The Space Shuttle: 1. The spaceplane

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Episodes of 30 Minutes Presents the Space Shuttle are released weekly, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the full season right now, first on BBC Sounds.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

This is Shuttle Launch Control at T-9 minutes, 30 seconds and counting.

It's the 12th of April, 1981.

Dawn.

Just a few seconds away now from our final built-in hold at the T-9 minute point in our countdown.

A machine as tall as a 14-floor apartment block stands bathed in beams of brilliant white light.

It is dramatic if you go out before sunrise.

It kind of looks unreal.

It really does.

It's a tower filled with nearly 2,000 tons of solid and liquid fuel.

We are approximately 26 seconds away from picking up the countdown at the T-9 minute point.

Nine minutes remaining between now and 7 a.m.

when we expect to have a liftoff of America's first space shuttle.

Strapped into this machine are two men.

One is a rookie, Bob Crippen.

I grew up wanting to fly.

Focused and quick-witted.

A star of the astronaut corps.

And I think, well, you know, hiring faster is better.

The other is already a national hero in the United States.

and one of the very few people to have walked on the moon, John Young.

If you're a rookie going flying, you would be happy to have the most experienced guy you can in the seat with you.

And John was that person.

They lie in their seats side by side.

Their eyes scan across more than 2,000 switches, controls, displays.

We wanted to make sure we didn't screw anything up so you're not doing anything but paying attention to what you've got to do.

T-minus, seven seven minutes and counting.

They're waiting.

Waiting for the fuel beneath them to ignite.

And then there's no going back.

The crew has been advised to lower their helm advisors.

This new machine is unlike anything ever flown before.

And on its maiden flight, its test flight, There are people in it.

For all previous spacecraft, the US Space Agency NASA first did an uncrewed test flight to make sure it's safe,

but not for this one.

530, you send your fly recorders out.

Crippen and Young's lives depend on each of the millions of components doing its job

and on the hard work and planning of every single designer, engineer, team member.

Everything has to go right.

Pilot Bob Crippen has signified the auxiliary power units are ready to be started.

If they're nervous about what they're going to do, the two astronauts aren't showing it.

Right now, all they can do is listen to the voices from launch control,

hear the countdown clock tick down, and hope.

T-minus five minutes, 15 seconds, and counting.

This is the boldest test flight in history.

This is the inside story of a dream to create the most remarkable spacecraft told by the people who made it happen.

Their hopes and dreams, their triumphs and their tragedies.

This

is the story of the space shuttle.

From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle.

I'm Space Scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock,

episode one of 10:

The Space Plane.

Welcome to the new BBC Space Studio from which we're going to be bringing you a whole series of programs.

Let me take you back to the spring of 1969.

The world's attention is on the Apollo project.

A little more than two months before the launch of Apollo 11.

The potential end of the space race.

The US, the world

reaching the moon.

And actually land on the moon in July in Apollo 11, the one you're looking at now.

But hidden away from public view, NASA has a new project.

One of the few female engineers at NASA is Ivy Hooks.

It was April Fool's Day 1969 when the phone rang and it said, You need to go to building 36, the third floor at 10 a.m.

This is Hooks, speaking to the NASA Johnson Space Center All History Project.

It's a brilliant archive that we always use in telling our stories on 13 minutes.

And once again, we'll be hearing sections of its interviews throughout this season.

It's April Fool's Day.

We're having fun here.

But two or three others in my group or near me got the same call.

So we looked up 36 on the back of the phone book because we didn't know where 36 was.

We drove down there and it's only two-story building, but next door was a high bay that clearly had three stories.

And there were people walking in that I knew, and we went in there.

And all they used it for since they built it was to store furniture in, which would have been five or six years.

It was filthy, and I was in white.

And we just hanging around, like, uh, what are we here for?

She's wondering, is this a joke?

It's the first of April, after all.

There were people there that you would not pull an April Fool's joke.

Then Dr.

Maxime Faget walks into the room.

Max Faget is the Director of Engineering and Development at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A brilliant and innovative engineer.

He's wearing his trademark bow tie and suit.

And without saying a word, he puts down his bag, he unzips it and pulls out a wooden model plane.

Pulled out this funny looking Bosswood plane, flew it across the room, and said, we're going to build America's spacecraft.

It's going to launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.

It's going to be reusable.

It's going to go about this high, do this.

The whole thing.

Max Vacher is an icon in our industry, in the human spaceflight industry.

Neil Hutchinson worked on the Apollo missions to the moon.

