Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The First Space Shuttle Pilot: Bob Crippen on the 40th Anniversary of STS-1

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Pilot Bob Crippen and Commander John Young became the first astronauts to fly a Space Shuttle into orbit on April 12, 1981. Crippen tells host Mat Kaplan about that mission and shares many more stories from his adventurous life. Mat was standing on the dry lake bed in the California desert when STS-1 returned to Earth.  Planetary Society senior space policy advisor Casey Dreier brings additional perspective to this anniversary, and it’s a space poetry festival when Bruce Betts arrives with this week’s What’s Up segment. There’s more to discover at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/bob-crippen-40th-shuttle-anniversarySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He piloted the first space shuttle into orbit 40 years ago, Bob Crippen, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. One of those very special conversations this week, Bob Crippen will tell us about sitting next to STS-1 Commander John Young in Columbia as they counted down to history. It was April 12, 1981, exactly 20 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. By the way, happy Yuri's Night, everyone. Bob will also tell us about his other space shuttle missions and the colleagues he flew with, along with much more about a life well-lived and the spaceships he still misses. Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer will get our shuttle anniversary started in moments with a

taste of his fascinating look back at what the shuttle program actually cost. It may surprise you. And surprise! This week's What's Up visit with Bruce Betts becomes a space poetry festival, as an unprecedented number of you turned your contest entries into rhymes. It's great fun. You know what else is going to be fun? Watching a helicopter take off from the surface of Mars.

Ingenuity is now standing on its own four feet in Jezero Crater, after being dropped from the belly of the. Ingenuity is now standing on its own four feet in Jezero Crater after being dropped from the belly of the Perseverance rover. Everything checks out so far with that first flight possibly happening in a few days. The tiny whirlybird tops the April 2nd edition of the down lake and is followed by these headlines. Phew! Earth is safe from asteroid Apophis for at least another 100 years. We already knew that it will pass closer than geostationary satellites in 2029. The concern was about its 2068 pass. Radar observations have now allowed officials to sound the all-clear. The United Arab Emirates

Hope spacecraft has achieved its final science orbit around Mars. The mission will deliver a complete picture of the red planet's climate. These stories and more about that elusive phosphine on Venus, if it's really there, are waiting for you at planetary.org. Here's Casey Dreyer. Casey is the Planetary Society's chief advocate and our senior space policy advisor. Casey Dreyer, great timing to join us as part of this celebration of the 40th anniversary of that first space shuttle mission. You have worked some of your magic once again, and it can be seen at planetary.org. Tell us about this new page, this new research that you have posted. Well, I figured 40th anniversary of the shuttle. I love budget numbers and I love knowing how much

it took to make something. So let's combine the two and we have a new data set that we've made available for free to anyone to use. Very detailed demonstrating the cost of the shuttle to develop it, to get it ready for Bob's first flight. And then also, really, which I think is new, broken out by major components. So how much did it cost to figure out how to make the external tank, the solid rocket boosters, the RS-25 entrance, the orbiter itself, and of course, all of the construction of facilities that they had to upgrade around the country to basically shift NASA from its Apollo paradigm into the shuttle paradigm in which it would stay for almost 40 years, really from 1972 until 2011 with the last

flight of the shuttle. Man, are you correct talking about that infrastructure? I remember the first time I went out to Edwards during the approach and landing test and saw this gigantic structure that had been built just to lift the shuttle onto the back of the 747. This was a real paradigm shift. It was. I mean, and it's important to remember how big of a deal this was. It was almost a 10-year endeavor, right? Starting in 72, when Nixon approved the program to its first flight in 81, NASA had to fundamentally restructure itself to deal with a reusable space shuttle, to deal with launching and landing frequently in order to process the shuttle, to get it ready to take payloads into Earth orbit, and to deal with the shuttle after it came back to repurpose it in order to clean it up and get it ready to launch again. All this stuff was new. And they kind of took the existing infrastructure they had developed out for Apollo and reconfigured it specifically for the shuttle orbiter and its major components. And that just takes money to figure out how to do that and to build it. And I believe this is the first time we're seeing both

the cost of research and development for the shuttle added to and incorporating the cost of constructing the facilities, which again, if you don't have an orbiter processing facility, you don't have a space shuttle launch, right? So it's all part and parcel of the same program. Great stuff. We will put a direct link up to Casey's new page from this week's episode page at planetary.org slash radio. And you might want to take a look at his little summing up of the day of action. He's got a piece about that at planetary.org as well. We talk about all of this at much greater length in the new space policy edition that

appeared on April, what was it? April 2nd, Casey. Great conversation. Oh, absolutely. on April, what was it? April 2nd, Casey. Great conversation. Oh, absolutely. If you love hearing me talk, you will not be disappointed in the Space Policy Edition. I go on at length about this stuff. One more thing. Can I make a point about the shuttle now, which I think is kind of interesting to think about? If you adjust the cost of the shuttle into today's dollars, it's about $49 billion to build out that program, to develop the shuttle,

to get from nothing to the first few test launches. That really, I think, puts into perspective what we're seeing with things like the SLS and Orion, which they're not cheap, but if you add them together, they're actually less than $40 billion. They're cheaper than the cost of the space shuttle. NASA's major human spaceflight projects

in the past, Apollo, shuttle, SLS, Orion, they're not cheap, but actually they're trending down cheaper. And the big question now is obviously with these commercial programs, you can do maybe even way cheaper, but it certainly adds some interesting perspective into how NASA has approached these programs in the past. Great insights as always, Casey. I happen to know that in addition to loving to build and work with budget numbers, you like to build other stuff too. Have you received your new Lego kit yet? I have not gotten the new, I've ordered it. I have not yet gotten the new Space Shuttle Lego special edition. However, i did not wait on just on my hands waiting for that to come

i dug out of my old childhood box of legos i dug out the original well one of the old lego shuttle sets i believe from 1992 uh it was a shuttle with solid rocket boosters and even had a little satellite in it completely out of proportion i could nitpick that thing to death for how uh not exact that is but it does have a little red tower it does have a little processing door that closes over the shuttle and i was able to reconstruct almost the entire set after probably 30 years so you know as my little homage to the shuttle again as a child of the shuttle that's the the spacecraft. That was NASA to me when I was growing up as a kid. So that was a fun experience to recreate. Can't wait to see you tweet out photos of those two space shuttle models next to each other, Casey. Looking forward to it and looking forward to talking again soon.

