What is true legacy of the space shuttle?
Bob Crippen’s heart rate jumped to 130. Countdown for the space shuttle’s maiden voyage had reached the one-minute mark, and he was strapped inside for the boldest test flight in NASA history.
Previous spacecraft — for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs — were first launched without astronauts onboard. But the shuttle was significantly more complex.
“We thought it had a better chance of success if we were there,” Crippen said.
The April 12, 1981, launch would be his first spaceflight.
Forty years ago, Crippen’s heart rate reflected a nationwide mood as his first flight coincided with the debut of an engineering marvel. The space shuttle fleet flew 135 missions over three decades, with mission control from the Johnson Space Center. Its crews built the International Space Station, repaired and upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope and carried a larger, more diverse group of people into space.
It was also expensive
and sometimes deadly. The shuttle never delivered on NASA’s early promises of flying 40 to 60 times a year, which would help bring down the cost of accessing space, and 14 people died between the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia accident in 2003.
“It left behind a mixed legacy,” said John Logsdon, a retired professor and founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “On one hand, the decision to develop it was based on a series of promises basically none of which were fulfilled. And yet it was a remarkable technological achievement and a continuing source of national pride.”
For Crippen, a Navy pilot who grew up in Porter, that first flight began like an aircraft catapult launching planes off a ship: It was a nice kick in the pants.
He launched into space with John Young. The first two minutes of the mission, dubbed STS-1, were loud, and the space shuttle Columbia shook as two solid rocket boosters propelled it upward. After the boosters detached, the ride was quiet and “smooth as glass,” Crippen said.
Chuck Lewis, a NASA flight director for later portions of the mission when the shuttle was in orbit, watched from his Clear Lake home.
So he sat on the edge of his chair and worried about the shuttle’s aerodynamics. Unlike capsules, which launched atop a long rocket in a streamlined manner, the shuttle had wings and other protruding features that would have to withstand the forces of launch.
If something went wrong during the first two minutes, Lewis knew the shuttle couldn’t abort its launch. And the ejection seats weren’t really expected to save the astronauts.
“If you eject, you’re going to eject right into a solid rocket booster tail blast,” Lewis said. “You probably would be burnt to a crisp.”
When the main engines shut off, meaning the shuttle had reached orbit, his daughter saw tears running down Lewis’ cheeks.
His shift at the Johnson Space Center began after the shuttle opened its payload bay doors — and just as Crippen reported missing heat-shield tiles on the top back of the vehicle.
“What about the tiles on the bottom?” Lewis recalled thinking. “Those are the critical ones.”
‘Technological hubris’
Developing a winged spacecraft was a giant technological leap, and the heat-shield tiles, essential for keeping the crew alive during re-entry, had long plagued the agency. Early versions of the tiles weren’t strong enough to withstand meteoroid impacts. After the tiles were strengthened, engineers struggled to keep them firmly affixed to Columbia.
The Apollo program had emboldened NASA. But when getting men to the Moon, the agency relied on brute force to escape Earth’s gravity. Its capsule landed in the ocean like a cannonball beneath parachutes. The shuttle’s
fixed wings, allowing it to glide to a runway landing, would require more sophistication.
“There was a significant degree of technological hubris in NASA’s view of what would be achievable,” Logsdon wrote in his book “After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.”
Further, there was no top-level, long-range planning for what NASA should do after Apollo until 1968, Logsdon said.
Unlike President John F. Kennedy, who threw ample resources into the Apollo program, President Richard Nixon placed human spaceflight alongside other national priorities. NASA hoped for a shuttle, moon base, space station and mission to Mars. Only the shuttle was initially approved.
The Office of Management and Budget had proposed a smaller, more experimental vehicle. But NASA argued for a larger space shuttle that would carry all U.S. missions: military, NASA and commercial.
Nixon chose the larger shuttle in 1972. He liked its ability to carry national security missions. And it created aerospace jobs ahead of his election — setting a precedent that would make jobs an important, sometimes overriding, factor for future space programs, Logsdon wrote.