He'd later find himself in charge of mission control as flight director.

Max was

a kind of a unique guy.

He was a major, major designer of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo.

Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were NASA's original manned spaceflight programs in the 1960s.

Max Fager was a key contributor to the design of every single one of their spacecrafts.

A pioneer and innovator.

He never pulled any punches.

He continually, he would argue a point to a fault if he thought he was right

and usually he was right.

As an engineer or whatever I am, I would absolutely hold him in awe.

Man was superhuman.

Superhuman brain.

And remember, Apollo is going on at the same time.

A one-shot program.

with a single goal, going to the moon, where none of the machinery, the hardware, the spacecraft, nothing can be reused.

It's all thrown away every time.

This new dream is perhaps more audacious.

It goes back to the early 1950s to Werner von Braun, a German rocket engineer who used to develop rocket technology for Nazi Germany.

He later became the mastermind behind the United States race to the moon.

His vision is to build a permanent human presence in space, to make it a place for human beings to live and work.

A large space station in low Earth orbit for scientific research and as a post for exploration deeper into space.

Space station seemed like an obvious thing to do to have a lavatory in space.

We had leapfrogged from Arbo flight to a lunar flight and completely left out a space station.

This is the voice of Max Fager.

In the 1960s, this idea starts to gain traction.

But as we got deeper and deeper into the space station, it became obvious that we needed a better vehicle.

Gemini was too small.

Apollo was too expensive.

So

we started looking at a brand new vehicle.

An all-purpose vehicle to ferry hardware and people back and forth into low Earth orbit.

We wanted a reusable spacecraft which could fly off and could be used over and over again.

To make spaceflight cheap and routine.

A reusable shuttle.

A space shuttle.

So, while the rest of the US is focused on the moon, Faget and his team begin work on America's new spaceplane, including Ivy Hooks.

And we spent six months locked up trying to figure out, could you really do that?

And we weren't allowed to tell anybody what we're doing or what we're working on.

They're hidden away on the third floor of Building 36.

They call it the Skunk Works, after a top-secret research and design facility that develops military aircraft.

So we just stayed in there with one telephone in the room.

And then we had these huge pipes running through the ceiling.

And so it was loud in there all the time.

And we would all be working, and the draftsmen would be drafting, and the thermal guys would be doing something.

My arrow buddies would be doing something over here.

I mean, it was just fun.

It was really fun.

The only thing wrong was no windows.

I am the windows person, so no windows.

Listening to Ivy Hooks, I wish I could have been there at the time.

Part of the team developing a completely new spacecraft when everything feels open with possibility.

One idea they investigate is using what looks like a big plane and a small plane.

The big one would have powerful engines, essentially like a rocket, and it would have enough power to cast the smaller space plane into low Earth orbit.

Both would be reusable and eventually both would return back to Earth and land on a runway.

Ivy Hooks was right in the middle of it all, looking into some of these ideas.

One was to look at putting jet engines on it for takeoff and landing.

And I had a pilot's license and I think I was the only person in the room that had a pilot's license.

And I spent a lot of time going to the library.

Somebody's got to know something that I can go look up and at least get started.

Oh man, if we'd had the internet, I'd probably have been bogged down forever, you know, because there have been too many sources.

Hooks is one of just three women in this secret team.

It was the secretary and Dot Lee, who was Aerotherma.

That was us.

We're the only women in the room.

And it didn't matter at all in that group.

It was just get it done.

But then there were other people who were very much trapped in that male-female role-playing mold.

At this point in time, NASA is a very male-dominated environment and not everyone sees women as their equals.

But here, working on the secret space plane, Hooks feels right at home, in part thanks to Max Fager's leadership.

Well, he had, I think, three or four sisters, and then he had daughters, one son, and three daughters.

You know, he was very aware that he wanted what was best for his daughters, and he wouldn't have cared.

He just wanted you to get the job done.

I don't think those kind of things ever entered his mind.

NASA's administrator Dr.

James Fletcher flew out to California to explain the new space shuttle system to President Nixon.

Almost three years later, in early 1972, the space shuttle design is finally revealed to the public.

At this point, an experimental space station, Skylab, is already in the works.

But the idea of a permanent one has been abandoned, or at least delayed.

With a lower budget compared to the Apollo Apollo program, it's simply too costly to develop both the shuttle and a space station at the same time.

The sole focus is now on the shuttle.

And it's not just Max Fager and his team that have contributed.

NASA has reviewed many different internal and external proposals.

They've weighed up the shuttle's design, development, costs and risks.

