alone. By the summer of 1979, Lieutenant General Tom Stafford had been in Washington for over a year in his position as deputy chief of staff of the Air Force for research, development and acquisition. It was a job that placed him in the forefront of many of the Air Force's most classified programs, including the development of the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, the Northrop B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and a number of black-world drone programs at a time when unmanned airplane technology was still in its infancy. Not many in the Air Force were particularly enamored with the idea of the latter. The fondness the Air Force had for pilots was in marked contrast to its feelings about astronauts. But in Stafford, Hans Mark had a high-ranking ally in his effort to change their view. Soon after Stafford's arrival in the Pentagon, the two of them began work on a study into the future of manned military space operations. Submitted to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in October, they called it "The Utility of Military Man in Space."

In Moonraker, the Shuttle launched from Vandenberg carries a squad of heavily armed space marines who, as the orbiter approaches the enemy space station, float up out of the payload bay to conduct their assault. The ambitions of Mark and Stafford's study may have been less flamboyant but they were still, ultimately, substantial. As a long-term goal, the strategic merits of a manned military space station were discussed in detail, but there was also a more immediate suggestion. Made possible by the decision, to which Mark himself had contributed, to allow payload specialists to fly aboard the Shuttle after months rather than years of dedicated training, Mark created a new cadre of Air Force astronauts known as manned spaceflight engineers, or MSEs.

As Moonraker finished its successful run in cinemas in August, the first thirteen MSEs were selected. All had backgrounds in existing Air Force or Navy space programs, including satellite control from inside the Sunnyvale Blue Cube. Just one was a pilot. And when they first reported for duty, they were described by National Reconnaissance Office Program A boss Major General John Kulpa as "the future of the Air Force in space." Mark's hope was that they would act as a conduit, educating NASA about the Air Force in space and vice versa. In the end, though, they found themselves in an uneasy position, neither entirely of the Air Force nor of NASA, and not quite fully fledged astronauts. It was a situation made painfully apparent by any comparison with the experience of the TFNGs, the new group of NASA astronauts who'd arrived in Houston the previous year.

• • •

As a graduate student hoping to study vulcanism on the deep ocean floor, claiming an aviation world record wasn't something Astronaut Candidate Kathy Sullivan had anticipated. But on July 1, 1979, wearing a full pressure suit in the backseat of one of NASA's big-winged Martin WB-57F reconnaissance aircraft, she and her pilot reached an unofficial women's world record altitude of 63,300 feet during a four-hour flight that took them over Big Bend, Texas.

Through nearly a year of briefings, lectures and training on everything from space physics to "People and Requirements: It Takes a Bunch to Make Things Work in NASA," the TFNGs felt like they were drinking through a firehose. From the spring of 1979, though, George Abbey had begun assigning them real responsibility in support of the crews preparing for the orbital test flights.

Before getting pressure-suit-qualified and flying from Texas to Panama, Peru, Uruguay and the Falkland Islands, sucking food out of toothpaste tubes on high-altitude air-sampling missions in the WB-57F, Kathy Sullivan was assigned to work with Dick Truly alongside Rick Hauck drawing up emergency procedures checklists for the Shuttle's ascent and reentry.

Many of the new astronauts put in time at SAIL, the Shuttle Avionics Integrated Laboratory. Here, they were charged with the Sisyphean task of testing and debugging the orbiter's software through every phase of flight using what John Young called the "Iron Bird." In truth, she was no bird at all. SAIL was a nervous system without flesh: the computers, wiring and electronics of the Space Shuttle, laid out exactly as they would be in a flying orbiter, but unsheathed by an airframe. It was repetitive, joyless and often frustrating work. But, as the third long pole alongside the development of the main engines and the heat shield, it was also crucial to the program's success.

Software used for critical computer systems like air traffic control contained, on average, ten to twelve errors for every thousand lines of code. NASA would reduce that figure to just 0.11 per thousand, but it was laborious, expensive work, each line of code costing twenty times what it cost to develop equivalent systems in commercial aviation. As vital as the work was, to alpha male test pilots who'd flown combat tours in Southeast Asia, SAIL could feel like exile.

Inevitably, there was second-guessing within the ranks of the TFNGs about the significance of the assignments they received from George Abbey and John Young. Did the air-sampling mission, requiring extended periods away from Johnson, mean Kathy Sullivan would be out of sight and out of mind? Was SAIL just a place to mop up a second tier? None of them knew; and Abbey and Young gave no indication of their thinking. There was one assignment, though, on which the whole TFNG group could agree: Jon McBride had landed a real plum.

• • •

In his last assignment before joining NASA, McBride opened the show for the Navy's Blue Angels display team, warming up the crowds in a spectacularly painted red, white and blue F-4 Phantom. For ten minutes, McBride flew a solo display, carving out a tight routine trailed by dirty smoke from the jet's twin J79 engines, able to keep within the airfield boundaries only because of extensive modifications to the big interceptor. His last display in the jet was in May 1978 in front of his prospective TFNG classmates at Ellington Field. He had mixed feelings about handing the spectacular-looking Phantom back to the Navy, but he got to keep hold of his matching red, white and blue "Captain America" flying helmet. On joining NASA, the affable, sandy-haired test pilot had his eye on becoming the first West Virginian in space.

After completing his basic training at Johnson, McBride was called in to see Abbey and Young. "We're passing out new assignments for you guys," they told him, "and we'd like you to lead the chase team for recovery of STS-1." McBride was going to have to join on the returning Space Shuttle at altitude then shadow her descent and approach to the Edwards lake bed. It didn't take long for him to appreciate that he'd been handed what was perhaps the most challenging aerial rendezvous ever attempted.

"How are we going to do this?" McBride asked as he mulled over the trajectories with Dick Gray, the NASA staff pilot working alongside him on the chase assignment. "It's never been done before; nobody has ever tried anything like what we have to try . . ." It was two weeks before the two of them even got airborne. Using flight profiles drawn up by a Houston aerodynamicist, they identified the best point to try to pick up the diving orbiter as wherever she was at 40,000 feet, just as her velocity dropped below the speed of sound. So fine were the margins, they discovered, that if the chasing T-38s missed their mark by more than three or four seconds, early or late, Young and Crippen would be descending into Edwards on their own. Not only that, in order to ensure that their sleek little jets didn't slip away from the blunt-nosed orbiter, McBride and Gray had to find a way to inhibit their passage through the sky. Their solution: to lower the T-38s' landing gear at nearly supersonic speed. That was way beyond the gear's design specs and would require help from Northrop to beef up the undercarriage, but it did the trick.

Alongside modifications to their jets, they also needed to develop infallible procedures. If they were to successfully arrive alongside the returning orbiter, McBride's chase pilots had to be able to roll out of a 360-degree circle in exactly the right parcel of sky at the right time. They measured their turns in minutes. A perfect three-minute circle would deliver them to the right place, but if the Shuttle was then going to be five or ten seconds early or late, they needed to be able to extend or crank up their turn to accommodate it. Up in thinner air at 40,000 feet the dartlike T-38 didn't have the wing area or thrust for really hard turns. If they needed to lean into the turn to pick up an early arrival, there was going to be barely half a g of flexibility with which to do so.

Lastly, they had to make sure they could perform the maneuver in three different locations: Edwards, the White Sands, El Paso diversion strip, and the runway at Kennedy Space Center, which would be used in the event of a return-to-launch-site abort. All three airfields were at different elevations. McBride and Gray penciled in the basics of the plan, then traveled to the Air Force bases at Vandenberg; Edwards; Holloman, New Mexico; and Patrick in Florida to work out the detail of the timings and distances and radio calls with the Air Force flight controllers who'd be directing the one-shot maneuver from behind their radar displays.

McBride was just relieved that he'd been handed the assignment so far in advance of the first flight. Even six months, he thought, wouldn't have been enough to perfect such a complex task loaded with so many variables.

• • •

While McBride wrestled with the challenge, fellow naval aviators Dan Brandenstein and Rick Hauck were assigned to support crews for the Shuttle's first flight. There was no debate over where that seemed to place them in the pecking order. Working right on the front line alongside Young, Crippen, Engle and Truly, it was, thought Hauck, the best job any of us could have had. While Hauck was first dispatched by John Young to Hamilton Standard in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, to report back on difficulties with the systems used for cooling the Shuttle on orbit, Brandenstein was given the job of following the development of the troublesome heat shield.

Every Monday morning, the astronauts reported back on their particular area of responsibility at the weekly pilots' meeting in Building 4. Being the tile guy meant Dan Brandenstein was having to get used to reporting bad news.

• • •

Tom Moser's options didn't look good. There were tile compounds available that were strong enough to survive the stress concentrations that were breaking them, but they were also heavier. Using them would impose an unacceptable weight penalty. Moser's Structures and Mechanics Division also explored the possibility of removing all the tiles, covering the SIP felt with a thin aluminum foil skin, then bonding the tiles onto the new, smooth surface. Again, it would add weight. Worse, they quickly realized the foil would expand and contract in response to heat and cold and so might only make the problem worse. Both solutions would also mean taking apart the intricate jigsaw that made up the heat shield, then putting it together again from scratch. Moser was acutely aware that unless the problem was fixed, the Shuttle was going nowhere. As division head, it was on him. And there were important people now banking on seeing the orbiter fly.

## THIRTY-SEVEN

#### Vienna, Austria, 1979

Surrounded by the baroque grandeur of Vienna's Hofburg Palace, President Jimmy Carter and a visibly ailing Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in June 1979. Although the treaty was hailed by Carter as "a victory in the battle for peace," there were many who viewed the agreement to limit the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, operated by each country to 2,250 with more ambivalence. Hans Mark was one of them, but not because he regarded the reduction as inadequate.

The previous month, Mark had accepted the position of secretary of the Air Force, and in doing so gave up day-to-day control of the National Reconnaissance Office and Air Force space programs but assumed greater influence over the Air Force budget. At the top of his list of priorities were the modernization of the country's strategic nuclear deterrent forces, the enhancement of the military airlift capability, and improving the ability of the Air Force to conduct operations in space. Mark worried that SALT II would restrict his ability to pursue the first two on the list, but when it came to his commitment to space, and with it the Space Shuttle, the SALT II negotiations were going to provide an unexpected bonus.

• • •

Houston boss Chris Kraft used an aviation analogy to describe the state of the Shuttle program as NASA looked forward to the first flight: it was behind the power curve. Since the day the program was approved they'd been underfunded, pushing what he called a bow wave amounting to a 10 percent shortfall on what they actually needed to get the Shuttle operational. After years of robbing Peter to pay Paul, NASA needed fresh funds. But, faced with continuing challenges with the main engines, the thermal protection system and the software, and believing that further funding from Washington would not be forthcoming, the Shuttle program's managers, in desperation, began to consider the possibility of turning the Shuttle into a research project. By allowing the program to eat itself—by diverting funds allocated to getting the Shuttle operational to just getting it into space—they felt they might at least be able to get her off the pad.

Hans Mark learned in August from friends at NASA that the Shuttle needed more money and time. For the first time, the space agency was planning to submit a supplementary budget request to Congress. Mark, concerned that any delay would give the Air Force the pretext they needed to abandon their commitment to the Shuttle, and with it the Vandenberg launch site, threw his weight behind NASA's request. In November, he was invited to attend a meeting with the president in the White House Cabinet Room to discuss the program's status. Sitting two places to Jimmy Carter's left, Mark spoke briefly to outline the Shuttle's importance to national security. The president quizzed NASA's representatives about the difficulties with the engines and heat shield. His questions, though, were no longer intended to help him make a decision, but to allow him to justify it. Before convening the meeting, Carter had already made up his mind.

Earlier in the year, shortly after his return from the SALT II talks in Vienna, the president had called NASA administrator Robert Frosch to a meeting at the White House. "I want to tell you how wonderful that Space Shuttle is," he told Frosch. Acutely aware of the program's struggles, Frosch could feel himself tighten. Carter went on to relate his discussions with the Soviets and how he'd enthusiastically endorsed the capabilities of the new spacecraft being developed by NASA. "It carried the day," said the president. Frosch left with a sinking feeling, uncertain how he could possibly reconcile expectation and reality. Days later he returned to the White House to tell the president that the Shuttle program was in trouble, that they had insufficient funds to meet the launch date, and that there were possibly insurmountable problems with the tiles. Carter listened, then he asked, "How much do you need?" Surprised, Frosch estimated a figure of $600 million now, and another $400 million the following year.

"You'll get it," Carter told him.

Despite some opposition on Capitol Hill, NASA's budget supplement was approved. And the Air Force, having always resisted any direct contribution to the Shuttle's development, paid for it. Hans Mark was only too happy to see the reengining of the Air Force Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker air refueling fleet delayed in favor of the Shuttle. November 1979 would be the final financial wobble. The money to get Columbia into space was now assured. If the technical challenges could be overcome.

• • •

Materials engineer Glenn Ecord was working in the Building 13 laboratory at Houston over the weekend. A member of Tom Moser's thermal protection team, he was kicking around potential ideas for strengthening the bottom of the tiles. One idea showed promise. By mixing a powdered silica called Ludox—extremely fine sand, essentially—into water and then stabilizing it with ammonia, Ecord was able to paint the suspension onto the tiles with a brush. Once the water evaporated, the powder—fine as talc—packed itself in among the fibers and set like cement. Ecord then baked it in an oven at 350°F for three hours, densifying—as the strengthening process was christened—the surface of the bottom of the tile. Ecord took the idea to Moser on Monday.

This looks good, thought the Structures and Mechanics boss. For the first time in months, Moser wondered whether there was a solution to the tile problem on the horizon. "Let's make sure it's right," he told Ecord. Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that the elegantly simple idea could work. Armed with test data drawn up using the facilities inside Building 13, Moser was able to convince the program's management that his team had solved the problem. Ecord's breakthrough allowed them to double the strength of the tile where it was attached to the stitched Nomex felt below. It was enough to prevent the fracturing that had Moser worrying they were going to have to start all over again, at vast expense.

And while, initially, Aaron Cohen wasn't convinced that densification was going to work, subjecting the treated tiles to real-life aerodynamic loads in wind tunnels and in flight using NASA's F-104 and F-15 jet fighters confirmed that it did. There was swift approval for the proposal from NASA HQ in Washington. But if Ecord's first tile test in the Houston lab represented tile one, it still left another 30,756 to go. The workforce at Kennedy still faced a monumental task to prepare Columbia's heat shield for flight.

When Columbia first arrived at Kennedy Space Center from Palmdale barely 1,500 of the silica tiles were ready for flight, most of them applied to the easier-to-work-with flat underside of the Shuttle. To complete the work on the spacecraft's heat shield, the orbiter processing facility at KSC, a high-bay hangar designed for a workforce of two hundred, became home to combined teams from NASA and Rockwell totaling around three thousand people. New employees, drafted in to provide the necessary manpower, were given a chance to practice the process of installing the tiles on the aluminum skin of an old Douglas DC-3 piston-engined airliner that hung inside the facility. Enduring a scramble for parking, inadequate catering and long lines for the restrooms, the tile installers worked in three shifts, seven days a week, to complete the work, and yet by the summer of 1979 they were installing barely 200 of the 600 tiles per week called for by the schedule. By the end of the year, with the additional requirement to remove vulnerable tiles in favor of individually fashioned, densified replacements, there were days and weeks when they were removing more tiles than they were fitting. Progress was so slow that, on average, each worker was installing just 1.3 tiles per week.

Every morning at 7:30, Tom Moser met with Orbiter Program Manager Aaron Cohen and Houston Director Chris Kraft to review progress. An essential part of the routine was the phone call to the Cape. Each morning, the question was the same: "How many tiles did you take off and how many tiles did you put on?" Cohen's wife had begun telling friends that her husband's hair was going gray in inverse proportion to the rate at which the tiles were being fixed to Columbia.

To test the strength of the tiles' bonds to the airframe, Moser's team had designed a device which, using suction cups, pulled on them in place on the orbiter. It seemed straightforward, but, from NASA HQ, Manned Spaceflight boss John Yardley saw an immediate problem with it. "I got a question for you guys," he said. "When you pull on that tile, how do you know you didn't decrease the strength . . . so it's not going to be as strong as it was before you pulled on it?"

"Good question."

In response, the Structures and Mechanics Division spent a weekend using a sensitive microphone to record the sounds of tiles as they were pulled, analyzing just how much noise they could get away with before the act of testing it caused it to fail. They predicted that 5 percent of tiles tested would fail the pull test. Down at the Cape, as large numbers of tiles were put through the time-consuming new test, with workers listening in every case for the tell-tale sound of failure, the figure turned out to be 15 percent. The nearly 31,000 tiles that covered the orbiter had been plenty. But inside the orbiter processing facility, with some tiles needing to be fixed multiple times, the overall number installed rose to more than 75,000. Just one thing was certain: one way or another, they were going to have to put on more tiles than they took off. It was a job that would take 670,000 man-hours to complete.

Such was the anxiety about the heat shield, however, even postdensification, that in January 1980, the aerospace company Martin Marietta received a contract from Houston to develop a tile repair kit that John Young and Bob Crippen could use on orbit. The reaction to that news from Kenny Kleinknecht, the engineer Houston had sent to the Cape to oversee Columbia's preparation for flight, was succinct: "Well, it would be fine to have that piece of equipment, but if we think we might need it, we really shouldn't be going."

## THIRTY-EIGHT

#### Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 1980

While NASA struggled to return American astronauts to space, the Air Force unmanned space program was thriving. The first year of the new decade saw Department of Defense spending on space exceed that of NASA for the first time since 1960. And on February 7, a third KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite was launched from Vandenberg. Following the de-orbit of the first of the big digital spy satellites a year earlier after 770 days on station, the spy agency once again had two of the big reconnaissance birds operational. On essentially the same orbit, they were separated by a period of around twelve hours. Between them, every day, they could take advantage of the long shadows at dawn and dusk to give greater depth and perspective to their images. They were about to prove their worth.

In the spring of 1979, a small, chaotic group of Iranian Marxist revolutionaries had managed to seize the US embassy in Tehran. They were quickly thrown out by supporters of the country's new leader, the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. In the aftermath of the attack, the CIA's Iran branch chief in Langley contacted the head of the Tehran station to reassure him that another incursion was unlikely. "The only thing that could trigger an attack," he said, "would be if the shah was let into the United States—and no one in this town is stupid enough to do that."

On October 21, the exiled Shah of Iran was admitted to a New York hospital for cancer treatment. Two weeks later, three thousand angry supporters of the ayatollah swarmed over the walls of the US embassy in the Iranian capital, overpowering the Marine guards to take hostage more than sixty embassy staff. The sight of American diplomats blindfolded and handcuffed while crowds outside burned the Stars and Stripes and chanted for the shah's return shocked America. Before the end of the month, Ayatollah Khomeini had released all the women and African American hostages, but a warning was to follow: if America attacked his country, the remaining fifty-three hostages would die "on the spot."

Work on a rescue attempt, however, had already begun. The foundation upon which the US Army's Delta Force planned their operation was overhead photography from the two KH-11 satellites. While a CIA agent on the ground was able to supply detail about what was going on inside the embassy, augmented by increased signals intelligence monitoring Iranian communications, no military option was possible without detailed information about the physical layout of the compound and its surroundings. The KENNEN images were able to reveal changing daily patterns of activity with a degree of fidelity that had a member of the ninety-three-strong Special Forces assault team talking about the tiles on the roof and the grass in the gardens. More importantly, the pictures revealed that large numbers of poles had been erected around the 27-acre grounds of the embassy to prevent the possibility of any helicopter being able to put down. At the same time they showed that the nearby Amjadeh soccer stadium was clear of obstacles, making it a potential alternative landing zone.

With sanctions, UN diplomacy and embargos all failing to make any progress in resolving the crisis, on April 11, 1980, the president authorized Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages. What unfolded was a catastrophe.

Already aborted because mechanical problems had reduced a planned force of eight Sikorsky RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters to just five, the operation quickly turned from failure to tragedy at Desert One, a forward operating base 200 miles southeast of Tehran. When the main rotor of one of the huge Navy Sea Stallion choppers sliced into the port wing of a fuel-carrying Lockheed EC-130 transport aircraft, Desert One was immediately turned into a fuel-fired inferno; eight servicemen were killed in the blaze that ensued. When the Iranians trawled through the wreckage and hardware left behind at the site, they found the cockpits of the abandoned helicopters stuffed with KEYHOLE imagery of downtown Tehran.

It was both a tragedy and a national humiliation for America. And a personal one for Jimmy Carter, from which his presidency would not recover. In the mood of gloom that swept over the country in the wake of the Desert One disaster, naysayers were predicting that the Space Shuttle program offered further heartbreak just around the corner. On newsstands, the April edition of Washington Monthly magazine carried a picture of the Shuttle on its cover alongside the headline "Beam Us Out of This Deathtrap, Scotty!"

• • •

STS-1 commander John Young was under no illusions whatsoever about the dangers involved in riding the Shuttle's first flight. "Anyone," he said, "who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen-fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation." For good measure, he also pointed out that the last time he could think of when anyone had climbed aboard a flying machine full of hydrogen was the Hindenburg, and that, he remarked, "didn't work so good." His wife, Susy, didn't want him to fly. When Young had been training for Apollo 16, she'd become aware of a formal NASA risk analysis that rated his crew's chances of surviving the mission as low as 20 percent. They weren't numbers that the management in Building 1 chose to share with the Astronaut Office, but Susy shared them with her husband. Young could only counter by telling her it was his job. Asked later whether it was a profession that needed daring and courage, he smiled. "Daring and courage? I hope you don't need any daring and courage because I don't have any of that." Instead he just kept picking away, firing off memos about the things he could fix; those that were out of his control he brushed aside with self-effacing good humor. Asked during one meeting about what kind of cockpit display he favored while performing the difficult and dangerous return-to-launch-site abort maneuver, he maintained that he was the wrong person to ask. "If we're doing an RTLS," he said, "I'll have my hands over my eyes and be going 'AAAAGGGHHH!' "

Columbia's first flight was scheduled for March 1981.

## THIRTY-NINE

#### Houston, 1980

MOL veteran Don Peterson was sitting in the cockpit of the Shuttle Mission Simulator (SMS) when it occurred to him that there was a procedure no one else had yet tried. As he sat with his feet on the rudder pedals, looking at the cockpit dials and displays ahead, he wondered: could the Shuttle ascent be flown manually? It's always been done automatically, he thought, managed by the computers; question is, could a crew do that?

The Shuttle ascent profile used something called Lambert steering. Climbing at an angle, some of the thrust is used to fight gravity, the rest for acceleration. As the stack ascends and fuel is burned, it gets progressively lighter and faster, while, as centrifugal force overcomes the effect of gravity, the angle of the climb flattens into a horizontal orbit.

Along the right ascent trajectory, by multiplying the Shuttle's acceleration and pitch angle, Peterson realized you should get a constant value. For a crew forced to do the calculations in their heads in real time, it appeared to offer a simple enough way of flying a safe launch. And it worked. Peterson successfully demonstrated it in the sim. It wasn't a perfect orbit, he had to admit, but it got you there.

Peterson's manual ascent crossed another possibility off the list. Every conceivable contingency, no matter how big, small or unlikely, was being explored. On one occasion the SimSups even climbed into the cockpit of the simulator, threw a rubber chicken onto the lap of the commander and told the pilot sitting next to him that he'd lost the man in the left-hand seat to a bird strike. "You're on your own," they told the surviving pilot. Throughout 1980, as the first flight approached, it could sometimes seem that, between them, the astronauts and SimSups were becoming increasingly imaginative as they considered potential flight safety issues. But with STS-1 scheduled for the spring of 1981, perhaps that was as it should be. By now, they had to count on the basics being right.

• • •

Joe Engle and Dick Truly climbed into the sim, took their seats, and relaxed as the hydraulic rams beneath the cockpit tipped them onto their backs. Another day, another ascent simulation. The crews were now so used to the SimSups throwing failures at them that maybe it did take a little imagination to keep them on their toes. Dialing in the failure of one of the four computers was pretty standard. The SimSups could now hear the familiarity in the astronauts' voices as they responded to pretty much whatever was thrown at them.

As the dials and displays recorded a nominal ascent, suddenly all three of the display screens on the instrument panel blinked off, their flight information replaced in every case by nothing but a big "X" against a dead black background. All four main computers had failed.

Aw, shoot, thought Truly, the simulator's crapped out. It happened often enough, and there was no way the SimSups would pull the plug on all of the computers. It was pointless: without them, the Shuttle was out of control; there was nothing more the crew could do. The trouble was, the sim wasn't over. The simulator was still working perfectly. It was the software. Using real flight software and a set of four of the same AP-101 processors as the orbiter, the computer systems were set up exactly as they were in Columbia. A flight software glitch that, if it had first revealed itself during a mission, would have caused the loss of the vehicle had chosen to make itself known just months before they lit the fires at the Cape.

The SimSups froze the simulation and gathered the data so that the teams debugging the orbiter's flight control software could try to reconstruct the problem, then iron it out.

That, thought a chastened Dick Truly, was pretty serious.

A decision was taken to carry a sixth GPC (general purpose computer) on board Columbia that, if all else failed, could be installed on orbit by the astronauts. Loaded with the PASS software—the primary avionics software system—needed for the orbiter's return to Earth, it got dubbed "reentry in a suitcase." The computers, though, weren't the only critical system throwing up surprises.

• • •

In May 1980, a series of tests conducted at the Naval Surface Weapons Center shock tunnel reinforced concerns about some test results that had first surfaced over a year earlier. A 1979 review conducted by the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory into potential heating issues revealed that temperatures experienced by the two orbital maneuvering system pods mounted on the sides of the fuselage beneath the vertical tail might be higher than anticipated. Further tests by the Air Force supported the initial findings. Then the Navy weighed in. Their data suggested that under the dynamic and acoustic loads experienced on launch, the pods would flex substantially more than expected; more so than some of the bigger 8-by-8-inch silica tiles protecting them could cope with without cracking and separating, and leaving the pods unprotected on reentry. While the thin, undensified tiles covering the OMS pods had already survived a simulated thirty-one missions in the acoustic chamber at Marshall, it hadn't been an area included in the flight testing conducted by Tom Moser's team earlier in the year. Rather than remove them, the decision was taken to carefully dice them into nine equal parts in situ. If they were already in pieces, the effect of any deflection of the airframe beneath would be negated. It was further evidence, however, that when it came to the tiles, there didn't seem to be a point at which the program management could breathe out and regard the issue as finished. In August, NASA went ahead and told Martin Marietta to build and deliver the on-orbit tile repair kit that earlier in the year they'd been contracted to design.

"We have confidence in the orbiter thermal protection system," Houston Director Chris Kraft had said when first considering the possibility of in-flight heat shield repair, "but at the same time we think it prudent to be prepared to make in-orbit tile repairs."

No matter how hard they tried, NASA couldn't seem to move the tiles off their to-do list.

• • •

None of this was news to Hans Mark. As director of Ames in 1972 he'd been a signatory to the letter highlighting the potential problems of bonding the tiles to the airframe. Responsible for much of the early effort to develop and test the tiles, he'd followed the heat shield's checkered progress since with interest. And in fighting the Shuttle's corner from the Pentagon the previous year he was up to date with the most recent efforts to come to grips with it. At Ames, Mark had known John Yardley, the NASA official leading the Shuttle program in Washington, since Yardley had first been drafted in from McDonnell Douglas. With Mark's own move to Washington their paths had continued to cross. They had recently met to formally discuss NASA–Air Force cooperation in space. Now, though, as the two of them talked about the continuing challenges posed by the thermal protection system and the internal arguments that had led to NASA's reluctant decision to build the on-orbit tile repair kit, Yardley was struck by the level of interest from the Air Force secretary.

It was clear to Mark that nobody at NASA wanted to order Young or Crippen to suit up and leave the safety of Columbia's pressurized cabin to inspect possible tile damage. Aware of the resources DOD might bring to bear in the event of fears for the integrity of the heat shield, he made clear that the Air Force was ready and able to help. "I think," he told Yardley reassuringly, "we could work something out . . ."

• • •

While the program continued to grapple with the dangers of reentry, John Young's greater concern was with ascent. If they got into space in one piece he thought that, relatively speaking, coming home would be, as he put it, "a piece of cake." Through the summer of 1980 there was better news from Rocketdyne and Marshall Space Flight Center. Over a month in May and June, each of Columbia's three main engines performed a successful 520-second static burn on the test stands at the National Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Then in July, a preburner fire was quickly followed up with an exploding oxygen turbopump. It appeared that, despite the progress being made, Young, Crippen, Engle and Truly had good reason to let the possibility of losing one or more of the main engines continue to dominate their abort planning.

• • •

John Young and Bob Crippen climbed down from the motion-based sim into the cool air of Building 5. "Even a blind squirrel can find a nut now and then," Young told the SimSups, his way of letting them know they'd run a good session. Even if it had meant that he and Crip had been forced, after losing the main engines beyond the point at which they could make it back to Kennedy, to fly the orbiter across the Atlantic only to pull their ejection seat handles and abandon her off the coast of North Africa.

Despite NASA's best efforts, the combination of abort profiles—return to launch site, abort to orbit, and abort once around—didn't quite cover everything. There remained a period between the call of "Negative return" and "Press to MECO" (main engine cut off) in which the only option was to fly the orbiter down to a safe height and bail out. In April, Crip and Young had been forced to paddle around in rafts in the Building 29 water tank, just to make sure they were ready for it. The whole idea rankled with Young. Yuri Gagarin had ejected from his capsule after reentry; there had even been a plan mooted by North American to boost an X-15 rocket plane into orbit before, after returning to a safe altitude, the pilot ejected into the Pacific. That had been back in the fifties, though, at the genesis of the space race when just getting into space and back was enough. The Shuttle was supposed to be different. That was the whole point.

Back in the Astronaut Office after the simulator session, Young shared his frustration with Crip, Joe Engle and Dick Truly. "This is stupid," he said, "to throw away a good airplane like this. We could probably land this thing." The trouble with that was that it wasn't possible to bring up the guidance systems that might provide a heading to an airfield on the primary software. And it wasn't possible to dump the primary software without losing the flight control system that carried the full reentry software.

It was Dick Truly, whose familiarity with the computer systems had seen some label him, along with Crip, "Mr. Software," who figured out that there might be a way around it. While Young and Crippen were flat out preparing for STS-1, he and Engle had time to pursue it. They were looking for anything they could fix or improve. And this one caught their imaginations.

They returned to Building 5 and asked the SimSups to give them exactly the same conditions as Young and Crip had had. As soon as the engine failed, Truly, leaving Engle with the primary computer and flight control, brought up the backup computer and displays on his side of the cockpit. While Engle flew the orbiter from the commander's seat, Truly used the information from the backup computer to navigate, passing instructions to Engle to gain or lose energy, or head left or right, in order to make it in to an airfield on the other side of the Atlantic. By dividing the work and making use of two computers to run different software simultaneously—which Truly was first to realize might offer a solution—they were able to land the Shuttle rather than abandon her to the sea.

Of course, it needed an acronym, and Truly and Engle's new transatlantic abort landing became TAL. And although it was too late to program the new procedure into the PASS software for STS-1, Young and Crippen trained in the sim to fly the abort manually as Engle and Truly had demonstrated was possible. In time, potential TAL airfields were added in France, the UK, Morocco, the Gambia, Senegal, the Azores, Nigeria, and even Easter Island for launches out of Vandenberg.

For the first Shuttle flight, though, Rota Naval Station, a US base in Spain near the Strait of Gibraltar, became the designated diversion in the event that Young and Crippen had to abort across the Atlantic. A NASA support crew was flown in days before the launch. The only thing missing if Columbia were to arrive in Europe would be a midair welcome from Jon McBride's Chase Air Force.

• • •

TFNG recruit Kathy Sullivan used to tease her colleague that the whole Chase Air Force assignment was just the world's biggest boondoggle. And in truth, McBride had enjoyed every minute of it as he, Dick Gray and the two backup crews punched holes in the sky above Florida, California and New Mexico in their T-38s. In the backseat of his own jet, McBride carried George "Pinky" Nelson, another one of the 1978 astronaut intake, charged with taking stills of Columbia with a top-of-the-range Hasselblad camera after they made their rendezvous. And on that score, McBride was feeling confident. He and his crews had practiced their three-minute circles at 40,000 feet till, McBride reckoned, we could do it in our sleep. They'd worked out their calls with Young and Crippen, who chopped a couple in an effort to keep the radio traffic to a minimum. McBride's T-38 had been specially calibrated so that he could pass on accurate speed and altitude to the Shuttle crew. They'd practiced on each other and with the Gulfstream Shuttle Training Aircraft, but in search of something that might make the same sort of dramatic entrance as the orbiter, McBride called up Beale Air Force Base in northern California, home to the USAF's Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird fleet. Would they, he asked, be at all interested in flying a Shuttle profile? The Blackbirds of the Ninth Strategic Reconnaissance Wing were already collaborating with NASA to help them evaluate the Shuttle's radios and navigation aids; they proved only too willing to play.

After a visit to Beale to plan the sortie with the Blackbird unit, McBride would lead his flight of four Talons into position in the skies over the California high desert. Under the direction of the flight controllers at Vandenberg and Edwards, he completed his three-minute circle and rolled out abeam the starboard wing of the big spy plane.

"We're aboard," he reported over the radio.

The sleek black jet didn't hang around for long, though. At just Mach 0.9 and 40,000 feet, trying not to outrun a pair of jet trainers dragging their landing gear, the SR-71 was way outside its comfort zone. Less than thirty seconds after reaching the agreed IP (initial point) at Shuttle speed and height, the Blackbird pilot poured on the coals and accelerated away, just giving a smiling McBride time to snap off a few pictures. The Chase team were ready.

• • •

The striking-looking spy plane might have provided a flavor of what was to come, but before the Chase Air Force had any chance of meeting the Shuttle on her descent into Edwards, NASA still had to put to rest any lingering concerns about the orbiter's ability to return safely to Earth, and what they might do if they thought she could not.

## FORTY

#### Houston, 1980

In August, NASA announced that John Young and Bob Crippen would carry the on-orbit tile repair kit developed by Martin Marietta with them on Columbia's first flight.

It consisted of a manned maneuvering unit—a 300-pound jetpack powered by twenty-four little nitrogen thrusters first tested on board Skylab. Worn by a space-suited astronaut, it provided a means to fly around the Shuttle to inspect the whole of the spacecraft's exterior. Combined with a work restraint station—a kind of window cleaner's cradle—that attached itself to the side of the Shuttle's fuselage, the jetpack allowed an astronaut to use a caulking gun containing a heat-resistant silicone-rubber paste to plug small gaps in the heat shield. To repair any larger areas of tile loss, 160 6-by-6-inch hardened blocks of the same basic material were to be stored in Columbia's cargo bay.

Tested in Denver inside Martin Marietta's zero-g simulator and on board NASA's KC-135 "Vomit Comet," it seemed to offer promise, and Bob Crippen, the astronaut with prime responsibility for conducting any emergency space walks during the first flight, was told to train for the job. But in Denver, strapped into the simulator that replicated the response in space of the jetpack to his control inputs, he struggled to stay in position for long enough to get any useful work done. Every time he applied even the smallest amount of pressure to the Shuttle he just pushed himself away from the vehicle. He quickly came to the conclusion that if he attempted to do any work on the bottom of the orbiter, he was going to tear up more tiles than he could ever repair.

"This is not going to work," he told John Young. "We gotta make sure they're going to stick on."

Looking at the prospect of hauling a tile repair system into orbit that the engineers argued wasn't necessary and which Crip said wouldn't work, Young put his foot down. He didn't want the jetpack and tile repair kit on board Columbia.

• • •

Tom Moser was certain the crew didn't need it. The tiles were going to work. Whenever there had been a fresh alarm over the heat shield's integrity it had been addressed. He was confident the system was robust enough to cope with all that was being asked of it—and even one or two things it wasn't. Down at the Cape, one of the engineers working on Columbia had fixed tiles to the front of a race car, then driven at speed through a flock of chickens in the hope of gaining an insight into whether or not they would survive an in-flight bird strike. The data he gained was, one suspects, of greater curiosity value than usefulness.

• • •

Dottie Lee, first drafted in by Max Faget to work on the earliest designs for the Shuttle in 1969, traveled to Ames to make a final presentation to Walt Williams, NASA's chief engineer, and a dedicated oversight committee of center directors, industry experts and academics known as the Aeronautical Space Advisory Panel. Throughout the day, representatives of the different disciplines contributing to the Shuttle had given their status reports to the committee. Lee was the last speaker of the day. For forty-five minutes she talked the group through the nuances of heat transfer and aerothermodynamics, and of the confidence there was in the orbiter's heat shield. As Lee packed up at the end of her presentation, one of the members of the panel came over to her and said: "Based on what you've told us today, we're going to recommend to the president that we launch the Shuttle." The thought was enough to send a chill down her spine.

• • •

A week later, a fifty-four-hour simulation of the entire STS-1 mission was carried out. Columbia, still inside the hangar at Kennedy—and now requiring fewer than a thousand tiles still to be attached—was networked to both Launch Control and the Mission Control room in Houston. While Young and Crippen shared the duration of the simulation inside the Shuttle's cockpit with their backup crew, Engle and Truly, the three teams of flight controllers in Houston worked the same shifts as they would during the mission. This was the second of a series of three full-duration, integrated simulations, and there was now a palpable, growing sense of anticipation around the first flight. After over a decade of development and delays, in the late summer of 1980 the Shuttle program was coming together.

## FORTY-ONE

#### Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 1980

Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, the home of Kennedy Space Center, wasn't, when NASA first acquired it, much of an island at all. An 88,000-acre swamp capillaried with gray-green water that was called home by alligators, manatees, dolphins, storks, wild pigs, tortoises and plagues of salt-marsh mosquitoes, it was as liquid as it was solid. The job of making it ready for service as a spaceport was handed to the Army Corps of Engineers. Fifteen thousand individual tracts of privately owned land were bought up, then dredged, drained, squeezed and packed with sand before construction work began on launchpads, firing rooms and processing facilities. At the end of September 1965, the workforce moved into their new buildings: a tableau of tan, beige and gray concrete modernism that, in a landscape devoid of trees, seemed to sit on top of the landscape rather than truly being part of it.

At the heart of the complex was the Vehicle Assembly Building—the VAB. Founded on a hive of thousands of piles driven 160 feet down through the soft ground until they found the bedrock below, the VAB was, at the time of its completion in the midsixties, the world's largest building. A third bigger than the Great Pyramid and enclosing a greater volume than either the Pentagon or nearly four Empire State Buildings, the giant iron-lattice cathedral seemed utterly alien on Merritt Island; a vast, pale, corrugated box standing over fifty stories high that dominated the view from any direction. The scale of the VAB was to accommodate the towering Saturn V moon rockets, assembled vertically within a building that was large enough, on hot, humid days, to generate rain showers from beneath its ceiling, then stacked on top of a 2,700-ton caterpillar-tracked flatbed transporter that carried it to the launchpad three miles away, where the Cape met the Atlantic.

Now, both VAB and transporter had been reengineered and repurposed for the Space Shuttle. And on November 5, the Kennedy workforce bolted the two solid rocket boosters, each of their steel cases packed with 1.1 million pounds of propellant, to the flanks of the white-painted external tank. Inside the Orbiter Processing Facility, Columbia's three main engines, test fired and recertified by Rocketdyne, were carefully maneuvered back into the waiting engine bays by specially adapted forklift trucks and reinstalled, ready for flight. On the twenty-fourth, in front of cheering crowds, Columbia, complete save for a handful of outstanding tiles, was towed outside for the first time since she'd arrived at the Cape on the back of a 747 in March 1979 looking, as one witness had put it, "like something the cat dragged in." A small crowd of the Kennedy workforce cheered her progress across the few hundred yards to the huge VAB, where she'd be prepared for launch.

It was this part of the process that Bob Crippen wasn't so keen on witnessing. The prospect of seeing 85 tons of Space Shuttle that had taken a decade and billions of dollars to create lifted from the ground then swung nose up to dangle vertically from beneath the roof of the VAB just made him too nervous. And yet after being winched up from the ground by a pair of cranes on November 25, she hung there overnight, suspended like a shot pheasant, high above the concrete floor until, the following day, she was finally mated to the external tank and solid rocket boosters. The first live Space Shuttle stack had been assembled. Nine days later, they powered her up.

While Crip's anxiety about seeing her might now have subsided, John Young said no to an invitation to go and look at his spacecraft for entirely different reasons. When offered the opportunity to climb up to a walkway near the roof of the VAB to look down on Columbia from above, the STS-1 commander declined.

"I'm afraid of heights," he quipped.

• • •

Perhaps it was being trussed up in a suit and tie that contributed to John Young's apparent awkwardness in front of the microphones and cameras in a press conference. Off duty, at home, he was more likely to be wearing a Stetson, denim jacket and jeans. That, somehow, seemed a more appropriate image to accompany the pithy cowboy rhythms of his voice. It was said of Young that he had the Right Stuff before we all knew what the Right Stuff was.

As the date of the first flight drew near, media interest in him and Crip grew stronger, and press conferences became more frequent. This ensured that Young had plenty of opportunities to share his own, distinctive reflections on what lay ahead. He may not have enjoyed the hoopla much, but, like batting away 20 percent odds of survival, he did it because it came with the job. What's more, he was good at it. Young himself professed bemusement. He maintained that people found him funny when he was trying to be perfectly serious, but he had a gift for a well-timed, bone-dry remark delivered, it seemed, to some arbitrary point in the middle distance. This often saw Crip reduced to playing the role of straight man, laughing as hard as the rest of the room. Uninformed or trivial questions were dealt with patiently, but often not without an edge.

During the Apollo years, a reporter once asked Young why all the vital burns and maneuvers took place on the moon's dark side, out of reach of radio contact from Earth. "Is it an insurmountable problem," he wanted to know, "to have these maneuvers take place on the front side?"

"It's an insurmountable problem, all right," Young replied. "You ought to talk to that guy Kepler."

When discussing the Shuttle, he'd lost none of his technique. Will boredom, he was asked, be a problem in future spaceflights?

"Gee, I hope so . . ."

Will there ever be a passenger Shuttle?

"If the US government wants to, we could do it."

But is it likely?

"Governments are funny critters . . ."

A question from a European journalist was more pointed: "It's still not entirely clear to me whether you can abort with the ejection seats during the burn of the solids . . ."

Young paused, apparently considering his answer, before putting the microphone to his lips, and saying, "You just pull the lil' handle . . ."

Young looked heroic, the journalist a little foolish. To those watching, it no longer mattered that neither he nor Crip thought that pulling the "lil' handle" to eject into the 750-foot-long exhaust plume of the SRBs offered much chance of survival; a question about danger and mortality had been deftly avoided.

Asked what he'd like his epitaph to be, Young was barely able to answer before beginning to chuckle at the thought of it. "Good grief," he attempted, "I'd not like to see any epitaph. I have no idea. I worry about a lot of things, but I'm not really worried about that yet. You're really pushin' me, aren't ya?" His broad grin threatening to get the better of him again: "Shoot . . ." He tried one more time—"I'd feel sorry for the guy who wrote it"—before he gave up, laughing infectiously at the very idea of something so absurd.

• • •

Low cloud and chill air hung over the Cape, when, at dawn on December 29, the huge doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building rolled open—a process that took forty-five minutes to complete. Around 8:00 a.m., the Shuttle stack emerged from inside the sanctuary of the high bay, rolling slowly on top of the crawler toward the pad along a track laid deep with crushed rock and river gravel—a three-mile journey on the back of a 5,500-horsepower machine as big as a baseball diamond that took ten hours to complete. By 6:30 that evening, as the sun went down behind the VAB, Columbia took her place on Pad 39A, casting shadows that reached out toward the Atlantic.

• • •

It was a bittersweet moment for Hans Mark. Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the November election, and Ronald Reagan was due to be inaugurated as president in January 1981. Mark knew that as eager as he was to cement the Shuttle's future with the Air Force and ensure the completion of the Vandenberg launch site, his days in the Pentagon were numbered, his influence within the Air Force already gone. He could only hope that the new administration would push on with STS-1, the Shuttle program and the military's West Coast spaceport without delay. At the same time he knew that if he could engineer a return to NASA as either administrator or deputy administrator, then he might bring his experience of NASA–Air Force relations to bear on the program from the other side of the fence. Influential friends and supporters championed his cause.

Early conversations appeared promising, but, as he packed up his Pentagon office to make way for the incoming secretary of the Air Force at the beginning of February 1981, nothing was certain.

## FORTY-TWO

#### Kennedy Space Center, 1981

There were three different ways to get back to the ground from the top of the launch tower. You could fly the Shuttle into space and back, take the elevator down the launch tower to the pad, or use the zip wire. Earlier in the year, Young and Crippen had asked to try the flying fox–style escape wire that, in the event of an emergency on the pad, was there to spirit them from the top of the launch tower to a waiting M113 tracked armored personnel carrier in which they could then drive themselves to safety. Both astronauts liked the idea of a 54 mph fairground ride to the ground, but while they were allowed to climb into the basket in their pressure suits, no one was prepared to let such a precious cargo try it for fun. On March 19, 1981, after completing the terminal countdown demonstration test, they took the elevator.

Young and Crippen were in high spirits. The countdown test, a dry run of the launch, was the last major test before they flew. There was less than three weeks to go. After the countdown ended at 7:24 a.m., the two astronauts climbed out of their ejection seats and crawled out of the Columbia's cabin. They spoke to engineers in the White Room, at the top of the gantry, before heading back to the crew quarters in the Operations and Checkout Building. The Shuttle systems were powered down at around 8:30.

"Hey," Crippen said, "we're getting pretty close to flight."

While, in press conferences, the experienced John Young had the air of a man who'd been there, done that, some journalists detected a quality in Crippen that they described as almost akin to yearning. After fifteen years of service as an astronaut, Crip was on the cusp of earning his long-cherished astronaut wings.

Then the bad news reached the astronauts: there had been an accident on the pad.

After a twenty-second test firing of Columbia's three main engines on February 20, there'd been a concern that nitrogen, used to purge the aft compartment of the orbiter as a precaution against fire during launch, was leaking and that it might find its way into the cockpit. Instead of halting the flow of nitrogen at the end of the countdown test, a decision was taken to extend the duration of the purge to give ground crew an opportunity to pinpoint any leaks. News of the change in procedure failed to reach Rockwell technicians John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole and William Wolford. The three men checked in to the monitor station at the 130-foot level of the launch tower at 9:15. They made their way past a bundle of hydraulic lines into the vehicle near the main engines. Six minutes later, another Rockwell contractor, Jimmy Harper, discovered Bjornstad and Wolford unconscious inside the aft compartment. Harper tried to help but then also collapsed. He was fortunate to fall backward and away from the concentration of gas inside the Shuttle. As he fell he was spotted by two colleagues, one of whom, Nick Mullon, managed to drag Wolford free of Columbia while the other rushed to get help. On his return, the two of them went back in to haul Bjornstad out, after which Mullon too lost consciousness. It wasn't until fire and rescue crews arrived nearly a quarter of an hour after the three men first entered the compartment that Forrest Cole was finally pulled free.

