Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (17 page)

The orbiter’s aft section was covered with a tail cone on all of the captive flights and on the first three free flights. The tail cone reduced aerodynamic drag and turbulence and was used on all flights where the orbiter was
ferried cross-country. The last two free flights were flown without the tail cone, thus exposing the three simulated Space Shuttle main engines and two Orbital Maneuvering System (
OMS
) engines, and most closely simulating actual conditions. The tail cone would continue to be used any time an orbiter was transported atop a 747 for upgrades or after a landing, up to and including their final flights to museum homes in 2012.

The tail cone not only made the orbiter easier to fly, it increased the time of the glide flight by reducing drag and slowing the vehicle’s descent rate. While the longer glide time—about five minutes with the cone versus about half that without—allowed
NASA
to gain more data on the orbiter systems in flight, the most important data would come when the cone was removed.

“The orbiter flew pretty benignly with that tail cone on,” Engle explained. “But that was not the configuration that we needed to really have confidence in, in order to commit for an orbital launch. So although we were getting more time on those systems with the tail cone on, from a performance standpoint and a piloting task standpoint, we really didn’t have what we needed until we flew it tail cone off.”

The fourth
ALT
flight—the first without the tail cone—flew October 12, 1977. By that time the decision had been made that the program would end with the fifth free flight. While the first four landings had been on a dry lake bed, the final flight would land on the main concrete runway at Edwards Air Force Base. To ensure successful accomplishment of that more-challenging landing, the flight would be focused solely on that task. As a result, any last in-flight research would have to be conducted on the fourth flight.

For Engle, the development of the profile for that fourth flight was the most exciting and more rewarding time in the
ALT
program. “Our goal on our flight was to pack as much meaningful flight-test data as we possibly could in that short period of time,” he explained. “We did work very hard, not only on the simulators, but at Edwards in both
T
-38s and the Gulfstream aircraft, in going through and tailoring and modifying and readjusting the profile so that we literally wasted no time at all from one data point to the other. We would go from one maneuver and make sure that we were set up for the subsequent maneuver. It was a very demanding, fun task.”

The grand finale of the
ALT
program was free-flight five, with Haise and Fullerton making the first landing on a concrete runway. While largely suc
cessful, that flight test led to the discovery of a flaw in the design of the flight control software that led the pilot into a pilot-induced oscillation. “We bounced around and shocked a lot of people, probably more than [we realized],” Fullerton said. “It didn’t look that bad from inside the cockpit. But, again, that’s why you do tests. You find out. Then the debate was, should we fix that and test it some more—it was a strong feeling that was a pretty exciting landing, which shouldn’t be that exciting—or do we cut it off, fix it by testing and simulators, both airborne and on the ground. Do we know enough to press on? And it turned out that was the decision: you’ve got to cut the
ALT
off so we can go on the
Columbia
and get into orbit.”

While the off-nominal landing—and the control problems that caused it—produced some concern, the experience was not without a silver lining. While most people had been pleased that, as a whole,
Enterprise
had flown and landed better than the models had predicted, the softer-than-predicted landings caused a problem for one particular team.

“The landing gear people were somewhat chagrined through most of that test program, because we were not landing hard enough to get them good data for the instrumentation they had on the landing gear struts,” Haise said. “I solved their problem on the fifth landing flight, where I landed on the runway and bounced the vehicle, and my second landing was about five or six foot a second. So that gave them the data, and they were very happy with that—although I wasn’t.”

Haise gave a lot of the credit for the success of the
ALT
program to Deke Slayton, who agreed to run it after his return from his flight on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. “I frankly was very happy with Deke to volunteer for that role,” he reflected.

I mean, we had no one, in my mind, that was at Johnson Space Center at the time that was better suited to take on that role. And I think it was reflected in the way the program went. We missed the first free-flight release from the 747 [by] only two weeks from a schedule that had been made several years before. We completed the program like four or five months earlier than we’d planned, which is almost unheard of in a test program, certainly something as complex as the orbiter. I think that was Deke’s leadership in pulling together both the contingent of
NASA
, which involved a lot of integration of Kennedy Space Center people and Dryden
NASA
people, as well as the contractor Rockwell in that phase.

Although the
ALT
flights weren’t spaceflights, they were still seen as plum assignments by many in the astronaut corps. Hank Hartsfield recalled being disappointed that he wasn’t selected to one of the
ALT
crews. “I was extremely disappointed that I wasn’t one of those, to be honest with you, and still don’t know why. I mean, I thought that having developed the flight control system, I’d be in a good position. So did a lot of other people, but we learned along the way . . . crew assignments are strange things. You don’t need to second-guess them. You just smile and press ahead.”

Astronaut Joe Allen recalled an interesting political side of the
Enterprise
tests involving Senator Barry Goldwater.

Senator Goldwater had been a pilot in the Second World War, and he knew a lot about aviation. He was very proud of the aviation success of America. He sat on several
NASA
committees, was interested in
NASA
, and was a strong supporter of
NASA
, but he thought this was the most cockamamie idea he had ever seen, affixing the orbiter to the top of the 747 and then exploding away the bolts that held it there. He knew in his gut that, once released, the orbiter would slide back and hit the tail of the 747, break it off, and would be lost. He just knew it. He wanted hearings. I talked to his staff and said I would organize the hearing, but I requested fifteen minutes with the senator himself to go over the aerodynamics of the problem a little bit.

I brought a model and I said, “Senator Goldwater, I understand your concern, but I’m a pilot as well. Let me just talk as one pilot to another. No science here; we’re just talking pilot talk.”