In a statement announcing his decision to go ahead with the system, the President said it will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it.

The cameras show Nixon and Fletcher sitting in armchairs.

The president is holding a model in his hand.

There's the white space plane with a black underside.

The original idea.

But there's also three bigger, rocket-shaped components now.

The biggest, directly attached to the space plane, is a large external tank, which will carry fuel for the shuttle's ascent into space.

And on either side of the tank are two solid rocket boosters.

The shuttle itself is actually launched riding piggyback on two rockets.

The two rockets drop off after launch and fall into the ocean where they're supposed to float until rescued for reuse.

The original wooden model plane that Max Faucher flew across the secret secret room in Building 36 three years earlier is now a sophisticated plastic model in President Nixon's hand.

And it has changed fundamentally in the process.

Just a quick note on language here.

Technically, the term space shuttle is used for the whole system, which includes the external tank and the solid rocket boosters.

The space plane part is technically called the orbiter or the space shuttle orbiter.

But I and many of the people you'll hear from will sometimes use these two terms, shuttle and orbiter, interchangeably.

Is the orbiter ready to be rolled out?

Yes, sir.

Dr.

Fletcher, the orbiter is ready.

It takes another four years until 1976 for the shuttle to be transformed from the model held by Nixon into something closer to the real thing, here at the manufacturing plant in Palmdale, California.

It's a significant moment.

Up until now, it's only been an idea, a vision of the spacecraft of the future, a model in a president's hand.

And this is also where reality and science fiction collide.

The first prototype was originally going to be called Constitution, but fans of the TV show Star Trek organized a petition.

They wanted to rename the prototype shuttle to honor their show's own starship.

Would you now roll out Orbiter 101,

now christened the Enterprise?

And they got their way.

The nose of Enterprise appears around the corner of a hangar, flanked by white-suited technicians.

The rest of the spacecraft gradually comes into view.

Brilliant white with a black underside, stubby wings set far back and a high tail fin.

It makes a 90-degree turn and then rolls forward to a crowd of waiting media, public and NASA employees.

Rollouts are always a big show bit today, and they had obviously a lot of press.

They had some members of the Star Trek cast there as well that day.

We looked at it as a great opportunity to get in the vehicle.

Fred Hayes can't wait for the Rasmutas of Rollout to finish so he can have Enterprise to himself.

That's the Fred Hayes.

You'll remember him if you listen to season two of 13 Minutes.

He was one of the crew on the fateful Apollo 13 mission, which nearly ended in disaster.

So after the showbiz had kind of died off, they allowed, arranged a ladder that we could get up in the vehicle.

We were worried about glare on the windows, and this was the first time it was going to be outdoors in sunlight.

And so we all got a chance to crawl in the cockpit and look all around the vehicle, out the windows, and see that, yeah, the window view didn't appear to be a problem, but also just the feeling of being in it in real, real light, the real light of the real world.

Fred has a very specific reason for wanting to know what it's like.

This prototype has been built to test one of the crucial big ideas behind the space shuttle dream.

The vision of a space plane.

Can it really fly and land on a runway?

There's only one way to know for sure.

Fred Hayes has been selected to be the first to test out the idea.

The first to pilot the orbiter in free flight and the first to bring it it in to land.

If he fails, the dream could be over before it's begun.

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Region control would show an altitude of 27,000 feet now.

Just two minutes, 41 seconds from pushover it's the 12th of august 1977 and a crucial moment in the history of the space shuttle one year after its showbiz rollout enterprise is flying high above the mojaby desert in california mark pushover minus two

but the orbiter isn't flying by itself.

It's sitting atop a Boeing 747, also known as a jumbo jet.

It's the shuttle carrier aircraft.

Enterprise has no engines, so this is the only way to get it into the sky.

A large space plane is mounted on top of an even bigger aeroplane.

Separation is the option of Fred Hayes after the launch ready call.

At Enterprise's controls are pilot Gordon Fullerton and Commander Fred Hayes.

Mark, push over minus one.

In a moment, for the first time, Enterprise will have to fly all by itself.

There was a lot of pressure I felt on myself

and more so than on Apollo 13, say, because of the potential program impact.

This is an astonishing statement.

Hayes feels more pressure in this moment than during the Apollo 13 mission, when the lives of the three-person crew were at stake.

He knows there's a lot riding on this moment politically.

The planned date for the first shuttle launch has already slipped by two years.

And there's a new president in office, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

And the program was Nixon's program.

President Nixon's program.

So you always worry about when you have that change, but not just the president, but Congress as well.

