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Growing Up With Spaceflight
Thursday, April 24, 2025
WELCOME to Wes Oleszewski's Space blog: Growing up with Spaceflight
Saturday, April 23, 2022
LEVEL IT.
The following are excerpts from Wes Oleszewski's book "Growing up with Spaceflight, Apollo Part Two" It is protected by copyright 2015 Wes Oleszewski, no part may be reused without the author's permission- publication here does not imply such permission.
APOLLO 16
I’M GONNA TELL ‘EM YER’ NUTS
Saturday’s EVA started around noon and to my delight
all three networks were covering the events a bit more completely, probably due
to the fact that weekend daytime programming was easier to pre-empt than the
weekday programming. Also to my approval was the fact that my entire family was
now gone to the Civic Center and the rodeo. As Mom worked in the concession
stand and Dad sold programs little brother and sister wore cowboy hats and
tried to look western… I guess. Such big events only came to the arena a few
times each year and, again, that one month delay of the Apollo 16 mission back
in January had worked out to my advantage. While my kin folk were away playing
cowboy, I was at home watching the moonwalkers and playing Descartes Highlands
on our living room carpet— life was as it should be for a space-buff.
EVA number two saw the crew making the maximum use
of the LRV as they headed uphill toward South Ray crater. The crater itself was
not the objective of the excursion, instead they were to stop at points where
the rays from the crater crossed their path and sample those areas. It did not
take long to conclude that these bright rays consisted mostly of large blocks
thrown out by the impact that created South Ray itself. Through the day there
was clearly more TV coverage than there had been on Friday. CBS even kept with
the mission as the crew drove between sampling stations 5 and 6 and then again
between 6 and 8 while the camera on the LRV was turned off. The slopes were
steep, the blocks were big and often fractured. Finally, upon returning to the
landing site with a 10 minute EVA extension, the crew got some additional ALSEP
work done before getting back into the LEM. Both the crew and Mission Control
were highly satisfied with the EVA and I was a great deal more satisfied with
the TV coverage- at least there were no soap operas involved.
Following the second EVA I went to bed with the
hum of the lunar communications background noise echoing in my ears. The next
day’s EVA would be the last for this mission and would take the crew up the
steep side of North Ray crater and right up to the rim. I tried to imagine how
amazing it must be for them to be inside the LEM at that same moment- looking
forward to another adventure tomorrow morning. I wondered how they could possibly
sleep.
I could hardly sleep here on Earth just imagining
the whole experience. What I did not know was that both John Young and Charlie
Duke had climbed into their hammocks inside Orion and slept like someone had
smacked them in the head with a hockey stick- they were exhausted.
Sunday’s EVA started at 10:25 in the morning Lexington Drive time. This traverse was scheduled to be two hours shorter than the first two EVAs in order to accommodate Orion’s lunar liftoff that was to take place at 8:26 pm. The abbreviated EVA was the result of the late landing, but everyone, including us space-buffs, knew that it was better to have that short EVA than to lose it completely like we had feared Thursday evening.
Once more, the rest of my family was down at the Civic Center at the rodeo and I had the house all to myself. Aside from a short bulletin stating that all was well, TV coverage of the EVA did not really begin until the crew got all the way up to station 11 on the rim of North Ray- nearly two hours after the EVA had started. Rats! Nothing to do until then, thus, I decided that my living room carpet was just not cutting it as a simulation of the Descartes Highlands. So, I went outside to make my own moonscape. Our above-ground pool had suffered some ice damage to the liner over the winter and my Dad had to take the pool down until we could get a new liner for the summer. Now our backyard had an 18-foot diameter sand pit where the pool was supposed to go. It was the perfect place for a lunatic 14-year-old to build a model of the Apollo 16 landing site.After two days of watching the mission coverage I
had a pretty fair idea of what the Descartes site looked like and I also had the
image of the landing site that had been published in TV Guide; so I went to
work. With my TV Guide at my knees I was almost done making my Descartes in the
sand by the time the real EVA reached North Ray. I was busy sculpting that area
when I heard a man’s voice speaking over the top of the stockade fence that
surrounded our yard.
“What in the world are you doin’?” the voice
asked.
It was my older cousin Tommy, who was a Saginaw City police officer.
I told him I was making the Descartes Highlands where Apollo
16 was right now.
