_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [91]
My radio colleague Steve Porter and I were broadcasting from the NBC building’s porch three miles away. We couldn’t believe the countdown was actually moving closer and closer to a liftoff.
Suddenly on board Columbia there was belief too, and Crip turned to John and said, “I think we might just do it!”
Young, the most experienced astronaut in NASA, was widely known for his sense of humor. “Did you lock your pickup?”
Then something never before seen happened. Ignition began in a swift rippling fashion, a savage fire birth as three liquid-fuel engines ignited one after the other, creating a blizzard, a swirling ice storm shaken from the flanks of the Shuttle’s fifteen-story-tall super-cold external tank, and I could not believe what I was seeing. I shouted into my microphone, “They’re going to do it. They’re going to launch.”
And when eight seconds had passed, the three main engines were up and screaming, waiting for the computers to sense all were running and ready to fly, and new flame raged. The giant solid boosters had ignited with six million pounds of thrust instantly growing into two large pillows of fire and steam. The boosters were alive, pushing against concrete, steel, and a Niagara of water flowing through the launch pad’s flame trench. Columbia was suddenly climbing from its insanity of fire—fire that was growing fiercer, then brighter, two legs of rocket thrust pounding into the Shuttle’s launch pad…determined to lift the mighty spaceship from Earth…both pillars of fire stretching longer than two football fields…shattering the quiet of Florida’s spacecoast with earsplitting thunder, thunder never before heard even from the mighty Saturn moon rockets…thunder rolling across water and earth and marsh to pound our chests, to physically move our skin and our clothes, to shake our teeth and bodies.
I looked at Steve Porter; he couldn’t seem to say anything. The all-new Space Shuttle glistened in the morning sun, muscling itself from the grip of gravity, slowly pounding its way skyward. Porter was clearly mesmerized by all the fire and thunder rising before us, so I did my best to tell our NBC audience what we were seeing, what we were hearing, as Columbia blazed its way deeper and deeper into a bright Florida sky.
Some fifty thousand had wormed their way onto the space center itself while three-quarters of a million crowded the fences, the causeways, the thickets, the beaches, anywhere they could to watch this unbelievable new space machine climb toward orbit. It was thunder that never stopped thundering, fire that never stop burning, and when two minutes had passed, Columbia kicked its towering burnt-out solid boosters to each side and sped out of our view, flying like a homesick angel into Earth orbit.
The new space plane shut its main engines down, and Young and Crippen, the gutsy fools, grinned at each other. Crippen savored the joys of weightlessness and told Mission Control, “You’re missing one fantastic sight.”
Then, the astronauts opened the clamshell-like doors covering the Shuttle’s sixty-foot-long cargo bay. The operation was critical. The inside surfaces of the doors were the Space Shuttle’s radiators, and without them the ship could stay in space only hours. Equally important, the doors had to be closed tightly during reentry. Otherwise, the Shuttle would go out of control and tear itself apart.
But mission planners weren’t having any of that. No troubles, thank you. They were keeping this first flight short—only fifty-four hours. They wanted safety margins as wide as possible. Young and Crippen spent the next two days shaking down Columbia’s systems and then headed to the wide-open dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The astronauts wanted all the room they could possibly use for the first Space Shuttle landing.
While flying backward, Young had fired the Shuttle’s twin maneuvering rockets over the Indian Ocean. The braking thrust slowed