Yeah, thanks, Matt. See you later. Casey Dreyer, he is our Senior Space Policy Advisor and the Chief Advocate at the Planetary Society. T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, we've gone for main engine start, we have main engine start. We have a lift off. We have gone for America's first space shuttle, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. April 12, 1981. I was watching. Tens of millions around the world were watching. Commanded by John Young and piloted by our guest, Bob Crippen, Columbia would achieve low-Earth orbit, perform almost flawlessly for two days, six hours, 20 minutes, and 53 seconds,

before landing as no spacecraft returning from orbit ever had, on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California's Mojave Desert. The shuttle era had begun. Bob Crippen would take the commander's seat for three more missions. He would later run the shuttle program from NASA headquarters before becoming director of the Kennedy Space Center and then achieving new success in the aerospace industry. He is retired now, and as you are about to hear, he remains immensely proud of his time in the shuttle, of the men and women he served with, and of the shuttle, the space transportation system itself.

I'm afraid the recording of our recent conversation is not up to our usual technical standards, but the content of that conversation has already made it one that I will always treasure. Bob, when I told my Planetary Society colleagues that I'd be talking with you, they were kind of awestruck. Frankly, so was I. Thank you very much for being our guest on Planetary Radio. Happy to be here. We're going to get to the space shuttle. We're going to get to Columbia and STS-1. But I want to talk to you a little bit about what got you to that point. In my research, I found out, among other things, you always love

flying, but you were also a first-generation computer geek. Did that play a part in your NASA career? Well, it did. When I was attending the University of Texas to get an aerospace degree, my senior year, they started a computer program, you know, with the old punch cards and so forth. I was interested in that, and I've continued to explore that interest throughout my career. But along the way, you did pick up something like, and I imagine it's more than this now, 6,500 hours in air and in space. What did you fly before you took the controls of the shuttle?

My primary fleet airplane was the A-4 Skyhawk, which I was flying aboard the USS Independence in the Mediterranean and throughout the Atlantic. And when I finished up that squadron tour, I applied for test pilot school and was fortunate enough to be selected. And the Navy and the Air Force exchanged people for the schools, and I ended up being sent to the Air Force School at Edwards Air Force Base. It was a thrill to be there. Chuck Yeager was the commandant of the school when I was there. That was a long time ago. Just recently, I lost Chuck.

It was quite an experience. Got to meet him once. That was a pretty amazing experience as well. You were a tried and true naval aviator. What was it like joining up with the Air Force there? Not that you actually joined. Well, I spent a lot of time working with the Air Force. They do things a little bit different in flying sometimes, but I learned to fit in. It wasn't that difficult. In fact, I enjoyed every minute.

They had some great airplanes. I love flying the F-104 Starfighter out there and the F-106. It gave me a chance to see a little bit of both sides of the operation between the Navy and the Air Force. When I was a kid, a budding space geek, the books I got from the library all talk about this amazing space plane that the Air Force was developing, the X-20, the dinosaur that was going to be followed. I mean, it was a follow on to the actual X-15, which did all that amazing work. I mean, it was a space plane, right? And then came plans for the manned orbiting Laboratory, the MOL. Do you think that you might have ended up living up there in the MOL if that program hadn't been canceled? Well, I was honored to be selected for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, MOL. It was, you know, a military space program as opposed to NASA's civilian space program.

And I thought there was a distinct role for the military in space. Still do, in fact. But they did cancel Dinosaur. And when they canceled that, they wanted to put in another program. And the Mandorving Laboratory was what came out of that. I was in the second group of people that was selected for it. Al Cruz, who was our boss at the time, one of the crew members, was actually on the dinosaur program, and he switched over to the manned orbiting laboratory.

I was, in fact, I was out there in California. We were home base there in El Segundo, California, hoping to move up to Vandenberg. Unfortunately, that never happened. I've read a lot about the stories about the cancellation of those programs. And I got to tell you, I mean, as a kid, I and a lot of other people, we were sure excited about Dinosaur. It did seem like a natural follow-on to the X-15. If these programs had gone ahead, do you ever think about where we might have gone, you know, instead of turning to all our attention to getting to the moon? not that there was anything wrong with that. Well, we're still learning how to exploit space, if you will.

And we're now moving on to more commercial applications there. But there still is room for doing classified stuff. We now have a Space Force. So the military is actively involved in what's going on around the Earth. How did you end up making the jump over to NASA? And I guess you had the chance earlier in your career, but you decided that you'd stick with the military. Well, when I first applied to be an astronaut, both NASA and the military were taking applicants, and there came a point in the selection process I had to choose between the two.

That was in 1965. NASA was in the middle of the Gemini program and they had quite a few astronauts on board. So I figured my best opportunity was to go with the military, which is what I did. Unfortunately, I was selected in 67 for the manned orbiting laboratory and we were working hard on it, looking forward to moving to Vandenberg, as I said earlier, and we unfortunately got a call one morning that the program was canceled. I learned early on that no matter how far along the program is, it can go away in a blink of an eye, and that's what happened to MOL. blink of an eye and that's what happened to MOL. All of us crew members, there were 14 of us at that time, were crying in our beer, if you will, trying to figure out what it is that we're going to do. And one of them, Bo Bobco, one day said in a crew meeting, why don't we ask NASA if they could use any of us? And we all pooh-poohed the idea saying, hey, they got too many astronauts already and they were already starting to cancel the moon flights and they hadn't even gone to the moon yet.

