The Space Shuttle: 3. Glass rocket

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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 Control Houston at 1 hour 49 minutes mission elapse time.

It's less than two hours into the first ever space shuttle mission, STS-1.

Orbiter Columbia has already completed one entire orbit around Earth.

It's now high above the Atlantic Ocean, arcing east.

Mission Control is out of contact with the shuttle and its crew, John Young and Bob Crippen.

As Columbia orbits the Earth, radio signals can only be picked up when it passes over a ground station.

These are dotted around the world, including one in Spain.

We're a little over three minutes away now from reacquiring Columbia.

Over Madrid,

astronaut Bob Crippen is working on opening the doors to the orbiter's payload bay.

Video on this pass.

It's a massive cargo space that could fit an entire bus.

But right now, it's empty.

And the payload bay doors are huge structures.

You know, they're 60 feet long.

They're very large.

Neil Hutchinson is the flight director in mission control.

And they have something...

on the inside of them that's absolutely vital to the shuttle being able to stay there.

Inside of those doors is the shuttle's cooling mechanism, which collects the heat that is being generated by all the systems and releases it into space.

But it's not just the cooling system that makes opening the payload bay doors a priority for Bob Crippen.

Hello, Columbia.

We're talking to you through Madrid.

Have you for about three and a half minutes and the picture looks great.

As Columbia comes back into contact with Mission Control, an onboard camera shows the payload bay opened up to space.

The doors are all opened up and hungry, Dory.

Roger.

Bob Crippin now has a view of the rear of the shuttle.

And there's something he needs the team on the ground to see.

Okay, what camera are y'all looking at right now?

Roger, we're looking at out the forward camera.

The forward camera is pointing towards one side of the payload bay, but it gradually swings round so it's looking at the rear of the orbiter.

The view shows Columbia's tail fin

and on either side of it the two large round pods that contain the rocket engines for maneuvering in space.

Okay, we uh we want to show you all the spots here.

We do have a uh a few tiles missing off of uh of both of them.

Some of the heat shield tiles are missing

off of the uh starboard pod,

it's got

basically what appears to be three tile and some smaller pieces.

The camera zooms in on one of the pods, then pans across to the other.

And off the port pod, it looks like I see one full square and it looks like a few little triangular shapes that are missing and we're trying to put that on TV right now.

At first the thing I saw was some ring spinning by and it glinted in the sun.

I'm like, oh, that's pretty.

In Mission Control, flight controller Marianne Dyson is watching the video closely.

And then we all looked to the back where the tail's coming up, and there's the two pods, and some of the white tiles were gone, sort of like a gap-tooth smile.

And we all just looked at that and went, oh no.

Where there should be a pristine white surface, there are blocks of black.

Roger Cripp, we can see that good.

The team at Mission Control and the astronauts know what this could mean.

These tiles are part of the shuttle's thermal protection system.

There are over 30,000 of them covering much of the surface of the shuttle orbiter.

They're meant to protect Columbia on its way back to Earth, to protect it from being burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Oh my goodness, there are tiles missing off the orbiter.

That was probably our oh no moment on STS-1.

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

I'm space scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Episode 3 of 10, Glass Rocket.

Let's go back two years to March 1979.

We'd already been told in February the orbiter's coming, in March the orbiter's coming.

Bill Carr is just 22 years old.

He only joined the shuttle program a couple of months ago as a technician for Rockwell, the company who's built Columbia.

At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he's watching a distant dot in the sky.

As it moves closer, he is in awe.

Here's a hundred-ton space shuttle mounted on the back of the 747.

But remember, it's the late 70s.

The 747 is the largest aircraft

that flew commercially.

The whole team has turned out to watch Columbia arrive, piggybacked on a Jambai jet.

And for most of them, this is the first time they're seeing it.

Going through the paperwork, going through the arduous training, there was no flight vehicle or no hardware there.

So everything was very academic.

And that this was that one moment that we just looked at each other and recognized that this is unbelievable.

I mean this is this is the space shuttle.

So they did a flyby and it just darkened a shadow over all of us, just this big black shadow.

of that vehicle coming across the crowd.

And then it went down the end of the runway to make its final approach and here comes a T-38 down the runway very low

alongside the two aircraft is a T-38 fighter jet and he was corkscrewing the T-38 down the runway and then he pulled up went straight up in the air

As the 747 and Columbia approach the runway, the crowd of workers erupts into cheers.

