I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (16 page)

But if nothing goes wrong, the Shuttle continues to pick up speed thanks to its main engines. They’re sucking fuel through a 17-inch-diameter pipe at such a rate that they’d drain an Olympic-sized swimming pool in ten seconds flat. After eight minutes they’ve used every one of the 500,000 gallons in the huge tank. And for this mission their work is done. The Space Shuttle is on the edge of space, doing 17,500 mph.

Truck? I don’t think so.

But if you think getting to space is a bewildering array of big numbers, it’s nothing compared with the complexities of getting back down again.

To penetrate the earth’s atmosphere, the nose cone has to withstand a shockwave that, at 3,000
degrees Fahrenheit, is considerably hotter than the surface of the sun. Crew members sitting in the back seats of the upper deck can look backwards through the glass ‘moon’ roof and see nothing but a sheet of white-hot flame. And after they’ve barged their way through this the pilot has got to slow the machine down from 17,000 mph to a safe landing speed of 211 mph.

This is tricky, partly because he has no fuel left and therefore no power and partly because the Shuttle has the aerodynamic properties of an Aga. As a result, he has to make a series of sweeping turns, washing off speed with each one, but even then the rate of descent is still seven times greater than in a normal plane. Put it this way: if a crew member were to jump as the Shuttle was on its final approach, the plane would hit the ground before he did.

I love the Space Shuttle. I love the sense that every single figure and every single fact is more mind-boggling than the last.

When it’s in space we know the crew take just the most astonishing photographs. There they are, fiddling about in their balloon suits, while far below we can see Italy sliding by. It’s the juxtaposition, I think, of utter civilisation in
the background and absolute hostility in the foreground that makes the shots so spectacular.

And it really is hostile where Hoot and his colleagues strut their stuff. For instance, if they fly with one side of the Shuttle facing the sun for too long, one cargo-door will swell and won’t close properly. So then they have to turn the whole caboodle round to heat the other side up as well.

No astronaut has ever been lost in space but there have been close calls. The 46th mission called for the crew to launch a European satellite from the cargo area and then fly in formation while checks were carried out by staff at the command centre in Germany.

All was going well until someone on earth pushed the wrong button. Instead of rotating, the satellite veered off course and started heading straight for the Shuttle. Andy Allen was alone at the controls when the radar sounded a collision alarm. He couldn’t see the satellite because they were on the dark side of the earth and he couldn’t get a fix from his instruments because it was so close.

Immediately he fired the reaction-control jets, using valuable propellant that would be needed to
get the ship in the right attitude for re-entry. But that seemed a long way off. Avoiding a crash was more important, so he kept on firing the jets until eventually a crew member saw the satellite and everyone could work out which way to turn. The two craft came within 700 feet of each other.

So, we marvel then at the skill of the crews and at the technological challenges that NASA has had to overcome. But do we ever stop and wonder what on earth the Space Shuttle is actually for?

It was conceived in the early seventies and announced on 5 January 1972 by Richard Nixon. He said the Shuttle would transform the frontier of space in the seventies into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavour in the eighties and nineties. This wasn’t a lie. But it did turn out to be wrong.

Originally the plan was for 50 launches a year – nearly one a week – and even as recently as 1985 they were talking about one a fortnight. But they seriously underestimated the time it would take to turn a Shuttle round between missions. I mean, if it lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, it must be fastened to the back of a Boeing 747 and flown back to Florida at a cost of $750,000.
Because of the time and expense of everything, they never really fly more than six or seven times a year.

There was another problem too. The inference of Nixon’s speech was that soon normal people would be going into space, not just a bunch of white, college-educated American males. But unfortunately the white, college-educated American males didn’t really hold with this. The astronauts felt that if females and plumbers were allowed up there, their status would be eroded. If a plumber can do it…

Eventually they agreed that civilians could come along, and selected a 37-year-old schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe. She was plucked from 11,000 applicants, spent a year in training and on 28 January 1986 was strapped into
Challenger
. Just 74 seconds after take-off an O-ring on the fuel tank broke, and television viewers around the world were treated to the unedifying sight of a Space Shuttle exploding.

