Touchdown, Columbia!

By Frederic Golden

The shuttle is "right on the money" and gives the U.S. a mighty lift

Suddenly shouts rose from the hot, sunbaked desert floor in Southern California. There it was, high over the distant buttes, a tiny, gleaming dot in the pale blue sky, an apparition from space returning to earth.

Inside the cockpit, the 50-year-old commander, with glasses specially fitted into his helmet to correct the farsightedness of middle age, took over the controls for the final critical maneuvers. Expertly, the veteran pilot guided his craft through a long, easy turn. When he completed the maneuver, the ship was lined up perfectly with a runway marked in the ancient, arid bed of Rogers Dry Lake six miles away. "Right on the money, right on the money!" encouraged Mission Control.

Then John Young edged the "stick" forward, and his ship's porpoise-shaped nose dropped slightly. Plunging earthward, Columbia was falling at an angle about seven times steeper than a normal airliner's descent and was traveling half again as fast. Powerful as it had been on takeoff, the ship was now functioning as a 102-ton glider with no engine to correct its course.

At 1,800 ft. and 35 sec. from landing, Young pulled back the stick to check his dive. Only Columbia's stubby wings and slightly flared underbelly were giving it lift. But, to his delight, he found the craft far more aerodynamically buoyant than expected. Nineteen seconds before landing, he dropped his wheels.

"Gear down," reported a chase jet, buzzing alongside and counting off the altitude: "50 feet . . . 40 . . . 5--4--3--2--1--Touchdown!" As its rear wheels made contact, the flight director in far-off Houston told his tense crew: "Prepare for exhilaration." Nine seconds later, the nose wheels were down too. Columbia settled softly onto the lake bed. Young had floated the shuttle along 3,000 ft. beyond the planned landing spot, able to use its surprising lift to make a notably smooth touchdown. As it rolled to a stop through the shimmering desert air, The Star-Spangled Banner rattled forth from hundreds of portable radios tuned to a local station. From Mission Control in Houston's Johnson Space Center came an exuberant "Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful. Beautiful."

So it was: simple and flawless, almost as if it had been performed countless times before. Yet the picture-perfect landing on California's Mojave Desert last week all but obscured the historic nature of those last, breathtaking moments of Columbia's 54 1/2-hr. odyssey. Gone were the great parachutes and swinging capsules of earlier space missions, splashing into the sea, never to travel into space again. For the first time, a man-made machine had returned from the heavens like an ordinary airplane--in fact, far more smoothly than many a commercial jet. So long delayed so widely criticized, Columbia's flight should finally put to rest any doubts that there will one day be regular commuter runs into the cosmos.

In the astonishing complexity of the craft's design, in its peerless performance certainly in the cool performance of its astronauts--possessors of what Tom Wolfe calls "the right stuff"--Columbia was a much needed reaffirmation of U.S. technological prowess. It came at a moment when many Americans, and much of the world as well, were questioning that very capability. The doubts grew out of a succession of U.S. setbacks: from the defeat in Viet Nam to the downed rescue helicopters in the Iranian desert, from the debacle of Three Mile Island to Detroit's apparent defenselessness against the onslaught of Japanese cars. The flaming power of Columbia's rockets seemed to lift Americans out of their collective sense of futility and gloom. At last they had a few things to cheer: an extraordinary spacecraft--the most daring flying machine ever built--and two brave and skilled men at its helm. As President Reagan told the astronauts, "Through you, we feel as giants once again."

Jubilant giants, at that. "The shuttle will become the DC-3 of space," exulted veteran Astronaut Deke Slayton, boss of orbital flight-test crews, referring to the sturdy Douglas aircraft that opened new routes for commercial aviation in the mid-1930s. Columbia's maiden space voyage brought to mind the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh's lone-eagle crossing of the Atlantic, even the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, which would turn a land of remote frontiers into a nation. Princeton's prophet of space colonization, Physicist Gerard O'Neill, saw the flight as a first step toward establishing mining facilities on the moon. Still others spoke of the shuttle's potential role in scientific research, in space manufacturing, in the eventual tapping of solar energy in orbit, in controlling the new "high ground" of space against Soviet incursion.

From the instant of Columbia's touchdown, a moment watched by tens of millions of television viewers in the U.S. and perhaps hundreds of millions more round the world, Americans seemed to go into orbit themselves. "Terrific!" shouted Dennis O'Connell, a truck driver from Queens, N.Y., as he paused in a Manhattan pub to watch the landing. "It shows everybody we're still No. 1." Mrs. Alicia Hoerter, a Louisville grandmother, could barely contain her excitement or her puns. "Columbia, the gem of a notion!" she exulted. "First, it's a rocket, then it's a spaceship, then it's a plane." In a packed Georgia Tech ballroom, great whoops of joy went up when John Young, class of '52, put Columbia down on the desert floor, and a band struck up "I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech."