All young people, just pretty excited and I think that we were just elated.

There was some high five and that's what they did back then.

There were no fist bumps, you know, it was the high five.

But the excitement of finally seeing Colombia up close is tempered by the fact that it looks a mess.

It already looked like a vehicle that had flown 100 times.

There are ugly gaps all over Colombia.

A bunch of the tiles are missing.

My first glimpse was, I was horrified.

Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe is also here to watch the landing.

You know, you see this big 747 coming into land with its patchwork of tile over the outside of an orbiter that's supposed to be, you know, pristine, white and clean.

And you're thinking, oh my God, you know, what have they done to it?

The current tiles are only temporary.

They're placeholders.

Each and every one will be replaced by permanent tiles, designed to withstand the scorching heat of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.

But the gaps show just how big a task this is, how many tiles need to be put in place, and how durable they need to be.

If a simple long-haul flight threw the placeholder tiles off, how will the real tile survive, leaving Earth and coming back?

Got involved in the Space Shuttle in 1969 when we were looking at different concepts for the shuttle configuration.

So that was my beginning in the Space Shuttle program.

Stayed in that from, I like to characterize it from sketchpad to launch pad.

10 years before Bill Carr and John Tribe see the shuttle arrive in Florida, Tom Moser is an engineer specializing in materials.

And at some point, he is tasked with answering a key question.

How will the future shuttle be protected from the heat of re-entry?

Just think about it as

a blanket, okay?

You put over the orbiter, okay, coming back in, and you lack that blanket to to

keep the structure cool.

Years earlier in the Apollo program, NASA's vehicle of choice was a capsule just large enough for three people.

When it returned through the Earth's atmosphere, its heat shield would disintegrate.

Like the rest of the Apollo hardware, it only had to do its job once.

The shuttle is a very different spacecraft.

It is a big, heavy cargo carrier designed to haul payloads like satellites into space again and again.

So, Tom Moser and his colleagues need to create a heat shield that is lightweight and reusable.

It takes several years, but they get there in the end.

I'm holding one of the tiles, which was, it was in the high-temperature portion of the vehicle during entry.

And it's in thickness, it's probably an inch and a quarter, inch and a half thick.

Okay,

the outside is the black tile coating.

It's about six inches by six inches.

So that's the tile.

And let me ask you, how would you

just put your finger on it, how would you describe that material?

Is it like a chalk?

It's like a chalk, isn't it?

The tiles are made of silica fibers spun from really pure sand.

And they're coated in a thin layer of glass to seal the surface.

That's the glass portion and I could break it if I did that a little bit harder.

It's so fragile you could easily punch a hole by dropping a ballpoint pen on it.

You can think of the shuttle as a glass rocket.

Every single tile has a part number because every place on the Arbiter there's a different place to which the tile has to be clearly and sufficiently bonded to the Arbiter.

And every one of the many thousands of tiles is unique and molded to fit a very specific position on the shuttle.

It's one huge jigsaw puzzle.

It is a jigsaw puzzle.

All the tiles have to fit within, let's say, an eighth of an inch of the adjoining tile.

And it has to be clearly a perfect eighth of an inch all the way around.

Okay, and then that thing filled with something else that doesn't let the hot gases get between the tiles.

So in 1979, after the shuttle arrives with many of the placeholder tiles missing, it's time to take them off and attach the real ones.

And to do this, you need an army of workers.

Yeah, they called them the puzzle people back in 79 and they had shirts made up called the puzzle people.

As Bill Carr tells it, the puzzle people are in charge of everything tile related.

From producing them to making sure they stick.

Every waking hour, the shuttle is swarmed by workers.

We had back shops which were making tile.

We had splash shops that were basically making splash molds of the tile.

We had people out there preparing to bond the tile.

We had people bonding the tile.

I mean, it was like an anthill.

Literally, I mean, when you walked around that orbiter, it looked like an anthill of people going to work.

You know, we stayed out of their way, but also big, fun group of people, young, working hard, energetic.

The idea of using heat shield tiles is entirely new.

It's experimental and high risk.

So after putting most of the tiles on the orbiter, they create a test.

They developed a pool test on how to pull the tile to determine that it was properly bond to the skin of the orbiter.

And when they went to pull the tile off, it came right off.

The tiles aren't sticking.

The back of each tile is effectively made out of sand and it won't properly bond to the orbiter.

It takes some time to invent a solution to make the back of the tiles stronger and denser.

And that worked but it meant that all the tile had to come off and go back on.