Nitrogen is not in itself toxic. It makes up nearly 80 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. But in a pure nitrogen environment, without the oxygen that makes up over 20 percent of the rest of the atmosphere, loss of consciousness comes quickly. The USAF Flight Surgeon's Guide explains that at an altitude of over 43,000 feet, where the oxygen concentration is equivalent to just 3.6 percent, a pilot will last between nine and twelve seconds before experiencing symptoms of hypoxia. At those concentrations, a loss of consciousness is likely to occur within forty seconds, death in minutes. Breathing pure nitrogen is so lethal—and yet doesn't produce a feeling of suffocation—that it's been argued it should be considered as a humane method for executing prisoners on death row.

Rescue crews had pulled all five victims clear by 9:28, but John Bjornstad, a father of three, died shortly after noon. Forrest Cole would die thirteen days after the accident. Years later, Nick Mullon too was killed by complications from the nitrogen asphyxiation.

Their tragic deaths, the first in the US space program since the 1960s, were due to faulty procedure and miscommunication rather than any failing in Columbia. But they served as a powerful reminder that it was often the things you hadn't planned for—the unknown unknowns—that were most likely to get you.

• • •

Houston director Chris Kraft knew it. He'd been there throughout NASA's two decades of triumph, tragedy and near misses. And despite the terrible, avoidable deaths of Bjornstad and Cole, Kraft felt they were running out of things they could meaningfully still test before lighting the fires.

After the destruction and delay that had bedeviled the development of the main engines, the massive fire in December 1978 had marked a turning point. By early 1981, having completed nearly 100,000 seconds of operation on the test stands—equivalent to nearly sixty-four launches—the main engines were flight qualified and man rated. The final flight software was released in February and loaded onto Columbia's mass-memory device the following month. There were still quirks, including a subsystem that displayed "off" when it should have read "on." To fix it would have meant revalidating the software, and there wasn't time. Instead they flew with a book of program notes detailing known flaws in the software.

The crew were similarly well prepared. Young and Crippen had each shot in the region of 1,500 landing approaches in the Gulfstream training aircraft. They'd spent well over 1,000 hours in the simulators and many more hours in the classroom, familiarizing themselves with the flight data file—a tower of paper 51 inches high and weighing 210 pounds. The delays to the program had not been without benefit. John Young maintained that, as a result of the extra time, he was "one hundred and thirty percent trained" for the mission.

• • •

Over the first three months of 1981, the preparations for flight had gathered pace. The auxiliary power units—APUs—powering the orbiter's flight controls were loaded with hydrazine and powered up; Columbia was disconnected from the umbilicals that provided power for her from the launch tower in order to test her internal systems. A mission verification test to check the readiness of Mission Control and the global network of tracking stations culminated in the arrival of T-38 jets, playing the part of the Shuttle, escorted by Jon McBride's Chase team, at Edwards and the White Sands diversion strip. One T-38 landed at Edwards and taxied past a waiting mock-up of the Shuttle, parked on the lake bed at the point where Columbia's landing roll was expected to end. As the T-38 returned to the hangar, the recovery convoy from Kennedy rehearsed their role on the facsimile orbiter. On Pad 39A, the external tank was pumped full of 384,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen, followed by 140,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, then emptied again, revealing a weakness in the foam heat insulation that saw chunks fall off and engineers at contractor Martin Marietta working round the clock to fix it and apply a solution.

The last of the orbiter's thermal protection tiles were installed as Columbia waited on the pad.

Yet while it had been determined that the Shuttle was good to go, there was still the odd dissenting voice. Inside NASA's Langley Research Center, a small but influential pocket of opposition was led by an engineer named John Houbolt. And Houbolt had a reputation. His forceful opinions had once turned him into something of a pariah inside NASA. The trouble is, on that occasion he'd been right.

• • •

Houston's original plan to put men on the moon was for all three astronauts somehow to land the upper stages of their Saturn V rocket on the lunar surface, before blasting off again at the end of their exploration to return home. It was realized early on that this approach, labeled "Direct Ascent," put the mission beyond the limits of what a single Saturn V rocket might carry. At Marshall, Wernher von Braun proposed getting around that by launching a series of Saturns, combining their payloads in Earth orbit, then continuing the mission to the moon. But working out of Langley Research Center, John Houbolt had an epiphany. The way to do it was not to use the heavy, complicated command module as a lunar lander, but instead to take a hollowed-out, lightweight vehicle dedicated to taking the astronauts to the surface and back to dock with the command module waiting in lunar orbit. His rough calculations suggested that, if adopted, it might be possible nearly to halve the weight of the Saturn V rocket's upper stages. It was a technique called lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), and it scared the life out of everyone working in Houston. If, for any reason, the rendezvous around the moon failed, the moon walkers would simply be left circling like a broken satellite, unable to come home, talking to Houston only until their fuel cells expired.

Such was Houbolt's conviction, though, that, abandoning any pretense of protocol, he bypassed the normal chains of command and wrote directly to NASA's deputy administrator. While admitting that his nine-page letter was "unorthodox," he went on to blast his superiors' (Houston's program managers) claim that he was "a voice crying in the wilderness," and suggested that failing to adopt LOR put NASA's very existence at risk. The reaction to the letter in Houston was furious; Max Faget immediately and loudly dismissed Houbolt's numbers as lies. But as the overwhelming challenges of landing vertically on the moon in a rocket which even after shedding its first and second stages was still similar in size to the one that had boosted John Glenn into orbit in 1962—then launching again—began to bite, Faget and Manned Spacecraft Center director Bob Gilruth took another look at Houbolt's numbers. And saw some merit in them. By April 1963, the decision to pursue lunar rendezvous was confirmed. And in July 1969, after Neil Armstrong had successfully piloted Apollo 11's buglike lunar module to a safe landing on the moon, Wernher von Braun turned to Houbolt, gave a thumbs-up, and admitted, "John, it worked beautifully."

Now, Langley, driven once more by Houbolt's certainty, expressed their concern about the ability of the tiles to stand up to the fierce, complex aerodynamic loads at the point where a thick steel A-frame strut attached the nose of the orbiter to the external tank. The men from Langley thought it best to conduct further wind tunnel testing of the area. At Houston, they weren't so sure. We've got it covered, thought Tom Moser; we understand all the loads on it and we've got enough margin. In truth, he'd kind of had it with Langley by now. He'd spent a year or more being challenged on every aspect of the thermal protection system, answering what he regarded as sometimes ridiculous questions from the theoreticians in Virginia while he and his team worked on solving real-world problems. He wasn't sure they were contributing a damn thing. Research Center, he thought, the clue was in the name; his job was to design it, build it, fly it. But the red flags kept coming up, and so, with weeks to go, he, Aaron Cohen and Chris Kraft agreed: "Okay, we'll do the test." To satisfy the concern, they told themselves.

When he found out what was planned, John Yardley demanded to see all three of them at 7:30 the next morning. All three were down at the Cape. Yardley was livid, tearing strips off them for agreeing to perform a test none of them even thought was necessary and, in doing so, putting at risk Columbia's first flight. Moser and Cohen said nothing, unable to bring themselves to speak up in support of running the test. It was Kraft who took the bullet. "They didn't want to do it," he told Yardley; "I agreed to do it."

"John, it's okay," they tried to reassure him. And it was. They performed the wind tunnel test Langley had asked for and, as they had expected, the thermal protection system came through. But Kraft was determined not to get tripped up again. It was time, as he put it, "to light the candle." After repairs to the damaged external tank were completed, the launch was set for 7:00 a.m. on April 10.

• • •

With the test on the tiles around the forward strut behind them, Kraft phoned Langley Center director Don Hearth. "Don," he asked, "do your guys have any issues? We think we answered your questions; we're comfortable; we're ready to fly."

"Let me get back to you tomorrow; I'll just check with everybody."

The next day, Tom Moser was in Kraft's office in Building 1 when Hearth called back. It was exactly the response they were hoping for. "We're good," Hearth told them. "We don't have any issues anywhere."

• • •

As the flight approached, Hans Mark found himself in a perplexing position. On the one hand, he'd got what he wanted: on March 11 he'd learned from the White House that the president wanted to nominate him as deputy administrator of NASA. On the other, he was not scheduled to take up the post until two weeks after Columbia flew. There had yet to be any kind of announcement about his appointment and so there was no formal reason, so far as anyone else knew, for him to be involved in the Shuttle's launch. But Mark wanted to be there, following the Shuttle's historic first flight from where, as the recently appointed director of Ames, he'd watched Neil Armstrong land an earlier spacecraft called Columbia on the moon. Mark phoned Chris Kraft in Houston and asked whether he'd be welcome in Mission Control. Kraft, who already knew of Mark's imminent return to NASA, had no hesitation in saying yes.

• • •

While at Houston, Kennedy and Edwards the final preparations were made for the first flight, inside the Blue Cube at Sunnyvale AFS, the Air Force was also getting ready. Much of the groundwork had been done on Mark's watch at the Pentagon.

In the summer of 1978, Program "S," a Shuttle operations office, designated VOS, was set up to plan and coordinate bluesuit support for the orbital test flights. While some of the baseline support for the Shuttle from the Satellite Test Center had first been agreed back in 1973, this had evolved over the years that followed. Ultimately, the Air Force was eager to move command and control of its space program away from Los Angeles to a more secure, remote location. As Air Force secretary, Hans Mark had endorsed the move as long as a new Consolidated Space Operations Center included a mission control center for the Shuttle. And while, in October 1979, it was decided to build the new facility in Colorado Springs, until it was ready, the Air Force would be working hand in glove with NASA. A small cadre of Air Force personnel was assigned to Houston to learn their trade as flight controllers alongside their NASA counterparts. At the same time, the Air Force paid for the creation of a secure, ring-fenced presence inside Houston from where it could support what it called "controlled mode"—that is, classified—Department of Defense Shuttle missions. The traffic was not all one way, however: NASA also still needed the Air Force.

During Columbia's first flight, Young and Crippen would be in contact with the ground for barely 25 percent of their time on orbit. A network of NASA ground stations capable of relaying voice transmissions between the crew and CapCom in Mission Control, Houston, was dotted around the world in Ascension Island, Chile, Bermuda, Botswana, California, Senegal, Guam, Hawaii, Spain, Florida, Australia, Ecuador and New Mexico. There was a gap, though: NASA had nothing between Botswana and Yarragadee in Western Australia. But the Air Force did. The Indian Ocean tracking station on Mahé in the Seychelles had weathered independence from Great Britain, coups, and the extortionate demands of the Seychelles government over lease negotiations, to remain a valuable part of the Air Force satellite-tracking network. In early January 1979, modifications that would allow it to support the Shuttle were completed. Using a four-strong constellation of Air Force communications relay satellites, conversations with Columbia would bounce to and from orbit between Mahé and Houston via the Blue Cube.

• • •

While the men of Program "S" looked forward to making their contribution, elsewhere in the Blue Cube the Special Projects Office continued their vigil of the Soviet Union.

In August 1980, at a rocket testing facility on the Khimki River, northwest of Moscow, design bureau KB Energomash conducted the first test-firing of their RD-170 engine, designed to power the Soviet shuttle's strap-on boosters. And in December of the same year, under the direction of the USSR's second man in space, Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, a K65M-RB5 rocket was launched from pad LC-107 at the Volgograd Cosmodrome near Stalingrad in the direction of Lake Balkhash to the east. On top was a half-scale model of the Spiral space plane designated BOR-4, built to test the aerodynamic characteristics of the design in suborbital flight before using it to test the thermal protection system under development for the Soviet orbiter.

An American National Intelligence Estimate expected a Soviet vehicle capable of carrying a 20-ton payload to be ready to fly in the mideighties. The Russians called it Buran, after the violent blizzards that swept across their Baikonur launch site in winter. For now, though, it was the Americans enjoying center stage.

Then John Houbolt came out of the woodwork again, pulling the kind of stunt that had so ruffled feathers in 1962.

## FORTY-THREE

#### Houston, 1981

The heat shield was safe to fly. The issue of the tiles had been officially put to bed. Until John Houbolt, without any formal authority from Langley, wrote a letter directly to Houston Center director Chris Kraft. Houbolt had enlisted support from an eminent structural engineer from Stanford University as a cosignatory. "We implore you," their letter began, "not to fly the Space Shuttle orbiter." The pair went on to expound their theory that the tiles were going to come off. They may not, the letter explained, come off on ascent, but by the time the orbiter was ready to come home NASA was going to be embarrassed by major tile loss, caused by the combined effects of vibration and dynamic pressure on the bond between the tile and the strain isolation pad beneath. They were going to lose the vehicle. As a fix, the pair suggested that the orbiter be cocooned in a steel net to prevent the tiles coming off during flight.

Kraft was furious. He wasn't sure what more he and his engineers could have done to demonstrate the robustness of the system. It had all been said and done. But Houbolt's track record—and his ability to make waves—meant he was impossible to dismiss out of hand. At least not now that he'd got the attention of NASA's senior management in Washington. Once again, Tom Moser felt like he was being forced to prove his innocence, and demonstrate to jittery agency administrators that, unlike in 1962, Houbolt was wrong. Other than that, though, the men in Houston did nothing. As far as Moser was concerned, Houbolt was just grandstanding.

• • •

At the end of March, Young, Crippen, Engle and Truly moved into quarantine, living in a caravan of trailers lined up inside Building 5 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, one for each astronaut. In the two weeks they spent removed from the day-to-day activity, only the astronauts' wives were allowed to visit them without wearing surgical masks. The primary crew catching a bad head cold had been Engle and Truly's last chance to take the helm for the first flight, but after months of good-naturedly encouraging Young and Crippen to go skiing or enjoy contact sports they knew there'd be no last-minute changes now. Certainly minimizing the possibility of the mission being affected by illness was important; even a cold, if it affected the astronauts' ability to equalize their ears, would be enough to have them removed from the flight. But quarantine was also an opportunity for them to focus on the flight without distraction. As the date drew near, there was a tendency for anyone plagued by any concerns either to unburden themselves or explain them to the crew. Most of it didn't need to go anywhere near them. Instead, members of the support crews like Hank Hartsfield, Dan Brandenstein and Rick Hauck acted as surrogates, hearing people out, deciding what might need passing on. When anything did get past the gatekeepers it was unlikely to be good news. It was while Young and Crippen waited in quarantine that they learned that a problem with Columbia's reaction control system was not, as the engineer conveying the news put it, 100 percent corrected.

In the weeks since the final flight software had been delivered, time in the simulator had revealed that the RCS, an arsenal of thirty-eight small rocket thrusters mounted in the nose and tail used to control the attitude of the Shuttle on orbit and reentry, had a tendency to fire uncommanded, fast lapping up the precious, limited amounts of propellant carried on board.

Well, wasn't that nice? Young reflected as he digested the news. Always fun to hear about a potentially dangerous problem before you launch. Columbia's commander was particularly concerned about hypersonic reentry when, in the thin air, the airplane-style aerodynamic flight control surfaces—the rudder and elevons—were of no use. Much of the uncertainty around the orbiter's anticipated performance was in this area of the envelope. They were dealing with chaos theory. Tiny variations had exponential effects, capable of unfolding more quickly than a human pilot could possibly react to. Small models of the orbiter had been tested in the shock tunnels at representatively high Mach numbers for barely seconds at a time. Data captured from these tests was then scaled up, but the results weren't perfect, only the best that the supercomputer at Ames Research Center could produce. Scaling ratios had a substantial but imperfect effect on the predictions; interference from shock waves interacting with the walls of the wind tunnel further muddied the water. The hypersonic region was, as Hank Hartsfield, who'd been working on the Shuttle's flight control system, pointed out, "an uncertain world."

One clear indication that did emerge, however, was that as Columbia sliced down through the upper atmosphere at over fifteen times the speed of sound, she was unstable in yaw; her back end had a tendency to swing out. Unchecked it would rip her apart. The rear reaction-control jets mounted beneath her tail really did need to work as advertised.

Unwelcome news of possible disaster aside, quarantine could get dull. The four astronauts broke up their time with flights in the T-38s and sim sessions, but slipped into a routine, ending each day with dinner, time in a nearby gym and conversation before turning in. At least the two weeks they spent in the trailers was made easier by a generous supply of beer from Crip's mother, happy to share supplies from Crippen's—her Porter, Texas, beer joint—with her son and his friends; pleased to be able to contribute something to his success.

• • •

On April 5, just before midnight, the final countdown began.

# PART FOUR

# Ignition!
It is this, the unspeakable danger—and the term danger is itself taboo among pilots—that has always given the phrase first flight such a righteous aura among test pilots.

—Tom Wolfe

## FORTY-FOUR

#### Houston, 1981

Bob Crippen's beat-up old red pickup truck had become something of a trademark; the kind of vehicle driven by a guy who didn't have to try too hard to make an impression. Astronaut Joe Allen's car just drew heat from his colleagues for being an old rust bucket.

After joining NASA as a scientist astronaut in 1967, Allen had spent three years seconded to the agency's headquarters. He took the car with him but the northeastern winters hadn't been kind to it. Now, back in Houston, he'd been assigned to the support crews, and was lead CapCom for the reentry phase, with Rick Hauck as his backup, for STS-1.

On April 8, two days out from launch, George Abbey collared him. "Joe," he said, "we're going to take John and Crip out to the airplanes. Come with me."

"Fine," Allen said. "Why do you need me?"

"My car won't start."

"Oh, terrific," Allen replied, thinking that his corroding jalopy was not the way the crew of America's new spacecraft ought to be arriving at Ellington Field to begin their journey to the Cape to fly her.

The four of them crossed the parking lot to Allen's car. Although just seven years separated them, Young and Crippen already looked generations apart. At fifty, Young wore a gleaming white turtleneck beneath his NASA flight suit, adorned with more mission patches than any other astronaut. He looked smart. By contrast, Crippen seemed relaxed, bare-chested beneath the open V-neck of his flying overalls—a picture of a frontline fighter pilot were it not for the blue fabric and NASA mission patches.

Settled in the right-hand seat, Young reached into his pocket, pulled out some cash and tried to hand it to Allen, sitting next to him. Allen had recently joined Young and Crippen for lunch and Young—with good reason to be preoccupied—hadn't brought any money with him. Allen had been happy to pick up his tab and had thought no more of it.

"Come on, John," Allen said, urging him to put the money away.

"No," Young insisted, "you don't go fly these things when you got debts."

Allen took the money and Young was reassured.

"All my debts are paid," he said, and returned to his own thoughts.

Then Allen realized to his horror that he could see TV antennas on broadcast trucks camped out at Ellington waiting for Young and Crip's arrival. He cringed at the thought of his wife's reaction to seeing their sad-looking car on national TV. She wouldn't talk to him for days. He quickly came up with a plan. He announced he had a favor to ask. "This sounds a little peculiar," he admitted, "but I can't really . . . can I drop you at the parachute shack?"

George Abbey had said the pilots' chutes were already waiting for them in the cockpit of the T-38. Strike one.

"I just need to drop you," Allen tried again, sounding awkward. "You just walk out—"

"Oh, I get it," Young smiled. "It's the car."

"Yes."

"Be happy to."

So rather than pull up next to their jet, Young and Crippen walked through the hangar to emerge in front of the cameras and flashbulbs on their own, while Joe Allen sloped away back to Houston. The next time he expected to speak to them they'd be in space. The thought of what lay ahead sent a chill through him.

• • •

The day after Young and Crippen left Ellington Field for the Cape, Hans Mark arrived in Houston. Not only had Chris Kraft welcomed him into Mission Control, he'd found him a spot in the control room itself, behind the program office console and alongside his old friends Program Manager Aaron Cohen and his deputy, Milton Silveira. Mark was determined not to miss any part of the flight. Instead of booking himself into a hotel, he set up a cot in the infirmary behind Mission Control Center in Building 30. He didn't anticipate needing much sleep.

• • •

At the Cape, more than forty thousand people had gathered to watch Columbia reignite America's manned space program. Many thousands more were camped up and down the Space Coast to catch a view of the launch. Since last sending astronauts to space, NASA had sent the Viking landers to Mars, and the Pioneer and Voyager probes had beamed home extraordinary images of Jupiter and Saturn, but nothing captured people's imagination like sending men into space. Alongside members of the public, nearly three thousand journalists were at Kennedy to cover the launch. It was time to give the world what it was waiting for.

• • •

There was a knock on the door. "Hey, Crip! Time to get up."

He glanced at his watch. 2:45 a.m. The STS-1 pilot climbed out of bed, showered, shaved, and pulled on his flight suit.

Out on the pad, as he and John Young got themselves ready, Columbia's external tank was being pumped full of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen that would propel them into orbit.

The two astronauts had a brief fifteen-minute physical, not much more than a temperature and blood pressure check and a peek in their ears—nothing compared to the pair of full-service medicals both had endured earlier in the month. "Okay," the flight surgeon told them, "ready to go fly."

First there was breakfast. Sitting together at the top table in front of heavy drapes, behind flowers and cake decorated with the STS-1 mission patch, the two of them labored through steak and eggs, coffee and orange juice, served by waiting staff wearing surgical masks. The astronauts' faces betrayed the early hour of the morning. There were occasional smiles from Crippen, but, to his right, Young seemed lost in his thoughts, staring across the room as he ate.

Before being helped into their pressure suits, both astronauts were hooked up with sensors to EKGs to record their vital signs. As they climbed into the bulky tan-colored suits, acquired from the Air Force, who used them to protect high-flying SR-71 spy plane pilots, Young was relieved to see that the Stars and Stripes on the suit's left shoulder had been scaled up. Even Crip had had to agree that the first flags they saw were almost comically small. Barely a week before the flight, Young had been trying to get the flags changed. "It has to be a small flag," he was told by someone in public affairs, "to balance out the Space Shuttle program" patch. Young was quick to point out that the United States was bigger than the Space Shuttle program. The flags were traded up for something more substantial.

Suited up, they sat in a pair of brown vinyl armchairs, a computer tower between them tracing their vital signs onto reams of paper, while fans blew cool air into the pressure suits through umbilical tubes. Half squadron ready room, half hospital, the scene suggested that the astronauts were both undergoing some kind of exotic medical procedure—a blood transfusion or dialysis.

Young flipped through his flight reference cue cards. He was nervous. But he also appreciated that it was right to be apprehensive. That came from a thorough understanding of what he and Crip were about to do. Some of the potential emergencies, he thought, make Apollo 13 look like a Sunday School picnic. He had to remind himself that as a result of both their training and procedures they were ready; prepared, he thought, to deal with anything short of Armageddon. He also had faith in the vehicle. NASA, as he put it, had engineered the heck out of it.

Crip's biggest fear was of simply making a mistake. After the recent humiliation of the Iranian embassy crisis and then, less than two weeks ago, an assassination attempt on the new president, he felt the country was desperate for good news. Don't screw up, Crip, he told himself. If there's a problem, we can handle it.

## FORTY-FIVE

#### Kennedy Space Center, 1981

At nearly 4:30 a.m. they were helped up from their chairs. Each picked up a portable cooling unit and was led by George Abbey to an elevator down to the exit. Waiting for them outside in the dark, in front of lines of waving Kennedy employees, was the familiar sight of an Airstream recreational vehicle, the "Astrovan," reporting for duty for the first time since 1975. Young and Crippen thanked the crowd, climbed into the back with Abbey, and drove off. Before continuing on to the pad, they stopped at Launch Control to drop off the Flight Operations boss. He shook them both by the hand and wished them good luck.

• • •

As Young crawled on all fours through the hatch into Columbia's mid-deck, Crip smiled and shook hands with pad workers in masks, each sporting either "NASA" or "Rockwell" on the backs of their white overalls. Young clambered awkwardly in his pressure suit over the rear bulkhead, then through the companionway to the flight deck. With the Shuttle on her tail pointing skyward, his seat was now directly above him. He pulled himself up to the cockpit using handholds before dumping himself into his ejection seat. He was enveloped on all sides by gray panels carrying dials, displays, and over two thousand different switches recessed or caged so that a stray foot or elbow in space couldn't flip them unintentionally. Patched wherever they could fit were checklists and cue cards, mounted on Velcro. Crip followed him and took his place in the right-hand seat before both astronauts were helped to fasten their harnesses, clip into the ankle restraints that would protect their flailing legs in the event of an ejection, and lock their helmets onto the metal hoops circling their necks. Twelve different communication and life support fittings connected them to their spacecraft.

They began running through comms and systems checks as the count continued. At T minus one hour and ten minutes, with the two astronauts settled, the closeout crew retreated back to the White Room, pushed shut the side hatch and secured it. That was a battle Young had lost. He thought an outward-opening hatch on a spacecraft made as much sense as an inward-opening door on a submarine. Sooner or later, he thought, it was going to get you.

• • •

At the scheduled twenty-minute hold, the computers transitioned from prelaunch to flight mode. At the same point, the backup computer, which until this point had been inactive, came on line. But something was wrong. An error message flashed up on Crippen's display.

Inside Firing Room 1 and Mission Control in Houston, the flight controllers' console lit up with the same information.

"BFS didn't follow the PASS," Crippen reported from the cockpit. For reasons unknown, the backup flight system, the emergency computer, had failed to synch with the four primary flight computers.

• • •

TFNG astronaut Kathy Sullivan knew as soon as she heard Crip's radio call that Columbia was staying put. She was assigned to ABC News alongside Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan. Clearly, the network regarded the last man on the moon as the box office draw, using him for their TV coverage while relegating Sullivan to support the radio coverage. Cernan, though, was now an ex-astronaut; Sullivan, by contrast, had been training to fly aboard the Shuttle for over two years. She listened in as the launch team discussed the situation. "This ain't going today," she told the radio team. Meanwhile, Cernan, in the absence of any announcement from NASA, was being called on to fill the airtime. Asked to provide increasingly speculative answers to what might have gone wrong, he was struggling; getting further off the ranch, Sullivan worried. She pulled at her producer's sleeve to get his attention. "Does it matter that he's not giving correct answers?" she asked.

The confusion wasn't limited to those trying to follow the launch from TV studios. Young looked to Crippen for ideas, who, he maintained, knows more about the Shuttle's computer system than anyone has a right to. But his pilot was stumped. Crip had never seen this happen; never even heard of it happening. The backup computer wasn't communicating with the primaries. Another attempt by the backup computer to synch with the primaries produced only more error messages. Crip reached forward and pushed the reset button. When exactly the same problem reoccurred, Launch Control held the count.

• • •

The crew had been lying on their backs in full pressure suits, helmet visors down, for an hour and a half. It now looked as if they'd be in their ejection seats for a whole lot longer while Houston tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong. There was nothing to do but wait and try to pass the time.

Crip fell asleep and, as he did, his right arm slipped off his lap onto the right console. On the back panel of the flight deck was a switch controlling a backup signal to the telemetry. No one had imagined at the time the controls were laid out that it might be required during ascent. When that view was revised as the first mission approached, the only way to operate the switch was to tie a piece of string around it and run the other end to the pilot's seat. It was a onetime deal though. Once the string was pulled, the switch couldn't be unswitched. As Crip dozed, the string got caught in the fastening on the back of his glove. When he woke and raised his hand, the switch pulled. They were just going to have to fly like that. Going to sleep, he decided, was not necessarily such a good idea.

In the end it didn't matter either way. After waiting in the cockpit for nearly six hours, with no fault in the backup software discovered, Launch Control restarted the count.

At T minus sixteen the backup computer tripped again, forcing a decision to scrub the launch.

"Well," said Crip, after climbing back out of the orbiter's flight deck onto the service tower, "this is liable to take months to get corrected." But it didn't. The problem was identified and a solution tested successfully by the end of the day. It boiled down to a forty-millisecond time skew that occurred at T minus fifteen hours. Caused by different programming priorities chosen by IBM and Rockwell when writing the primary and backup software, the problem, analysis suggested, was likely to happen just once every sixty-seven times. There was nothing fundamentally wrong, and so, on April 11, the decision was taken to go for launch the following morning.

Crip still wasn't so sure they'd get away. Something else will go wrong, he thought; we're going to get lots of exercise at climbing in and out. Neither he nor Young had expected to go first time. On leaving Houston for the Cape, Young had packed a month's worth of clothes into the baggage holder they had slung like an extra fuel tank beneath the T-38's fuselage. As ever, Young tried to make sure he'd thought of everything.

• • •

Like Columbia's primary crew, Dick Truly and Joe Engle had flown down to the Cape for the launch. But with the launch scrubbed on the tenth, Truly argued that either he or Joe should return to Houston. He felt strongly that one of them should be in Mission Control during the Shuttle's ascent. John's healthy, Crip's healthy, he thought, I'm not going to fly. If something went wrong, however, they were trained to the same level of preparation for the mission as Young and Crippen themselves, and in a unique position to contribute. After discussing it with Joe and George Abbey, he decided to fly a T-38 back to Houston, where he would maintain his quarantine, just in case, until the launch attempt the next morning.

He caught up with Crip and Young before leaving the Cape. "Have a great flight," he told them.

If that went ahead, as was now planned, on the twelfth, it would be just twenty years to the day since Yuri Gagarin had first been fired into orbit on top of a modified R-7 ICBM from the Kazakh Steppe. That they had come this far, from there, so quickly, seemed almost inconceivable. As if to underline the difference between their bird and the tiny falling capsules that launched the space race, while they waited to climb back aboard Columbia for their second launch attempt, Young and Crippen spent a couple of hours shooting approaches into the long Kennedy runway in the Gulfstream training jet.

## FORTY-SIX

#### Kennedy Space Center, 1981

"That's a mighty fine piece of speech" was John Young's succinct, appreciative reaction to words read out on President Ronald Reagan's behalf by Launch Director George Page. Page then added a few more words of his own: "John, we can't do more from the launch team than say, we sure wish you an awful lot of luck. We are with you one thousand percent and we are awful proud to have been a part of it. Good luck, gentlemen." Two minutes later, after a planned ten-minute hold built in by Page to make sure his team was calm and focused, he restarted the count. Outside, the crowds packing the bleachers erected around Kennedy Space Center cheered.

T minus nine minutes and counting.

• • •

With his left hand, Jon McBride advanced the T-38's two throttle levers. In the seat behind him, Pinky Nelson clutched his camera. The jet's twin General Electric J85 engines flared as the afterburners sprayed fuel into the jet pipes to add a few thousand pounds of extra thrust. Chase One accelerated down the runway at Patrick Air Force Base, on the edge of Cocoa Beach, Florida, followed by a second T-38, Chase Two.

T minus seven minutes and fifty-two seconds.

• • •

Lying on his back inside the cockpit of the orbiter, John Young watched the White Room access arm jerk away awkwardly from Columbia's side. It looked like it might jam completely, but after telescoping back a short distance from the fuselage it then swung smoothly out of harm's way. With seven minutes to go, computers on the ground were cycling through diagnostics and checks on every element of the Shuttle stack. Launch Control advised Young and Crippen to lower the visors of their helmets.

"Columbia, Launch Control, initiate APU prestart."

"Roger," acknowledged Crip. With authority to light the auxiliary power units, he reached down to begin the sequence to power up the hydraulics to the flight controls and rocket gimbals.

He glanced over at Young. Even as Columbia came to life, Crip still wasn't confident they'd get away. We're going to find something that's going to cause us to scrub again. He kept his thoughts to himself.

"Control, Columbia, prestart complete," reported Crip. "Powering up APUs."

T minus five minutes.

• • •

The last of the three Chase Air Force T-38s, a flying reserve, climbed away from Patrick toward a holding pattern to the south of the Shuttle's flight path. There, all three would wait at 38,000 feet, ready to pick up Columbia on her return to Kennedy in the event of a return-to-launch-site abort.

• • •

Liquid oxygen boiled off through vents at the top of the external tank, condensing in the subtropical humidity and curling in ribbons above the astronauts. Behind them, Columbia flexed her flight controls for the first time, moving the elevons, body flap and rudder through their full arcs of travel. In the cockpit, Young and Crippen monitored the strip indicators in the center of the control panel that recorded their progress—another step along the path to ignition.

T minus three minutes, forty-two seconds, and counting.

• • •

At two minutes, the venting valves on the external tank were closed, allowing the liquid hydrogen tank to build up pressure for flight.

Seconds later, Firing Room 1 announced, "You are go for launch," following up with a call that hadn't made it onto the cue cards: "Smooth sailing, baby."

For the first time, Crippen dared to believe they were going to go. "I think we really might do it . . ." he said to Young. And then his heart began to race, soaring quickly to around 130 beats per minute. Alongside him, his commander's pulse barely pushed ninety.

• • •

T minus thirty-one seconds.

Columbia's primary computers assumed control from the ground launch sequencer and the solid rocket booster nozzles were powered up. As the Shuttle groaned and sighed on the pad, girding herself for liftoff, Hugh Harris, the Firing Room commentator, counted down over the public address system: "T minus fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen . . . twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . ."

A cat's cradle of sparklers fizzed beneath the bells of the three main engines, burning off any bleeding hydrogen to ensure a smooth ignition. At T minus 3.3 seconds, the taps were turned on. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen streamed into the main engine turbopumps, which near instantaneously spun up to their full 28,000 rpm, forcing high-pressure fuel and oxidizer into the engine's combustion chambers. In quick succession, over less than a quarter of a second, the three main engines ignited, building rapidly in power over the next three seconds. As the three pale flames flared then settled, orange shock diamonds formed, hovering like angry ghosts at the center of each plume.

We have main engine start.

On the flight deck, Young and Crip felt the vehicle come alive with a smooth rumble. In the center of the control panel, the strip indicator bars rose rapidly to 90 percent. Outside the deep window on the commander's side of the cockpit, the stack cast a moving shadow on the launch tower as the power of the three main engines pushed it forward out of the vertical—the twang. Young and Crippen felt the trident-shape of the Shuttle stack swing forward then rock back through a 2-foot arc. Then, with the three main engines burning stable, in the split second the stack swayed back to a completely vertical position the two solid rocket boosters exploded into contention.

From silence to nearly six million pounds of thrust in less than half a second.

And everything changed.

As Columbia leapt from the ground, the astronauts were pushed back into their seats with a force unlike anything John Young and the other Apollo astronauts had experienced at liftoff. With the snapshot, all-or-nothing ignition of the SRBs, what had been, for a few seconds, a powerful advertisement for the sophistication of Rocketdyne's engineering was brutally and instantly overwhelmed, becoming instead a bone-shaking, agricultural experience, like driving with flat tires along a washboard road. The astronauts' cheeks shook, the sound of their ejection seats fighting at their mounts drowned out by the bigger cacophony beneath them. Even inside their helmets, the noise was like standing close to a chainsaw. The simulator hadn't even come close to capturing it.

So jolted around was he by the sharp, metallic vibration of the SRBs, Young had trouble reading the instruments ahead of him. But the boosters were doing their job; the Shuttle was really moving. By the time he called liftoff they were halfway clear of the tower. He'd joke later that he thought he'd swallowed his Adam's apple.

Rainbirds, a series of sound-suppression water cannons, had been laying liquid sheets across the pad from eleven seconds before ignition. The intention was for the water to prevent the shock wave produced by the ignition of the SRBs from bouncing back off the pad and damaging the rear of the orbiter. The rainbirds didn't even come close to containing it. With a 20-millisecond pulse of sound, too brief for the crew even to be aware of, the SRBs fired a pair of massive aural pistons—like bolt guns against the pad—that threatened disaster. A wave of overpressure rebounded to strike Columbia before she'd made her escape with a violence she'd not been designed to endure.

• • •

Tom Moser had been in Launch Control before liftoff, but he knew he had to see, hear and feel the Shuttle's departure. He'd made his way onto a balcony, watching first as the main engines gave life to a boiling, furious cloud before the SRBs seemed to carry Columbia out of a weather system of her own making on two solid pillars of white fire. Then, a second or so later, having covered the 3 miles from Pad 39, a freight train of noise hit him, a physical, superamplified sound like tearing canvas that pulled at his clothes and reverberated inside him—a noise capable of killing anyone within 800 feet of it.

• • •

John Young called "Tower clear" as the gantry's lightning conductor disappeared beneath them. A couple of seconds later, sitting outside the center of rotation, he and Crip were turned on their heads when Columbia rolled through 180 degrees onto her back as the computers established her in the right trajectory to reach an orbital inclination of 40.3 degrees to the equator. Sunlight flared through the cockpit glass as the orbiter rolled out of shadow into the rising sun. Accelerating through 100 mph, the stack settled into a pitch of just under 80 degrees. Inverted like this, the load on the wings was reduced as they approached the period of maximum dynamic pressure—Max Q—during the ascent. Still low, the Shuttle stack's awkward cluster of shapes and struts generated fierce turbulence and vortices as it approached transonic speed. As they had so many times in the simulator, Young and Crippen checked that the three main engines throttled back to 65 percent to protect the vehicle from the worst of it. Hanging the orbiter beneath the tank as she climbed, though, also meant that, if a main engine failed, she was in the right attitude for Young and Crippen to perform a return-to-launch-site abort.

• • •

From 38,000 feet, Jon McBride had the best seat in the house. He watched Columbia soar past him on a 750-foot-long plume from the solid rocket boosters just a minute after she'd left the pad. This is the greatest, he thought, urging her on, listening intently to the calls between CapCom and the Shuttle. But he was going to be a lot happier once Crip and Young had passed the point of no return.

• • •

In Houston, Mission Control missed the spectacle of it completely. Video feed of the launch was deemed to be a distraction to the controllers, each monitoring their own particular subsystem. Dick Truly, plugged in behind Dan Brandenstein at the CapCom console, watched trajectory data crank up on a monochrome TV display while he listened to the radio calls between Brandenstein and the crew on his headset.

"Columbia, Houston," Brandenstein called, his voice betraying his own excitement. "You're go at throttle up."

"Roger, go at throttle up," Young replied.

Past Max Q, the three main engines came back up to full power. Now traveling faster than sound, Columbia's rapid acceleration was unhindered by the concerns about dynamic pressure that had afflicted her as she bludgeoned her way through the dense air of the lower atmosphere. Ahead of him, Crip watched as small flakes of white debris that had sloughed off the nose of the external tank skittered and stuck around the cockpit glass, some part of him aware that they shouldn't be there.

In Mission Control, Flight Dynamics boss Jay Greene didn't like the look of the trajectory. Ascending in a long open arc, Columbia was supposed to be flattening off, trading gain in altitude for a gain in speed. But she was lofting. We're going to go off the plot board, he thought. There was nothing anyone could do except ride out the solids, then sort it at second stage.

From his ejection seat, John Young noticed that the pitch needle was off-scale high. Better high than low, thought Crippen alongside him, as the pitch deviation pushed as far as 6 degrees beyond nominal.

• • •

John Young once said, "What you don't know won't hurt you," before admitting, "but sometimes it will, I guess." Neither he, Crip nor anyone else yet had the least idea of what had happened at the moment the solid rocket boosters had blasted into life. On the ground, the big solids had scorched the grass a mile in every direction. Closer to the epicenter there was buckled steel, melted and torn-away electrical wires, and an elevator door that had had a railing driven through it. But it was the effect of the overpressure from the big boosters on Columbia herself that, had they known of it, would have been of greater concern.

That there would be a shock wave was understood and anticipated. One-fifteenth-scale tests were staged using the solid rocket motors from Tomahawk cruise missiles. Once assembled alongside a one-fifteenth-scale orbiter and external tank on a one-fifteenth-scale launchpad, the engineers fired the motors and scaled up their results. In extrapolating the figures from the test, however, the wrong assumptions were made. Once more it was shown that, as the last line of an old air-accident investigation from the fifties had it, "extrapolation is the fertile parent of error." What hit Columbia was a factor of ten higher than had been predicted. As a result, a strut holding the oxidizer tank for the forward reaction control system in the orbiter's nose buckled, straining the pipes carrying the propellant. That it didn't fail—as the structure of the nose had during stress testing—was a lucky near miss. In the rear of the orbiter, the body flap, crucial to controlling the Shuttle at hypersonic speeds, was deflected 5 degrees out of position.

Young would later suggest that if he'd known that he'd have ridden Columbia to safe altitude and ejected. But at this stage, the only real evidence of any problem came from a handful of outlying accelerations recorded from around the airframe at the point of ignition. No one was asking whether there might be any damage to the Shuttle as a result. Nor would they. After surviving the split-second assault from the shock wave at liftoff, Columbia was performing like a dream.

• • •

"Columbia, you're negative seats," Brandenstein told the crew as the Shuttle climbed through 120,000 feet, now traveling too fast and too high to use the ejection seats. Seconds later, Brandenstein spoke again; it was time for the first major milestone of their ascent to orbit: "Columbia, you are go for SRB separation."

On the flight deck, the computer displays told the crew that the chamber pressure inside the solid rocket boosters had dropped below 50 pounds per square inch. Fuel gone, their job of giving Columbia a leg up to 160,000 feet was complete. The solids had fought and battered their way through the lower atmosphere, now it was time to drop their dead weight and let the Shuttle's three main engines, grateful for the brawn supplied by the big boosters, continue alone toward their goal.

Two batteries of eight rockets fired for a second. With an explosive thump, the astronauts' view ahead was engulfed by a white-orange flash rolling back past the side window of the flight deck as the two boosters were punched away. Then, silence; the violent metallic grind of the solids suddenly absent. A beat of concern pulsed through Crippen as, with the dramatic end to the fury of the solids, the thought struck him that they'd lost the power of the main engines. A quick glance down at the temperatures and pressure reassured him. Still doing their thing.

Young reported the separation of the SRBs over the radio to CapCom.

"Roger on the sep, Columbia," confirmed Brandenstein from Mission Control.

Sitting behind him to his left, Max Faget could contain himself no longer. He leapt up from behind his console and shouted, "They're off!"

Chris Kraft spun around in surprise. "Max, for Chrissake, sit down," he told the exuberant engineer.

• • •

With the boosters gone, Columbia's trajectory began to flatten out as she accelerated under the smooth, refined power of the three main engines, leaving nothing but an exhaust of water vapor in her wake. As the speed built up, so too did the gs on the crew, pushing Young and Crippen back into their ejection seats. A little over two and a half minutes after liftoff, Columbia was 40 miles high and 40 miles downrange of Kennedy, chasing down a mile every second. And getting faster.

Behind her, the two used-up SRBs continued upward on a ballistic arc for over a minute, climbing another 50,000 feet before reaching their peak and starting the fall back to Earth. Two specially built 1,052-ton recovery ships, Freedom Star and Liberty Star, each carrying a team of divers, awaited their return. So too did a Soviet spy trawler. Instead of nets, winches and freezers, the ship was packed with electronic intelligence-gathering equipment, intent on mining what data she could from the launch of America's first Shuttle. A US Coast Guard helicopter was on hand to make sure she didn't come too close to the operation to recover the boosters.

Columbia speared through an altitude of 62 miles—the so-called Karman line that NASA recognized as the boundary of space. Barely four minutes after ignition—and fifteen years after being chosen as an astronaut by the US Air Force—Bob Crippen had earned his astronaut wings. His first words were, "What a view! What a view!"

## FORTY-SEVEN

#### Chase One, 1981

"Columbia, stand by for negative return. Mark. Negative return."

In the cockpit of Chase One, this was the call from CapCom that Jon McBride was waiting for. Whatever happened to her now, the Shuttle was too far away to be able to make it back into Kennedy. If they lost an engine, Young and Crippen either had to claw their way into orbit or fly the orbiter across the Atlantic into Rota Naval Station in Spain. With a return to Kennedy no longer an option, McBride turned the Chase Air Force on its heels back toward Patrick AFB. With their flight plans west already prefiled, they'd be at Patrick only long enough to refuel before taking off again. All being well, in a few hours' time they'd be on the ground at Edwards and ready—in case of an early end to the planned two-day spaceflight—to meet the returning Shuttle.

• • •

Young and Crippen were traveling rather more swiftly, now covering 2 miles every second and accelerating fast. No longer fighting air pressure, the orbiter was gaining another mile per second's velocity every minute. But it still wasn't enough. Six minutes into their ascent, at a height of 400,000 feet—76 miles high—Columbia's nose pitched down into a powered dive that would trade height for speed. Upside down, Crip watched as Earth's blue horizon, streaked with cloud, seemingly descended into his field of view. Using gravity's pull, the Shuttle lost 70,000 feet of altitude, and in doing so piled on the speed. At a little over 330,000 feet they were lower now than the maximum altitudes reached by the X-15 rocket plane, but moving at 15,000 miles per hour, three times faster. Columbia had become the fastest winged vehicle ever built at around the same moment Crip won his astronaut wings. He was being pressed into his seat with a force of 3 gs. A trim 160 pounds, he now weighed 480 pounds. Next to him, John Young's 5 foot 9 inch frame was pushing 500. Columbia herself was suffering similar weight gain.

To ensure the load never exceeded the airframe's 3.5 g limit, the main engines, programmed to maintain a constant 3 g limit, throttled back again to 65 percent of their rated power for a second time. Six seconds later, a cluster of three red lights on the main engine panel blinked on as the three main engines shut down for good. In the immediate silence that followed, the two astronauts were thrown forward gently in the straps, bracing themselves against the cowling of the instrument panel as the orbiter unloaded, the relentless push from the big Rocketdyne engines at an end.

And then, for the first time, Crippen noticed that any loose items, washers or screws that had been tucked away, out of sight of preflight inspections, had begun floating around the flight deck.

"Okay, MECO," Young reported—main engine cut-off. It had been nearly a decade since his last spaceflight ended when he'd splashed down in the Apollo 16 command capsule. He was enjoying being back.

"Roger, Columbia, MECO," Brandenstein responded.

Over the exchange between the Shuttle commander and CapCom, the public announcer took the reins: "Confirm shutdown. Columbia, the gem of this new ocean, now in space, not yet in orbit. Standing by for external tank separation."

Although traveling at an orbital speed at MECO of 17,500 mph, Columbia was not yet in a stable orbit. To get there, two smaller 6,000-pound thrust Aerojet rockets mounted in the orbital maneuvering system pods on either side of the tail had to fire. But with no further need for the main engines or the liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel contained in the external tank, it was time to ditch it. With that gone, the flight ahead gave Young less cause for apprehension than what had already passed. It was the ascent of such a new, untried combination that had preyed on his mind. Now he was back in zero-g and able to marvel, once more, at how beautiful Earth looked from space.

