Coming in "High and Hot"

By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis, Jerry Hannifin

After a wave-off, Columbia soars home to an uncertain future

The report from Mission Control in Houston was a pilot's nightmare. A blinding dust storm, with winds up to 55 m.p.h., was whipping across the White Sands Missile Range, in southern New Mexico. Even from 150 miles up, Astronauts Jack Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton could see the swirl of white powder. "There will be no landing today for Columbia" said Houston. "The situation has degraded."

Usually NASA's biggest headache is to get spacecraft safely off the ground. But after the White Sands wave-off last week, Houston was confronted with a new sort of crisis: deciding when and where to bring one of its ships down. There was little time to spare. Columbia, already in or bit for a week, had no more than three days of fuel left for generating electricity to run the spacecraft's life-support systems or get it out of orbit.

Word went out to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for a possible touchdown there. But NASA was uneasy about landing on the single, three-mile-long K.S.C. runway. Though Kennedy will eventually be used regularly by the shuttle, NASA has not yet tested the bird's landing characteristics in the crosswinds that might be encountered there. An even less desirable option: putting Columbia down on a concrete strip at California's Edwards Air Force Base, near the muddy, rain-soaked desert lake bed where Columbia touched down on its two earlier missions. Laconically acknowledging the ship's dwindling fuel supplies, Flight Director Neil Hutchinson explained: "We are in a finite situation, and the longer you wait the fewer options you have."

Next day the astronauts were awakened at 3 a.m. E.S.T. for another try. This time, the winds on the desert were down to 15 m.p.h. Circling over White Sands in a jet, Astronaut John Young, commander of Columbia's first mission, observed with a touch of hyperbole: "Visibility is CAVU [ceiling and visibility unlimited] to Mars." With that, Mission Control gave the go-ahead for White Sands. On Columbia's 129th orbit of the earth, 14 more than planned, Lousma and Fullerton braked to re-enter the earth's atmosphere and began a long zigzagging descent over the Pacific. When a coastline finally appeared, Skipper Lousma cheerfully announced, "I think we're booming right over the Commander in Chiefs ranch right now." In fact, he was above Baja California, rather than the hills north of Los Angeles, site of President Reagan's retreat. Apparently he was still thinking of the glide path the shuttle would have followed had it landed as scheduled the day before.

Fortunately, Columbia's computers knew where they were. After streaking across Arizona and New Mexico, the delta-winged craft emerged right on target at the sprawling, mountain-rimmed missile testing grounds. Columbia then made a wide right turn, aligned itself with one of the desert runways and plunged downward at breathtaking speed, dropping at an angle seven times steeper than that of a commercial jet. At 4,000 ft., its fall was accelerated by a fluke wind that caused the speed brakes in the shuttle's rudder to retreat automatically. Finally, only 143 ft. off the ground, Lousma took over the stick. Columbia came in so "high and hot"--pilot's lingo for fast and steep--that Fullerton released the main landing gears a scant seven seconds before touchdown. (Had they jammed, he could have freed them in an instant by firing an explosive charge.)

But the day's perils were not yet over.

After the shuttle's main wheels touched the chalky ground, its nose suddenly veered up, almost as if it were about to take off again. Mission controllers had a brief, horrifying vision of the nose gear thudding back down on the hard desert floor and collapsing under the jolt. But Lousma gently leveled the ship off and let it roll out to a halt. Initially, NASA officials speculated that Columbia's lurching might have been caused by an unexpected gust of wind. But later they insisted that Lousma had eased the stick back, probably to slow the ship down.

About one thing there was no doubt: at touchdown, Columbia was moving at 250 m.p.h., about 30 m.p.h. faster than in either previous landing. The ship required nearly three miles of desert before coming to a stop, almost a mile more than before. Even before Lousma and Fullerton exited, inspectors had begun looking over the ship for damage. Though about 50 heat-shield tiles were chipped or missing, the underlying aluminum was only superficially scorched.

The extra day in space probably added significantly to the mission's cost --NASA would not say by how much -- but it provided 20 hours more to collect scientific data. During that extra time, Columbia's instruments monitored a surprise eruption of a huge solar flare, a fiery burst of hot gases from the sun's surface. Such plumes often reach thousands of miles into space and give off a flood of charged particles that can play devilish tricks on spacecraft. In 1979, Skylab, NASA'S abandoned space workshop, came crashing prematurely to earth after its orbit was disturbed by solar activity.

Columbia should be ready for its fourth and last test flight in late June. NASA Chief James Beggs is so pleased with the shuttle's progress that he is shopping around for a private contractor to run the ships. So far he has had no takers. Many companies have booked space aboard future shuttle flights in order to launch satellites, but few believe that private enterprise could now operate the shuttle profitably without heavy Government subsidies. Industry has also displayed considerable caution about using the shuttle for testing such schemes as making drugs or mixing alloys in zero-g conditions. Before making any heavy investment in it, businessmen first want NASA to prove, at Government expense, that there are real commercial benefits from space manufacturing.

Beggs, however, is eager to get NASA "out of the space trucking business" and back into its primary role as a research and development agency that opens up new avenues to the high frontier of space. Beggs already has one idea he wants NASA to pursue: "platform," a building the permanent first habitat true space where scientist astronauts could live and work in orbit. With a little trucking help from the shuttle, of course. -- -- By By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Sam Allis/White Sands and Jerry Hannifin/Washington

With reporting by Sam Allis/White Sands and Jerry Hannifin/Washington

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