Imagine taking off thousands of individually molded tiles, strengthening each one and then sticking them back on.

It's a Herculean task, even for the puzzlers.

And through 1979, 1980.

Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe.

It was nothing but how many tiles did we take off, how many tiles did we put on?

Every day, morale was down.

We felt like we were not making any progress.

We were just working our butts off and not getting anywhere.

Literally, you know, some mornings we'd come in, more tile had come off than had gone on the night before, you know, and thought we're never going to get there.

But 34,000 tile at the time.

So those were bad days.

We took most of the tile and all that labor that was put in place to get ready to go fly, and we had to start over.

And for all of us who are looking forward to a rollout and a launch date, that was pretty disheartening.

But you got to get it right.

I mean, you can't, you know,

it's not something you can hope that you do it the right way.

You got to do it the right way.

Columbia is originally scheduled to fly in 1979, but in large part because of the heat shield tiles, it gets delayed and then delayed again to April 1981, almost two years after the original launch date.

You know, all of us had done yeoman's work getting STS-1 ready to go fly.

I felt that I really worked hard to meet the bar.

When launch day finally arrives, Bill Carr and John Tribe are at the Cape.

They're standing alongside the rest of the army of workers who got Columbia ready.

All of them feel a huge sense of pride and achievement.

So does tile expert Tom Moser.

He's been part of the shuttle story from the very beginning.

He really has seen the shuttle go from sketchpad to a launch pad.

And I was in the launch operations inside the building, and so I had to step outside.

I mean, I wanted to step outside to be able to see that vehicle lift off.

The engines ignited, and it was like something being born, okay, being created, coming out of the womb, if you will.

And This vehicle was saying, I'm alive, let me go.

Columbia Houston, how do you read to Ascension?

We're back on STS-1.

Just over five hours into the two-day mission.

John Young and Bob Clippin are on their fourth orbit.

The tiles have been the shuttle's biggest obstacle for years.

And now, on its maiden flight, several are missing.

In mission control, as one shift hands over to the next, there's a press conference.

Roy Neale, NBC.

Inevitably, the journalists focus on the missing heat shield tiles.

Can we get a few words of wisdom now on that whole tile situation?

Why did the tiles fall off as best you can figure?

The ones Bob Crippen found just after getting into orbit.

The gap tooth smile.

Are there any other tiles that might be missing and if so, how will you know?

The two men fielding the journalist questions are Gene Krantz, NASA's legendary Apollo flight director, now the deputy director of mission operations.

Well that's a lot of questions.

And Neil Hutchinson, flight director of the Ascent team on this mission.

We believe there are nine tiles missing on the starboard pod.

There is still a debate going on how many might be missing on the port pod.

So I knew the heating wasn't anywhere near as bad on the

top side of the orbiter as it was on the bottom.

And I guess my thought was the thermal whiz kits will model this thing and find out that's not a big deal.

The missing tiles are from the top of the orbiter.

But no one was going to say no problem until they'd run a computer model.

But what if there are more?

And of course that begs the obvious question, well

holy cow, what about the part of the orbiter where a missing tile would be a problem?

You can't help but be concerned.

You need the tiles on the bottom of the ship to survive.

Astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen have no way to look at Columbia's belly to check for damage, let alone fix it if they find any.

Besides, they have other things to think about.

This is Mission Control Houston at three hours 41 minutes after the launch of Columbia and about a minute away from acquisition through the Botswana voice relay station in South Africa.

Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippin have a busy mission schedule to follow.

Pretty much every minute is accounted for, but one task task comes first.

At this time the crew of Columbia should be crawling out of their tan-colored escape pressure suits.

When I finished up with the payload bay doors, the whole idea was we were going to doff for suits.

So I made my way down to the mid-deck, keeping my head upright with respect to the vehicle, and started to climb out of my suit.

In the process of doing that, I went topsy-turvy upside down, remember which way, and finally got out of the suit.

I put my suit away so I could get it later, went back on the flight deck and let John go down and get rid of his suit.

Back on the flight deck, Criffin finally gets to take it all in.

I did get a chance to look out the window every now and then and

getting a chance to observe this spaceship Earth that we're lucky enough to live on is a pretty dramatic view.

I think just about everybody that flies in space comes back with a new appreciation of how thin our atmosphere is that allows us to live on Earth.

Bob Crippin was first elected as an astronaut in 1966.

It's taken 15 years for him to get the opportunity to fly in space.

