Riding Rockets

Five years later, in 2003, another commission would investigate theColumbia tragedy. Its conclusions would hauntingly mirror those of theChallenger Roger’s Commission—cultural issues within NASA had led toColumbia ’s loss. No one should have been surprised. The lessons ofChallenger had been forgotten long beforeColumbia was dust falling through the Texas sky. Watching Mr. Glenn strap into the shuttle was proof of that.

*There were exceptions. Charlie Walker flew three missions and many of the Spacelab PSes flew multiple times too.

*Again, there were exceptions. Most astronauts felt the European Spacelab and Canadian astronauts, as well as McDonnell Douglas’s Charlie Walker and a handful of other part-timers, were valuable additions to crews.

Chapter 25

The Golden Age

If ever there was a Golden Age for the space shuttle program, that period was 1984 toChallenger . In those two years there were a total of fifteen successful shuttle missions, ten of those coming in the final twelve months. The shuttle would never again achieve that flight rate. In April 1985,Discovery andChallenger were launched only seventeen days apart, another STS record. (The seventeen-day record marks the interval between successful launches.Challenger ’s final mission was launched only sixteen days after aColumbia mission.) The missions were coming so fast that shuttles were simultaneously being readied for launch on pads 39-A and -B. KSC was looking like a spaceport out of science fiction.

The history recorded in this Golden Age was remarkable. It included the world’s first tetherless spacewalks by jet pack–wearing astronauts, the first on-orbit repair of a satellite by spacewalkers, and the first retrievals and return to earth of malfunctioning satellites. With its fifty-foot-long robot arm and spacewalking astronauts, the shuttle repeatedly demonstrated its unique ability to put man to work in space in ways never before possible. It was also during this period that the orbitersDiscovery andAtlantis joinedColumbia andChallenger to complete the four-shuttle fleet. And that fleet showed its muscle: Twenty-three satellites, totaling 142 tons of payload, were deployed from shuttle cargo bays. Just as NASA had promised, the shuttle was doing it all…launching commercial satellites, DOD satellites, and science satellites.

On the surface things looked glorious for NASA. But there was a problem: Getting to the twenty-plus missions per year that would give the shuttle a cost-competitive advantage over other launch systems was proving to be a much more formidable task than expected. The shuttle was a voracious consumer of man-hours. After every landing there were thousands of components that needed to be inspected, tested, drained, pressurized, or otherwise serviced. There were 28,000 heat tiles and thermal blankets on the vehicle. Each one had to be inspected. Mission-specific software had to be developed and validated. Payloads had to be installed and checked out. Severely hampering every turnaround was the lack of spare parts. Just-landed orbiters were being cannibalized of their main engines and other components to get the next shuttle ready. The necessary requirement to meticulously document all work was another drag on vehicle turnarounds: Just tightening a screw generated multiple pieces of paperwork. The joke within the astronaut corps was a space shuttle could not be launched until the stacked paper detailing the turnaround work equaled the height of the shuttle stack…two hundred feet.