But one thing led to another and NASA did decide to take some of the crew members, thanks to a guy by the name of George Miller, who was one of the NASA headquarters guys. He kind of directed the astronaut office in Houston that they should take some of us. And Deke Slayton, who was a big boss there at that time, decided, well, I'll take everybody that's 35 and younger. And that cut the group right in half. Seven of us actually moved over to NASA at that time. And the seven unfortunately didn't give but they were quite successful as well. I imagine you pretty happy that you made that age cut off that the Deke said. That's an understatement yes I was very happy. Apollo ended earlier than it should have

but you managed to keep busy. I mean I read about your work with Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, which didn't actually get you into space, but I mean, you did have to spend a whole bunch of time with some other astronauts in a tank, didn't you, for some of the preparation for Skylab? Yes, actually, to go back to Deke for a minute, when Deke hired the seven of us, he said, look, guys, I don't have any flights for you. They're talking about this thing that called a space shuttle that may fly around 1980 or something, but I got lots of work for you to do. So we moved over and started supporting the programs that were impending. And the one at that time was Skylab, our first attempt at a space station. I joined that program, started following the hardware and in fact, following the computer that was on board

as to how it was going to be programmed. And after I'd been there a couple of months, I guess, Pete Conrad, who'd finished up Apollo 12, called me into the office one day and he said, Pete Conrad, who'd finished up Apollo 12, called me into the office one day and he said, Krip, I need you to volunteer for this thing. And I said, what is it? He said, well, they want to do the ground simulation of the environment of the Skylab. And they're going to lock you up in a vacuum chamber with 5 psi of pressure. And you're going to live in there for about 56 days.

And being the new guy on the block, you don't turn down a volunteer. So I said, yes, sir. And he said, we've got two other guys who are going to volunteer with you, but they don't know about it yet. You've got to go talk to them. And that was Bo Bobco, I mentioned earlier, and Bill Thornton. And so we set out to work on this program that was called the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test, or SLEEP for short. It was quite a project, and we did spend 56 days locked up in that chamber, which was a little bit of an ordeal, but

it actually produced some results regarding the medical hardware and things that we needed to do that fed into the actual Skylab program itself. And I imagine some of the stuff they learned still benefiting people living on the ISS today. I mean, it's amazing to think that even today, there's still stuff that we're learning about what it takes to keep a human happy and healthy in space. And this was an early attempt to do that. It was. And you do have to keep occupied. I learned that.

You don't want too much idle time. You want just the right amount of idle time. But you need to be busy. And we set that up to work. And it turned out that that did feed into the Skylab program. And unfortunately, we discovered we were overworking one crew way too hard and had to back down on that. But there is a balance of what you can do while you're on board, especially if you're new to getting into being weightless. That takes a little getting used to and you're not as productive initially.

That's a famous story, I guess, for another time about that Skylab crew that rebelled a little bit, but something I think has come up on our show. Then came Apollo Soyuz. You know, you weren't up there shaking hands with the Soviets, but you were playing a pretty important role on the ground. Yes. Actually, when we finished up Skylab, I moved in to start helping with the design work on the space shuttle and worked on that for about a year or so. And then Tom Stafford called me in and said, Krip, I need you to volunteer to be on my support crew for this thing called Apollo Soyuz, which was a joint mission we were going to do with the Russians. And that actually sounded like it would be interesting to do. So myself, Dick Trulli, Bo Bobco, and Bob Overmeyer, I think, were the support crew on that. And we actually ended up going over to Moscow and Star City and their launch site at Bacchanor. We were the first Americans to ever go there.

Tom Stafford insisted that we were going to get to go see their launch site, Bacchanal. We were the first Americans to ever go there. Tom Stafford insisted that we were going to get to go see their launch site, which we did. Wow. It strikes me that you got asked to volunteer for some things over and over by a lot of people who are now pretty important parts of history. Well, I was the new guy, so you get to volunteer a lot. Well, I was the new guy, so you get to volunteer a lot. So you were the CAPCOM, right, for Apollo-Soyuz? I was CAPCOM for Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz. Let me point out something there, Matt.

Sure. That was a very important role because the people in mission control play a significant role in all of our space flights and learning to work with them on the ground in the control room really helped me out later on when I was flying but I could picture what was going on in the control room and what they needed to know and how to communicate with them a lot better because of that. Wasn't this a really important decision right from the start, I mean from Mercury on, to make a fellow astronaut the person who was the liaison with the people who were up there? I think it was. We owe that to the original Mercury

7. I'm not sure. It was probably Al Shepard and Dick Slayton who were probably the forcing functions behind that. It helps to have somebody you're talking to that kind of understands you and how you're operating and what your limitations are and what you can do. Let's go back to the shuttle. So you were already working on it, helping to make it into what it became. And I'm also thinking back to the 1970s when I used to drive up from my college radio station in Orange County to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave, of course, and I would stand on the side of the dry lake bed for the approach and landing tests. You know, there was Enterprise, that test article, first writing on top of the 747, you know, always being lifted up there, but eventually being released. And I think it was the first time they actually released it to glide back on its own.

