_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [92]
“Welcome home, Columbia,” Mission Control radioed. “Just beautiful, beautiful.”
Seven months to the day after the first Space Shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral, Columbia became the first spaceship to return to orbit. At the controls was a pair of space rookies: Joe Engle, who had been bumped from his ride to the moon on Apollo 17 to make room for scientist Jack Schmitt, and Richard Truly, a learned gentleman who would later become the boss of NASA. They were followed by shuttle crews sending spinning satellites out of Columbia’s cargo bay and by premiere spacewalker Dr. Story Musgrave. Musgrave opened the space repair business by testing new spacesuits and tools, every tool you could imagine that would be needed in weightless orbit.
Columbia put America into the space transportation business and the next Space Shuttle, Challenger, stepped to the plate and made its debut two years later. It carried the $135 million tracking and data relay satellite (TDRS) into orbit, and then NASA officials turned their attention to a thorn in the agency’s side since its birth: female astronauts.
A female cosmonaut was one of Russia’s first space fliers.
In 1978 and 1979, NASA selected eight qualified women and began their training. After sending eighty-two men into space in twenty-two years, the United States finally was ready to launch a woman. Her name was Sally Ride, and on June 18, 1983, as the Space Shuttle Challenger thundered from its pad, my colleague Steve Porter was shouting into his mike, “Ride Sally Ride.”
Ride did her job exceptionally well, reporting, “It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” and proved women were just as adaptable to space-flight as were men, and in some cases better. Two months after Sally opened the space door to women, another door was opened. America’s first black astronaut, electrophoresis engineer Guion Bluford, Jr., flew aboard Challenger.
Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, talks with Mission Control. (NASA).
Shuttle flights were happening so fast and successfully that a smiling NASA was realizing its dream of routine access to Earth orbit. There were problems, however. Computers did terrible, unpredictable things by halting countdowns, shutting down main engines after they had ignited, and, as computers can, just being shits. Of course, there were also the nit-picking mechanical problems, and the weather—always the stinking Florida weather halting one launch attempt after another and diverting landings to Mojave’s high and dry desert lake bed.
But America’s Space Shuttles flew and flew, and their crews delivered satellites and brought some back for repair. Astronomy astronauts gazed at the heavens while other astronauts tested space-station assembly techniques, conducted extensive medical research, and when no one was looking, dropped off secret spy stuff for the military.
Missions were coming and going so fast the media and a large percentage of the public were becoming bored. After all, Space Shuttles were only circling Earth. Many Americans had been rocked to sleep with NASA’s “can do” attitude and safety record. Forget about the fact space flight could be a killer.
The public at large believed the winged spaceships were as reliable as a passenger jet. The fact U.S. Senator Jake Garn was permitted to go into orbit didn’t help discredit that fantasy. As chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversaw NASA’s budget, the senator joked in a meaningful tone that he would not vote for the space agency’s budget if he didn’t get a shuttle ride. When NASA finally said okay, critics accused Garn of using his political clout to make the ultimate congressional