Milk Run To the Heavens

By Frank Trippett

A round-trip truck and bus for space

Hail Columbia, officially designated a Space Transportation System (S.T.S.), and known as the space shuttle or the shuttle orbiter for short. The shuttle, to make it even shorter, is the most powerful and complicated craft ever put together by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Apollo capsules that went to the moon are Model T artifacts in comparison. Columbia, with booster rockets and fuel tank, weighs 2.7 million Ibs.; it is controlled by computers loaded with more than 600,000 lines of exquisitely precise program codes; it has pumps the size of trash cans that can discharge superheated gases at the rate of half a ton a second. Barring the reality of flying saucers, Columbia is the most ambitious and versatile spacecraft ever contrived. Heretofore, space explorers have had to blast payloads into the heavens with rockets that later burned up, falling back to earth in showers of shrinking fragments. The shuttle will honor round-trip reservations, going up and coming down intact, not once, but time and time again, if all goes well, reducing the cost of working in space and vastly increasing its possibilities. Columbia is designed to ascend like a rocket, orbit as an all-purpose freight truck and passenger bus, ward off melting re-entry temperatures with an armor of glazed silica tiles, then land like an airplane--or like an 80-ton glider.

The Columbia seems out of this world even on earth, suggesting something the Wright brothers might have come up with if they had been utterly ignorant of aerodynamics. ("Wilbur, why don't we put some little wings on that silo?" "Let's give it a try, Orville.") Actually, the space shuttle brings to mind a bloated, brick-covered DC-9, except that when "stacked" (as the space people say) on the launch pad with its enormous fuel tank and two crayon-shaped rocket boosters, it forms a surreal ensemble that could easily be passed off as the Intergalactic Hilton in a hokey sci-fi movie.

Yet the Columbia looked gorgeous, nothing less, to its creators who watched--along with the first scheduled pilots, John Young and Robert Crippen--as it lumbered onto its pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral one chilly day last week. Said NASA Director Robert Frosch: "We are now at the threshold of a new capability to investigate the universe."

The shuttle that is to orbit at speeds up to 17,500 m.p.h. was trundled to its lift off site on a massive crawler-tractor that took 7 1/2 hours to creep the 3 1/2 miles from the Kennedy Space Center's immense Vehicle Assembly Building. NASA's delight could be detected as far away as Houston. There, a technician watching the proceedings on television at the Johnson Space Center exclaimed what many felt: "Hey! This is for real! We're back to launching birds again." It has been a long time between shots.

Indeed, NASA has not sent a man aloft since July 1975, when three astronauts docked with two Soviet cosmonauts. Since then, manned spaceflight has been strictly a Kremlin monopoly. The Soviets have flown 19 manned missions, staying aloft as long as 185 days and performing numerous scientific experiments.

Given that American time out, small wonder that Columbia somehow looked triumphant just resting on its pad, and never mind that it was two years late getting to the launch site. It was a marvel, all political, financial and engineering realities considered, that the shuttle was there at all. Since its conception in the 1960s, there were doubts that the shuttle orbiter would ever come into being. In 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the project an unenthusiastic nod by asking a skeptical Congress for $5.15 billion. For eight Sisyphean years after North American Rockwell (now Rockwell International) got the prime contract, construction turned out to be a torment of too little money, hence too little planning; too many disasters, hence too many delays. Even some space enthusiasts began to suspect that nothing was sure to reach the stratosphere in the program except the shuttle's cost, now at $8.8 billion, $1 billion (20%) over the initial estimate after allowing for inflation. Soon the critics were sneering at the shuttle as "America's Space Lemon."

But now there it loomed against the Atlantic sky, glistening with promise, its recoverable rockets already fueled or "hot," its dominating and disposable main fuel tank soon to be filled with 139,000 gal. (1.3 million Ibs.) of liquid oxygen and 370,000 gal. (224,000 Ibs.) of liquid hydrogen. And it already was jampacked with the biggest dreams yet conjured up for extraterrestrial fulfillment. NASA's hope is that Columbia and three improved versions now in various stages of production will give the U.S. a regular commuter service to space in the 1980s. The shuttle is envisioned as a hotshot, to-and-fro pickup truck of a vehicle, a craft whose 65,000-lb. cargo hold will enable it to put a space lab into position, manned and ready to go, as well as to carry up satellites and other payloads for science, for commerce, for military purposes. Says NASA's Jesse Moore, who is coordinating the 47 flights already fully booked for the Columbia: "Once we're in operational phase and can guarantee a flight schedule, the commercial opportunities are enormous."

