![]() “On my first mission, when the SRBs came off, this debris just went smacking against the windshield, kind of like you ran through a bunch of bugs. That separation moment, he notes, is “kinda like a train wreck.” “You feel a little bit less acceleration, and then you get that big bang when the solid rocket boosters separate,” Walheim says. “When those engines come back up, it feels like you just threw the afterburner on a jet, going straight up of course,” the former astronaut explains.Īs the Shuttle kept cruising upwards, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) eventually petered out. “You know you are getting shot off the planet really quick,” he adds.Īt a certain point, the Shuttle throttled back to avoid stressing the vehicle then it throttled up again. The G-forces rapidly accumulated to around 2.5, which is more than twice as much gravity you feel on Earth. “At T-minus zero you get that big kick in the pants when the solid rocket boosters light,” Walheim says. “And now this beautiful building that seems like it was solid as a rock, it just starts to shake like it’s coming apart.” The engines burned for just a few seconds before the solid rocket boosters kicked in. “At T-minus six, the main engines start,” Walheim says. “ is solid as a rock.”īut that feeling only lasted until the moment of the launch. “You pretty much feel like you’re sitting on the top of a 15-story building or something,” Walheim says. Once he got to his seat, he was flat on his back. Walheim flew on the craft three times, and still vividly remembers the liftoff sequence.Ĭrawling into the vehicle some 90 minutes before blastoff required some “gymnastics,” he tells PopSci, given that the giant space plane was sitting on its tail, as opposed to being parked flat on a runway. ![]() Just over 30 years after Crippen and Young’s landmark flight, Rex Walheim and three other astronauts climbed aboard the final Shuttle mission. The first Shuttle flight touches down on April 14, 1981. “About darn time,” he quips, when asked about the Crew Dragon launch. Now nearly 40 years later, Crippen is ready to see NASA and SpaceX set another milestone. “On the first flight, ascent, which lasts 8.5 minutes, seemed like it went by in 30 seconds to me.” “There’s nothing like your first flight,” he explains. “That was when my pulse rate shot up, and it was pure excitement on my part.” He flew three more times after that inaugural mission, but of course, the initial trip stands out the most. “It was only when the count got into one minute that I really thought we were going to do it,” he tells PopSci. “Anybody who thinks they can statistically predict when something with two million moving parts is gonna fail is sort of smoking something they shouldn’t be, probably.”Ĭrippen remembers his heart rate rocketing to around 130 beats per minute at launch. “We didn’t have any idea about probability risk assessment when the Shuttle was first launched,” Young recounted in the 2008 Discovery Channel documentary series, When We Left Earth – The NASA Missions. “But it worked.” The then-43-year-old space rookie was joined by commander John Young, who died in 2018 at age 87.Ĭrippen and Young couldn’t draw on spaceflight history for their maiden voyage, called STS-1. Robert Crippen, now 82, remembers how the first Shuttle mission rocketed off the deck only two days after the scheduled takeoff was cancelled, or “scrubbed.” “I was pleasantly surprised by that because it was a pretty complicated vehicle, and there were lots of things that could scrub it for a launch,” he says. John Young and Robert Crippen (right) in 1979. Both shared their thoughts on what it’s like to ride a space plane that’s attached to two solid rocket boosters-and how the experience might differ for those headed to the ISS on Saturday if conditions permit. To mark the Crew Dragon launch, PopSci spoke with two Shuttle-era astronauts-one who flew on that initial 1981 mission, and another who flew on the final 2011 tour. (They did run atmospheric glide tests with a crewed orbiter that was hitched it to a 747, but those missions weren’t actually in space.) Up to that point, NASA had never before sent a rocket system up on its maiden flight with people strapped in. When the Shuttle made its debut on the Kennedy Space Center launchpad in 1981, it had two astronauts on board. It will be the first crewed launch from US soil since 2011, when the Space Shuttle orbiter made its last flight. If all goes according to plan on Saturday-the new launch date for a high-profile mission-two NASA astronauts will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Update on June 1: the launch and journey to the ISS was a success.
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