_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [112]
Now he would command the most important flight in the Space Shuttles’ history—a flight that would result in either the space planes’ rebirth or their demise.
I wasn’t the only one ready to get back to work.
TWENTY-FIVE
How High Is Up?
September 29, 1988.
Space Shuttle Discovery sat on its launch pad.
Five seasoned astronauts waited.
They had been hand picked to fly the rebuilt ship after seven of their number were lost in the Challenger fires.
Two hundred-fifty thousand other souls had surrounded the spaceport to lend their support. Twenty-four hundred members of the news media had settled on the press site. They would witness NASA’s comeback from its worst disaster.
At 11:37 A.M. Eastern time, Discovery’s main engines roared. Seconds later the twin solid rockets fired. The assembled thousands crossed fingers and gritted teeth. The two rebuilt solid rockets lifted the five astronauts skyward—boosting the space plane and rocket combination straight and true. Two minutes later the huge assemblage broke into wild cheers as the boosters, blamed for the Challenger accident, burned out and peeled harmlessly away from the Shuttle and its human cargo. Six minutes later, the main engines shut down, and the five seasoned astronauts sailed safely into Earth orbit. Cheers erupted from the Launch Control Center at the Cape and in the Mission Control Center near Houston.
President Ronald Reagan opened an awards ceremony in the White House Rose Garden with the announcement, “America is back in space.”
NASA had spent thirty-two months fixing the O-ring seal and other Shuttle problems, but to make sure they drove down the road of caution, Discovery’s mission was designed to be as benign as possible. Six hours into the “Return-to-Flight,” astronauts Mike Lounge and Dave Hilmers released from the Shuttle’s cargo bay a $100 million tracking and data relay satellite. The huge communications spacecraft was the replacement for the TDRS lost in the Challenger accident. The new satellite’s onboard rocket motor fired and the new tracking and data relay satellite raced to a stationary orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. There it could cover a third of the Earth as it joined the first TDRS, launched earlier.
Discovery’s astronauts poignantly remembered the five men and two women, who died aboard Challenger, before gliding to a landing on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Four hundred thousand gratefuls were there to meet them.
Discovery’s veteran crew sport Hawaiian shirts given to them by its Cape Canaveral launch team. Front left: Dick Covey, pilot, and Rick Hauck, commander, center. Front right: John “Mike” Lounge. Back left: George “Pinky” Nelson. Back right: Dave Hilmers. (NASA).
The comeback continued two months later when the space shuttle Atlantis soared into orbit on a secret mission solely for the Defense Department, and then opened the door for science to dominate America’s space efforts. The crew of Atlantis deployed the Space Shuttle’s first planetary probe. A Magellan planetary ship was sent streaking away to Venus with radar to look through the thick Venusian clouds and map the planet’s steamy surface. A second Shuttle planetary mission began October 18, 1989, when astronauts launched a three-ton Galileo spacecraft on a six-year, 2.4 billion–mile journey for up-close photographs of Jupiter. Other major planetary craft that were sent racing from shuttle cargo bays included Ulysses, to orbit and study the sun, and the Gamma Ray Observatory, to measure space radiation.
NASA entered the final decade of the twentieth century fully recovered from the worst accident in space flight history, and I entered the 1990s recovered from a coronary bypass operation at Emory University. My friends were amazed at how lucky I had been not only with my health, but with the Space Shuttle launch schedule itself. None of my health problems caused me to miss