The Space Shuttle: 3. Glass rocket

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Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

Speaker 7 This is Shuttle Control Houston at 1 hour 49 minutes mission elapsed time.

Speaker 6 It's less than two hours into the first ever space shuttle mission, STS-1.

Speaker 6 Orbiter Columbia has already completed one entire orbit around Earth. It's now high above the Atlantic Ocean, arcing east.

Speaker 6 Mission Control is out of contact with the shuttle and its crew, John Young and Bob Crippen.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 7 We're a little over three minutes away now from reacquiring Columbia

Speaker 7 over Madrid.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 8 And the payload bay doors are huge structures. You know, they're 60 feet long.

Speaker 5 They're very large.

Speaker 6 Neil Hutchinson is the flight director in Mission Control.

Speaker 8 And they have something... on the inside of them that's absolutely vital to the shuttle being able to stay there.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But it's not just the cooling system that makes opening the payload bay doors a priority for Bob Crippen.

Speaker 9 Hello Columbia, we're talking to you through Madrid.

Speaker 10 Have you for about three and a half minutes and the picture looks great.

Speaker 6 As Columbia comes back into contact with Mission Mission Control, an onboard camera shows the payload bay opened up to space.

Speaker 11 The doors are all opened up and hungry Dory.

Speaker 11 Roger.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 10 Okay, what camera are y'all looking at right now?

Speaker 10 Roger, we're looking at out the forward camera.

Speaker 6 The forward camera is pointing towards one side of 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,

Speaker 6 and on either side of it, the two large round pods that contain the rocket engines for maneuvering in space.

Speaker 11 Okay, we uh we want to show you our spots here.

Speaker 12 We do have a uh a few tiles missing off of uh of both of them.

Speaker 6 Some of the heat shield tiles are missing

Speaker 12 off of the uh starboard pod, it's got

Speaker 10 basically what appears to be three tile and some smaller pieces.

Speaker 6 The camera zooms in on one of the pods, then pans across to the other.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 13 At first, the thing I saw was some ring spinning by and it glinted in the sun. I'm like, oh, that's pretty.

Speaker 6 In Mission Control, Flight Controller Marianne Dyson is watching the video closely.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And we all just looked at that and went, oh no.

Speaker 6 Where there should be a pristine white surface, there are blocks of black.

Speaker 10 Roger Cripp, we can see that good.

Speaker 6 The team at Mission Control and the astronauts know what this could mean.

Speaker 6 These tiles are part of the shuttle's thermal protection system.

Speaker 6 There are over 30,000 of them covering much of the surface of the shuttle orbiter.

Speaker 6 They're meant to protect Columbia on its way back to Earth, to protect it from being burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Speaker 8 Oh my goodness, there are tiles missing off the orbiter.

Speaker 8 That was probably our oh no moment on STS-1.

Speaker 6 From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle. I'm space scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Speaker 6 Episode 3 of 10, Glass Rocket.

Speaker 6 Let's go back two years to March 1979.

Speaker 14 We'd already been told in February the orbiter's coming, in March the orbiter's coming.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he's watching a distant dot in the sky. As it moves closer, he is in awe.

Speaker 14 Here's a 100-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.

Speaker 6 The whole team has turned out to watch Columbia arrive, piggybacked on a Jambai jet.

Speaker 6 And for most of them, this is the first time they're seeing it.

Speaker 14 Going through the paperwork, going through the arduous training, there was no flight vehicle or no hardware there. So everything was very academic.

Speaker 14 And this was that one moment that we just looked at each other and recognized that this is unbelievable. I mean,

Speaker 16 this is the space shuttle.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And then it went down the end of the runway to make its final approach.

Speaker 14 And here comes a T-38 down the runway, very low.

Speaker 6 Alongside the two aircraft is a T-38 fighter jet.

Speaker 14 And he was corkscrewing the T-38 down the runway and then he pulled up, went straight up in the air.