15 years of being a rookie.

And Crip, Lampo, your mother and Jenny and the girls are all in the viewing room watching.

In a video downlink, Crippin shares his experience of this first mission so far.

The audio is tough to make out in parts, but the meaning isn't.

I guess being the so-called rookie on this flight, I had a thrill from the moment of liftoff all the way up to what we're doing now.

It would really have been super.

On the ground, tile expert Tom Moser has been working with a team of engineers to look into the missing heat shield tiles on top of the orbiter.

Chris Kraft said, You go to the news conference and get up there with the other folks and explain to

the world why we're okay.

Chris Kraft is a legendary figure.

He's NASA's first ever flight director and now the director of Johnson Space Center in Houston.

If he asks you to do something, you do it.

So I said, okay, I'll do that.

So I did.

These tiles missing

will not have any effect on the safety during entry of the vehicle.

Tom Moser reassures the gathered reporters that his team is confident.

They're thin tiles by nature and therefore are lower temperature tiles than some of the other tiles on the vehicle.

We don't really see any problem at all with this.

But there are other tiles.

The black tiles on the underside, that have to withstand much higher temperatures.

They are critical.

Could some have fallen off?

Would you clarify for us if there were ever any pictures taken of the underside of the craft and what was the result of that?

A question for Gene Krantz.

He's mentioned previously that there are Air Force ground telescopes that could potentially snap a picture as Columbia passes high above them.

There's been awful lot of rumours on this thing, and officially and organizationally, operationally, we have no usable photos obtained from the ground stations.

It's a no.

But the questions don't stop there.

The problem we have with that statement is that we have heard from other sources within Air Force and so on and so forth that some surveillance of the underside of the craft has been accomplished to the point where it has been determined that there is no obvious damage to the tile surface.

Can you confirm or deny that?

Could photographs have been taken in some other way?

From space rather than from the ground?

In other words, from a spy satellite?

I can't confirm that.

I believe, from a standpoint of the position that we find ourselves in right now, we are working with the Air Force in using available resources.

From that standpoint, we have conducted no survey of that type to this time, and any further discussion on that subject is classified.

And that's as much as Gene Krantz is willing to share.

I remember being told specifically by Gene Krantz, don't worry, we're okay.

And if they'd said anything any different,

you know,

if they'd have known anything any different, I'm not sure they would have said anything because there's absolutely nothing the control center could do or the crew.

If there's a towel missing in the wrong place, it's over.

If we had a problem, there wasn't anything we could do to fix it.

We didn't have another arbiter to send up.

We didn't have any way to get to that area of the vehicle.

We just had to be confident in our testing and analysis that the vehicle would have sufficient integrity to withstand an entry and everything else.

This is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, Don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be heard.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

This is Mission Control.

Two days, four hours, 57 minutes elapsed time.

Coming up on acquisition through Ascension Island.

Two days since launch.

On Columbia's flight deck, John Young sits in the commander's seat on the left and pilot Bob Crippen on the right.

Both are back in the tan-coloured pressure suits they wore for launch.

Columbia Houston through Ascension, 4-7 minutes, please configure AOS.

For the last two days, they've put the orbiter through its paces and it's all gone smoothly.

But now, it's time to test something that has never been attempted before.

For a spacecraft to return from orbit by gliding back through the atmosphere and landing on a runway.

It's time to bring Columbia home.

Columbia, the solutions on board look very good to us, and you can start to maneuver to burn attitude whenever is convenient.

Okay.

In mission control, everyone is at their consoles.

Tense,

focused, keeping a close eye on their data.

Orbit Flight Director Chuck Lewis has just handed over to another flight director, Don Puddy, for the re-entry phase.

I said, Don, if it's okay with you, I want to sit back here on the ledge.

And he said, sit down.

Neil Hutchinson is here too.

At the flight director Director Console,

with my mouth shut and trying to stay out of Dodge's way.

The first stage of the return to Earth is to slow the orbiter down.

Right now, Columbia is traveling at 10 times the speed of a bullet.

In order to get entry started, you had to fire those OLM's engines.

two engines in the back of the orbiter against the way you were going.

Columbia, your burn attitude looks good to us.

Everything aboard looks good to us.

You are go for de-orbit burn.

At this point, the orbiter is facing backwards, a maneuver you can only really do in space.

So the orbiter is flying backwards in orbit.

You fire those engines, it takes energy out of the orbit, and now the orbiter only has enough energy to come back into the atmosphere at a certain point and land.