A lot of members changed.

Would they recognize and continue to support what a previous administration had started?

I knew we did not have a backup vehicle, so I had a lot of worry that if I

had a problem and I damaged it or crashed it, even

it could end the program right there.

905, we're coming up on four seconds to push over.

Two, one, pushover.

Fitz Fulton, the pilot of the 747, pitches it downwards.

Remember that Enterprise, the shuttle orbiter, is sitting on top of it.

From an altitude higher than Mount Everest, the two aircraft begin to die.

Well, Fitz, for the way we had worked it out, would go into a slight shallow descent.

It wasn't very steep.

And would watch the speed build up.

Accelerating now at airspeed 205.

In a few seconds, the two will separate.

And when they do, there's a danger that Enterprise could slide back into the jumbo jet's tail.

Fred Hayes and Gordon Fullerton have ejection seats and a chance of surviving a collision.

But in the 747 Pilots Fulton and McMurtry would have no escape.

So we had a viable plan B.

747 crew did not.

Houston is Gopher Seth.

Have a great flight.

We had to devise the speed that would be good.

And he'd just call launch ready.

Launch ready.

It's now up to Hayes to choose his moment to separate from the carrier aircraft and see if this thing can fly.

And within a second or two after that, I punched the button

and we were off.

The two aircraft peel away from each other.

The Boeing 747 continues its trajectory downwards while Enterprise raises its nose and glides.

No collision.

The first maneuver has been a success.

As the two planes turn in opposite directions, Fred Hayes is focused on keeping Enterprise in the air.

With its bulky body and short stubby wings, the Space Shuttle Orbiter looks very different from a traditional glider, which has a small body and very wide wings.

So it's no surprise that Enterprise flies like a brick.

It's more of a controlled fall.

Now, I of course just continued doing what I had to do flying the vehicle.

And without engines, Hayes has only one shot to get this right.

Hey, she's flying good.

Roger?

Luckily, Hayes is the test pilot's test pilot and has been training for this moment for a long time.

Yeah, looking great, there, Fred.

As Enterprise falls, Hayes and Fullerton only have a few minutes in the air to test it out.

The first maneuver was to get what we call pre-flare airspeed.

250 starting flare.

Hayes slows Enterprise down to landing speed.

Frederite is conducting a practice landing at altitude.

High up in the sky, this is his chance to practice.

When they reach the ground, he will have to perform the maneuver perfectly.

This gives him the feel,

attitude, and same airspeed as when he touched down.

Just a little further north on that flight, I actually turned over control to Gardo.

Then, Hayes lets pilot Gordon Fullerton have a go to test how this short wind brick handles in the air.

You tried to get a number of pilots to evaluate, so I wanted to give Gardo the time to fly it.

Enterprise you cleared to start the turn.

Hey, Gardo's in the turn.

Fullerton rolls Enterprise sideways to a 30-degree angle, pulling it to the left.

It is really tight, Bo.

In fact, I think it's a little better than the OLS TA field.

It's flying better than expected.

And I took back over to effect the final turn.

He's starting to turn to final.

Start to turn to final.

They're on the steep approach for landing on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Speed brakes coming in now.

Hayes lines up Enterprise on the runway and lifts its nose ready for landing.

It was easy, easy, slow pull-up to sort of level out.

The landing gear comes down.

Two sets of wheels in the back and one in the front.

Doors open and they're all down, coming down.

Look down here.

A fighter jet is flying alongside Enterprise.

Its pilot relays back to the crew and mission control what he can see.

Four feet.

You're getting some pass.

Four feet, three feet, two feet.

The main gear, the rear wheels, touched the runway first.

You're on, you're on.

Then the nose wheels touch down.

Three, two, one.

We'll see you, babe.

Yay, that's great.

Enterprise has flown beautifully.

Roger, congratulations, it was a beautiful flight.

Total flight time, five minutes and 22 seconds.

Gardo quipped that we knew this was not going to be a program to build up a lot of flight time.

With this initial approach and landing test, the first of five, NASA has proven a spaceplane can land on a runway.

But all they've shown so far is that the shuttle can fly the last few minutes.

Everything else, the launch, orbiting the Earth, re-entry through the atmosphere, has been meticulously planned.

But it will only be tested on the very first shuttle mission.

And for the first and only time in its history, NASA will attempt a test flight with astronauts on board.

The question is, who is bold bold and competent enough to fly it?

Well, when I grew up, there were no astronauts.

No such thing.

This is Bob Crippen, or as people at NASA like to call him, Cripp.