Speaker 6 As the 747 and Columbia approach the runway, the crowd of workers erupts into cheers.

Speaker 14 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-fives.

Speaker 6 But the excitement of finally seeing Colombia up close is tempered by the fact that it looks a mess.

Speaker 14 It already looked like a vehicle that had flown 100 times.

Speaker 6 There are ugly gaps all over Colombia. A bunch of the tiles are missing.

Speaker 15 My first glimpse was, I was horrified.

Speaker 6 Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe is also here to watch the landing.

Speaker 15 You know, you see this big 747 coming into land with this patchwork of tile over the outside of an orbiter that's supposed to be, you know, pristine, white and clean.

Speaker 15 And you're thinking, oh my God, you know, what have they done to it?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 If a simple long-haul flight blew the placeholder tiles off, how will the real tile survive, leaving Earth and coming back?

Speaker 19 Got involved in the Space Shuttle in 1969 when we were just looking at different concepts for the shuttle configuration. So that was my beginning in the Space Shuttle program.

Speaker 19 Stayed in that from I like to characterize it from sketchpad to launchpad.

Speaker 6 Ten 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.

Speaker 6 How will the future shuttle be protected from the heat of re-entry?

Speaker 19 Just think about it as

Speaker 19 a blanket, okay?

Speaker 19 You put over the orbiter, okay, coming back in. and you lack that blanket to

Speaker 19 keep the structure cool.

Speaker 6 Years earlier in the Apollo program, NASA's vehicle of choice was a capsule, just large enough for three people.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So, Tom Moser and his colleagues need to create a heat shield that is lightweight and reusable.

Speaker 6 It takes several years, but they get there in the end.

Speaker 19 I'm holding one of the tiles, which was

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 19 the outside is the black tile coating. It's about six inches by six inches.
So that's the tile.

Speaker 17 And let me ask you, how would you

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 19 That's the glass portion and I could break it if I did that a little bit harder.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 19 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 orbiter.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Okay, and then that thing filled with something else that doesn't let the hot gases get between the tiles.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 14 Yeah, they called them the puzzle people back in 79, and they had shirts made up called the puzzle people.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 I mean, it was like an anthill.

Speaker 14 Literally, I mean, when you walked around that orbiter, it looked like an anthill of people going to work.

Speaker 14 You know, we stayed out of their way, but also big, fun group of of people, young, working hard, energetic.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 14 They developed a pool test on how to pull the tile to determine that it was properly bonded to the skin of the orbiter. And when they went to pull the tile off, it came right off.

Speaker 6 The tiles aren't sticking.

Speaker 6 The back of each tile is effectively made out of sand and it won't properly bond to the orbiter.

Speaker 6 It takes some time to invent a solution to make the back of the tiles stronger and denser.

Speaker 15 And that worked but it meant that all the tile had to come off and go back on.

Speaker 6 Imagine taking off thousands of individually moulded tiles, strengthening each one, and then sticking them back on.

Speaker 6 It's a Herculean task, even for the puzzlers.

Speaker 15 And through 1979, 1980.

Speaker 6 Shuttle processing engineer John Tribe.

Speaker 15 It was nothing but how many tiles did we take off, how many tiles did we put on. Every day, morale was down.

Speaker 15 We felt like we were not making any progress. We were just working our butts off and not getting anywhere.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So those were bad days.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And for all of us who are looking forward to a rollout and a launch date, that was pretty disheartening.

Speaker 15 But you got to get it right.

Speaker 14 I mean, you can't, you know,

Speaker 14 it's not something you can hope that you do it the right way. You got to do it the right way.

Speaker 6 Columbia is originally scheduled to fly in 1979.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 All of them feel a huge sense of pride and achievement.

Speaker 6 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 launch pad.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The engines ignited, and it was like something being born, okay, being created, coming out of the womb, if you will. This vehicle was saying, I'm alive, let me go.

Speaker 21 Columbia Houston, how do you read to Ascension?