With room for three scientists besides the crew of four, the shuttle would be a quick way up for repairmen who would pop outside to get at equipment already orbiting. Futurists think of the shuttle as a first practical step toward the industrialization of space. There has been no stampede for commercial reservations, but there is no doubt that the shuttle could carry factory parts up, and products back, as easily as the satellites already on its schedule. Says NASA Associate Administrator Glynn S. Lunney: "The shuttle will be like an orbiting Cape Canaveral."

Still, Dream No. 1 is simply to get the shuttle up, into orbit and then safely back to earth on a 2.8-mile-long landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center or another at Edwards Air Force Base in California--or even, in an emergency, one at the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico. Fulfilling this feat cannot be breezily taken for granted. One sobering fact is that the Columbia, unlike every other U.S. spacecraft, will be launched without having undergone unmanned test flights in space; to bring it back alive, the astronauts must go along on the very first trip. If only for that reason, the launch may be the riskiest NASA has ever undertaken. The odds? John Naugle, NASA'S former top scientist and now a consultant, calls the chance for complete success a "sporting proposition." But Kenneth Kleinknecht, the shuttle orbiter manager, insists that there will be no launch until every risk has been minimized. Says Kleinknecht: "If we don't have the confidence, we won't fly it."

With a little bit of luck, and much more than a little final testing and adjusting, the Columbia team could attempt a launch as early as March, though a later date is more likely. Full-throated jubilation over Columbia must wait--and perhaps wait some more--yet the sheer presence of the shuttle on the pad at long last charged Kennedy Space Center, and the space community in general, with a mood of revived expectancy and muted exultation. No hats in the air and no drinks all around as in the old days of A-O.K. lift-offs and jubilant splashdowns. Still, the spirit of the NASA people was lifted by a palpable shot of what Kleinknecht calls "the Apollo spirit, the stuff that made Apollo work." Says he: "I think we've got it going again."

"The space shuttle is the U.S.'s launching pad into a new era of space research and manufacturing," says President Karl Harr Jr. of the Aerospace Industries Association. As such, it could help the nation reclaim the leadership in manned spaceflight that it has never relinquished in unmanned explorations, such as those of Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. Says NASA Engineer Robert Gray, mindful of the Soviet advances in recent years: "The shuttle is revolutionary. We'll catch up fast."

Columbia and the space-shuttle system it introduces could contribute substantially to the domestic economy, extend U.S. capacities to find mineral resources on earth, survey the oceans, keep track of weather patterns and help bring solar energy down to earth. The most compelling of the early projects for the shuttle will be placing in orbit in 1985, if all goes well, a 22,500-lb. telescope that, free of the haze of the earth, will be able to see seven times farther than the world's most powerful instruments and perhaps solve some riddles of the universe.

The military uses of the shuttle are not all obvious or unclassified but do clearly include the role of setting out satellites for surveillance and warning systems. Devices planted in the heavens by the shuttle could also guide missiles to a bull's-eye. Says Defense Secretary Harold Brown: "We plan to begin the transition of our operational spacecraft to shuttle launch by 1983. Our dependence on the shuttle will become critical."

Not only would the shuttle allow the U.S. to seed the skies with satellites more cheaply and accurately than it does now, it would permit astronauts to haul them aboard the craft for a return trip to the repair shop on earth. The shuttle would also give the U.S. the means of examining all satellite systems in orbit, although that is not its mission. Tampering with another nation's satellite would be regarded as a hostile act with serious consequences, and would be done only in a wartime emergency. Understandably, the Soviet Union is now working on its own shuttle system.

The U.S. shuttle should trim the costs of space exploration, vital in an era of tight budgets for programs many argue are a luxury the U.S. can scarcely afford. NASA's accountants claim that the shuttle will be able to place satellites into orbit at one-half to two-thirds the cost (upwards of $22 million) needed to do the job with conventional, expendable rockets. Many of Columbia's promises are probably as unperceived as were some development problems. But surely its success would help NASA regain some of the prestige and popular support that it needs to do half of what it would like to do.

