Thursday, August 4, 2011

Go At Throttle Up

As I sit here, watching the video feed of the final Space Shuttle landing that will ever be, I reflect upon the thirty plus years that I've noted this space program.  MY space program, if you will.  I'm 40 years old now.  The Shuttle program was started in the early '70's.  So just as the Mercury and Apollo programs were what I consider to my parent's space programs, this one, is mine.  Or my generation's.  However you choose to look at it.

There have been so many triumphs with the Space Shuttles.  The validation of the whole concept of the reusable space vehicle.  All the wonderful space repair missions.  The assembly of the International Space Station.  So many wonderful things.  Yet, as is my bent, I recall much of the tragedy as well.

When I was in  fourth grade, we all gathered in Sister Catherine’s Learning Lab, at St. Thomas Aquinas school in East Lansing.  She turned on the big projection screen television.  And we all watched excitedly, as the Space Shuttle Columbia climbed into the sky on it’s fiery tail.  I was totally in awe of the spectacle.  It didn’t make me want to become an astronaut or anything, but it definitely got me interested in such things.  My father bought me a plastic model kit of the Columbia, which I put together, painted, and hung from my ceiling over my desk with fishing line.  I had it cranked up in a reentry attitude.  And I looked at that up there for many years. 

Like most people, I followed the NASA shuttle program rather casually.  When something big happened and my attention was brought to it, I followed it as close as the next guy, but then life took over my attentions, and I forgot about it for awhile.  Such was the Shuttle Program.

The next thing I remember vividly about the program, was from 1986.  I was sitting in Coach Smith’s Freshman Algebra class, when the announcement about the shuttle Challenger explosion  came over the PA system.  I was shocked, and I didn’t concentrate on anything for the rest  of the day.  It was made more real, and horrifying by the news coverage that evening at home.  The horrible pit  in my stomach as I watched the video for the first time, knowing that something was about to happen.  Then that fateful moment, right after the call for main engine throttle up, when the Challenger exploded into a geyser of fire.  The booster rockets going on their merry way, spiraling up into the sky.  Mission control still dutifully calling out telemetry, long after the explosion.

Then the horrible playing of the explosion, over, and over again.  As analyst after analyst talked about it, and examined the tape.   Much like the awful repetition of Joe Theismann's leg injure only a few months before.  The media loved showing it again, from a different angle every time.   Of course, we all know what happened now.  That "25 cent" O-ring around the solid rocket booster section, burned through, and shot flames right at the main fuel tank.  And nothing good comes of that.  Preventable, and a design flaw,, to be sure. 

But the biggest thing I remember, and that I dream of sometimes, is that last call out from the orbiter to mission control:  “Roger, go at throttle up”.  Then the explosion.  The pieces of debris falling, endlessly it seemed, to the ocean below.  The later determination, that the crew was possibly alive up until the crew module smashed into the water, didn’t help make it any nicer.

I was at home on that Sunday morning in 2003, when the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry.  I latched onto the live news coverage right away, and watched it for hours.  With great dismay.  I felt the urge to find the mission patch logo from NASA, and I took great care in printing out a large 1 ft long sticker of it.  I took it to work, and placed it on the back of my toolbox, something that was not allowed.  I did it anyways.  I wanted to look at it every day for some reason, remind myself of the risks of doing such things I guess.  I was working for Pratt & Whitney's experimental flight test division at the time, and it seemed appropriate.  Over the following months, the sun slowly bleached out all the color from my homemade sticker.  I sort of liked that.  It mirrored how our minds let tragedies fade away, until they are less horrible.  Eventually, it was a blank outline of the logo, and I scraped it away.

Once again, that accident turned out to be preventable.  Caused by insulation falling off the main fuel tank during launch, hitting the leading edge of one of the shuttle's wings.  That’s the way of it though.  Most accidents of that nature can be prevented.  We just don’t have the foresight to see that something is a real problem sometimes, until it is proven to us.  We are like that, as a species I think.  Rather optimistic. 

The risk is always there, whenever you get into your car, ride your motorcycle, take an airplane, or even get into a rocket ship.  We know that things can go horribly wrong for a myriad of reasons.  But we go anyways.  Optimistic that things will work out ok, and we will be able to do whatever it was we wanted to do.

I look forward to seeing what the private companies can do with spacecraft launching, and exploration.  I am heartened by what I see so far from companies like Space X, and Virgin Galactic.  I will watch their progress off and on, as in the past.

Hoping to never again hear the fateful  dead air over the radio, that came after “Go at throttle up”.  Like it did that one day in April.

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