How to Pilot the Hottest Ship in the Skies

By James Kelly

As commander of Apollo 16, John Young was walking on the moon on April 21, 1972, when Mission Control radioed the good news: the U.S. House of Representatives had just approved funding for a space shuttle program. Looking like a great panda in his space suit, Young jumped up and down and then saluted the American flag freshly staked into the moon. Proclaimed Young as millions of TV viewers looked on: "The country needs that shuttle mighty bad."

Today, nearly nine years later, Young, now 50, is ready to command the Columbia space shuttle on its maiden voyage, scheduled for March. A former Navy jet pilot who retired in 1976 with the rank of captain, Young logged four trips into outer space between 1965 and 1972. His co-pilot in Columbia will be Robert Crippen, 43, a Navy captain and jet pilot. The two have more than 12,000 hours flying time and an almost boyish sense of excitement about getting the chance to control the most sophisticated flying machine ever built.

Young and Crippen are just two of the 80 astronauts now being trained for shuttle flights at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. Most were selected from more than 11,000 applicants over the past three years. Of the group, 47 are pilots and the rest are mission specialists--mostly scientists and physicians who will operate the equipment aboard the shuttle. The trainees include eight women, three blacks, one Hispanic, and the world's first husband and wife astronauts, William and Anna Fisher.

With the other pilots, Young and Crippen began full-time training in January 1978. Each has received 25 hours of formal instruction a week in such subjects as navigation and astronomy, but each also spends many more hours poring over what Astronaut Crew Trainer Thomas Kaiser calls the "cookbook"--a 21-volume compendium of launch, orbit and descent procedures for piloting Columbia that will be on board during the flight. The manual is changed constantly; in the office shared by Young and Crippen is a stack of mimeographed revisions 2 1/2 ft. high. The two men have also spent more than 1,200 hours working in elaborate mock-ups of the Columbia's flight decks, familiarizing themselves with the maze of switches and the five computers that run the ship.

To accustom themselves to the weightlessness of space, Young and Crippen have donned pressurized suits and entered a water tank, where they performed flight operations in an orbiter model. But perhaps the most important drills have involved the crucial moments of takeoff and landing. Unless the blast-off is precise, says Young, "you can almost leave the wings sitting on the ground. You have to thread that needle very carefully." The risk in landing is that Columbia will swoop down with no power; there would thus be no way of correcting a mistake.

To get a realistic sense of flying the shuttle, the two men are spending hours piloting a Boeing 707 to get the feel of a massive aircraft. They fly a nimble Gulfstream II outfitted with thrust reversers and side-force generators, to practice tricky touchdowns. They pilot a jet trainer adjusted to drop with a sudden lurch. The two pilots have also flown mission after mission in a simulator so realistic that three-dimensional views of space and the earth are flashed in the cockpit windows. While testing the pilots, the planners make sure what ever can go wrong does go wrong.

"We've taken advantage of some of the delays to really put ourselves in a much better position to handle just about every contingency," says Crippen. Adds Young: "For example, what if you lost two of the shuttle's three main engines? The thinking was you had lost the whole vehicle. But now we've found we could land."

Crippen likes to quote Young's remark, "If you're not nervous, you don't understand what's happening." But both men are looking forward eagerly to the moment when they will "thread the needle" with Columbia as they blast off from Cape Canaveral and then come plummeting down for their one and only pass at the runway 54 hours later. Says Young: "Unbelievable!"

--By James Kelly Reported by Joseph N. Boyce/Houston

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce/Houston

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.