Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [183]
We had passed through the hottest part of reentry andAtlantis was flying just fine. Without a hiccup she was completing her transformation from spaceship to airship. My doubts about our assessment of the tile damage were growing and, again, I was happy to be alive to have those doubts.
Now there was significant wind noise accompanied with heavy vibrations.
“Speed brakes coming out.” We were ten minutes from landing.
At Mach 5 Guy activated the switches to deploy the air-data probes on the sides of the nose. The information they provided on airspeed and altitude would further refineAtlantis ’s guidance.
“Mach 3.7…100,000 feet…I’ve got the lakebed in sight.”Atlantis ’s computers had done their job. After a glide spanning half the Earth, they had put a runway within our reach.
The wind noise outside my little room had become a freight train roar.
“Mach 1.0…49,000 feet.” AsAtlantis ’s velocity dropped below the speed of sound our shock waves raced ahead of us, lashing the vehicle with a buzzing vibration. No doubt they were also sonic-booming the high desert and heralding our arrival to the wives.
We had finally entered the useable envelope of our crude bailout system. We were at subsonic velocity and below fifty thousand feet. If an escape became necessary now, I would pull the emergency cabin depressurization handle, followed by the hatch jettison handle. Then, I would unstrap from my seat, deploy the ceiling-mounted slide pole, clip my harness to a ring, and roll out. Of course all of this presupposed Hoot or the autopilot would be able to keepAtlantis flying in a straight-ahead, controlled glide. If the vehicle was in a tumble, the G-loads would pin us in the cockpit like bugs on a display board.
Hoot took control from the autopilot and bankedAtlantis into a left turn toward final approach. Guy’s calls of airspeed and altitude came like an auctioneer’s. “Two hundred ninety-five knots, 800 feet…290…500 feet…400 feet…290…gear’s coming.” I heard and felt the nose landing gear being lowered. “Gear’s down…50 feet…250 knots…40…240…30 feet…20…10…5…touchdown at 205 knots.” We were safely home. Our heat shield had held. I was anxious to look at it and see how much crow we’d have to eat.
After the standard postlanding cockpit visit by the flight surgeon, we changed into our blue coveralls and walked down the steps from the side hatch. NASA Administrator James Fletcher was present to greet us. We exchanged handshakes and then turned to inspectAtlantis. There was already a knot of engineers gathered at the right forward fuselage shaking their heads in disbelief. The damage was much worse than any of us had expected. Technicians would eventually count seven hundred damaged tiles extending along half ofAtlantis ’s length. It was by far the greatest heat-shield damage recorded to date. Some of the more severely damaged tile had been melted deeper than the initial kinetic penetrations. The area around the missing tile had been particularly brutalized and the underlying aluminum looked as if it had been affected by the heat. But there had been no “zipper” effect, as the engineers had promised. If any of them had been present, I would have flung my arms around them and kissed them.
We had taken seven hundred bullets and lived to talk about it. The damage had been sustained in the only place where it could exist and still be survivable. It started a few yards back from the carbon-composite nose cap and stopped just a few feet short of the right wing’s leading-edge carbon panels. If any of those carbon-covered areas had been hit, we would have died as theColumbia crew would die fifteen years later, incinerated on reentry, except in our case the Pacific would have been our grave. Even the location of our missing tile proved fortuitous. By happenstance it covered an area where an antenna was mounted, and the underlying aluminum structure was thicker than in other locations. Had a different