Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) (16 page)

Astronaut Charlie Bolden praised the
STA
for giving him an excellent feeling for how the shuttle handled during entry and landing. “When I was Hoot’s [Gibson’s] pilot, sitting in the right-hand side, calling off airspeeds backwards, airspeed and altitude, putting the landing gear down, it was just like being in the
STA
. Combine that with the
SMS
, it was just as if I had been there before. So, the world of simulation, even back then when it wasn’t as good as it is today, was awesome.”

Of course, an even better tool than an airplane for learning how an orbiter lands is an orbiter. In an unusual turn of events, the Space Shuttle landed before it ever launched for the first time.

The first orbiter completed was
Enterprise
, a flight-test vehicle ultimately incapable of flying into space but fully functional for atmospheric glides. Originally,
Enterprise
was to be a member of the operational orbiter fleet, a fact reflected in its official vehicle designation. Each of the operational orbiters has an Orbiter Vehicle, or
OV
, number.
Enterprise
, the first of the fleet, is
OV
-101.
Enterprise
was to be joined by three other orbiters:
Columbia
,
OV
-102;
Discovery
,
OV
-103; and
Atlantis
,
OV
-104. (Later would come
Endeavour
,
OV
-105.) An additional orbiter, the Static Test Article, was built as a ground-based test vehicle and was given the designation
STA
-99.
Enterprise
was the first of the flying orbiters to be completed, but it was not given a space-worthy configuration. Rather, it was modified for use in glide flights to test how the vehicle would fly during entry and landing. The vehicle was also used for vibration testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to determine how an orbiter would withstand the stresses of launch, and to test the facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to make sure they were ready for processing vehicles for launch. The plan was that all of those tests would be completed during the mid-1970s, and then
Enterprise
would be modified to take its place alongside
Columbia
as
a spacecraft. However, it was determined that because of the weight of
Enterprise
, it would actually be easier to modify the Static Test Article instead, and thus
STA
-99 became
OV
-99,
Challenger
, while
Enterprise
would be used for other ground tests and ultimately would be the first orbiter to become a museum exhibit. Since the initial construction of
OV
-101 was completed in 1976, it was originally to be named
Constitution
, in honor of the U.S. bicentennial year. The name was changed as the result of a letter-writing campaign to the White House organized by fans of the television series
Star Trek
, which featured a starship named the
USS
Enterprise
.

Between February and November 1977,
Enterprise
made a series of test flights, dubbed approach and landing tests (
ALT
s). The first flights were captive-carry tests, in which
Enterprise
was carried, unmanned, on the back of a specially modified Boeing 747 to study its aerodynamics. For later flights, the orbiter was released from the 747 during flight and piloted to the ground. Assigned as
Enterprise
’s crews for those flights were astronauts Dick Truly, Fred Haise, Gordon Fullerton, and Joe Engle.

Just prior to the start of the
ALT
program, Fullerton was a key player in the design of the orbiter cockpit, which he believes contributed to his selection for the
ALT
program. “I’d run across a lot of really crummy designs in learning to fly certain airplanes, and I thought I could do better,” Fullerton recalled.

As it turned out, that was a real challenge. With the shuttle, rather than lying on your back on the end of a rocket riding into space, you had possibility of controlling it, both in the vertical mode and coming back as an airplane pilot at the end. The whole complexity of it is far more complex than the [earlier
NASA
] rockets, as far as what the man could do. Putting all that together in a cockpit was really intriguing, and I enjoy working with stuff in an engineering sense, so it was perfect. I became the cockpit design czar, sort of, to go to really organize and set up and go to all the reviews. I had a big foam-core cardboard mockup of the entire cockpit built right there in the Astronaut Office, and I cycled all the other guys in there to say, “What can you see? What would you do if this was a checklist? Can you reach it?” So I did a human factor study on all that.

With
Enterprise
, Fullerton saw the designs and drawings he had signed off on come to life. “It’s very satisfying when you see [the results of what you did],” he said. “I can go get in an orbiter right now and look at the panels and think, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember all this.’ It’s a real feeling of personal pride.”

10.
An aerial view of
Enterprise
hoisted into the Dynamic Test Stand at
NASA
’s Marshall Space Flight Center for the Mated Vertical Ground Vibration test. The test was the first time that all of the Space Shuttle elements were mated together. Courtesy
NASA
.

As with the shuttle itself, training for the
Enterprise
test flights was very much a make-it-up-as-you-go-along process, Fullerton explained. “People say, ‘How do you train?’ thinking, well, you go to a school and somebody tells you how to do it. It’s not that at all. Somebody’s got to write the checklist, so you end up writing the checklist, working with each subsystems person and trying to come up with a prelaunch checklist for the approach and landing tests. So you’re doing the work, and the learning comes from doing jobs that needed to be done.”