There we were all standing on the edge of the dry lake bed, feeling awfully fortunate to be out there for this. And the shuttle glides past us, you know, almost silently. And of course, all our eyes are on that. All of a sudden, this earth shattering roar takes place right above our heads. And that was the T-38 chase plane. And it put us all on the ground. And I'm just wondering if maybe you were flying that plane that knocked me onto the dirt. Not on that particular mission. Actually, I was on the ground out there at Edwards, along with you, but not beside you. I was over by the runway. One of the things that we also do in the astronaut office is we assign a crew member, an astronaut, to be with the family of the people that are flying on missions like that.

flying on missions like that. And so I was what we call the family escort. So I had all the wives out there and telling them what was going on. Unfortunately, I had also caught a bad cold earlier and I'd lost my voice. So it was mostly with my hands. I was talking to the women. But we did use the T-38s to chase all of those missions, and we actually used them for the first initial orbital flights as well. And I did fly some of those chase missions on subsequent flights. It's one of my favorite stories about being out there. Then I was out there again, of course, not too long after, because Columbia was coming back from space. not too long after, because Columbia was coming back from space. You were lucky enough on April 12th, 1981,

to be sitting next to John Young out there on Pad 39A at the controls for Columbia. What was going through your head? Well, we already scrubbed once on April the 10th, and I thought there was a good chance that we were going to scrub again because it's a very complex vehicle. And there were lots of things that have to work correctly. You know, I've been working as an astronaut, but hadn't flown for a very long time. So I was pretty excited. But it was only when the count got inside of a minute that I really turned to John and I said, I think we might do it. That's when my heart rate went up to about 130. It was a moment of pure

excitement and it lived up to everything that I dreamed it would be. How was it to fly once you made it up into orbit, thanks to that giant external tank and those mighty solid rocket boosters. And you were up there in low Earth orbit on your own. And having ridden a vehicle that had not gone through any uncrewed tests, not into space anyway, because you couldn't do that. It was meant for people to fly. Yeah, actually, we discussed, the discussed, starting about a year prior to flight, and we'd already been delayed as to whether they ought to modify the vehicle to try to get it where

it would fly unmanned. And both John and I lotted against that because we thought it had a better chance if we were on board, because we're modest I guess. I think they call it the right stuff, actually. I'm not sure about that. It was an interesting test flight. Both John and I are trained as test pilots, and first or something that a lot of test pilots want to do, so we were pleased to be on the first flight. And it lived up to our expectations. You know, eight and a half minutes from sitting on the pad to going 17,500 miles an hour is quite a ride. But I thoroughly enjoyed my first time to be in weightless and getting a chance to observe this beautiful planet Earth that's our spaceship and was lucky enough to get to do it a few more times after that.

And we're going to talk about some of those. They kept you pretty busy, I'm sure, but you did get some time to look out the window and enjoy that view? Well, I did. However, there were only two of us on board. There was quite a bit of work going on, so I didn't get to look out as much as I might have wanted to. I discovered the commander gets to look out more than the pilot does. So on my subsequent flights when I was commander, I did spend more time looking out the window. It's good to be in charge sometimes. Utah already talked about how complex it is, and we've talked about that on this show. Most people have. What an amazingly complex machine it was. Can you give some idea of the

complexity of this system? Because it was much more than just a flying machine. Well, it was. The computers we talked about a little earlier were very much involved with the whole operation of the space shuttle, and we didn't have that much memory and not nearly as much as you've got in your earphone or probably in the computer you're using. The computer looks at all the systems. That's how the crew monitors most of the systems. We did have some hardwired displays but predominantly we depended on the computer to see those. You've got first an environmental control system that's got to allow you to breathe and keep the temperature reasonable and keep the pressure right.

The vehicle builds up a lot of heat because of the electronics on board, so we have to have a radiator, which was the inside of the payload bay doors, that was required to be open for you to stay in orbit very much or for very long. We used what we call a flash evaporator to keep it cool going up and coming back down. So you've got all that system to deal with. Then you've got to generate power. We had three fuel cells to do that. No batteries at all, strictly of the three fuel cells, part of what's building up heat.

You also need to worry about the structure of the vehicle, which is an interesting thing. And the thermal protection system, which was required to keep it cool because the vehicle is basically got a skin of aluminum, which melts at around 300 degrees and you're going to come in at 3 000 degrees so we've been on these several protection systems to keep the vehicle at a reasonable temperature and also a material called reinforced carbon carbon which is on the leading edges and the of the wings and the nose of the spacecraft you've got very complicated main engines the most complex thing we've built. In fact, the derivative of those is going to be used on the new space launch system that NASA is working

on right now. So there's a lot of complexity in the vehicle. You've got a hydraulic system that's run by auxiliary power units that allows you to control the vehicle, the elevons and the flaps and the main engines to some extent as well. So there's a lot going on. It's built, weighs around 200,000 pounds. When it's empty, just the orbiter itself, it can bring you, it'll take a payload of almost 50,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. And it has a crew, a crew of seven that's allowed us to fly a lot of people in space much more than we've ever had before. Still an amazing vehicle. It'll be a long time before we have anything nearly as complex or capable.

You know, you made me remember, because I've studied this, and I like to tell computer people this story, the memory you had on those original shuttles. And I remember that it was magnetic core memory, which the computer geeks out there know was the earliest form of random access memory, RAM memory, and not very much of it, as you said. Yeah, we started out with only 64K. Did get that boosted up to 100K before we flew. There were 32-bit words on the thing. We also had the programs stored on magnetic tape. So we had to load the programs.

They had one in it for the pre-flight when they were getting ready to launch for the countdown. Then you loaded the ascent program in at about 20 minutes prior to the liftoff. You get on orbit, you got to load the orbiter program in for the flight control, and then you've got an entry program you've got to load in, and all those things need to work. So if the system crashed, you had to reload from magnetic tape while you were on orbit? That's correct. Wow. That's Bob Crippen, pilot for the first flight into space by the space shuttle. More is just ahead. Space exploration doesn't just happen. In a democracy where you're competing against other priorities and resources, we need to maintain a constant engagement in the political process to ensure the types of missions we want to

see in the future. I'm Casey Dreyer. I'm the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society. I'm asking you to consider making a donation to our program of space policy and advocacy that works every single day to promote your values in space science and exploration to the people who make the decisions in our democracy. Your donations keep us independent, keep us engaged, and keep us effective. Go to planetary.org slash take action. That's planetary.org slash take action. Thank you. You were the pilot. How did it fly? I mean, how did it handle, first of all, you know, in space when you had to maneuver around some, but then bringing it back down to the dry lake bed here in California?