As he waited for the tank to separate, the movement of the main engine bells as they stowed for orbit suddenly pitched the nose up. In response, the powerful reaction-control-system jet thrusters in the nose fired, thumping through the flight deck like the report of a field gun as they produced a combined 2,610 pounds of thrust, quickly forcing the nose down. As the three jets fired white plumes tens of feet into space ahead of the cockpit window, Young's thoughts echoed the warning they'd been given in quarantine about the RCS jets—not 100 percent corrected. Adrenaline shot through him. Fearing they wouldn't now shut down on their own, he reached up with his right hand to an overhead panel to kill the system's drivers. Then the roar stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

Young glanced down at the center console to see that the external tank separation light had blinked off. Neither he nor Crip had even felt the bolts blow as it flew free. But as the orbiter pitched away, he got his first look at it. Looks like that tank's been in a war, he thought as he and Crip watched it float away through the cockpit glass. Three regions of the big bullet-shaped white tank had been burned black during ascent. It was to be expected, perhaps, around the bottom where it was closest to the fierce heat of the five rocket exhausts, but the nose too was swathed in black. The charring here was purely a result of aerothermodynamic friction. Speed alone had been responsible. On top of that, though, there was another area displaying signs of heat damage, and that was the point where the forward strut connected the orbiter to the tank—the place that had given John Houbolt such cause for concern.

But for the sound of cooling fans, it was now quiet on Columbia's flight deck as she traveled at over twenty times the speed of sound in a loose formation with the abandoned external tank, already beginning its terminal dive across Africa before burning up on reentry over the Indian Ocean. Of the 4.5-million-pound stack that lifted off Pad 39A just nine minutes earlier, only 214,000 pounds were left. That was the kind of equation it took to get into orbit.

"Columbia, Houston," called CapCom through the static. "You are go for nominal OMS 1."

"Roger that."

The crew maneuvered their ship into position for the first firing of the orbital maneuvering system rockets, a 1-minute-27-second burn that would push Columbia into an elliptical orbit with an apogee—the greatest distance from Earth—of 132 nautical miles and a perigee—where she passed closest to Earth—of 55 miles. As John Young watched the chamber pressure of the orbital maneuvering rockets build on a strip indicator below his computer display, Columbia passed out of range of the Bermuda relay station.

"We'll see you in Madrid," Brandenstein told them.

• • •

After a further four and a half minutes in contact with Madrid, Young and Crippen were on their own until, thirteen minutes later, they acquired the signal from the Air Force tracking station in the Seychelles.

"Well, the view hasn't changed any," Young observed as Columbia sped southeast across the Indian Ocean toward Australia.

"I tell you," responded Crip, "John has been telling me about it for three years but ain't no way you can describe it. It's hard to get my head in the cockpit here and do my procedures."

For a moment the two astronauts were transfixed by the sight of Earth, curving deep blue and white beneath them. Then something seemed to cross Young's mind.

"Hey, Crip," he asked his pilot, "you remember to lock that old pickup of yours?"

• • •

The moment the Shuttle cleared the Pad 39A tower at Kennedy Space Center, control of the mission had passed from Launch Control in Firing Room 1 to Houston. After two years in the spotlight while Columbia sat inside the hangar at Kennedy having the 30,757 tiles of her heat shield stuck on one by one, Center director Dick Smith didn't need much prompting to admit that he'd never "wanted to get rid of anything any worse in my life." But Kennedy's role in STS-1 wasn't entirely finished. First of all, out at Edwards there was the hundred-strong recovery convoy, a twenty-one-vehicle welcome party that, dressed in atmospheric protection suits, would make the orbiter safe at wheels stop. Then at the Cape itself, barely was the Shuttle out of sight before working groups began examining film and video of the launch taken by cameras placed around the launchpad.

Fresh from watching Columbia go, Tom Moser was part of the effort, reviewing data streams, high-speed film and stills photography of the launch. It only reinforced the good feeling he had about the mission. Outside, postlaunch pad inspectors would, as soon as it was safe to do so, scour the launch site, flame trenches and surrounding area for debris.

• • •

The soft acceleration from a second, shorter 44-second burn from the two orbital maneuvering rockets circularized Columbia's orbit at a touch over 132 nautical miles above the Earth's surface. While orbital mechanics dictated that they would never meet, they'd now joined a pair of Soviet cosmonauts who'd been in space for a month already, circling the globe at a steeper inclination of 51.6 degrees in their Salyut 6 space station.

Crippen unlocked his helmet and pulled it off, placing it inside a soft drawstring bag before putting it aside. That didn't mean on a surface necessarily, just floating in the cabin air alongside him would do. After returning from longer flights it could take broken bottles to remind astronauts that, back on Earth, they had to put things on shelves rather than just let them go when they were done. In zero-g for barely half an hour so far, Crippen was still finding it a novelty.

Next to him, only Young's boots remained. Before unstrapping and floating out of his chair to switch on the cabin fans located on the aft crew station, the experienced commander had unzipped them and slipped his feet out while leaving the boots' spurs still attached to the ejection seat behind. He advised Crip to do the same. You didn't want to be kicking around the cabin in a pair of heavy leather flying boots. Crip, though, wasn't planning on kicking around at all. Still worried about the possibility of bringing on space sickness, he decided it would be less disorienting to treat the floor as the floor. After reconfiguring the computers for orbit, he unlaced his boots and slipped his feet out. Nice and slow, he told himself as he carefully pushed himself out of his seat.

So far, Columbia's temperature had been controlled using a series of flash evaporators that sweated her cool by boiling off water, but they only had a lifetime of a few hours. On orbit, she relied on two pairs of 15-by-10-foot aluminum honeycomb radiator panels that unfolded like a beetle's wings from beneath the graphite-epoxy carapace of the payload bay doors. If they failed to deploy the astronauts would have no option but to de-orbit in a hurry. Finding a runway would be a secondary consideration; with the avionics overheating, they'd just have to get down before things began to fry.

Running the whole length of Columbia's spine, from cabin to tail, the 60-foot-long doors were at the time the largest carbon fiber structures ever flown. The original plan had been to use an aluminum honeycomb, until Tom Moser calculated that they could shave another 600 pounds off the structure by pushing the state of the art. Too feeble to operate on Earth without deforming, their success was predicated on operating in the zero-g environment of space.

Bob Crippen's first task was to make his way back to the workstation at the rear of the flight deck and check that the radiator panels were working. He watched through one of the two toughened glass picture windows as an incision of light opened along the top of the dimly lit payload bay. It all unfolded at a stately pace, until the starboard door reached its full extent, lying, as if unpeeled, just above Columbia's wing, covering both Old Glory and the legend "United States" that ran down the length of the fuselage in a crisp black Helvetica font. And as he examined the view aft he realized that all was not as it should be. He called for John Young to join him.

Columbia had a problem.

## FORTY-EIGHT

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

There were tiles missing from the heat shield.

The fronts of the orbital maneuvering system rocket pods that bulged out of the rear fuselage on either side of Columbia's vertical tail should each have presented a solid chalk-white surface. Instead both were blemished with splinters of black where the tiles were gone.

Crippen continued to cycle the payload bay doors while Young inspected the back of the pods, the black-tiled vertical stabilizer, and what he could see of the critical reinforced carbon-carbon leading edges of the wings. They needed to tell Houston what they knew. One hour and fifty-three minutes into the mission, as they began their second orbit, they were reacquired by the Madrid station. Shooting real-time video that could be seen on the ground, Young asked which camera they were looking at in Mission Control.

"Roger," Dan Brandenstein confirmed, "we're looking out the forward camera."

"Okay, we're . . ." Young started again. "We want to tell y'all here we do have a few tiles missing off both of them. Off the starboard pod, it's got basically what appears to be three tiles and some smaller pieces and off the port pod . . . looks like . . . I see one full square and a few little triangular shapes missing. We're trying to put that on TV right now."

Less than a minute later, Houston again lost the signal to Columbia as she passed out of range of the relay stations in Madrid and Dakar leaving nothing but static in the headsets of those listening in on the ground. Sitting behind Brandenstein at CapCom, Dick Truly now heard only silence around him. Holy mackerel, he thought, immediately wondering what the bottom of the vehicle looked like. If it's been stripped of tiles, then these guys are in deep trouble.

• • •

From the aft crew station, Young's inspections with the binoculars suggested that the hardened silicone adhesive below the tile was still there, offering a measure of protection to the airframe below. That was a good sign. "Unless it gets up to two thousand degrees," Young said, sounding confident, "we'll just melt some of the RTV because that's an ablator." Working the same way as the old Gemini and Apollo capsule's heat shields, he thought that if the glue—the RTV (room temperature vulcanization)—beneath the tiles was to form an insulating layer as it burned away it might protect the aluminum skin beneath. But 2,000° was wishful thinking, though. The adhesive was only good to 600°F, but the astronauts had little choice but to agree that they weren't worried about it. Young certainly credited his pilot with being sanguine about the situation, but, despite what he'd said to Crippen, those missing tiles did make him nervous. An aversion to letting go of any technical issue until it was solved and dealt with had underpinned his success in the Astronaut Corps. Young's reaction was a combination of sangfroid and concern that would be echoed in Mission Control.

• • •

As Columbia passed through the blind, Max Faget was eager to try to reassure the room. He was unequivocal: the tiles were not critical; nor would their loss represent a hazard to the vehicle or crew. The Public Affairs Office was quick to share Faget's reaction. But Houston's chief engineer had called it wrong on the orbital maneuvering system pods before. What's more, providing an instant response, he could only pass judgment on what he could see on a fuzzy television transmission from space, not what still remained unknown. Faget's dismissal of the possibility that Columbia might be in trouble was premature; the truth was it was too soon to say so with any certainty.

No one knew, at this stage, whether the tiles they could see were missing represented the full extent of the damage, nor, for sure, the extent to which the tiles they could see were gone might themselves jeopardize the orbiter's safe return. Furthermore, Faget's instincts about the OMS pods had been shaky. Air Force test data had first shown him to be wrong about the need to protect the leeward side of the Shuttle on reentry. Then, in an effort to disprove his own theory on that, Faget had said to Bob Ried, Dottie Lee's division head, "Bob, I want you to burn at least a small hole someplace on the lee side." It was beyond the capability of either the computational fluid dynamics or the hypersonic wind tunnels to reproduce the reentry conditions with any certainty, but in the tests requested by Faget, the one place Ried's team came close to burning through the vehicle's aluminum skin was on the OMS pod.

While Faget's confident, snap assertion helped calm nerves, thoughts at the same time began to turn to how best to come to grips with a potentially serious situation. For all his conviction, Faget was going to have to wait for answers like everyone else. But as they'd shown during Apollo 13 and Skylab, tackling a real-time crisis was a game at which NASA excelled.

• • •

In Florida, Tom Moser was still in the Launch Control building, but satisfied that the playback of video and 70 mm film from the launch had revealed nothing amiss, he was preparing to drive to Orlando to catch a commercial flight back to Houston. At Johnson he could enjoy the rest of the spaceflight with his colleagues. Then he was called back to look at the footage being beamed from Columbia. There was trouble. The feed was grainy and washed out, but the tarnished white curves of the orbiter's orbital maneuvering pods were only too clear. Moser focused on the accusing black cluster of missing tiles and thought: Oh shit.

• • •

As Dottie Lee watched the first TV images of Columbia with other members of the engineering team it should have been cause for celebration. Instead, at the sight of the damaged heat shield, her eyes filled with tears. Feeling sick with anxiety, she phoned her counterparts at Rockwell in California to ensure that there was a parallel effort from the contractor to properly understand the ramifications of the damage to the orbiter. The drinks brought in for the occasion were immediately forgotten as the team in Building 13 got to work.

• • •

John Yardley told Moser he wanted him to get back to Houston to run his team. To get him there, the Shuttle program boss bumped someone off a jet chartered by NASA to fly senior headquarters personnel back to Johnson. Before leaving the Launch Control building, Moser phoned Houston to make sure that detailed analysis of the missing tiles was already under way. Then he took his seat inside the cramped cabin of the business jet for an uncomfortable, anxious two-hour flight to Houston, knowing that he was in the dark about the real nature and scale of the problem they faced.

## FORTY-NINE

#### Houston, 1981

Dick Truly scanned the room, looking at the faces of the people sitting at the tiered rows of flight controller consoles. He recognized Hans Mark. The two men hadn't met before, but Truly already knew more about NASA's next deputy administrator than most of those in Mission Control. Because of the security clearance he'd acquired during the MOL program, Truly was aware that, as under secretary of the Air Force, Mark had also been director of the National Reconnaissance Office—classified information to which only a handful of people at NASA were privy. Mark was the one person, Truly realized, he could talk to about what assets the Air Force might be able to bring to bear on the potential threat facing John Young and Bob Crippen aboard Columbia.

Mark was shocked by the revelation that the Shuttle's thermal protection system was compromised. He'd been concerned about its sturdiness from the moment the program had been approved in 1972. Now, like Truly, his anxiety was about whether they yet knew the full extent of the damage to the tiles. Were they, he wondered, missing from regions of the surface where such a failure could possibly be catastrophic?

The two men with the TALENT/KEYHOLE security clearances made their way to the edge of the control room, out of earshot of anyone else, to talk about the classified Department of Defense resources that could be made available—which meant KEYHOLE satellites.

While he'd been in Washington, as fears over the robustness of the thermal protection system loomed over the whole Shuttle program, Hans Mark had told John Yardley that, if it came to it, the Air Force might be able to help. With NASA and the astronauts debating whether or not to fly with a tile repair kit on board, Mark told Yardley that DOD reconnaissance satellites—what Yardley called "spooky ships"—would be on orbit during the first Shuttle flight. Before ordering any astronaut out of Columbia's cabin with a maneuvering unit and can of silicone paste, he told Yardley, "we can get a photograph to see if you've got a problem." Now, just weeks after leaving the Pentagon and yet to assume his new role at NASA, Mark was officially outside the decision loop; but while no more than what he considered an educated spectator, he and Truly discussed the need to call on the Air Force for help they knew no one else could provide.

• • •

In 1962, Captain William "Ted" Twinting was introduced to the press as "one of eight seasoned test pilots selected by the Air Force for special astronaut training." It didn't quite work out that way. In line to fly the Dyna-Soar space plane, Twinting, after that program's cancelation, had to content himself with flying chase for the X-15 before being sent off to war in Southeast Asia, flying a hundred combat missions in the Republic F-105 Thunderchief. But Twinting wasn't quite done with space. In 1980, he was given command of the Space and Missile Test Organization at Vandenberg Air Force Base. A year later, as the Department of Defense manager for Space Shuttle Support Operations, Brigadier General Ted Twinting, still sporting the crew cut he'd worn as a young astronaut student, was sitting at a console in Mission Control, conspicuous in his one-star epaulettes over a crisp white short-sleeved shirt. There was one more thing that marked him out from the others sitting in rows in the control room: at his station, mounted next to his computer monitor, was a red telephone providing a secure, direct link to the Department of Defense. Twinting made the call.

• • •

Two hours and twenty-seven minutes into the mission, after a brief pass across the Indian Ocean station, Columbia was reacquired by the transmitter at Yarragadee in Western Australia.

"And we do have another question concerning that starboard OMS pod," began CapCom Dan Brandenstein. "We would like to know the color of the area where the tile is missing."

"Roger, it's red."

"Roger, Crip, we copied red."

Like John Young, Houston wanted to know the extent to which the layers of thermal protection were gone. That closer inspection confirmed the presence of silicone adhesive simply provided the engineers in both the Structures and Mechanics Division and at Rockwell with more hard information about the damage to the Shuttle. With that, their effort to assess the risk could be more accurate. Barely three quarters of an hour after first becoming aware of the missing tiles, NASA was preparing a statement about the situation, the public announcer explaining that in addition to postlaunch assessment of the launch video and checking surface temperature measurements from the Shuttle for abnormalities, they would also be relying on outside help. "Department of Defense ground stations, that's Hawaii and Malabar, Florida," he said, "will be utilized and obtain ground-based photography for any other potential damage." He was careful not to share any more information than that.

• • •

Code-named TEAL BLUE and TEAL AMBER, the two DOD telescopes charged with carrying out the "ground-based photography" performed a role the Air Force described as "Space Object Identification" and represented the zenith of an effort initiated by the Air Force soon after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to track and photograph spacecraft. The former was mounted 10,000 feet high on Mount Haleakalā in Maui, the latter, 30 miles south of Cape Canāveral. Both Air Force telescopes were used to take high-resolution pictures of orbiting Soviet and Chinese spacecraft. By combining spotting telescopes slaved to a more powerful reflecting telescope, TEAL BLUE and TEAL AMBER first found their orbiting targets, then followed them using computer-controlled tracking to keep the larger telescopic camera smoothly focused on its quarry. The capability of the system was classified, but an earlier generation of ground-based Air Force tracking telescopes had taken pictures of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory test article, launched along with the MOL program's Gemini-B capsule from the Cape in 1966, that were sufficiently clear to reveal how UV light had faded the paintwork on the skin of the space station facsimile. In the fifteen years since, it was safe to assume that the quality of the images attainable using TEAL BLUE and TEAL AMBER was substantially greater.

Alongside the classified facilities in Hawaii and Florida, there were also plans to try to capture pictures of Columbia using another Air Force telescope: a deployment mapping instrument located at the end of a 13-mile fire trail, 4,098 feet above sea level on top of Anderson Peak, in Big Sur, California, considered by the Air Force to be one of the few remaining clear-sky areas of the United States. Used to track ballistic missile tests out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Anderson Peak DMI was a reflecting telescope with a 24-foot focal length which, like the Hawaii and Florida telescopes, was slaved to computer-controlled hydraulic servos. There had been existing plans to use the Anderson Peak tracking station to follow Columbia on her glide across the Pacific toward Edwards at the end of the Space Shuttle's first mission. Now the possibility of pressing the Western Test Range facility into service as early as Columbia's sixth revolution was being explored.

At no point was any suggestion made that NASA might be looking for help from Department of Defense assets in space.

• • •

On board the Shuttle, John Young and Bob Crippen pushed on with their flight plan. The missing tiles had no bearing on the mission they had to perform on orbit. There's nothing you can do about it, Crip told himself, so don't worry about it. To help distract him, there was an issue with one of the development flight instrumentation (DFI) recorders. It was stuck running, and unless it was switched off manually, it would reel through its limited supply of magnetic tape and deprive engineers of valuable reentry data. While Mission Control explored possible solutions, a workable temporary fix was simply cutting the power. But apart from the need for Crip to keep pulling the DFI circuit breaker in and out, Columbia, it seemed, was performing beautifully. As she took eighteen minutes to fly the width of the continental United States, Crippen purged the three hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells of the water they produced as a by-product of generating electricity.

"Columbia, Houston, you guys did so good we're going to let you stay up there for a couple of days. You're go for orbit."

"Let's go for orbit," Young confirmed. "This thing is performing just outstanding."

With confirmation that their mission would continue, the astronauts no longer needed to wear the Air Force pressure suits they had on to protect them in the event of a high-altitude ejection. While Crippen reorganized the checklists, Young floated down to the mid-deck to change into sky-blue slacks and a dark polo shirt sporting the obligatory NASA logo.

The Shuttle's cabin was arranged on two levels. On top was the flight deck, which, once operational flights began, would include two seats for mission specialists behind the commander and pilot. All the cabin's windows, flight controls and, at the aft crew station, the payload control panels were on the top deck, a close-walled den of screens, dials, buttons and switches. Access to the mid-deck was through a companionway behind the commander's seat. Here, after seats for four more crew members for ascent and reentry were stowed on orbit, was a lavatory—or rather a waste management compartment—galley, workstation, sleep stations and, biting a large chunk out of the limited space, the airlock that opened into the payload bay behind the crew compartment.

As Columbia streaked across southern Africa and out over the Indian Ocean, Crippen made his way down through the hatch to the mid-deck to doff his pressure suit. For two and a half hours he'd been moving around the cabin with the slow, exaggerated care of a man doing an impression of weightlessness. Then, as he pulled and stretched, focusing on the awkward task of extricating himself from the pressure suit, he began to tumble head over heels. Any pretense at keeping his head level was gone, but as he spun every which way he realized with relief and no small amount of joy that, apart from a slight pressure in his head, he wasn't feeling sick at all. There seemed to be no way of predicting which astronauts would suffer from space sickness, but Crip was one of the lucky ones; he was going to be able to enjoy the flight. Like John Young, it turned out that, when it came to space, Bob Crippen was a natural.

• • •

In Texas, the Learjet carrying Tom Moser back from the Cape landed at Ellington Field at around 10:30 a.m. local time. The engineer caught a lift back to Johnson Space Center and headed straight to Building 13, eager to bring himself up to speed with his team's progress.

## FIFTY

#### Houston, 1981

There were three separate Flight Control teams assigned to the Shuttle flight, each with responsibility for a different phase of the mission: silver, bronze and crimson; ascent, on orbit and descent. With Columbia safely established on orbit, Dan Brandenstein passed his seat at the CapCom console to Bronze Team's Hank Hartsfield, while Brandenstein's Silver Team flight director, Neil Hutchinson, joined Gene Kranz, the pugnacious deputy director of Flight Operations who would one day be credited with the line "Failure is not an option," for the change-of-shift press conference. An excited press corps was waiting for them in the space center's Building 2 auditorium. And there was one subject, above all others, that they wanted to know about.

"Can we," asked the first questioner, "get a few words of wisdom on the tile situation? Why did they come off? How many are missing? Are they critical? Are there any other tiles that might be missing? How will you know?"

"That's a lot of questions . . ." Kranz began wearily, sounding as if he had anticipated just what was coming.

Of the forty-five or so questions that followed, over thirty were about the missing tiles. And of particular interest was just how NASA was going to get hold of the high-resolution pictures that might put everyone's mind at rest. The journalists teased and probed at the subject, looking for different ways in which they might persuade Kranz to reveal more about the help being received from the Air Force. Patient and relaxed, Kranz, projecting a lack of concern, was as open and straightforward as he could be, suggesting that revolution—orbit—nine might provide an opportunity for the camera in Hawaii to capture an image of Columbia when the lighting was favorable. But if a question provided him with no wriggle room, he was blunt. Asked about the purpose and resolution of the Air Force telescopes in Hawaii and Florida, he first neglected to answer; then, when the question was repeated, he provided a terse "That's classified information."

Throughout the press conference he seemed almost at pains to keep stressing that the help from the Air Force was from "ground-based optics." And certainly that help was forthcoming. But, put on the spot about a possible alternative, his answer was qualified.

"You've already mentioned high-resolution photography from Earth," the questioner began. "Do you have any plans to take pictures of the orbiter from satellites already in orbit?"

"We don't have any specific plans for that type of work . . ."

Not yet they didn't.

• • •

Hans Mark knew that to capture images of one spacecraft from another, while it could be done, required not just skill but also a good deal of luck. In taking normal reconnaissance pictures of the Soviet Union from space, months could go by before a KEYHOLE satellite was able to deliver photographs of any given location. Frequent, thick, persistent cloud cover over Russian territory often bedeviled the National Reconnaissance Office's efforts. So too did night and day. If a satellite's orbit took it over downtown Moscow at midnight any images would be of limited value. In that situation there was no option but to wait twelve hours until the satellite's orbit coincided with daytime. A further complication was simply that the Soviets knew when the American spy birds were passing over; orbits were tracked and predictable, meaning there was time to hide anything that they wanted to remain unseen. That lack of cooperation, at least, wouldn't be an issue with any effort to take pictures of the Shuttle.

At the time of Columbia's launch, the NRO had four birds on orbit. Two of them, a CIA KH-9 HEXAGON and a KH-8 GAMBIT launched by the Air Force, still used the bucket-drop system to return their images for analysis. That alone removed them from contention. The planned fifty-four-hour first flight didn't allow enough time for the two earlier-generation designs to snap the Shuttle, retrieve the film from midair and transport it back to Federal Building 213 in Washington DC—the unprepossessing home of the National Photographic Interpretation Center—to be developed and analyzed, then for any conclusions to be shared with NASA. And that's assuming that the big KH-9, designed to image great swathes of enemy territory, was even capable of an operation as tricky as sat-squared photography. With HEXAGON and GAMBIT out of the equation, the NRO's efforts rested with the digital KH-11 KENNEN, the only member of the KEYHOLE family capable of beaming images back from space for nearly instant analysis.

• • •

In July 1977, Lockheed and Perkin-Elmer had been chosen to build what NASA called a large space telescope (LST) that was to be launched using the Shuttle. Hans Mark, in his capacity as director of the NRO, was kept closely informed of the program's development. It was little wonder. In the broadest terms, the new telescope—which, ultimately, would be named after astronomer Edwin Hubble—was a digital spy satellite designed, instead of pointing at targets on Earth, to look at the wonders of the universe. Hubble's 94-inch mirror, already under construction at the Perkin-Elmer plant in Connecticut, would be at the heart of a telescope capable of focusing on a dime in Boston from Washington, nearly 400 miles away. The diameter of the mirror used in the first KH-11 KENNEN was only 2 inches smaller. So closely related was the technology shared between the two satellites that Mark was unable to discuss the detail of his involvement in Hubble's development with anyone who didn't possess the necessary security clearances.

An imaging satellite like KENNEN or Hubble is not a mass-produced machine. Instead, it has the feel of an instrument built in a laboratory rather than a factory. There was no concession to style; form followed function. Individually cut and milled panels and components were stitched together with rivets and crosshead screws to lend it a custom-made feel—assembled rather than manufactured. And both space telescope and spy satellite were huge, bare-metal cylinders the size of a Greyhound bus. But another thing they had in common was that neither was designed to take pictures of a fast-moving target on an intersecting orbit. And the challenges of doing that were formidable.

While the cloud cover that blighted the NRO's efforts to take photographs of northern Europe wouldn't complicate any effort to capture Columbia, there was a different set of challenges to contend with, unique to the task in hand. Chief among them were those springing from the different orbits flown by Columbia and the two KEYHOLE satellites. While the Shuttle circled the world around its middle, never exceeding a latitude of 40 degrees north or south, the two reconnaissance satellites were in a polar orbit. There was no guarantee that those orbits would intersect in such a way that the orbiter and the satellite were over the same point on Earth at the same time. While on paper there was a point in every revolution when their orbital tracks crossed, it was no good if, for instance, Columbia passed over the Azores twenty minutes before the satellite did. And if NASA and the Air Force were fortunate enough to identify a latitude and longitude at which the two spacecraft crossed at the same time, they also then had to be lucky enough for that to happen in sufficient daylight. In completing an orbit every hour and a half, Columbia's darkness was never more than three quarters of an hour away. What's more, location and light were just the essential preconditions for being able to take a sat-squared photograph.

Columbia was in a circular orbit. The two KH-11s were in elliptical orbits, swinging in and out as much as 40 nautical miles between the apogee and perigee. Establishing the distance between the Shuttle and the satellite at the point of any encounter was crucial, but it was also subject to rapid change. If occasions when the spacecraft's orbits intersected were found, the moment when one was directly above the other would last only a split second. Immediately before and after that point in time, the distance between them would either be closing fast or lengthening; and this highlighted perhaps the greatest technical difficulty involved in capturing a clear, high-resolution shot of the Shuttle from a spy satellite: the angular velocity between the KEYHOLE bird taking the picture and its target; that is, the speed of Columbia from the point of view of the KH-11. It can be well illustrated by the idea of trying to read a station name from inside an express train as it speeds past the platform without stopping. But imagine if that station was itself moving, traveling vertically up or down at the same speed your train is racing horizontally along the track. Now try reading that station name as it flashes past the window of your carriage.

It's been suggested that the KH-11s were capable of handling an angular velocity of just 1.6 degrees per second. The smaller the distance between the satellite and the orbiter, if and when they crossed paths, the greater the likelihood of the angular velocity exceeding the design limits of the satellite's camera system. Closer wasn't necessarily better.

Inside Sunnyvale's Blue Cube, operators from the Air Force Satellite Control Facility's Special Projects Office were already working on the problem, comparing the orbits of the two KH-11 KENNENs on station with those of Columbia, trying to establish whether or not it was even going to be possible to attempt to capture a picture of the Shuttle.

• • •

As Gene Kranz and Neil Hutchinson continued to field questions about how they planned to capture pictures of the orbiter, Bob Crippen and John Young returned to the flight deck to prepare the orbital maneuvering system engines for two further burns to push Columbia into her definitive 147-mile circular orbit.

In Mission Control, the white-haired Hank Hartsfield, one of the six MOL refugees who'd joined NASA alongside Crip, was at the CapCom console. Together they'd shared the bitter disappointment of the MOL program's cancelation, then years in NASA's Astronaut Corps knowing that there were others ahead of them in the line for spaceflights.

"Hey, Hank," Crip enthused, "I guarantee you it's worth all the time you and I have been waiting for it."

After his frustration at missing out on the Enterprise test flights, Hartsfield too was now in training with T. K. Mattingly to fly Columbia. For the time being, though, he was relishing working CapCom for the first time since he'd played the role for John Young, nine years earlier, during the Apollo 16 lunar mission.

"While we got a few minutes here," he said, "I might tell you that we had a pretty big flare pop on the sun here back at 1700 ZULU on the tenth . . . no concern at all for radiation effects, however we do want to caution you that during the next four revs as you pass through the South Atlantic anomaly, there may be enough radiation there's a possibility of kicking off your smoke detector."

"Good grief, Henry!" said Crip with mock concern. "That sounds like fun . . ."

"Also, there's a good chance there's going to be a spectacular aurora later this evening."

"Okey-doke," answered John Young, before getting back to business. "And could somebody look at these coordinates and see if they look okay to you?"

While the STS-1 commander worked the digital autopilot, Crip, anchored in the right-hand ejection seat, reached up to the control panel in the roof of the cockpit to arm the two orbital maneuvering rockets.

• • •

From their own, carefully cultivated sources inside the military, some of the journalists covering the Shuttle mission got word that, as Columbia crossed the Pacific toward the California coast to begin her sixth orbit, the telescope on top of Anderson Peak had captured pictures of her. Unfortunately the results did little but confirm that snaring a photograph of the Shuttle on orbit was a job of a different order of magnitude to tracking the suborbital flight of a ballistic missile. While the Western Test Range operators had successfully acquired Columbia on orbit, their primary telescope, even at its maximum magnification, increasing its basic 208-inch focal length to 120 feet, just didn't have the power to provide useful images of the orbiter. As far as NASA was concerned the pictures revealed nothing more than a blurred track across the sky, detailing nothing of her condition.

• • •

While Air Force cameras struggled to take pictures of Columbia from the ground, inside the spacecraft Bob Crippen was again preparing to transmit TV pictures in the other direction. After a status report on their fuel and water from CapCom, Crippen turned the camera on John Young, sitting in his ejection seat in the cockpit. The commander was effusive in his praise of his ship: "The vehicle has just been performing beautifully, much better than anyone ever expected it to do on a first flight . . . just performing like a champ, real beautiful." Young made a point of thanking the armies of people who'd "helped get this thing airborne," before handing the baton to his pilot.

"I'd like to echo John's words," Crip began, talking with similar enthusiasm, before his thoughts turned to the men who'd tragically lost their lives while preparing Columbia to fly. "I think it's only right that we mention a couple of guys that gave their lives a few weeks ago in our countdown demonstration test: John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole. They believed in the space program and it meant a lot to them. I'm sure they would be thrilled to see where we have the vehicle now. We, I, had to talk to those guys . . ." Crippen's heartfelt message, heard on the ground against a background of static and the intermittent tick of an electronic beep, far away yet close, felt like an appropriate tribute. And it also served as a counterpoint to the copybook enthusiasm that usually characterized scheduled broadcasts from space.

• • •

Mission elapsed time was nine hours and twenty-two minutes.

## FIFTY-ONE

#### Houston, 1981

"Okay," came the message from Columbia. "We're all healthy, so if you need that Hawaii pass for something other than medical you got it." All communication between the crew and Mission Control was conducted over an open loop with CapCom, with one exception. As they passed over the Hawaii ground station there was a ten-minute private medical communication scheduled with the flight surgeon. Three seconds later they lost the signal from the Indian Ocean station.

In Mission Control, after the discovery of the missing tiles and the approach made to the Pentagon for assistance, there had been an animated discussion over whether or not to tell the crew. And how much. Hans Mark listened as people aired different positions, but was in no doubt whatsoever that they owed it to the astronauts to be straight with them. "We've got to tell them," he said. Anything else was unthinkable. He wasn't alone; the decision was taken to bring Young and Crippen fully into the picture.

At Young's suggestion, the private conversation between Columbia and Houston through the Kokee Park tracking station as she crossed 147 miles above Hawaii was scrubbed. Young thought it had been a waste of time to schedule it in the first place—they hadn't bothered with them during the Apollo missions when they were flying to the moon and back. But without the opportunity for any radio communication over a secure channel, whatever needed to be shared with the crew offline would have to be conveyed via the teleprinter that chattered through reams of folded, stacked paper on the mid-deck. And it was clear, when the ground relay was next restored as Columbia acquired the UHF radio signal from Santiago, Chile, that the missing tiles had been at the forefront of people's minds.

On CapCom, Hank Hartsfield conveyed some of the detail of what had so far been learned from the analysis into the OMS pods. He painted a reassuring picture. "We don't think it will be a concern during the entry," he told Crip, "and the structural integrity will be maintained." In a still thick Alabama accent, Hartsfield explained the work being done by Tom Moser's team studying heat transfer and skin surface temperature data. "Anyhow," he wrapped up, "the bottom line is that we think there is no real problem at all with the pieces of tile or tiles that there seem to be missing off the pod and we don't plan to make any changes to the entry flight plan because of the tile loss."

"Okay, Henry, you could have saved all that for your end-of-mission press conference," Crippen responded, sounding pointedly unconcerned. "Sounds good enough," he added, "we don't think it's a problem either . . ."

They moved on. However, the situation with the tiles wasn't yet quite as final as the brief exchange between the two MOL veterans had made it sound.

• • •

Inside the Structures and Mechanics Division, Tom Moser's engineers working the problem may have come up with some preliminary conclusions, but they were far from finished. Much of the work was done by the aerothermodynamics team, of which Dottie Lee was a member, running computer models in conjunction with arc jet test data. Of particular concern was trying to establish the extent to which the disruption to the smooth air flow caused by the missing tiles might generate greater than expected local temperatures in exactly the area where the heat shield had been compromised.

But alongside what needed to be done to analyze the impact of the tiles they knew were missing was the fact that NASA was still uncertain about whether or not that loss represented the full extent of the damage to Columbia's heat shield. To establish that still required help from the military.

Unable to discuss, over open channels, the details of the Air Force effort to illuminate the situation, NASA relied on the teleprinter as a means to inform the crew of what was being done to help them and, crucially, what they needed to do to facilitate it. Back in Houston, as the requirements of the Blue Cube operators reached Mission Control, the carefully worked out and well-rehearsed flight plan for day two of Columbia's mission was being pulled apart and rewritten.

• • •

Before loss of signal from Santiago, Hank Hartsfield drew Bob Crippen's attention to a written message being sent up from Houston. "We have a teleprinter message coming up to you," he said, "that we would like for you to take a look at at your earliest convenience." Through messages like this, the Shuttle's crew was informed of what the public wasn't privy to. Both crew members knew what was now going on. And while Columbia's commander didn't share the same top-level security clearances as his pilot, all that mattered was that John, as Crippen put it, had enough. The Air Force, though, did guard this sort of information jealously.

• • •

While Columbia sped east in the direction of the Botswana ground station, Mission Control anticipated contact through the Indian Ocean station, which was to follow. "Indy comm check, Houston comm check," a female voice requested, "air to ground UHF." Greeted with nothing but static, she tried again: "Sunnyvale comm check, Houston comm check, air to ground one."

"Houston comm check," one of the Air Force controllers replied, speaking low and fast, "Sunnyvale comm check on one." In contrast to the brightness on air from NASA, the Blue Cube controller was terse, speeding through messages and acknowledging, military style, with a click of the transmit button rather than speaking.

"Houston," reported Sunnyvale, "I'm not copying you on air to ground two."

"Okay, stand by . . . you're not copying me on air to ground two at this time?"

"Affirmative."

Even with this brief exchange, NASA, in trying to establish the line to the Indian Ocean station, relayed via satellite through the Blue Cube, was forcing the Air Force space facility into greater public prominence than it was entirely comfortable with, and at a time when it actually seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. Just a month earlier, Sunnyvale had had its security status upgraded from "controlled" to "restricted." That had followed the earlier removal of 3-foot-high chrome letters announcing "US Air Force Satellite Test Center" from Sunnyvale's entrance in an effort "to reduce visibility." How effective this was, given the Blue Cube's unusual and conspicuous appearance, was debatable. Initiatives in other areas were more successful. In setting up what was known as control-mode operation for the Department of Defense missions, command and control was ring-fenced from NASA's unclassified activities using discrete computer networks, secure rooms within Mission Control, codebooks allowing open communication between CapCom and the Shuttle, and encrypted on-orbit video feeds. There were even attempts to avoid any open utterance of the name Sunnyvale. In years to come, astronauts preparing for Shuttle missions carrying DOD payloads would file false flight plans from Ellington to an airfield they had no intention of flying to, only to find some reason to divert en route from their stated destination to Moffett Field, a couple of miles north of the Air Force space facility in Sunnyvale.

• • •

Inside the Blue Cube, there was disappointment when personnel realized that one of the two operational KH-11 satellites was going to be of no use to them. The path of the newest KENNEN, designated 5503 and launched in February 1980, wouldn't, during the remaining hours of Columbia's mission, provide an orbital encounter giving any opportunity to try to capture an image of the Shuttle. Luck, as pointed out by Hans Mark, was a critical component in any sat-squared photograph, and it hadn't been on the side of 5503. That left hopes resting on a single bird: 5502.

While Air Force officers narrowed down their options for imaging Columbia using the KEYHOLE satellites, operators at another Air Force facility 2,300 miles to the southwest were already trying to do the same thing from the ground—albeit from over 10,000 feet above sea level on the summit of Mount Haleakalā. As Young and Crippen began their ninth orbit, twelve hours into the mission, it was hoped that, as their spacecraft passed within range of the Maui Space Surveillance Complex TEAL BLUE telescope camera, the Air Force might capture the first usable images of her heat shield. The attempt, however, was doomed to failure. The Shuttle, as she passed Hawaii, was still on the flight plan as originally scheduled; there'd been no effort to maneuver her into a different orbital attitude. Traveling upside down and tail first, there was simply no way that her underside could be seen from Earth. It was no more visible to the Air Force telescope operators than the dark side of the moon.

• • •

Sitting in the pilot's seat of the Shuttle Mission Simulator in Building 5, Dick Truly loosened his straps and leaned around behind himself, stretching for a circuit breaker with a swizzle stick—a telescopic aid designed to provide access to out-of-reach panels. As had happened throughout the Apollo program, NASA was trying to work through a problem aboard an operational spacecraft by working it on the ground in the simulator. While the risk posed to the already damaged heat shield from any further missing tiles may have been the main source of anxiety, it wasn't the only concern over the Shuttle's reentry. Because of the limits of the data provided by the hypersonic wind tunnels and arc jets used to test the Shuttle, Columbia's first orbital test flight was itself going to be a crucial source of information. Only through her first reentry could data confirming the validity of all the preflight testing be gleaned in real-world conditions. And one of the machines set up to record that data was not turning on and off as planned. On orbit it had been possible to stop the jammed recorder running out of tape prematurely by turning it on and off using the circuit breaker to cut the power, but once Crip was strapped into his seat for the journey home, the back panel was going to be out of reach.

Twisting around in his seat, Truly found he was able to just stretch to the circuit breaker to operate it, but he was in shirtsleeves. Trussed up in the pressure suits Young and Crippen would be wearing for reentry, he wasn't sure it was doable. For now, though, the faulty tape recorder remained a frustration rather than a worry.

"Perhaps," joked the public announcer, the crew "should have carried the Pete Conrad Skylab hammer with them." In referring to the Skylab 2 commander's on-orbit repairs, he was unaware that he was also talking about the last occasion the National Reconnaissance Office had used its KEYHOLE spy satellites to help NASA assess the damage to one of its spacecraft.

• • •

At twelve hours forty-eight minutes' mission elapsed time, Columbia picked up the signal from Santiago, Chile—the last scheduled communication with the ground before Young and Crippen turned down the volume of the comms link in order to sleep. At the beginning of the five-and-a-half-minute pass, Mission Control requested a brief private medical consultation. The flight surgeon reported that the conversation with the crew over a discrete radio channel revealed no medical concerns of any sort—just as Young had assured Mission Control had been the case two hours earlier. Back on an open channel, Hank Hartsfield flagged the imminent arrival of further written communication—"a teleprinter message," he said, "that'll tell you everything we've done"—and wished them a good night's sleep. There was twenty seconds until loss of signal.

"See you mañana," Crippen signed off from on board Columbia, while in Houston, Hartsfield's Bronze Team leader, Flight Director Chuck Lewis, on finishing his shift, made his way to Building 2 and installed himself in Room 135 for the change-of-shift press conference—and another barrage of questions from reporters about the tiles. They were becoming more forensic, scratching harder at some of the suggestions Gene Kranz had made about possible orbits for taking pictures from ground-based systems.

"I'll tell Mr. Kranz when I see him tomorrow," Lewis joked, "that everyone's anxious for him to come back over and talk to you."

Kranz, not this time leading one of the Flight Control teams himself, was responsible for the offline effort to establish the integrity of the heat shield. For now, though, Lewis answered questions about Air Force efforts with the same careful mixture of transparency and evasion that Kranz himself had employed. But asked when NASA expected to draw their final conclusions about the risk from the tiles missing from the OMS pods, Lewis told them, "My guess is around three or four a.m." Seven hours away. In fact, the teams working the problem in both Downey and Houston were closer than that to delivering their verdict.

## FIFTY-TWO

#### Flight Simulation Laboratory, Downey, California, 1981

Since completing his nine-month astronaut training, TFNG James "Ox" van Hoften had spent more time at the Rockwell plant in Downey than he had in Houston. Flying out to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station on Monday morning before climbing back into the T-38 on Friday night, he spent the week in Mrs. Chen's Empire Motel on Lakewood Boulevard. By day he could be found in Rockwell's Flight Simulation Lab (FSL) working on each new iteration of Columbia's flight control software; ironing out flaws, verifying fixes. Working in parallel with the Shuttle Avionics Integration Lab at Houston, FSL tended to focus on the orbital entry software while in Houston their counterparts concentrated on the ascent. Ox van Hoften led the team at Downey with responsibility for reentry. And after the discovery of the loss of tiles from Columbia's orbital maneuvering pods, van Hoften was put to work.

Over the hours that followed, van Hoften's team in Downey flew repeated simulated reentries, configuring the software to represent the effect of different levels of damage on Columbia's ability to come home. If Young and Crippen were to lose some of the reaction control thrusters housed in the pod, then their survival, the FSL simulations suggested, might still be a possibility. If burn-through led to the loss of the whole pod, however, the outlook was bleak. In reporting their findings back to Houston, there was no point in sugarcoating that particular message. If the damage to the OMS pods was too severe, van Hoften said, "you're going to die."

• • •

Bob Crippen woke up to see his arms floating out ahead of him in the manner of a B-movie zombie. In the background, above his head, Earth appeared to be revolving slowly in the opposite direction. There was something about it he found disconcerting, and he resolved to fold his arms before trying to sleep again. If he could get warm, that was. Crip reckoned he could sleep just about anywhere, and strapped loosely into his ejection seat it should have been a breeze; weightlessness, he thought, the softest bed you could find. But the cabin temperature had dropped right off. He looked over his shoulder to see John Young lying horizontal in midair, just floating around the back of the flight deck behind him. He looked comfortable enough, but, like Crippen, Young couldn't sleep because of the cold.

The commander hadn't felt ready for sleep at the time appointed by the flight plan. After Crippen had eased himself into position in the cockpit, Young had drifted around the cabin, checking systems, reassuring himself that his spacecraft was working as advertised. That's what they paid us for, he thought. Before trying to sleep he returned to the cockpit and unclipped his Brogan flying boots from the ejection seat and pulled them on. It wasn't ideal, especially when, from time to time, he kicked the control panels, but at least they'd keep his feet a little warmer. Despite the impression from where Crip was sitting, Young managed to do little more than catnap.

• • •

While the astronauts tried to sleep, Tom Moser's engineering team at Houston worked late into the night on their analysis of the missing tiles. No one believed that they faced the kind of worst-case scenario from the damage to the pods that Ox van Hoften's simulations had explored. But shortly before 11:00 p.m. in Houston—mission elapsed time seventeen hours—Moser gathered the teams of aerothermodynamists, materials scientists and structural engineers to review their data. After twelve hours of running thermo-models on computers and reviewing arc jet data, they were of one mind: we're okay. Dottie Lee, managing the aerothermal team's relationship with Rockwell, conveyed the same verdict from their counterparts at Downey: "You will not burn up the spacecraft."

Around midnight, Lee finally left the office, climbed into her car and made the short drive home. Subsisting on water and anxiety, she'd not eaten all day. Exhausted, she pulled open the refrigerator door and stared at the contents, almost past caring what she ate. She opted for a leftover sausage patty, then threw ice into a tumbler and poured herself a well-deserved Tanqueray gin. After finishing what counted for a meal, she showered and went to bed, already anticipating the sound of the alarm clock that would wake her in three hours' time.

• • •

As Lee and the astronauts slept, in Houston and Sunnyvale NASA and the Air Force continued to work the problem. Analysis of the orbits flown by Columbia and 5502, the sole KH-11 KENNEN satellite capable of capturing the image NASA required, suggested that there would be just three opportunities to do so before the end of Young and Crippen's mission. The first, during Columbia's nineteenth orbit, was out over the Atlantic, east of Philadelphia and south of Portland, Maine. The second, an hour and a half later, saw the orbital encounter between the two spacecraft move 1,500 miles west as Columbia tracked across Missouri and Illinois, while the KEYHOLE bird swept down toward Arkansas from the north. The last chance was barely an option at all, offering a marginal window for the satellite as it bisected the Midwest through Idaho and south toward Nevada, after Columbia had already crossed its path on her way through Utah and Colorado. Three crossroads in the sky. Three chances. Through the discrete channels of communication established in case of contingencies prior to the launch, the Air Force passed details of what it needed to be done on to NASA, where, coordinated by Gene Kranz, the information was filtered through to Mission Control.

• • •

Irrespective of what reassurance came out of Building 13, the one thing Tom Moser's Structures and Mechanics team couldn't do was say whether or not the tiles missing from the maneuvering pods represented the full extent of the damage to the heat shield. Having failed in any attempt to capture a usable picture of Columbia on day one of the mission, Mission Control needed to make sure that if there was an opportunity for Department of Defense cameras, whether ground-based or in space, to photograph the Shuttle, she was presenting her best side.

In Building 30, Neil Hutchinson's Flight Control team worked on revisions to the next day's flight plan. During the day's first change-of-shift press conference, Hutchinson and Gene Kranz had said they were hoping to avoid making any changes to the flight plan, but as Hutchinson's Silver Team considered the orbital attitudes required of Columbia by the Air Force alongside tests of the reaction control thrusters already planned for day two of the mission, it was clear that they were going to have to make a few changes. It looked as if the astronauts were going to be busy. A long teleprinter message detailing the changes to the flight plan was prepared, ready to be uplinked to the crew once they were awake.

