Space: High Marks for a Solid Bird

Columbia was fine, and so were the experiments aboard

To Joe Engle and Richard Truly those dramatic 36 orbits in space must have seemed like a pleasure cruise compared with the postflight grilling they began last week at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Only a day after reaching earth they found themselves at a ceremonial breakfast with Vice President George Bush, who did a little probing of his own to find out what it was like to fly the shuttle (said Truly: “We were just getting the hang of it” when the flight ended). Next day the astronauts started nine days of more formal debriefings, answering the questions of their engineering colleagues, doing a stint in the flight simulator to check whether it accurately reflects what happens in space, and reporting to the space center’s director, Christopher Kraft Jr. The preliminary verdict: in spite of problems before and during the flight, Columbia was, in that venerable NASA expression, A-O.K.

Unlike the first flight, no tiles were lost. The hot, jolting shock at lift-off had apparently been sufficiently dampened by the new water system so that Columbia’s heat-shielding devices escaped unscathed. A handful of tiles were nicked by debris, and half a dozen more on the starboard wing were inexplicably stripped of their surface glazing. Otherwise, the 100-ton orbiter survived magnificently, even weathering the bold maneuvers—much wilder than anything attempted by the first crew—that Engle put his bird through during the fiery descent. As the orbiter’s stubby wings and flared fuselage began getting lift from the thin air in the upper atmosphere, he threw the ship into a sharp 80° bank and worked its big body flap to the limit, pulling the nose up in a series of porpoising motions.

Columbia emerged from its radio blackout nearly 30 miles off course and some 3,000 ft. lower than the flight plan called for. But Engle and Truly found the ship surprisingly aerodynamic, even without an engine. With only occasional assists from their little thruster rockets, they were able to get it quickly back on course. Such responsiveness certainly delights Chris Kraft. Says he: “We gained a great deal more confidence in the flying capability of this machine. We’re beginning to prove our belief that it will perform as advertised.”

The researchers who assembled Columbia’s scientific experiments were just as pleased. Even though the abbreviated flight gave them less data than a longer one might have provided, NASA Geologist James Taranik described the experimenters as “literally jumping up and down with excitement over what they have seen.” All five of the automatic experiments perched in the shuttle’s open cargo bay worked, at least to some degree, performing various types of remote-sensing of the earth. The most successful machine was the big shuttle imaging radar, called SIR-A, which succeeded in making the longest single radar sweep in the history of earth-sensing, gathering one series of pictures over a 10,000-mile-long track, stretching from Spain to Australia.

The only real disappointment was the sunflower experiment in the cabin. The seeds sprouted in their little vials, but because the time in space was cut short, they did not grow enough to reveal whether or not their “inner senses” had been disturbed by zero gravity. If the photographs of Engle and Truly happily exercising in space are any indication, the astronauts, both military test pilots, did not seem to have any trouble adjusting to weightlessness.

In Houston, Vice President Bush not only lavished praise on the astronauts but said that “the people here at the NASA complex are a national treasure.” What he did not mention is that this treasure may soon be removed to Florida. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, NASA is thinking of consolidating launch and mission-control facilities at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as early as 1984. A few years ago, a congressional study rejected a similar scheme as impractical. It may still be impolitic. Texans, who were awarded the manned space center, in large part because of Lyndon Johnson’s clout, are not likely to give up so valuable a prize without a fight.

—By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry Hannifin/Washington