“Yer’ what?!” he exclaimed.
I explained that the astronauts were there right
now.
“They’re right about here now.” I said pointing
toward the southern slope of my version of North Ray crater.
He just shook his head, snickered and looking down, he said that my parents had asked him to drop by and check up on me.
“I’m gonna tell ‘em yer’ nuts,” he laughed.
“Okay,” I just shrugged and agreed.
On the Saturday immediately following the Apollo
16 splashdown I was indeed forced from space-buff euphoria into the cold hard
reality that Apollo 16 was really over. That was when my Dad discovered the
moonscape that I had sculptured out of the spot where our backyard pool was
supposed to reside.
I was handed a rake and ordered to “level it.”
My Dad had a saying that, “The mess you make is
the mess you clean up.”
He shot that one at me.
“It’s not a mess,” I told him, “it’s the Descartes
Highlands of the Moon.”
Without missing a beat Dad replied,
“The Moon you make is the Moon you clean up.”
Thursday, April 21, 2022
APOLLO 16: 50 YEARS AGO TODAY, APRIL 21, 1972
The following is an excerpt from Wes Oleszewski's book "Growing up with Spaceflight, Apollo Part Two" It is protected by copyright 2015 Wes Oleszewski, no part may be reused without the author's permission- publication here does not imply such permission.
APOLLO 16
THANK GOODNESS THE RODEO IS IN TOWN
Coasting toward the Moon, Apollo 16 was, again,
making it look easy. Those of us on the earth saw very little of the transit
between the Earth and the Moon as the big networks simply did not find it worth
their time on the evening news. Still, the mission continued to unfold in my
favor as each critical event just fell right into place on my calendar. Lunar
orbit was entered on Wednesday, April 19th and the lunar landing was
scheduled to take place on Thursday afternoon at 3:41 Eastern time with the
first EVA scheduled to begin that same day at 7:19 in the evening. The second
EVA was scheduled to start at 5:44 Friday Evening and the final EVA was set for
Saturday evening at 5:17 followed by lunar liftoff at 4:34 Sunday afternoon. An issue with the CSM TVC would cause a delay in the PDI, and reshuffle the EVA schedule. Yet, this all worked for me because my folks would give me Thursday off of school
for the landing and the rest of the events fell into a good place for me for
one big reason... the rodeo was in town!
Okay, so you may be asking yourself, “Rodeo? In
mid-Michigan? How the heck does that fit into Apollo 16?” The fact is that I
have about zero interest in rodeos or anything associated with them and the
same was true in April of 1972. My parents, however, at that time both worked
at the newly opened Saginaw Civic Center and the rodeo coming to town was a
huge event for the arena. Mom and Dad were going to be completely occupied from
early in the morning until late in the evening working at the Civic Center from
Wednesday until Sunday. Mom worked the commissary and Dad huckstered programs-
they made a good deal of extra money over and above Dad’s full-time job as a
railroad engineer for the C&O. The best part was that on Saturday and
Sunday, they were taking my brother and sister with them. They would both get
cowboy hats, and I would get Apollo 16! So it was that on Friday April 21, 1972
the scheduled first EVA for Apollo 16 was mine alone at home to enjoy and tape record.
In order to make up for the power used in the near
six hour delay prior to PDI, the crew had been directed by Mission Control to
execute an extensive power-down. Following that, the orders were for the
astronauts to go to sleep. The entire lunar activity schedule was being
re-written on the spot and the first EVA was now set to begin 11:30 am, Eastern
time the following morning rather than taking place at 7:19 pm this evening as
originally planned. Of course, the delay meant that the 7:19 time had already
passed- so the first EVA’s start time was already moot. That rescheduling struck
gold with me- now I had a reason to stay home from school on Friday too!
I did not even have to work at convincing my
parents to give me the day off. As they dragged themselves in from working at
the Civic Center, I simply told them that the EVA had been rescheduled to
tomorrow morning. Mom simply yawned and said,
“Have fun on the Moon dear.”
APOLLO 16:
NOTHING COULD BE WORSE THAN A SPACE-BUFF THAT IS
STUCK WATCHING SOAP OPERAS AND GAME SHOWS
Friday morning arrived and with my brother and
sister gone to school and my folks gone to the Civic Center, I had the whole
day by myself with nothing but continuous coverage of Apollo 16’s lunar EVAs on
the TV… or so I thought.