Not since the first landing of men on the moon had the nation shown such enthusiastic interest in space. Teachers interrupted classes so youngsters could see the landing. Work in offices and factories virtually ceased. Hearing that Columbia was about to touch down, a fitter in a Manhattan men's shop dashed off to the nearest TV set, leaving a customer standing before a mirror all pinned up in an unfinished suit. The Atlanta Constitution's resident cartoonist, Baldy, showed a beaming Uncle Sam emerging out of the shuttle with his arms raised high like a victorious boxer's. Though some editorial writers expressed discomfort about the shuttle's military role, others dismissed such fears. Commented the Chicago Tribune: "It appears we will get into a space arms race whether we like it or not . . . So fly aloft, Columbia!; deliver your laser guns and satellite busters and spy eyes. Build your battlestars. May the Force be with us."

All but forgotten amid America's sudden love affair with the shuttle were its $9.9 billion price tag (at a 30% cost overrun), all those loose tiles, the exploding engines, even the last-minute computer failure, to say nothing of the inevitable jokes about America's "space lemon" and "flying brickyard." Could past scorn actually have increased the passion of this new embrace? The shuttle had become a kind of technological Rocky, the bum who perseveres to the end, the underdog who finally wins. Columbia's success, explained Milwaukee Sociologist Wayne Youngquist, "ties in with so many of our cultural themes. It's Horatio Alger. It's The Little Engine That Could."

Perhaps. But the infatuation also had a boisterous, abrasive, decidedly chauvinistic tone. Out in the desert, many among the nearly one-quarter of a million people who had gathered to welcome the shuttle home sported T shirts emblazoned EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, RUSSIANS. In a New York bar, after watching the landing, a patron boasted: "The French and the Brits can't do anything like that. Neither can the Russkis."

The French and the British, not to mention the Germans and Japanese, were not about to disagree. In London, the mass-circulation dailies exploded in a chorus of adulation. FANTASTIC! exclaimed the Daily Mail, wow! trumpeted Rupert Murdoch's Sun. Most Britons, rather than showing concern over the shuttle's military potential, seemed to welcome it. Said the London Times: "The conquest of space is both a necessary expression of man's drive to explore and understand his environment and a military requirement if the West is not to be dominated by Soviet activity in space."

The West Germans had special reason to celebrate. They are the prime builders of Europe's main contribution to the shuttle program: the Spacelab, a self-contained scientific compartment for up to four experimenters scheduled to be car ried aloft in 1983. Said one official: "Success for America means a breakthrough for us too and signals the entry of Western Europe into aerospace." The French, who are building a conventional rocket launcher called Ariane, which could draw away some of the shuttle's business, were no less effusive. Said Le Figaro: "After their political and military failures of recent years, our friends [the Americans] needed a big technological success. And they've got one." The French public wanted to share that success. During the very hour of Columbia's homecoming, France's government-run television was to air a required, equal-time political broadcast for the April 26 presidential balloting. But viewers protested so vociferously that only twelve minutes before touchdown, France's election commission scrubbed the broadcast with the candidates' belated assent, and the French got to see le shuttle's return. "Reason," intoned Le Figaro, "triumphed at the last moment."

For Japanese televiewers, the landing occurred in the early hours before dawn, local time. But in a country that both admires and competes with American technology, some 2 million households tuned in for the event. In his message of congratulations to the U.S., Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki said of the shuttle: "It is the crystallization of your nation's highly developed technologies and scientific achievements and symbolizes the beginning of an 'American renewal.' "

The Soviets, again, complained that the shuttle is mainly a military vehicle. But they did show 30 seconds of the landing on televison. Chinese Communist newspapers, though fascinated by the idea of products labeled "made in space," excoriated both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for casting a "shadow of war" over space.

Parked on the desert, Columbia had a decidedly unwarlike look. It survived its journey in remarkably fine style. A dozen or so of its 31,000 heat-shielding tiles had come unstuck during the thunderous ascent. But during its glowing, 2,700DEG F plunge through the atmosphere, a maneuver that has been likened to riding inside a meteor, not one was lost from the craft's underbelly. Only a few tiles were gouged and chipped, apparently by pebbles and other desert debris kicked up by the wheels after touchdown. After an initial going-over at Edwards Air Force Base, the shuttle will be placed atop a modified Boeing 747 for a slow, two-day piggyback return to Cape Canaveral, where the ship will be refitted for a second launch, probably in September. The astronauts will be Joe Engle, 48, and Richard Truly, 43, this mission's back-up crew.

