The final countdown for the Space Shuttle programme

Published on Wednesday 6 July 2011 12:22

Blustery weather permitting, this weekend will see the very last launch in the 30-year Space Shuttle programme. Here Ken MacTaggart, a Scot who has worked for Nasa, charts its ups and downs

• The space shuttle Atlantis in position for launch yesterday

JOHN Young screwed up his eyes, squinted, and realised that the fuzzy type in front of him was smaller than what his middle-aged eyes could comfortably focus on - so he reached for his reading specs.

It was a very normal act for someone in their fifties, but the occasion was far from ordinary. Young was the foremost astronaut of his generation, and 30 years ago was about to embark on his most taxing mission, the first flight of America's untested Space Shuttle.

If anything summed up how mundane space flight had become - and raised some eyebrows in the TV viewing public - it was the sight of space suited Commander Young, moonwalker and American hero, flipping up his helmet visor and reaching for his glasses to read the flight plan.

Short-sightedness notwithstanding, John Young and his young co-pilot Bob Crippen soared into the Florida sky in the world's first reusable spacecraft, and pressed all the right buttons.

Two days later they returned to California - not in a capsule floating under parachutes, as had all previous spaceships, but gliding to a gentle landing with wheels on a runway like any conventional aircraft.

The Space Shuttle, whose last-ever flight is planned for today, is a remarkable machine which has opened up space to hundreds of engineers, scientists and pilots who have travelled millions of miles around the Earth, launched satellites, visited space stations and floated free in the vast blackness of space.

This weekend's launch will be the 135th time a Shuttle has headed into space over the past three decades. If delayed by weather, Sunday could be the big day.

But its genesis was highly controversial. After the euphoria of six Moon landings, the US public was losing interest in space, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) needed a new direction. The big idea was a reusable spacecraft that could launch, fly back in one piece, and be quickly turned around for another mission. Throwaway rockets used once, then dumped in the ocean, were to be a thing of the past.

When America's elite astronauts first saw the engineers' model design for the Shuttle - looking like a toy aircraft strapped to the side of a Coke bottle and a couple of kitchen-roll tubes - they laughed incredulously. It looked like a primary school project rather than any high-performance jet or space capsule they had ever flown.

They were test pilots who would risk their lives to fly almost anything, with or without wings, including the converted nuclear missiles that had taken the first Americans into space. But they wondered aloud whether this joke contraption, plastered with thousands of ceramic tiles to protect it from the heat of re-entry, could ever actually work.It was originally supposed to have two aircraft-like components, one piggy-back on the other, and be fully reusable. But budget cuts and technical challenges reduced the carrier stage to the throw-away components we see now.

After years of delay, and the inevitable over-budget delivery, Young and Crippen steered Columbia to a triumphant first flight and a new era in space transportation began. The Shuttle started to launch satellites from its cavernous cargo bay, and even sent up space-walking repairmen to fix broken satellites which previously would have been abandoned.

The Shuttle now started to clock up a few records, including Sally Ride, the first American woman in space in 1983, albeit 20 years behind her Russian counterpart, Valentina Tereshkova.

Bruce McCandless strapped on a jet pack and headed away from the Shuttle to make the first free-flying, untethered spacewalk, creating an iconic image of a tiny figure floating vertiginously in black space above the blue and white Earth.

However, it soon became apparent that there was no destination to visit, as Shuttles circled the Earth again and again. Its astronauts earned the undignified title of space "truck divers" who simply delivered goods routinely into orbit.

Some aspects of the programme started to look almost bizarre. Nasa administrator James Beggs apparently suffered from triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13. Launches were designated with STS, standing for Space Transportation System, and a number. So when the Shuttle reached its ninth launch with STS-9, and with memories still strong of the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 Moon flight, Beggs had them change the designation of the next one to STS-41-B.

Then they took US politicians and foreign guest astronauts, including a Saudi Arabian prince, into space. Other missions were secret military ones cloaked in a news black-out, unlike the open policy which had characterised all previous US human spaceflight. Questions began to be asked about where it was all going.

It came to a shuddering halt in 1986 when the shuttle Challenger, the 25th launch, took off in freezing weather conditions. It had teacher Christa McAuliffe on board, to conduct TV lessons on science for US schools. A minute into the flight Commander Dick Scobee announced "Throttle up", and the shuttle promptly exploded in a monstrous fireball. Its boosters had been damaged by sub-zero overnight temperatures, which the designers had never considered, knowing the launches would always be from sunny Florida.

Nasa had carefully planned procedures for dealing with the human aspects of disaster, but they were never implemented. TV pictures cruelly showed the bewildered reactions of the parents and family of teacher and astronauts, who had watched it all from the VIP stand. Dazed flight controllers stared at blank screens which, seconds before, had been full of reassuring data. After many accusations and lengthy investigations, the Shuttle was fixed and flew again after a two-year gap. And having skipped over 13, they resumed the normal numbering system at STS-26.

Stripped of its military role and with the job of launching routine satellites given back to unmanned rockets, the Shuttle went on to achieve new heights. It launched Magellan, a probe which uncovered the mysteries of the cloud-covered planet Venus.