I was a sophomore in college when the Soviet Union put up Sputnik.

This is in 1957.

Sputnik is only a small aluminium sphere carrying a radio transmitter.

But Crippin realizes that if a satellite can be put into orbit, people will soon follow.

And then shortly thereafter, the Mercury 7 crew was announced.

And I was quick to notice that they were all test pilots.

And four of the seven were naval aviators.

And I figured, well, that may be a good way to go.

And I wanted to fly and be a a test pilot anyhow.

I joined the Navy, became a naval aviator, managed to get the test pilot school, and things fell in place for me.

Bob Crippin becomes an astronaut as part of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a space station being developed by the US Air Force.

But the program is scrapped three years later.

So in 1969, while Max Paget and Ivy Hooks are dreaming up America's space plane, Crippen joins NASA.

A group of us that came off the Manned Orbling Laboratory program were joining the astronaut office.

And Deke Schlayton, who was head of flight crew operations at that time, said, guys,

no flights, don't have anything out there, got lots of work for you to do.

Probably the first flight I've got for you might be something called a space shuttle.

That was really the first time that I'd ever heard it mentioned.

A winged vehicle that would come back and land,

the concept sounded pretty good to me.

Flying some kind of craft with wings and landing on a runway, it's much more elegant than dropping into the ocean on parachutes.

Crippen has a lot of work to do on the ground, including on the shuttle, but he's also waiting for his turn to fly.

Waiting while Nixon announces the space shuttle program holding the plastic model.

Waiting while the prototype shuttle Enterprise is revealed to the public.

And waiting while Fred Hayes tests the last few minutes of landing Enterprise on a runway.

Almost a decade of waiting passes before Bob Clippin's phone rings in March of 1978.

I received a call from the then Director of Flight Crew Operations George Abbey.

George Abbey is the powerful but mysterious director of flight operations, a man of few words, the so-called astronaut maker.

Riding piggyback on the shuttle carrier aircraft, Enterprise has just made a pit stop at Ellington Field Air Base near Houston.

And he says, Crip, how'd you like to go out and look at the vehicle?

And I said, fine.

He wanted me to drive him out there.

So we got in my old pickup and

drove out to Ellington.

And it was parked out on the ramp.

A crowd has gathered at Ellington to see the strange-looking arrival.

They gaze up at the airliner with the prototype space plane mounted on top of it.

And he and I were walking around the vehicle out on the ramp, as quite a few other people were.

And Abby said, Cripp, how would you like to fly the first one?

Caught me completely by surprise.

I knew that John Young was probably going to be the commander since he was the most experienced astronaut we had at that time, but I expected him to select the other seat for somebody that had already flown in space before, and not that they would go for a rookie like me, but it was a thrill.

I mean, I was ready to turn handsprings out on the ramp.

Bob Crippen may not have known it, but in George Abbey's eyes, he has been a front-runner for selection for a long time.

Crippen calls himself a rookie still, but in many ways, he's far from it.

Nobody understands the shuttle systems, particularly its computers, better than him.

And George Abbey, this this is exactly the right person to pair with the veteran, John Young.

Prior to being selected for the flight, I'd never worked with John that closely before.

And I learned that if John was concerned about something, I should be concerned as well.

He was an excellent engineer and a fun guy to work with.

John was

a supreme engineer.

Neil Hutchinson.

soon to be flight director on the first shuttle mission.

I would describe him as absolutely unflappable.

He never changes his demeanor.

He never yells.

He never gets irritated.

John had the most level personality, I think, of any person I've ever met.

The veteran moonwalker and the rookie astronaut are very different characters, but they make a great team.

John's wit was, I would call it a very dry wit.

Cripp was effusive.

He would tell it like it was.

He would laugh with you.

Terribly easy to get along with.

John would lead you around to an understanding about what you did incorrectly, and Cripp would say, you screwed up.

Why did you do that?

We shouldn't have done it that way.

Young will be commander.

Trippin will be pilot.

But they're somewhat confusing terms.

I'd always concluded it's because none of us red hot test pilots want to be called a co-pilot.

So

really the commander is the pilot

and the pilot is more or less a co-pilot.

But I I think we do confuse the public with the nomenclature that we use sometimes.

The official name for the space shuttle is the Space Transportation System, or STS for short.

The first mission is designated STS-1.

It will use a new shuttle orbiter.

Enterprise was only a prototype.

The new one is called Columbia, after the first American ship to circle the globe, as as well as the command module of Apollo 11.