A future with any luster at all would dazzle NASA in contrast to the notorious production history of the shuttle orbiter. Many of the troubles that cropped up during the shuttle production can be tracked to the fact that the agency was barely making do on little more than subsistence funding at the very time it wanted to move into shuttle development. NASA thought the project might run to $8 billion. Still, when offered some $3 billion less than that, the agency faked optimism, took the money and kicked off the work.

Says ex-NASA Scientist Noel Hinners, now head of the National Air and Space Museum: "To take on a technological challenge like the shuttle with penny-pinching as its major goal was just plain stupid. If you are going to break technological ground, you can't design to cost." NASA was determined to try, however, and produced a calamitous mess.

The worst mishaps kept turning up in the most vital and touchy parts of the shuttle: the engines and, above all, the tiles that form the heat shield, which had to be perfectly fashioned and installed to keep the craft from melting under the incandescent re-entry temperatures of up to 2,700DEG F. During their painful development, the engines suffered delays from blown valves, faulty welds, split fuel tubes, cracked turbine blades, splintered ball bearings. The engines blew up. They were scathed by at least five fires. A hydrogen-carrying nozzle broke, inundating an engine's innards and reducing it to a molten char. Three years ago, Rockwell, the main contractor, and NASA found themselves bogged down in such knotty problems that, after a Senate inquiry, a research team from the National Academy of Sciences had to be called in to get the engine program back on the right track.

The hyperadvanced concept of the engines, the requirement that they provide 375,000 Ibs. of lift and deal with unprecedented pressures, the fact that they were, as ex-Astronaut Thomas Stafford said, "at the furthest cutting edge of space propulsion technology"--all this helped to explain the sequence of design and performance foulups. But the whole process was handicapped because NASA--as an economy measure--had not demanded the component-by-component testing that would have been automatically called for in the former days of abundant money and redundant research.

The tiles? There are 30,761 of them, each eccentric in shape, no two alike, ranging from smaller-than-hand-size to 6 by 6 in. To provide full thermal protection they had to fit within 2/1000 to 3/1000 of an inch and be bonded to the hull of the Columbia so securely that they could withstand the turbulence and heat of a 14,000 m.p.h. reentry. But it turned out that thousands of tiles could not with stand the heat and were poorly installed as well. Solution: redesign of the padding between tiles and hull, retreatment of the tiles, reinstallation. Grief over the tiles continued for two years, in fact. When Columbia was piggybacked from the West Coast to Cape Canaveral on a Boeing 747, some 7,500 more tiles were damaged in transit. To fix them, hundreds of young technicians worked around the clock at Canaveral for months prior to last week's roll-out of Columbia.

By last week, happily and perhaps too optimistically, everybody was speaking of the production history in the past tense. While as recently as last fall Director Frosch was admitting the need for a "new management approach" for NASA and "particularly" the shuttle, he was calling the difficulties "par" for the technological course--and recalling that the Monitor and the Merrimack also had construction troubles. With Columbia reared up on its pad, it understandably was hard for anybody around Canaveral to think about anything but the future.

Yet there were other problems ahead. Filling the huge fuel tank with liquid oxygen and hydrogen would create temperatures as low as minus 423DEG F. Would they spoil the tank's fit with the spacecraft? The first 20-second test-firing of all three engines was scheduled for Feb. 9. Would something else blow, or break, or give, or ignite? And there were those pesky tiles to be checked, and rechecked, right down to blastoff. Marshall Kaplan, a former NASA flight engineer, warns that the loss of a single tile on re-entry could lead to a general, irreversible burnout. Says Kaplan: "You would lose the ship and the crew." But NASA engineers dispute Kaplan's view.

Despite the difficulties, there was still time last week to imagine the lift-off that would for the first time use solid rockets to boost men into space. Said NASA Official James Kukowski: "It's going to be a visual spectacular, more spectacular than usual. When Columbia goes up, it won't be just flames and steam as it is for the Saturn stuff. There will be huge streamers of fire and dark, billowing clouds of smoke." And, quite likely, a good deal of hoping and praying. And not a little of that anticipatory mood that was expressed last week by Congressman Don Fuqua, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee. Said he: "It will be a great day to see, after five years, the U.S. back in the manned-space business."

--By Frank Tripett. Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Washington

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington

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