Then the remarkable Hubble Space Telescope was orbited 385 miles above the Earth and its turbulent atmosphere, giving mankind its clearest ever view of the sky. Its spectacular pictures of the birth of stars have revolutionised understanding of our place in the universe. In 1998, Nasa tried an unusual experiment in human reactions to spaceflight. John Glenn had been the first American to orbit Earth in 1961, then entered politics and sat in the US Senate for 24 years. A jogger all his life, he was still extraordinarily fit when he retired, and Nasa gave him the chance to fly again into space on the Shuttle.

So aged 77 years, he found himself once more in orbit, with people half his age. He floated up to the Shuttle's large windows and got the proper view of the Earth he had been denied from the tiny porthole of his solo capsule all those years previously. But disaster was to return to the Shuttle programme in 2003. Having apparently made the launchings safe again after the Challenger explosion, this time the weakness was in the high-speed re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Columbia had launched carrying a space laboratory and a very mixed crew - alongside the usual white male pilots were woman flight surgeon Laurel Clark, an Indian-born female engineer Kaplana Chawla, the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, and African American scientist Michael Anderson.

After 16 days conducting experiments in orbit, Columbia descended over California for a routine landing in Florida. It entered radio black-out during the intense heat of re-entry as expected, but its signals never re-appeared.

Observers in Texas looked up to see multiple fireballs streaking through the sky, where there should have been only one. Columbia had lost part of the heat shielding on its left wing, blazing hot gases had penetrated the spacecraft and it disintegrated. The paltry remains of the craft, the crew and their experiments were scattered over Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Again, the cause was laboriously traced and fixed, and the Shuttle's return to flight was entrusted to it first female commander, Eileen Collins. Already an experienced Shuttle pilot, Collins was a remarkably accomplished test pilot and Air Force colonel.

The Shuttle later had another female Commander, Pamela Melroy. Nasa actually offered them the option of flying an all-female crew to prove that the girls were as good as the boys - but they declined on the grounds that it would just be tokenism. And you could just imagine the cartoons in the newspapers…

This weekend's launch marks the end of the Space Shuttle's 30-year role in ferrying Americans and many other nationalities into space, and in its later years constructing the International Space Station with their former Cold War rival, Russia. When Atlantis returns to Earth, the fleet will have clocked up about 515 million miles of travel.

Starting next week, there will be no way for Americans to get into orbit, except by buying seats on foreign craft. The Shuttle replacement now being worked on will be a cheaper return to capsules, and that is many years off.

Astronauts who launched from Scottish soil

ALTHOUGH no Scot has yet been in space, many of the US astronauts have Scottish ancestry and connections.

Bonnie Dunbar could hardly have a more Scottish name, and her family comes from the east coast. Her grandfather, Charles Cuthill Dunbar, was born in Dundee while her grandmother Mary West Dunbar was born near Gardenstown, Banff.

Dunbar made five space flights between 1985 and 1998. Now 62, she still regularly visits Fife. She received an honorary doctorate from Dundee University in 2002.

Piers Sellers was born in Sussex and graduated as an ecological scientist from Edinburgh University. He emigrated to the USA and became an American citizen, in order to join the astronaut corps. He flew in space three times and made six space walks.

Apollo lunar astronaut Dick Gordon's grandfather emigrated to the USA from Aberdeenshire. He circled the Moon in 1969 while his two colleagues made the second lunar landing, following Neil Armstrong's historic descent a few months earlier.

Armstrong himself traces his ancestry to Langholm in Dumfriesshire, the traditional seat of Clan Armstrong. He visited it in 1972 and was made the first freeman of the burgh. The Justice of the Peace read out an unrepealed 400-year-old law that required him to hang any Armstrong found in the town.

Other astronauts of Scottish descent include Apollo 15 commander David Scott, Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean and Walter Cunningham of Apollo 7. The vehicle and the ground equipment used to launch it are so fiendishly complicated that countdowns are frequently reset, and launches postponed, sometimes for weeks or months.

Last February, at the fourth attempt, I finally saw Shuttle STS-133 Discovery head into orbit. Along with guests from various worldwide space agencies, we were bussed in through strict security to the viewing site at Banana River.

US Air Force fighter jets and helicopters flew past in a show of strength, while Nasa Chief Charlie Bolden, an African American ex-astronaut, gave the crowd a pep talk. "Put your cameras away. Our pictures will all be on the web site tomorrow. Just watch it."

A singer belted out the Star Spangled Banner, and even the Brits joined in. As the digital countdown clock ran its course, the crowd chanted in unison "Five, four, three, two, one!" and then - nothing.

In total silence, two white clouds of steam emerged from the sides of the launch tower, three miles away. Then a bright point of light, so dazzling even in the bright Florida sunshine that we winced and looked away, rose up from the pad.

Finally the sound reached the crowd, a deep thunderous tremor followed by sharp crackling from the engines. Even at this distance, the bleachers on which we stood trembled.

Now we could see the entire vehicle on top of its tower of flame, rotating in the air to the correct orientation, then heading out over the Atlantic. With two white flashes, the boosters peeled off and fell towards the sea.

Eight minutes later, Discovery was in orbit travelling at 17,000mph.

All that was left was a monstrous tower of smoke 28 miles tall, being slowly shredded by the wind. And a few very startled birds.