NBC started their coverage at noon, but by then
both astronauts were already on the surface and working after having popped the
hatch at 11:47 am Sheridan Park time. There was no news coverage of John
Young’s first step onto the lunar surface nine minutes later due to a failure
in the LEM’s high-gain antenna. Without that antenna, no television could be transmitted,
so no TV equated to no TV ratings and thus no TV interest from the network news
producers. Young’s first words as he became the ninth human to set foot on the
Moon and looked around were,
“There you are, our mysterious and unknown
Descartes Highland plains. Apollo 16 is gonna change your image.”
Instead of Young’s historic first steps onto the lunar surface, what we here on earth got was a 60 second blurb of Roy Neil telling us
that Young was on the surface and Duke was still “…inside the cabin…” In fact,
listening carefully to the tape, Duke’s voice can be heard in the background
telling Houston that he is, “…makin’ little footprints here…” which were some
of his first words on the surface, thus Charlie Duke was also walking on the
Moon at that moment. Roy Neil announced that TV pictures would be had as soon
as the lunar rover was set up and its camera was turned on; that would be
accomplished, “…in about an hour.”
“Okay,” I reasoned, “a break in coverage due to a
high-gain antenna failure, I can see that.”
What I did not know was that the networks had
decided to do away with the “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the lunar EVAs,
similar to that given to political conventions. So instead of being able to
watch the moonwalks in an eight-hour marathon, as had been the case with Apollo
15, now we would get short segments inserted into regular programming. For
daytime TV addicts it was probably a huge annoyance, for space-buffs it was a
huge disappointment and another example of the networks turning their backs on
Apollo and the peaceful advancement of human civilization in favor of game
shows and soap operas.
Just before one o’clock the camera on the rover
was activated and the networks cut into “Let’s make a Deal” “As the World Turns”
and “Three On A Match” to show us the men walking on the lunar surface. Young
and Duke were loading up the rover and obviously enjoying every moment of it.
The pictures from the lunar surface were amazingly clear due to a new image
enhancement process that NASA had contracted prior to the mission.
“Beautiful!” Both astronauts exclaimed.
“This country needs that Shuttle mighty bad,” Young
added, “you’ll see.”
At that moment, John Young had no idea that he
would command the first Shuttle mission nearly a decade later as well as the
ninth mission two- and one-half years after that. Likewise, CAPCOM Tony England
would go on to fly on the 19th Shuttle mission STS-51F as a mission
specialist.
I spent the rest of the day busily spinning the rotary dial, switching between the three channels on our TV set, 5, 12 and 25, in the hope of being able to catch some coverage whenever whatever network saw fit to present it. Bringing out my black and white portable TV helped as I could leave it set on one channel and scan the other two with the big set. Still, it made for an aggravating afternoon- the worst part of which was having to watch the dribble that was being broadcast between the segments of EVA coverage. Nothing could be worse than a space-buff being stuck watching soap operas and game shows while a lunar EVA is in progress. Since the birth of humanity people have dreamed of walking upon the Moon and now, when it is finally happening, we got to watch soap operas.
I turned the sound off and began reciting my own
dialogue to the shows,
“Doctor, he has a hangnail.”
“Quick, prep him for surgery, we’ll have to remove
his gonads.”
“But Doctor…”
“Don’t argue with me nurse, I’ve had six months of
medical ROTC.”
The details of the EVAs I've saved in my book, "Growing up with Spaceflight- Apollo Part Two" which you can get on Amazon or get autographed at www.authorwes.com
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
STS-3: The "wheelie landing"
The following is an excerpt from my book "Growing up with Spaceflight- The Space Shuttle" and is protected by copyright 2015. No portion of this text may be reproduced in any form.
DTOs AND THE MYTH OF THE “WHEELIE LANDING”
Officially NASA's objectives for the STS-3 mission were to
"Demonstrate ascent, on orbit, and entry performance under conditions more
demanding than STS-2 conditions. Extend orbital flight duration.
Many of the experiments carried aboard STS-3 were listed as
Detailed Test Objectives, or DTOs. For the full schedule duration of the
mission the two-man crew worked at systematically completing their DTOs.
