Riding Rockets

I hated being downstairs. I was staring at a wall of lockers. There were no windows, no instruments. I felt claustrophobic. I could not imagine anything more terrifying than being in this room and hearing the death throes of a disintegrating shuttle while simultaneously having the lights and intercom go off, as had Ron McNair, Greg Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe onChallenger. If the lights went dark and my intercom failed, I resolved to unstrap from my seat and try to climb upward so at least I could die looking out a window. There would be no reason to go to the side hatch and try our new bailout system. If I jumped out during aerodynamic heating, my body would be vaporized as quickly as a mosquito in a bug lamp.

I could hear rumbling throughAtlantis ’s structure. Again, I wished I had paid more attention on STS-41D. Was the rumbling normal wind noise?

We had glided 11,000 miles in the past 50 minutes but most of our deceleration was still ahead of us. Hoot’s dialogue came quicker. “Mach 20; 210,000 feet; 1,190 miles to go…Mach 18; 200,000 feet…one-G…185,000 feet; Mach 15.5…1.4 Gs.”

We had passed through the hottest part of reentry andAtlantis was flying just fine. Without a hiccup she was completing her transformation from spaceship to airship. My doubts about our assessment of the tile damage were growing and, again, I was happy to be alive to have those doubts.

Now there was significant wind noise accompanied with heavy vibrations.

“Speed brakes coming out.” We were ten minutes from landing.

At Mach 5 Guy activated the switches to deploy the air-data probes on the sides of the nose. The information they provided on airspeed and altitude would further refineAtlantis ’s guidance.

“Mach 3.7…100,000 feet…I’ve got the lakebed in sight.”Atlantis ’s computers had done their job. After a glide spanning half the Earth, they had put a runway within our reach.

The wind noise outside my little room had become a freight train roar.

“Mach 1.0…49,000 feet.” AsAtlantis ’s velocity dropped below the speed of sound our shock waves raced ahead of us, lashing the vehicle with a buzzing vibration. No doubt they were also sonic-booming the high desert and heralding our arrival to the wives.

We had finally entered the useable envelope of our crude bailout system. We were at subsonic velocity and below fifty thousand feet. If an escape became necessary now, I would pull the emergency cabin depressurization handle, followed by the hatch jettison handle. Then, I would unstrap from my seat, deploy the ceiling-mounted slide pole, clip my harness to a ring, and roll out. Of course all of this presupposed Hoot or the autopilot would be able to keepAtlantis flying in a straight-ahead, controlled glide. If the vehicle was in a tumble, the G-loads would pin us in the cockpit like bugs on a display board.

Hoot took control from the autopilot and bankedAtlantis into a left turn toward final approach. Guy’s calls of airspeed and altitude came like an auctioneer’s. “Two hundred ninety-five knots, 800 feet…290…500 feet…400 feet…290…gear’s coming.” I heard and felt the nose landing gear being lowered. “Gear’s down…50 feet…250 knots…40…240…30 feet…20…10…5…touchdown at 205 knots.” We were safely home. Our heat shield had held. I was anxious to look at it and see how much crow we’d have to eat.

After the standard postlanding cockpit visit by the flight surgeon, we changed into our blue coveralls and walked down the steps from the side hatch. NASA Administrator James Fletcher was present to greet us. We exchanged handshakes and then turned to inspectAtlantis. There was already a knot of engineers gathered at the right forward fuselage shaking their heads in disbelief. The damage was much worse than any of us had expected. Technicians would eventually count seven hundred damaged tiles extending along half ofAtlantis ’s length. It was by far the greatest heat-shield damage recorded to date. Some of the more severely damaged tile had been melted deeper than the initial kinetic penetrations. The area around the missing tile had been particularly brutalized and the underlying aluminum looked as if it had been affected by the heat. But there had been no “zipper” effect, as the engineers had promised. If any of them had been present, I would have flung my arms around them and kissed them.