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The AmazingAll-ElectricFlying Machine!By Brian Welch

here were a quarter-of-a-millionpeopleon the lakebed that morning, awash in,a sea of Winnebagos, blue bunting,American flags and network anchor-men, but most of the half-million eyes weretrained on the sky.Although they couldn't see the spacecrafljust yet- olumbia was still far out over thePacific- hey had been able to hear theexchanges between Mission Control and thetwo astronauts thanks to loudspeakers out onthe desert floor. "Okay, understand Go for thedeorbit burn," Commander John Young hadsaid when the time came to fall out of orbit."Thank you now."Clad in bright orange pressure suits, sittingatop ejection seats, Young and Pilot RobertCrippen were about to exercise the onecapability that made their spacecrafl trulyrevolutionary: they were about to bring it backin one piece. Al l of it. And they were going toland it on a runway. But first, there was El toget past. Entry Interface, it was called, thepoint at which the spacecrafl began to plungethrough denser and denser folds of theatmowherex railing heat and a plasmasheath--as it went. Because this had never been done

before with this kind of machine, because theavionics were new and highly challenged bywhat was to come, because of fragile heatshield tiles and predictions of a "zipper effect,"millions of people on the planet below werewatching and waiting.If even one tile came loose from theunderside, so the conventional wisdom said,then the flow of hot gases would work aroundand under the next tile downstream and thenthe next one, in short order stripping an areabare of heat protection ike yanking on azipper. "The two major technology problemswe had to solve in the orbiter program," JSCDirector Aaron Cohen remembers, "were theavionics system and the tiles." Now bothelements were about to be tested. It was anedge-of-the-seat kind of moment."Nice and easy does i t John," CapCom JoeAllen radioed rom Mission Control, "we're allriding with you. We'll see you about Mach 12."And then the crackling transmissions receded,it grew quiet on the airwaves, and the specta-tors out on the lakebed talked about how thismust be the radio blackout rom reentry. Theblackout dragged on, the landing convoy'sengines were idling, and the anticipationbecame palpable. The spectators were aboutto witness an event unique to history; no oneknew what to expect next.Still out over the ocean, Columbia wastripping down through the high Mach numbers,nose high, in a state of equipoise amidst thefireball, while the avionics bays hummed withautomatic flight controls at work, firing off etsand steering through regimes of flight neverbefore navigated by a vessel with wings. Untilnow, it had all been theory. It was still a realmof vast uncertainty for a flying machine and itsdesigners, this business of balancing opposingforces along a sliding scale of altitudes,velocities and pressures, where every tenth ofa Mach number you passed through was adistinct and separate place, a different aerody-namic address.Now at last the technical heritage ofAmerican high-speed flight research and thepractical experience of sending men to theMoon had oined to create the granddaddy ofall plane rides. It really was happening. Andwhen the moment finally came, the engineers

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Page 2B SpaceNews Roundup April 12, 1991The Amazing All-Electric Flying Machine(Continued from Page 1B )and operators who had sloggedthrough the lean times of Reductionsin Force and program stretchouts tobuild this machine could only standand wait, just like everybody else.Henry Pohl was one of them, andhe still marvels at how rocketry andaeronautics came togetherthat day intheshuttle program. "Most peoplecan'tappreciatethattheshuttle,when it's inorbit up there, is going eight times