I was in a Fulham pub when the pictures were flashed onto a TV screen above the bar and I remember the whole place fell absolutely silent. Never again, we thought, will any of us see anything quite so violent and quite so shocking. Little
did we realise, of course, that on 11 September 2001 we would…

The
Challenger
accident was a catastrophe for NASA, and not only because it killed seven people. It was a catastrophe because it didn’t destroy just one Shuttle. It seriously damaged all of them.

Suddenly the public realised that space travel was not and could never be routine. So the Nixon dream of people popping up there ‘for a laugh’, so to speak, suddenly seemed very far away. And worse, corporate satellites were banned from the cargo area so NASA would never again be exposed to commercial pressure. The military had never been fans of the Shuttle so suddenly it looked like a delivery truck with nothing to deliver, a Shuttle with nowhere to shuttle to. It looked like it was doomed.

When operations began again two and a half years later I had no idea what they were doing. It seemed like the crews were going up there, eating Phenergan to settle their sicky tummies and then coming back again. They teamed up with the Russians so they could use the Mir Space Station as a stopping-off point, but mostly it all seemed rather pointless.

It still does actually. Sure, in November 1998 they finally got the first piece of the International Space Station into orbit and the Shuttle became a vital part of that programme. But then came the reentry loss of
Columbia
, which broke apart 200,000 feet over Texas, and that grounded them again.

Bush may say that Mars is the next goal but Bush is an idiot. Now everyone is more interested in genetic blueprints and human cloning than space travel.

So here we are. We’ve already colonised the bit of space that surrounds our planet and we’ve already been to the Moon, which is a useless lump of rock. To progress, we have to start thinking about the moons of Jupiter and the next galaxy, and that means we’re going to need far more power than we have now.

It seems to me, then, that today the Shuttle is nothing more than a stopgap, a device that keeps our hand in while we think what to do next.

Each time it takes off its enormous power serves only to demonstrate that, really, it’s nowhere near powerful enough. So, far from being a reminder of how brilliant we are, the poor thing merely reminds us that when it comes to the exploration of space we’re puny and absolutely hopeless.

It was quite a con. I’d managed to convince the producers of ‘old’
Top Gear
that we should film a feature about fast Fords through the ages.

The suits nodded sagely as their new-boy presenter outlined his treatment. We would have a look at cars such as the Cortina 1600E and the Escort RS2000, which would bring a sense of teary nostalgia to the piece, and then we’d look at the new Fiesta turbo for the ‘yoof’ audience. ‘Everyone likes a fast Ford,’ I argued, and they agreed, giving me the green light to set it up.

I’d given them the sort of marketing speak that TV types love, but actually there was only one reason I wanted to look at souped-up Fords past and present: because it’d mean I’d achieve a dream. I’d get to drive the fastest Ford of them all – the GT40.

The day arrived and I went through the motions of being excited at the XR3s and the Consul GTs. They’d all been brought along by
proud owners who were almost priapic at the notion of having their cars on television, so it would have been churlish to have pointed out that they were merely extras, a bit of padding leading up to the great event.

I’d loved the GT40 since I was six. At that time Ferraris were so exotic and so alien that there seemed little point in worrying about them. I was living in Doncaster, so I was never going to even see one for heaven’s sake. Whereas Fords were different. I mean, my dad had one of those.

So when I heard that a Ford was going to Le Mans to take on these exotic alien spaceships from Italy I could sense, even then, that David was loading his sling in readiness for the battle with Goliath. What I didn’t know then is that the GT40 had been born out of spite.

In the early sixties Ford had been on the verge of buying Ferrari but at the last minute, worried that his beloved race team would be drowned by big-company bureaucracy, Enzo had pulled out of the deal. Henry Ford was so livid at the public rebuttal that he ordered his enormous empire to build a car that would go to Le Mans and make Ferrari look like a team of part-time amateurs.