Well, it flew very well, actually. The flight control system is also digital. So when you're controlling it, your hand controller is putting inputs into the computer, which goes out and drives the aero systems to do what you want, or the jets. When you're on orbit, we had some large 800-pound reaction control jets, and we had some smaller ones, vernier jets that we also used to control your attitude. And we had a large orbital maneuvering system that allowed us to change the orbit while we were on orbit and to do the de-orbit. Coming back in, you're initially using the jets till you get down to around 400,000 feet and you

start to get a little atmosphere. And you blend in using the flight control system with the jets. and you blend in using the flight control system with the jets. It's when you go subsonic, which is usually right over your landing site at around 45,000 feet, then you're strictly on aerodynamic controls. The jets are not used after that. Really? Because of the reaction control system going through a digital system, we were able to tune the vehicle. It actually flew much more like a small fighter airplane than it did a big shaky because you could set the gains and most of us in the crew were former fighter pilots. So we tended to want it to be pretty

responsive, which it was. That's also amazing when you think, you know, it's often compared to a Boeing 737, that you were able to tune that thing so that it could fly like the fighters you were used to. Not quite as responsive as the fighters, but much more so than some 707s, which I flew at that time. Did you have control over that balance between the reaction control system and the regular, the traditional control surfaces, or was that also something determined by the computer as you came down in altitude? That was all programmed in the computer. It modified the system as you came down. It's amazing sophistication, considering it was state-of-the-art for the time, but still, it still amazes me. It is.

And it worked very well. I mean, considering that we couldn't really simulate that in any system prior to flight, the fact that it did behave so well was remarkable. Let me go back on the approach and landing test because they played into that. The last landing Fred Hayes was doing on the concrete runway out at Edwards, he actually got in what's called a pilot-induced oscillation with the nose. It was because we needed to change the gains to correct that, that allowed us to come in and fly the orbital flight so well. But it was something that we discovered in the test, and that's why you do tests. I'm just thinking of how much my pilot brother is going to love hearing this part of this

conversation, man. He's just going to go nuts. That first return, when you set it down and it slowly came to a stop behind the parachute there on the dry lake bed, and all those vehicles start coming out, and I was standing off on the dry lake bed again, cheering, jumping up and down with everybody else. It had to feel pretty good. That's an understatement. It felt, you know, the fact that it worked as well as it did and it all came together. And I've never seen John Young as excited as he was.

We needed to keep doing some of the bring the systems down. And we were working with mission control to do that. John left me to do that. unstrapped, got off of the flight deck and went down to the mid-deck, but they wouldn't open the hatches until they cleared that there weren't any noxious fumes outside. So John was bouncing back and forth between the mid-deck and the flight deck, and he was very excited, to say the least. When they opened the hatch, he immediately exited. I still was busy working with the mission control trying to get the vehicle shut down properly. And I came out shortly thereafter. But let me go back to one point. You mentioned you were out on the lake bed. When John and I came overhead Edwards around 45,000

feet, and when he put the vehicle on a big left turn to do our circling approach that we use out there, I looked out his window and I saw all these people out there on the lake bed. I pointed out to John, I said, I hope none of them are on the runway, but they kept me off the runway. They let us closer than I thought they would, actually. I was surprised. But yeah, I mean, the night before, because I've been up all night, I was wandering around out just outside the fence where those thousands and thousands, not of people. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands of people, thousands and thousands of RVs who had pulled up there and all those people sitting on top of their vehicles to watch you guys make that first

landing. It was a glorious experience. I also have a photo of people milling around outside what was then the Dryden Research Center, now the Armstrong Center, of course, walking around Enterprise, that test article that you had worked with for so long on the approach and landing test. It was really amazing. It was such a touching experience to see the people who had helped to build, who had paid for this system, being out there to enjoy its success. Yeah, it was. And I was amazed that as many people came out as they did. But I think there

was a good portion of LA that was deserted at that point. I think they'd all driven up to see that. Had a good deal of Palmdale and Lancaster. Palmdale and Lancaster were empty by that point. Yeah, you're right. I mean, and to say nothing of the tens of millions of people who were watching on live TV all around the world. Tell us about John Young, the guy who walked on the moon, another legend. John was a great guy. Glad to have called him my friend. I'm just sorry he's not here

to celebrate this 40th anniversary coming up. John is perhaps one of the funniest human beings I've ever met. He had these one-liners that he delivered in a sort of a rye matter that I wish I'd written them all down in a book somewhere and I could have sold it and got this rich. But he was also a brilliant engineer. I learned early on when John was worried about something on the vehicle or that we were doing that I ought to be worried as well.

So he and I had had three years to train for that initial flight because we kept getting delayed due to problems with the main engines and that thermal protection system. So I got to know John very well, and he was a pleasure to fly with. When you're a rookie going up, you like to have a nice experienced guy to go with, and John was our most experienced guy. He was chief of the astronaut office. He had flown four flights, including walking on the moon on Apollo 16, so I had the best to go fly with. Truly a legend. You got to fly three more times, all three times as commander of Challenger. What strikes me most maybe about these three later missions is that they were all about getting work done up there in space. It was. The initial ones were, we had to keep testing out

things to make sure that they would do what we wanted them to do. On my second flight, STS-7, I had a great crew. As you said, I was a commander on that, and we wanted to go see if we could work in proximity of satellites and capture satellites and deploy them again with our remote manipulator system, the arm that's on the shuttle. We actually did deploy a couple of communication satellites and then got down to the basic work to find out whether we could turn the satellite loose and pick it up again. I had John Fabian and Sally Ride doing that. And Rick Halk, who was my pilot on that, he and I flew around the vehicle that we deployed,