Speaker 6 We're back on STS-1.

Speaker 6 Just over five hours into the two-day mission. John Young and Bob Clippin are on their fourth fourth orbit.

Speaker 6 The tiles have been the shuttle's biggest obstacle for years and now on its maiden flight several are missing.

Speaker 6 In mission control as one shift hands over to the next there's a press conference.

Speaker 23 Roy Neale NBC.

Speaker 6 Inevitably the journalists focus on the missing heat shield tiles.

Speaker 24 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?

Speaker 6 The The ones Bob Crippen found just after getting into orbit.

Speaker 6 The gap tooth smile.

Speaker 24 Are there any other tiles that might be missing, and if so, how will you know?

Speaker 6 The two men fielding the journalist's questions are Gene Krantz, NASA's legendary Apollo flight director, now the Deputy Director of Mission Operations.

Speaker 25 Well, that's a lot of questions.

Speaker 6 And Neil Hutchinson, Flight Director of the Ascent team on this mission.

Speaker 25 We believe there are nine tiles missing on the starboard pod.

Speaker 25 There is still a debate going on how many might be missing on the port pod.

Speaker 8 So I knew the heating wasn't anywhere near as bad on the

Speaker 8 top side of the orbiter as it was on the bottom. And I guess my thought was the thermal whiz kids will model this thing and find out that's not a big deal.

Speaker 6 The missing tiles are from the top of the orbiter.

Speaker 8 But no one was going to say no problem until they'd run a computer model.

Speaker 6 But what if there are more?

Speaker 8 And of course, that begs the obvious question, well,

Speaker 8 holy cow, what about the part of the orbiter where a missing tile would be a problem?

Speaker 8 You can't help but be concerned. You need the tiles on the bottom of the ship to survive.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Besides, they have other things to think about.

Speaker 10 This is Mission Control Houston at 3 hours 41 minutes after the launch of Columbia and about a minute away from acquisition through the Botswana voice relay station in South Africa.

Speaker 6 Aboard Columbia, Young and Crippin have a busy mission schedule to follow. Pretty much every minute is accounted for, but one task comes first.

Speaker 27 At this time the crew of Columbia should be crawling out of their tan-colored escape pressure suits.

Speaker 18 When I finished up with the payload bay doors, the whole idea was we were going to doff for suits.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 In the process of doing that, I went topsy-turvy upside down, remember which way, and finally got out of the suit.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 6 Back on the flight deck, Criffin finally gets to take it all in.

Speaker 18 I did get a chance to look out the window every now and then and

Speaker 18 getting a chance to observe this spaceship Earth that we're lucky enough to live on is a pretty dramatic view.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 6 Bob Crippin was first elected as an astronaut in 1966.

Speaker 6 It's taken 15 years for him to get the opportunity to fly in space.

Speaker 5 15 years of being a rookie.

Speaker 28 And Crip, Lampfo, your mother and Jenny and the girls are all in the viewing room watching.

Speaker 6 In a video downlink, Criffin shares his experience of this first mission so far.

Speaker 6 The audio is tough to make out in parts, but the meaning isn't.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 6 On the ground, tile 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.

Speaker 19 Chris Kraft said, You go to the news conference and get up there with the other folks and explain to

Speaker 5 the world why we're okay.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 19 So I said, Okay, I'll do that. So I did.

Speaker 21 These tiles missing

Speaker 21 will not have any effect on the safety during entry of the vehicle.

Speaker 6 Tom Moser reassures the gathered reporters that his team is confident.

Speaker 21 There are 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.

Speaker 6 But there are other tiles.

Speaker 6 The black tiles on the underside, that have to withstand much higher temperatures. They are critical.

Speaker 6 Could some have fallen off?

Speaker 22 Could you clarify for us if there were ever any pictures taken of the underside of the craft and what was the result of that?

Speaker 6 A question for Gene Krantz.