Finally, on the mission’s last scheduled day the two astronauts suited up,
closed the payload bay doors and prepared for reentry. The final set of DTOs
would involve the reentry and landing.
Heavy rains in California had wetted the normally dry
lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base until the surface was "the consistency
of Cream of Wheat." The flight test nature of the STS-3 mission dictated
that the landing was to be conducted on a dry lake if at all possible. At this
point in the Shuttle program the runway at KSC was untried. In fact, only one
Shuttle orbiter, the ENTERPRISE, had made a landing on a concrete runway and
that was a single landing made at Edwards back in 1977 during the ALT. NASA was
simply not ready to allow the Shuttle to land on the confines of the concrete
runway yet. Oddly, that lone runway landing had been made by a two-man crew,
the PLT of which had been Gordon Fullerton. That fact aside, NASA had elected,
two weeks prior to the STS-3 launch, to land on the dry lake at White Sands,
New Mexico. Unfortunately, on the scheduled landing day, an occasional, but
classic sandstorm suddenly blew up and brought with it severe turbulence, low
visibility and drifts of gypsum powder across the runway. STS-3’s landing was
waved off for 24 hours.
Dawn the following day at White Sands revealed absolutely
perfect weather for the landing. This segment of the mission was scheduled to
be test piloting to the greatest degree as the final DTOs would be
accomplished. Jack Lousma was required to test the auto-land system to a point
far beyond normal operation and far beyond any previous flight. He was to take
over manually at scheduled points during the entry and put in some small
control inputs such as forward stick to neutral stick to back stick than to neutral
again, all at one second intervals. Then he was to reach up on the glare shield
and punch the button that would activate the auto-land. In each of these cases
the crew was to note how the auto-land responded. Lousma estimated that he did
this procedure about 10 times. Interlaced with that series of tests, a similar
test sequence was performed in the roll axis as well as with the body flap. The
same exercise had been performed in the simulator numerous times, but what the
crew of STS-3 was to discover was that the simulator and the actual orbiter did
not perform alike at some points.
CDR Lousma executed the testing through reentry and the
switchovers appeared to be normal. Then, as directed by the mission profile, he
engaged the auto-land at 12,000 feet on the outer glide slope. At that time the
Shuttle approach PAPI, a series of lights located beside the runway that gives
the pilot visual information concerning his glide slope, indicated two red and
two white on a 19-degree glide slope and on center line.
"That was the last time I saw a stabilized airspeed,”
Lousma recalled, “although the automatic system controlled OGS (Outer Glide
Slope) well, including the transition from OGS to IGS (Inner Glide
Slope)."
Unexpectedly the auto-land system made a slight right roll
correction, probably to nullify the effect of a right crosswind at that altitude.
Then the crew felt the speed brakes close immediately. This was abnormal and
allowed the orbiter to accelerate to 285 knots. These “speed brakes” consisted
of the rudder splitting in half vertically and hydraulically extending out into
the airflow symmetrically to each side and thus providing a high degree of
drag. Normally in a hand-flown approach the Shuttle pilots use the speed brakes
in degrees to manage the orbiter’s energy and blend airspeed and altitude. As
the auto-land computer sensed the speed increase, it opened the speed brakes
again to a greater than normal degree. Now the airspeed slowed to a speed which
was below a software set-switch that would automatically fully close the speed
brakes at 4,000 feet if the speed was too low. The speed brakes were not
designed to move suddenly from highly open to fully closed and then back again,
but that was what the auto-land was commanding. In this critical portion of the
approach the auto-land was over-correcting the travel of the speed brakes. On a
manual approach the crew would have closed the speed brakes at 2,500 feet to
prevent them from cross-coupling with the pre-flare pull-up at 1,750 feet. On
the STS-3 auto-land approach the computer commanded the speed brakes closed
1,500 feet early, which caused an acceleration prior to entering the pre-flare
that was carried to the end of the pre-flare.
In short, the auto-land system was causing wide swings of
the speed brakes during the most critical portion of the landing, rather than
mimicking the inputs of a manual approach. It was later discovered that the
software in the simulator that everyone had considered to be the mirror image
of the software in the orbiter was not that at all.
