"Man, What a Feeling! What a View!"

By Frederic Golden

A spectacular launch hurls America 's shuttle, Columbia, into orbit

The morning sun glinted off the towering white trident-shaped stack. Out of the top of the great main fuel tank seeped puffs of steamy vapors, supercold droplets of liquid oxygen. Suddenly, just after dawn on Sunday, the ship's three main engines roared to life. Throttling quickly to 90% of their full 1.1 million lbs. of thrust, the engines caused the spacecraft and fuel tanks to tilt ever so slightly. Seconds later, they snapped back to vertical, and two solid-fuel rockets--fiery space-age Roman candles never before used on a manned flight--ignited, adding their full fury, 5.3 million lbs. more of thrust.

Trailing a Promethean plume of fire and smoke, the entire 18-story-high, 4.5 million-lb. package thundered off the pad, shaking the earth for miles around, a seismic jolt greater even than the tremors from the mighty Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. From the hundreds of thousands of spectators at the Kennedy Space Center came encouraging shouts: "Go, man, go!" "Smooth sailing, baby!" "Fly like an eagle!" "Oh my god, what a show!"

Into a clear blue hole in a partly overcast Florida sky the spacecraft rose, seemingly carried aloft by an ever lengthening orange-and-white column of fire and smoke. As it arched higher and higher, Astronaut Bob Crippen, 43, making his first flight into space, shouted exuberantly: "Man, what a feeling! What a view!" "Glad you're enjoying it," replied Mission Control in Houston.

So did a waiting, watching world. Two days late but this time almost precisely on its new schedule--indeed, only 3.983 sec. late, by Launch Control's incredibly accurate reckoning--the spaceship Columbia took off on man's first commuter run into the heavens. Two minutes after the flawless liftoff, the two solid-fuel boosters folded back from the 75-ton space shuttle and began to settle under parachutes about 160 miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean, only 16 miles off target, for recovery by ship and later reuse. Said Mission Control: "Columbia is now committed to space travel."

As the spacecraft accelerated, eventually to reach speeds of 17,000 m.p.h., the astronauts were pressed hard against their couches, experiencing a tug three times that of normal gravity, only half of a Saturn launch's g forces. Eight and a half minutes after the spacecraft had left the launch pad, its engines had swallowed up more than half a million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Columbia fired explosive charges to spin off its main tank, which disintegrated in a shower of fragments over the Indian Ocean, only ten miles off course, although at a higher altitude than expected. Then Columbia switched to its smaller, orbital maneuvering engines and fired a series of bursts that carried it into orbit.

It was the first time in six years that Americans had been in space, and it came 20 years to the day after Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight. But for Columbia's commander, John Young, 50, it was old hat. During the fiery, jolting liftoff, his pulse hardly climbed above 85 beats a minute; this was, after all, Young's fifth such journey, the most by any American astronaut. Allowed Young: "It shook a little sharper. The vibration was more than what we experienced in the simulator." But the rookie Crippen could barely contain his excitement--his pulse raced to 135--or find the right words to express his emotions. Looking out of Columbia's windows, he said jubilantly, "John's been telling me about it for three years, but ain't no way you can describe it. It's hard to get my head into the cockpit here to do my procedures."

As the delta-shaped spacecraft--part rocket ship, part airplane--raced around the earth at an altitude of 150 miles, its nearly perfect performance seemed a glorious vindication of more than a decade of effort and expense. Columbia's flight plan called for a 54 1/2-hr., 36-orbit mission, ending with a nerve-racking, gliding descent into California's Mojave Desert. There was every expectation that it would achieve that goal. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the spacecraft began its third orbit, Mission Control sent word that Columbia was "go" for the full flight. His ship, reported Young, "is performing just outstanding."

Even before they got their green light, the astronauts were settling in for a long haul. With almost anticlimactic ease, Crippen operated the spacecraft's big cargo bay, opening and closing and then reopening its doors. That was an essential maneuver at the start of the second orbit, allowing the ship to rid itself of internal heat from all its operations, and it was executed flawlessly. Televised pictures from space quickly showed just how well the machinery worked. Even the big engine housings in Columbia's tail were dramatically visible against the blackness of space.