They can hardly outdo Young, who has now made five space flights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted into the Atlantic. When a nosey Soviet "trawler" edged into the site, the Coast Guard vessel Steadfast had to warn it off, then actually block its path, before the Russians backed off. The steel rocket frames were burned and bent a bit, but can probably be overhauled and refilled for another shot.

As always, there was in-flight banter between the astronauts and the Houston control center. When Crippen felt Houston was loading him with too many tasks at one time--realigning the inertial navigational unit, shooting a picture of the Southern Lights, confirming a message on the teletype--he asked in mock seriousness: "You mean all that right now?" To jog the astronauts awake, Houston piped in a loud country and western ditty about the shuttle called The Mean Machine. There was a somewhat more serious moment when Vice President Bush got on the radio from Washington to congratulate them on behalf of the nation.

There were also a few mi nor glitches. During the first "night" in space--actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit--Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had drooped to 37DEG F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They tried to get to it with a screwdriver but found the panel over it had been too tightly screwed down (or "torqued," as NASA put it).

The most serious problem came on the second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevens. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson: "It's absolutely amazing. We didn't have anything that is a show stopper."

The real "show stopper," of course, might have been the landing. But it was breathtakingly "nominal," NASA lingo for "perfect." Crossing the coast below Big Sur at Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or about 5,100 m.p.h., Crippen crowed: "What a way to come to California!" Young lost his cool only after he had artfully landed Columbia right on the runway's center line. Eager to make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their "sniffing" chores--ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally allowed to emerge, 63 min. after touchdown, he bounded down the stairs, checked out the tiles and landing gear, then jubilantly jabbed the air with his fists. It was probably Young's most uncontrolled move of the entire flight.

Curiously, Young's and Crippen's heartbeat patterns reversed on takeoff and landing. Both are normally in the 60s. At launch Young's rose only to 85 beats a minute, while Crippen's soared to 135. Returning, Young's pulse rate zipped up to 130 as he flew the craft in. Crippen's stayed around 85.

To be sure, Young's racing pulse slowed down soon after landing--and the nation's is likely to do the same. Says Forrest Berghorn, a political scientist at the University of Kansas: "The American spirit is too self-centered to concern itself with this for very long. The space shuttle success is in a class with our hockey victory over Russia." That may be too harsh a judgment; of late there have been signs of a renewed popular interest in space. Yet even those who want a redoubled U.S. space effort doubt there will be a lasting effect from the flight unless a profound change of mood occurs in budget-minded Washington. Says Jerry Grey, public policy administrator for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: "Right now, there is no real commitment to space, no strong proponent of it within the Administration."

There is no doubt of continued military interest in the shuttle. But in the realms of pure science and commercial enterprise, the future of the costly space shuttle seems far from assured.

In its struggle to get the shuttle launched, NASA has already been forced to drain funds from other areas, especially those concerned with the unmanned exploration of the solar system. To NASA's great embarrassment, it has had to drop out of a joint effort to position two satellites--one American, the other European--in great, looping orbits around the poles of the sun. These solar regions have never before been inspected by technically equipped robots from earth, and such satellites could help answer important questions about the behavior of our parent star: How does it affect terrestrial climate and weather? Is it warming up or cooling off?

The space agency has also been forced to delay until 1988 a project to orbit Venus with a satellite that will scan its cloud-veiled surface with radar beams. In 1986, Halley's comet, perhaps a chunk of debris left over from the early solar system, will return to the earth's vicinity for the first time since 1910. So far the space agency has been unable to scratch up the money for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intercept this visitor from deep space with cameras and other scientific instruments. Says George Rathjens, former chief scientist at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency: "Space science is in shambles. Planetary exploration is in shambles." Indeed, because of shuttle costs, NASA is so strapped that there is only one planetary exploration it can be sure of--and that the budget cutters cannot call off: Voyager 2, launched 3 1/2 years ago and still speeding toward an August rendezvous with Saturn and its moons.