Speaker 6 He's mentioned previously that there are Air Force ground telescopes that could potentially snap a picture as Columbia passes high above them.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 6 It's a no.

Speaker 6 But the questions don't stop there.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 30 Can you confirm or deny that?

Speaker 6 Could photographs have been taken in some other way? From space rather than from the ground? In other words, from a spy satellite?

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 From that standpoint, we have conducted no survey of that type to this time, and any further discussion on that subject is classified.

Speaker 6 And that's as much as Gene Krantz is willing to share.

Speaker 8 I remember being told specifically by Gene Krantz, don't worry, we're okay.

Speaker 8 And if they'd said anything any different,

Speaker 8 you know,

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 If there's a tile missing in the wrong place, it's over.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

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Speaker 31 This is mission control.

Speaker 10 Two days, four hours, 57 minutes elapsed time. Coming up on acquisition through Ascension Island.

Speaker 6 Two days since launch.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 32 Columbia Houston through Ascension, 4-7 minutes, please configure AOS.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 For a spacecraft to return from orbit by gliding back through the atmosphere and landing on a runway.

Speaker 6 It's time to bring Columbia home.

Speaker 32 Columbia, the solutions on board look very good to us and you can start to maneuver to burn attitude attitude whenever is convenient.

Speaker 32 Okay.

Speaker 6 In mission control, everyone is at their consoles. Tense,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 16 I said, Don, it's okay with you. I want to sit back here on the ledge.
And he said, sit down.

Speaker 6 Neil Hutchinson is here too.

Speaker 8 At the Flight Director Console,

Speaker 8 with my mouth shut and trying to stay out of Dodd's way.

Speaker 6 The first stage of the return to Earth is to slow the orbiter down.

Speaker 6 Right now, Columbia is traveling at 10 times the speed of a bullet.

Speaker 8 In order to get entry started, you had to fire those Ohm's engines, two engines in the back of the orbiter against the way you were going.

Speaker 32 Columbia, your burn attitude looks good to us. Everything aboard looks good to us.
You are go for de-orbit burn.

Speaker 6 At this point, the orbiter is facing backwards. A maneuver you can only really do in space.

Speaker 8 So the orbiter is flying backwards in orbit.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 Okay, understand both of the deal sparks. Thank you now.

Speaker 6 The engines start putting the brakes on.

Speaker 18 You can feel the deceleration pretty good when you do that.

Speaker 18 And the idea is when you hit the atmosphere, it will start slowing you down, which it does.

Speaker 6 Now, there's no going back.

Speaker 32 Raj, moving right along, John.

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 start down.

Speaker 32 Hey, Columbia, we're 50 seconds from LOS.

Speaker 6 LOS is short for loss of signal.

Speaker 6 No radio contact.

Speaker 32 Nice and easy does it John. We're all riding with you.

Speaker 6 It's called the Blackout.

Speaker 8 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 that radio signals, no matter how powerful they are, cannot penetrate.

Speaker 8 No data of any kind.

Speaker 27 We will be out of communication with Columbia for another approximately 21 minutes. No tracking stations

Speaker 27 before the West Coast.

Speaker 27 And there is a period of about 16 minutes of aerodynamic re-entry heating. That communications are impossible during this entry.

Speaker 6 John Young and Bob Crippen are on their own.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 6 Pretty warm. That's Crippen's understated way of saying, it's so hot that aluminium, one of the main materials the shuttle is made of, would melt instantly.

Speaker 27 Columbia should see maximum surface temperatures during entry

Speaker 27 of 2750 degrees Fahrenheit on the wing leading edge. That will diminish to less than 600 degrees Fahrenheit on the upper fuselage.

Speaker 6 Columbia is burrowing deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 It also creates a spectacular, but potentially deadly, light show.

Speaker 18 The glow outside the window is pretty dramatic.

Speaker 6 If that plasma finds any chink in the heat shield, it could melt its way through the orbiter.