As directed in the flight plan, Lousma took over manual control when the orbiter was stabilized on IGS. This took place between 200 and 150 feet AGL. As he took control, he noted that the controls “felt different” than they should at that point. The vehicle was carrying more airspeed than normal at that phase of flight. Although he was 5 knots over the gear deploy speed he called for the gear and Fullerton lowered the landing gear. It is important to note here, again for any non-pilots who may be reading this, that deployment of landing gear is normally dependent on speed and not the observations of persons on the ground or the proximity of the aircraft to that ground. In the case of STS-3, to people on the ground it appeared as if the gear had come down low and late. In fact, it was deployed somewhat early as the vehicle was 5 knots too fast.
Another result of the higher speed was that the touchdown
point was now farther down the runway than desired. Like any good test pilot,
Lousma negated the error by simply planting the aircraft on the runway. It is
important here to also note one thing about the Shuttle that a lot of people do
not understand. When rolling with all of their wheels on the ground the Shuttle
orbiters had a negative Angle Of Attack (AOA). Thus, during the landing rollout
after the main gear was on the ground and the vehicle began to slow the nose
would drop through from a positive AOA, to a neutral and then to a negative AOA
very rapidly. The pilot was required to compensate by consciously
"flying" the nose down to the ground. Originally the orbiter’s nose
gear had been designed with a longer strut to compensate for this
characteristic, but a subsequent weight scrub had negated that idea. Lousma was
well-prepared for this characteristic, but as COLUMBIA's main gear contacted
the runway the nose immediately began to go down. The plan, however, had been
for the CDR to hold nose up and perform aerodynamic braking from the point of
touchdown until slowing to 165 knots. Instead, the COLUMBIA's nose gear was now
headed toward the runway at 220 knots. Instinctively, Lousma made a quick
pitch-up input with the rotational hand controller, but the nose continued
down. He immediately entered a second input which was greeted with a rapid nose
up response. He corrected by putting an additional nose down response and this
time regained authority and the nose wheels were placed on the runway. The
orbiter rolled to a stop 13,723 feet down the runway.
It was later discovered that there was a divergence in the
longitudinal contrast software for the Shuttle’s landing configuration. That,
combined with the additional speed that the auto-land system had left the
orbiter with, conflicted with the gain setting in the software. This caused the
fly-by-wire system to impose an abnormal delay between the pilot’s inputs into
the hand controller and the movement of the control surfaces. In simpler terms,
(engineers please forgive me for this simplification) the first stick input to
counter the dropping of the nose was delayed because the software sensed that
the orbiter was going too fast for such a command to be executed. Then when the
second input was made the software added it to the first command and then that
total was transmitted to the control surface which responded by commanding the
total movement to the aerodynamic control surfaces. Lousma had nothing to do
with this process other than making intuitive corrections. Had he done nothing,
the nose gear would have hit the runway at 220 knots and may very well have
been damaged or sheared off.
Of course, to the uninformed observer, such as most
reporters in the TV news media and some present-day Internet
"experts," it appeared as if Lousma had botched the landing. In one
good example of this misconception CBS news’ reporter Terry Drinkwater
hyperbolized on the evening news that day by reporting that this was;
"The Shuttle’s least perfect landing." He then
went on to further to mindlessly exaggerate; "The landing gear is
programmed to come down when the spacecraft slows to 311 miles per hour, (270
knots,) but when the speed finally dropped to that, the COLUMBIA was extremely
low. There were only 5 seconds between wheels down and touchdown. Close! Next,
as the nose seemed to be gently settling, suddenly it lifted again. Then
apparent control, but the force of the forward speed and the weight on the nose
gear was close to its tolerance." He added that this was likely caused by
of a gust of wind or more likely a computer error, or pilot mistake."
Frankly, the only parts of that statement that were correct
was the gear speed and the term “computer error”.
Thus began the myth of the "wheelie landing."
Some people then and now picture Jack Lousma in a state of
embarrassment immediately after the landing of STS-3. In fact, quite the
opposite is true. He was happy and excited and somewhat tickled that on this
test flight, during the entry, approach and landing, the crew had uncovered a
series of flaws in the auto-land system as well as the impact of those flaws on
the software for the fly-by-wire system. Those problems could now be corrected
so that future Shuttle pilots would not experience the same problems. That was
the purpose of his flight: to test. It is also worth denoting the fact that on
the previous two flights, as well as all of the ALT flights, the crews had only
tested the auto-land for very brief periods of flight, and no one prior to
STS-3 had tested it all the way down to the IGS, let alone exercised it as had
been done by the STS-3 crew. This was flight test at its best and the results
improved future missions.