Okay, I understand both of the DOL spots.

Thank you now.

The engines start putting the brakes on.

You can feel the deceleration pretty good when you do that.

And the idea is when you hit the atmosphere, it will start slowing you down, which it does.

Now, there's no going back.

Raj, moving right along, John.

After you complete the maneuver, the vehicle's reoriented such that the nose is pointed forward.

You put it in an attitude that allows you to hit the atmosphere at about 40 degrees angle of attack and

start down.

Okay, Columbia, we're 50 seconds from LOS.

LOS is short for loss of signal.

No radio contact.

Nice and easy, does it, John?

We're all riding with you.

It's called the Blackout.

That's been a phenomenon since we've been bringing people back from space that there is an ionization of the air around the orbiter.

Radio signals, no matter how powerful they are, cannot penetrate.

No data of any kind.

We will be out of communication with Columbia for another approximately 21 minutes.

No tracking stations

before the west coast.

And there is a period of about 16 minutes of aerodynamic re-entry heating.

That communications are impossible during this entry.

John Young and Bob Crippen are on their own.

Our maneuver was in darkness and when we hit the atmosphere, the outside goes from black to a nice pretty pink, which just says that it's getting pretty warm out there.

Pretty warm.

That's Criffin's understated way of saying, it's so hot that aluminium, one of the main materials the shuttle is made of, would melt instantly.

Columbia should see maximum surface temperatures during entry of

2,750 degrees Fahrenheit on the wing leading edge.

That will diminish to less than 600 degrees Fahrenheit on the upper fuselage.

Columbia is burrowing deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.

The spacecraft is moving so fast, it's ripping the molecules of air apart, ionizing them to form plasma.

And that's what's causing the blackout.

It also creates a spectacular but potentially deadly light show.

The glow outside the window is pretty dramatic.

If that plasma finds any chink in the heat shield, it could melt its way through the orbiter.

The only thing protecting Columbia and its crew from the searing temperatures outside is a thin layer of tiles.

As the shuttle streaks across the sky, high above the Pacific, there's nothing anyone in mission control can do.

Orbit Flight Director Chuck Lewis is sitting at the back of the room, waiting.

When you're in blackout, there's just no communications from anywhere.

You're wanting to help get it down, help get, you want to hear it

for, you know, proof that

it's through the blackout.

Everyone is thinking about those heat shield tiles.

We had so much writing on something we'd never done before.

We had a thermal protection system that was being tested on a manned flight, and we'd already seen some evidence that it wasn't perfect because we had the tile damage.

Mark, two minutes to the time we should be able to talk to the crew of Board Columbians.

You've computed when that blackout's going to start.

and when it's going to end right down to the second.

And while you're in that blackout, you actually have a clock counting down to blackout exit

up on the big screen in front.

And you're watching that clock.

And boy, when it gets to zero, you really want to hear the crew say something.

Mark, one minute.

A minute to go until they should acquire the signal from Columbia again.

Everybody is watching the countdown,

listening, straining to hear from the crew.

Stand by.

Mark.

And it seemed like it was

an extra long time because they made the call.

Capcom made the call

two or three times and a pause.

Stand by for mark on 9,700 feet per second.

Hello, Airbnb.

You can hear the delight in Capcom Joe Allen's voice as John Young comes through on the air-to-ground loop.

We've got a good data in-house.

Okay, I'll look to me like the L over D is, Mama.

Thank God, Clinton.

And I think there was some relief on the ground at that point because they must have figured, well, no tiles must have come off on the bottom.

Columbia has made it through the atmosphere.

The tiles held up.

We came over the coast of California and we came over just about San Bernardino.

And you can look out the window and I can see it was a nice clear day.

You can see the Sierra Mountains and you could see where Edwards Air Force Base was on the other side.

Columbia is coming in at an angle, nose up, with the underside pushing against the air rather than slicing cleanly through it.

That's helping bleed off the speed pretty quickly.

But to lose more energy, the shuttle's computers are programmed to fly roll reversals, a series of S-shaped turns.

Roger that out of 112k, 4.8 miles.

Then, as Columbia passes 112,000 feet or 34,000 meters, Commander John Young takes manual control and banks the orbiter left into the next roll reversal.

He's flying Columbia and it's handling like a dream.

You fly over Edwards Air Force Base about 40,000 feet.

That's about when you slow down to subsonic, go through Mach 1.