The Americans initially offered up a 4.2-litre
V8 that produced 350 bhp and a top speed of 207 mph. But this was deemed too wet so it was increased in size to 4.7 litres. And that didn’t work either.

The early prototypes were nose-light, tail-happy, unreliable dogs but, driven by his need to humiliate Enzo Ferrari, Henry Ford ploughed on. The British team working on the chassis and body, which was 40 inches tall hence the GT40 name, fiddled with aerodynamics and the complexities of fitting a spare wheel under the stubby bonnet. The Americans meanwhile worked on the engine, eventually going the whole hog and coming up with a massive 7-litre V8.

This did the trick and in 1966 Ford won the greatest race of them all. And not just once either but four times on the trot. Here, then, was a blue-collar street fighter beating a blue-blooded aristocrat. It made a little boy in Doncaster very happy indeed because, so far as I was concerned, it was my dad’s Anglia out there, doing the business.

And now, nearly thirty years later, I was about to climb into a real GT40 and take it for a spin.

It wasn’t a racer. It was one of the seven road
cars built by Ford to commemorate the victories. There were plans for more, but a road test in a respected American car magazine was critical, saying the detuned V8 with just 300 bhp on tap was not gutsy enough and that, with its big boot on the back, the car was ugly. Ford was incensed and the road project was canned.

I didn’t care though. I was about to drive a dream and as I opened that low, low door my heart was beating like a washing machine full of wellingtons.

I got one leg inside and knew I was in trouble. It didn’t really slide under the dashboard as I’d imagined. So I took it out again and went in backside first, but that didn’t work either. Eventually, with much huffing and puffing, I did get my feet onto the pedals and my bum into the seat, but then the door wouldn’t close because my head was in the way. I had the car. I had the keys. I had the right insurance. But I was just too tall. It was a crushing blow.

In some ways, though, it was a good thing. They say you should never meet your heroes because they will always be a disappointment. True: when I was four Johnny Morris told me to
‘bugger off’ when I asked for his autograph. And I think it’s the same with cars.

The simple fact of the matter is that the road-going GT40 is slower, more uncomfortable, less safe, less well equipped than, say, a Golf GTi, and nowhere near as nice to drive. Had I been able to take it for a spin I would have been let down. And that would probably have been worse than not being able to get inside.

So what about the new GT, built to celebrate Ford’s centenary. Although it can’t be called a GT40, because Ford sold the rights to the name to a kit-car company, it does look like one. Bigger, yes, and sharper round the edges, but there’s no mistaking the shape. It’s beautiful, and brutal and wonderful.

But unlike the old car, this one is spacious, easy to drive and extraordinarily fast. With a 5.4-litre V8 engine, lifted straight from the Lightning pickup truck, you get 540 lbs feet of torque, 540 bhp and as a result a top speed of 212 mph. That makes it not only faster than the GT40 but faster than any other road car on the market today. The blue-collar, Bruce Springsteen heart still beats.

Happily, I’m due to get one and I’m sure we’ll have many happy miles together. But when all is
said and done it is a fake, a facsimile of the real thing.

I shall enjoy the car in the garage. But I love the one in the poster above my desk.

It was an Italian engineer who first came up with the notion of a battleship. Vittorio Cuniberti reasoned way back in 1903 that soon naval vessels would not only have to face attack from the surface. Torpedoes would make them vulnerable from below and, who knows, one day bombs could be dropped by ‘aero craft’ making ships susceptible from above as well.

His solution was simple. The modern ship, he reckoned, would have to be fast, supremely well armoured and fitted only with massive guns. No more pea-shooters for close-range stuff. Just lots and lots of monsters.

This way, the battleship could use its speed to get to the right place while its armour resisted any attack from above or below. And then, when it was correctly positioned, the enemy could be bombarded with a hail of 12-inch – or better still 16-inch – shells.

There was no point fitting smaller supplementary
guns. The splashes made when their shells missed the target would obscure the view for the main armament and make life difficult for the loaders in the magazines. If there was only one type of shell in there, the chance of sending the wrong type to the wrong gun was eliminated.