The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Carlos and Jean did the finishing touches, making sure my straps were tight, the emergency oxygen was plugged in and tested, and everything was good to go.

After that, we all ran through a checkout of the communications system. Curt was talking back and forth with the launch control center at the Cape and mission control in Houston, which would assume control at liftoff. We went through intercom and radio checks. Everybody answered in order: the commander, the pilot, the three mission specialists, Chiaki as payload specialist one, and then me, “PS two, loud and clear.”

At twenty minutes, the countdown stopped for the first of the two built-in holds, designed for last-minute catch-ups and adjustments. Then it resumed and ticked down to the second built-in hold at nine minutes. This one was supposed to last ten minutes, but it went on longer than anticipated because an alarm had gone off when the cabin pressure was brought up. When the countdown resumed, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. After that, Curt came on the intercom to say, “Okay, everybody, we’re going on silent cockpit.” At that point, you stayed off the loop unless you really had something to communicate. The next comments we’d make would be in orbit.

But we all could hear Curt’s and Steve’s communications with the launch center and with Houston.

At five minutes the countdown stopped again because two airplanes had entered the restricted area. We heard the irritation in Curt’s and Steve’s voices. How on earth could you get to this point and have airplanes in the area? Nobody knew how long the hold was going to be. The FAA should yank flight licenses over something like that because there’s no excuse for it.

After a few minutes, the count resumed. As it went down, all I wanted was to get going.

About six seconds from zero, the orbiter’s three main engines lit. I felt the shuddering and the resonance as they built toward full thrust. The shuttle bent as if it was starting to bow, then straightened. The push of the orbiter’s engines is straight up, but the center of gravity of the whole launch assembly, including the solid rocket booster engines and the external tank, is a point a few feet into the tank, so the assembly, held down by eight massive bolts, flexes in that direction.

As it came back to vertical, the solids lit. We were going someplace. The shaking and the shuddering and the roar told us that. In rapid sequence the solids built up power, the explosive hold-down bolts were fired, and over seven million pounds of thrust pushed us up at 1.6 Gs.

I hit the time on my knee and the one on my wristwatch. The wristwatch gave the mission elapsed time starting from launch, and would also count days. The timeline for all our activities, including research experiments, required us to know the day as well as the hour and minute from launch.

The vehicle was moving at a hundred miles an hour by the time it cleared the launch tower. It was accelerating far more rapidly than the Atlas, and its shaking and vibration were much more pronounced.

Max Q, and the worst shaking and shuddering, came about sixty seconds after launch. The main engines throttled back automatically to keep the vehicle within its structural limits. Then came the voice from the ground, “Go at throttle up,” which meant we were through the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure and the main engines had returned to full throttle.

The solid-fuel boosters run for two minutes and six seconds. Everyone looks forward to the moment they burn out and detach. They’re the one thing in the launch vehicle you have absolutely no control over. You can’t throttle them back, you can’t shut them off, and you can’t detach them. There are no emergency procedures if anything goes wrong. You just hope everything keeps working right. I had told Annie and Dave and Lyn, who still worried, that when the solids were gone we were home free.

They burned out. I felt a sudden loss of thrust, then heard a bang like a rifle shot as the explosive bolts holding them to the external tank fired and detached them. They would cartwheel down until their parachutes deployed to bring them down for retrieval and reuse.

With the solids gone, the ride eased out. The orbiter’s main engines run smoothly, and you ride into orbit accelerating as the fuel in the external tank is burned, making the vehicle lighter. You hit three Gs just before you reach orbit.

Then another bang, more muffled than the first, signaled that the spent external tank was jettisoned. It would burn up reentering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. After that, we were operating on the fuel that was stored within the orbiter itself for the final sprint to orbital velocity.