faster than a bullet when it leaves themuzzle of a 30.06," said Pohl, JSC'sDirector of Engineering. "It's an air-plane. But we launch it like a rocket.We kick it out of orbit halfway aroundthe world, dead stick, no engines. Itflies like a rock, yet we set it down onthe runway, and wedo ittimeand imeagain."It comes down like a rock for goodreason, explains Max Faget, who hadPohl's job during the long years ofshuttle development. "There neverwas a machine imagined like theshuttle before there was a shuttle,"Faget said. "Embodied in that onemachine you have a launch vehicle,you've a spacecraft, and you'vegot a reentry airplane, not a reentryvehicle. Prior to the shuttle,when heApollo came down, it just fell down.They didn't fly down, they fell down.There was no way it could supportitself in the air on wings, so it fell. Andeverybody knows hat if you fall down,you're going o get down. So it was amuch easier maneuver. There wasnothing tricky about it."The shuttle, on the other hand,must remain perfectly balanced on itswings throughout he long steep dropto Earth, said Chris Kraft, ormer JSCDirector and an engineer with someexperience in the world of flight con-trol systems. "The way you balancesomething is with pure orce," he said,"and those forces are totally knownbecause there are no aerodynamicforces (on the orbiter) above aboutMach 10. The real problem was be-tween 8 and 1 "And it was that region of the entryprofile which required a tool of thetrade called a Monte Carlo analysis.In that procedure, Kraft explained,aerodynamic parameters were plot-ted againstdifferentMach numbers inrandom combinations. The idea wasto first fashion an aerodynamic curvealong which the shuttle would fly, acorridorwhere he light control systemwould be designed to guide the shipthrough precise forces at specific ve-locities, compensating for changingconditions all the way down. Thenthey expanded that envelope aboveand below the curve by adding varia-tions to the flight control settings."There are about40 major aerody-namicparameters, giveortakeafew,"Kraft said, "and within this envelope,atany given Mach number, we tookall40 of these parameters and ran themin a totally random way, 1,000 timesforeach Mach numberuntil herewerezero, zero failures. Zero."They even went so far as to breakthe Mach numbersdown ntotenthsofMach numbers, threw all the param-eters back into the hopper, and thenran it until they could go a thousandtimes without a glitch. "If we had asingle ailure we went back and madea correction o the system until we got1,000 runs without a failure for everyMach number," Kraft said.They used wind tunnels to predictwhat the parameters would be alongthe corridor, measured their ability topredict these phenomena, and poredover flight data from research aircraftsuch as the X-15 and the YF-12. Notyet satisfied, they tweaked the re-sponsiveness of the controls by add-ing gains to the system, damped outand tight in one place, high and loosein another. They varied the gains allthrough those Mach numbers, Kraftsaid, adjusting the flight path anglehere, the angle of attack there, untilthe aerodynamic actors, the thermalconstraints and he structural ntegrityof the vehicle were all harmoniouslybalanced.There was nothing harmoniousabout the waiting, however, as Co-lumbia took the hypersonic obogganride back to Earth. "Even with all ofthat testing," Kraft said, "I still wasn'tsure this sonofabitch was gonna fly."

He and Faget were sitting at the man-agement console n the back of FlightControl Room-I with Gene Kranz, henDeputy Director of Flight Operations.At last the telemetry started com-ing back after more than 16 minuteswith no data from the orbiter, S-Bandthrough the Western Test Range atfirst, then through the Buckhorn sta-tion, showing the Columbia to be do-ing Mach 10.3at 180,00Ofeet, "exactlynominal," the flight dynamics officernoted.At 151,00Ofeet, traveling morethan8 times the speed of sound, Crippensaw coastline ahead. "What a way tocome to California!" he called. Theworst of the waiting was over. Theorywas becoming reality.Even though still hypersonic atMach 6, heading down toward Mach5, the Columbia was now in the famil-iar territory of flight regimes first pio-neered by theX-15. "It wasaquestionof getting this flying machine downfrom orbit and into flight conditionsthatwe understoodsomething about,"Kranzremembers. "We had been herebefore."

cubic feet of debris recovered after team." Pohl agrees: "Alo tofthe peoplethe Challengeraccident. Point, coun- that worked on the orbiter worked onterpoint. Glowing praise and harsh the X-15," he said. "Then hey workedcriticism, success and ailure, triumph on Apollo. So they had he knowledgeand tragedy. That's been the way of of howto build airplanes, hey had heit over the course of the whole pro- knowledge of how to build rockets,gram. and the kindsof hings that you had oEven in the afterglow of STS-1 at be concerned about when operatingthe very inception of the flight pro- in the space environment."gram, the shuttle was already being The designers of the shuttle, inseen as oo much of one hing and not otherwords, hadjustsent people backenough of another, depending on the andforthtotheMoon noneof history'sviewer's perspective. "All but forgot- great adventures. They thought ex-ten amid America's sudden loveaffair pansively n hosedays. In hatsense,with the shuttle," TlME said as only their plans for operating the shuttleTlME can, "were its $9.9 billion price fleet and their baseline assumptionstag, all hose oosetiles, heexploding about how we would do the job, andengines, even the last-minute corn- what tools would be required, were atputer failure, to say nothing of the least a generation ahead of the hard-inevitable jokes about America's ware. Backthen, heythoughtinterms'space lemon,' and 'flying brickyard.' of a rough and ready, rugged andCould past scorn actually have in- robust 4-wheel drive of a spacecraft,creased the passion of this new em- capable of bouncing around the backbrace? The shuttle had become a roads of space with a vast array ofkind of technological Rocky, the bum redundantsystems,fourdeepinmanywho perseveres to the end, the un- cases, to provide defense in depthderdog who finally wins." against hardware problems andAnd this was after only one flight. ground processing headaches.Over the decade that followed, the That defense in depth, known asAnd that was ,when Kraft urnedto Faget, even be-fore the twin sonic

booms wereheard over Cali-fornia, and said,"We have ust be-come infinitelysmarter."There wasplenty of enthusi-astic agreementon that point, andnotjust n NassauBay, where theyblocked off thestreets and had alanding party, ustlike the splash-down celebrationsof Apollo. All overthe country, pride I 'ran deep afterSTS-1. It was tnesame sort of dy-namic, althoughon asmaller scale, .as theone atworkIn America todayin tne e~ ~ ho r i a . . . . . . . . . . . .