At this point, flying at the speed of sound, the sudden change in air pressure creates a double sonic boom, like this one.

We did set it up so that we were doing a big left-hand turn to land on a runway on the lake bed out at Edwards.

Columbia, you're coming right around the hack, looking beautiful.

I recall when

John started the left-hand turn, I looked out over his window and I saw these thousands of people out on the lakebed out there.

I said, John, I hope they're not on the runway.

Hundreds of thousands of people have driven out into the desert to watch Columbia return to Earth.

There are trucks, camper camper vans, buses, all parked in neat rows, hundreds of cars long.

From up high, it looks like a small town.

The crowd here on the ground can see it now and it's cheering.

Video feeds of Columbia are being broadcast live.

That is the space shuttle Columbia you see on your screen.

Across North America and the world.

That's a silent spacecraft, no engines, just a rush of air.

No one has ever seen a glider like that before.

And the plane is dropping, dropping, dropping in altitude and finally gets around a circle close to 10,000 feet and then it's going to drop straight down to the earth at an ungodly,

I believe it's about 18 degrees.

And I can tell you having ridden in a plane going down at 18 degrees, it's a crash scenario.

You're right on the glide slope, Columbia.

And then

right before you get to the ground, you pull up the dose

and you put the landing gears down.

You don't put them down on the way down.

You put them down when you get all the way down to the bottom.

For one of two chase planes flying next to the orbiter, astronaut John McBride McBride is acting as an extra pair of eyes for Columbia's crew.

Here coming.

He reports the landing gear coming down.

Hear down.

The shuttle approaches the runway.

Five,

four,

three,

two,

one,

touchdown.

Touchdown.

Welcome home, Columbia.

Beautiful, beautiful.

As they roll down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base, John Young is singing the space shuttle's praises.

The world's greatest all-electric flying machine, I'll tell you that.

It was super.

He says, this is the world's greatest all-electric flying machine.

I tell you that, it was super.

Okay, convoy's on its way.

Convoy on.

We'll stop on the Columbia.

We'll stop.

Columbia comes to a halt.

The mission is over.

So we get to wheel stop, and everybody in the room is racing hell and clapping and waving their American flags.

You know,

kind of a general sense of euphoria.

It got noisy.

Don Putty, the entry flight director, he said, okay, guys, you've got 30 seconds.

You can hoop hoop and holler, clap, whistle, and then you got to get back on your console and help power down the orbiter.

And all of a sudden, somebody is pounding on the window in the VIP room.

And it was loud enough that several of us had heard it.

And we all turned around.

Again, it's sort of pandemonium in there, but it was a seminal moment.

Dr.

Kraft was standing in the VIP room.

That's Dr.

Chris Kraft, NASA's NASA's original flight director.

And he had an eight and a half by 11

notebook piece of paper.

He wrote, we just

got infinitely smarter.

We just got infinitely smarter.

Meanwhile, Columbia's commander, who usually low-key and quiet John Young, is on a high.

John was unstrapped out of his seat, going from the mid-deck to the flight deck, the mid-deck, the flight deck, back and forth.

He wants to open up the hatch.

So there was a while there where John wanted to get out that he couldn't get out.

They finally opened the hatch up and John didn't wait.

He went on out.

He damn near ran down the gangway.

I think he was still in his flight suit and they were bagging behind him to underneath the

orbiter to check it out.

It was fun seeing John in that kind of mood.

He's pumping his fist.

What a job.

It's a great vehicle.

I would call it a triumphant fist in the air.

It's go.

Once, when he did that, I thought, damn, we got a program.

But there's a sting in the tail.

There are big doors on the bottom of the shuttle that have to open up.

to let the landing gear drop down

and one of those doors

had the thermal protection tile.

And the material between the tile had failed and let a lot of heat into the wheel well

and literally had warped the door and

damaged the struts, the struts the wheels were on.

But it worked anyway.

And we got away with it.

While Young and Crippin Crippin were in the blackout of re-entry, the shuttle was burning up beneath them.

But they were lucky.

For the shuttle, NASA has recruited a new generation of astronauts, unlike any that have come before.

But it's been a big challenge.

When I saw these civilians, not just the women, but the other male civilians, to me, I thought, what could they possibly bring to the table here?

That's next time on 13 minutes.

This has been episode three of ten.

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 Pocock.

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We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

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

The assistant producer is Robbie Wojahowski with additional research by Fabri Smallhart.

Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram.

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.

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