Launch cadence
Between 1981 and 2011, the space shuttle flew 355 individuals into space. It carried a more diverse group of passengers, including NASA’s first female astronaut, Sally Ride, and NASA’s first African American astronaut, Guion Bluford. People representing 16 different countries flew on the shuttle.
“I don’t think there will ever be a vehicle quite like the space shuttle. It was beautiful,” said Jason Davis, editorial director at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that seeks to get more people engaged with space.
The initial intent was to launch the shuttle 40 to 60 times a year at a cost of $10.5 million per launch. The shuttle’s launch cadence peaked in 1985 with nine flights. The average annual launch rate was 4.3 a year, and the cost per launch was up to 20 times higher than the 1972 estimate, according to Logsdon’s book.
Extensive refurbishment was required after each flight. And the shuttle lost commercial customers after the Challenger accident in 1986, which prompted a change in national policy to prohibit the shuttle from launching most fare-paying satellites. Most military satellites were also removed from the shuttle and placed on rockets that launch without people onboard. Today, rockets owned by companies, not
the government, are launching satellites into orbit.
“You can lose a rocket and it’s a sad day and billions of dollars get lost,” Davis said. “But if you lose a space shuttle, you lose people. And it’s awful and tragic.”
The Department of Defense had determined many aspects of the shuttle’s design, but only 10 dedicated national security missions would fly on the shuttle.
“The increased complexity of a shuttle designed to be all things to all people created inherently greater risks than if more realistic technical goals had been set at the start,” according to a report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
In orbit
Crippen knew the shuttle was complex, and he anticipated problems on the first flight. The missing tiles didn’t really bother him. They hadn’t been tested as rigorously as the more crucial tiles on the shuttle’s belly.
He spent his two days in orbit testing the shuttle’s various systems. The toilet, unfortunately, wasn’t working properly (bags were on the shuttle as a backup).
Crippen also gave a tribute to John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole, who died after a countdown test just weeks before the shuttle’s first launch.
“They believed in the space program, and it meant a lot to them,” Crippen said while in orbit, according to a NASA transcript.
On the ground, mission control was preparing to bring the astronauts home. Ultimately, they had to trust in the shuttle’s design.
‘An amazing machine’
The design of the shuttle would become a point of pride for the nation.
“You’d be hard-pressed to say we’ve had any other spacecraft or launch vehicle in the last 40 years that’s contributed as much as the shuttle did,” said Jared Zambrano-Stout, a space policy expert with the law firm Meeks Butera & Israel. “That type of technological prowess is not something that any other country has been able to duplicate.”
The shuttle’s biggest accomplishment was building the International Space Station. But it spurred innovation on Earth, too. The shuttle’s fuel pumps inspired a miniaturized heart pump designed to keep patients alive as they waited for a transplant. Aerodynamics research conducted as part of the space shuttle program made trucks more fuel efficient, according to NASA.
The shuttle was also a predecessor for reusability before SpaceX began landing and reusing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.
In the Houston area, some 650 people working with NASA’s Johnson Space Center retired only after the shuttle took its final flight.
“People are just really passionate about the space shuttle around here,” said Jennifer RossNazzal, a historian for the Johnson Space Center. “It was an amazing machine.”
Back to Earth
George W.S. Abbey was at Edwards Air Force Base in California when the first shuttle re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. He was director of NASA’s flight operations at that time and would later become director of the Johnson Space Center.
“John (Young) was so exuberant,” he recalled. “He was jumping up and down. So excited that everything had worked as we wanted it to work.”
Abbey wished NASA would have built another winged vehicle. But that isn’t in the agency’s immediate future. NASA is using a capsule for its plans to return humans to the moon. And the Commercial Crew program, where companies own vehicles that carry astronauts to the space station, is using capsules. These turned out to be simpler and faster to design.
Double sonic booms announced that space shuttle Columbia was arriving, surprising the crowd at Edwards Air Force Base. Lewis was watching from Houston’s mission control. He recalls Young getting out of the shuttle, looking at its belly and triumphantly pumping his fist in the air. The tiles had worked.
“Then I knew we had a program,” Lewis said.