quad redun-dancy, hadanoddsounding acro-nym (even forNASA) o expressits method of op-eration: FOIFOIFS. ThatstoodforFail-Operational1Fail-Operational1Fail-safe. Safeenough o get youhome even ifthree stringscratered, and foranything short ofthat, you ust kepton operating. Andl a u n c h i n g .Strange as it mayseem today, theoriginal design n-tent of the pro-gram was to beable to absorbhardware prob-lemsandkeepthemissions going.People intendedto aunchwithoneout of five com-

bring a revolutionary spacevehicleonline. There was more. "From he verystart, they never gave us the moneywe asked for," Loftus said. "So it wasa constant struggle to develop thesystem and it's been a constantstruggle to get adequate funding forspares and for all the kinds of thingsthat are productivity enhancing."Forthe person running he OrbiterProject at the time, the budget situa-tion was "very severe and very hard."But Aaron Cohen is quick to point outthat when the budget axe had to fall, itgenerally fell on the schedule, not onquali tyand not on safety. "I don't thinkwe made any shortcuts n hat sense,"he recalls, "butwhen I had a problem,Icouldn't solve t as rapidly becauseIcouldn't go with parallel approaches.I had to pick an approach and thenhope it was right, rather than go downtwoorthree pathsatthesametime, aswe did in he Apollo program. We hadto be much more accurate on thesolution we picked before going for-ward in the shuttle program, and t didslow us down somewhat."Pohl remembers the technicalhorsetrading that went on in thosedays, such as the time when his oldPropulsion and Power Division de-leted a fourth fuel cell and auxiliarypower unit during a weight reductionexercise. He still speaks of it as if thedivision had to offer up a kidney and alung, and remembers how tough thechoices were. "And I don't think aperson can give Aaron Cohen toomuch credit," he says next. "His te-nacity and ust being hard-nosed andbeing able to deal with an enormousnumber of problems simultaneouslyearly in the program, not caving in tothe whims of everybody, was one ofthe major contributions o he successof it."In the end, they couldn't do it all,however, they couldn't make theshuttle all things to all people andsomehow also manage to achieveevery one of the enormous promisesthat were made. It is illuminating, in1991, to consider just some of theelements that were a part of the list ofthings that said, "here's how you canlaunch 60 shuttle flights each year."The list included a baseline of sevenorbiters, three launch pads, two or-biter processing facilities, adequatefollowingO~eration~esert~torm.he aura of expectation surrounding the puters down, for instance, and the spar& parts, regular Florida landingsnewsweeklies ran cover stories, the shuttle gave way to the realities of very nature of the processing time and a large percentage of highly stan-morningshowsclamoredtointerview launch scrubs, schedule slips, requiredwaspredicatedonthenotion dardized commercial satellite de-Young and Crippen, the Sunday remanifested payloads, upset and that not every system or subsystem ployment missions. In one way orsupplements ran picture pages, and verycriticalcustomersand,ultimately, wouldbecheckedoutbetweenflights. another, for one reason or another,people generally felt good about the the cauterizing spectacle o f the The redundancy in the hardware, it none of those baseline assumptionscountry's very visible leap forward in Challenger accident. "There was an was thought, would preclude hat ne- was met, yet the expectations placedspace exploration. aura of expectation," said Joe Loftus, cessity. on the shuttle scarcely lessened.TlME said the flight was "a much assistant director for plans, "and the So the shuttlewas styled assome- Despiteall ofthose things, workonneeded reaffirmation of US. techno- failure to meet some of those expec- thing of a space truck, fitting enough the shuttle program continued, andlogical prowess. It camea ta moment tat ions has totall y obfuscated since the design team was based in now the fleet is flying. The tenth anni-when many Americans, and much of anybody's actually looking at what's Texas, but there was more to it than versary of STS-1 is a good time tothe world as well, were questioning been accomplished. So the disparity that. The people ofApol lo had seen all reflect onjust howcapable hevehiclesthat very capability." TlME said we betweentheexpectationandthereal- sorts of heavy duty adventure take have turned out to be, despite thewere troubled a decade ago by Viet ity creates the sense that it's a de- place eight light seconds away on the shuttle's bad press.

