For STS-4 on 27 June–4 July 1982, I paired up Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield, for the first time making a shuttle crew that had graduated from the same school, Auburn University. Like STS-3, this mission was designed to put all of the shuttle systems through their paces.
Naturally there were a few glitches. During launch, both solids were lost forever after separation when they fell back and hit the ocean at high velocity. In orbit, the thermal gradient closure of the payload bay doors failed. The port door of the payload bay jammed the aft latches after partial travel, which had to be thermally corrected.
Like STS-3, it was a complex test mission. The crew had more than seven hundred hours in the shuttle mission simulator and more than nine hundred STA approaches. T. K. flew the orbiter manually to landing from Mach 0.9 through rollout. This became the recommended pilot control procedure that was used right up to the end of the shuttle program. As T. K. noted at the time, the orbiter was difficult to land because its center of rotation lay forward of the cockpit instead of close to the center of gravity as in most aircraft.
Its landing was the first time a shuttle had come down on a concrete runway (runway 22 at Edwards). Columbia alighted 948 feet down the runway at 204 knots and at a sink rate of 1.1 feet per second—very nicely done. President and Mrs. Reagan met the crew as they left the vehicle. T. K. and Hank were surprised to see the First Couple, even though that was actually why we had them land on the concrete runway. Nancy Reagan would not have been able to walk well in high heels in the sand!
Officially the shuttle was now “operational”—meaning, among other things, that we were now ready to put in a crew of four and fly without ejection seats. I was okay with just that label from an engineering perspective, but some leading government bureaucrats and NASA officials were not. For the shuttle to be “fully operational,” they declared that it needed to be ready to launch 24 missions a year, thereby becoming the only U.S. launcher available for commercial payloads.
Early on, some yokels in NASA had predicted that we’d be able to fly as many as 116 missions between 1981 and 1985; in reality, we flew 23 and had to stretch everybody’s abilities and capacities to the breaking point just to fly those. We couldn’t have done anywhere near 116 missions even if the business had been there to do them all—and it wasn’t, not even close...
I was amazed that we could disconnect the ejection seats and call the shuttle “operational” after only four missions. Truth was, as NASA would finally recognize officially following the loss of Columbia in 2003, the shuttle should never have been considered anything but an experimental vehicle. Neither civilian nor military aircraft have ever been considered operational until proven over thousands of test flights in their final operational configurations, whereas the shuttle, even at the end of its life in 2011, still had fewer than two hundred flights total, with almost continuous modification between 1981 and 2011.
Speaking of Hank Hartsfield, who is perhaps less well-known than his commander or their boss (Young became Chief of the Astronaut Office in '74), here's a snip from Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle:
Although under pressure to launch quickly, NASA, by the end of 1985, was still struggling to make twelve flights a year, with no indication that the tempo of operations would increase any time soon. “The whole system was starting to crater,” Hank Hartsfield later recounted, with scheduled flights hurriedly prepared so that NASA could meet its self-imposed guidelines. Unable to achieve the economies of scale sought, the shuttle, by the end of 1985, looked less and less like a commercial satellite launcher than another in a long line of experimental space vehicles.
In July 1985, NASA selected the New Hampshire social studies teacher Christa McAuliffe as a prime crew member for a future shuttle flight, with the Idaho second-grade teacher Barbara Morgan serving as her backup. Unlike with previous astronaut assignments, NASA assigned McAuliffe to a single mission for which the flight crew had already been selected; the crew, led by Commander Dick Scobee (a former lifting body test pilot who joined NASA in 1978), greeted her upon her return to JSC.
Without piloting or scientific duties on the forthcoming flight, McAuliffe would deliver two televised lessons for children from space. According to news accounts, Scobee welcomed McAuliffe with the comment that “no matter what happens on the mission, it’s going to be known as the teacher mission,” a statement intended to flatter her, but which instead reflected Scobee’s recognition that the public cared little for the difficult work of the flight, which would include a satellite deployment and astronomical experiments...Career astronauts, McAuliffe believed, resented both her presence and NASA’s suggestion that she would “ ‘humanize’ ” spaceflight, a remark that (perhaps inadvertently) branded her fellow crew members as inhuman.
...The space shuttle, despite statements otherwise, had not been designed for passengers and could be destroyed relatively easily through the careless operation of its many controls. Astronauts were aware of these vulnerabilities, but “joyriding” “part-timers” (as NASA career astronauts called them) were not. “Individuals who were clueless about the risks of spaceflight were being exploited for public relations purposes,” later wrote Mullane. “The entire part-timer program was built on the lie that the shuttle was nothing more than an airliner.”
The shuttle was a flawed, experimental machine that taught us some deadly lessons, of which there could have been many more, as illustrated by Young's sixth and final spaceflight:
Entry of STS-9 turned out to be exciting—too exciting...
When our attitude’s dead band was reached, the primary nose jets on the orbiter fired. When they fired, GPC 1 failed. We then keyed GPC 2 into Orbit Operations Mode 2. About six minutes later, we got another round of dead-band firings from our primary nose jets. Then GPC 2 crashed. When the first computer failed, my knees started shaking. When the second computer failed, I turned to jelly. It looked like Brewster felt the same way...
The postflight mission report explained what happened next with the looped onboard computers: “A ground review of GPC-2 memory dump indicated some memory alterations had occurred. However, GPC-2 was reinitialized in OPS 3 and was used in the redundant set with GPC-3 and GPC-4 for entry and landing. At Orbiter nose wheel touchdown (342:11:16:45), GPC-2 again failed.”
In a nutshell, Columbia experienced two failed computers, one of which we restored only to have it fail again at landing. The cause of one of the failures turned out to be a sliver of solder eleven-thousandths of an inch thick that became dislodged when the thrusters were fired, shorting out the CPU board. During the postflight debriefing, I remarked about this incident, “Had we activated the backup flight software when the problem first emerged, loss of vehicle and crew would have resulted.”
...
As suggested earlier, postflight investigation found that the computer failures had been caused by particles in the GPC amplifiers. The general-purpose computers had not been given the normal zero-gravity “particle impact noise detection” tests. So, again, we were lucky that the computers did not totally fail. If GPC 2 had failed during entry and we had used the recommended procedures to fix it, we would have lost flight control of the orbiter. That would have been very bad for us.
Shortly after landing, our number one APU—providing hydraulic power to move the elevons, rudder, speed brakes, and body flap—shut down prematurely because of a turbine “under-speed” condition. Later we found out that, shortly after the first shutdown, APU 2 also shut down because of a turbine not turning fast enough. We landed on a Thursday, and on Saturday we found out that APU 1 exploded eleven minutes after touchdown and that APU 2 exploded twenty-five minutes after touchdown.
We were told the APUs had actually caught fire—caused by leaking hydrazine fuel—at 40,000 feet when we had gotten down to the altitude where oxygen in the air allowed it. Not to mince words, we were on fire when we landed, though of course we didn’t know it at the time. We didn’t find out until two days later.
Space is hard.
Selah.
1 - The book is...okay. Ostensibly co-authored with James Hansen (wrote First Man, which I haven't read yet, but I did like the movie), it was mostly written by Young, whose stuff doesn't flow as well as other astronaut's from where I sit. It is also horribly edited. But it does provide good coverage over the man's awesome, long NASA tenure.