flew out, flew back in, and picked it up a couple of different times. So that was early on test to find out if that worked like we would want it to. By second flight, we had a satellite that was on orbit that had malfunctioned. It was called Solar Max, put up there to observe the sun during the maximum phase of the sun. We had not done a rendezvous yet prior to that flight, so we were the first rendezvous with the space shuttle and then came in to capture it. We had planned to use Pinky Nelson that was going to fly over and grab it with a man maneuvering unit that we had. And unfortunately, the capture device on that was not designed correctly and it didn't do the job,

resulting in a tumble of the Solar Max. But the ground was able to stabilize it again to get it where we could come in and capture with it just rotating in a slower manner. Terry Hart was the guy that did the capture with me on that. Then the last flight was more of an operational flight. It was primarily with instruments designed to observe the Earth. And we did do a, to try to figure out whether we could actually refuel satellites on orbit, we did an experiment that Dave Leesma and Kathy Sullivan did a spacewalk and proved that we could do that. Sally Ride was also with us on that. It was a great mission. I didn't know that was going to be my last flight, though. When I came back down and after working for a while, I was assigned to do the first initial mission that we were going to fly out

of Vandenberg Air Force Base. And that was going to be a polar orbit, which I really was regretting that I never got to do that. In fact, we were going to launch off the same pad that we had planned to launch off of the manned orbiting laboratory. But after we lost Challenger, all that went by the wayside and I hung up my flying boots and got into management, unfortunately. Well, fortunate for the rest of us, maybe, but yeah, I can understand your feelings about it. I'm going to come back to that elephant in the room of Challenger, of course, because it was your bird on those three fights that you made. So many of the names that you've just mentioned have also become legends. I mean, I'm very proud that Sally Ride became a friend of mine. I live in the San Diego area, and

she actually made a regular contribution to this show for a while, was pretty devastated by the loss. I just wonder if there's anything else that you want to say, not just about her, because you must have all been thinking somewhere in the back of your minds hey we got the first american woman up here in space but but also all these other amazing colleagues that uh that you work with over those missions yeah sally was special she was a great crew member i flew with her twice in fact her only two flights so we're my crews we lost her way too early i was pleased with the work that she did while she was out there in San Diego with trying to inspire more young women to get involved in some

of the more technical projects that sometimes women don't seem to go in that direction. And she did a lot to inspire women to prove that they can do anything they want to. Yeah. Sally Ride Science, still going strong as far as I know. And there's a ship that I pass by every now and then here, an oceanographic research vessel called the Sally Ride. That's great. And it always makes me feel good to see it. Let's talk about Challenger and what happened. We don't need to dwell on this, but that had to be pretty devastating. And I know that you were involved in the recovery from that and in making sure that it wouldn't happen again. What can you say about that?

Well, as you said, it was pretty devastating. pretty devastating. I lost a lot of close friends on that mission and a vehicle that I'd grown to love, the Challenger. It was an accident, in my opinion, that never should have happened. We launched on a cold day and the solid rocket joints didn't handle it very well and that caused the loss. There was some, the initial recommendation out of the solid rocket manufacturer was not to launch because of the temperature, but because of some communication issues, I guess, various reasons that was decided to override that to get them to change their mind. Unfortunately, they did go launch and the accident happened. As you said, I know that I felt the crew very strongly would want us to get back to flying

again. I made some recommendations to my boss at that time, who was Dick Trulli in Washington, that we needed more operational people in running the program. And he said, if I believe that, I'd hang up my flying boots and come help run the program, which is what I did. And Arnie Aldridge, who was the director of the program, and Dick Kors was in Houston, and I was in the Kennedy Space Center, worked very hard on overcoming a lot of stuff to get back flying again, because there was a lot of things that needed to be corrected on the shuttle besides the solid rocket motors. And we took advantage of a two-year-plus period to do that. Probably one of the tougher things I ever participated in. Back before I started doing this show 18 years ago, there was a short-lived TV show. I actually went and did an interview at Rockwell

with one of the leaders of the work to redesign the shuttle after the loss of Challenger. And I still am blown away by how many upgrades were made, how many changes were made from the early design? And I guess that's some of what you're talking about. That's correct. I mean, we, you know, we fly a vehicle, you discover things that you'd like to improve on. And we had discovered quite a few. So we took advantage of that period to do that. One of the big things is the wheels and brakes were not up to what some of us wanted,

so we improved those, putting those wheels steering in, and improved a lot of the systems on board. And then, of course, along came Endeavor, which I never get tired of visiting when I make it up to LA nowadays. It is truly awe-inspiring to stand underneath that vehicle and know that it was part of this family of vehicles that did such amazing work up there in low-earth orbit. I mean, do you ever get to see any of the shuttles now on display around the country? Oh, yes. I've visited them all. It was kind of heartbreaking for me to see them go into museums instead of flying, but I'm glad that they're out there where people can see them. Usually the first time anybody walks around one of the shuttle orbiters, they're amazed at how big it is.

They don't fully appreciate it until they see it. Another amazing thing is the first time I heard they were going to put that in the museum out there by USC, I said, they're never going to be able to get it there. I didn't see how it ever worked, but the people managed to fly it into LAX and they did manage to move things that allowed them to put it there. But we have a discovery up at the Smithsonian Kudvar-Hazy in Washington. And we have Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center on display there. Well, I share your regret that they're not still flying. But I also regret that, you know, the Challenger and Columbia aren't also on display where people can come and remember the amazing work that they did.