Nam, Japanese cars, Three Mile Is- bacle, while in fact the achievement Moon's near side. There was no rea- Thereareveryfew Americanswholand and the failed hostage rescue at has been mpressive." sontosupposethatwould bedifferent realize, for example, that the spaceaplacecalledDesertOne. Newsweek Another problem for the shuttle, in the future. "I think what we are shuttle is one of the most reliablesaid, "All Americans hadtherightstuff Pohl said, is the finite size of the finding difficult is that since the '60% launch vehicles the world has everagain: and it turned out to be Nomex research and development pie from society has become far more risk known, with a success-to-failure ratiofelt nsulation andheat-resistant silica which all pieces must be cut and aversethanwas the case previously," of ,974, with 1 being perfect. More-tiles. 31,000ofthemfittingtogetheras served. "The way our environment s Loftus noted. over, most Americans do not realizeseamlessly as Arizona and New set up, everybody that wants to sell All of this helps explain how it was, that this number is made even moreMexico." something has togo knocksomething in the days before Saigon fell, in the impressive by the fact that, Loftus willLooking back on i t now across a else," he said. "There's always some- years before Watergate ook its toll, in tell you, launch vehicles usually expe-gulf of memories 10 years wide, such body that can gain something from the first half of the '70s before disco rience more ailures in he early yearssentiments seem quaint. Over the thisotherprogram,and hey canshow strangled rock 'n roll and infected a of operation, before hey hit a strideofpast decade, the shuttle has become you ust howcheaply heir newwidget decade, that NASAwent orward with design maturity after 100 or so flights.the aerospace world's most visible can be made. Paper airplanes never plans for a space station and for a But the shuttle, with 38 flights, has alightning rod, a waste to some, an art have problems with hydrogen eaks." reusable vehicle to get people there. higher reliability rating than any otherform to others, a machine with wings But many believe the shuttle's And back. U.S. booster. Ariane, the only otherthat flies not only in outer space and problems of perception go well be- "Very early on in our discussions vehicle designed in the '70s and op-the Earth'satmosphere, but also plies yondscheduleslipsorhydrogenleaks. with the Office of Management and erated n the '80s, had five failures inthe murky realm where budgets, sci- The problems, some say, go all the Budget,"Kraftsaid,"wefoundoutthat the first 40 flights.ence and politics all meet. way back to the beginning of the we couldn't build what we wanted to How many Americans are aware,But then, diversity of opinion has program to what one space reporter, build. And .we had to compromise as another example, that the shuttlealways been one of the common Morton Dean of ABC News, called greatly in order to get the program to has launched almost half of all thethreads in the space shuttle tapestry. "originalsin."Andthatwasthepromlse fit into the budget that people were mass that the United States has everIt was President Nixon himself who, that the shuttle would drastically re- allowing us to have. We estimated deployedtospace? Mostofwhattheyhaving just announced that the U.S. duce the cost of getting a pound of $15 billion to build a totally reusable see and read tells them only thatwould proceed to build the shuttle, cargo into orbit by flying 60 times a machineand hey said, 'You can have one launch or another has been de-alluded to the controversies of this year, along the lines of a spacegoing five.' And we ended up compromising layed, or that one mission or anothernext step when he quoted Oliver airline. When that didn't pan out in he at a fixed price contract of about $6.5 has moved into or out of a givenWendell Holmes: "We must sail '80s-when itdidn't even comeclose billion with a billion dollaroverrun pos- calendar year. It'slike trying oassesssometimes with the wind and some- to happening-thecriticslitintoNASA sibility." how the railroads shaped westwardtimes against it, but we must sail, and for overselling the program. It never got any easier after that. A expansion and America's manifestnot drift, nor l ie at anchor." That was To understand why those prom- slowdown hit he aerospace ndustry, destiny in the 19th Century by fixatingJanuary 5, 1972. Fifteen years later ises were made, one has to return to thousandsofengineerslosttheirjobs. on whether the 3:10 to Yuma actu-- o the day -the headwinds were the heady days of Apollo. "You could Reductions in Force swept NASA, ally gottoYuma at 3:lO p.m. on Aug.blowing as work crews opened an not have built the shuttle without the and the civil service complement at 21, 1889. Historically speaking, itabandoned Minuteman test silo in Apollo heritage," Loftus said. "You JSC had o be reduced n hose years doesn't matter f he train was late onFloridaand began nterring he20,OOO couldn't have done it with another from 4,800 to 3,200. All while trying o Please see AMAZING,Page 48

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April 12,1991 Space News Roundup Page 3BSTS-1 Crew Remembers Pride, Satisfaction of First FlightBy James Hartsfield