Allen walked Goldwater through the process, step-by-step, explaining that because of the aerodynamics of the orbiter and the way it was mounted on the 747, its lift increased as the plane sped up, such that, on the ground, the plane was bearing the full weight of
Enterprise
, but toward the end of the flight, the orbiter was essentially weightless relative to the airplane. Shortly before the orbiter was released, the relationship changed so that
Enterprise
had enough lift that the orbiter was actually carrying some of the weight of the plane. Goldwater, he said, had no problem following when Allen broke the process down for him step-by-step.

“I said, ‘Now let me show you the calculations. The tail drops, and by the time it goes below where the orbiter is, the orbiter has moved back only an eighth of an inch toward the tail, so it’s not going to hit it.’ And he said,
‘I understand that. Why didn’t
NASA
tell me that before?’”

No hearing was ever held.

Allen’s political acumen came into play again in discussions with Indiana senator Birch Bayh, who sat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and whom Allen described as a rather liberal senator who was “not a friend of
NASA
.”

“I’m from Indiana; I know Indiana people,” Allen noted. “I got to know individuals in his office, including a most genuine lady who ran his office, and I discovered one day that she was from Rockville, Indiana. Rockville is a very tiny town. It has maybe two stoplights, or three, max. It is thirty miles from where I grew up in a somewhat bigger town, not much bigger. I knew something about Rockville that she did not know, and I got a photograph of the 747 with the
Enterprise
on top, flying along, a beautiful big photograph, and I took it in to this office.”

When he delivered the picture, Bayh’s secretary at first assumed it was for the senator. Allen corrected her.

I said, “No, this is for you. I brought this to you. I want to tell you something about this photo. This, of course, is the 747 and it’s worth $300 million, and this is the orbiter, even more valuable.” And I said, “The 747 on these tests is flown by an individual I think you know. His name is Tom McMurtry, and he grew up in Rockville, Indiana.” He was a very skilled test pilot at
NASA
Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California]. And she said, “That’s being flown by Tommy McMurtry?” I said, “Yes, that’s correct.” She said, “Golly. How much is all of that worth?” I said, “Well, it’s about a billion and a half dollars.” “Lordy,” she says, “I remember when Tommy’s daddy wouldn’t let him drive the Buick.” She was older than Tom, but she knew him as a boy. She immediately put the picture up on the senator’s wall, and to my recollection the senator never voted against
NASA
again, ever, not once.

While the successful conclusion of the
ALT
flights brought the shuttle to launch, back in Florida, work to prepare
Columbia
for its maiden voyage was running into problems. In particular, the vital thermal protection tiles required to safely shield the vehicle from the heat of reentry were proving not to work as well in practice as they did in theory.

“Initially, when they put the tiles on,” recalled Bob Crippen,

they weren’t adhering to the vehicle like they should. In fact,
Columbia
, when they brought it from Edwards to the Kennedy Space Center the first time, it didn’t arrive with as many tiles as it left California with. People started working very diligently to try to correct that problem, but at the same time people said, “Well, if we’ve got a tile missing off the bottom of the spacecraft that’s critical to being able to come back in, we ought to have a way to repair it.” So we started looking at various techniques, and I remember we took advantage of a simulator that Martin [Marietta Corporation] had out in Denver, where you could actually get some of the effect of crawling around on the bottom of the vehicle and what it would be like in zero g. I rapidly came to the conclusion I was going to tear up more tile than I could repair and that the only realistic answer was for us to make sure the tiles stayed on. . . . I concluded that at that time we couldn’t have realistically repaired anything.

Astronaut Charlie Bolden was part of Crippen’s team in that effort. “Ideally, what we wanted was something that would be like a spray gun or something that you could just squirt and it would go into place, and then you could use a trowel and smooth it out, and you could fly home,” he explained. “Everything seemed to be going very well initially, but every time we took whatever material was developed into vacuum, it just didn’t work. . . . The gases in the material would just start to bubble out and cause it to crack and pop, and we became seriously concerned that the repair material would probably do as much damage or more than we had by a missing tile.”

In the meantime, a new adhesive was developed that, it was believed, would greatly reduce the risk of tile loss. Additional analysis was also performed regarding the risks presented if there were tile loss in flight. Particular attention was paid to the possibility of a theoretical “zipper effect,” in which the loss of one tile would cause aerodynamic forces to rip off more tiles and most likely doom the vehicle. The team eventually determined that the zipper effect was unlikely.

Bolden noted that, in all of the analysis of potential thermal protection risks, he does not recall any discussion about damage to the reusable carbon-carbon on the leading edge of the wing, which in 2003 resulted in the loss of
Columbia
and its crew.

Never in my memory—and I’ve been through my notebooks and everything—never did we talk about the reusable carbon-carbon, the
RCC
, the leading edge
of the wing, leading edge of the tail, and the nose cap itself. Nobody ever considered any damage to that because we all thought that it was impenetrable. In fact, it was not until the loss of
Columbia
that I learned how thin it was. I grew up in the space program. I spent fourteen years in the space program flying, thinking that I had this huge mass that was about five or six inches thick on the leading edge of the wing. And to find after
Columbia
that it was fractions of an inch thick, and that it wasn’t as strong as the fiberglass on your Corvette, that was an eye-opener, I think, for all of us.

Based on the success of the
ALT
program,
NASA
had looked to launch the first Space Shuttle mission by the end of 1979. However, a variety of issues, including those with the shuttle tiles, a problematic test firing of the Space Shuttle main engines, and an unexpected problem with insulation on the external tank after
Columbia
was stacked and on the launchpad, kept delaying the first launch of the Space Transportation System. While the delays were certainly not optimal,
NASA
and its astronauts worked to make the most of the extra time.