But these TV views also revealed a possible hitch: a handful of the spacecraft's 30,000 or so silica tiles, essential for insulating Columbia against the flaming, 2,400DEG F heat of re-entry into the atmosphere, had fallen off. Apparently they were shaken loose during maximum vibrations in the first few moments of the launch, possibly when the solid-fuel rockets were kicked away. The tiles, about a dozen in all, came from the area just above the orbital maneuvering engines on either side of the rudder. Mission controllers quickly pointed out that this was a noncritical zone and would not interfere with the landing, though Columbia's skin was likely to be scorched where the tiles had peeled off. But they were taking no chances. The rest of the ship would be carefully scrutinized from the ground with the eagle-eyed telescopes of the U.S. Air Force's new tracking network.

By midday, after completing initial housekeeping duties, Young and Crippen, having doffed their bulky space suits, settled comfortably into their new home in the sky. On tap was their first meal in space, featuring "rehydratable" turkey tetrazzini and "thermostabilized" frankfurters. There was also a chance that the playful Crippen might take a nibble from a turkey sandwich he was said to have smuggled on board. "Their performance is just super," said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson, "I kept watching for something to go wrong, but it was pretty much picture book."

For untold millions of television watchers around the world--including President Reagan, who rose early for the launch on his first full day back at the White House after returning there from the hospital--it was an awesome show. It was all the sweeter because, for a while, it seemed that it might never take place. With the original takeoff slated for Friday morning last week, crowds had collected at Cape Canaveral before dawn, young and old, in cars and campers, in chartered buses and on motorcycles. Some had partied through the night at their roadside encampments in an outbreak of "launch fever" not seen since the days of the Apollo program, when Saturn rockets were carrying Americans to the moon. Others, stuck for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic, grumbled at motorists who tried to edge ahead of them.

But at least the traffic moved, even if only at a snail's pace. Columbia, designed to girdle the earth in 90 min., did not move at all that day. After 3 hr. 9 min. of tense waiting and conflicting reports, launch controllers passed the disappointing word. The world's first space shuttle would have to wait a while longer. Not until after dawn Sunday was there a chance that the star-crossed spacecraft, troubled throughout its development, would finally take off.

The postponement was not caused by the space shuttle's complex engines, fuel tanks or heat tiles, but by the kind of maddening, mysterious glitch familiar to anyone who has been incorrectly billed or simply ignored by today's electronic bookkeepers. Columbia had been stalled by wayward computers.

The failure was all the more frustrating because the 73-hr. countdown had been proceeding smoothly. Early in the week the launch crews quickly disposed of problems with a troublesome fuel valve and contaminants in lines leading to Columbia's electricity-and water-producing fuel cells. When Young and Crippen arrived from Houston in twin T-38 jet trainers, they had every reason to be cheerful. Said Crippen: "Columbia is in great shape."

Their optimism continued through the originally scheduled launch day. Rising at 2:05 a.m. Friday, they had a traditional hearty prelaunch breakfast of steak and eggs, underwent one last physical exam, suited up and were driven off to Pad 39A, where Young and other Apollo astronauts had begun their journeys to the moon. It was a sequence that they were to repeat in almost the same way two days later. But then they were joined at breakfast by a number of former astronauts, including Republican Senator Harrison Schmitt. After an elevator ride up the service tower, they climbed aboard their spacecraft and at 4:20 they were strapped into their couch-like cockpit seats. It was a nearly perfect day, with clear skies and only a breeze rippling the surface of the nearby Banana River. Columbia, perched like a giant moth on the great stack formed by its big silo-shaped fuel tank and companion solid-fuel rockets, seemed certain to get under way.

But then the problems began. Crippen, chosen for the flight partly because of his computer skills, noticed from his cockpit video displays that Columbia's back-up computer had not come on line as required. Controllers figured that the difficulty could be easily overcome, and they allowed the countdown to continue. But by the time the clock reached T minus 9 min., when it had to stop for an automatic 10-min. "hold," complications were multiplying.