• • •

As Columbia passed across Australia on her fourteenth orbit, day once again blinking into night, Young and Crippen activated their computer displays and prepared for the second day of their mission, grateful to be moving around the cabin again—warming up. As the Shuttle passed out of range of Australia's Orroral Valley ground station on a track northeast toward Quito in Ecuador, there were thirty-two minutes of their scheduled sleep period remaining.

Mission elapsed time was twenty hours and eighteen minutes.

## FIFTY-THREE

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

On board Columbia, the sound of rocket engines erupted in Young and Crippen's ears—the roar of a launch broadcast over the RT from Mission Control. Then, over the rumble, came the familiar sound of the public address system: "She's beautiful . . . she's cleared the pad . . . do you copy, Houston?"

"This is Houston," came the reply at the moment drums and bass guitar struck up a bouncing country and western rhythm over the background. "We copy," continued the commentary as a guitar, pedal steel and vocal joined the song. Performed by twenty-two-year-old country and western singer Roy McCall and written by a Shuttle technician, "Blast-Off Columbia" was chosen by Mission Control as the day two wake-up music. Some of the technical detail in the lyrics was a bit iffy, but the song captured the mood, urging the crew on with repeated hollers of "All right!" and claiming that, thanks to Columbia, Young, Crippen and God's grace, America was once again number one in space.

"All right!" Crip repeated, making a mental note to give a copy to his mom to put on the jukebox in Crippen's. "Morning, gents, how's the Silver Team this morning?"

"Well, we're just fine," replied Dan Brandenstein, back at the CapCom console on Flight Director Neil Hutchinson's watch. After inquiring about the cabin temperature and the need to capture some missed data from the previous day's tests of the reaction control thrusters, Brandenstein got to the meat of the situation. "There are going to be some timeline changes today in the CAP [crew activity plan]. They don't start until twenty-four hours MET [mission elapsed time] so we have a message that's being ginned up that will request all those changes." Sandwiched in among other more mundane procedures, there was no suggestion from Brandenstein that it was anything out of the ordinary. But it marked the beginning of a series of maneuvers that it was hoped might provide critical evidence of the condition of Columbia's heat shield.

"Okay," Crip acknowledged at the end of the transmission. Nothing out of the ordinary.

• • •

From Quito, the orbiter swept northeast within range of the Bermuda tracking station before crossing the Atlantic on her way to Madrid. On board, Young and Crippen reconfigured the flight deck after their sleep period, adjusting the window blinds and preparing, once again, to align the inertial measurement units, the sensitive collection of gyroscopes and accelerometers that recorded the spacecraft's changes in attitude to feed into the flight control computers. Measured against snapshots of space taken by the onboard star trackers, the three highly tuned instruments had proved accurate so far. With the maneuvers being planned for day two it was vital that they should continue to perform.

"Columbia, Houston, talking to you through Madrid. We have you for about seven minutes."

"Okay, loud and clear."

"Roger, and we have a state vector coming your way. And there's also a teleprinter message on its way with some photo information . . ." A combination of three-dimensional attitude and velocity, the state vector recorded the Shuttle's position on orbit at a given moment in time.

While Mission Control prepared the numbers for the first of a revised series of reaction control system burns that would reposition Columbia in orbit, John Young looked down through the rear windows at the aft crew station as she flew 147 miles above the Strait of Gibraltar. "Looks to me as if we're right over Rota, Dan," he said, identifying the US naval base in Spain that had been earmarked as their destination in the event of a transatlantic abort during ascent.

"That's affirmative."

Young never tired of the view from space. Throughout the mission, as he looked down from Columbia, he pulled out the world map they carried on board to check on anything of interest, only to find that by the time he'd retrieved the map and opened it out, whatever had caught his eye was long gone, vanished behind him as his ship fell around the globe, velocity and gravity in perfect balance.

• • •

Twenty-five minutes later they were over Australia. And as Columbia came into range of the Yarragadee ground station near Perth, Dan Brandenstein passed the crew the details of the first reaction control system burn. At present, while the crew knew changes to the flight plan were coming, the scheduled timeline remained in place. From the CapCom console, Brandenstein ran through the numbers for the required burn attitude in three axes—roll, pitch and yaw—the delta-v, that is, the change in velocity, the time of ignition and the duration of the burn. Crippen took them down and repeated them back.

"Roger," Brandenstein confirmed, requesting another check on the inertial measurement units before Columbia went over the hill from Yarragadee.

On this orbit, Young was to maneuver the orbiter into a position known as the gravity gradient attitude. By positioning the Shuttle in the vertical relative to the surface of the Earth, her nose pointing down, the pull of gravity itself helped keep her stable, which reduced the need to use the thrusters to keep her in the desired orbit; as a result, the demand on their precious supply of propellant was reduced. But it also, as far as Young was concerned, made Columbia a bigger target. Space, he thought, was a debris meteoroid shooting gallery; an environment very similar to combat. He was a lot happier flying tail-first, presenting the orbiter's rocket bells in the direction of travel. But with her nose pointing toward the center of the Earth and circling like the hand of a clock, Columbia was able to maintain her attitude and orbit without a single correction for over three hours. And with her wings canted 120 degrees to port, she would also be pointing her belly directly at the rising sun as she flew overhead Pad 39A to begin orbit seventeen, some twenty-four hours after launch.

• • •

Inside control rooms at the Malabar Test Facility, 45 miles south of Kennedy Space Center, Air Force personnel operating the TEAL AMBER telescopic camera were preparing to track and image Columbia as she crossed Florida. At nearby Patrick Air Force Base, on the edge of Cocoa Beach, a jet was kept on standby to carry the results of their efforts back across the Gulf of Mexico to Ellington Field.

Waiting in Houston, Gene Kranz thought, It's going to probably take longer to get the film here than it is to analyze it . . .

• • •

At twenty-three hours mission elapsed time, as Columbia settled into orbit seventeen, the Flight Control team shift changed again. At CapCom, Astronaut Joe Allen of the Crimson Team replaced Dan Brandenstein.

"Good morning, Joe," Crippen greeted him. "It's about time you all came to work . . ."

In return, Allen was able finally to confirm that their flight plan had been changed. "Curious to know if you have Message Eleven on board," he added as the Shuttle flew across Australia again. "It's a pretty major change to the timeline and . . . prepared to answer questions, when and if."

"Okay, I'll tell you what, John is down on the mid-deck now. Meanwhile, I got a little piece of Slim Dusty and 'Waltzing Matilda' for our friends down under . . ."

"Let her rip!"

And as the familiar sound of Australia's alternative national anthem, sung by their most popular country and western star, struggled through the static on the S-band radio, backed by the additional electronic beeps that accompanied transmissions from space, Columbia disappeared out of range over the Pacific, on her way back to Cape Canaveral for the first time since blasting off the previous day.

• • •

On the mid-deck, John Young pulled Message Eleven off the teleprinter and began reading. Mission Control Center, he thought, had really redone the whole flight plan. Normally he'd have questioned the wisdom of changing so much midmission, but this time, of course, he knew that the flight directors were trying to solve a real-time problem. It was entirely clear what they were trying to pull off, and why. Potentially, his life and that of his pilot depended on it.

By the time Columbia arrived over Merritt Island, Young was back in his ejection seat, performing checks on the flight controls. Alongside him, his flight data file floated freely near his head.

"Bob, Columbia," Joe Allen called up. "If you look down now you'll see Cape Kennedy perhaps. There was a tremendous launch from there yesterday, which you may not have seen . . ."

Looking down toward Florida from the cockpit, Bob Crippen reached for the camera as he picked out the Vehicle Assembly Building and the long runway built for the Shuttle from orbit.

While Crip snapped away at familiar landmarks on Earth, next to him John Young performed checks on the rotational hand controller—the joystick. And, at the Malabar Test Facility below them, Air Force technicians operating the TEAL AMBER camera tried and failed to capture an image of Columbia as she passed overhead. For all that it was hoped that the attitude of the Shuttle would help facilitate NORAD's efforts to take the picture, the report received by Gene Kranz in Houston claimed that, on this pass, the elevation level was too low. For now, the aircraft on standby at Patrick to spirit any pictures back to Houston remained firmly on the ground. There was just one more chance to capture an image from Malabar, on orbit twenty-one. Otherwise, hopes of getting an image using ground-based assets now rested with the TEAL BLUE telescope in Maui. There, too, arrangements had been made to courier photographs back to Houston as fast as was possible. The problem was capturing the Shuttle in the first place.

"The weather isn't cooperating," Kranz told reporters at the end of Neil Hutchinson's shift, "and between the time we'd like to get set up and make sure we don't have any obscuration from the ground sites, then we look at the sun angle, look angle and range to the spacecraft, we've got a tough geometry problem." The veteran flight director's tortuous syntax seemed to reflect the difficulty he was experiencing in trying to answer the journalists' queries without straying into areas he knew were off-limits. He remained calm and collected through further persistent questioning about the tiles, but in the end his frustration at being unable to deal more conclusively with the issue showed itself. "We're working the daylights out of this thing trying to understand it," he admitted, "but for me it's unfamiliar territory."

The Department of Defense either would or would not succeed in being able to tell NASA what they had no other way of knowing. Until they did, though, the sword of Damocles would hang over Columbia. Whatever happened, the next five orbits would be key.

• • •

As the ground link to Madrid began to crackle and fade, Bob Crippen thumbed the Transmit button one last time. "Joe," he said, "one additional request. If you could zap me up another copy of that timeline change, I would appreciate it. So John and I each have a copy."

Clearly it was going to need their full attention.

"Roger that."

## FIFTY-FOUR

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

As Columbia swept over the continental United States on orbit eighteen, Young and Crippen's conversations with Mission Control became increasingly frequent. Following a successful first test of the reaction control thrusters, the scheduled timeline called for two further burns, RCS 2 and RCS 3, at 2:22 and 3:22 p.m. GMT, respectively. Both the times and the final postburn attitudes into which the spacecraft would settle following these maneuvers were changed. A fourth RCS burn was also added to the flight plan and scheduled for 5:12 p.m. GMT—or a mission elapsed time of one day, five hours and twelve minutes. In each case, Young and Crippen had first to accurately take down the coordinates, ignition time and velocities from CapCom, then input them into the digital autopilot. With barely an hour to go before TIG, the time of ignition, on RCS 2 burn, Crippen pushed Houston for clarity. "We do not have a RCS 2 PAD [preadvisory data] on board," he told them. Despite an earlier suggestion to John Young over the Orroral Valley that the PAD with the details the crew needed to perform the maneuver was already on board, they were still waiting for the numbers from Mission Control.

As the orbiter completed her run across the country, passing out over the Atlantic toward Africa, Crip looked down from the flight deck to see the familiar contours of the northeastern seaboard. "I think we just passed over Long Island, there," he reported.

"Roger."

Ahead of Columbia, just over 1,200 miles to the east, the NRO's KH-11 KENNEN, number 5502, shot across her bows, streaking south toward Brazil on an orbital inclination of 96.82 degrees and at an altitude a little under 50 miles higher than the Space Shuttle. In Sunnyvale, California, Air Force satellite operators were preparing their bird for its first shot at capturing an image of the Shuttle. Before the two spacecraft met again, in an hour and a half's time, after both had completed another orbit, Mission Control and the astronauts had to make sure Columbia was in position for the second attempt.

Passing in range of the Bermuda ground station, Crippen pushed CapCom for details. "About when can we expect an RCS 2 PAD from you?"

"Well, how about one second from now," Joe Allen came back. "We got it ready for ya."

"All right, let's see if we're ready for it. Okay. If you got time, we got the time."

"Okay, here it comes . . . burn attitude two three niner. Postburn attitude is four eight decimal six, one six nine decimal zero, three zero four decimal two. And attitude time is three hours and fourteen minutes. Read back."

The three numbers making up the postburn attitude represented roll, pitch and yaw. All were measured clockwise from a nominal zero in which Columbia was traveling forward in the direction of travel, upright and wings level. The instructions from Houston would position her on her back, flying tail first, her nose tilted down, her underside pointing up toward a point in space to the southeast of her position. Equally important was the attitude time given—three hours and fourteen minutes. This was the moment at which the Air Force operators from the Blue Cube Special Projects Office had determined that the window during which their bird could capture its image of Columbia closed. The point at which the two spacecraft were closest—just 158 miles from each other—came a little over two minutes earlier, at 15:11:52.

So by 15:14 GMT—the "three hours and fourteen minutes" given by Joe Allen from Houston—the orbits of the KEYHOLE satellite and the Shuttle would have already crossed; the KENNEN camera would be looking from behind the orbiter as she raced away. But while, ultimately, the Shuttle would quickly travel out of range of the KH-11 camera, it was not necessarily the moment when the orbits actually crossed that the Air Force was gunning for. Instead of proximity alone, Sunnyvale prioritized reducing the angular velocity between the spy satellite and its target and the position of the sun. Taking a picture from a latitude below Columbia—and from behind her—meant that to face toward the satellite's telescope mirror, the orbiter's belly would also be facing in the direction of the afternoon sun from the south as it arced from east to west, lit up like an artist's model.

John Young repeated the vital details of the message from CapCom, confirming "end time is three fourteen."

"Read back is good and we'll see you in six minutes over Madrid."

• • •

In Mission Control, as Columbia tracked down across Africa and on across the Indian Ocean toward Western Australia, Dick Truly and Hans Mark followed the radio exchanges between the astronauts and CapCom. Later, for public consumption, Mark, his hands tied by the levels of classification attached to the KEYHOLE program, would say only that NASA, ultimately, had no choice but to trust in God and hope for the best; but he and Truly both had the necessary security clearances to appreciate the significance of Columbia's upcoming change in attitude. With ringside seats, they clustered around the consoles to follow more closely the efforts of Young and Crippen to position the orbiter, able only to imagine the work being done in parallel by the Air Force controllers in the Blue Cube. And now, even as Young inputted the numbers for the second burn into the digital autopilot, at CapCom, alongside Truly, Joe Allen prepared the PAD for the third reaction-control burn, needed to maneuver Columbia into position for the encounter with the spy satellite that would follow on orbit twenty.

On the flight deck of the Shuttle, as she picked up the signal from Yarragadee, the tasks were beginning to stack up. While, twenty minutes off the planned timeline, Young prepared to maneuver the orbiter, Crippen reconfigured the flight control computers and stowed the radiators.

"If you got time on your hands," began Allen, "I can read up to you the RCS test sequence for number three."

"Stand by one, Joe."

"Roger, no hurry."

While Allen waited to pass his message, Bob Crippen organized paper and a pen.

"Both John and I are standing by to copy," Crip confirmed.

As Allen read carefully through the complex sequence of instructions, Crip took them down before repeating the details back to CapCom. "The postburn att is three one one decimal two, one eight two decimal seven, zero one three decimal zero. End time is four four four, over."

The time of ignition was 3:42 p.m. GMT. As before, the roll, pitch and yaw numbers would position the Shuttle with its underside facing the satellite as it passed overhead the Shuttle. Once again, the end time given—4:44 p.m. GMT—was two minutes later than the point at which Columbia's orbit took her closest to the NRO bird. This time there would be just 67 miles between them as their trajectories crossed.

Joe Allen listened to Crip read back the numbers, checking them against those on the sheet in front of him. This time the numbers didn't tally.

"Okay, Crip, three corrections," Allen began, but as he tried to fix the errors, he lost the signal to the Shuttle. "Columbia, this is Houston," he called up in the blind, "we're having a little trouble copying you . . ." Each time he made a transmission, the static was punctuated by a shrill electronic bleep.

When Allen next made contact with the spacecraft over the Orroral Valley tracking station there was a further correction to make. Instead of configuring Columbia for a maneuver using the batteries of small reaction-control thrusters, the crew were set up to use the two powerful orbital maneuvering system rockets in the tail. "Columbia, we are showing you about seven degrees out in yaw," he pointed out, "and it's an RCS burn coming up and we're showing OMS selected at the moment."

"Okay," Crip replied, caught by surprise. "We . . . yeah, you're right, you're right. Thank you." He was annoyed with himself for screwing up, but conscious that there was no damage done.

In losing the signal at Yarragadee, Allen had known he'd pick up Columbia again at Orroral Valley, just thirty seconds' flight time away. But Orroral was the last opportunity to communicate with the crew until they were picked up by Hawaii forty minutes later—and that was just twenty minutes before the first encounter with the NRO satellite. If Columbia had to be in the right attitude at eleven minutes past three, it needed to be sorted out now. And as she sped northeast toward the limits of the Australian ground station's transmitters, there were discrepancies between Mission Control and the crew. Allen passed up the correct roll, pitch and yaw values.

"Stand by one," responded Crippen, sounding wrong-footed, "you are implying we're not in the correct attitude?"

"That's affirm," Allen said, before once again reading out the postburn coordinates.

"Okay, Joe, I guess we're confused, I guess we did not understand that you wanted us to go to the postburn attitude. You want us in the postburn attitude right now?"

"Multiaxis burn always use postburn attitude," Allen confirmed as Young and Crippen began to lose the signal from Orroral Valley. As he tried to help them orient the Shuttle for their encounter with KENNEN 5502, Allen eventually had to accept that they were out of range. "Columbia," he told them, "we are in the blind . . ."

## FIFTY-FIVE

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

Columbia lanced northeast across the equator, 144 miles above the Pacific. With the autopilot programmed, at mission elapsed time of one day, two hours and forty-two minutes, John Young moved his hand controller out of the detent to initiate the burn. The ignition boomed through the hull of the spacecraft, shaking the cabin as clusters of jets in the nose sent angry white plumes of exhaust streaming into blackness ahead. A hundred times worse, thought Young, than it ever shook the lunar module. Ahead, his view of Earth curving away beneath him in blues and whites began to swing around through the layers of cockpit glass.

In the vacuum outside there was only silence as the Shuttle began to rotate around three axes, all the time continuing arrow straight at 17,500 mph along her orbital trajectory. To be heard inside, the thrusters needed to resonate through the substance of the airframe and cabin air. In pitch and roll the movement was smooth. Around the z axis, though—yaw—there seemed to be minor oscillations, almost as if she was walking. It just didn't feel clean, Young thought after the maneuver, his long experience in spaceflight giving him a seat-of-the-pants appreciation of his ship's movement. It was something the simulator hadn't predicted—it would need looking at. As the Shuttle continued her measured tumble head over heels, she was reacquired by Mission Control.

"Hello, Columbia, Houston, back with you through Hawaii, over."

"Okay, we read you loud and clear and we are maneuvering to the postburn attitude."

"Okay, copy that."

Between Hawaii and the coast of California, opposing sets of reaction control jets fired against the direction of the orbiter's rotation to stabilize her attitude. In space, coming off the flight controls simply left a vehicle to continue its movement until a positive force was applied to stop it. But as the spacecraft was reacquired from the ground by the Buckhorn ground station, and after the confusion that had crept in earlier during the pass between CapCom and the astronauts, the news was that all was as it should be.

"Okay," Young confirmed, "we are in attitude."

"Okay, John, it looks good."

Now it was up to the National Reconnaissance Office.

• • •

To see the northern lights from Thule Air Base, military personnel stationed there had to look south. Positioned in northern Greenland, less than 14 degrees south of the North Pole and 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the American military's most northerly facility was a lot closer to Moscow than it was to Washington. Icebound and dark for much of the year, it was not an easy environment in which to work. In March 1972, rocks the size of baseballs were whipped up and thrown against buildings like cannonballs as Thule was battered by the fastest low-altitude winds ever recorded on Earth. The reading on the anemometer was 207 mph and climbing before the instrument was destroyed by the force of the storm. But Thule's remote, unforgiving location also made it one of the country's most vital military bases. Described in one newsreel as "this nation's greatest military secret since the mounting of the Normandy invasion," construction of the base was a massive engineering feat—sometimes compared to the building of the Panama Canal—complicated by extreme conditions, frozen ocean and the absence of a port. The Strategic Air Command Base was home throughout its life to squadrons of fighters, bombers, missileers, and elements of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System in the shape of SAC's 12th Missile Warning Squadron. It had also, since 1961, been next-door neighbor to the Thule tracking station, part of the global network of facilities serving the Air Force Satellite Control Facility at Sunnyvale.

Three and a half miles to the southeast of the air base, the tracking station was a small mushroom farm of radio and radar antennas housed in white spheres of different sizes, augmented by masts, dotted around a collection of low-rise buildings, their shallow-pitched roofs as often as not blanketed in thick snow. Until its existence was declassified in 1969, it was referred to simply as Operating Location 5.

Because of its unique position near the North Pole, Thule was able to provide telemetry on nearly every orbit flown by NRO satellites launched out of Vandenberg.

Now, as the Shuttle crossed the continental United States on a track that took her from south of Portland, Oregon, across the Midwest and southern shores of the Great Lakes toward Philadelphia, KENNEN number 5502 was passing directly overhead Thule toward Newfoundland. At their consoles, beneath the NRO bird's orbit, the Thule operators—call sign POGO—tracked its progress, their data relayed back to the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale via the Defense Satellite Communication System network.

In the exchanges between Mission Control and the Shuttle, there was no suggestion that anything significant was happening. In fact, there seemed to be a studied indifference to it.

"John, we've got a call from Building 4," began Joe Allen, as Columbia approached her first orbital encounter with the KH-11. "It's Monday morning here and they want to know if they should go ahead and start the pilots' meeting without you."

"Pilots' meeting?" replied John Young. "I never knew whether it made any difference whether I was there or not! Is it Monday morning already?"

"Would you believe that?" Allen played along, before pointing out that the line was bad. "Tell John," he said to Crip, "his communication was a little garbled."

"He's been accused of that before," Crip teased as he looked down toward the eastern seaboard from the flight deck. "We're just coming across Cape Cod once more."

While Young and Crippen bantered with Joe Allen on CapCom, they knew they were barely thirty seconds from the window in which Sunnyvale controllers would first try to capture a sat-squared image of Columbia on orbit.

It was rubbing your tummy and patting your head on a grand scale. Performing complex, computer-controlled orbital ballet—against the clock—in a $10 billion spacecraft while never dropping the attaboy, A-OK, no-sweat demeanor with ground controllers that was expected by the public. However they felt, whatever they were doing, the astronauts had to stay unruffled, unhurried and cheery. It was as if a combat pilot were also required to exchange pleasantries on prime-time radio while flying a dangerous, demanding mission over enemy territory.

• • •

There was no signal or acknowledgment of whether the Air Force had been successful in their effort to capture a photograph of Columbia. The paths of the two spacecraft simply crossed as swiftly and silently as they had been destined to from the moment the Shuttle was successfully established in her orbit. That, during their brief encounter, the Air Force team in Sunnyvale had commanded their big KH-11 reconnaissance satellite to try to steal an image of the orbiter as she passed was a moment which, in itself, was incapable of providing any reassurance. But whatever the combination of light and shade gathered by the KENNEN's powerful reflecting telescope and collected by its arrays of hundreds of thousands of electronic receptors, it was now on its way via SDS relay to Area 58, the NRO's Aerospace Data Facility East in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

• • •

A minute before loss of signal through Botswana, Bob Crippen reported, "We're back in OPS 2 and getting ready to go to the postburn attitude." Crip reached forward to the center console, pushed the OPS button on the keyboard, keyed in the three digits to bring up a new computer operating mode and pressed the PRO button at the bottom right of the panel to confirm it. Because of the limited memory capacity of the computers, different flight modes demanded the scrubbing and reloading of different software throughout the flight. The reaction control burns were performed using OPS 3, and Crippen was already on the case.

"Okay, Columbia," Joe Allen responded, "we were hoping you would tell us that."

As the Shuttle crossed the Indian Ocean, John Young pushed his hand controller through the detent to fire the third reaction-control-system burn. Once again, the thrusters boomed through the cabin like howitzers as Columbia began to maneuver into the attitude that she'd maintain until her next encounter with the NRO's spy satellite, itself now sweeping over Antarctica.

Mission elapsed time was one day, three hours and forty-two minutes.

• • •

The little city of Unionville was the county seat of Butler County, northern Missouri. It labeled itself "the Hunting Capital of Missouri." Today that seemed appropriate enough, as Unionville's 2,000-strong population were located directly below a celestial pursuit that, in Mission Control in Houston, Flight Director Gene Kranz compared to trying to find a needle in a haystack. As dawn broke on April 13, Columbia approached the Pacific Northwest to begin orbit twenty, and her next pass across the continental United States. At the same time, coming down across the Hudson Bay toward Ontario was the NRO's KENNEN 5502 spy satellite. Less than ten minutes later, at 4:42 p.m. GMT, it was midmorning in Unionville when, unbeknownst to the residents going about their business below, Columbia and the KH-11 crossed paths in the skies overhead.

As the spacecrafts' orbits bisected, Joe Allen was already relaying the numbers for the next maneuver to the astronauts. Mission Control wanted them to maintain the same postburn attitude for the fourth reaction control burn. "End attitude time is one day, six hours and fourteen minutes." 6:14 p.m. GMT marked the last time there would be any opportunity to use the NRO's satellite to capture a picture of Columbia's heat shield. John Young repeated the numbers.

"Okay, John, read back is correct. And, once again, do the burn in the current attitude."

"All righty."

Everything looked good. The crew had the details of their reaction control burn—one that had not been required in the original mission timeline. But, over three orbits, Houston had rewritten the details of the flight plan in real time to ensure that Columbia presented herself as the best possible target for the NRO's cameras. Still, it all seemed in hand. Summing up, the Houston public affairs officer explained: "Information for the fourth reaction control system test-firing was passed up, the delta velocity [change in speed] is two feet per second, duration of the burn is four seconds, ignition time is one day, five hours, twelve minutes." It sounded easy.

"Okay," confirmed Young as Houston reacquired Columbia through Dakar, "we're at three zero two, the burn is all fit up and the targets look okay."

"Okay, very good," replied CapCom. Then, after a brief conversation with Crippen, they pressed to transmit again. "Okay, John and Crip, we want to modify your RCS burn PAD . . ."

Mission Control wanted to shake things up again. And just to complicate things further, on the next orbit Young and Crippen were scheduled to be talking to the vice president, George H. W. Bush.

## FIFTY-SIX

#### Houston, 1981

For those in Houston trying to calculate the orbital attitude required to place the Shuttle in the gaze of both celestial and terrestrial Department of Defense cameras, the situation was not straightforward. Orbits twenty and twenty-one offered a cluster of possibilities that would have been more easily accommodated had they been more spread out. As well as the only three KH-11 passes offered up during STS-1, there was also another chance to capture Columbia using the Air Force TEAL AMBER telescope on Malabar. But in order to be in position for both, the orbiter would have to flip-flop quickly to present her belly in two entirely different directions. With the Shuttle already over Australia and less than fifteen minutes' flight time from Hawaii, there was now some urgency about relaying the news to the crew.

"Columbia," said Joe Allen, "we're going to ask you for another RCS maneuver using the current attitude." As the orbiter arced northeast up over the Pacific and in and out of radio range, Allen worked hard to convey the necessary information. "We're also sending up a one-line teleprinter message to you there we'd like you to glance at before you get to Hawaii."

Then, just as Allen was on the verge of transmitting the numbers for the new maneuver, the comms link began to fail.

"Columbia, Houston . . . Columbia, this is Houston, over," he persisted, getting nothing but static in return. "Hello, Columbia, this is Houston, do you read?"

Eventually, barely decipherable through the crackle, John Young's voice made it back to CapCom: "We're here."

"You're weak, but we're basically in the blind," Allen told the spacecraft's commander. He pushed on: "We'd like a body axis burn at the time five hours and forty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds." After reading off the solution for the new maneuver, he finished by telling Young, "Do the burn in OPS 2 please, over."

"Houston, you're cutting out," Young said after a long pause.

Allen repeated the details, and again finished by telling Young he wanted the burn done without first reconfiguring the orbiter's computers with the appropriate software. It remained academic.

"That whole thing was completely broken," Young told him, his voice faint against the background hiss. "We didn't hear a word you said there . . ."

The link may have been poor, but, as Columbia approached the limits of the Yarragadee ground station's range, they were about to lose it completely. With one eye on the clock, Allen tried again. "And that's in OPS 2," he emphasized as time ran out, uncertain whether the crew had captured the message, "and we'll see you shortly through Guam."

• • •

Bob Crippen hadn't plugged into the comms link as Young scribbled down the particulars of the hastily added maneuver from Allen's last transmission.

In order to try to lighten the load on the astronauts, Mission Control had decided not to ask the crew to reconfigure the software out of OPS 2. But it was a mistake.

When he returned to his seat, Crip, who'd been so central to developing the software in the first place, urged his commander not to go ahead with the burn in that set-up. Young was struck by his pilot's conviction, but at the same time he felt Mission Control had been clear: "Do the burn in OPS 2." Houston, he figured, knew something I didn't know.

"Well, I'll do it," he told Crippen.

With the time of ignition looming, Young brought up the MNVR EXEC—"Maneuver Execute"—display and selected the reaction control jets from four different engine options. He loaded the data and time of ignition into the digital autopilot, chose "Manual," then reached up to press the "Execute" button in the center console.

At 17:43:45 the commander used his hand controller to trigger the burn, expecting to feel the acceleration as 1,740 pounds of thrust produced by two downward-pointing jets mounted in the right-hand orbital maneuvering system pod pushed Columbia into her new attitude. But when the fire command was sent, nothing happened. Young watched the delta-v monitor on the instrument panel ahead of him hold stubbornly at zero before a "jet fail" message flashed up on the warning display between him and Crip.

Oh, we've really messed up now, he thought.

• • •

Two minutes later, as the Shuttle flew into range of Guam, John Young thumbed the Transmit button to tell CapCom what had happened, or rather what had failed to. Because of the attempt to perform the burn in OPS 2, the reaction jet drivers, necessary to fire the thrusters, were not switched on. As a result no chamber pressure was sensed, and that triggered the fail light. Bob Crippen did his best to mask his frustration.

"I thought we all knew that it was not satisfactory for doing burns," he chided.

"Okay, we did know that it was only semiaccurate," Joe Allen confessed.

"Semitotally-unaccurate," Crippen responded, a hint of impatience creeping into his voice.

There was still time to correct the mistake, however.

"I'm going to reselect the jets," Crip said.

"Okay, very good."

And shortly after Mission Control lost the signal from Guam, after powering up the jet drivers, the astronauts completed the maneuver into the required postburn attitude, barely a minute before being picked up as she passed north of Hawaii.

• • •

"I've discovered," Crippen had told CapCom earlier in the mission, "that there's lots of clouds around the world." And now, as Air Force personnel at the Maui Optical Station and in Malabar tried to track and focus on Columbia as she passed within range of their telescopes, they were proving to be an issue. Both sites had been chosen because of clear air and good weather. Today, though, during one of the few orbits in which the Shuttle's trajectory combined with favorable lighting conditions to make an image a possibility, the Air Force was obliged to contend with scattered cloud around 4,000 feet and visibility of only about 7 miles. It was making a difficult task even harder.

• • •

"White House, Houston . . . White House, Houston."

"Houston, White House, testing one, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one."

"White House, you're loud and clear."

"Houston, you're loud and clear also."

A month before the launch, Bob Crippen had just returned to the Astronaut Office after a five-mile run when he got a message that John Young wanted to see him. "Say, Crip," Young told him with a smile, "the vice president wants to go run with you!" After Crip had pulled on his running shoes again, the picture taken of him and Young, dressed in regulation NASA T-shirt and shorts, running with George Bush, became one of his favorites. The vice president, like both astronauts, was a naval aviator whose interest in the upcoming spaceflight was evident. As well as running around Kennedy, Young and Crippen were able to pull the strings necessary to get him into the cockpit of Columbia, already standing vertical on the pad. Now, with President Reagan recovering from the attempt on his life at the end of March, the job of conveying the nation's appreciation of the astronauts' efforts fell to the vice president.

"John and Crip, we have a telephone call coming into the space network from the White House for the crew members of the spaceship Columbia. We would like to patch them through. If you would, please, Mr. Vice President, go ahead."

There was an easy familiarity about the brief conversation that followed, with Bush teasing Crippen about his racing pulse at liftoff. "I couldn't understand that," he said, "I thought he was a calm guy out there, you know, and now look at him . . ."

"Right, right," agreed Young.

As Navy fliers, all three men had been schooled in a tradition in which excitability was frowned on. Crippen's heart rate was an easy target. But, when it came to the way the mission was unfolding, the vice president's full résumé provided him with an unusual appreciation of things. Alongside his time flying Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers for the Navy, he could also point to a year in which he'd served as director of the CIA.

Jimmy Carter's election had brought George H. W.'s time at the agency to a premature end, but Bush had still been at the helm for the launch of the first KH-11 KENNEN satellite, number 5501, on December 19, 1976. During the transition period following Gerald Ford's election defeat, he'd also briefed the incoming Democratic president on the capabilities of CIA's revolutionary new reconnaissance platform prior to it capturing its first imagery—the pictures shown to Carter on his first full day in office. Now, at precisely the moment he was talking to the astronauts from the White House, the spacecraft he'd helped usher into service with the National Reconnaissance Office was passing within range of Columbia for the last time. And as the conversation with the vice president came to an end, thoughts on board the Shuttle turned to coming home.

"The only bad part about it, Joe," Crippen said after the link to CapCom was restored, "is we're going to have to come down."

"Well, don't come down in that attitude," Allen joked.

Crippen laughed. It wouldn't matter what state the heat shield was in if they tried to reenter upside down.

• • •

After Tom Moser's Structures and Mechanics team established, late the previous night, that there would be no risk to the Shuttle during reentry from the sixteen tiles known to be missing or damaged from the two orbital maneuvering pods, he'd had to share their conclusions with the project management team. Carrying the analysis and calculations with him, he presented his case to John Yardley, Chris Kraft, Aaron Cohen and Bob Thompson in Building 1. They challenged him on every point but, ultimately, were reassured. Moser's reward for being so convincing was to be asked by Kraft to join the next change-of-shift briefing alongside Don Puddy, boss of the Crimson Team, and Gene Kranz in the Public Affairs Office auditorium inside Building 2. Moser had never been asked to sit in on a briefing of that magnitude and knew well the focus there had been on the integrity of the heat shield in all the preceding press calls. But confident of his ground, he felt comfortable about the prospect of sitting in front of the room.

As he prepared himself, Mission Control turned their focus to another problem that, although attracting less attention, had been nagging both them and the astronauts throughout the flight.

Every thirty-three minutes, Mission Control had reminded Bob Crippen to pull the circuit breaker on the faulty flight recorder required to capture the vital data from the Shuttle's reentry. It was hoped, following Dick Truly's efforts in the sim using the swizzle stick to pull it in and out, that this process might continue after Crip had strapped himself back into the ejection seat for the return home. But Truly wasn't optimistic that, once his friend was constrained by a bulky pressure suit, he'd be able to make the stretch.

While John Young sat in his ejection seat, running a comms test with the new Flight Control shift, Hank Hartsfield, on CapCom, reminded him that Crip needed to try reaching the circuit breaker.

"I'll tell him, Henry," Young said. "He's still downstairs off comm."

After pulling himself into the tan pressure suit on the mid-deck, Crippen drifted through the companionway to the flight deck above, then floated across the cabin, using his arms to stabilize himself as he pushed himself down into his seat. After a quick comms check, Crippen tried to reach the circuit breaker, but without success. "I might accidentally do it," he told Hartsfield. "I can just barely lay the top of the swizzle stick on top of it, but I can't get any pressure on it. I got my neck rotated through 180 to do that."

Hartsfield kept pushing, suggesting that maybe Crip should try loosening his straps.

"Yeah, I can do that," Crippen replied, with an exasperated laugh. He could get up out of his seat if they wanted him to, he added. "I don't understand what it is you're all asking. When is it you were thinking you might ask me to do that?"

About four minutes before they fired the rockets to begin the Shuttle's de-orbit, Hartsfield told him.

Crippen's reaction was immediate and firm. "Uh-huh," he said, dismissing the possibility. "I got APUs to start and a burn to get off."

Every second of the astronauts' time was accounted for. "Not one place in the flight plan," Young observed, "where it says 'go to the bathroom' even." On day one he'd had to christen the waste management system between the two rocket burns that established Columbia in her final orbit—an effort that had impressed Crippen with its efficiency. If Mission Control wanted them to add anything to the flight plan, they had to find ways of making time to do it.

"Okay, Crip," Hartsfield said, backing down, "don't bother trying to work at it anymore now," before explaining more carefully why they were spending so much time trying to work the problem.

The worry back in Houston—the worst-case scenario—was that if they failed to capture the reentry data they needed from the first flight they might have to consider adding another mission to the orbital test flight program. And with Plan A—Crip and the swizzle stick—now out of contention, the management's thoughts turned to the possibility of asking the crew to start removing panels in order to try to disconnect the offending flight recorder and swap it with one of the other two carried on board Columbia.

## FIFTY-SEVEN

#### Houston, 1981

After a brief introduction from Don Puddy, who'd just come off shift, Tom Moser was given the floor to deal with the issue that was on top of the media's agenda. Sitting alongside the two veteran flight directors, in front of a packed auditorium, he provided a full account of the work done by his team and their conclusions, always conscious that he was talking to a particularly well-informed group, many of whom had covered the space program since its inception.

The tiles missing from the maneuvering pods would not, Moser said, "have any effect on the safety of the vehicle on entry." But while he could be unequivocal about what was known, what was still unknown about more critical areas of the heat shield dominated the rest of the briefing.

Gene Kranz was asked what measures might be taken if damage to these more critical areas of the thermal protection system was discovered. His answer revealed the limits of the options available. The astronauts could, he told them, purge and depressurize any of Columbia's tanks and systems that might be at risk from burn-through; there was room to slightly alter the reentry profile, except that, he admitted, it was already planned to be about as benign as possible. Reentering with even a fraction of a degree more sideslip in an effort to reduce the thermal stress to a damaged area of the heat shield would only increase the danger elsewhere by shifting the point of peak heating from the reinforced carbon-carbon nose cone to a less resilient part of the airframe.

At first glance, the presence of Salyut 6 in orbit might have looked like a potential lifeboat, but the harsh realities of celestial mechanics meant it was no such thing. Circling in an orbital inclination of 51.6 degrees, the Soviet space station would have needed around 20 tons of propellant to move her into the same 40.3-degree orbit as Columbia—as much as the total mass of the space station itself. The change in velocity—the delta-v—necessary to make the maneuver would have been around eight times the speed at which the average airliner flies. A shift in its orbital plane was about as thirsty a maneuver as any spacecraft could be required to perform. And in this situation it was impossible.

That left the possibility of keeping Young and Crippen on orbit until some plan for bringing them home could be improvised. And while, through careful conservation of the resources on board, Columbia's time in space could be extended, it was anything but indefinite; days not months.

The only realistic option was confirmation that the critical areas of Columbia's heat shield were undamaged. As Kranz stressed throughout, "We have no hard evidence at this time that leads us to suspect that we have any problems with the underside of the orbiter." The trouble was, neither did he, Puddy and Moser have any hard evidence to the contrary.

Asked whether the Air Force had yet successfully managed to take pictures that determined there was no tile loss from the underside of the Shuttle, he could only admit they had not. The most recent effort to capture the orbiter using the TEAL AMBER telescope at Malabar on orbit twenty-one had failed to yield any useful data. "Officially, and organizationally, operationally we have no usable photos obtained from the ground stations," Kranz said, but that statement didn't shut the door completely. And it was clear that some of the reporters in the room had sources suggesting that, while ground-based telescopes may have drawn blanks, the Department of Defense might still be in a position to provide imagery of Columbia.

"We're working with the Air Force in using available resources," Kranz explained, declining to expand on what those DOD assets might be. "Any further discussion of this subject," he said, "is classified."

As he spoke, there were still hopes that the classified efforts of the Air Force controllers at Sunnyvale might yet provide the photographic reassurance NASA wanted, even if the details of how they might do so had to remain off-limits to the public.

• • •

"Columbia, Houston. Can you listen now?"

"Okay, Hank, I guess I can listen up," replied Crippen.

"Okay. Our management has met and talked about this DFI problem and we have concluded that the data that we could get on that is very important to have." Hartsfield emphasized the significance of the development flight instrumentation recorder that was proving so profligate with its supply of tape. It was supposed to be recording the thermal data from the point at which Columbia began her reentry from space through to when she emerged, after a communications blackout, in atmospheric flight. Impossible to test properly in ground facilities, it was the most elusive and uncertain part of the Shuttle's envelope.

As the date for the first flight launch had approached, Bob Crippen had lobbied hard for an in-flight maintenance capability to be carried aboard the orbiter. Now, providing Mission Control could reorganize the flight plan to give him the time to do it, he was enthusiastic about his chance to road test the tool kit. John Young was more skeptical. It didn't make sense to go messing around changing out big components on the vehicle unless, he thought, they were flight critical. And the flight recorder, as much as the information it captured was valuable, had no bearing on whether or not Columbia and her crew were going to make it home in one piece. It was not a flight safety issue.

While Young stayed up on the flight deck, Crippen floated down through the hatch to the mid-deck to get to work.

From CapCom, Hank Hartsfield read through the details of a task that hadn't been practiced on the ground. "On step eight," he said, "what we want to do is change the order of removing those connectors so that we don't . . . so that we reduce the possibility of pulling the pins and the wires, and the order we want is as follows: eight . . . seven . . . six . . . one . . . three . . . four . . . five."

It sounded as if he were transmitting the step-by-step instructions for defusing a bomb.

"Henry," John Young cut in, "you want me to give torquing angles now?"

While leading Crip through trying to change out the flight recorder, Hartsfield still had a job to do helping the commander fly the Shuttle. "Yes, sir," he replied without breaking his stride, "we've got fifty-five seconds. Shoot 'em to me."

Young just had time to pass his message before Columbia lost the signal from Botswana.

On the mid-deck, Crip was having a hard enough time of it to stop whistling the tunes with which he'd set about the job. For all the discussion of precision disconnection, the problem facing him first demanded brute force. Most of the twelve fasteners holding each panel to the bulkhead just wouldn't budge, and without the help of gravity to root him to the spot, he was struggling to gain the purchase he needed to make inroads on the stiff Allen-head screws. With the temperature in the cabin now restored to a comfortable level, he was beginning to work up a sweat.

As Columbia tracked northeast across the Himalayas en route to Hawaii, Crip called up to his commander to see if he might have any more success in moving the screws and shifting the panel. Young drifted down headfirst through the hatch, completely at home maneuvering around in weightlessness, but after trying to plant himself in front of the bulkhead, his efforts to loosen the screws were no more successful than his crewmate's. Young imagined they'd been tightened up and painted in by some 300-pound guy. No chance, he thought, that they could expect a pair of astronauts that only weigh nothing in zero gravity to get the thing off.

After wrestling with it for nearly forty minutes, when they reacquired a radio link to CapCom, they broke the bad news. "Okay, Hank," Crip said, "we've got a small problem, or a big problem, depending on how bad you want DFI."

If it had been mission critical, if they'd said, "Change out the computer," Young maintained, he and Crip would have worked all night to get the job done. If that panel had to come off, we'd have sawed it off with a bone saw.

But even that might not have been enough. In deciding that the mission wouldn't fail on account of his work, the technician responsible for installing the panels had used Loctite glue to seal it shut. There was no way his panel was going to be the one that shook itself loose. The astronauts would have been lucky to be able to drill them out.

"We'd better give up on it," Hartsfield agreed, "unless somebody here comes up with a Eureka in the next few minutes."

The failure to change out the recorder was a frustrating end to a day that had borne almost no resemblance to the flight plan. And yet it had also been encouraging. Columbia had shown herself to be abundantly capable and flexible, responding with alacrity to all that had been expected of her and more.

Bob Crippen returned the panel hiding the flight recorder to the condition in which he'd found it, stowed the tool kit and flight procedures file which he'd had to hand as he worked, then pushed himself back up through the companionway to the flight deck. After three-quarters of an hour without a view outside, he was drawn to the sight of the stars through the cockpit windows. Previous astronaut groups had used a planetarium to study the heavens—knowledge of which was necessary as a backup for the spacecraft's inertial navigation and guidance systems. Crippen and the rest of the MOL guys hadn't been so lucky, relying instead on the simulator. John Young, though, as with lunar geology, had pursued astronomy with enough fervor to become expert. As he and Crip had trained for STS-1, the veteran astronaut had shared his understanding of the stars with his pilot. Throughout the mission, during the time they'd spent beyond the range of the ground-station network, Young had been pointing out stars to his rookie crewmate. Now, gazing out from Columbia's cockpit at a constellation he recognized as the Southern Cross, bright and unfiltered by Earth's atmosphere, Crip was moved by how dramatic it looked. Fifteen years after the Air Force had selected him to be an astronaut, it was a small moment of wonder that would from here on color his memories of his first spaceflight.

With the timeline compressed because of the attempt to change out the recorder, there was little more to do than eat and prepare for their second night's sleep on orbit.

"We all look forward to seeing you tomorrow," Hank Hartsfield told them, "we're excited about it. We understand you're buying."

"Well," Crippen laughed, "you might be right . . ."

Seconds later, the crew lost the signal through Santiago. Because of the ground track of orbit twenty-five, it would be nearly an hour and a half before, returning to Chile, they could have any contact at all.

• • •

The astronauts' sleep period began at one day, thirteen hours MET. As Young and Crippen settled in their ejection seats, blinds drawn over the deep cockpit windows, in Houston, Flight Director Neil Hutchinson's Silver Team replaced the Bronze Team at the Mission Control consoles. After plugging in and shadowing the last minutes of Hank Hartsfield's shift, Dan Brandenstein sat down at CapCom for what he anticipated would be a quiet shift. There were ongoing efforts to come up with a solution to the flight recorder problem. One possibility was simply to trip the master switch and shut down all three recorders until just prior to reentry. Aaron Cohen and the program management were weighing up the pros and cons of that. At the same time, a team of astronauts were expecting to work through the night in the sim to see if they could jury-rig an appendage for the swizzle stick that might give Crip the reach and control he needed to operate the circuit breaker from his seat.

On board Columbia, Young and Crippen turned down the ground-to-air comms link. For the next seven hours, they just had each other, and the silence of space, for company.

## FIFTY-EIGHT

#### Houston, 1981

As Silver Team settled into their night shift with the big screens and banks of consoles inside Building 30, the outgoing flight director, Chuck Lewis, left Mission Control and walked to the small briefing room in Building 2. There, once again, Gene Kranz was sitting in on the change-of-shift press conference. He was already braced for what was coming and, sure enough, the first question concerned the timing of the last opportunity to take pictures of Columbia. While Kranz conceded that, conceivably, it might be possible to get some coverage on revolution thirty-five, he didn't think it would be necessary. "We've examined all data that's available," he told the reporter from the Minneapolis Tribune, "and we've concluded we've got no basis for altering our plans." It was a line he clung to like the Fifth Amendment for the rest of the briefing. While the trouble with the flight recorders added a little variety, it was only a minor distraction from what had dominated proceedings all day. One reporter suggested that perhaps Kranz appeared to be sounding more confident than he had at the morning briefing. "Mainly because maybe I feel this is the last time I have to do this," Kranz dodged, "because tomorrow we're all going to be interested in the landing phase of the mission. Now if you want me to read that statement once more I will . . ."