Yet, even as of this writing, four decades after STS-3, you
can look on YouTube and find videos of the “wheelie landing.” And if you have a
strong stomach, you can read the moronic comments about it left by people whose
total flight experience extends no farther than their computer’s keyboard, and
whose research into the event goes no farther than repeating the quips that
others have posted. The same is sadly true of most Internet spaceflight forums
and their self-certified Shuttle “experts.”
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
STS-3... DOESN'T SEEM LIKE 4 DECADES AGO
The following is an excerpt from my book "Growing up with Spaceflight; Space Shuttle" and is protected by copyright 2015 Wes Oleszewski. This text may not be reproduced in any form, either in whole or in part.
Personally,
I had the great fortune to witness the first two Shuttle launches from two
different perspectives: STS-1 from the banks of the Indian River and STS-2 from
the VIP site. For the launch of STS-3, I was lucky enough to have my parents
and younger brother visiting Florida during the event. Venturing down from
Michigan in my Dad’s second-hand motor home, they were seeking to relieve me of
my normal working-your-way-through-college diet of Rice-a-roni and peanut
butter for at least a week. As a bonus, they had scheduled their visit during
the launch of COLUMBIA and we were going to head down and see it as soon as I
got off of work.
Freed from my service in the
living hell that was the Daytona Kmart’s garden shop at 4:00 pm sharp on March
21, 1982, I left the loading of pine bark nuggets and cow manure to someone
else and boarded the family motor home. We set out for the Space Coast. The
folks wanted to take the scenic route down US1, and so southbound we rattled
toward Titusville.
Along the way my Dad turned to me
and asked, “So, where are ya’ gonna have us park this beast?”
“I’ll let ya’ know when I see it,”
I simply shrugged and replied.
What I knew, but my Dad was not
aware of, was that on a launch day, almost any place within 25 miles of the
Kennedy Space Center becomes a public campground.
Just after US1 turned into the
town of Titusville, a vacant piece of open ground caught my eye near the river
south of the intersection of the highway and Max Brewer Parkway.
“Right there!” I exclaimed,
pointing at the open lot. “Just pull in right there!”
Dad reluctantly pulled the land boat
onto the open dirt lot. As we came to a stop it was clear that there were
already several campers staked out there. Stepping out of the motor home I did
my best Jake Blues arriving at the “Country Bunker” impression.
“Yep, this is the place.”
Dad was not at all convinced.
“What if they come and run us otta
here?” he asked doubtfully.
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “on
the night before a launch ‘they’ don’t exist.”
Dad worried most of the evening.
People from the Midwest are very uncomfortable about invading other folk’s property
without an invitation or a paid camping spot. But as the evening wore on and
the once open lot became packed with campers, my Dad turned off his mid-Michigan
worry switch and started to relax like the rest of us.
Our little camping spot was
exactly 12.2 miles due west of Launch Complex 39A. As the sun set, the spotlights
on the pad turned the waiting Space Shuttle rightfully into the center of
attention. My Mom was absolutely transfixed by the Shuttle illuminated at the
pad and simply could not take her attention away from it. She was not alone, as
most of the campers there also were first-timers to a space launch. On the
other hand, I was kept busy monitoring news reports on launch status as best I
could, mainly by way of local AM radio. Unlike STS-1, this time there were
plenty of TVs and radios to be found in the area. Much like STS-1, however,
very few in the crowd understood the details of the countdown and the massive
amount of glitches that could trigger a scrub. For the first time it dawned on
me that I sort of wished I was one of those people who did not know how many
things could go wrong and delay the launch. It was a feeling I would re-live
three decades and 122 Shuttles later during STS-125.