Columbia launched the spaceshuttle program a decade ago, but forthe two men who flew it, some of thestrongest memories came later."Right about then, everybody wasdownon he United States. Two weeksbefore we launched, they (news re-ports) said the space shuttle was alemon," STS-1 Commander JohnYoung said recently. "But after welaunched, t really changed everything.And after the flight, when we went allover the country and talked to every-body- e made about 400 appear-ances in about three months- oucould see a lot of good spirit comingback. It was a shot in the arm to thepatrioticspirit and o the get up and gospirit that's inherent in the people inthis country."For STS-1 Pilot Robert Crippen,one of the strongest memories of themission also comes not from spacebut from Earth."One thing that has really stuck inmy mind wasn't during the flight oreven right after the flight. It was thetravels that John and I made," theNavy captain said. "Everywhere wewent, we felt the sense of pride thecountry had. People everywhere felttheywerea real part n t, notjust inthiscountry, but abroad as well, from Eu-rope to Australia. It was out there,from small towns to big cities. Whenyou see people reacttosomething ikethat, it gives you a verygoodfeeling, agood feeling of satisfaction."Young had flown three differentspacecraft and walked on the Moonbefore he flew the shuttle, yet thebeginning of the space shuttle wassurprisingly different."We had parades in Apollo wherenobody came except the people whowere in the parade," he said. "But wehad parades all over the country afterSTS-1 and there were all kinds ofpeople there."

~ ~ . .-

The biggest surprise for those shuttle.aboard Columbiadur~~ngts baptismal "There were a lot of things thattrip was the simple act thatthere were people could see when we got backno surprises during the first flight. and looked at the data. On ascent, it"We prepared or so many disaster pitched up and solid rocket boosterscripts in simulation:^ where every- staging was about 10,000 feet high.thing went wrong. And so little went and, on entry,we had a big side slip,"wrong, in terms of start to finish, that Young said. "That's what we werethat is probably the most memorable supposed to be doing with the firstthing, "Young explained. "The whole mission, looking at those kinds ofmission was just like! we planned it. things. Fortunately, the control sys-We didn't run into anything we didn't tem was set so that you could do thatexpect. We did lose some tiles on the kind of stuff and get away with it. ItOMS pod, but that was about all we was very tolerant of not having tocould see onboard." know the exact aerodynamics to flyAlthough here were few problems properly."apparent on board, tl?e test flight did For many of the shuttle's design-

Iwanted to stay up there another twoor three days and see how it reallyworked. But before we flew, therewereones who wanted o go around arev and then land. So we thought wewere very lucky to be up for two daysor so. We could have done it (orbitedlonger), but nobody would let us.""Entry was a big unknown," addedCrippen. "But Ididn't find it tense. Infact, one of the hardest things to dowas to keep your mind on the ob andnot spend time sightseeing out thewindows, because t was really spec-tacular."Cnppenalsowouldhavelikeda ongerfirstflight. "Honestly,Iwasso busy all hefin d unantici pated ers, the reentry of STS-1 was the - tirne,that ldidn'tgetachancetosit

serves as a special assistant to JSCDirector Aaron Cohen- nd both arestill nspired."I'vealways thoughtthattheshuttle was the real way to find out howto use space," Crippen explained. "Ibelieve that it has proved itset to be afantasticflying machine. Working on it svery satisfying to me personally. I'mproud of what the shuffle has done, but Ithink itcan do better.""I think the shuffle program is stillnew," Young added. "And there's greatopportunity to improve the shuffle. Youcould mproveittremendouslyfromwhatwe know now. There's awhole new suiteof avionics out there that's been devel-oped. It's a ot offun o still be involved nthe program. You learn something newevery day. Each mission does havespecial contributions it's making to sci-ence and technology in the country. Allofthesethingsarereallygoing ochangetheway hatweliveand t'sreally hardforpeople to see that."Although the shuffle program hashad setbacks, they are simply the workinvolved with operating such a vehide,Young said, and the future is bright."There are no slick managementschemes in working the space shuffle.There ust aren't." Young said. "You'vegot to figure out a way to do it and thenjust do it. It's plain old engineering."I hink the people, he maternal careand he attention odetail hat everybodyhas to give to this program to make itworkrightare hanging n hereanddoingit. There isn't anything magic about it.New technologies that allow you to dothings lighter, and better engines, arereally the keys to the future."The spirit and dedication of thoseinvolved with the shuffle made STS-1work, and they also are the key to itssuccesses to come, Crippen said.

'The amount of teamwork that wentinto itthen and now s exceptional. It s amawelous flying machine, and it is aterritic team that built it. And it s a erriticteam that flies it," he added.