"Never seen a dead horse get beat so much," joked Chuck Lewis. But they had barely started on Kranz. As in previous briefings, he referred only to ground-based optics and to the quality of the images that had been seen at Anderson Peak. What had sounded obliging and informative earlier in the day now seemed to shine a light on what was not said. Reporters had got the message that there were no usable ground-based images. And that the unclassified Air Force telescope at Anderson Peak, imagery from which Kranz so readily discussed, wasn't up to the job.

"You give," as one of the journalists pointed out, "a very careful answer to that question."

"You're right," Kranz agreed.

"Let me hit it nose on: do you have any data indicating an anomalous condition associated with the tiles other than those which we've seen on TV on the OMS pod?"

"I'll read you the statement again if you want it . . ."

"Okay, let me go at it this way then: are you under instructions not to go beyond that statement?"

"I've stated I can't go into further detail on this subject."

"Why can't you?"

"Because I said I can't go into further detail on this subject."

"Well, I mean, is God compelling you not to go beyond it or is someone else saying 'you shalt not go beyond that statement'?"

Kranz paused, thinking how best to answer. "I think I identified in an earlier activity that we were using DOD resources."

"Do you, then, have confirmation?"

"I'll read it one more time . . ."

"You've mentioned twice now this blip transversing the sky," the reporter continued, focusing on Kranz's description of the images from the Western Test Range telescope on Anderson Peak. "Is that kind of the sum total description of all you've gotten today? From all these resources?"

The question, dripping with disbelief, prompted laughter from the rest of the press pack.

"I think that I identified from the optical sites that we didn't get any data that we believed usable. I think Anderson Peak . . . the data is going to be played back and you can form your own opinion on it. Any other data, I just can't discuss."

## FIFTY-NINE

#### Houston, 1981

At first, it was just a ripple around Mission Control, little more than a rumor: We don't have to worry anymore.

In the second row of consoles, sitting alongside CapCom Dan Brandenstein as his backup, fellow TFNG recruit Terry Hart asked, "Why don't we have to worry anymore?"

"Can't tell you," came the answer, as if it were some kind of parlor game, before once more stressing, "You don't have to worry anymore."

But there was only one thing that had been nagging away throughout the mission and that was the state of Columbia's heat shield. The risk from the missing tiles on the maneuvering pods had been dismissed quickly and completely by Tom Moser's engineers. But, despite Kranz's calm assurances at briefings throughout the flight, the effort to establish beyond doubt whether or not there was a far more serious risk to Columbia and her crew had rightly been regarded as an emergency. It just wasn't one which, because of the highly classified nature of the resources being brought to bear, was allowed to play out in full view. In the Mission Control room, though, the drapes were pulled back a little on the secret world.

The reporter who'd detected a change in Gene Kranz earlier had been right. About an hour after the buzz first began to spread around Building 30, the deputy director of Flight Operations walked into the Mission Control room. The blond crew cut and widow's peak still framed his boxer's face; the trademark vest, tailored by his wife, Marta, was present and correct; but Kranz, whose thin-lipped intensity had come to personify Mission Control, seemed unburdened.

After the pad fire that had claimed the lives of John Young's friend Gus Grissom and his Apollo 1 crew, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, Kranz had told flight controllers that, whatever any accident investigation established, "we screwed up . . . we should have caught it . . . we are the cause." The words that followed became known as the Kranz Doctrine. "Flight Control will be known by two words," he'd said, "tough and competent. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect."

And this was how NASA had responded to the missing tiles. From the moment the damage to Columbia's thermal protection system was discovered, Kranz had led the charge to deal with it. He'd hoped for the best but had assumed nothing; they'd worked the problem.

Now, as the astronauts on board the Shuttle slept, Kranz had returned to his domain carrying the last part of the jigsaw: photographs of the bottom of the Shuttle. And these were very definitely not the kind of amorphous streaks Kranz had been prepared to describe to reporters. The flight director had a sheaf of high-resolution pictures taken hours earlier by the NRO's KH-11 KENNEN spy bird. What, during the Skylab crisis, had taken days to turn around had this time, relayed through Area 58, Aerospace Data Facility East at Fort Belvoir, arrived the same afternoon.

The detail was stunning, showing clearly that there were none of the black pockmarks on Columbia's belly that would indicate there were further missing tiles. Crew safety, Kranz had always maintained, was the first priority; in leaving no stone unturned, he now had the evidence to illustrate it.

"How did you get those?" Kranz was asked.

"I can't tell you," he responded, no more forthcoming about their source than he had been with the press about their existence.

Joe Engle and Joe Allen, both in the control room when Kranz brought in the pictures, examined them. But unlike Dick Truly, also with them in Mission Control and who also had the opportunity to look at the images, neither knew in detail how they'd been captured. "Special methods," "national technical assets" or just plain "DOD" was as much as any one of them clustered next to the rows of consoles, as far as Allen was aware, had been told about their source. Truly knew otherwise. He was able to attach a program name to the "DOD resources" Kranz had alluded to with reporters. He knew the nature of the spy bird's day job, its capabilities, and how good fortune, along with skill, had contributed to Air Force controllers' success in capturing the pictures that confirmed that his close friend Crip and his commander were safe. Relief flooded through him; the anxiety he'd felt at the prospect of the missing tiles being symptomatic of a more serious problem immediately washed away. Around him, too, the mood was transformed.

The Shuttle's fine, Terry Hart told himself, reflecting the view of the whole room; it's going to come back fine.

The pictures did not stay in the Mission Control room for long. And, ironically, Hans Mark, the man who had reassured NASA's John Yardley in Washington that the Department of Defense had the capability using its "spooky ships" to take pictures of the Shuttle on orbit, did not see the results with his own eyes. But he did learn when he returned to Mission Control that "it's okay"—he didn't need to be told more than that—the rest of it he could fill in himself. As had been apparent during the Iranian hostage crisis, the NRO's KEYHOLE satellites couldn't actually intervene when things went wrong—they just provided information. Sometimes, though, knowledge alone was cause enough for celebration.

• • •

Bob Crippen was jolted awake by the insistent electronic bing bing bing of an alarm. For a moment he was disoriented, unsure where he was or what he was doing.

"What's that, Crip?" John Young asked anxiously, also woken by the alert.

Crip tried to force himself awake, eventually shaking off his slumber sufficiently to break out the big malfunction book. For now, Columbia was out of range of any of the ground stations. Whatever was happening was something the crew were going to have to sort out themselves. Crip checked to see where they would next pick up CapCom. Ascension Island. And he began rifling through the "mal" book in search of the source of the problem.

Ahead of him, at the bottom of the matrix of warning lights in the center of the instrument panel, the APU temperature light glowed. While only fire and a loss of cabin pressure triggered the sirens or klaxons of a Class 1 alarm, the auxiliary power units that moved the orbiter's flight control surfaces were still crucial. Without them, once she returned to atmospheric flight, Columbia would be uncontrollable. There were three APUs. Like virtually every other critical system, redundancy was built in. Shut down after reaching orbit, one and three had both been restarted to make sure the crew were confident of having at least one functioning system. The problem now was with APU 2, the concern being that, if the temperature dropped too far, it would be impossible to start it again when it was needed.

Following the procedures laid out, Crip floated back to the aft crew station to switch on the heaters. It seemed to have no effect.

"Columbia, Houston." As the Shuttle passed into range of the S-band and UHF transmitter on the remote British mid-Atlantic island, Mission Control, their own screens displaying the APU problem, made contact. On CapCom, Dan Brandenstein told them to switch on the heaters.

"Okay, well, our heaters are A-Auto," Young replied. "Crip did that first thing."

"Roger, Columbia. Our switch scan shows the switch still in Bravo." In Mission Control, the telemetry was suggesting that Crippen's action had failed to initiate the changeover. "I recommend you cycle the switch," Brandenstein suggested.

On board the orbiter, Crippen tried again.

"Okay, that's done now."

"We show it per nominal," said Brandenstein. Nominal was the word every astronaut, engineer and official wanted to hear describing every aspect of a spaceflight—everything was just as it should be. "And," he continued, "the temp's rising."

"Sure is. See you guys tomorrow."

"Good night, Columbia."

No one likes things that go bump in the night—and in space least of all. But with the scare dealt with, Crippen returned to his ejection seat, while Young, after having his sleep interrupted, decided he'd stay up for another hour or two, drinking in the view and taking photographs—the archetypal extraterrestrial, just squeezing the juice from his last few hours in space.

There had been so many memorable sights from orbit: the jagged, snow-covered relief of the Himalayas; boiling thunderstorms mushrooming high above the Amazon; smoke drifting into the sky from the caldera of Mount Etna; and sunlight catching the swell of the ocean at dusk, picking out ships hundreds of miles away. Crip had thought Dasht-e Kavir, the great salt desert in central Iran, was the most striking sight, its magnificent swirls of red, ochre and white mineral deposits looking more like the surface of Jupiter than anywhere on Earth. For Young, though, it was the Bahamas. They glowed like emeralds, he thought, certain that his photographs could not do justice to the beauty he was able to pick out with his own eyes.

They were on orbit twenty-seven, mission elapsed time one day, sixteen hours. When their sleep period ended in five hours' time, they would, almost immediately, begin preparing for their return to Earth. Even with their heat shield intact, it remained reentry, peak heating and hypersonic flight that was the corner of the Shuttle's flight envelope about which least was known. Columbia's return would provide the mechanism for learning it. Not for nothing was STS-1 described as "the boldest test flight in history."

## SIXTY

#### Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, 1981

As director of Ames Research Center, Hans Mark identified a handful of programs that he felt demanded priority: the series of Pioneer space probes; the ILLIAC supercomputer; and the nascent but promising tilt-rotor program that would one day evolve into the Marine Corps' MV-22 Osprey, which, in the wake of the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran, Mark once again advocated as a machine with "extraordinary promise." And there was the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.

The KAO started life as an effort by Lockheed to sell its C-141 Starlifter military airlifter to civilian operators. After barely 700 hours in the air it became apparent that there was insufficient commercial interest to sustain the project. But when, in 1970, NASA went looking for a large four-engine jet capable of carrying a big infrared telescope for high-altitude astronomy, the mothballed jet offered the perfect solution. In 1974, after extensive modifications, she emerged painted in NASA's elegant blue-and-white house style and carrying a 36-inch reflecting telescope which could observe the heavens from an altitude above most atmospheric interference. Named in honor of infrared astronomy pioneer Gerard P. Kuiper, the director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the KAO's telescope had studied Halley's Comet and total eclipses, discovered rings around Uranus, a heat source inside Neptune, Pluto's atmosphere and water vapor in comets. Observers on board the aircraft had explored the formation of elements inside supernovas, mapped the Milky Way's galactic center, and examined the structure of star-forming clouds. And in 1976, before Mark left Ames for the Pentagon, his researchers began to look at whether the jet might be used to capture infrared images of the Space Shuttle as the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere. By August of the following year, a report concluded it was feasible. The experiment was christened IRIS—infrared imagery of Shuttle.

Three and a half years after the publication of the study, the long, low, high-winged shape of the KAO was parked on the apron at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii in the predawn, having been deployed west across the Pacific from Moffett Field in readiness for Columbia's return. Through the night, technicians had prepared her for a mission which had been rehearsed using radar controllers on the ground and, in the absence of the Shuttle on which to focus the telescope, stars and planets. Already the sensitive infrared detectors were being precooled inside a vacuum flask—a dewar—to minus 452°F using liquid helium, while the detector's cores were chilled further to just four-tenths of a degree above absolute zero using helium-3.

Joining the KAO's aircrew and scientists for the flight were the aircraft's mascots: two cuddly toys—a koala bear and a kiwi—gifts from colleagues Down Under.

• • •

While the team from Ames prepared for their contribution to Columbia's return, in Houston, Dan Brandenstein pressed Play on the day's wake-up music. Thankfully, Young and Crippen were already awake when a mad blast of Texas radio was beamed up as their day-three alarm call. After a brief, deceptive snippet of birdsong, the trumpets began, followed by a lot of shouting.

Get out of the rack!

Both of you could use a shower.

C'mon John, after five missions you ought to have this down by now!

Be nice to him, he's fifty years old . . .

Crip, you've waited for this for twelve years. If you don't wake up now you'll miss the whole darned thing!

It still paled in comparison to the kind of things that were used as wake-up calls in the sims. Most of those were definitely not for public consumption.

With the cacophony over, Bob Crippen thanked Brandenstein for his help in the night. "I was so asleep in the middle of the night I couldn't think," he admitted.

"Roger."

"We got all of your teleprinter messages off there. We appreciate that."

Unable to broadcast via CapCom details of the NRO's spy satellite photograph seen in Mission Control the previous night, if the good news was passed on to the crew about the integrity of Columbia's heat shield, it was contained in the reams of paper Young and Crippen had woken up to from Houston. And if Crippen was going to be more fulsome in his appreciation, then that too would have to wait until conversations could be held in private on the ground. Further reassurance was also required, as it appeared that the efforts of both Mission Control and the crew to solve the problem with the APU heater had been unsuccessful. Although Columbia could return with just two functioning auxiliary power units, test data suggested that even if the temperature continued to drop on APU 2, they were still, even if it was a little sluggish at first, going to be able to get it started. As Brandenstein looked forward to the end of his shift, it was a relief not to have replaced one problem with another.

"We're twenty seconds from LOS [loss of signal]," he told Crip. "The Crimson Team will pick you up at Indy at twenty-two plus fifty-four. See you guys later."

"Okay," Crip replied, "we're just mighty glad that you did not have to practice any of those things that you know so much about there . . ."

It was a feeling strongly shared by Brandenstein. It was, he thought, a load off everybody's minds. After he'd seen the photographs brought in by Gene Kranz, he could hand over the CapCom console to Joe Allen secure in the knowledge that he wasn't passing his replacement a world of trouble.

• • •

Ames Research Center's Kuiper Airborne Observatory was just one of a fleet of aircraft being readied for Columbia's return. Already parked on the Dryden flight line at Edwards were the four T-38 jets belonging to Jon McBride's Chase Air Force. A squadron of helicopters carrying soldiers, doctors, astronauts and rescue workers was ready to control crowds and respond to an emergency.

They were also joined by one of the Gulfstream Shuttle Training Aircraft, sent to Edwards to bring Young and Crippen home to Houston after their arrival. It now also had to conduct the weather flight as the pilot scheduled to do the job was going to be absent. Dick Truly's call sign would have been Weather West.

Truly had been assigned to fly a weather flight over Edwards in a T-38 in advance of the orbiter's return. With good weather forecast over the Californian high desert base, though, it was agreed that his presence was surplus to requirements. Instead, the astronaut chose to stay in Mission Control with Joe Engle for the landing. He wasn't sure why, but for some reason he couldn't put his finger on, reentry had always caused Truly more anxiety than ascent. He wanted to watch the landing from the nerve center of the mission, feeding on the detail of it. First to know of any developments.

"On your next pass over the US," Dan Brandenstein suggested, "do your own weather flight."

"We will take over for Weather West," Crippen laughed.

In the Mission Control room, Truly smiled and pointed out that it was actually going to be the other way around—on Columbia's next flight, Truly, with Engle sitting alongside him next to the CapCom console, was actually going to be taking over from him.

Clocks were started to count down toward the ignition of the orbital maneuvering system rockets to initiate the spacecraft's reentry.

As Crippen bantered with Joe Allen at CapCom through the Bermuda ground station, the Shuttle was beginning orbit thirty-three. Mission elapsed time was two days, one hour. On their next revolution, Young and Crippen would climb into their David Clark S1030 pressure suits and verify the positions of the switches on the mid-deck before returning to the flight deck for the last time in readiness for coming home.

• • •

At Hickam AFB, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory sat waiting. Beneath long wings, angling down from her shoulders toward the hardstand below, the launch crew moved purposefully around her. Her fuel tanks were full; the supercooled dewar carrying the IR detectors had been loaded and attached to the telescope.

With less than half an hour before their scheduled departure time, the flight crew walked out to NASA's unique variation on Lockheed's big airlifter, climbed on board and strapped into their seats. On the flight deck, the aircraft's captain, Dave Bark, commanded, "Before engines, start checklist," prompting a scripted call-and-response between him, his copilot and their flight engineer as they set up the jet's systems for flight. Outside on the ramp, a second engineer, the scanner, verified the KAO's responses and directed the launch crew to remove the landing-gear pins and main-gear chocks. With the checks complete, Bark was ready to start the four Pratt & Whitney TF33-P-7 turbofans. He pressed the starter button, then moved the fuel and start ignition switch to "Run." Behind him, his flight engineer routed high-pressure air through the engines, and then checked the temperatures and pressures as each jet spooled up, generating a building whining growl in the dark of predawn.

In what had once been the aircraft's cargo hold, the team of telescope technicians sat in a windowless cabin in front of a mosaic of switches and cathode-ray tubes mounted on gray panels running along the length of the fuselage. Around them were exposed structural spars and junction boxes, as much a victory for function over form as a university electrical engineering lab. The bags of flight food brought on board—potato chips, cookies, soft drinks—didn't suggest nutrition was as huge a priority on the long mission ahead.

With a nudge on the throttles to move them forward out of idle, Bark began to taxi. As the big Lockheed jet rolled toward the runway, his copilot next to him set the wing flaps at 75 percent and armed the spoilers. Minutes later, as the KAO accelerated past 120 knots, Bark pulled gently back on the yoke to raise the nose. As they accelerated away into the night, the crew raised the gear, pulled the power back to 92 percent and, after raising the flaps and settling into the climb, handed control to "George," the C-141's autopilot. Given the precision flying to come as they attempted to track Columbia as she streaked past Hawaii, it made sense to lighten the load while they still had the opportunity to do so. The success or failure of the KAO's mission would be measured, ultimately, in milliseconds.

## SIXTY-ONE

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

On board Columbia, the astronauts continued their preparations for reentry. After the wake-up call, life on board the orbiter had continued noisily as John Young test fired each of the forty-four reaction control jets needed to control the Shuttle before she descended into air thick enough to allow the aerodynamic flight controls to bite. Then, after firing up one of the auxiliary power units, he cycled the engine gimbals and flight control surfaces before checking the spacecraft's guidance and navigation systems. Crossing the Pacific on orbit thirty-five, Bob Crippen stood at the aft crew station. With the radiators stowed and latched over Australia, he initiated the closing of the payload bay doors. As he worked, data was dumped from Columbia's computers and captured at the Orroral Valley and Hawaii ground stations for postflight analysis.

"Those doors are closed up and locked," Crip reported, "just as they were supposed to." He then asked whether Mission Control had the numbers for the de-orbit burn to trigger their return to Earth.

"We sure do," Allen confirmed, "in fact when you're ready, we are ready."

For the first time since main engine ignition at Kennedy, what followed from CapCom began to weave the language of air traffic control—of aviation—in among that of spaceflight. Along with the inertial attitudes and burn duration, Allen also passed up the wind speeds and directions waiting for Columbia over California and told them to plan for a "left-hand turn to Eddie 23"—the 22,175-foot-long runway on Rogers Dry Lake Bed at Edwards.

As John Young prepared to maneuver into the right attitude to use the star trackers in Columbia's nose to pinpoint his ship's position against the celestial map for the last time, he looked down at the continental United States passing beneath them.

"It looks like we're going right over Chicago," he said. "Or are we lost in space again?"

• • •

Outside Edwards Air Force Base there was a 6-mile-long bumper-to-bumper line of vehicles trying to get into the base for Columbia's return. Thousands of cars, RVs and pickups were already parked in the lee of dry, pitted hills dotted with sagebrush. An estimated quarter of a million people had decided they wanted to witness America reclaim her lead in space. Many had arrived the previous night, pitching tents on the cracked earth around the western edge of Rogers Dry Lake Bed behind a mile-long wooden security fence. Fueled by beer, barbecue and anticipation, there was a festival mood, and after dark the campers were entertained by a country and western band laid on by the Air Force. Some stayed up all night under the stars, drinking, smoking and talking, before then sitting out on folding chairs under dry, azure morning skies waiting for the double-barreled sonic boom that would herald Columbia's arrival. They looked as if they were lining a beachfront. Announcements from the public affairs officer at Houston echoed from a PA system to keep them up to date with the spacecraft's progress.

By 8:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on April 14, the sun was already beginning to heat the surface of the lake bed. Soon the haze would soften and distort the view across it.

• • •

On their thirty-sixth revolution, after verifying the position of the switches at the aft crew station and stowing loose items before gravity had the opportunity to throw them around the cabin, Young and Crippen propelled themselves gently forward, toward the cockpit. They pressed themselves down into their ejection seats, strapped in, then pushed their feet into their flying boots. Crip was glad that his earlier decision to leave them connected to the boot spurs meant he'd dodged a job which in zero-g would only have been more awkward. Hundreds of hours flying F-104 Starfighters, he thought, and I never could put those spurs on.

Mission elapsed time was two days, four hours and twenty-nine minutes.

• • •

As the time of the Shuttle's scheduled arrival approached, the levels of activity increased. Air Force helicopters circled overhead. One of the two Gulfstream training aircraft climbed away from Runway 24 on its way to report back on the weather at altitude. And, following extensive briefings inside the Dryden crew room, Jon McBride and the seven other pilots and backseaters of the Chase Air Force deployed to Edwards walked outside to their line of immaculate white T-38 jets. Wearing blue NASA flight suits, each sporting the Chase team patch, they carried out preflight checks of the aircraft before climbing up ladders into their cockpits and lowering themselves into their ejection seats. McBride pulled on his red, white and blue "Captain America" helmet and strapped into his shoulder harness, lap belt and parachute lanyard. He plugged into the jet's radio and intercom and connected himself to the oxygen supply. Behind him, his backseater and fellow TFNG recruit Pinky Nelson did the same.

• • •

Using estimates of the Shuttle's ground track from Mission Control, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory held station in a pattern north of Hawaii. On board the big NASA jet, Dave Bark and his flight crew were ready for any late updates on Columbia's expected reentry that would require them to reposition prior to the rendezvous. Even without last-minute changes, success required precise navigation based on accurate data from Houston, skillful handling and seamless teamwork between the aircrew on the flight deck and the telescope operators behind. KAO needed to be flying at 475 knots and 41,000 feet on a path parallel to the Shuttle as the spacecraft overtook her. From their own position, cruising 16 miles south of the orbiter's descent, there would be a window of just sixteen seconds between the moment the IRIS tracker could lock onto the Shuttle at a range of 50 miles and the point at which Columbia passed out of the heat-seeking telescope's field of view. After two and a half days in space and a hypersonic descent from orbit, the maximum allowable cross-track error was just 2 miles, while the difference in speed between the two flying machines would be over 9,000 mph. Bark's last update on Columbia's predicted trajectory would come ten minutes before the entry interface, the point 400,000 feet over the western Pacific where she began meeting resistance from the upper atmosphere. Her encounter with the airborne observatory would take place nearly twenty minutes after that. The margins were fine, the opportunities for error great.

• • •

When the Apollo 13 capsule reentered the Earth's atmosphere after a slingshot around the moon that had saved the lives of her crew, there was a period of around six minutes during which communication between the spacecraft and Mission Control was impossible. Because the capsule was forced to reenter at a shallower angle than originally planned, Gene Kranz and his team of flight controllers in Houston had endured a blackout that persisted for nearly a minute and a half longer than expected. After all that had been done to bring Lovell, Haise and Swigert home, the uncertainty over the fate of the astronauts was agonizing. But while it may have been more persistent than predicted, the blackout itself was no surprise. In fact, it was a direct consequence of the capsule's forceful collision with Earth's atmosphere. And it would be no different for Columbia.

When the orbiter's nose and underbelly collided with the upper atmosphere at a speed of nearly 5 miles per second, a shock wave would form ahead of her. And between the bow of that shock and the thin boundary layer flowing over—and protecting—the surface of Columbia herself, atmospheric gases, heated by their violent compression to temperatures of over 6,000°F—comparable to the surface of the sun—would begin to disassociate. Electrons, stripped from the molecules contained in the thin air around the orbiter, would then envelop her in a superheated sheath of ionized gas, or plasma. And when the density of the plasma cocoon around the Shuttle exceeded the level at which radio communication was possible, Columbia and her crew would be cut off.

In the Mission Control room, it was impossible not to be aware of a tightening mood as the entry interface approached. Sitting behind the CapCom console, Dick Truly and Joe Engle were plugged in, listening to what remained to be shared with Young and Crippen during the final hours of their spaceflight. Always more anxious about the return, Truly could feel his own tension mounting, despite the reassurance the satellite pictures from the National Reconnaissance Office had provided. Sitting ahead of Truly and Engle, Joe Allen and Rick Hauck scanned the telemetry coming from Columbia on their monitors. Allen pressed the Transmit button.

"Columbia," he said, "your burn attitude looks good to us and everything aboard looks good to us. You are go for de-orbit burn and we'll go LOS in thirty seconds here. We'll talk to you in Botswana in about five minutes."

"Okay. We understand ready for de-orbit burn. Thank you now. That's the best news we've had in two and a half days. And we've had some mighty good news . . ."

• • •

Jon McBride checked his fuel settings, reached forward with his left arm and pressed the right-hand engine start button. Behind him, the first J85 engine whined as the needles on the temperature and pressure gauges in the cockpit swung clockwise. He set the throttle at 47 percent rpm, then repeated the procedure for the port engine. With both engines idling, he checked his flight controls, speed brakes and trim switch before requesting taxi clearance from the tower. He advanced the throttles to 75 percent and began rolling forward. He dipped the brakes and continued, setting the T-38's flaps at 45 percent for takeoff as he taxied toward the runway, steering the nosewheel with his rudder pedals. Alongside him, Chase Two, Three and Four settled into a brisk procession along the taxiway. En route, the crews of the lithe, athletic-looking little jets closed their canopies as they approached the runway threshold.

• • •

Nineteen minutes earlier, Young had maneuvered out of the top-sun attitude he'd used to try to chill Columbia's belly before reentry. Now, as she completed a three-minute pass across the Botswana tracking station, she was flying upside down and tail-first in anticipation of the de-orbit burn that would upset the delicate balance of speed and gravity that had kept them in orbit. At ignition minus one minute, Young made a final adjustment to the attitude, checked the maneuver targets on the CRT screen ahead of him, and armed the two orbital maneuvering system engines. Then, at ignition minus fifteen seconds, he reached forward to the computer keyboard in the center console and pressed the EXEC button—execute—to begin the countdown.

## SIXTY-TWO

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

One hundred and forty-five miles above the Indian Ocean, fuel and oxidizer ignited inside the combustion chambers of Columbia's two Aerojet OMS engines. The combined 12,000 pounds of thrust generated by the two hypergolic rockets burned against the Shuttle's direction of travel, gently pushing Young and Crippen back into their seats—a subtle suggestion of the gravity that would soon reassert itself. As the engines fired, Young and Crippen monitored the computer displays in front of them. The crucial number was that of their current perigee—the lowest point in their orbit. The two-and-a-half-minute rocket burn barely slowed Columbia, shaving just 200 mph off her 17,500 mph orbital velocity. Instead, its effect was to alter the shape of her orbit from a circle to an ellipse with an apogee, or maximum altitude, that remained the same, but a perigee that brought them low enough to ensure their capture by the atmosphere.

At the termination of the burn, Columbia's return from space was inevitable, but not instant. Still traveling at over 17,000 mph, the entry interface with the "sensible" atmosphere—the 400,000-foot altitude at which friction would begin to slow her progress—remained half an hour away. But this was the point at which the conclusions drawn from both the analysis done by Tom Moser's engineering team on the missing tiles and the study of the NRO's satellite photographs would be put to the test. And while those difficult-to-capture pictures had been able to demonstrate that the heat shield was in place as designed, they were not able to highlight areas where the design of the heat shield itself might be inadequate. That would remain unknown until Columbia put theory into practice.

John Young typed in the pitch, roll and yaw data on the autopilot. Following the attitude indicators on the eight-ball display ahead of him he used the rotational hand controller—the joystick—to pitch the spacecraft into the high angle of attack in which she'd reenter. From her tail-first, belly-up attitude, Columbia's nose arced silently counterclockwise like the needle on a dial through a semicircle at a rate of just 0.2 degrees a second. Through the cockpit windows the two astronauts watched their view of Earth disappear over their shoulders until Young halted their progress, his attitude indicator telling him he had the required zero-degree roll, zero-degree yaw, and Columbia's nose pitched up at an angle of 39 degrees, braced for the worst that reentry could inflict on her. That was less than twenty minutes away.

• • •

The four Chase team T-38s waited, poised in a diamond formation at the threshold of the runway, their engines turning and burning, generating a billowing heat haze in their wake. In the lead jet, Jon McBride set the horizontal stabilizer to the takeoff position, thumbed the transmit button and requested takeoff clearance from Edwards tower. Moments later, riding the brakes, he pushed the two throttle levers forward to full military power. With the little Talon straining at the leash, he took his feet off the brakes, pushing the throttles through the detents to light the afterburners. He and Nelson were pushed back as the aircraft leapt forward in unison with her three sister ships. As they reached 135 knots, all four pilots pulled back on the sticks and the formation lifted off as one, tucking up the gear straight after leaving the ground. McBride kept them low to gather speed before climbing away into clear blue skies. Almost immediately, Chase Three and Four peeled off toward the south, where they would wait in a holding pattern as backup, ready to fill the breach if required. McBride and Nelson, followed by Dick Gray and Pete Stanley in Chase Two, continued their climb toward 40,000 feet, where they were to wait, flying circuits, crossing the initial point just south of Edwards's lake bed with each northbound leg.

• • •

"Columbia, this is Houston through Yarragadee. We're standing by."

"Burn was on time and nominal" was all the Shuttle's commander offered Joe Allen in reply. Even by Young's standards it was succinct. But if the spacecraft's ascent had been a concern to the veteran astronaut because of the possibility that something might go wrong requiring him to take manual control of the situation, during the long glide across the Pacific he knew for sure that he'd be flying Columbia on her return. As he concentrated on what lay ahead, his clipped report was understandable.

Alongside him, his pilot remained relaxed.

Joe Allen told them: "You'll like to know that four chase aircraft just launched from Eddy and are coming up looking for you."

"Check Six," Crippen joked, repeating the age-old fighter pilot's instruction to watch your tail for enemy aircraft. "Yeah, we ought to be there in about forty-five minutes."

"That's what they're hoping," Allen replied, before quickly adding, "and we're sure of it." The slip went unnoticed by a buoyant Crippen, apparently unfazed by their imminent return and trying to capture his last memories of what remained of the first flight.

"Joe, whoever said that space was black was not kidding ya. It's really black."

"Roger, you've convinced us."

"Yeah, but you are so easy. It is my great scientific observation that did it to you."

The signal from Yarragadee was lost thirty seconds later.

• • •

From inside the cockpit of Chase One, Jon McBride monitored two different radio channels. He kept the volume on the link to Vandenberg's radar controllers turned up, with a line to Mission Control in Houston down lower in the mix. It was the Western Test Range radars at Vandenberg that would first get a fix on the returning Shuttle before handing over to their counterparts at Edwards, who would then control the rendezvous with Columbia. As he and his wingman flew circles in the air between Edwards and Rocket Ridge—the nickname given to the engine test facility on Leuhman Ridge, a few miles to the east of the dry lake—he passed back a real-time report on the conditions at 40,000 feet. Winds were favorable. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

• • •

Approaching Guam, the astronauts worked their way through the entry switch checklist. With a precision hard won in the simulator, Young and Crippen reached around the banks of switches and buttons that surrounded them, preparing the guidance and navigation system for atmospheric flight, dumping propellants from the forward reaction control system, which, unlike the rear reaction control jets, wasn't going to be required after reentry, and cycling the rudder, speed brakes and elevons for five minutes to prepare the hydraulic system. They pulled the safety pins out of their ejection seats and stowed them. Now armed, the seats were ready to use once they reached a safe speed and height with one pull of the "lil' handle." Then they ran through the entry switch checklist again. One-armed paper hanger was the phrase that went through Crip's mind.

• • •

Two separate clocks counted down in the Mission Control room in Houston. One recorded twelve minutes and twenty-five seconds to entry interface; the other, that there were just forty-five minutes until, from Columbia's current position over the South Pacific, John Young was due to bring her home to Edwards. Over the Flight Control loop during the comms blackout period between Yarragadee and Guam, Flight Director Don Puddy told his Crimson Team what he wanted from them when Columbia arrived. After the nosewheel touched down, he said, they had exactly fifteen seconds to "whoopee," then it was back to work until the vehicle was made safe.

• • •

Flying at 41,000 feet over the Pacific northeast of Hawaii, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory had already conducted a fifteen-minute practice run along Columbia's expected ground track. Following updates from Dryden via the USAF's high-frequency radio net, the big NASA four-jet was now again tracking east by north at 475 knots along a path 16 miles south of where the Shuttle would dive past at hypersonic speed. Just forward of the port wing root, the 36-inch telescope pointed up through an open hatch in the C-141's fuselage. Isolated from the movement and vibration of the aircraft on an air-cushioned bearing, the telescope seemed to be in constant motion. In reality, its restlessness was relative. The telescope's mounting kept it still while the aircraft responded to the ripples and swirls in the air ahead.

• • •

Joe Allen reacquired Columbia over Guam just as Bob Crippen spooled up the last of the three auxiliary power units before reconfiguring the software for entry. The Shuttle was 85 miles high and traveling just shy of twenty-four and a half times the speed of sound.

"Hey, Columbia," Allen signed off, "we are fifty seconds from LOS. Everything looks perfect going over the hill. Nice and easy does it, John. We're all riding with you."

"Roger that."

"Ten seconds until LOS. We'll see you at about Mach 12."

"Bye-bye. Looking forward to it."

And with a crackle, static overwhelmed the radio link.

Columbia and her crew were now on their own. Soon Young and Crippen would be the only two people who knew whether or not they were alive or dead.

His movement restricted by the layers of his Nomex pressure suit, Young reached forward to the coaming above the instrument panel and punched a button to switch the orbiter's body flap from manual to automatic.

## SIXTY-THREE

#### Houston, 1981

Inside Mission Control there was tension you could chew. The Mercator projection world map that had recorded Columbia's orbital track around the globe on big screens in front of the consoles was taken down. In its place went a graphic showing the Shuttle's velocity and ground track across the Pacific toward the West Coast. The former was also included in the flight dynamics data displayed in front of Joe Allen and Rick Hauck at CapCom. But for sixteen minutes, from the point when hot plasma gas engulfed the Shuttle, there was nothing.

Behind the CapCom team, Dick Truly was, by his own admission, sweating bullets, conscious that there had never been a Shuttle model in a hypersonic wind tunnel that was bigger than a toy. And now, he thought, here's the Shuttle itself, half the size of a house. Enormous. He looked around the room. Tense City.

• • •

Sitting alongside Hans Mark at the program office console, his friend Deputy Program Manager Milton Silveira had similar concerns. A veteran NASA engineer, Silveira had once walked beneath the vast flat-iron canopy of Columbia's underside and, struck by the difference in scale with the 12-foot diameter of the Apollo capsule, had had to ask himself: Do you really know what you're doing? He wasn't sure if the answer was yes.

• • •

Rick Hauck welcomed the distraction of a radio call from Jon McBride in Chase One.

"Chase, this is Houston," he responded, "go ahead."

"We're set up in orbit pattern for a nominal two three with a left turn," reported McBride, confirming that he was expecting the orbiter to cross Edwards from the west then double-back to land on Runway 23, which ran toward the southwest.

Hauck told his colleague that Columbia's de-orbit burn and entry trajectory were nominal. He confirmed that he'd call again, whether or not they'd yet heard from the crew, on the assumption that the astronauts' return was going as planned. McBride acknowledged. Then there was silence, except for the background static through his headset. It felt like his heart was beating at triple speed.

• • •

As Young tweaked Columbia's attitude with the reaction control jets, Crippen caught sight of small flashes of light in his peripheral vision through the right-hand window. He figured it had to be light from the little reaction control jets reflecting off the sparse fringes of the atmosphere. It was the first indication that the vacuum of space was beginning to fill with molecules. At around 350,000 feet on a track passing north of Hawaii, Columbia began to experience microdeceleration produced by an almost insignificant dynamic pressure of just a tenth of a pound per square foot; but with her plunge into thicker air, that figure was starting to rise quickly. All being well, they were barely fifteen minutes away from wheels stop at Edwards.

It was still dark outside, and Crip was first to notice the pale pink glow through the sides of the cockpit glass as they fell through 330,000 feet. Both astronauts pulled down and locked the visors on their helmets, sealing their pressure suits, ready to inflate and protect them if burn-through led to a loss of cabin pressure. A deeper orange glow began to build around Columbia's nose.

It was nothing like the inferno produced by the ablative heat shields that protected the capsules that had previously returned Young from space, but it was mesmerizing. A bunch of happy ions, thought the commander.

Next to him, Crip felt as though they were flying down the length of a giant neon tube. But the apparent gentleness of the light show did not properly reflect the ferocity of the conditions outside Columbia's cabin. If they'd turned to look through the windows in the roof of the flight deck, they might have seen the pink-orange glow of the long plasma plume their ship was leaving in her wake.

Instead, Young kept his eyes on the instruments ahead, looking for anything in the position of the flight controls that might signal trouble. For now, the readings were nominal.

"I don't see it anymore," Crip said, as the rising sun ahead of them overpowered the pale colors flowing off Columbia's heat shield. At the same time, the sensors recorded that the dynamic pressure from the atmosphere had risen to 10 pounds per square foot. The computers deactivated the RCS thrusters used to control the Shuttle in roll. Responsibility for that now fell to the big elevons hinged across the trailing edges of the delta wings. Columbia was beginning her transition from spacecraft to aircraft. She was also approaching peak heating. And, unknown to the crew, superheated plasma had begun to snake its way through gaps between the tiles in the starboard main landing gear door.

• • •

The trajectory of a spacecraft's reentry is a tradeoff. By reentering more steeply, greater peak heating is experienced, but for a shorter time. At the same time, the greater rate of deceleration of a steep reentry imposes higher g-loads on the vehicle and its crew. On their return from the moon on Apollo 16, John Young and his crew had been subjected to over 7 gs. The Shuttle, by contrast, wasn't designed to endure that kind of load and so, returning along a shallower reentry corridor, was forced to stay hot for longer. But there were further consequences of coming in shallow in a winged vehicle like Columbia, the first being that as the density of the air increased, the lift generated by those big delta wings meant she might skip back out of the atmosphere like a stone bouncing across a smooth pond. The other was simply that she had to find a way to bleed off her excess speed. Both issues were dealt with through a series of long, sweeping S-turns known as roll reversals. By banking onto her side, the lift generated by Columbia's wings no longer worked to push her higher, but instead to change her direction, pushing her in the opposite direction to where she was pointing her belly. The angle of attack she was using to slow her down remained the same, but there was no longer a danger of skipping and further increasing load on the heat shield.

At 255,000 feet and Mach 24, Columbia stood on her starboard wing as she rolled through 70 degrees into the first of those big sweeping turns. Through the flight deck window, the crew watched the Shuttle's nose begin to track right across the curve of a horizon silhouetted against the blackness of space by the rising sun. But almost immediately, Young had something other than the view from the cockpit to occupy him. The slip indicator beneath the eight-ball display ahead of him pegged all the way over to stops and stayed there. At its limit, the instrument was only able to show a sideslip of 2.5 degrees, but it looked like it was trying to record something more substantial. In fact, Columbia's tail had fishtailed out by 4 degrees. In the simulator, Young had seen high yaw angles at hypersonic speed develop into rolls that had torn the wings off. What was happening now was unexpected and unnerving.

Traveling three times faster than any winged flying machine had ever flown, Columbia was feeling her way. In the thin high-altitude air her attitude was controlled using a combination of the aerodynamic surfaces—the elevons and rudder—and the remaining active thrusters. But she was also traveling over twice as fast as the best available wind tunnel at Ames had been able to replicate. The effect of yaw thrusters firing into the heated, disassociated airflows over the wing and OMS pods had been mispredicted. Now, every time the RCS jets fired in an effort to try to stabilize the oscillation, they were also, at the same time, contributing to it.

Nor was it just the risk of losing control that was of concern as a result of the sideslip. Any more than plus or minus a degree of sideslip had the effect of moving the stagnation point—the area where the heat of reentry is at its greatest—from the orbiter's reinforced carbon-carbon nose to a part of the heat shield less capable of resisting the nearly 3,000°F surface temperatures.

It took over forty seconds for Columbia's flight control system to bring her swinging tail to heel after the trim integrator had intervened to prevent the first skid from exceeding limits beyond which it would have been impossible to recover.

Young and Crippen knew they'd just experienced a serious encounter with a characteristic of the orbiter's high-altitude, high-Mach flight that had, until now, been unknown. "It certainly got our attention," Young would say later. That Columbia was able to cope with what was, in the circumstances, a wild oscillation was testament to the work done by Crip's MOL comrade-in-arms Hank Hartsfield, with teams of Rockwell and NASA engineers, to build a flight control system that was capable of accommodating uncertainty.

And there was still more of that to come.

• • •

After a briefing earlier in the morning, the recovery convoy had driven out to a point two miles south of where Columbia was expected to roll to a halt. Twenty-one vehicles strong and manned by a hundred personnel from Kennedy Space Center, they were the only people allowed within 100 feet of the Shuttle until they could establish she was safe to approach. As well as detectors capable of sniffing out toxic or flammable fumes escaping from the orbiter, they also carried powerful wind machines to disperse any dangerous gases. On orders from Flight Director Don Puddy in Mission Control, the convoy crew began pulling on their self-contained atmospheric protection ensemble—SCAPE—suits, which gave them the appearance of a biohazard emergency response team. Above them, the sky throbbed with the sound of helicopter blades thumping the air. On board the helos were more men in SCAPE suits, their motto "That Others May Live."

They were the USAF's own special operations team; their day job, combat rescue—recovering downed aircrew from ocean, desert and jungle. Many of them had earned their spurs in Vietnam. For months, though, Air Force pararescue jumpers—PJs—had been training with NASA to perform the same role for the Shuttle in the event of a Mode 8 contingency. If Columbia landed hard or overshot the runway, the PJs were on hand to go in and pull Young and Crippen out. Wearing protective clothing in case of leaking hydrazine from the broken bird, teams of PJs had also deployed to Kennedy and the STS-1 diversion strip at White Sands. Assigned to each group were astronauts. In the time they'd worked with the pararescue men they'd developed procedures and checklists peculiar to the demands of the spacecraft. Together they'd rehearsed lifting people strapped to backboards out of the overhead windows of a mock-up orbiter. Riding with the PJs in the four helicopters on standby at Edwards was TFNG John Creighton, on hand to provide any specialist technical advice needed in the event of an emergency.

• • •

As Columbia battled the sideslip, the elevons worked in tandem with the yaw jets. On a display in the center of the instrument panel below the warning light matrix, needles indicating their movement rose and fell. Young and Crippen watched the gain fall as the flight control system eventually got the upper hand. But in the seconds that followed the yaw oscillation another reading caught their eye. The strip indicator recording the angle of the body flap began displaying an unexpectedly high reading.

Following the first roll reversal, the possibility of skipping back out of the atmosphere was past. The wings once again rolled level, Columbia remaining locked tight in a 40-degree angle of attack throughout, using the expanse of her underside as an aerodynamic brake to bleed off over 6,000 mph, dissipating heat as she went, to bring her speed down from Mach 24 to nearer Mach 14. So that she could exert sufficient control in the thin upper atmosphere, the elevons controlling pitch were assisted by the large body flap that, like a hinged barn door sitting horizontally beneath the three main engine rocket bells, provided the extra force required.

The aero-data book predicted that the body flap would deflect to 7 degrees during Columbia's deceleration. Young and Crippen watched the needle on the instrument panel rise through 10 degrees. Then 12 degrees. The limit of the body flap's arc of travel was 21 degrees but the needle kept rising through 15. If its maximum deflection proved not to be enough they wouldn't be able to hold their 40-degree attitude and that, like everything else during reentry, had repercussions for the heat Columbia would have to endure. At 16 degrees the body flap found the angle it needed to hold the orbiter in her attitude, and then stayed there for the next twelve minutes. While a deflection of over twice what was predicted would expose the flap itself to excessive heating, it would remain local. Unless it moved farther, it was anomalous but safe.

But having slipped through the gap in the tiles on the starboard main landing gear door, the hot plasma gas was getting to work on the structure beneath, scorching and charring the filler bar below. Underneath that, the aluminum skin of the door structure began to soften and buckle.

• • •

Standing behind the CapCom console, Joe Engle and Dick Truly looked on anxiously over the shoulders of Allen and Hauck. Engle, in a dark vest over his shirt and tie, stood with his hands on his hips. He looked more relaxed than Truly, to his left, whose hands moved constantly to and from his face.

• • •

In the Shuttle's cockpit, with their speed bleeding off, Young and Crippen could feel themselves being gently pressed into their ejection seats. On the instrument panel, the small dial recording their acceleration in gs began to move clockwise off zero. As they plunged across the Pacific, the astronauts monitored the vehicle's systems, reporting their observations to each other in clipped exchanges that prompted no more than "Roger" or "Verified" in response.

Flying beneath them was the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. The seven-strong crew aboard the KAO had done everything right. As Columbia overhauled them, the IRIS tracker locked on, then passed through the field of view of the acquisition camera. A digital feedback loop should have then allowed the tracker to follow the orbiter while the main telescope was brought to bear, but it didn't happen. In the brief seconds available to the telescope operator sitting at the main console in the C-141's hold, a systems failure prevented the 36-inch telescope from moving to the necessary elevation to capture the speeding Shuttle in its focal plane. It was a bitter disappointment. They knew they were exercising the capabilities of the KAO to near its limits, but that was of no consolation to Bark and his crew as they hauled back to Hickam empty-handed.

• • •

In Mission Control, the room watched anxiously as the clock counted down to the moment when they expected to make contact with Columbia again. Rick Hauck pressed transmit to speak to Jon McBride. "Chase, stand by for the Mach 9, 9,700 feet per second, call."

"Chase One."

"Stand by . . . Mark."

"Chase," Hauck came back a short while later, "disregard the Mach 9 call, we'll do it again shortly."

"Wilco, wilco."

"Stand by for mark on 9,700 feet per second."

• • •

As Columbia descended through 200,000 feet, her speed coming down, the heat generated by her passage dropped to a point where air molecules, allowed time to get out of the way, were no longer torn apart by her bludgeoning progress. Instead of shedding electrons, the air began to flow smoothly around her. No longer in need of the protection offered by the paving of black tiles on her underside, the orbiter unloaded, her nose coming down from the high 40-degree angle of attack to a point where the leading edges of her wings began to slice into the air ahead. She was now gliding.