Of course Mom took the liberty of
telling nearby campers that her son, ya’ know, the guy in the aviator
sunglasses standing down there by the river talking to a crowd about the
spaceflight, knew all about the Shuttle- because he was a pilot studying
Aeronautical Science. Of course that little boast got out among the retired
folks camped nearby and morphed into, “That guy is an astronaut.” Try
convincing a crowd of old folks that you are NOT an astronaut. Explaining that
you are working your way through college, you only have 200 flight hours in
little Cessnas. That you don’t work for NASA, you work for Kmart. It should be
easy, but it ain’t; one old lady wanted me to pet her dog, then she said now
she could tell the people back home that fluffy was petted by an astronaut! Finally,
I decided it would be best if I just spent the evening in the motor home and
let the rumor mill die out. Mom just said she didn’t know where they got that
idea. Ugh.
Following 70 days in the Orbiter
Processing Facility after STS-2, COLUMBIA had been mated to the External Tank
(ET) in the VAB on February 3, 1982, and rolled out to Pad 39A just 13 days
later. STS-3 was the first Shuttle stack to have the now well-known “orange”
ET. Even after the ETs were in production, NASA was engaged in the process of
weight scrubbing. After some extensive testing, it was decided that the ET’s
spray-on CPR-488 foam insulation was strong enough to tolerate the heating of
the high-speed airflow during the ascent. For that reason, the white-colored
Fire Retardant Latex (FRL) that was used as an overcoat on the tank was deleted
on later tanks following STS-2, the first of which flew on STS-3. Deletion of
the FRL not only saved a small amount of money and man-hours in production, but
also saved 595 pounds of weight. Oddly, when a new ET was rolled out of
assembly with its fresh CPR-488 coat on, it was not orange, but rather was a greenish
yellow color. Solar ultraviolet rays caused the foam to turn orange over time
and as it was exposed to more and more sunlight it turned an orangish brown in
color – a Space Shuttle suntan. Doing some launch day announcing for ABC News, astronaut
Gene Cernan speculated that they may later mix a white pigment with the CPR-488
to make the tank white again. Yet that never happened, but that thought
illustrates just how odd that orange tank appeared when stacked as a spaceflight
booster in the 1982 era.
Sporting its orange ET, the
countdown for STS-3 was normal up until very late on the night before the
launch. A malfunction on a nitrogen gas line in some ground support equipment
delayed fueling operations for a short time and it looked like a bad glitch to
those of us on the outside. Just before dawn, however, NASA PAO announced that the
delay would be just one hour in length. Oddly, at our little campsite, rumors
spread saying everything from “Pack it up and go home” to “Problem? There’s no
problem.” At the time, I found it was best to just stay glued to the AM radio
and avoid the other campers.
At 11:00:00 a.m. Eastern Time, the
bolts blew, the SRBs ignited and the STS-3 stack lifted off. The burst of
sun-bright flame and billows of smoke and steam at Pad 39A set off cheers and
screams from every direction around KSC. About 17 seconds later, as the
first-timers in our little campsite started to realize that they could not hear
the Shuttle, it was then that COLUMBIA reached out for the third time, took hold
of every soul and shook us to the point where we knew the true meaning of glory.
Thrilled screams and cheers now reflexively burst from the crowd at a higher
pitch. For a moment I could feel the ground actually shake. Looking down I saw
a puddle nearby and its water was vibrating. I tapped my Mom on the shoulder
and pointed down at the reverberating water. She glanced down, squealed with
delight and went back to watching COLUMBIA climb. Dad was spell-bound and just
kept saying,
“Man! Look at her go!”
There were broken cloud decks in
the launch area, but from our location the launch was mostly un-obscured.
Raining fire from her SRBs COLUMBIA climbed with the determination of a
homesick angle. This time, instead of my family watching me entranced by a space
launch, I got the joy of standing back and watching all of them captivated by
the wonder of America’s space program.
Following SRB separation the COLUMBIA
once again became a bright star rapidly fading into the morning sky. In a
phenomena that would accompany every Shuttle launch for the next three decades,
the crowd of spectators broke into spontaneous applause that no one directly
involved with the mission could hear. Straining their eyes toward the sky, many
tried to watch the Shuttle’s departure for as long as humanly possible before
turning away and heading home. I was guilty of that myself. Then I looked at my
Dad and Mom and little brother.
“THAT,” I exclaimed proudly, “is
what it’s all about.”
Mom wiped tears from her eyes, Dad
gave that relieved laugh that he always used when he had no words for a given
event and my younger brother simply kept saying words such as “Wow” and “Cool.”
It was an experience that they would take home and share with their friends and
relatives for decades to come.