Speaker 6 The only thing protecting Columbia and its crew from the searing temperatures outside is a thin layer of tiles.

Speaker 6 As the shuttle streaks across the sky, high above the Pacific, there's nothing anyone in mission control can do.

Speaker 6 Orbit Flight Director Chuck Lewis is sitting at the back of the room, waiting.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 for, you know, proof that

Speaker 16 it's through the blackout.

Speaker 6 Everyone is thinking about those heat shield tiles.

Speaker 16 We had so much writing on something we'd never done before.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Mark, two minutes to the time we should be able to talk to the crew aboard Columbia.

Speaker 8 You've computed when that blackout is going to start and when it's going to end right down to the second.

Speaker 8 And while you're in that blackout, you actually have a clock counting down to blackout exit

Speaker 8 up on the big screen in front.

Speaker 8 And you're watching that clock.

Speaker 8 And boy, when it gets to zero, you really want to hear the crew say something.

Speaker 8 Mark one minute.

Speaker 6 A minute to go until they should acquire the signal from Columbia again.

Speaker 6 Everybody is watching the countdown, listening, straining to hear from the crew.

Speaker 6 Stand by.

Speaker 6 Mark.

Speaker 16 And it seemed like it was

Speaker 16 an extra long time because they made the call. Capcom made the call

Speaker 16 two or three times and paused.

Speaker 16 Stand by for marked on 9,700 feet per second.

Speaker 16 Hello, Houston. Columbia's here.
Hello, Columbia. Houston's here.
How do you read?

Speaker 6 You can hear the delight in Capcom Joe Allen's voice as John Young comes through on the air-to-ground loop.

Speaker 9 We've got a good data in-house.

Speaker 11 Okay, I look to me like the L over D is almost.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 6 Columbia has made it through the atmosphere. The tiles held up.

Speaker 18 We came over the coast of California, and we came over just about San Bernardino, and you could look out the window, and I could see it was a nice clear day.

Speaker 18 You can see the Sierra Mountains, and you could see where Edwards Air Force Base was on the other side.

Speaker 6 Columbia is coming in at an angle, nose up, with the underside pushing against the air rather than slicing cleanly through it.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 32 Roger that out of 112k, 4.8 miles.

Speaker 6 Then, as Columbia passes 112,000 feet or 34,000 meters, Commander John Young takes manual control and banks the orbiter left until the next roll reversal.

Speaker 6 He's flying Columbia and it's handling like a dream. Oh, that's beautiful.

Speaker 18 You fly over Edwards Air Force Base about 40,000 feet.

Speaker 18 That's about when you slow down to subsonic, go through Mach 1.

Speaker 6 At this point, flying at the speed of sound, the sudden change in air pressure creates a double sonic boom, like this one.

Speaker 18 We did set it up so that we were doing a big left-hand turn land on a runway on the lakebed out at Edwards.

Speaker 32 Columbia, you're coming right around the hack, looking beautiful.

Speaker 18 I recall when

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 6 Hundreds of thousands of people have driven out into the desert to watch Columbia return to Earth.

Speaker 6 There are trucks, camper vans, buses, all parked in neat rows, hundreds of cars long.

Speaker 6 From up high, it looks like a small town.

Speaker 26 The crowd here on the ground can see it now and it's cheering.

Speaker 6 Video feeds of Columbia are being broadcast live.

Speaker 26 That is the space shuttle Columbia you see on your screen.

Speaker 6 Across North America and the world.

Speaker 33 That's a silent spacecraft, no engines, just a rush of air.

Speaker 24 No one has ever seen a glider like that before.

Speaker 8 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,

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 32 You're right on the glide slope, Columbia.

Speaker 8 And then,

Speaker 8 right before you get to the ground, you pull up the dose

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 6 From one of two chase planes flying next to the orbiter, astronaut John McBride is acting as an extra pair of eyes for Columbia's crew. Here coming.
He reports the landing gear coming down.