Though the shuttle's cost overruns have caused penny pinching on other scientific projects, the future in space should now brighten for scientists, even if their experiments must ride on military flights. In 1985, the shuttle is scheduled to hoist a large, remote-controlled telescope into orbit high above the earth's obscuring atmosphere. From there, astronomers should be able to see out 14 billion light-years (seven times farther than they can see using the biggest earthbound reflectors), expanding the volume of the known universe about 350-fold and bringing them very close to what is presumed to be its "edge." Says Physicist Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers): "We don't know what we'll find out there, whose hand we'll see at work." Also in 1985, the shuttle is slated to get the Galileo spacecraft on its way: an unmanned package of instruments that will drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter in search of organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Adds Jastrow: "The two great cosmic mysteries are the origin of the universe and the origin of life. The shuttle will give us a chance to probe both."

It will also enable scientists to perform more mundane research, like that planned for Spacelab. Among them: investigations into the behavior of metals, chemicals and even living cells in what scientists call the microgravity of orbit, the familiar condition of weightlessness. Some student experiments will be carried up as well, probably as part of NASA'S so-called getaway specials, compact canisters as small as 1.5 cu. ft. that can be placed on a flight for as little as $3,000. One young man recently announced he intended to use such an experimental package to see if fruit flies breed in space. What will be next?

No less intriguing but so far less precise are the shuttle's commercial possibilities. It is a working truck with a 65,000-lb. payload, but who is going to buy space in it? Communications companies, for one, are already lined up to use the shuttle for satellite launches. One advantage is price: $35 million for a shuttle launch vs. $48 million for a boost into space from a conventional Atlas-Centaur rocket. Another is that the shuttle can carry several satellites at a time. What is more, says A T & T 's Robert Latter, "you can test the satellite all the way up. Maybe you could even fix it in flight." After the astronauts perfect their skills at retrieving satellites with the shuttle's big mechanical arm, ailing "birds" may also be recovered and repaired either in orbit or on the ground.

An early operational flight of the shuttle, in 1983, is scheduled to carry a tracking and data relay satellite aloft for the Space Communications Co. AT&T is planning to use a 1984 flight to put one of its new Telstar 3 satellites into orbit. Foreign nations have rented a total of 18 payloads, among them: an Arab consortium, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Great Britain, Japan and Luxembourg. Other potential users of shuttle space have been slower to come forward, in part because the idea of working in orbit is still a bit too risky and futuristic for most corporate chiefs to contemplate. But there is little doubt that microgravity and the "hard" vacuum of space offer unique opportunities for research and development. One idea that will be tested jointly in space by McDonnell Douglas and Ortho Pharmaceutical is a procedure for separating biological materials through electrophoresis, a process whereby substances move under the influence of electric fields. The object: to isolate hormones, enzymes, proteins and certain cells in higher and purer concentrations than can be achieved under the influence of gravity.

Still other companies are considering the use of space to grow crystals for the manufacture of electronic "chips," the tiny semiconductor wafers that are at the heart of modern electronics. Space-made crystals, say the experts, could be larger and more uniform than those made on earth. Other possible orbital products: high-purity glass, new alloys, higher-yield vaccines. Says Jerry Grey: "These aren't future technologies. They can be used today." Adds Merrill Lynch Analyst Ed Greenslet: "The important thing is that the shuttle is now there. Things that are there often start people thinking and evaluating what could and should be done with them."

If commercial clients sign up in sufficient numbers, NASA plans to fly more than 400 shuttle missions in the next ten years. It has even considered subcontracting shuttle operations to an airline, and United Airlines has expressed interest. Farsighted planners are thinking about more ambitious roles for the shuttle, or its successor. In the future, such a spacecraft may carry work crews into orbit, where they will be left behind inside comfortable modules that could serve as building blocks for permanent space stations. As more components are shuttled up, these centers might begin to produce space goods, perhaps even utilize raw materials, as Gerard O'Neill suggests, from the moon or from asteroids. There would be no shortage of power for such enterprises; energy would come from the sun.

In the more distant future, such stations, like the great wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could serve as a launch pad for journeys far beyond the earth, maybe to Mars. Interplanetary spacecraft assembled in earth orbit could be made of much lighter and less costly materials since they would not have to survive the stresses and friction of travel through the earth's atmosphere.

Even in the excited aftermath of Columbia's incredible journey, such schemes have the ring of expensive fantasy. Some people even find them disturbing retreats from the earth's own hard realities, including widespread poverty and hunger. But are they really only escapist dreams? At least one hard-nosed test pilot does not think so. Speaking after his return from space last week, John Young said: "I think we have a remarkable capability here. We're really not too far--the human race isn't far from going to the stars. Bob and I are mighty proud to have been a part of that evolution."

--By Frederic Golden.

With reporting by Benjamin W. Cate, Jerry Hannifin

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