So you went into management. You became the director of the space shuttle program, working out of NASA headquarters. And there were a lot of good years left in the program. That's true. After a couple of years where I'd been working at the Kennedy Space Center, Arnie Aldridge wanted to move over into another position there. And Dick Trilley, who was running our manned spaceflight at that time, asked me to come up and be the director of the program. A couple of years is

about all I could tolerate working in Washington, though it's not one of my favorite workplaces. It was educational, let me say that. Not the first person I've heard that from, and yeah, I think you're being polite. I guess that helped prepare you for, as far as I know, what was your next big job, and that took you back to the Kennedy Space Center. It did. I was always fond of the Kennedy Space Center. I first visited there in 1967, I think, and I always likened it to, that's where the space program, where the rubber hits the road. The opportunity came for me to take over as director, replace Forrest McCartney, who's hard, big shoes to climb into. But other than sitting in the cockpit, probably being director of the Kennedy Space Center was my next most favorite job.

From there to private industry, quite a jump from the military to government and then to private industry. I mean, what was that transition like? I mean, and I think first it was to Lockheed Martin. That's correct. I decided at some point while I was at the Kennedy Space Center that if I ever wanted to be able to retire, government pay and military pay is not all that great. So I probably needed to get out into private industry. Look for a job and started my job search after I quit NASA and ended up getting an offer to work in Orlando at one of the Lockheed Martin facilities there and was primarily working on simulators for the military. Because of the management roles I had, I was restricted from working on anything with NASA for a while. But after a couple of years there, I got a call one day from a headhunter. There was a position out in Utah with this company called Thalcol,

which I knew very well. And I said, there's no way my wife is ever going to go to Utah. It's too cold for her out there. But I talked it over with my wife. One thing led to another, and I went out to be the president of Thiokol at that time. That's a name that people ought to remember better than maybe it is, because of course, and it was not long after or during your time that Thiokol went through some mergers, but I mean, this was the company that was building those amazing solid rocket boosters, right? It was. It was actually Morton Thiokol until we had the Challenger accident. And after that, the Morton Salt Company decided they didn't want any part of

the rocket business. So they spun that off. When I joined Thiokol, we had a corporate headquarters that had gone out and acquired a couple of other companies. So there were three companies in the corporation, Huck and Howmatt were the other two. We changed our corporate name to Cordent, I think. I had the Thalcall portion of the business until one day I got a call from one of the corporate office guys and told me that they were selling the company to Alcoa. office guys and told me that they were selling the company to Alcoa. And I handled that transition, and then Alcoa decided they didn't particularly like their rocket business either, and so I put it up for sale for them and sold it to a company called ATK at that time. Another one with a pretty important history. Weren't you, during your time at THACOL, weren't you involved with work on the solid rocket boosters

and better ways to help get the shuttle up there? Yes. We've done improvements to the solid rockets ever since the accident. But we primarily were focused on the production of them. We primarily were focused on the production of them. Initially, I saw that early on when we were building rockets before we'd ever flown the first flight, and it was more like a blacksmith shop sometimes. But we cleaned it up where it was.

That was even preceding me. They were working on that, and we continued that. We were doing the big solid rockets on the shuttle and Minuteman missiles and the Trident missiles for the Navy. I'll take you back to the shuttle for a minute as we get close to wrapping up here. You've been very generous with your time. You know, when I hear people nowadays, and even at the time, criticize the shuttle, the space transportation system, and there's room for criticism, you have to admit. I always tell them, yeah, but look at what it accomplished. And just look at it. Look at what took all these people and payloads up into orbit. With all its flaws, it's still magnificent. Do you agree? I'm obviously biased. I'm... I knew. magnificent. Do you agree? I'm obviously biased. I'm very proud of the space shuttle program. Yes,

we had two tragic accidents that should have never happened. It was a complicated machine, and it required a lot of tender, loving care, TLC, but it was able to do fantastic things. Flew 130 flights with those two accidents and carried hundreds of people into orbit, including satellites that did things like the Hubble Space Telescope. That has revolutionized our knowledge of the universe. Early on, we did some military flights. They decided to quit flying those following Challenger, but I personally think some of them helped us win the Cold War. They were very important. And it was, like I said earlier, it's going to be a long time before we have a machine that's anywhere near as capable as the space shuttle was. Do you want to add any thoughts about NASA's current efforts to get humans back up into space? I mean, we've seen that happen now on Crew Dragon, of course,

but Orion Space Launch System, sounds like they may finally be making it up there, maybe even by the end of this year. First, I was very chagrined when we didn't have a capability to put our people up in space, and we're dependent totally on the Russians. I was very pleased when SpaceX finally was able to launch crews from the United States again. And hopefully Boeing is going to be able to do that with their Starliner maybe before this year is out.

As you mentioned earlier, I keep thinking to myself, I'm retired, so I'm not doing anything. But the United States is working on the Orion capsules, similar to what we flew to the moon with, but a little larger. A new large rocket called the Space Launch System. Totally, it's going to end up being a little more capable than the Saturn V, which is going to allow us to go back to the moon and hopefully eventually land people on the moon. I know that a lot of people think, well, we ought to be going on to Mars. Personally, we need to learn to work and live on another planet that's a little bit closer to Earth than Mars is going to be. We'll eventually get there.

I don't think you or I are going to see it, Matt. But the lunar program is something we're working on. And now China and Russia have just united to go work on the lunar program themselves. So we've got a little competition again. So when you see that big space launch system rocket, and you know that those engines, as you said, are derived from the space shuttle engines. And you see those solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides. Does it make you think back?

Well, we did take advantage of the technology we'd had before with the main engines and built a larger solid rocket based on what we used in the space shuttle. And I think it's a smart thing to do, take advantage of technology you've learned. I'm somewhat chagrined that it's taken so long and as much money as it has to get the Artemis program going, which is what they call the program at this time with the Orion and the space launch system. Hopefully we'll get there, maybe get it off this year on an unmanned launch.