Decade of Accomplishments: Space Shuttle Statistics 1981-1991Mission Orbiter Launch1 Times People Days Man-Hours Orbits Maximum Statute Total No. Orbiter Pounds Payload Payload EVA

Landing Orbiter Flown* in Orbit in Orbit Altitude, Miles Payloads Weight at to Orbit Deployed, Returned Man-HoursDates Flown n. mi. Flown** Lift-off, (not including Ibs to Earth,

Ibs Orbiter) IbsSTS- I ColumbiaSTS-2 ColumbiaSTS-3 ColumbiaSTS-4 ColumbiaSTS-5 ColumbiaSTS-6 ChallengerSTS-7 ChallengerSTS-8 ChallengerSTS-9 ColumbiaSTS-41B ChallengerSTS-41C ChallengerSTS-41D DiscoverySTS-41G ChallengerSTS-51 A DiscoverySTS-51C DiscoverySTS-51D DiscoverySTS-51B ChallengerSTS-51 G DiscoverySTS-51F ChallengerSTS-511 DiscoverySTS-51J AtlantisSTS-61 A ChallengerSTS-61B AtlantisSTS-61C ColumbiaSTS-51L Challenger ,STS-26 DiscoverySTS-27 AtlantisSTS-29 DiscoverySTS-30 AtlantisSTS-28 ColumbiaSTS-34 AtlantisSTS-33 DiscoverySTS-32 ColumbiaSTS-36 AtlantisSTS-31 DiscoverySTS-41 DiscoverySTS-38 AtlantisSTS-35 ColumbiaTOTALS

SOURCE: JSC FLIGHT DATA AND EVALUATION OFFICE'Uses number in crew; total individuals who have flown, not inclucling reflights, s 119.*Cnm ~ r m . n~kumllntwnatinnal

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April 12, 1991 SpaceNews Roundup Page 4BFuture Bright for Maturing The Amazing All-ElectricBy Kari Fluegel

As the Space Shuttle Program be-gins its second decade, Columbia,Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour,will shed their training wheels andshift into a new era of operationalaccomplishment."I hink we're on the verge in thenext year or two of demonstrating,yea verily, this vehicle will do what wesay it will do and that we have laid inplace all the right plans to make it arobust, varied program with a highdegree of confidence," said LeonardNicholson, deputy director of theSpace Shuttle Program.Delivery of Endeavour, OV-105,expected later this month, will roundout the orbiter fleet and will be thenext major milestone for the shuttleprogram."By having another vehicle wewon't be as hardware poor, so tospeak, which is where we've beenever since we lost the Challenger,"said Dan Germany, manager of theOrbiter Projects Office.Endeavour, the first new orbiter insix years, will ly its maiden voyage onSTS-49 in May 1992 to rendezvouswith and repair a disabled INTELSATcommunications satellite."We will for the first time be in a

posture where we have margin tomake our manifest," Nicholson said."We'll have sufficient number of orbit-ers and, along with Endeavour, a newprocessing facility at the KennedySpace Center. We will be in, for thefirst time, what I call an operationalposture."A fifth orbiter could come into thefleet in ate 1990s,Nicholson said, butnational priorities as described by theAdvisory Committee on the Future ofthe US. Space Program now call forthe development of a new heavy-lifllaunch vehicle.In May, Columbia will drop fromthe manifest for a few months as ilundergoes structural nspections andseveral modifications as part of thestandard orbiter maintenance plan.Discovery will follow Columbia toPalmdale n February of next year aswill Atlantis in July 1992.Modifications to the orbiters overthe next decade will gradually up-grade the fleet, Germany said."The technology the shuttle wasbuilt on was like 1970, so we're about20 years behind the times," he said,"lt's very difficult now to replace thehardware and to make replacement(parts) because no one is using thattechnology in the aircraft industry."Cockpit nstrumentationupgrades,new auxiliary power units and a newdrag chute system eventually will beinstalled in all the orbiters."There are an awful lot of smallerthings," Nicholson said. "The list ispages long that folks have beenworking on that will be incorporatedinto the system. Many of them areenhancements o the system to allowthe turnaround at KSC to be short-ened."Improving orbiter turnaround atKennedy is the key to meeting mani-fest requirements, Nicholson andGermany agreed."The experience that we've had isthat it takes us longer o process thanwe'd like for i t to," Germany said."That comes about for a variety ofreasons. The mechanics of process-ing are very labor intensive. Some ofthat is due to the complexity of thehardware and some of it is due to thechecks and balances laid in place."Currently heshuttlemanifest callsfor six flights this year and eight in1992. An average year's manifestwill provide for 10 flights per year.Both Nicholson and Germany agreedthat launching 10 imes a year is wellwithin the grasp of the program's ca-pabilities."I think 10 flights per year is cer-tainly doable," Nicholson said. "lt'swithin the capacity of the system andour challenge sto make he flight rateon a year-in year-out basis even withthe kind of problems we're going tohave."Occasionally, unforeseen prob-lems like last year's hydrogen leakson Columbia and the current hingelug cracksonDiscoveryaffecttheflow."Those hings seem to be happen-