On the flight deck, no longer veiled by the plasma layer, Young and Crippen caught the last part of the exchange between Hauck and McBride: Stand by for mark on 9,700 feet per second.

"Hello, Houston," John Young interrupted, "Columbia's here!"

At CapCom, Joe Allen sat up with a jolt, a wide smile triggered on his face. "Hello, Columbia, Houston's here, how do you read?"

"Loud and clear," confirmed Young.

He and Crip were diving in toward Edwards at over ten times the speed of sound at an altitude of 188,000 feet.

"Columbia, you've got perfect energy and perfect ground track," Allen told them.

"Roger that."

The Shuttle was shedding around 1,000 mph of velocity and nearly 20,000 feet of altitude every minute. The deceleration arced the two astronauts deep into their ejection seats.

"We got the coastline in sight," Crip reported as he accepted the navigation data from military TACAN (tactical air navigation) beacons on the ground. He'd been measured so far in his reaction to the view from the cockpit, but as they flew down the San Joaquin Valley, north of a pillowy covering of cloud extending south toward LA, he was more aware of their speed than he had been previously. They were really traveling. And he let his exhilaration make itself known. "What a way to come to California!" he exclaimed.

At CapCom, Joe Allen just whooped and grinned in reply.

## SIXTY-FOUR

#### Space Shuttle Columbia, 1981

Prior to the flight, John Young was concerned about whether the computers would have the necessary finesse to fly the S-turns in the lower atmosphere. As Columbia dived to the southeast past Bakersfield, he took manual control and, at nearly five times the speed of sound and 112,000 feet, he eased her into a 40-degree bank to the left. Holding his left hand up in front of him to keep the sun out of his eyes, he applied back pressure to the hand controller and felt the mounting gs push him back into his seat. He never pulled more than 1 g, but after two days of weightlessness it felt like more. And, for the first time, after years of "flying" the simulator, he discovered what it was really like to fly the Shuttle. Now it all felt fluid; real, not academic. He could feel it through the seat of his pants as Columbia responded smoothly to his control inputs, cutting gracefully across her ground track. He watched the clouds going by through the side window and thought to himself, By golly, we really are turning. He was enjoying himself as, coming through 89,000 feet at Mach 2.8, he leveled the wings briefly, then rolled smoothly into a new S-turn to starboard. Young's manually flown roll reversals may have been included in the flight plan to both manage energy and prove the fly-by-wire flight control system, but there was still something exuberant about the way Columbia, on her return from space, was carving through the sky like a swooping fighter jet.

• • •

Ahead, Jon McBride was already committed to the final three-minute circle required to deliver him to the point above Edwards where he would intercept the spacecraft. As he flew the inbound leg to the rendezvous point, he tried to pick out Columbia as she descended through 50,000 feet from the west. He knew not to be distracted by the sight of her. When he first made visual contact, the sun picking her out against the clear blue sky, she was still barreling in at near twice the speed of sound. He had to trust the procedure and the controllers on the ground, not instinct, to make sure he rolled out on time and on target. But there she was, looking beautiful.

He thumbed the Transmit button on the T-38's control column. "Shuttle's in sight," he told Edwards radar.

• • •

When Columbia sliced across Rogers Dry Lake Bed, she was still traveling faster than the speed of sound, but as her speed dropped toward Mach 1, Young began to experience an unexpected buffeting—sometimes an early indicator of an impending stall. He put his hand up again to try to see the angle of attack indicator against the glare, but it was no good. With the sun dazzling him through the cockpit windows there were too many panes of glass, he thought, between him and what he was trying to look at. He pulled up the visor on his pressure suit helmet to get a better look. Alongside him, Crip did the same. But, as the speed dropped toward Mach 0.85, the buffeting was already receding. He asked Crip if he thought it could be something to do with the speed brakes, which, along with the hand controller, was the only tool he had to control the unpowered orbiter's speed and angle of attack.

• • •

On the lake bed below, the crowds cheered as the double crack of a sonic boom echoed like gunfire. Dragged along the boom carpet left in the orbiter's wake, the shock wave signaled that they were about to get what they came for. In unison, heads turned up to catch a first glimpse, binoculars clamped firmly to faces. On the tops of RVs and campers, amateur photographers were perched precariously with their tripods, ready to capture the arrival from space.

• • •

Jon McBride rolled out of his three-minute circle alongside Columbia's starboard wing and dropped the T-38's landing gear so that his slippery little jet could keep station on the big blunt-nosed Shuttle. He pressed the Transmit button: "Chase One coming aboard at 30,000." Sitting behind him, Pinky Nelson was already shooting off film on the Hasselblad, while in the backseat of Chase Two, flanking the Shuttle on the port side, Pete Stanley shot TV footage.

From the flight deck of the orbiter, Crip caught a glimpse of the white dart-shaped jet at their side, before it dropped back out of view. Tally ho! he thought.

Once he was stable in formation off the starboard wing, McBride maneuvered his aircraft back and below the orbiter, careful to avoid vicious, spiraling vortices streaming off the tips of Columbia's wings that had the power to flip the little Talon upside down. While McBride concentrated on keeping out of harm's way, Nelson pointed his camera up at the Shuttle's underside and snapped away, making a record of any damage to the tiles prior to what yet might be added from stones kicked up off the lake bed by the landing gear.

"Looks real good underneath," he reported.

With soft hands, John Young pulled Columbia into a sweeping left turn around the heading alignment circle, an imaginary 20,000-foot-diameter vertical cylinder of air that, if he followed it around an arc of 225 degrees, then leveled the wings, would place him on long finals, 10 miles out from the threshold of the runway. Deprived, in the simulator, of much of the feel of a real aircraft, Young felt he'd always had trouble flying the HAC. This was different, though. The orbiter, he thought, is a joy to fly. She just went wherever he pointed her, then stayed rooted there without complaint or demur until he moved the control stick or rudder pedals.

Next to him, as Young pulled Columbia through the turn, Crip caught a glimpse of the people and cars waiting for them at Edwards. And as they got closer to the ground, he suddenly had a strong impression of how quickly they were bleeding off their remaining speed. Man, he thought, we're slowing fast. They'd lost over 17,000 mph in half an hour, but only now was it beginning to feel as if their ride was slowing down.

Young rolled out onto the glide path for Runway 23, the nose of the orbiter pitched down in a steep 20-degree dive, correcting with a touch of left elevon. Ahead of them, the expanse of the lake bed, smooth, flat and pale against the surrounding scrubland, invited them home.

"Right on the glide slope, approaching centerline, looking great," reported Joe Allen, the telemetry giving him a complete picture of Columbia's approach, despite being hunkered down in Mission Control, 1,400 miles away in Houston.

In much closer proximity, Jon McBride called "Mark fifteen" as he passed through 15,000 feet on the Shuttle's wing. His specially calibrated instruments gave Crip a chance to check the numbers against the orbiter's own. As Young kept Columbia's nose aimed at a point just short of the end of the runway, Crippen reeled off the airspeed and altitude so that his commander didn't have to take his eyes off the picture ahead. Young's pulse during liftoff had led Flight Director Neil Hutchinson to joke that he must have been asleep. Now, though, as he concentrated on the single chance he had to bring in his 85-ton glider, Young's heart began to race, hitting 135 beats per minute, something it hadn't managed in any of his four previous spaceflights.

"Nine thousand, 280 knots," CapCom reported.

"Everything looks real good," confirmed Chase One. "Five thousand, 290."

At 2,800 feet, Crippen called "282 knots." It was 3 knots slower than Young had planned. He was beginning to get the impression that Columbia was a better glider than anyone had expected her to be. We'll tuck in the boards, he thought. By closing the speed brakes that butterflied out on either side of the rudder to see how she flew without the drag they generated, they'd collect the data they needed to test that theory.

Descending through 1,750 feet, Young applied back pressure to the control stick, pulling the orbiter's nose up into the preflare for landing. They were still flying 100 knots faster than they needed to be at the point of touchdown, but by trading that excess speed for height, Young could slow her descent to bring Columbia in on a flatter approach for a smoother, gentler landing. Young held her on a 1.5-degree glide as the runway, outlined in black on the lake floor, raced toward them.

Crippen reached forward toward the switch to arm the landing gear, flipped the cover, and pushed it. Then he did the same with the button to the right to lower the gear. It snapped down, faster than either astronaut had anticipated. A trio of green lights on the instrument panel blinked on to confirm the wheels were locked.

"Gear coming," reported Jon McBride from the cockpit of Chase One. "Gear down."

Young held her stable, nose high, losing speed, while she seemed to float above the length of the long runway, reluctant to meet her racing shadow skimming along the lake bed beneath her. Columbia sailed 1,300 feet past the designated touchdown point, escorted by McBride's T-38. From the flight deck, high above the main gear beneath the wings, Young was grateful for the commentary from Chase One as he felt for the runway below.

"Fifty feet . . . forty . . . thirty . . . twenty . . . ten . . ." McBride reported, his voice crackling with radio static; "five, four, three, two, one, touchdown."

• • •

In Mission Control, as Columbia's main wheels kicked up rooster tails of dust behind them, Flight Director Don Puddy told his team, "Prepare for exhilaration . . ." On the big screen in front of them, the Shuttle continued to speed across the lake bed on her main wheels, her nose held high.

• • •

Crip reckoned that, as they kissed the lake surface sinking at just one foot per second, it was about the smoothest landing he'd ever experienced. John really greased it in, he thought. But his commander's job wasn't quite done. As they raced down the length of the runway, Crippen marked off the speeds while Young maintained a careful balance. Keeping the nose high allowed him to use Columbia's underside as a big aerodynamic brake, slowing her down without straining the brakes. If he left it too long, though, he'd lose the lift he needed to bring the nose down gently and the orbiter would simply slam down hard onto her nose gear. For ten seconds, Young maintained his back pressure on the stick, before relaxing, carefully guiding his ship's nose down toward the desert floor.

Careful not to ignore his own flying as he kept station alongside, McBride looked on. "Nose gear's ten feet," he reported. "Five, four, three . . . touchdown." The hydraulic leg on the nose gear compressed and bounced gently, the twin tires streaming soft, pale dust behind them. "Welcome home, skipper!" McBride finished. And with Columbia safely on the ground, he poured on the coals, pushing both throttle levers forward to accelerate away. As he pulled the little T-38 into a climb, the world's first winged spacecraft rolled to a halt beneath him, shimmering like a mirage in the heat of the high desert.

• • •

"Do I have to take it to the hangar, Joe?" an exuberant Young joked as Columbia slowed to wheels stop, her nose low, at the intersection with Runway 15/33.

"We're going to dust it off first," Allen replied with a smile in his voice.

"This is the world's greatest all-electric flying machine, I'll tell ya that," Young drawled, in a voice that somehow evoked the rich history of flight-testing over the Mojave Desert. "It was super."

## SIXTY-FIVE

#### Houston, 1981

"Wheels stop on the Columbia," confirmed Convoy One, and Don Puddy made good his promise.

"All controllers, you have fifteen seconds for unmitigated jubilation, and then let's get this flight vehicle safe," he said.

And on his command, the tension bottled up and wrung out in Mission Control over the two and a half days since the Shuttle's launch was released in an eruption of cheering and clapping.

An elated and relieved Dick Truly raised his right arm and punched the air.

In the days of Gemini and Apollo it would have been the cue for cigars to be fired up. But while big smokes were pulled out and sat next to the ashtrays built into the consoles, they remained unlit.

"Time's up," said Puddy, shutting it down as quickly as he'd triggered it. But though he put a lid on the most ecstatic celebrations, it was impossible to keep it sealed tight while, for another three-quarters of an hour, responsibility for the spacecraft remained with Houston.

• • •

As Columbia's long speed brakes slowly hinged shut down the height of her vertical fin, Convoy One, leading the twenty-one-vehicle-strong recovery convoy, reported its progress across the lake bed toward her. Rolling in line astern across the haze of the lake bed toward the waiting Shuttle, thick piping suspended from the front of the largest trucks in the convoy lent them the appearance of bull elephants leading their herd across an ethereal African plain, kicking up powder as they went.

• • •

On board Columbia, the joy was no less in evidence than in the Mission Control room.

"I can highly recommend it," Bob Crippen reported back to CapCom on the virtues of spaceflight. The way he was feeling, he said, "if we can bottle it we can make a million!" For all his excitement, though, the spacecraft's pilot stayed in his ejection seat, throwing switches and powering down systems. He shut down the APUs, reached up to the overhead panel to deactivate rocket and thruster circuits, then reconfigured the computer software for the last time.

His measured progress through the postflight checklist was in stark contrast to his crewmate. With adrenaline still coursing through him following the landing, Young was simply unable to stay still. He unstrapped, safed his ejection seat and climbed up and down the ladder that ran between flight deck and the mid-deck below. But even after removing his helmet and gloves, he had no choice but to remain sealed inside his ship. Until Convoy One declared the orbiter safe, there was no place to discharge the euphoria he felt. As Young ran back and forth whooping, Crippen sat in his ejection seat watching in amazement. He'd never seen his commander like this before. No one had.

"I'm looking right out the hatch window and I don't see anybody out there," Young said, his face pressed against the thick layers of glass. "I can make it down there if you'd like me to open the hatch and jump out . . ."

Listening to him from the cockpit, Crip thought his commander might just do that. Usually so deliberate in everything he said and did, it was all now just bubbling out of him.

"You just can't believe what kind of a flying machine this is," Young continued, "it is really something special."

• • •

If the Shuttle's commander was finding it hard to contain his exhilaration, the crowds lining the western edge of the lake bed were unable to. People charged forward; the makeshift fence, an acknowledged boundary until now, was swept aside. On foot, on motorbikes and in cars, people streamed out onto the lake bed to try to get a closer look at Columbia. Overwhelmed, the small security detail called the PJs. The Air Force helicopters, already airborne and ready to go as the Shuttle landed, skimmed across the airfield, dropping down low, using rotor wash to churn up a dust storm that might stem the automotive tide. Strapped into the back of one of the helos along with the Air Force pararescue men, John Creighton could see the chopper pilots were having a ball. Like airborne ranchers herding cattle, the helicopters swooped and shimmied to head off and round up the exuberant motor derby, finally gaining the upper hand before any of the vehicles got closer than a mile to the waiting space plane.

• • •

White and black against the pale earth and tan of her surroundings, Columbia looked almost like a living thing, albeit helpless and dependent; a patient in intensive care—monitored, connected up, tested, purged, pumped and swarmed over by the white SCAPE-suited technicians. None of it was happening fast enough for Young though, standing down on the mid-deck still scanning the view from the porthole for any sign of the ramp stairs being rolled up against the side.

"We're still here, you know," he said. "And if we're going to get this thing operational, this is one of the parts we're going to have to work on a lil' more. You know what I mean?"

"John, I'm pushing as hard as I can," Rick Hauck told him.

"Well, what are you pushing?!" Paying passengers, Crip laughed, wouldn't be kept waiting this long.

"You're not going to have to wait for your luggage when you get off," Hauck encouraged—unless, of course, he pointed out, it had been left in Florida. Or they'd forgotten their baggage tags.

• • •

From the confines of Columbia's cabin, the astronauts imagined Hauck as the last man in Mission Control, left behind after everyone else had packed up and gone home, just to entertain them. The picture was far from accurate, although Hauck might have been one of the last in the control room having to resist joining in the celebrations.

On the central main screen that during the mission had lent the room the feel of a military command bunker, controllers projected a slide linking NASA's latest triumph to her past. Alongside both the Mission Control and STS-1 flight patches a swoosh swept up through the words Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz toward Shuttle. "THE FUTURE IS NOW" it declared. Its appearance prompted another round of clapping and cheering.

Through their own celebrations, those at the back of the room heard a faint tapping coming from behind them. Turning around, they saw Houston director Chris Kraft standing behind the windows of the adjoining VIP room. Pressed up against the glass was a sheet of foolscap paper on which he'd written, in fine-lined ink, We just got infinitely smarter.

• • •

Still up on the flight deck, Bob Crippen felt his ears pop at the moment the hatch was finally pulled open. Below him, John Young, obliged to wait for a flight surgeon to come on board to check him before deplaning, wasn't prepared to hold out for the medic's okay. He walked straight out and, shaking off attempts by the ground crew to help him down the stairs, came bounding down, as eager to get away as a champagne cork from a bottle. Grinning broadly, and carrying his helmet, he seemed more interested in Columbia herself than in the welcoming party at the bottom of the stairs. Stepping down, he immediately cut left and underneath, dwarfed by the size of the spacecraft above him. He looked up at the heat shield, wanting to inspect it for himself. Pacing backward, his gait made awkward by the pear-shaped bulk of his pressure suit, he pointed, exuberantly jabbed his fists, then stopped at the main landing gear, pausing only to kick the tires as if he were a fighter pilot out on the squadron flight line. Only later would the heat damage to the buckled starboard undercarriage door be discovered. For now, there was nothing to spoil his party. Satisfied, he carried on back, turning and looking up at the cluster of rocket bells that towered above him. They'd served him and Crip well.

"I think John's out there doing a postflight," Hauck told Crip, who was still waiting in the cockpit to hand over Columbia to another pair of astronauts before getting out.

We did it! thought Young. We pulled it off! Punching the air with both hands, he returned to the nose of the vehicle, handing his helmet to white-overalled support crew before crouching down in front of the nose gear next to a yellow airfield tow truck and looking back down his ship's centerline. The smile was still fixed to his face as he came back around to the ramp stairs to talk to Director of Flight Operations George Abbey, there to greet him wearing blue NASA overalls and sporting his trademark crewcut. As had generations of pilots before them, they both used their hands to illustrate the conversation about Columbia's performance. There was still no sign of Young's pilot though, so the commander, leaving Abbey on the lake bed, went back up into the orbiter's cabin to check on his progress. Crip was going to be out in a minute.

As he finally pushed himself out of his seat, Crip felt the full weight of his pressure suit for the first time. He climbed down the companionway to the mid-deck and emerged into the midmorning sun. Unsure whether or not to steady himself with the handrails, he climbed down to meet Abbey, who wrapped an arm around his shoulders, shook his hand firmly, and told him "good job."

The astronauts stepped into a van and were driven to a specially erected reception center where a brief postflight medical was followed by three good things: they met their wives, they took their first shower since leaving Kennedy, and they were both handed a cold beer. It would fortify them for the speeches to come.

• • •

Crip's emergence from Columbia had elicited further cheers and clapping from those standing in Mission Control watching the scenes from Runway 23 on big screens. But the Shuttle was now in the care of the Kennedy Space Center team, who would begin the job of preparing her for a return to the Cape. And her next flight. It was new ground for NASA—the future.

As the ceremonies in Edwards drew to a close, Young and Crippen—as passengers this time—boarded the Gulfstream with their wives for a flight back to Houston. And after twenty years as a pilot, and fifteen as an astronaut waiting for his first spaceflight, Crip's logbook collected a unique new entry. It read:

April 12, orbiter Veh 102 54.4, night time 20, Young KSC 39A-RW 23 EDW Lakebed

With the TV coverage drying up, a jubilant Max Faget made his way over to where Hans Mark was sitting with Aaron Cohen and Milt Silveira. In 1969, he'd told a small gathering of hand-picked engineers, "We are going to build the next-generation spacecraft." Now, something like his balsawood and paper model had been made real. Smiling irrepressibly, he told the three men sitting at the program management console: "Let's do it again!"

• • •

Although he had not been in the Mission Control room, Tom Moser had watched Columbia's landing from inside Building 30, which housed it, sharing in the moment with his colleagues. As people began to move around the building again following the astronauts' safe return, able at last to leave the edges of their seats, Moser was stopped by Bob Thompson. The program manager in Houston with overall responsibility for the whole Space Shuttle system—orbiter, external tank and solid rocket boosters—it was Thompson who, after the tiles were discovered to be missing from Columbia's OMS pods, had ordered Moser back to Johnson to lead the team analyzing the risk posed by their loss.

For over two years, Moser had lived and breathed those troublesome silica tiles. Through the difficulties of bonding them to the Shuttle and the discovery of the densification process that had solved it, to the last-minute claim from Langley's John Houbolt that to launch was courting disaster, Moser and his team had kept on working the problem, overcoming each fresh challenge thrown at them. The behind-the-scenes effort from NASA, Rockwell and the Air Force prompted by the discovery that tiles were missing from Columbia's heat shield had merely been the climax of a long-running drama.

Thompson wanted to know the answer to just one question: "Did you really think they were going to work? The tiles?"

• • •

In the joyful scenes broadcast around the world from Edwards, Houston and Kennedy, one location was not mentioned at all. There were no pictures of satellite controllers at Sunnyvale Air Force Station cheering, clapping or punching the air. Throughout the mission the only public evidence of the Blue Cube's involvement was periodic comms checks with Sunnyvale in its capacity as a relay for the Indian Ocean tracking station, and the force of Gene Kranz's refusal to be drawn out on his statement that NASA was using Department of Defense resources and looking at "all available data." But the bluesuiters in Palo Alto had every reason to celebrate the part they played in the mission's success. Their photographs of Columbia allowed NASA and the astronauts to breathe out, to look forward to their spacecraft's safe return without a corrosive undertow of concern that she might not make it. Their contribution did not go unrecognized, however. In 1981, following the successful conclusion of the Space Shuttle's first flight, five Sunnyvale AFS mission controllers were awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for "their crucial support during the Shuttle mission." They would wear the distinctive blue-and-yellow ribbons on their uniforms with pride, unable to tell even their friends and families what they had done to earn them.

## SIXTY-SIX

#### Edwards Air Force Base, 1981

In the euphoria that followed Columbia's arrival at Edwards, John Young made a brief speech to the crowds before returning to Houston. "We're really not too far," he said, "the human race isn't far from going to the stars." That's how it felt. America was on top of the pile again with a machine that might make possible the vision first laid out by Wernher von Braun in Collier's magazine in the fifties. The chief astronaut's bold claim was no more or less than a recognition that the Shuttle had the potential to be the "enabling technology" espoused by von Braun as he'd talked to Hans Mark and the crew of a yacht sailing in San Francisco Bay over a decade earlier; the Shuttle could provide the means through which an orbiting space station might become a waypoint to the moon and beyond.

The first step toward that, though, began with the orbiter's historic second mission. And, ten days after landing at Edwards, in front of reporters at Johnson, Young and Crippen introduced Joe Engle and Dick Truly before handing them a big golden ignition key, purporting to be Columbia's.

"Would you buy a used spacecraft from this gentleman?" Truly joked as he and Engle accepted the key from Young.

Six months later, on November 12, Columbia carried Truly and Eagle into orbit from the Cape. Two days later, after Engle had taken manual control for much of the reentry, they touched down at Edwards. In completing the mission, Engle, following his experience flying the X-15 over Edwards decades earlier, became the first and only man to have flown into space aboard two different winged spacecraft—something no Flying Tiger ever managed.

The STS-2 crew were forced to return three days early because of a fuel cell failure, but for those who'd always maintained that, as a stick-and-rudder pilot, Engle was in a class of his own, the mission was a triumph—especially after Dick Truly announced, as they prepared for their first hypersonic maneuver on the edge of space, "Joe Henry, I can't see a damn thing . . ."

The flight plan had called for Truly to put on a fresh scopolamine patch to ensure he wouldn't suffer from motion sickness during the sequence of twenty-nine planned high-Mach maneuvers. He'd not suffered any space sickness so far and was about to say "screw it," before he put thoughts of rebellion aside. But the drug had got in his eyes and soon he was struggling to make out the numbers on the cue cards. He was squinting and blinking back the pain and tears to try to clear his vision.

This is going to be a pretty interesting entry, thought Engle, as he drew on an intuitive memory of the series of maneuvers he'd been tasked to fly; we got a fuel cell down, we got a broke bird, we got winds coming up at Edwards, we got no sleep, we're thirsty and dehydrated, and now my pilot's gone blind . . .

But as he set up the orbiter to land on Rogers Dry Lake, Engle thought it was one of the greatest feelings he'd ever experienced. Edwards was in his blood and he was unable to resist a nod to past glories by putting in an unscheduled call to base air traffic controllers. "Eddy Tower," he announced over the radio, causing confusion back at Mission Control in Houston, "it's Columbia rolling out on high final. I'll call the gear on the flare."

"Roger, Columbia," came the deadpan reply, "you're cleared number one. Call your gear."

Just like the good old days.

• • •

Columbia's third mission, flown by Commander Jack Lousma and Pilot Gordo Fullerton, followed just four months later, at the end of March 1982. Three months after that, T. K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield blasted off from Kennedy on the Space Shuttle's fourth mission and the last of the series of two-man orbital test flights.

On July 4, after their seven-day mission, Mattingly brought Columbia in to land at Edwards AFB. On the ground the president was waiting to welcome them. In his speech, delivered in front of Enterprise, the leading edge of her wing draped in blue cloth, Ronald Reagan declared that the Shuttle was now "operational." Nor were Columbia and Enterprise the only orbiters at Edwards for the Independence Day celebrations. The dramatic climax to the president's speech was provided by the departure for Kennedy of the recently completed third orbiter.

"Challenger," the president declared, "you're cleared for takeoff." And on cue, the 747 carrier aircraft, with Challenger on her back, began her takeoff roll along the dry lake bed, kicking up a thick wake of dust behind her, before climbing into the sky and past the ceremony. "You know, this has got to beat firecrackers," Reagan grinned, prompting more cheering from the happy, flag-waving crowd.

In his speech, the president drew attention to a payload aboard Columbia that had been sponsored by the Air Force, highlighting the importance of the Shuttle to national security and to developing space as a means of "maintaining the peace." The Shuttle program had been born and kept alive because of the qualified support of the military. Ultimately, it was decided, despite much Air Force opposition, that the Shuttle was to be the sole launch vehicle for the Department of Defense. And with the introduction of Hans Mark's cadre of manned spaceflight engineers, a projected first launch from Vandenberg in 1985, the creation of Air Force Space Command and the construction of a new Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado, and the prospect of an improved KEYHOLE satellite, known variously as advanced KENNEN, CRYSTAL, IKON or KH-12, designed specifically for the orbiter's payload bay, it appeared that enough had been done to bind the Pentagon to the Shuttle program. But the real contribution of the military to the Shuttle program was in the people it provided, none more so than a nearly lost generation of astronauts who had seen the Air Force fail in its ambition to pursue its own manned space program, but who ended up being at the heart of NASA's program.

As well as being central to the development of the vehicle itself, the small group of refugees from the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, so reluctantly taken on by NASA in 1969, formed the core of all the early crew assignments. A MOL veteran was part of the crew of the first eight Shuttle missions. Bob Crippen and Dick Truly were given command of STS-7 and STS-8, respectively. Of the first twenty-four flights, two-thirds included astronauts from the USAF's stillborn manned space program. They flew aboard the first flights of Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis, conducted the first night launch and landing, the first landing at Kennedy Space Center, and the only landing at White Sands. MOL guys commanded crews including the first female and African American astronauts.

In the exchange between NASA and the military, however, it didn't all flow NASA's way. Throughout the Shuttle's development it appeared that it would go on to become as much of a military asset as a civilian one. Things didn't quite work out as had been envisaged. And while the Shuttle was certainly to perform a substantial number of useful military missions, it did not end up providing the Pentagon's only access to space. In fact, it's possible that the Shuttle's main contribution to national security came rather more indirectly, but no less significantly for that.

• • •

In the autumn of 1985, two Soviet cosmonauts, Igor Volk and Rimantas Stankyavichus, sat in the cockpit of a large black-and-white delta-winged airplane at the threshold of the 17,700-foot-long runway at Zhukovsky Flight Test Center near Moscow. Their aircraft, labeled BTS-002—an acronym for "big transport aircraft"—looked a lot like NASA's Space Shuttle, but clustered around the tail were four jet engine nacelles, each containing a 17,000-pound-thrust Lyulka AL-31 turbofan more usually found powering Soviet Air Force Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker jet fighters. After warming up the engines, Volk and Stankyavichus pushed forward four throttle levers and began their takeoff roll. Six thousand feet along the runway, Volk, the new airplane's captain, pulled back gently on the stick and raised her nose. As soon as "Number Two" was airborne, he reduced the back pressure on the stick a touch as his copilot raised the landing gear. The Soviet Union's Space Shuttle program was off the ground.

Unlike NASA's prototype orbiter Enterprise, "Number Two," although similarly unable to reach orbit, took off and climbed under her own power. Without an aircraft that, like the Boeing 747, was capable of carrying the Shuttle on its back, Soviet designers had no choice but to conduct their series of atmospheric flight tests this way. Over the next two and a half years, twenty-four test flights, flown without serious incident, provided sufficient confidence to look forward to Buran's first spaceflight. But the effort came at an enormous cost.

As a launch vehicle for the NRO's spy satellites, the American Space Shuttle was always expected to make a major contribution to national security. More potentially belligerent missions resulting from the president's "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative remained theoretical, but even without that prospect, the Shuttle program had a crippling effect on the country's Cold War opposition: the Soviet Union. By frightening them into launching their own space shuttle program, which they could neither afford nor divine any practical purpose for, it committed them to a project estimated to have cost between fifteen billion and twenty billion rubles. At late-eighties exchange rates that was a figure marching north of $30 billion. It was a sum of money the beleaguered Soviet economy, suffering from years of what was dubbed the Age of Stagnation, could ill afford. In trying to meet a perceived threat from the American Shuttle, the Kremlin was prepared to pay over five times what it had cost NASA to develop their own vehicle, while drawing on the resources of a gross national product that was barely half that of their Western rival. And while the development of the Buran space shuttle did not, in itself, bankrupt the USSR, it was symptomatic of the unsustainable pressure created by Ronald Reagan's massive investment in the US military that certainly did hasten the creaking political system's collapse. Ultimately, Buran, flying unmanned, would complete just two orbits before returning to the runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1988. She never flew again and, following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the whole program was consigned to the scrap heap.

## SIXTY-SEVEN

The promise of the reusable Shuttle was that in providing regular access to space it would also reduce the cost of it. That never happened. The idea that it might be possible to recover the Shuttle from the runway, dust her down, bolt her to another external tank and set of solid rocket boosters, then relaunch her was never realistic. While those who instigated the program had imagined the redundancy and reliability built into the Shuttle might allow launches when, for instance, one of the four computers failed to synch with the others, it never happened. Between each flight, the orbiter was pared back to the bone, refurbished and rebuilt. Even systems and components that had worked perfectly were subjected to further testing that, ironically, could hasten the moment when those parts did need replacement. This of course cost further time and money.

Even accepting that the Shuttle would not be providing "cheap" access to space, NASA had to endure intense pressure on the program throughout its life. It was largely of the agency's own making—a consequence of the promises necessary to get the program approved in the first place. In explicitly setting out to build a workhorse capable of regular launches and to meet the demand from government, commercial and military customers, the Shuttle program managers now had to show that they had done so. The idea that the orbiter was "operational," however, didn't sit comfortably with many at NASA, none more so than their chief astronaut. As far as John Young was concerned, the Shuttle was and remained an experimental vehicle. "Space machinery," he would later be explicit in saying, "is not airline machinery." The point was well illustrated when Young himself returned to Columbia's flight deck as commander of STS-9, the first mission to carry the European Spacelab inside the Shuttle's payload bay.

Four hours before reentry, following a ten-day mission—the longest yet flown by the Shuttle—Young fired the thrusters to reorient the Columbia for reentry. At the moment the jets boomed through the vehicle, one of the primary flight computers failed, its crash signaled by the white cross displayed on the monitor ahead of him. Six minutes later, the next firing of the thrusters triggered the failure of a second computer. This was enough to get Young rattled. His legs trembling, he could only let Columbia drift in space while he and his pilot, Brewster Shaw, ran through checklists, reconfiguring and rebooting the computers in an effort to recover them. Their return to Earth seemed impossible until the astronauts, after eight hours of troubleshooting, were eventually able to load the reentry software onto two of the computers and fire the maneuvering rockets for a delayed reorbit burn. But even after this partial success, Young was conscious that they'd been just a decision away—had he chosen to activate the backup flight software—from losing flight control of Columbia. And that, he thought with characteristic understatement, would have been very bad for us.

Nor was the drama of STS-9 quite over yet. Four and a half minutes from touchdown on the dry lake, while flying a revised approach into Edwards from the north, the temperature in one of the auxiliary power units rose sharply. Unknown to the crew, a hydrazine leak, exposed to higher levels of oxygen as they descended through 40,000 feet, had ignited. As Young touched down on Runway 17, two of the three APUs that powered the orbiter's flight controls were on fire. Then, as the nosewheel came down heavily as a result of a late change to the flight control software, one of the main computers failed again. Within twenty-five minutes of landing, the two burning APUs had been destroyed by fire.

The headline news around STS-9, Young's sixth and final spaceflight, was Spacelab's successful debut. The failure of the computers and APU fires—both invisible to television viewers—went largely unnoticed by the public. They had been told the Shuttle was now operational and, without conspicuous drama or catastrophe, they had no reason to believe otherwise. Where was the interest in job done?

The Shuttle's success in doing what she was designed to do was the very thing that, in the end, inured the public to her extraordinary and unique capabilities. It simply wasn't possible for each flight to be special. And so the Space Shuttle, the high-water mark of the US aerospace industry—the last American flying machine built to fly higher and faster than everything that had come before—began to attract less attention. And she became familiar quickly. As early as the fifth mission—the first "operational" mission—Pilot Bob Overmyer, the fifth MOL veteran to fly, was asked how he felt about being a space trucker. He could live with that, he told the interviewer. So too, it turned out, could Chuck Yeager. Having spent twenty years making plain his view that astronauts were riding rather than flying their spacecraft, he'd changed his tune now that graduates of his own Edwards AFB Aerospace Research Pilot School had a winged space plane to fly. When asked what he made of Overmyer's reply, the legendary test pilot said, with a touch of desire in his voice, "To be called a Space Shuttle pilot, man—to be called a trucker—I'd be called anything to fly it . . ."

But the question he'd been asked got to the heart of it. If successful, the Shuttle program became one of utility rather than adventure. Instead of exploring and striking out in new directions and discovering new worlds, the Shuttle—the most remarkable flying machine ever built—was no more than a tool; a means to an end. And, from inside NASA's Washington HQ, Hans Mark campaigned for three years to make sure that that end was the construction of a space station.

In January 1985, his effort appeared to have succeeded. Sitting in the gallery of the Capitol Building, a short walk from the NASA office block, the agency's deputy administrator listened as the president delivered his State of the Union address, anticipating the moment when Reagan would announce news of his decision.

After opening the speech with news of the country's economic growth, Reagan moved on to what he described as "America's new frontier." In words designed to echo the resolve and optimism of Jack Kennedy's decision to shoot for the moon, Reagan announced: "We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade."

The space station was to be named Freedom, and the Shuttle, as first laid out by Nixon's 1969 Space Task Group, would be both the means of its construction and its connection with Earth on completion.

Ultimately, plans to build Freedom were to falter before eventually evolving into the International Space Station following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Until then, the orbiter itself, the last great achievement of NASA's Apollo generation, would serve as a means through which we learned to live and work in space. With each new mission, the growing Shuttle fleet—three-strong with the addition of Discovery in the summer of 1984, and joined by Atlantis the following year—grew into the role, expanding the range of jobs they could perform, from, with Spacelab on board, mini space station through satellite launch, repair and retrieval to early on-orbit construction. The promise of launching probes to distant planets and the space station lay ahead.

• • •

It would be too late for Max Faget. He could see trouble ahead for the Freedom program in any case. At the age of sixty, soon after Engle and Truly brought the second Shuttle mission to a successful conclusion, Houston's little Cajun engineering dynamo decided to call it a day. The truth was that Faget, who'd first resisted then embraced the Shuttle zealously, felt burned out. He'd lived through it all. Part of the original NACA Space Task Group that had left Langley and set up home in Houston, his story was that of the American manned space program, from Mercury through to the Shuttle. But with Columbia's successful first flight he saw his world was changing. The adventure was over.

You could see, he thought, Camelot fading into the fog.

# EPILOGUE

# Brought Down
A lot of folks said the Shuttle was a lemon. But my mom said, "It's not a lemon, it's a peach."

—John Young
On May 16, 1985, Bob Crippen wrote to aspiring artist Tim Gagnon with his thoughts on the design of a patch for his next mission in command of the Shuttle. Since the early seventies, Crip had been encouraging the young artist in his ambition to see his work reach space. For his upcoming flight, Crip provided Gagnon with a few guidelines: "I'm partial to round patches, but other shapes are okay if there are a minimum of protuberances. Also, simple is good. Too much detail in a patch doesn't work. As for colors, I'm partial to red, white and blue, but that is not a constraint. However, the maximum of colors should be about ten. It would be desirable, if the first launch from Vandenberg was symbolized somehow. One idea is we commonly use the term V1 when talking about that flight. In addition, a polar orbit indicator would be appropriate. Crew names are Crippen, Gardner, Mullane, Gardner, and Ross. We will add any Payload Specialist(s) names at the bottom."

Five months later, Crippen, who throughout his time as an astronaut had remained a serving naval officer, was introduced to the press, alongside the rest of his crew, in the brand-new Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF) at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Only one of them was not wearing military uniform, and he was hardly less military than the rest of them. Pete Aldridge, flying with the crew as a Department of Defense payload specialist, was Hans Mark's successor as under secretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office. The last member of the crew was Payload Specialist Brett Watterson, the first of Mark's cadre of Air Force manned spaceflight engineers to be assigned a spaceflight. The mission aboard the third orbiter in the fleet, Discovery, was designated STS-62A under a new numbering system in which "6" denoted the year of launch, "2" a West Coast launch, and "A" that it was the first mission, from that site, of the year. And it was to be the most conspicuously military manned spaceflight yet launched by the United States—a tentative embrace of the Space Shuttle by the Air Force.

In early 1985, in preparation for the mission, the orbiter prototype Enterprise had been flown to Vandenberg on the back of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for a series of tests to prove the facilities at the USAF's new spaceport were ready.

For Crippen, it marked a return to Slick Six, the launch complex first developed in support of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. As well as the new OPF, the old MOL Launch Control Center was renovated and fitted with the same state-of-the-art computer system used at Kennedy. The MOL launch mount and flame trench were adapted to accommodate the different configuration of the Shuttle, while the railway line that ran through the base now, rather than being an unwelcome complication, came into its own as a means of delivering the solid rocket booster segments from Thiokol in Utah. Building 8505, the old MOL crew quarters, was refurbished, ready once again to become home to Bob Crippen and his fellow military spacemen.

Crip felt his career as an astronaut had come full circle. At first the Air Force had resisted NASA's selection of a naval aviator as commander on what they regarded as a bluesuit mission, but Crip himself lobbied hard for it. And, as the experienced commander of three Shuttle missions since STS-1 and a veteran of the Air Force's own canceled manned space program, the case for assigning him the mission was too strong. Having won command of the flight, though, Crip never then got the chance to wear the STS-62A mission patch he'd briefed so carefully.

• • •

In January 1986, Crip led a flight of three T-38s down to Albuquerque, New Mexico. From there, the STS-62A crew were flown in a light aircraft to the Los Alamos Laboratories, where they were being given instruction on one of their two mission payloads, an experiment code-named CIRRIS, designed to collect data on levels of background radiation in space, which might then be used to inform the development of future military hardware.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the crew took time out from the classroom to watch the launch of Challenger, the second orbiter, from Kennedy Space Center. For less than thirty seconds they watched Challenger's roaring ascent before, with Shuttle launches beginning to seem routine, coverage broke off in favor of more standard morning programming.

"Let's see if they're covering it on one of the other channels," someone said, and Crip spun the dial in search of an alternative station. No joy. As the crew prepared to leave for work, Dale Gardner suggested, "Well, let's try it one more time" and turned on the TV set again. As the screen blinked on, dreadful images took shape in front of them. From the back of the room, Pete Aldridge saw violent tendrils of white smoke corkscrewing away from a massive, boiling explosion. Jesus, he thought. Ahead of him, sitting closer to the screen, he saw Bob Crippen's head drop. Any uncertainty about what they'd just witnessed was swept aside by his commander's obvious and instant devastation. Challenger was lost, and with her the lives of her seven-strong crew.

While each member of the STS-62A crew tried to process what had happened, Aldridge called the Air Force. "I need a flight," he told them. "We need seats for seven people." He knew the astronauts had to return to Houston immediately. There were the T-38s waiting at Albuquerque, but he didn't think Crippen was in the right frame of mind to be piloting an airplane.

"No," Crip told him, "I'm going to fly. I need to think a bit."

He'd lost a friend—Dick Scobee, Challenger's commander, had flown as pilot on Crip's third Shuttle mission. But as a senior member of the Astronaut Office, Crip was close to all seven members of the crew. Alongside them, he also mourned an eighth loss: the orbiter herself. For over a decade he'd invested everything in bringing the Space Shuttle to life. Following his historic first flight with John Young, Crip had been given command of Challenger's second flight. He was as familiar with her inside and out, her qualities and foibles, as anyone alive, and now she had been smashed to smithereens in an instant, the cause of the destruction unknown. That beautiful machine, he thought as he replayed the indelible image of the explosion. What the heck happened to her?

There was no radio chatter between the three T-38s as Crippen led the formation home to Ellington, nor between Crip and Mike Mullane in the backseat, but with each change of frequency as they flew cross-country back to Houston, air traffic controllers offered "NASA Flight" their condolences.

By nightfall, George Abbey had already asked Crip to act as deputy head of the review board investigating the loss of Challenger and her crew of seven. The next day, he once again strapped himself into the cockpit of a T-38 to fly to Kennedy, where he got to work on the cause of the accident, the recovery of the vehicle, and of the crew's remains, a task led by another MOL veteran, Bob Overmyer.

• • •

Had Pete Aldridge flown aboard STS-62A, Crippen thought, he'd have seen what the Shuttle was capable of. She'd have convinced him. He'd have become, like his predecessor Hans Mark, a supporter. But with the loss of Challenger, the arranged marriage between NASA and the Air Force was on the rocks before it was properly consummated. DOD had always had reservations about putting all their eggs in the Shuttle basket. From within NASA, as deputy administrator, Mark had continued driving toward that goal but, left with a fleet reduced to just three vehicles, Columbia, Discovery and Atlantis, it became impossible to sustain the flight rates and availability required by the Air Force launch schedule. And so, after DOD had spent at least $2.8 billion on redeveloping Slick Six—including $79.5 million on a windscreen to shield the Shuttle from the strong winter gusts that whistled through the surrounding hills—Pete Aldridge took the decision to pull the plug on Vandenberg. While maintaining that a West Coast spaceport remained, he said, "essential," he reduced the site to operational caretaker status. In theory, the facility could be reactivated, but it never happened. No Shuttle would ever launch from Vandenberg. And it remained the biggest regret of Bob Crippen's career that he never had the opportunity to do so.

• • •

Within weeks of the tragedy, Dick Truly was brought back to NASA as associate administrator for manned spaceflight, chairing an agency task force set up to work alongside the Rogers Commission investigating the disaster. While they looked into the cause of the failure of the solid rocket boosters that had led to the loss of Challenger, Truly assigned Bob Crippen the job of leading an internal review of the Shuttle program's management structure. When Crip submitted his report two months later, in August 1986, recommending that there be a NASA Shuttle program deputy director, based at Kennedy, with responsibility for Shuttle operations, Truly responded with a challenge.

"Crip," he told his friend, "if you really believe that, you'll hang up your flying boots and come take that position."

He did. And, after assuming his new role at the Cape, Bob Crippen never flew the orbiter again. Instead, he and Truly led the effort to get the vehicle itself airborne once more.

• • •

Alongside modifications to the solid rocket boosters, thousands of other changes, deemed critical, were made post-Challenger to try to ensure the Shuttle's safety. After STS-26, dubbed the "Return to Flight," launched in 1988 with Rick Hauck in command, the Shuttle fleet flew for another fifteen years without major incident. Then, in 2003, the appearance that NASA had succeeded in making manned spaceflight routine was shattered. And this time it was Columbia, the ship in which Young and Crippen had so spectacularly ushered in the Shuttle era, that was lost.

Eighty-two seconds after launching from Pad 39A, Columbia was traveling at nearly two and a half times the speed of sound. As she climbed through 66,000 feet, a chunk of insulating foam tore away from the external tank and punched a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of her port wing. It was a fatal blow, but one which would wait to reveal itself. The only conceivable hope for the astronauts was that it might be discovered. The tragedy was that it so nearly was.

As in 1981, there had been concern, following the launch, about the integrity of the heat shield. But twenty-two years after the Shuttle's maiden flight, the Kranz Doctrine appeared to be in danger of being forgotten. While those technicians responsible for examining footage of the Shuttle launch were concerned about possibly serious damage as a result of a foam strike to the wing, the prevailing view among the program's management was that this was a familiar problem rather than an event that demanded an exceptional response. A request made to the Air Force for high-resolution photographs of Columbia on orbit was rescinded and further efforts to enlist DOD help were dead-ended through failed bureaucracy. With that failure, Columbia and her crew were condemned.

On reentry, hot plasma gas roared in through the hole in the leading edge and whipped around the aluminum compartments within the wing, burning and melting whatever was in its path. Inside Mission Control, telemetry downlinked from Columbia began to record a series of anomalous readings that couldn't be attributed to any single failure: first a higher than usual strain on the wing spar, then "off-scale low" readings from hydraulic sensors. At 1:59:15 p.m. GMT, fifteen minutes after the orbiter's entry interface at 400,000 feet over the Pacific, tire pressure in the port-side main landing gear was lost.

As the air thickened through 200,000 feet, the integrity of the port wing began to fail, its structure devoured from inside as if by an aggressive cancer. With greater aerodynamic pressure pressing against the unsupported skin of the lower wing, its carefully calculated curve buckled and collapsed, creating asymmetric levels of lift between port and starboard that tried to flip her onto her back. At the same time, the increased aerodynamic drag from the ruined wing pulled the nose hard to the left. Columbia's computers commanded the RCS thrusters in the tail to fire in a last-ditch effort to try to hold her stable, but she was overwhelmed, first rolling onto her back, then tumbling uncontrollably through the high Texas skies.

• • •

Columbia had struggled mightily to save herself and her crew. Labeled as fragile, NASA's fleet of orbiters turned out to be anything but. In thirty years of operations, not one of them failed her astronauts. They proved themselves capable of absorbing, containing and enduring whatever faults developed in their own systems. Instead, on the two occasions when an orbiter was lost, she fell victim to an assault: Challenger to a blowtorch of burning rocket fuel that destroyed the stack to which she was attached; Columbia to the percussive attack of a sharp-edged lump of molded foam that might as well have been a sledgehammer. Subjected to such precisely applied violence, neither machine stood a chance.