The
ALT
flights blurred the distinction between the crew members’ new careers as astronauts and their past experiences as test pilots. “[For] astronauts now, the orbiter’s a pretty stable configuration, so they go to a school with ground school instructors that know the system. . . . For
ALT
and then subsequently on the
Columbia
, we were clearly test pilots because we were doing stuff that there wasn’t a procedure for. We were writing the procedure and then flying it for the first time.”

Not only did procedures have to be developed for the test,
NASA
had to decide exactly what the test would look like. On the one hand, for safety reasons, testing would have to be incremental, starting with the relatively low-risk captive-carry flights and ending with actual flight-profile landing tests. From that perspective, more flights were better, to assure safety at each step and to maximize the data results of the tests. On the other hand, the
ALT
flights would use money and manpower that would otherwise be going toward preparations for the actual spaceflights of the shuttle, so more tests would delay the first flight. After a lengthy debate, the decision was made to not pick a number in advance, but to decide in real time what was needed. Ultimately, thirteen
ALT
flights would be made.

“There were five captive, inert flights,” Fullerton explained,

where the orbiter was bolted on, completely inert, nothing moving, nothing running other than some instrumentation. Fitz Fulton and Tom McMurtry and flight engineers flew those five to the point where they said, “Okay, the combination is clear, and we understand what we’ve got here.” So then they decided to have some
x
number of captive, active flights, where the crew got on board and powered up the
APU
s and the electronics and all the subsystems, and those were dress rehearsals up to launch point. They had an open number of those. It turns out after three, they thought they’d learned all they needed to know. The systems were working. Had a couple of failures on number two, a big
APU
propellant leak. I was chasing that one. At three, they said, “Okay, it’s time to go do it,” and they were trying to get to the end as quick as possible, so they could get on with the
Columbia
.

After the three crewed flights atop the 747, it was time to set
Enterprise
free and see how the vehicle and its crew would do on their own. Fullerton was pilot and responsible for monitoring the orbiter’s systems. With him, as commander, was astronaut Fred Haise. “On the very first flight, the instant we pushed the button to blow the bolts and hop off the 747, the shock
of that actually dislodged a little solder ball and a transistor on one of the computers, and we had the caution tone go off and the red light. I mean instantly,” Fullerton recalled.

I’m looking, and we had three
CRT
s, and one of those essentially went to halt. It was the one hooked to one of the four computers that monitored. This is pretty fundamental. All your control of the airplane is through fly-by-wire and these computers. So I had a cue card with a procedure if that happened, that we’d practiced in the simulator, and I had to turn around and pull some circuit breakers and throw a couple of switches to reduce your susceptibility to the next failure. I did that, and by the time I looked around, I realized, “Hey, this is flying pretty good,” because I was really distracted from the fundamental evaluation of the airplane at first.

Haise recalled that it was surprising to him not to be able to see the 747 beneath him while
Enterprise
was still attached to the airplane. “No matter how you’d lean over and try to look out the side window you couldn’t view any part of it, not even a wingtip. It was kind of like a magic carpet ride. You’re just moving along the ground and then you take off. It was also deceptive sitting up that high. Things always looked like it was going slower than it was, for your taxiing and particularly the first takeoff, it didn’t look like we were going fast enough. I said to myself, ‘We’re not going fast enough to make it off the ground.’”

Leading up to this point, predictions and models had proposed how an orbiter would fly. There had been simulations, both in training equipment on the ground and on the Gulfstream in the air. But now it was time to move beyond the models and simulations. For the first time,
NASA
was about to learn how the orbiter would fly from the real thing.

“To me, even at the first flight, it was very clear it handled better in a piloting sense than we had seen in any simulation, either our mission simulators or the Shuttle Training Aircraft,” Haise explained.

It was tighter, crisper, in terms of control inputs and selecting a new attitude in any axis and being able to hold that attitude, it was just a better-handling vehicle than we had seen in the simulations, although they were close.

The landing also was a pleasant surprise from the standpoint of ground effect. Ground effect is a phenomenon you run into. When you get within one wingspan height of the ground, you start running into air-cushioning effects, which can, depending on the vehicle’s shape or configuration, be very different. It turned out the shuttle, in my view, was a perfect vehicle. If you get set up with the right sync rate, coasting along, you can literally almost go hands-off, and it’ll settle on and land itself very nicely.

11.
The Space Shuttle
Enterprise
participating in approach and landing tests. Courtesy
NASA
.

Flying two of the
Enterprise
flights—the second and fourth—were Joe Engle as commander and, as pilot, Dick Truly. Engle and Truly went on to crew the second shuttle flight,
STS
-2. Engle had participated in similar flights as part of another space plane program, the
X
-15, a joint endeavor by
NASA
and the air force, and had actually earned astronaut wings for flying into space with the air force before being brought in to
NASA
’s astronaut corps. As with the
Enterprise
test flights, the
X
-15 began its flight by being lofted by a larger aircraft. “I think one of the reasons that I was selected to fly the shuttle, initially,” Engle said, “was because of the experience that I’d had at Edwards (Air Force Base) with the
X
-15 and air launching from another vehicle, from a carrier vehicle.”