Speaker 6 Hear down.

Speaker 6 The shuttle approaches the runway. Five.

Speaker 6 Four.

Speaker 6 Three.

Speaker 6 Two. One.

Speaker 27 Touchdown.

Speaker 6 Touchdown.

Speaker 9 Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker 6 As they roll down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base, John Young is singing the space shuttle's praises.

Speaker 6 The world's greatest all-electric flying machine, I'll tell you that. It was super.

Speaker 6 He says, this is the world's greatest all-electric flying machine. I tell you that, it was super.

Speaker 9 Okay, convoy's on its way. Convoy on.
We'll stop on the Columbia. We'll stop.

Speaker 6 Columbia comes to a halt. The mission is over.

Speaker 8 So we get to wheel stop and everybody in the room is racing hell and clapping and waving their American flags.

Speaker 5 You know,

Speaker 8 kind of a general sense of euphoria.

Speaker 16 It got noisy. Don Putty, the entry flight director, he said, okay, guys, you've got 30 seconds.

Speaker 16 You can hoop and holler, clap, whistle, and then you've got to get back on your console and help power down the orbiter.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Again, it's sort of pandemonium in there, but it was a seminal moment. Dr.
Kraft was standing in the VIP room.

Speaker 6 That's Dr. Chris Kraft, NASA's original flight director.

Speaker 8 And he had a eight and a half by 11

Speaker 8 notebook piece of paper. He wrote, we just

Speaker 8 got infinitely smarter.

Speaker 6 We just got infinitely smarter.

Speaker 6 Meanwhile, Columbia's commander, the usually low-key and quiet John Young, is on a high.

Speaker 18 John was unstrapped out of his seat going from the mid-deck to the flight deck to mid-deck to flight deck back and forth.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He went on out.

Speaker 16 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

Speaker 16 the orbiter to check it out.

Speaker 18 It was fun seeing John in that kind of mood. He's pumping his fist.
What a job.

Speaker 18 It's a great vehicle.

Speaker 16 I would call it a triumphant fist in the air. It's go.

Speaker 16 Once when he did that, I thought, damn, we got a program.

Speaker 6 But there's a sting in the tail.

Speaker 8 There are big doors on the bottom of the shuttle that have to open up to let the landing gear drop down.

Speaker 8 And one of those doors

Speaker 8 had the thermal protection tile, and the material between the tile had failed and let a lot of heat into the wheel well,

Speaker 8 and literally had warped the door and

Speaker 8 damaged the struts, the struts the wheels were on.

Speaker 8 But it worked anyway.

Speaker 8 And we got away with it.

Speaker 6 While Young and Crippen were in the blackout of re-entry, the shuttle was burning up beneath them. But they were lucky.

Speaker 6 For the shuttle, NASA has recruited a new generation of astronauts, unlike any that have come before.

Speaker 6 But it's been a big challenge.

Speaker 20 When I saw these civilians, not just the women, but the other male civilians, to me, I thought, what could they possibly bring into the table here?

Speaker 6 That's next time on 13 Minutes.

Speaker 6 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 Paycock.

Speaker 6 13 Minutes wouldn't be 13 Minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then shared them with us. Thanks to every single one of them.

Speaker 6 We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound. Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

Speaker 6 I hope you're enjoying listening to 13 Minutes as much as I have enjoyed presenting it. And you can guess what I'm going to ask.

Speaker 6 Please tell everyone you know about it and leave a rating and review if your podcast app lets you do that. It helps us so much if you do.

Speaker 6 The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange. The assistant producer is Robbie Wojciechowski with additional research by Fabry Smallhart.

Speaker 6 Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram. Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

Speaker 6 And produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Speaker 6 The sound design is by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

Speaker 6 Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay.

Speaker 6 The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.

Speaker 6 The podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

Speaker 6 And the series editor is Martin Smith.

Speaker 6 If you're in the UK, listen first on BBC Sounds.

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