Space Shuttle Fleeting to us a lot more than what I would (Continued from Page 2B) timesas much o launch oneof thosecall smooth processing is happening u to launch a shuttle.to us," Germany said. "So Iwould say say the shuttle is tooto get to 10 flights per year on aconsistent basis is going to be a big picture escapes the But how does that square with thejob for us." 't is very complicated, generally accepted notion that theOrbiter processing also wil y and large the public shuttle has siphoned off vast sums ofbeenhanced when mi as neither the means money from science programs,sions routinely and nor the motivation wrecking a golden age of planetaryat KSC. Aseries of to add up all the reconnaissance n the process?improvements in- numbers, and cer- The easy answer is, it doesn't,cluding redundant nose- tainlythenation's newsmediadoesn't because none of that was ever true.wheelsteering, henewcarbon brakes fl do it. "Contrary to general belief," Loftusand drag chutes coming online withEndeavour and the Columbia modi-fications have increased he comfortlevel for landing at KSC."We just recently polled the com-munity and I hink everybody s to thepoint of saying if we can meet ourflight rules, we're ready to start goingback to the Cape very shortly."Nicholson said.Still, the fast-changing weather inFlorida will remain a concern, hesaid.While being checked out atPalmdalethisyear, Columbia alsowil lbe outfitted as the fleet's extendedduration orbiter. It will then have thecapability to remain in orbit for 16days and will demonstrate the capa-bility duringa 13-day flight on STS-50now manifested for June 1992.

And staying on orbit longer will bethe nextfrontier crossed by he SpaceShuttle Program."I think the tendency to use theED 0 capability will grow," Nicholsonsaid. "We're also putting the basicprovisions in OV105 (Endeavour) toallow it to be an EDO. I intuitivelybelieve hat that capability is going tobe something that people find veryuseful and will be requesting moreand more of."No matter what the flight rate, theSpace Shuttle Program will continueto challenge the limits of mankind'sinaenuitv. More and more fre-

ment. It will provide transportation toretrieve and repair satellites. It alsowill provide the platform or construc-tion of Space Station Freedom."The shuttle is a workhorse," Ger-many said. "lt's the way you get tozero-G and get home. It's the wayyou take crews up here and get themback. It's the way you take payloadsup there and bring them back. Rightnow there is no other manned spacehardware capable of doing that in hestable of the USA. This is it, and weplan to use it for the next 30 years."Whereas the first 10 years havebeen a decade of development, thenext 10 will be a decade of growingoperations."I hinkthe next 10 years are goingto be the proof of the pudding, so tospeak," Germany said. "The first 10years have been 'Let's get our sealegs under us,' or 'Let's get used tothe training wheels on the bicycle.'We're ready to take training wheelsoff and get on with more of an opera-tional program as much as this pro-gram can ever be operational."I'm looking forward to the next 10years. I think we're going to startshowing a much better return on theinvestment, for all the money thecountry has put into his program andit'sgoingto beveryexciting."- 0

One who does have the meansand the motivation to add up thenumbers and assess the big pictureis Loftus. "I'll give you a chart," hewill say, "that shows for all intentsand purposes we've launched 1,200tons of payload every decade. Ittook us 215 launches in the '60s,152 launches in the '70s and 102launches n he'80s. The shuttle,with41 percent of all U.S. launches, haslaunched 41percent of all the mass.Not including the orbiter."During Apollo, the measure ofmass deployed to space includedthe Command and Service Moduleand the Lunar Module. Imagine howthe numbers would change today ifNASA included the launch of awinged vessel of exploration in themeasure of mass sent to space!Beyond that point, however, is thespectre of another "truism" that crit-ics trot out with some regularitywhenever t's timeto bash heshu ttleagain. The Saturn V, they say, wasfar more reliable than the shuttle istoday, abletosend upfarmorecargo,and would be much cheaper andless complicated o operate han theorbiter fleet. It was a gross mistake,they say, to replace tw ith he shuttle."The truth of the matter is," Pohlsaid, "if you go back and look at thenumber of people that worked onbuilding those stages for every

translate that

DEDICATION-This special issue of Space News Roundup is dedicated to al l of the men and women who have given ofthemselves to create and fly America'sspace shuttle, the worldsfirst reusable spacecraft. Their dedication and sacrifice has,stone bv stone, built a new hiohway to the heavens. It goes out to the family members who encouraged, supported, enduredand rejoiced n heir effortsand accomplishments. ltespecially honorsthe memoryofthose who havedied builbing ortravelingthat highway, including he STS-51L crew-Dick Scobee, Mike Smith. Judy Resnik, E l Onizuka, Ron McNair, Greg Jamis and