Then came a warning light indicating that one of Columbia's fuel cells was overworking, producing too much water. That was fixed simply enough by temporarily switching back to electricity from the launch pad. But, as controllers ran another test on the balky computer, the big glitch returned with a burst of phosphorescent green signals on the computer screens in front of Young and Crippen, still flat on their backs and strapped in the cockpit. The signals crackled through NASA's circuits almost simultaneously to nearby Launch Control and to Mission Control in Houston. "It made my console look like a Christmas tree," said one controller, observing the flashing warnings on the screen.

By that time, the launch had slipped by 40 min., and the delay was producing troubling side effects: because the earth had moved considerably in that interval, the extremely precise inertial guidance system, using gyroscopes and accelerometers, on which the ship depends for accurate navigation through space, would have to be reset. This took another costly 51 min. Said one launch official to the men waiting patiently in Columbia's cockpit: "You have to excuse the delay, gentlemen. All the ducks weren't in a straight line."

Indeed they were not. More than any spacecraft before it, Columbia depends on computer memory and problem-solving skills. It carries six computers in all, four primary, plus a back-up and a spare. This electronic brainpower has total command of the ship, navigating it, controlling fuel consumption, firing its rocket engines and many small, jetlike thrusters. Even when an astronaut is operating the controls, as in the final plunge back through the atmosphere, he is in effect flying the computers rather than the ship itself. Whatever maneuver he calls for, it is the computers that turn the commands from the cockpit into specific instructions for the flight machinery. Says Young: "A human being could never remember how to point 38 thrusters--he just couldn't do it."

At part of Columbia's fail-safe system, all four primary computers are programmed--that is, mathematically instructed--to perform in exactly the same way. Such redundancy protects the spacecraft against computer breakdowns. Though any one of the computers can operate the ship on its own, mission rules require all the computers to be in perfect order on launch. Extra computers provide another kind of insurance. If one of the look-alike machines suddenly goes berserk, issuing wild commands, its three brethren will promptly veto those instructions. In other words, the majority outvotes the minority. If the four cannot resolve their differences in a civilized computer way, the back-up will intervene and settle the issue.

But for this digital democracy to work smoothly, the computers have to be in constant conversation, performing as many as 440 checks on each other every second. That, of course, requires extremely precise synchronization. Yet even after repeated troubleshooting, the controllers in Houston found that Columbia's primary computers were a 25th of a second ahead of the backup. For human beings, a 25th of a second is a mere blink of the eye. But for the computers it was a yawning gap that put communications between the overeager main machines and their back-up badly "out of sync," turning their exchanges into electronic gibberish. Said an exasperated controller in Houston: "The back-up computer simply couldn't talk to the other four on board. The computer guys have never seen anything quite like this."

Hours slipped by. The mood in the control rooms changed sharply. Some computer experts, noting that Columbia's machines used hardware of early '70s vintage, feared that the computers simply might not be up to handling their complex task. Launch Director George Page became increasingly gloomy as Friday morning wore on. Finally, when it became clear that the computer timing problem could not be repaired quickly, the launch was canceled for the day, at an estimated cost of $6 million, and work crews rode up the service tower to help the astronauts out of the ship. Said a weary but unflappable Crippen: "It was just one of those things."

Not since 1966, when Gemini 9 was delayed by an electrical malfunction, had a launch been scrubbed with the astronauts already in the cockpit. And critics used the setback to raise again what has by now become a litany of complaints about the shuttle program: it is too expensive--nearly a third higher than the original estimate. It is military oriented. Above all, it drains money away from such scientifically important unmanned space projects as the joint European-American mission over the poles of the sun and the once-in-a-lifetime probe of Halley's comet. Democratic Senator William Proxmire, long a foe, noted, "I've never seen so much hype in my life. We're launching a truck into space, and everybody keeps saying it's the Second Coming."

But Gemini 9 flew off triumphantly two days after its launch was scrubbed --and so did Columbia. Toiling through the night, computer experts in Houston eliminated the hitch by going around it. On Saturday, the experts switched the computers on early, almost a day before the second launch attempt. This time the machines worked in full harmony, and controllers knew they had those electronic gremlins licked. And so, an hour after dawn on Sunday, the signal was given, the engines thundered and, as the grassy meadows and sandy beaches of Florida's coast trembled, Columbia was finally on its way. --ByFrederic Golden.

Reported by Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Robert C Wurmstedt/Houston

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral, Robert C. Wurmstedt/Houston

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