• • •

Six days after the loss of Columbia, Bob Crippen, now retired, returned to the Kennedy Space Center, where, standing in front of the workforce, gathered together on the facility's Shuttle runway, he delivered a eulogy to the lost spacecraft and her crew. Clearly emotional, occasionally pausing to control his voice, Crip spoke slowly, in a rich, cracked baritone:

Columbia was a fine ship. She was named after Robert Gray's exploration ship that sailed out of the Boston harbor in the eighteenth century. Columbia and the other orbiters were all named after great explorer ships, for that is their mission: to explore the unknown. Columbia was hardly a thing of beauty, except for those of us who loved and cared for her. She was often badmouthed for being a little heavy round the rear end. But many of us can relate to that. Many said she was old and past her prime. Still she had only lived barely a quarter of her design life. In years, she was only twenty-two. Columbia had a great many missions ahead of her. She, along with the crew, had her life snuffed out in her prime.

I was here at the Shuttle runway in March of 1978 [sic] when Columbia first arrived at Kennedy Space Center. She came in on the back of a seven-forty-seven escorted by Deke Slayton in a T-38. Readied for launch by the loving care of the Kennedy team—the same care they've given to all twenty-eight of her flights. She was ready to fly in April of 1981. John Young and I were privileged to take her on that maiden flight. She performed magnificently. "The world's greatest electric flying machine" was what John described her as. Because she was a little heavy, she didn't get some of the more glamorous missions, but she was our leader at doing science on orbit, just as she was doing with this crew in Spacelab on STS-107; microgravity scientific exploration was her bag. She carried Spacelab numerous times, studying material processing and life sciences, all of which were focused at giving us a better life here on Earth. Columbia also helped us better understand the heavens and learn about the origins of the universe with several missions including Astro, also by deploying the most advanced X-ray observatory ever built, the Chandra Space Telescope, and by her very recent Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.

Just as her crew has, Columbia has left us quite a legacy. There's heavy grief in our hearts, which will diminish with time, but it will never go away. And we'll never forget.

Hail Rick, Willy, KC, Mike, Laurel, Dave and Ilan.

Hail Columbia.

Space cowboy. A young Bob Crippen on his first horse, Sugar, beside the house in Porter, Texas, where he grew up.

In the early 1950s Collier's magazine laid out German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun's vision for space, serving as an inspiration for many who later became part of the space program.

Last of the gunfighters. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Dick Truly flew Vought F-8 Crusaders from the USS Enterprise, the Navy's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

With dreams of becoming a test pilot, Bob Crippen earned his wings of gold as a naval aviator before flying A-4 Skyhawks off the deck of the USS Independence during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Crip is kneeling third from the right.

Bob Crippen trained as a test pilot at Chuck Yeager's Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1965. One of his instructors was Dick Truly. Crip is in the back row, far right.

John Young trained at the Navy's test pilot school at Patuxent River in 1959. Three years later he was a project pilot evaluating the fleet's new interceptor, the F-4H-1 Phantom II.

In 1962 Young took part in Project HIGH JUMP, establishing a number of time-to-climb world records in a stripped-down, lightweight Phantom. He was sure his involvement secured his selection as an astronaut.

John Young (left) and Gus Grissom in the Gemini III capsule before making the spacecraft's first manned flight in 1965.

Air Force test pilot Joe Engle in the cockpit of the North American X-15, an experimental rocket plane which he was to fly into suborbital space in 1965.

Launched from beneath the wing of a B-52 mothership, the X-15 reached speeds of Mach 6.7 and heights of over 67 miles.

In the late fifties and early sixties the USAF pursued plans for a small, winged spaceplane called the X-20 Dyna-Soar. A mock-up was built.

Project LUNEX. Dyna-Soar wasn't the summit of the Air Force's ambitions in space. A 1961 USAF plan to put men on the moon included this diagram of their proposed spacecraft and lander.

MOL. Unconvinced by USAF arguments for Dyna-Soar, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara canceled it in 1963. In its place he approved the development of a military space station, labeled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.

Manned Orbiting Laboratory mission patch.

Dick Truly was assigned to the MOL program in 1965. He's pictured here with a scale model of the space station, capped with the Gemini capsule the crews were to use to travel to and from orbit.

The MOL pilots in 1966. Back row, left to right: James Taylor, Francis Neubeck, Dick Lawyer, Al Crews, "Mac" Macleay, Jack Finley, Dick Truly. Front row, left to right: Bob Crippen, Bob Overmyer, "Bo" Bobko, Gordon Fullerton, Hank Hartsfield.

A previously unseen picture from 1966 of Dick Truly, Mike Adams and Jack Finley at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The three had been training to use the tunnel linking their Gemini-B capsule to the MOL space station in simulated zero-g conditions aboard an Air Force KC-135 christened "Weightless Wonder."

A USAF Titan IIIC rocket launching from Kennedy Space Center on November 3, 1966. Carrying a facsimile of the MOL space station below a Gemini-B capsule used to test the spacecraft's modified heat shield, it was the only occasion on which MOL hardware was ever flown.

A KH-9 HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite nears completion in a clean room at Lockheed's facility in Sunnyvale, California. The four domes are reentry buckets used for film recovery.

After being dropped from the KH-9, the reentry buckets floated toward the Pacific beneath parachutes before being snatched from midair by the specially modified C-130s of the USAF's 6593d Test Squadron flying out of Hawaii.

The MOL guys. The seven refugees of the canceled Air Force space station program joined NASA in 1969. From left to right: "Bo" Bobko, Gordon Fullerton, Hank Hartsfield, Bob Crippen, Don Peterson, Dick Truly and Bob Overmyer.

Apollo 16 Commander John Young gives a "big ol' Navy salute" while leaping from the surface of the moon in April 1972. Young was on the moon when Mission Control told him the Space Shuttle program had been approved.

NASA engineer and spacecraft designer Max Faget demonstrates the principle of the Space Shuttle using a balsawood model that he'd built in his garage.

NASA's original plan was to launch a straight-winged orbiter from the back of a fully reusable winged booster. In this picture the design—christened DC-3 by Max Faget—is tested in the wind tunnel.

As the design evolved—influenced by the needs of the Air Force—a delta-winged orbiter emerged. As seen here, plans to use either a reusable winged booster or the first stage of a Saturn V moon rocket were both considered.

January 5, 1972. Richard Nixon and NASA Administrator James Fletcher discuss a more familiar-looking Shuttle configuration on the day the president announced the decision to proceed with the program.

Dr. Hans Mark during his time as Director of NASA's Ames Research Center. Once skeptical about the value of manned spaceflight, he became one of the Shuttle program's most committed supporters.

Ceramic tiles designed for the Shuttle's heat shield were tested inside the arc jet facilities at Ames used to simulate the hot-gas flow of reentry.

One of the Shuttle's giant solid rocket boosters blasts out nearly three million pounds of thrust on the test stand.

A masterpiece of engineering. An RS-25 Space Shuttle main engine undergoing testing. Much of the engine's early development was plagued by explosions, fires and violent disintegrations.

A bearded Bob Crippen emerges from the Skylab Medical Experiments Altitude Test in 1972—fifty-six days sealed inside a pressure chamber designed to simulate life on board Skylab, America's first space station launched the following year.

John Young in his office at Johnson Space Center, Houston. In 1974, following the retirement of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, Young became head of the Astronaut Office.

To boldly go. After a campaign by Star Trek fans to have the prototype Shuttle named Enterprise, Spock, Sulu, Bones and Scotty all attended the rollout ceremony but chose to wear casual clothes rather than Starfleet uniforms.

Without jet engines of its own, the Shuttle had to be ferried from landing site to launch site by other means. One ambitious, stillborn proposal was for the enormous Virtus carrier aircraft, built from two B-52 fuselages.

In the end inspiration came from the Short-Mayo Composite, a British idea from the 1930s that launched one aircraft in midair from the back of another.

The world's largest aircraft, Lockheed's C-5 Galaxy, was considered as a potential Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA.

A downturn in commercial aviation allowed NASA to acquire a Boeing 747 cheaply. Their ex–American Airlines jumbo is seen here prior to its conversion into its new role as a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

To test the principle, a remote-controlled scale model of the 747/Space Shuttle was built and flown.

To train astronauts to land the Shuttle, two Gulfstream business jets were modified—a process that included the two rectangular fins below the fuselage—to replicate the distinctive flying characteristics of the Shuttle.

The 1977 Approach and Landing Test Program would see Enterprise fly, launched from the back of the SCA, for the first time. Astronauts Fred Haise, Gordon Fullerton, Joe Engle and Dick Truly were chosen as crew.

As the SCA dives away, Enterprise, streaming vortices from the wingtips, flies free for the first time with Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton at the controls.

The Approach and Landing Test mission patch.

Enterprise banks over the Mojave Desert. The fiberglass shroud over the rocket engines at the back was to make her more aerodynamic.

Fred Haise guides her in for her first landing on Rogers Dry Lake Bed at Edwards Air Force Base.

Job done. Haise, Fullerton and Enterprise after their successful first flight.

Enterprise enjoys an airborne salute from the 747 carrier aircraft and one of the fleet of NASA T-38 jets that had accompanied the first flight as chase planes.

ALT-4. Joe Engle and Dick Truly were in the cockpit for the fourth flight, and the first without the shroud. Truly couldn't help but be surprised at the steepness of the Shuttle's descent.

The fifth and final ALT test flight exposed dangerous problems with the Shuttle's fly-by-wire control system when Enterprise began to roll and porpoise wildly as Fred Haise tried to bring her in to land.

NASA introduces the crews for the first four Space Shuttle orbital test flights. John Young and Bob Crippen, far right, were named as the primary crew for the STS-1, with Joe Engle and Dick Truly as reserve.

The astronauts spent endless hours in the simulators, training to be ready for any contingency. Here Fred Haise, Apollo 13 mission patch to the fore, sits in the commander's seat.

Haise and his pilot, Jack Lousma, trained for a Buck Rogers mission planned to return NASA's vacant Skylab space station to a safe orbit, but delays to the Shuttle program saw it scrubbed. Skylab was lost when she burned up on reentry in 1979.

"No stone unturned." While the astronauts practiced abort procedures in the sims, NASA used wind tunnels to test whether in an emergency it might be possible to separate the orbiter from the stack at hypersonic speeds while the SRBs were still burning. They thought not.

Showstopper. Columbia, the first Shuttle built for spaceflight, arrives at Kennedy Space Center on the back of the SCA in 1979. As can be seen in the picture, the tiles making up the heat shield were falling off, a problem which, if not fixed, would ground the Shuttle.

Once it was believed a solution to the tile-bonding problem had been found, it had to be tested. To do this, NASA used the new process to fix tiles to F-104 and F-15 jet fighters and then flew them at high speed.

With the fix tried, tested and proven, most of the tiles making up Columbia's heat shield had to be removed, then reattached.

NASA's nervousness about the robustness of the Shuttle's heat shield led to the development of an on-orbit tile repair kit, shown here being tested by Dick Truly.

The eighty-five ton Columbia hangs from the ceiling of the Kennedy Space Center's vast Vehicle Assembly Building prior to being mated to the external tank and SRBs.

Max speed: one mile per hour. The Space Shuttle stack begins its 3½-mile journey from the VAB to Pad 39A on the back of an eight-track, 3,000-ton crawler-transporter.

STS-1 Mission patch.

Ready to go. Columbia sits waiting on Pad 39A.

Mission Commander John Young in the T-38 jet he flew from Houston to KSC for the launch.

Mission planning. After a five-mile run, Pilot Bob Crippen sits down with Young to study the STS-1 flight plan.

"Any landing you can walk away from . . ." Bob Crippen steps out at KSC after another long session shooting practice approaches in Shuttle Training Aircraft in the days prior to launch.

Looking like test subjects in the lab, Bob Crippen and John Young suit up for the mission.

"When thoughts turn inward . . ." A watercolor by artist Henry Casselli captures Columbia's contemplative commander prior to the flight.

A very composed-looking STS-1 crew walk out to the "Astrovan" for the drive to the pad. Walking behind Crip at the left of the picture is Director of Flight Operations George Abbey.

Young and Crippen as they would have appeared before the launch—although the smaller US flags on their shoulders show this was a picture taken during an earlier simulation.

The T-38s of Jon McBride's chase team had the best view in the house of the Shuttle's first launch.

Liftoff. Nine years after President Nixon announced the program to the nation, at 7:03 EST on April 12, 1981—the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight—Columbia took to the air.

Into the black. Riding nearly seven million pounds of thrust, Columbia breaks the earthly bonds.

SRB sep. Fuel spent and their job done, the two reusable solid rocket boosters are ejected, leaving Columbia under the power of the three SSME engines in her tail. She's ascending past 150,000 feet and accelerating past Mach 4.5.

ET sep. The empty, discarded external tank, blackened by heat from Columbia's engines and friction, looks like it's been through a war.

After reaching orbit, Crippen and Young unstrapped, floated back from their ejection seats to the aft crew station and opened the payload bay doors.

The view aft. Obvious on the starboard pod—left of the picture—are the tiles missing from the heat shield. At the time the reasons for their loss were unclear. Whether it signaled tile loss from more critical areas was unknown.

Flight Director Gene Kranz, JSC Director Chris Kraft and Engineering Director Max Faget study the STS-1 telemetry inside Mission Control.

Dr. Hans Mark, ex-director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in Mission Control during STS-1. Mark, aware of the capabilities of NRO satellites, recommended that NASA ask the Department of Defense for help.

Brigadier General William "Ted" Twinting, USAF, sits at the DoD console in Mission Control studying TV footage downlinked from Columbia. Note the red phone to his left.

The Blue Cube, the Air Force Satellite Control Facility in Sunnyvale, California, from where, inside building 1003, Air Force personnel maneuvered a KH-11 KENNAN spy satellite to take pictures of Columbia on orbit.

The Hubble Space Telescope is essentially a digital reconnaissance satellite pointing, instead of at Earth, toward the heavens. Hubble provided an indication of the appearance of the KH-11 KENNAN spy satellite.

Cape Cod pictured from Columbia during STS-1. The first minute-and-a-half-long window in which the KH-11 might capture the Shuttle took place over the Atlantic about 150 miles to the south.

Joe Engle and Dick Truly (at the right of the picture) sit behind the CapCom console. When he first saw the missing tiles, Truly knew that if more tiles were missing, the STS-1 crew could be in real trouble.

As hot as the surface of the sun. The temperature of the pressure wave created by Columbia's reentry could reach more than 6,000°F.

Shooting star. This 2011 picture of Columbia's sistership Atlantis reentering captures the blistering heat generated by plunging into Earth's atmosphere at 17,500 mph.

The Kuiper Airborne Observatory used the infrared telescope behind the open door on the forward fuselage to observe the heavens. In 1981 it launched from Hawaii to capture images of the reentering Shuttle.

Tallyho! Chase team leader Jon McBride keeps station on Columbia's starboard wing as she glides toward Edwards. In the backseat, fellow astronaut "Pinky" Nelson took photographs.

Final approach. Columbia over Rogers Dry Lake Bed, pictured from Chase One.

Three greens. With Columbia's gear locked down, John Young flares for landing.

Using the air brakes on the vertical stabilizer to slow her, Columbia rolls to a stop on Runway 23. Moments later her ecstatic commander, John Young, claimed, "This is the world's greatest all-electric flying machine, I'll tell ya that!"

A spacecraft has landed on Earth. The view from inside Columbia on landing could hardly have looked more like a scene from a science fiction movie.

John Young and Bob Crippen leave Columbia to grab a shower and a beer before addressing the waiting crowds.

Postflight. Columbia in repose. Half spacecraft, half aircraft. The yellow tractor wouldn't look out of place at any airport. The umbilicals attached like IVs speak of something more special.

Mission accomplished. With her return to Edwards Columbia wrote the last chapter of a story that began with Chuck Yeager's first supersonic flight in 1947.

After the success of STS-1 and subsequent flights, Bob Crippen, Dick Truly and the rest of the MOL veterans looked forward to a return to Vandenberg AFB in California and launching the Shuttle into polar orbits on DoD missions. It wasn't to be.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There's a long list of people to thank. As ever, the first challenge was just trying to make contact with the people I needed to talk to. When I began to contemplate writing about the inaugural flight of the Space Shuttle—another subject that first captured my imagination as a boy who'd been born too late to share in the excitement of the Apollo moon missions—it felt as if this was going to be a good deal harder than it had been with my first three books about some of Britain's postwar military endeavors. Literary agent Ed Victor helped me get my foot in the door by talking to one of his clients, moon walker Dave Scott, on my behalf. Dave was kind enough to do the same with Bob Crippen, one of the two-man crew on Columbia's maiden voyage. When Bob said he was willing to meet me and talk about his memories of the time, I knew I was in business. Bob also put me in touch with his friend and contemporary in the Astronaut Office, Richard Truly.

Richard—and his wife, Cody—were extremely welcoming and generous with their time. Looking back on it now, I'm astonished how ignorant I was of both how much I had to learn and the shape of the overall story—beyond trying to reclaim the sense of excitement that surrounded that first flight after six years in which American astronauts had been grounded without a spacecraft. Talking to Richard helped fire my imagination and crystallize the story that follows.

Bob and Richard enjoyed exceptionally illustrious careers at NASA as astronauts, then administrators, and both provided help that was way beyond the call of duty. I'm not sure that writing Into the Black would have been possible without them. I'm hugely indebted to both of them.

Thanks to Richard, I was lucky enough to talk to three of the 1978 astronaut intake whose recollections helped provide a different perspective on the first Shuttle mission. I'm grateful to Jon McBride, Rick Hauck and Dan Brandenstein for their time and willingness to help. All had fascinating stories to tell. Richard also introduced me to Simulator Supervisor Jerry Mill. I was really pleased that the two of us got to talk—not least because I learned from him that if you're handed a jacket by the Prince of Wales you don't put it down, however interesting a Space Shuttle simulator might be.

Bob Crippen put me in touch with Fred Haise. It's not every day you have the opportunity to interview a member of the crew of Apollo 13. That was a real high point. So too was talking at length to Joe Engle, whose career in aviation, as a visitor to space in both the X-15 and the Shuttle, must rate as one of the most remarkable there's been. Fred and Joe were patient and forthcoming in answering my questions. It was a pleasure and privilege to speak to them both.

For reasons that will be obvious, Dr. Hans Mark's story was central to the one I wanted to tell. I hadn't expected to have the opportunity to talk to him, but he was gracious enough to respond to a completely unsolicited email and to answer my questions on two occasions. I'm grateful to him.

I'd mentioned on my website that I was researching a book on the Shuttle and Steven Quayle kindly dropped me a line to suggest that I talk to his friend Christopher Stott, who in turn introduced me to Jay Honeycutt, the ex-director of Kennedy Space Center. I'm glad I did. Jay and his wife, Peggy, were warm and generous hosts during my time in Cocoa Beach. Jay also helped put me in touch with others I was to have valuable conversations with, most notably former Flight Operations boss George Abbey and former Kennedy Space Center public affairs officer Hugh Harris.

Closer to home, a big thank-you to Dr. David Baker, ex-NASA engineer, space writer and editor of the British Interplanetary Society's magazine Spaceflight. David has been enormously encouraging as well as being an extraordinarily well-informed sounding board. I also got the chance to talk to British test pilot Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown, which was as great a privilege as talking to those who flew the Shuttle. I'm certain that had he not been born in Edinburgh, Eric would have added "astronaut" to his incredible list of accomplishments.

Thanks to Charlotte Surtees of Darlow Smithson, and Jeremy Hall, who directed that company's excellent documentary The Last Flight of the Space Shuttle. Jeremy helped me make contact with NASA engineer Tom Moser. Tom's experience proved key, and I'm grateful to him for the time he spent talking to me.

Other writers who had absolutely nothing to gain from sharing their insights and reflections but were happy to do so include Andrew Chaikin, author of the definitive account of the Apollo program, A Man on the Moon; Andrew Smith, author of Moondust (which might have been the thing responsible for getting me thinking about space again); and Bill Sweetman, Aviation Week's senior international defense editor. Thank you all.

Thanks to friends Nick Cook, Rob Lenaghan (who, fortuitously, is a real rocket scientist) and, as ever, James Holland, who never ceases to be a source of encouragement, inspiration, and very good company.

At Transworld Publishers, I'd like to thank Viv Thompson, Phil Lord and Richard Shailer. Viv and Phil ensured my scribblings were as handsomely presented as they are inside the book, while Richard was responsible for Into the Black's beautiful dust jacket. Alongside them, copy editor Dan Balado has done an incredible job of sorting out the text, sparing my blushes on many occasions through his care and thoroughness. Behind it all, my publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr, has kept the faith despite—and I see this now—my delivering a first draft, which he says he didn't really understand. My agent, Mark Lucas, has been similarly enthusiastic about the story's potential and careful in his editorial advice. I can't really imagine doing this with anyone but you two. Thank you.

At Touchstone in New York, I'd like to thank my editor, Matthew Benjamin, for his enthusiasm for the book and sound advice on the manuscript.

Once again, Lalla Hitchings has done a wonderful job of transcribing the interviews and in doing so has helped make the book possible, providing me with a little more time to write when there too often appeared to be none.

And on that subject, I must thank Michael Joseph managing director Louise Moore. Lou has been unbelievably kind, patient and understanding when she must have been feeling anything but. At a time when the writing was at its most intense, I felt nearly overwhelmed by the twin demands of the book and the day job. Somehow, Lou managed to be supportive when she had every right to be pretty fed up.

Again, a mention of Rory, Jemima and Lexi, with whom I've not spent nearly enough time for too long now. I'd like that to change. The ball's in my court, of course.

Lastly, there's my amazing wife, Lucy. You've endured with good grace, selflessness and strength a year that I suspect might have seen other people curling up in a little ball and twitching in a corner. Somehow you got through 2014 and still managed to be you. And I love you for it. I'm very lucky. Thank you. We should have a party. Celebrate. Something like that.

## GLOSSARY

AFB | Air Force base

---|---

AFS | Air Force station

ALT | Approach and Landing tests

Angle of attack | angle between the oncoming air and a reference line on the aircraft, often a line connecting the leading edge with the trailing edge of the wing

AOA | abort once around

APU | auxiliary power unit

ARPS | Aerospace Research Pilot School

ATO | abort to orbit

BFS | backup flight system

Blue Cube | Air Force Satellite Control Facility

CAP | crew activity plan

CapCom | capsule communicator

CCD | charge-coupled device

CIA | Central Intelligence Agency

CMP | command module pilot

CORONA | code name for the KH-1, KH-2, KH-3 and KH-4 reconnaissance satellites

CRT | cathode ray tube

CSM | command and service module

DFI | development flight instrumentation

DMI | deployment mapping instrument

DOD | Department of Defense

DORIAN | code name for the KH-10 camera system designed for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory

EST | Eastern Standard Time (US)

ET | external tank

EVA | extravehicular activity

FBI | Federal Bureau of Investigation

FRSI | felt reusable surface insulation

FSL | Flight Simulation Laboratory

g | unit of acceleration

GAMBIT | code name for the KH-7 and KH-8 reconnaissance satellites

GAO | General Accounting Office

GMT | Greenwich Mean Time

GPC | general-purpose computer

GVA | grizzled veteran astronaut

HAC | heading alignment circle

HEXAGON | code name for the KH-9 reconnaissance satellite

hydraulic oleo | a shock absorber used on landing gear

hydrazine | rocket fuel

hypergolic rocket | one where the propellants spontaneously ignite upon coming into contact

ICBM | intercontinental ballistic missile

IP | initial point

IR | infrared

IRIS | infrared imagery of Shuttle

JSC | Johnson Space Center

KAO | Kuiper Airborne Observatory

KENNEN | code name for the KH-11 reconnaissance satellite

KEYHOLE | code name for US spy satellites

KSC | Kennedy Space Center

LACROSSE | code name for a family of NRO radar reconnaissance satellites; properly known, according to some sources, as LACROS

LLTV | lunar landing training vehicle

LM | lunar module

LMP | lunar module pilot

LOR | lunar orbit rendezvous

LOS | loss of signal

LST | large space telescope

Mach | measurement of speed in relation to the speed of sound

Max Q | maximum dynamic pressure

ME | main engine(s)

MECO | main engine cut-off

MET | mission elapsed time

MIT | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MMU | manned maneuvering unit

MOL | Manned Orbiting Laboratory

MSC | Manned Spacecraft Center

MSE | manned spaceflight engineer

MSFC | Marshall Space Flight Center

NACA | National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics

NAS | naval air station

NASA | National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NORAD | North American Aerospace Defense Command

NRO | National Reconnaissance Office

OMB | Office of Management and Budget

OMS | orbital maneuvering system

OPF | Orbiter Processing Facility

OPS | operational sequences

OTF | orbital test flight

PAD | preadvisory data

PASS | primary avionics software system

PIO | pilot-induced oscillation

PJ | pararescue jumper

PRO | proceed

RAE | Royal Aircraft Establishment

RAF | Royal Air Force

RAT | ram air turbine

RCS | reaction control system

RFP | request for proposal

RID | review item discrepancy

RMU | remote maneuvering unit

ROTC | Reserve Officers Training Corps

RTLS | return to launch site

RTV | room temperature vulcanization

SAIL | Shuttle Avionics Integrated Laboratory

SALT | Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

SCA | Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

SCAPE | self-contained atmospheric protection ensemble

SDS | Satellite Data System, a network of communication satellites used to relay information from KH-11 and LACROSSE back to US ground stations

sep | short for separation

SimSup | simulator supervisor

SIP | strain isolation pad

SMS | Shuttle Mission Simulator

SRB | solid rocket booster

SSME | Space Shuttle main engines

STA | Shuttle Training Aircraft

STS | space transportation system

TACAN | tactical air navigation

TAL | transatlantic abort landing

TFNG | The F***ing New Guys

TIG | time of ignition

TPS | thermal protection system

USAF | United States Air Force

VAB | Vehicle Assembly Building

VOS | USAF Satellite Control Facility Shuttle operations office

## APPENDIX

## STS-1 GRAPHICS AND LOCATION MAPS

KEY

Structure and general

1 Two-spar fin torsion box, integrally stiffened skin panels

2 Fin base rib, integrally machined

3 Multibolt fin/fuselage attachment fittings

4 Engine support/thrust structure

5 Main engine thrust and fin support canted frame, integrally machined

6 Shoulder longeron

7 Wing spar carry-through structure

8 Upper fuselage attachment fitting, also used for hoist attachment

9 Upper thrust beams, titanium machined with boron epoxy-reinforced welded-on end fittings

10 Lower thrust beams

11 Machined and diffusion-bonded titanium bracing structure

12 Keel beams

13 Aluminum honeycomb heat shield, thermally insulated

14 Midfuselage payload bay shoulder longeron

15 Electrical cable tray

16 Machined, integrally stiffened frames

17 Between-frame machined skin stiffeners

18 Integrally stiffened aluminum skin panels

19 Truss bracing

20 Payload bay wing carry-through structure

21 Payload bay lining insulation panels

22 Payload bay door, conventional skin and stringer construction (two doors, four panels)

23 Radiator panels (two per side)

24 Forward fuselage crew module

25 Integrally stiffened machined frames and skin for inner cone (crew module is self-contained unit, housed in aerodynamic shell)

26 Cabin support links, total 12

27 Rear pressure bulkhead

28 Forward pressure bulkhead

29 Crew entry door

30 Machined window frames and thermal-resistant transparencies

31 Forward unpressurized nose section

32 Reinforced carbon-carbon nose-cap

33 Wing/fuselage multibolt attachment fittings

34 Corrugated-web wing spars

35 Built-up, multibraced and capped wing ribs

36 Riveted stringer, upper and lower wing-skin panels

37 Wing/fuselage stub structure (electrical and hydraulic connection panels)

38 Detachable leading-edge structure, reinforced carbon-carbon skin panels

39 Leading-edge access panels (upper and lower)

40 Heat-resisting surface insulation along entire leading edge spar, with built-in thermal barrier

41 Sliding elevon shrouds, also give access to elevon controls and jacks

42 Entire structure covered in HRSI and LRSI tiles

Environmental control and life support

C1 Access door to payload bay or Spacelab when carried

C2 Emergency exit, first two orbiters only

C3 Upper observation windows

C4 Rearward-facing observation windows

C5 Commander's station

C6 Pilot's station

C7 Flight control panels (automatic control and manual override)

C8 Hand controller, both sides

C9 Rudder pedals, both sides

C10 Speed brake thrust controller (both sides)

C11 Avionic consoles

C12 Toilet and hygiene

C13 Galley

C14 Access via floor hatch to lower deck, both sides

C15 Airlock

C16 Ladder to lower deck

C17 Four-berth sleeping bunks

C18 Cabin heat exchanger and water separator

C19 Fan

C20 Wastewater tanks

C21 Drinking and domestic water tanks

C22 Avionics bay heat exchanger and fan

C23 Avionics and instrument cooling ducts

C24 Return-air ducts to cabin fans

C25 Capsule and payload bay venting ducts (nitrogen purged, vented rearward

Fuel system

F1 Hydrogen tank (oxygen tank forward)

F2 Integrally stiffened aluminum skin structure supported on frames

F3 Machined end dome

F4 Rear external tank/orbiter attachment cradle

F5 Hydrogen-feed pressurization line

F6 Oxygen-feed pressurization line

F7 Manhole cover

F8 Antivortex baffle

F9 Hydrogen tank pressure line

F10 Oxygen tank pressure line

F11 Oxygen recirculating line

F12 Electrical conduit

F13 External pipe support, sliding ball Teflon-coated on surface to accommodate shrinkage

F14 Orbiter oxygen pull-off umbilical connection (hydrogen on other side)

F15 Hydrogen main fuel-feed pipe

F16 Oxygen umbilical panel (hydrogen on other side)

F17 Oxygen tank fill and drain pipe (hydrogen on other side)

F18 APU fuel tanks (three)

F19 Helium tanks (four) used for pneumatic systems, valve actuation and tank purging

F20 Solid-fuel rocket booster, one each side

F21 Ribbon-type drogue chute (four)

F22 Recovery parachute (three)

F23 Navigation stowage and thrust-vector system access

F24 Cable tunnel

F25 Forward separation motors, 15,000-pound thrust each

F26 Rear separation motors, 15,000-pound thrust each

F27 Rear skirt and launch support cone

F28 Contoured expansion nozzle, 8 omni-axial gimbal capability

Payload-handling equipment

E1 Payload-handling station

E2 Rendezvous and docking station

E3 Payload specialist's station

E4 Payload manipulating arm

E5 Mating adapter

E6 Manipulator armrest

E7 Payload retention guide, electrically actuated

E8 Payload mounting trunnion

Propulsion, main engines and orbital maneuver system

P1 Rocketdyne liquid-propellant, throttleable main engine, one of three

P2 Gimbal actuator (two per engine) 10.5 pitch, 8.5 yaw

P3 Low-pressure turbopump (liquid hydrogen) mounting

P4 High-pressure hydrogen turbopump

P5 High-pressure oxygen turbopump

P6 Engine controller

P7 Thrust nozzle

P8 Nozzle cooling pipes

P9 Heat shield

P10 Orbital maneuvering system engine packs (both sides interconnected)

P11 OMS main engine (6,000-pound thrust in vacuum) one of two, electromechanical gimbal-actuated

P12 OMS propellant tanks containing nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine

P13 Helium bottle to pressurize OMS propellants

P14 Orbiter reaction-control system (RCS)

P15 Primary bipropellant thrusters (870 pounds in vacuum), 12 per side

P16 Vernier thrusters (25 pounds in vacuum), one each side

P17 RCS propellant tanks containing nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine

P18 Forward RCS propulsion units (three)

P19 Fixed thrusters (total 14)

P20 Vernier thrusters (total 2)

P21 RCS forward propellant tanks

P22 Ground servicing receptacle

Avionics, electrical and radio

A1 Rear avionics bay, one of three

A2 Electrically deployed payload bay doors and radiators

A3 Orbiter electrical fuel cell (total three)

A4 Crew module electrical connecting panels to payload bay

A5 Static and temperature probes (normally retracted except for approach and landing)

A6 S-band antenna

A7 L-band antenna

A8 Ku-band antenna

A9 Floodlight (three per side)

A10 Hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells

A11 Transparency cover for star tracker

Hydraulics

H1 One of three hydraulic reservoirs serving three independent systems

H2 Pump (one of three) 3,000 pounds /square inch variable delivery

H3 Sundstrand APU (one of three)

H4 APU exhaust ducts

H5 Water boilers and coolers (one of three)

H6 Boiler blow-off outlets

H7 Rudder/speed-brake actuator unit

H8 Rotary actuator (one of four)

H9 Body-flap actuators (total three), –11.7 +22.5

H10 Eleven actuators (two per side, total four), –40 +15

H11 Main engine gimbal actuating jacks (two per engine) and control valves (three)

H12 Hydraulically actuated antiskid device, main undercarriage, and up-lock (all three legs of freefall design)

H13 Nose undercarriage, hydraulically steered

## PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and clear permission for the photographs in this book, the provenance of a number of them is uncertain. The author and publisher would welcome the opportunity to correct any mistakes.

First insert

page 1—A young Bob Crippen: © Bob Crippen. Dick Truly and Vought F-8 Crusader: © Richard Truly. Bob Crippen and A-4 Skyhawk: © Bob Crippen.

page 2—Bob Crippen at the Aerospace Research Pilots School: © Bob Crippen. John Young with F-4H-1 Phantom II; Project HIGH JUMP, Phantom: © US Navy. John Young and Gus Grissom in Gemini III: © NASA.

page 3—Joe Engle in North American X-15 © USAF. X-15: © NASA. X-20 Dyna-Soar; Project LUNEX spacecraft and lander: © USAF.

page 4—MOL diagram: © NRO. MOL mission patch; Dick Truly with scale model of space station; MOL pilots in 1966: © USAF.

page 5—Dick Truly, Mike Adams and Jack Finley at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: © USAF. USAF Titan IIIC rocket: © NASA. KH-9 HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite: © NRO. Reentry bucket and C-130: © USAF.

page 6—The MOL guys; John Young on the moon; Max Faget; DC-3 in wind tunnel: © NASA.

page 7—Models for a delta-winged orbiter; Richard Nixon and James Fletcher; Dr. Hans Mark; ceramic tiles being tested: © NASA.

page 8—Shuttle solid rocket booster; RS-25 Space Shuttle main engine: © NASA. Bearded Bob Crippen: © Bob Crippen. John Young at Johnson Space Center: © NASA.

Second insert

page 1—Spock, Sulu, Bones and Scotty at Enterprise rollout ceremony; VIRTUS carrier aircraft: © NASA. Short-Mayo Composite: © Crown Copyright. Lockheed C-5 Galaxy: © NASA.

page 2—NASA Boeing 747; scale model of 747/Shuttle: © NASA. Modified Gulfstream business jet: © David W. Whittle courtesy of NASA JSC Oral History Project. Enterprise astronauts 1977: © NASA.

page 3—Enterprise flies free; Approach and Landing test mission patch; Enterprise banks over the Mojave Desert; Enterprise lands on Rogers Dry Lake Bed: © NASA.

page 4—Haise, Fullerton and Enterprise; airborne salute to Enterprise; Joe Engle and Dick Truly on Shuttle's fourth flight; fifth ALT test flight: © NASA.

page 5—NASA introduces crews for Shuttle test flights; Fred Haise in simulator; Buck Rogers mission; orbiter in wind tunnel: © NASA.

page 6—Shuttle on back of SCA; F-104 and F-15 jet fighters flying at high speed; tiles being reattached to Columbia; Dick Truly using on-orbit tile repair kit: © NASA.

page 7—Columbia in the Vehicle Assembly Building; Columbia on journey to Pad 39A; STS-1 mission patch; Columbia on Pad 39A: © NASA.

page 8—John Young in T-38; Bob Crippen and John Young study STS-1 flight plan; Bob Crippen descends from Shuttle Training Aircraft; Bob Crippen and John Young in test lab: © NASA.

Third insert

page 1—Casselli's watercolor of John Young; STS-1 crew; Young and Crippen in simulation flight; T-38s of the Chase team: © NASA.

page 2—Columbia takes off; Columbia in flight; Columbia ascends past 150,000 feet; Columbia's discarded external tank: © NASA.

page 3—Crippen and Young in aft crew station; tiles missing from heat shield; Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft and Max Faget; Dr. Hans Mark: © NASA.

page 4—William Twinting: © NASA. Blue Cube: © USAF. Hubble Telescope; Cape Cod pictured from Columbia: © NASA.

page 5—Joe Engle and Dick Truly at Capcom console; painting showing temperature and pressure wave created by Columbia on reentry; Atlantis reentering; Kuiper Airborne Observatory: © NASA.

page 6—Columbia and Chase team glide toward Edwards; Columbia over Rogers Dry Lake; John Young brings Columbia in to land; Columbia on Runway 23: © NASA.

page 7—View from inside Columbia on landing; Young and Crippen leave Columbia; Columbia postflight: © NASA.

page 8—Columbia returns to Edwards; Vandenberg AFB: © USAF.

## ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Rowland White is the author of three critically acclaimed works of aviation history: Vulcan 607, Phoenix Squadron and Storm Front. All three have been Sunday Times top ten bestsellers. As well as talking to paying audiences on subjects related to the books, White has delivered lectures at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell and to bomber crews at RAF Marham. He is an honorary member of the RAF's Old Cranwellians Association, Royal Air Force Club and the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm Officers Association.

As publishing director at Penguin Books in the UK, White has more than fifteen years of experience and publishes a wide variety of commercial fiction and nonfiction in Penguin's Michael Joseph imprint, including authors Jeremy Clarkson, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Mark Owen.

Born and brought up in Cambridge, White studied modern history at Liverpool University. He has held a private pilot's license since 1998 and lives near Cambridge, England, with his wife, Lucy, and three young children.

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## BIBLIOGRAPHY

It would have been impossible even to contemplate writing Into the Black without drawing on the work of others who preceded me. While a complete bibliography follows, I am particularly indebted to a handful of fine writers who require a special mention. Dennis Jenkins's book Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System and T. A. Heppenheimer's two-volume History of the Space Shuttle were both vital and comprehensive references with respect to the story of the Shuttle itself. For providing some insight into the black world of the NRO and KEYHOLE satellite program, William E. Burrows's book Deep Black, Jeffrey T. Richelson's America's Secret Eyes in Space and numerous outstanding articles by Dwayne A. Day from the website thespacereview.com were indispensable. I recommend the work of all five gentlemen without reservation.

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Cooper, Paul A., and Paul F. Holloway. "The Shuttle Tile Story." Astronautics & Aeronautics, January 1981.

Easterbrook, Gregg. "Beam Us Out of This Deathtrap, Scotty." Washington Monthly, April 1980.

Flight International.

Glanz, James, and John Schwartz. "Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage." New York Times, September 26, 2003.

Kenden, Anthony. "Was Columbia Photographed by KH-11?" BIS Space Chronicle, February 1983.

Launius, Roger D. "Astronaut Envy: The U.S. Military's Quest for a Human Mission in Space." Space and Defense, Summer 2010.

Lewis, Richard S. "Skylab Brings NASA Down to Earth." New Scientist, May 1978.

Little, Geoffrey. "Spaceman." Air & Space, September 2005.

McCrum, Kirstie. "Flying High." Wales Online, April 22, 2013.

Middlecamp, David. "Air Force Space Shuttle Astronauts Introduced at Vandenberg." San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune, October 16, 1985.

National Geographic. October 1981.

Oberg, James. "Max Faget: Master Builder." Omni, April 1995.

———. "Skylab's Untimely Fate." Air & Space, February/March 1992.

Overmyer, Bob. "The Gulfstream II in the Shadow of the Shuttle." AOPA Pilot, March 1, 1997.

Posey, Carl. "The Greatest Test Pilot You've Never Heard Of: Meet Fitz Fulton." Air & Space, December 2013.

———. "A Sudden Loss of Altitude." Air & Space, July 1998.

Recer, Paul. "Astronomer Is Flying High over Peek at Mercury." Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1995.

Salisbury, David F. "An Airborne Eye on the Cosmos." Christian Science Monitor, November 28, 1983.

Weiss, Rick. "Satellite View of Shuttle Unsought; Columbia Orbited in Camera Range." Washington Post, February 14, 2003.

Wilford, John Noble. "New Test, Open Hatch Suspected in Space Shuttle Fatality." New York Times, March 24, 1981.

———. "Shuttle Rockets into Orbit on First Flight." New York Times, April 13, 1981.

———. "Spy Satellite Reportedly Aided in Shuttle Flight." New York Times, October 20, 1981.

#### Archive Documents

The Air Force in Space Fiscal Year 1962. USAF.

Air Force Satellite Control Facility Historical Brief and Chronology 1954–Present. USAF, 1984.

Apollo XVI Lunar Surface Journal. NASA.

Ben Franklin Gulf Stream Drift Mission Report, 1969.

Berger, Carl. "History of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program (MOL)." USAF, 1970.

Contingency Aborts 21007/31007. United Space Alliance, 2007.

DARPA Technical Accomplishments: An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, Vol. 1. Institute for Defense Analyses, February 1990.

Dolci, Wendy Whiting. "Milestones in Airborne Astronomy: From the 1920s to the Present," American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997.

Dr. Hans Mark interviewed by Gerald Haines. NRO, 1997.

Eilertson, W. H. "Two-Stage, Fully Reusable Space Shuttle Lunar Mission Capability." Bellcomm, Inc., October 27, 1969.

Eppley, Charles V. "History of the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School, 4 February 1951–12 October 1961." USAF, March 1963.

Erickson, Edwin F., and Allan W. Meyer. "NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, 1971–1995: An Operations Retrospective with a View to SOFIA." NASA, December 2013.

Ferguson, Matthew J., and Chester B. May. "Use of Ben Franklin Submersible as a Space Station Simulator." NASA, September 1970.

"The Gambit Story." National Reconnaissance Office, 1991.

Geiger, Clarence J. "History of the X-20A Dyna-Soar." USAF, October 1963.

Haynes, Davy A. "Feasibility Analysis of Cis-lunar Flight Using the Shuttle Orbiter." NASA Technical Memorandum 104084, June 1991.

"The Hexagon Story." National Reconnaissance Office, 1992.

Houston, Robert S., Richard P. Hallion, and Ronald G. Boston. Transiting from Air to Space: The North American X-15. USAF, 1987.

Infrared Imagery of Shuttle (IRIS). NASA/Martin Marietta, 1977.

"Infrared Imagery of Shuttle (IRIS) Experiment IRIS/STS-3 Engineering Report." NASA, June 23, 1982.

Interview with Dr. William O. Baker. Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, 1996.

Interview with Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly. US Navy, 2005.

Johnson Space Center News Release Logs, 1973–81.

Jones, J. J. "Use of the Shuttle Orbiter as a Research Vehicle." AIAA, November 1981.

Lambert, John V., and Kenneth E. Kissell. The Early Development of Satellite Characterization Capabilities at the Air Force Laboratories, Landbased Instrumentation Handbook. Headquarters Western Space and Missile Center, Air Force Systems Command, USAF, 1981.

Lunar Expedition Plan. USAF, 1961.

"Man in MOL." USAF, 1969.

Moser, T. L., and W. C. Schneider. "Strength Integrity of the Space Shuttle Orbiter Tiles." AIAA, 1981.

Weingarten, Norman C. "History of In-Flight Simulation & Flying Qualities Research at Calspan." AIAA, 2005.

#### NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project

Aldridge Jr., Edward C. "Pete"

Algranti, Joseph S.

Allen, Joseph P. "Joe"

Blackburn, Gerald

Bobko, Karol J.

Brand, Vance

Brandenstein, Daniel C.

Coats, Michael L.

Cohen, Aaron

Covey, Richard O.

Creighton, John O.

Crews Jr., Albert H.

Crippen, Robert L.

Cuzzupoli, Joseph W.

Fabian, John M.

Faget, Maxime A.

Fullerton, C. Gordon

Greene, Jay H.

Gregory, Frederick D.

Haines, Charles R.

Haise Jr., Fred W.

Hart, Terry J.

Hartsfield Jr., Henry W. "Hank"

Hauck, Frederick H.

Hawley, Steven A.

Hodge, John D.

Hoffman, Jeffrey A.

Hooks, Ivy

Hutchinson, Neil B.

Kiker, John W.

Kraft Jr., Christopher C.

Lee, Dorothy B.

Lenoir, William B.

Lousma, Jack R.

Lunney, Glynn S.

Mattingly II, Thomas K.

McBride, Jon A.

Moser, Thomas L.

Mullane, Richard M.

Myers, Dale D.

Nagel, Steven R.

Nelson, George D.

Odom, James B.

Peterson, Donald H.

Ried Jr., Robert C.

Ross, Jerry L.

Schaffer, Phillip C.

Seddon, Margaret Rhea

Sheehan, Gerald D.

Shriver, Loren J.

Silveira, Milton A.

Stafford, Thomas P.

Sullivan, Kathryn D.

Thompson, Robert F. "Bob"

Van Hoften, James D. A.

Williams, Donald E.

Yardley, John F.

National Reconnaissance Office Mission Ground Station Declassification "Questions and Answers."

OL-AG Phillips Laboratory Malabar Test Facility User Manual, c/o fas.org.

Project Hexagon Overview. NRO.

Report of the Space Task Group, 1969. NASA.

Mr. Robert Crippen Oral History. Kennedy Space Center, 2002.

Space Shuttle Orbiter Approach and Landing Test Final Evaluation Report. NASA, 1978.

Space Shuttle Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) Sites. NASA, 2006.

STS-1 Operational Flight Profile. NASA, 1980.

STS-1 First Space Shuttle Mission Press Kit. NASA, 1981.

STS-1 In-Flight Anomaly Report. NASA, 1981.

STS-1 Transcript. NASA, 1981.

System Failure Case Studies: Tough Transitions. NASA, 2011.

#### Websites

aiaahouston.org—Jackson, Dr. A. A. The Ugly Spaceship, 2012.

americaspace.com—Covault, Craig, "Top Secret KH-11 Spysat Design Revealed by NRO's Twin Telescope Gift to NASA."

amyshirateitel.com—"A History of the Dyna-Soar."

astronautix.com.

astronomycafe.net—"Observing with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory."

c141heaven.info—"NASA 714."

collectspace.com.

fas.org—"Lacrosse/Onyx"; "The SLC-6 Saga."

flightjournal.com—Patel, Devang, "747 Pilot Comments About Carrying the Shuttle."

globalsecurity.org—Vick, Charles P. "Lacrosse/Onyx."

hankbrandli.com—"The Rescue of Apollo 11."

jamesmskipper.us/SMEAT1.html—"SMEAT."

johnwyoung.com.

launiusr.wordpress.com—"NASA's Space Shuttle and the Department of Defense."

mach25.nl—STS-62A.