By Pam Alloway management and, despite numer- lems encountered with the experi-While many engi neers were ous roadblocks, built a miniature ment.working on various aspects of the orbiter that could ride piggyback on "One thing we did learn was thatshuttle in flight, one JSC engineer a Boeing 747 scale model. He did it our orbiter models, which of coursewas concentrating on getting the on his own time, in his own garage, had nostability ororientation, weren'tshuttle from its landing site, gener- mostly at his own expense. flying well with thetail cone installed,"ally Edwards Air Force Base in "No one thought it would work," Kikersaid. "Wetri edflightaf terfl ightCali fornia , to its launch site at said Kiker, who retired from NASAin and had many crashes. SowetalkedKennedy Space Center. 1980 but now isa n engineering con- to our aerodynamics people andJ.W. Kiker, a longtime aircraft sultant for Lockheed. "But it was an asked what we should do."model builder and aviation enthusi- attempt to show the center and the Aerodynamics engineers recorn-ast, was a branch chief in the Engi- world that this was the way to do it." mended Kiker partially deploy theneering Directorate's Mechanical So on a warm day in 1977 Kiker, models'speed brakesand body flap,Systems Division in the late 1970s. fellow JSC engineer Kirby Hinson, which helped.He'd seen a lot of airplanesasa boy and dozens of others gathered in a Gett ing the orb ite r to la ndworking at a North Carolina airport JSC field and watched Kiker's I / smoothly continued to plague theand as a flight instructor for the Air 40th scale radio-controlled 747 and experimenters but a new tail coneForce. While others were talking orbiter models take off, separate in configuration enabled the model toabout strapping several jet engines mid-air and glide to a successful glide to a nearly flawless landing onunder the orbiter's belly and making landing. its last flight in 1977-minus onenumerous stops on its way back to "It was great to see it work," Kiker wheel that popped off on impact withKSC, Kiker was doing what he usu- said. "But we crashed a lot of mod- the ground. That flight was the pre-ally did, tinkering with models. But els." cursor for a successful set of teststhis latest model project would have Kiker narrated a historic NASA with the space shuttle Enterprise,a far-reaching effect. Kiker devel- film clip that recorded his model's and a long history of safe cross-oped a design, proposed it to NASA flight. Kiker alked about some prob- country ferry flights.0

. -said, "the agency spent less moneyon transportation in the '80s than itspent in the '60% and more moneyon the operations of science, TDRSand all the data networks.''Another shuttle strength not gen-erally recognized is that its 20-year-old design is still state-of-the-art inmany areas, including computerizedflight control, air frame design, theelectrical power system, h e hermalprotection system and the main pro-pulsion system. It s the one vehicleflying that offers any sort of mean-ingful capability to return payloadstothe Earth, and has, infact, broughtmore than half-a-million pounds ofcargo back to the planet. And it alsois the only man-rated vehicle typenow being emulated by all of theother major spacefaring powers.In the end comes the question ofhow the shuttle will rank in the vastpantheon of flying vehicles. Fagetoffered the perspective of an experi-enced aerospace designer: "Whenwe first broke the speed of sound.we did this in a research airplane.After we flew that airplane a dozentimes we discarded it, put it into amuseum, and then got to work ondesigning airplanes based on theknowledge we gained from it. Whenwe flew up to Mach 3, then Mach 6,none of these machines was usedoperationally. The shuttle is the firstone that. . . flew this tremendousMach number range but it also didthe job of a launch vehicle and aspacecraft that could stay in orbit fordays or weeks at a time. If t is a littlebit wanting in some of its operationalfeatures, I hink it's excusable. WhatI'm trying to say is, maybe the sec-ond and third generation shuttlecould be really good, but I don'tknow how you can make the thirdgeneration shuttle without having hefirst and second generation shuttle.We are still learning."The shuttle is a stunning expres-sion of the art of engineering. It wasthe very finest that could be donewith the tools at hand, and no othernation could have reached as farand achieved as much. The spaceshuttle can't do everything perfectly,it can't even do some things as wellas other vehicles. But anybody whoreally does expect it to perform atsuch an exotic level of perfectionisn't firing on all thrusters anyway,and certainly doesn't understand hetrue challenge of space flight. To theengineerswho built t, the shuttle willalways be a miracle.Chris Kraft tells the story of want-ing to design automobile enginesbefore airplanes lured him to aero-nautics, and how his high schoolphysics teacher back in Hampton,Va., gave him an early insight intothe profession. "He always said,'Young man, if you really get to bethat kind of engineer, when you seethat automobile drive down thestreet, you will not see that automo-bile at all. What you will see arethose pistons going up and down,and the camshaft going around andthe spark plugs going off and theflame burning inside that cylinder.'And he was right," Kraft said.

After a decade of flight, with expe-rience both triumphant and tragic toguide our perceptions, t's easy to getbogged down and lose sight of thatsame kind of magic. Perhaps it wasBob Crippen who summed it up bestas Columbia rolled out across thedesert lakebed for the first time. Hecould see, in his mind's eye, the hun-dreds of valves, the miles of wiringand the sheer, raw power this ma-chine had just spent with an easygrace. "The shuttle is," he said, "theworld's greatest all-electric flying ma-chine." 0 NASA-JSC