And this will be the first and only time that NASA attempts to put humans into orbit without first doing an uncrewed test flight.

But what kind of person does it take to fly an unproven virtually untested spacecraft?

Well, we had tested it as much as we could on the ground.

And just about everything has risk.

I was taking a risk driving over here the morning to do this interview.

And all you can do is, when you're getting ready to do something like that, is evaluate it,

make your own best judgment as to the chances of success, and

try to make sure that you don't screw it up in any way

and

accept it, or don't accept it.

I mean, if you're too nervous about it, see if you can get it corrected or do something else.

Bob Crippen is characteristically relaxed about it all.

But on launch day,

everything has to go perfectly.

His and John Young's lives depend on it.

It's early morning on the 12th of April 1981.

There have been several delays.

Even just a couple of days ago, the launch was scrubbed due to a computer software problem.

But now, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, out on Launch Pad 39A, Space Shuttle Columbia stands ready for its crew.

In the pre-dawn darkness, it is brilliantly lit up with xenon lights.

You can see it from miles away.

Bob Crippen and John Young are in the astronaut crew quarters.

Hours earlier, they ate the traditional pre-launch breakfast.

Well, for some reason back in the early days of Apollo and Gemini, they always

served the crew a big breakfast of steak and eggs.

And that's too much for me.

But anyway, I ate some of the steak and the eggs.

We suited up after the docs had given us a little checkout to make sure we were reasonably healthy.

The two astronauts, suited up in their tan pressure suits, walk out of the crew quarters.

They're greeted by applause.

True to his character, John Young is focused, barely looking around him.

Bob Trippin on the other hand is waving at the crowd with a big smile on his face.

He looks like he's really enjoying the moment.

And

then you get in the astro van and it takes you out to the pad.

The astronaut transfer van or Astra van is a modified motorhome.

Under the cover of darkness, it takes them to the launch pad in a long motorcade.

At the present time, the astronauts are in their van on the Kennedy Parkway, proceeding towards the pad.

Through the front window, Crippin catches a glimpse of the vehicle he's going to board.

It stands out, lit up against the dark sky.

At the present time, the astronauts have arrived on the pad surface.

The two astronauts get out of the van.

Bob Crippin looks up at Columbia as it towers over him.

When I went out to the pad,

we have these large lights that are lighting up the whole stack and it's a very impressive sight.

It looks like almost nothing you've ever seen.

Flight director Neil Hutchinson again.

It had a huge fuel tank that contained liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

It had a space shuttle off on the side of that tank, the airplane part, and then it had these two pencil-shaped solid rocket motors that were used in the beginning of flight to help overcome the gravity well of Earth to get the vehicle off the pad.

Those solid rocket motors are effectively giant fireworks.

Once they're lit, there's no going back.

If only one solid fired, it would tip the whole stack over because it would come loose and the other half wouldn't come loose.

And depending on which way you would go, you would end up horizontal out on the pad, so it would not be a good day.

More than 10 years of designing, planning, building, training, testing.

More than 10 years of Bob Crippen's life and career.

It's all been leading towards this moment and the spacecraft standing in front of him.

The most complex flying machine ever created.

And it is alive, very much alive.

With steam coming out here, it's not steam, but the blow-up and the liquid oxygen and that sort of thing is

pretty dramatic.

Columbia is alive.

and waiting.

Bob Crippen turns and walks towards the service structure to board the elevator which will take him to Columbia's flight deck.

He arrived at the launch pad today in the Astrovan.

But if all goes to plan, he'll be leaving the Earth, going straight upwards.

It's the moment of truth.

It's time to go fly.

That's next time on 13 minutes.

This has been episode one of 10.

Thank you for listening to 13 Minutes Presents, The Space Shuttle from the BBC World Service.

It's a BBC Audio Science Production.

I'm Maggie Adarin Paycock.

13 Minutes wouldn't be 13 minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then then shared them with us.

Thanks to every single one of them.

We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound and the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for its archive interviews.

In this episode, The Interview with Ivy Hooks.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg and produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

The sound design is by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

If you're new to 13 Minutes, seasons 1 and 2 are available right now.

The extraordinary stories of the first moon landing and the near disaster and rescue of Apollo 13.

And do follow and subscribe to 13 Minutes to get all episodes and new seasons automatically.

The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange.

The assistant producer is Robbie Wojahowski, with additional research by Fabrize Maumhart.

Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram.

Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay.

The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.

The podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

And the series editor is Martin Smith.

If you're in the UK, listen first on BBC Sounds.

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