"Peeking at the Shuttle from Space"—Windrem, Robert, and Tierney O'Dea. nf104.com. russianspaceweb.com.

satobs.org—Molczan, Ted. "Could Columbia Have Been Imaged by a Keyhole?"; "STS-1 and KH-11-2 Encounters"; "STS-2 and KH-11-3 Encounters."

sony.net—"Determination Drove the Development of the CCD 'Electronic Eye.' "

spacefacts.de.

spaceflightnow.com:

Ray, Justin. "In His Own Words: Pentagon Space Official Pete Aldridge"; "From Shuttles to Rockets"; "Space Launch Complex 6."

thespacereview.com.

Day, Dwayne A. "Astronauts and Area 51: The Skylab Incident" (2007); "A Bat Outta Hell" (2010); "The Big Bird and the Turkey" (2011); "Big Black and the New Bird" (2010); "Blue Skies on the West Coast" (2007); "General Power vs Chicken Little" (2005); "The Hexagon and the Space Shuttle" (2011); "The Hour of the Wolf" (2012); "Ike's Gambit" (2009); "Those Magnificent Spooks and Their Spying Machine" (2013); "The Sounds of Distant Thunder" (2012); "The Spooks and the Turkey" (2006); "Theft, the Sincerest Form of Flattery" (2012). Oberg, James. "Academic Honors for a Spaceflight Prophet" (2005).

<http://news.utexas.edu/2011/05/02/humanities_mark>.

Mark Hans. "The Education of the Guardians." UT News (2011).

thuleab.dk.

#### Audio

<https://archive.org>—NASA Audio Collection STS-1 mission transcript.

www.youtube.com—Hans Mark: Origin Story of Carl Sagan's Plaque on Pioneer 10.

#### Video

www.youtube.com.

—Astrospies, NOVA, 2008.

—Bob Crippen STS-107 eulogy, 2003.

—Hail Columbia!, IMAX Corporation, 1982.

—MIT Aircraft Systems Engineering Course, 2005.

—The Space Shuttle's Last Flight, Darlow Smithson Productions, 2011.

—STS-1 Postmission Press Conference, NASA, 1981.

## INDEX

A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system's search function.

Abbey, George, –52, ,

Challenger disaster,

NASA's TFNGs, , , ,

STS-1, , , , , ,

ABC News, –61

Abrahamson, Jim, ,

Adams, Mike, –30,

Aerojet

AJ10 rocket engine, –78

LR-87 engines, –41

OMS engines,

rockets, –73

Aeronautical Space Advisory Panel,

Aerospace Data Facility East, , ,

Aerospace Research Pilots School, , , , , ,

Class 64A, , –20,

Agnew, Spiro, –56

Air Force One,

aircraft. See individual manufacturers

Alaska satellite tracking station, ,

Aldebaran,

Aldridge, Pete, , ,

Aldrin, Buzz, , , , , ,

Allen, Joe

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –37

as STS-1 CapCom, –56, –8, –13, –18, –22, , –43, , , , –55, –62, ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , , –55, ,

Alvin submersible,

American National Intelligence,

American Ordnance Association,

Ames Research Center, –63

Apollo program,

facilities, –32, , ,

Hans Mark at, –88, , , ,

high-intensity laser program,

Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO), –41,

Shuttle's heat shield development, , –33,

Space Shuttle design and development, –100

STS-1 launch preparations,

See also wind tunnels

Anderson Peak. See telescopes

Apollo , , , , –6

Apollo , ,

Apollo , , , , , ,

Apollo , , , –65, , –101,

Apollo , , , , ,

accident, –80, ,

Accident Investigation Board, –89

Apollo ,

Apollo , , ,

John Young on, , –95, , , , ,

on the moon, –95

T. K. Mattingly on, ,

Apollo , , , , , ,

Apollo ,

Apollo program, , , ,

abort procedures, –2

Apollo command module, ,

Apollo Guidance Computer,

astronauts, ,

capsule design and construction, –6, ,

capsule reentry,

future of, ,

heat shield design, , , , ,

moon missions, , ,

radio communication,

See also Skylab

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, , –40, , , , ,

Aquarius. See lunar module

Armstrong, Neil

Apollo , , , , , , ,

Columbia,

and Eric Brown, –72

Handley-Page HP.115,

on the moon,

X-20 Dyna-Soar,

Ascension Island, , ,

Asimov, Isaac,

Astronaut Office (NASA), , , , –40,

astronaut selection, , , ,

crew chosen for Shuttle Approach and Landing tests,

Fred Haise at, , ,

Shuttle's design and name, ,

TFNGs,

AT&T,

Atlantis, , , ,

auxiliary power units (APUs), , –39, , ,

Avco, ,

Avro Vulcan,

BAC-Aerospatiale

001 (prototype),

Concorde, ,

Baikonur Cosmodrome, , , , ,

Baker, William, –60

Baker Report (1956),

Ballistic Missile Division,

Ballistic Missile Early Warning System,

ballistic missile program, Minuteman,

Bark, Dave, , ,

Bass, Saul,

Beale Air Force Base,

Beechcraft T-34B Mentor,

Bell Aircraft Corporation, ,

X-1, ,

Bell Laboratories Research Division, –60,

Bell-Boeing MV-22 Osprey,

Bergman, Lon, –72

Bjornstad, John, , ,

Black Tuesday (June 10, 1969),

Bleymaier, General,

Blue Angels (display team),

Blue Cube. See Sunnyvale Air Force Base

Bobko, Karol "Bo"

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ,

MOL program ends, , –61,

NASA selection,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , , ,

Space Shuttle program,

Boeing

707,

737,

747-100 Jumbo Jet, , , , , ,

B-29 Superfortress,

B-52 Stratofortress, , ,

KC-135 Stratotanker ("Vomit Comet"), –20, , , , ,

NB-52,

Shuttle airframe testing, ,

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), , –28, , , , , , , , ,

VC-137,

X-20 Dyna-Soar, , , , , ,

boosters. See rockets; solid rocket boosters (SRB)

Bradburn, Major-General David, , , ,

Branch, Major-General "Twig,"

Brand, Vance, ,

Brandenstein, Dan

applies to NASA, –97

assigned as STS-1 support crew,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , –83,

Shuttle's heat shield development,

as STS-1 CapCom, , , , –83, , –6, , , , –43

STS-1 launch, , , ,

Brandii, Captain Hank,

Braun, Wernher von

and Hans Mark, –89, ,

lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), ,

at Marshall Space Flight Center,

Saturn V, , , ,

V-2 missile, , ,

Brezhnev, Leonid,

British Aircraft Corporation (BAC),

TSR-2,

Brooks Air Force Base, ,

Brown, Eric, –72

Brunswick Naval Air Station,

Brynner, Yul,

Buckhorn ground station,

Buran. See spaceplanes

Bush, George H. W., , –24

cameras

charge-coupled device (CCD), –60,

GAMBIT-3,

KH-7 GAMBIT,

KH-9 HEXAGON ("Big Bird"),

KH-10 DORIAN, , –33, –40, , , ,

KH-11 KENNEN,

CapCom (Capsule Communicator)

Apollo ,

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project,

Chase Air Force,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –83, –94

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder, –26, –31

Columbia's reaction control system burns, –5, –15, –22

Flight Control teams,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests,

Skylab, , , ,

STS-1, , , , –94, –15,

STS-1 in orbit,

STS-1 launch, ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , –56, , –62, , , , –72,

wake-up music,

Cape Canaveral, , , , , –49

Carpenter, Scott, –24,

Carter, Jimmy, ,

KH-11 KENNEN, ,

Operation EAGLE CLAW, ,

request for more money for Shuttle, –21

SALT II Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (1979),

Castenholz, Paul, –85,

Cernan, Barbara,

Cernan, Gene, , , , ,

Cessna Aircraft Company,

A-37,

C-172,

YAT-37 Dragonfly,

Chaffee, Roger, , , ,

Challenger, , , , –91,

Chandra Space Telescope. See telescopes

Charles, Prince, –75,

Chase Air Force, –17, –33,

STS-1 launch, , , ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , , , –53, –56, –62, –65, , –68

China,

CIA

A-12 OXCART, ,

KH-4 CORONA, , , ,

KH-9 HEXAGON, –59,

KH-11 KENNEN, , ,

Skylab,

Soviet interest in Space Shuttle,

Space Shuttle program, , –89

spy satellites, –88,

TALENT, –40

CIRRIS (experiment code name),

Clarke, Arthur C.,

Cleator, P. E.,

Cohen, Aaron

Columbia's damaged heat shield,

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder,

heat shield testing,

orbiter development, , , , , –22

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests,

STS-1, , , –74

Cold War, , , , , ,

Cole, Forrest, , ,

Collins, Michael, , , ,

Colorado Springs,

Columbia,

abort procedures, –32, –40

arrives at Kennedy Space Center,

auxiliary power units (APUs), , –39, , , ,

cabin design,

computer systems, –29

construction, –92

engines, , , , , ,

flight control system,

heat damage to undercarriage door, , ,

heat shield construction concerns, –12, , –23, , –47,

heat shield suffers damage (STS-1), –6, –84, –329, –37, , –52,

launch preparations, , , –45, , –52

leaves Rockwell, –11

loss of, –93

malfunctioning flight recorder (STS-1), , –26, –31,

name,

reaction control system (RCS) (STS-1), –52, –5, –15, –22, , ,

recovery convoy, , , –70

reentry simulations,

shock waves, , , –69, ,

Shuttle to ground voice transmissions,

solid rocket boosters (SRBs), , , , –70

STS-1 in orbit, –6, –339, –51

STS-1 launch, , , , –72

STS-1 reentry and landing, , –48, –73

STS-2, –77,

STS-3,

STS-4, –78

STS-5,

STS-7,

STS-8,

STS-9, –83

STS-107,

temperature control, –76

Columbia (ship),

command modules,

Odyssey, , ,

computer systems, –9, , ,

Apollo Guidance Computer,

IBM  RAMAC,

IBM pi, , –9, ,

IBM AP-101, , –31,

MOL program,

PASS (primary avionics software system) software, , ,

software problems, –29

Space Shuttle, –31, , , ,

STS-1 launch problems, –62

STS-9 problems, –9

Confederate Air Force,

Conrad, Pete, , , , –20, ,

Consolidated Space Operations Center, ,

Constellation, USS,

Convair

B-58 Hustler,

F-106 Delta Dart,

Coral Sea, USS,

Cornell University, Aeronautical Laboratory,

CORONA. See KH-4 CORONA (Discoverer)

Creighton, John, ,

Crews, Al, –30

Crippen, Ginny,

Crippen, Robert Laurel "Crip," ,

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ,

applies to DoD,

appointed as STS-1 crew, –83, –92,

Bob Lawrence's death,

Challenger disaster, –90

Chase Air Force,

Columbia disaster, –94

Columbia eulogy,

Columbia's auxiliary power units (APUs), –39

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –6,

at Edwards Air Force Base, , –28

enters preflight quarantine, ,

heat shield construction concerns,

interest in space and aviation, –14

joins Navy,

joins VA-72 "Blue Hawks,"

KH-11 KENNEN,

meets new NASA applicants,

MOL program, , , , , , , , ,

NASA selection, ,

on-orbit tile repairs, –35

patch design,

press conferences, –40, –43

Shuttle abort procedures, –201, , –31,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , , –76

Shuttle's computer systems, , , –48,

Shuttle's engines and SRBs, ,

simulator practice, , ,

Skylab, –69, –11, , ,

STS-1 in orbit, , –339, –51

STS-1 launch, –72

STS-1 launch preparations, , , , , , , –56,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , , –47, –68, , –74

STS-62A, –89

STS-7,

tile repairs in orbit, ,

Cuban Missile Crisis, ,

Curtiss P-40 Warhawk,

Dasht-e-Kavir,

David Clark S1030 pressure suits,

Davis, Rear Admiral,

De Havilland Canada Beaver,

De Havilland Comet,

Defense Satellite Communication System network,

Delta Force,

Descartes Highlands, ,

development flight instrumentation (DFI),

Dirks, Leslie, ,

Discoverer program. See KH-4 CORONA (Discoverer)

Discovery, , , , –89,

Doolittle, Jimmy, ,

DORIAN. See KH-10 DORIAN

Dornberger, Walter,

Douglas Aircraft Company, , , –51

A-4 Skyhawk,

B-26 Invader, ,

C-47 Gooney Bird,

C-54,

DC-3, , , –51, ,

DC-8,

MOL program,

Dryden Flight Research Center, , , , –66, ,

Duke, Charlie, –79,

Apollo , –95

Dyna-Soar. See Boeing

Dzhanibekov, Vladimir,

Eastman-Kodak, ,

Ecord, Glenn, ,

Edwards Air Force Base, –20, –23,

Aerospace Research Pilots School, , –20, , , , , , ,

Dryden Flight Research Center, , , , –66, ,

Fighter Test Operations, –23

Flight Test Center, ,

Robert Crippen at,

Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests, , –88

STS-1 landing, –46

STS-1 recovery,

Einstein, Albert,

Eisenhower, Dwight D., –15, , –36,

El Paso International Airport, ,

El Toro Marine Corps Air Station,

Ellis, Warren,

Empire Test Pilots School,

engines. See individual manufacturers

Engle, Joe Henry,

Apollo , , –82,

applies to NASA, –26

appointed STS-1 reserve crew, ,

and Chuck Yeager, , –25

Columbia's damaged heat shield,

computer systems,

at Edwards Air Force Base,

enters preflight quarantine, ,

Fighter Test Operations, –23

flying career, –22

meets new NASA applicants,

Pearl Harbor reenactments,

Shuttle abort procedures, , , –31

Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests, –57, –60, , , –74, ,

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft,

Shuttle Training Aircraft, , –60

simulator practice, –57, –60, ,

Space Shuttle program,

STS-1 launch,

STS-1 launch preparations, , , ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , ,

STS-2, –77,

transatlantic abort landing, ,

X-15 program, , –26

Enterprise, , –80,

Approach and Landing tests, , , –78, –86

design and construction, , , –56,

name, –56

testing at Marshall Space Flight Center,

Enterprise, USS, –56

Essing, Captain John Earl,

Evans, Ron,

external tanks (ET), –45

extra-vehicular activity (EVA),

Faget, Max

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –79

concern over heat shield design, ,

DC-3 Study, –51,

introduces Space Shuttle concept, –4

lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR),

orbital maneuvring system (OMS), pods, –79

retires,

scaffold escape tower, ,

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, ,

Skunk Works, –50, ,

Skylab,

Space Shuttle concept, –48, –51, , , ,

Space Shuttle designs, ,

STS-1, , –74

Fairchild A-10,

Fairchild-Hiller (manufacturer),

Finley, Jack, ,

Fleet Weather Center,

Fletcher, James, –92

Flight Dynamics Laboratory,

Flight Simulation Laboratory (FSL),

Ford, Gerald, ,

Fort Belvoir, Virginia, ,

Fort Gulick, Panama Canal Zone,

Foster, John,

Freedom space station, –84

Freedom Star (recovery ship),

Frosch, Robert, –21

Fullerton, Gordon "Gordo"

Apollo ,

appointed as STS-4 crew,

MOL program, , –42,

NASA selection,

Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests, –55, , , –69, , –74, ,

Shuttle's computer systems, –48

STS-3, ,

Fulton, Fitz, ,

Gagarin, Yuri, , , –23, , ,

Gagnon, Tim,

GAMBIT (satellite), , ,

See also KH-7 GAMBIT

Gardner, Dale,

Gemini III,

Gemini program, , , ,

abort procedures,

computer systems,

heat shield,

Gemini-B capsule, , , , , ,

Gemini X, –46,

General Dynamics

F-16,

YF-16,

General Electric, , ,

J79, , ,

J85,

George Air Force Base,

Gilruth, Robert, , ,

Glenn, John, , , ,

g-loads, , , ,

Glushko, Valentin,

GPS T-27 simulator,

Gray, Dick, –17, ,

Greene, Jay,

Griggs, Dave, ,

Grissom, Gus, , , , , ,

Grumman Aerospace Corporation, , ,

A-6 Intruder, –37,

bids to build Shuttle,

F-14A Tomcat,

Gulfstream G-II,

HU-16B Albatross amphibian,

TBM Avenger,

Guam, , , , , ,

Haise, Fred "Freddo"

acoustic stress concerns, –9

Apollo ,

Apollo , –77, –81

appointed as STS-3 crew,

crashes "Vibrator," , –24, –47

joins Grumman Aerospace Corporation,

Shuttle abort procedures,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, –55, , , , –69, , –77

Shuttle program, , –47,

Skylab rescue plans, –85,

Haleakalā, Mount, ,

Halley's Comet,

HAL/S (coding language),

Hamilton Standard (parts supplier),

Handley-Page HP.115,

Harper, Jimmy,

Harris, Hugh,

Hart, Terry, ,

Hartsfield, Hank,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , ,

Columbia's flight control system,

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder, –26, –32

MOL program, , , , , ,

NASA selection,

selected as STS crew, ,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, ,

Skylab, –11

Space Shuttle program, –21

STS-1 CapCom, , –91, , , , –26, –32

STS-1 launch preparations, ,

STS-4, , –78

Hauck, Rick

applies to NASA, –97

assigned as STS-1 support crew,

emergency procedure checklists,

STS-1 CapCom, , , –56, ,

STS-1 launch preparations,

STS-26,

Hawaii, , ,

Hearth, Don,

heat shields, Apollo program, , , ,

heat shields, Gemini program, ,

heat shields, Shuttle program

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –6, –84, –329, –37, , –52,

construction concerns, –12,

densification, –23

development and construction, , , , –33, , –86, , ,

John Houbolt's concern over, –47, –50

loss of Columbia, –92

materials tested for, –34,

on-orbit repair kit, , , , –35

RTV,

testing,

helicopters, , , , , ,

Sikorsky RH-35D Sea Stallion, –26

Westland Whirlwind,

Herres, Bob, ,

HEXAGON, , ,

See also KH-9 HEXAGON

Hickam Air Force Base, , , –44

Hindenburg,

Hoften, James "Ox" van, ,

Holmes, Oliver Wendell,

Honolulu, Hawaii,

Hornet, USS, ,

Houbolt, John,

concern over Shuttle's heat shield, , , –50,

lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), –46

Houston. See Manned Space Flight Center, Houston (MSFC)

Houston, Captain Sam,

Hubble, Edwin,

See also telescopes

Hughes Aerospace Company,

Hutchinson, Neil, , , , , ,

IBM. See computer systems

Imperial Airways,

Independence, USS,

International Astronautical Federation,

International Space Station,

Iranian Embassy siege (1980), –25, ,

IRIS tracker, , ,

Israel, ,

Iven Kincheloe award (1977),

Johns-Manville (fiberglass manufacturer),

Johnson, Caldwell,

Johnson, Kelly,

Johnson, Lyndon B.,

Johnson Space Center, , , ,

Jungle Training School,

Jupiter, ,

Karman line,

Kazakh Steppes,

KB Energomash,

Keldysh, Mstislav,

Kennedy, John F., , , , ,

Kennedy Space Center, , –49

accident on Pad A, –44

Challenger, –91

Columbia arrives at, –11,

first Shuttle landing,

MOL program,

preparation for Columbia's launch, , ,

recovery convoy,

Shuttle launch facility, –90

STS-1 landing,

STS-1 launch, –70

KENNEN. See KH-11 KENNEN

Kerwin, Joe, , , ,

KEYHOLE (spy satellite program), , , , ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –82, –90, , , –11, –18, , , –37

failings of,

MOL program, , –40,

security, ,

Skylab,

Vandenberg Air Force Base,

See also individual satellites (KH)

KGB,

KH-4 CORONA (Discoverer), –38, , ,

CIA develops replacement,

Discoverer 0,

Discoverer 1, –35

Discoverer 2,

Discoverer 3,

Discoverer 13,

Discoverer 14, –36

USSR reconnaissance,

KH-7 GAMBIT, –38

KH-8 GAMBIT, ,

KH-8 GAMBIT-3 (G3), ,

assists Skylab, , , –18

KH-9 HEXAGON, –59, , , ,

cancellation of, –60

design, , ,

launch, , –63,

KH-10 DORIAN, , –33, –40, , , ,

KH-11 KENNEN, , –62, , –4, –25

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –90, , , –11, –18, , , –37

development of, ,

launch, –4, –25,

KH-12 Advanced KENNEN (CRYSTAL/IKON), ,

Khomeini, Ayatollah, –25

Kiker, John, –27

Kindley Field Naval Air Station, –84

Kissinger, Henry, ,

Kleinknecht, Kenny,

Knoche, Hank,

Kokee Park tracking station,

kosmolyot,

Kosygin, Alexei,

Kraft, Chris, , ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield,

and Hans Mark, –57

heat shield development, , ,

John Houbolt's concern over Columbia, ,

meets NASA's TFNGs,

Shuttle development, , ,

Shuttle Training Aircraft program, ,

state of Shuttle program, –20

STS-1 launch,

STS-1 reentry and landing,

Kranz, Gene, ,

Apollo  reentry,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –87, , , , , , –29, –37, ,

press conferences,

Kranz Doctrine, ,

Kubrick, Stanley (2001: A Space Odyssey),

Kuiper, Gerard P.,

Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO), –41, , –44, –54

STS-1 reentry and landing, –48

systems failure,

Kulpa, Major-General John, , –89,

Land, Edwin, –36

landing

Approach and Landing tests, , –88

landing gear, –26

landing simulations, –37

Langley Research Center, , , –47

Larsen, Dr.,

Lawrence, Bob, , ,

Lawyer, Dick, –30,

Learjet,

Lee, Dottie

Apollo ,

begins work on Space Shuttle concept, –4, –51

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , , , –301

final presentation to Walt Williams,

LeMay, General Curtis, ,

Leonov, Alexei,

Lewis, Chuck, ,

Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory,

Liberty Star (recovery ship),

Liebergot, Sy,

Life magazine, ,

Lindberg, Charles,

Ling-Temco-Vought Company,

Livermore Laboratory, –88,

Lockheed Corporation, , , ,

A-12 OXCART, ,

bids to build Shuttle,

C-5A Galaxy, ,

C-130 Hercules, ,

C-141 Starlifter, , –41, –44, –54,

EC-130,

F-104 Starfighter, , , , –28, , , ,

F-117 Nighthawk, ,

heat shield, , –86

JC-130B,

Jetstar,

large space telescope (LST),

NF-104 AeroSpace Trainer,

NT-33,

P-80 Shooting Star,

Shuttle airframe testing,

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft,

Shuttle Training Aircraft,

Skunk Works, , , ,

SR-1 ejection seat,

SR-71 Blackbird, , , ,

T-33, ,

U-2 (spyplane), , ,

Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor,

Los Alamos Laboratories,

Los Angeles Air Force Base, ,

Lousma, Jack, , –85, ,

Lovell, Jim, , , –80,

Lovell, Marilyn,

Lozino-Lozinskiy, Gleb,

Luftwaffe,

Lunar and Planetary Laboratory,

lunar landing training vehicle ("Flying Bedstead"),

lunar module,

Apollo program,

Aquarius, , , , , ,

Orion, –95, ,

simulators,

lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), –46

Lunar Rover buggy,

Lyulka AL-31 turbofan,

M113 tracked armored personnel carrier,

MacLean, Alistair (Ice Station Zebra), ,

Macleay, Mac, –30, , ,

Mahe, Seychelles, , ,

Malabar Test Facility, , ,

manned maneuvring unit,

Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), –33, –44, , ,

closure of project, –58, –61

computer systems,

costs, –53

DORIAN, –33, –40, , ,

launch, ,

"Magnificent Eight," –30,

Manned Space Flight Center, Houston (MSFC), –51, , –70, –86, –38, –64, –36, –58, –98, –39, –62, –75

Apollo program,

Faget introduces Space Shuttle concept, –4

Firing Room , , , ,

Flight Control, , , , , ,

Launch Control, , , , , ,

Shuttle's computer systems,

Space Shuttle program,

Structures and Mechanics Division (Building )

airframe testing, –8

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , , , , –25,

heat shield construction concerns, ,

heat shield testing,

See also Astronaut Office (NASA); Johnson Space Center; Mission Control

manned spaceflight engineers (MSEs),

Mark, Hans, , ,

at Ames Research Center, , –100, , –63, , ,

appointed Air Force Secretary, , –21

appointed deputy administrator of NASA,

appointed director of NRO, , –4, ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –82, , , , ,

Freedom space station,

Hans-o-grams,

heat shield design concerns,

heat shield development, , , , , ,

Hubble Telescope,

interest in intelligent life, –64

interest in space,

MSEs,

Payload Specialists, ,

seeks extra money and time for Shuttle program, –21

Shuttle crew selection,

Shuttle's future under Reagan, –41

Shuttle's launch location,

Skylab, –22

Space Shuttle program, –89, , –22

spy satellites,

STS-1, , –57, , –74

USAF and CIA's resistance to Shuttle, –88

"The Utility of Military Man in Space," –14

and Wernher von Braun, –89, ,

Mark, Herman,

Mark, Marion, ,

Mars, , –67,

Marshall Space Flight Center, –100,

acoustic stress testing, ,

development of Shuttle's engines, , ,

engine testing, , ,

Skylab, ,

Space Simulation Branch,

Wernher von Braun at,

Martin

NB-57 Canberra bomber,

WB-57F, ,

Martin-Marietta (manufacturers), , –46, , , ,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),

Mathematica Inc. (consultants), –90

Mattingly, T. K., ,

Apollo ,

Apollo ,

appointed STS crew,

STS-4, , –78

Maui Optical Station, , –97, ,

Mayo, Major R. H.,

McBride, Jon

applies to NASA, –97

Chase Air Force, , –17, –33,

STS-1 launch, , ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , , –53, –56, –68

Vietnam War, –96

McCall, Roy,

McDonnell

F-4H-1 Phantom II, –10,

F-101 Voodoo,

McDonnell-Douglas,

Apollo 1 fire, –54

bids to build Shuttle,

DC-10,

F-4 Phantom II, –10, , , ,

F-15 Eagle, , ,

F/A-18,

MOL space station,

Skylab, ,

McLucas, John, ,

McMurtry, Tom, ,

McNamara, Robert, , ,

Mercury program, , –24, , , ,

Mercury Seven, , –14, , , ,

Merritt Island, Florida, , –7

Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet,

Michener, James A.,

Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau (MiG), , , ,

MiG-25 "Foxbat,"

MiG 105.11 "Lapot,"

Milky Way,

Mill, Jerry, ,

missiles

Atlas,

ICBMs,

Minuteman ballistic program,

Polaris,

R-7 intercontinental, ,

Redstone missile,

Tomahawk,

V-2 ballistic, , ,

Mission Control

Apollo , –79, ,

Apollo ,

Columbia's auxiliary power units (APUs), –39,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , , , , , –37

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder, –26, –31

Columbia's reaction control system burns, –5, –15, –22

development flight instrumentation (DFI),

loss of Columbia,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, ,

Skylab, ,

STS-1, , , , , , –15

STS-1 launch, , , , , , ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , –49, , , –56, , –62, , , , –72,

wake-up music, ,

missions. See specific STS mission

Moffett Field, California,

Mojave Desert, California, –77,

moon missions, ,

Apollo ,

Apollo , –65, –101,

Apollo , –95

Apollo ,

landing simulations,

Moonraker (film), –14

Morgenstern, Oskar, ,

Moser, Tom,

airframe testing, –8

Apollo  flag, –101

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , , , , , , –25, , , ,

John Houbolt's concern over Columbia, –47,

on-orbit tile repair kits,

searches for solution to heat shield concerns, , , , –23, ,

Shuttle's heat shield development, –3,

Shuttle's payload bay doors,

STS-1 launch, ,

STS-1 reentry and landing,

Mueller, George, , , –70

Mullane, Mike, –90

Mullite,

Mullon, Nick, ,

Multimission Modular Spacecraft,

NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). See NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

Ames Research Center,

announces Shuttle manufacturer, –6

announces STS-1 crew, –83

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project,

astronaut corps,

astronaut selection and training, , , , , –62, , , –98, –15

budgets,

changes name from NACA, –12

chooses Shuttle Approach and Landing test crew, –53

Faget introduces Space Shuttle concept to,

formation of,

ground stations,

Hans Mark appointed deputy administrator,

Mars mission,

Mercury, –24,

moon missions, , , , ,

MSC-040 Space Shuttle design,

need for USAF support over Space Shuttle, , , –74,

plans successor to Apollo program, ,

pressure on Space Shuttle program,

proposes Space Shuttle,

public image,

Space Shuttle costings, –21

space station plans,

Space Task Group, , , , , , ,

X-15 program, –26

National Photographic Interpretation Center,

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), ,

Aerospace Data Facility East, ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , ,

foundation, ,

four  satellite system,

Hans Mark as director, , –4, ,

KEYHOLE coding system,

Pete Aldridge as director,

security classifications, ,

Skylab, , , –98

Space Shuttle as launch vehicle for spy satellites, –89,

spy satellite network, , , , , –89,

USSR invades Czechoslovakia,

USSR reconnaissance, –40

See also individual satellites (KH)

National Security Council,

National Space Technology Laboratories, ,

Naval Surface Weapons Center,

Nelson, George "Pinky," –33, , , ,

Neptune,

Neubeck, Greg, –30

Neumann, John von, –90

New Hampshire satellite tracking stations,

Newton, Sir Isaac, –97

NII-I design bureau (USSR),

Nimoy, Leonard,

9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing,

Nixon, Richard

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project,

approves Space Shuttle program, –92,

KH-11 KENNEN,

Mars mission, –67

MOL program, , , –59,

Space Shuttle program, , , , , ,

Space Task Group, ,

Nomex felt,

NORAD air defence radar,

North American Aviation, ,

Apollo program, –6

B-25 Mitchell,

B-45 Tornado,

F-86 Sabre,

P-51 Mustang,

RA-5C Vigilante,

T-6 Texan,

X-15, , ,

air-launching,

engines,

history,

influence on the Shuttle design, ,

Joe Engle and, , –26, , ,

maximum altitude,

pilot ejection,

X-15 program, –26, , , ,

XB-70 Valkyrie, , ,

North American Rockwell. See Rockwell International

Northrop

B-2 Spirit,

T-38 Talon, , , , , , , ,

at Aerospace Research Pilots School,

Challenger disaster, –90

Chase Air Force, –17, –33, , , , , , –65, , –68

Columbia leaves Rockwell,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , , , –76

STS-1 launch,

NPO Energiya,

Nygren, Rick, ,

Oceana Naval Air Station,

Odom, James, –46

Odyssey (command module),

O'Neill, Gerald,

Operation EAGLE CLAW, –26

orbital velocity, –98

orbital maneuvering systems (OMS), , , , –79, ,

pods, , , , ,

Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF), , , , –88

orbiters. See orbiters by name and components

Order of the Elephant membership,

Orion. See lunar module

Orroral Valley ground station, , , , ,

Overmyer, Bob

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, , , ,

Challenger disaster,

MOL program,

NASA selection,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , , , , –76

STS-5,

Packard, David,

Page, George,

Pan-Am International,

Panama Canal Zone,

pararescue jumpers (PJs), –60,

PASS. See computer systems

Patrick Air Force Base, , , , ,

Patuxent River Naval Air Station, , , ,

Payload Specialists, , ,

Peenemunde rocket research facility,

Perkin-Elmer (manufacturers), , ,

Peterson, Bruce,

Peterson, Don

MOL program, , , , –61

NASA selection,

Space Shuttle program, –21,

Phillips, Hewitt,

Phillips, Major General Sam,

pilot-induced oscillation (PIO), , , ,

Pioneer, ,

Pioneer ,

Pioneer ,

Pluto, ,

Pompidou, George,

Pontiac Catalina V8,

Pratt & Whitney

J52 turbojets,

JT8D-15 turbofans,

Space Shuttle engines, , ,

TF-33-P-7 turbofans,

XLR-129,

probes. See Pioneer; Voyager

Program 1010. See KH-11 KENNEN

Project HIGH JUMP, –10, ,

Puddy, Don, , , , , ,

quarantine, ,

Quito, ,

rainbirds,

RD-170 (Soviet rocket engine),

reaction control system (RCS), –52, , , ,

Reaction Motors XLR99 (engine),

Readers Digest,

Readout Ridge, Kodiak, Alaska, ,

Reagan, Ronald, , ,

assassination attempt, ,

Freedom space station, –84

STS-4,

reconnaissance satellites

benefits of spy satellite program,

and Columbia's heat shield, –90, , , –11, –17, , , , –37

NRO security classifications, ,

NRO unmanned spy satellites,

and Skylab, –18

Space Shuttle as launch vehicle, –89,

See also individual satellites (KH)

recovery convoy, , , –70

reinforced carbon-carbon, –34

Remote Maneuvering Unit (RMU),

Republic F-105 Thunderchief, ,

Rickenbacker, Eddie,

Ried, Bob,

Roberts, Lee,

Rocket Ridge,

Rocketdyne, –86, , , , , , ,

Aerospike,

J-2,

rockets

K65M-RB5,

Proton-K,

UA1205 (booster),

See also Saturn; Titan-series rockets

Rockwell International,

builds Columbia, ,

builds Enterprise, –6, , ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, ,

computer systems, ,

Enterprise construction and delivery, ,

Flight Simulation Lab (FSL),

former name (North American Rockwell), –6

Orbiter Processing Facility,

OV-10 Bronco,

Saul Bass logo,

Shuttle's heat shield, , ,

wins bid to build Shuttle, –6

Rockwell-Standard,

Rogers Commission,

Rogers Dry Lake Bed, ,

Enterprise's first flight, –68,

STS-1 lands at, , , –67

STS-2 lands at,

Rolls-Royce Spey (Shuttle Training Aircraft engine),

Rota Naval Station, , ,

Royal Air Force,

Royal Aircraft Establishment, ,

Sagan, Carl,

SALT II Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (1979), ,

Salyut ,

Salyut , ,

Sänger, Eugen, –42

Santa Susana, California,

Saratoga, USS,

Satellite Test Center. See Sunnyvale Air Force Base

satellites

benefits of spy satellite program,

and Columbia's heat shield, –90, , , –11, –17, , , , –37

NRO security classifications, ,

NRO unmanned spy satellites,

and Skylab, –18

Space Shuttle as launch vehicle, –89,

See also individual satellites (KH)

Saturn,

1B, ,

1C, ,

Saturn V, , , , ,

Apollo ,

assembly of, , , –38

cost of,

development,

engines, ,

failure of,

landing on the moon, –46

Skylab, –56,

voyages to the Moon,

SCAPE (self-contained atmospheric protection ensemble) suits,

Schaffer, Phil,

Schirra, Wally,

Schmitt, Jack, ,

Science Advisory Committee, –15

Scobee, Dick,

Shah of Iran, –25

Shaw, Brewster,

Shepard, Alan, , , ,

Short Brothers C-Class Flying Boats,

Short-Mayo Composite,

Shuttle Avionics Integrated Laboratory (SAIL), ,

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), –28, , , , , , ,

Challenger,

Columbia leaves Rockwell,

Enterprise,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, –68, –73

Shuttle Main Simulator

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder,

manual ascent, –28

Shuttle abort procedures,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, –54, –57, –60,

STS-1 practice,

Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), –37, –60, , , , ,

landing approaches,

STS-1 preparations,

STS-1 reentry and landing,

Sikorsky RH-53D Sea Stallion. See helicopters

Silbervogel. See spaceplanes

silica tiles. See heat shields, Shuttle program

Silvera, Milton, , , , –74

simulation supervisors (SimSups)

Engle and Truly wind up,

Prince Charles visit, –75

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, ,

test flight safety issues, –28

transatlantic abort landing, ,

simulators

Ames Research Center, –32

Apollo  simulations,

GPS T-27 simulator,

lunar landing training vehicle,

malfunctioning flight recorder simulations,

Martin-Marietta's zero-g,

Shuttle Main Simulator, , –54, –57, –60, , –75, –201, –28, ,

Space Shuttle abort procedures, –201

Space Shuttle landing, –37

STS-1 practice, , , ,

Six-Day War (1967),

6594th Test Group, , , ,

Skunk Works (Lockheed facility), , ,

Skunk Works (Max Faget's), –50, ,

Skylab, , ,

assisted by GAMBIT-3, , –18

computer systems, –10,

development of, –69, ,

launch and problems, –20,

micrometeoroid shields, –14, , –19

rescue plans, –84, , , ,

Skylab

develops problem in orbit, –13, , –19

launch,

operation to fix, –20,

Skylab , , , , –20, ,

Skylab ,

Skylab ,

Slayton, Deke,

Apollo crew selections, , –82

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, , , ,

astronaut recruitment, ,

Columbia arrives at Kennedy Space Center,

Columbia leaves Rockwell,

MOL crew, , –66, ,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , , , , , ,

Smith, Dick,

Society of Experimental Test Pilots,

solid rocket boosters (SRB), , ,

construction, ,

design, , , , –94, –3

modifications,

separation and jettisoning, , –70

shock waves,

Soviet Shuttle program, , –55, –5, , –80

Soviet Union. See USSR

Space and Missile Systems Organization, ,

Space Clipper (vehicle),

Space Object Identification,

space race, –12, ,

Space Shuttle program

airframe, ,

bonding tiles to, , ,

design, , , –8, , , , ,

testing, –8

Approach and Landing tests, , –88

approved by Nixon, –92

concept, –4, –51, , , –70, –74

costings, , , –96, –21,

crew selection, , –83,

Critical Design Review,

design, ,

flight control system, , , ,

fly-by-wire technology, , ,

glide ratio, –25

Lambert Steering,

launch facility, –90

as launch vehicle of spy satellites, –89,

MSC-036A design,

MSC-040 design, ,

names, , , –56,

North American Rockwell appointed manufacturer, –6

payload, –74, , ,

problems of transporting Shuttle,

resistance to from USAF and CIA, –88

reusability of,

Skylab rescue plans, –85, ,

wing design, , , ,

See also individual components, STS missions and orbiters by name

Space Shuttle Support Operations,

space sickness, ,

space stations, ,

Freedom space station, –84

International Space Station,

Salyut ,

Salyut , ,

Spacelab, , ,

See also Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL); Skylab

Space Task Group

founding, , , –56,

mission to Mars, ,

NASA's space station plans, ,

Spacelab, , ,

spaceplanes

BoMi,

Buran BTS-002, , –80

Silbervogel ("Silverbird"/"Amerika Bomber"),

Spiral (BOR-4), , , –5,

X-15. See North American Aviation

X-20 Dyna-Soar. See Boeing

See also Space Shuttle program

Sputnik

first flight, –12, , , , , ,

as inspiration, , ,

spy satellites

benefits of,

and Columbia's heat shield, –90, , , –11, –17, , , , –37

LACROSSE,

NRO security classifications, ,

NRO unmanned spy satellites,

and Skylab, –18

Space Shuttle as launch vehicle, –89,

See also individual satellites (KH)

spyplanes

SR-71 Blackbird, , , ,

U-2, , ,

Stafford, Lieutenant-General Tom, , , , , , , –14

Stalin, Joseph,

Stalin, Vasily,

Stankyavichus, Rimantas,

Stanley, Pete, ,

Star City (Soviet training base), –48

Star Trek, , –56, ,

Star Wars, ,

Storms, Harrison "Stormy," –6

strain isolation pad (SIP), ,

Strategic Air Command, –16

Strategic Defense Initiative,

Strategic Interplanetary System,

Strategic Lunar System,

Strategic Orbital System,

STS-1

countdown test,

crew announced, –83

flight scheduled, , ,

launch, –72

launch preparations, , , , –45, , –52

in orbit, –339, –51

press conferences, –40, , , –87, , –29, –34

recovery convoy, , , –70

reentry and landing, , , –48, –73

Shuttle to ground voice transmissions,

simulations, , ,

STS-2, , –77,

STS-3,

STS-4, –78

STS-5,

STS-7,

STS-8,

STS-9, –83

STS-26,

STS-62A, –89,

STS-107,

Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker,

Sullivan, Kathy, –15, ,

Sunnyvale Air Force Base

Building ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , –96, , , , , ,

Program "S," ,

Satellite Control Facility (Blue Cube), , –54, , , , , , , , , ,

satellite integration,

Satellite Test Center,

security,

Skylab, , ,

STS-1, , ,

Swigert, Jack,

Apollo , –77, –80

TACAN beacons,

TALENT (aerial reconnaissance imagery), –40, , ,

Task Force ,

Taylor, Jim, –30

Tehran, Iran, –26, ,

telescopes

Anderson Peak DMI, , , ,

Chandra Space Telescope,

large space telescope (LST) (Hubble Space Telescope), –89,

TEAL AMBER, –84, –6, , ,

TEAL BLUE, –84, ,

tracking, –84, , , –6, , , , ,

Teller, Edward,

thermal protection system. See heat shields, Shuttle program

thermal stress, –4, ,

Thiokol (manufacturers), , , ,

Thompson, Bob, , , ,

Thompson, J. R.,

Thule Air Base, , –16

Thule tracking station (Operating Location Five),

Time magazine, ,

Titan -B launch vehicle,

Titan IIIC, , –41,

Titan IIID, –93, ,

Titan IIIM, ,

Titan-34D,

Titanic,

titanium, , –4

Titanium Corporation of America,

Titov, Gherman,

Tropical Survival School,

Truly, Cody, –58, ,

Truly, Dick,

at Aerospace Research Pilots School,

Apollo ,

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, , –40,

appointed as STS-1 crew, ,

Challenger disaster, –91

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –78, , , –37

Columbia's malfunctioning flight recorder, ,

at Edwards Air Force Base, ,

emergency procedure checklists,

Hans Mark,

KH-11 KENNEN,

meets new NASA applicants,

MOL program, , , , , –44, , –58, , , ,

NASA selection, –68

Shuttle abort procedures, , –31

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, –56, , , , –74, ,

Shuttle's computer systems, ,

simulator practice, , ,

Skylab, , –10, , , , , –20,

Space Shuttle program, ,

STS-1 in orbit, –78

STS-1 launch, , , , ,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , , ,

STS-2, –77,

STS-8,

transatlantic abort landing, –32

water survival training, –44

TRW (defense contractor),

Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, –98

Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" bomber,

Twentieth Century Fox,

Twinting, William "Ted,"

Unionville, Missouri,

Uranus,

US Air Force

Air Force Space Command,

BoMi,

Century series fighters,

Challenger disaster,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, –82, , –97, , –18, –23, –29, –37,

concerns over heat shield construction, ,

Consolidated Space Operations Center,

CORONA/Discoverer, –38, ,

drone programs,

Flight Surgeon's Guide,

future of Space Shuttle,

GAMBIT, –38,

Hans Mark appointed Secretary,

importance of Shuttle to national security, ,

ISINGLASS (rocket glider program),

loss of Columbia, –92

LUNEX (mission proposal),

manned spaceflight engineers (MSEs),

merits of reusable winged spacecraft,

military space program, –15, –29

Minuteman ballistic missile program,

pararescue jumpers (PJs), –60,

resistance to Space Shuttle program, –89,

Satellite Control Facility, –54,

satellite development, –54

Shuttle Carrier Aircraft,

Shuttle testing,

Skylab, –18

Space and Missile Systems Organization,

Space Shuttle program, , , , , ,

spy satellite program, –89, –25, –88

TALENT, –40

tracking telescopes, –84,

Tropical Survival School,

unmanned space program,

view of astronauts,

view of Space Shuttle program, , , –74

X-15 program, –26, ,

X-20 Dyna-Soar, , ,

See also Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL)

US Army,

US Navy, ,

Apollo ,

MOL program, ,

NRO,

Project HIGH JUMP, –10,

Shuttle testing,

VA-72 "Blue Hawks,"

VF-33 Naval Air Squadron,

VF-103 squadron,

USSR

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, , –40,

CORONA/Discoverer program (KH-4), –36

Gagarin becomes first man in space,

intelligence gathering,

invades Czechoslovakia,

Salyut ,

satellite reconnaissance of,

Soviet Shuttle program, , –55, –5, , –80

space race, –12, , ,

Sputnik's first flight, –12

titanium,

US satellite reconnaissance of, –40

US Shuttle program, , , –55, ,

Ustinov, Dmitry,

Vandenberg Air Force Base, , , , –26,

GAMBIT-3, , ,

KH-11 KENNEN, –62,

KH-9 HEXAGON,

MOL Space Station,

Moonraker (film), –14

Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF), –88

Shuttle launch facility, , , , , ,

SLC-6 ("Slick Six"), –55, ,

Space and Missile Systems Organization,

Space Shuttle launch, , ,

Western Test Range, , , ,

Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), –38, ,

Venus,

Verne, Jules,

Vickers Valiant,

Vietnam War, , , , , –98,

Viking (lander),

VIRTUS (aircraft proposal),

Volgograd Cosmodrome,

Volk, Igor,

Vostok  capsule,

Vought F-8 Crusader, , , , , ,

Voyager,

Vultee BT-13 Valiant ("Vibrator"), –24

Wang Hu, –93

Waterson, Brett,

weightlessness, training for, –20

Weinberger, Caspar, –91

Weitz, Paul, , , –16, –19,

Western Test Range. See Vandenberg Air Force Base

Westland Whirlwind. See helicopters

White, Ed, , , ,

White, Robert,

White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, –61, , , ,

Williams, Walt,

wind tunnels, , , , , ,

Ames Research Center, , , , , ,

Wolford, William, ,

World War Two Glider Pilots Association,

WS-117L. See KH-4 CORONA (Discoverer)

X-15. See North American Aviation

X-20 Dyna-Soar. See Boeing

Yardley, John, , ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, , , ,

heat shield development, , ,

Yarragadee, Western Australia, , , , , ,

Yeager, Colonel Chuck, , –60

Aerospace Research Pilots School, –18, , , ,

attempts world altitude record,

Bell X-1,

and Joe Engle, , ,

military space program, –29

MOL program, ,

Young, John,

abort procedures, , –40

Apollo ,

Apollo , –64,

Apollo , –77, –79, ,

Apollo , , , –95, , , , , , ,

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ,

applies to and joins NASA,

appointed STS-1 crew, , , –92, ,

Chase Air Force,

as Chief Astronaut, –38, ,

Columbia's damaged heat shield, ,

enters preflight quarantine, ,

Gemini III,

Gemini X, –46

and Gus Grissom,

joins US Navy, –11

moon landing simulation,

NASA's TFNGs, , ,

on-orbit tile repairs, –35

press conferences, –40, ,

Project HIGH JUMP, –10, ,

Shuttle abort procedures, –201, , –31,

Shuttle Approach and Landing tests, , –54, –61, ,

Shuttle Training Aircraft,

Shuttle's engines,

Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, , –94

simulator practice, , ,

Space Shuttle program, ,

STS-1, , , , ,

STS-1 in orbit, , –339, –51

STS-1 launch, –72

STS-1 launch preparations, , –39, , , , –56,

STS-1 reentry and landing, , , –47, –68, , –74

STS-9, –83

Young, Susy, ,

zero-g, ,

Zhukovsky Flight Test Center,

Zond 5 (probe),

Touchstone

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Copyright © 2016 by Project Cancelled Ltd.

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