Yeah, it's good to see it progressing. Bob, I got just one more for you. The town of Porter in Texas, it's about an hour and a half drive, I think, from your birthplace, Beaumont. Have you visited Robert L. Crippen Elementary School? I was there for the opening. I'm pretty proud to have a school named after me back in my hometown. I have one sibling, a sister, Betty Monroe,

and I think she did some lobbying around there to have the school named after me. That was nice. And I've been back to visit the school a few times. It's been a few years, but I get back to Porter every now and then because my sister still lives there. I bet that lobbying effort didn't have to be too strenuous to get them to adopt that name. I also hope, Bob, that you and I are both around to see a lot more great things happen up there. Certainly the return of humans to the moon.

But, you know, I'm not willing to rule out to get no footprints on Mars yet. Would you go again if you had the chance? John Glenn got to go again. If I could drive. That's great. Bob Crippen, thank you. This has been absolutely delightful and an honor to talk with you. Thank you for your many decades of service that are going to have you remembered for a long, long time. Thank you, Matt. You have a good day. Time for the What's Up Poetry Festival. At least that's what it seems to be this week. As we welcome the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Batts. Welcome indeed.

I welcome you as well. Wherefore art thou, O Matthew? Matei, oh, wow. We have so many poems to go through this week, including two haiku, in fact, to rhyme a bit, from one of the winners in our Planet Fest auction. She actually bid on and won the opportunity to have her poetry presented in Planetary Radio. And so we're going to hear not one, but two haiku from Susan Kotwicky. Congratulations, Susan, and thanks for being part of the auction. But that'll come up a little bit later. What have you got for us up front? I have a lot of non-poetry, but really cool science stuff. Science stuff. That'll do.

You're okay with that this week? Sure. It doesn't all have to be poetry. All right. In the pre-dawn sky, we got Jupiter, super bright, Saturn, yellowish. Over in the east, in the pre-dawn. In the evening sky, in the southwest, in the evening sky sky you can check out a triangle the red triangle not to be confused with other red triangles uh there are four reddish four you know it's a

triangle with four vertices let's try that again there are three reddish star-like objects that are hanging out together and because there are are three, it's a triangle. It becomes an equilateral triangle-ish in the next week or two. And that's, you got Mars, which is the dimmest of the three right now. And then Aldebaran, the star in Taurus. And then Betelgeuse, the bright red star, the brightest of the three in Orion. So if you check out the southwest, look for those three. And on the 16th, if you're having trouble finding them,

the moon, the crescent moon on the 16th, will be hanging out in the middle-ish of this red triangle. We move on to this week in space history. Nothing happened this week. I doubt that very much. Or in 1961 this week, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. And 20 years later, the first space shuttle flight, as you may have heard earlier in the show, STS-1 was flown.

A somewhat significant week in space history. Yes, indeed he do. We move on. Did you have something special you've hinted at? I sure do. It doesn't really rhyme, but it's a little Random Space Fact. Space fact. Random space fact. Wow. I know. Wow. That is amazing. That's magnificent.

Who is responsible for this fabulous thing? That was from an obviously terrific barbershop quartet called Soundwave, which has as a member Tom Moore, who was formerly of the quartet called High Fidelity, which we did some stuff with on past shows, including a Planetary Radio Live or two. And Tom got his guys to put that together for us. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Soundwave. Pretty damn great. Thank you. Thank you, Tom and Soundwave. That was magnificent. And I'll try to deliver on the call for a random space fact. Bob Crippen, who you wonderfully interviewed, is one of the few winners of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. And this has been awarded only 28 times, and 17 of those were posthumously to U.S. astronauts who died in the spacecraft accidents. And Bob Crippen was the last one of these awarded in 2006.

Well-deserved. Indeed. We go to the trivia contest, and I ask you what part of the International Space Station is named after a chess piece? How'd we do, Matt? You remember I call this a poetry festival? I do indeed. This is unprecedented. This is unheard of. You know, we usually get a couple of poems a week, maybe three, including the one from our poet laureate, of course. For some reason, I think we got seven poems this time. We don't have time to do all of them, but I thought I would ply you with a selection of these.

Can I read the first couple of these? No. Yes, of course you can. It's your show. You control everything. You do the editing. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Here is the's your show. You control everything. You do the editing. Yeah, go ahead. Here is the response from Douglas Emerson in Ontario, Canada.

No kings or queens in space, no pawns of political hand, no medieval knights or castles. This is a borderless land. On tranquility, new piece on the board, a bishop's gambit, bold and brash. Moves diagonally. Payloads to deploy. It's taking out the trash. Well, that's what I call it when my bishops go and whoop on some other teams. I say, hey, my bishop's taking out the trash. It's correct, isn't it? It is indeed. It's correct, isn't it?

It is indeed. The NanoRacks Bishop Airlock has been birthed to the Tranquility module since 19 December 2020. It is used, apparently, or it will be used to dispose of trash to push out the bigger pieces, which I guess then decay and burn up on their way down? Yeah, it'll have a variety of uses, including being used as an airlock, including for trash, but also to do various science experiments that will be contained in the airlock as it's then turned to space and exposed to space. And then it can be brought back and have those experiments retrieved and all sorts of good stuff. Robert Cohane in Massachusetts said, what, apparently there's no fine for littering in space? Not yet, Robert.

Stay tuned. Here's one from James Maxey in Arizona. After riding a dragon's back on CRS-21, Tranquility birthed this hunk of metal weighing about a ton, the first commercial airlock with a pressurized volume immense. Will, with the help of Canadarm2, allow CubeSats to dispense.

Named for one of two chest pieces which can move in a diagonal way, this pressure vessel will serve customers every single day. Unlike old modules, which have started to show cracks, the Bishop airlock is brand new from our friends at NanoRacks. Well, that was a much better description than I did. And it rhymed. Here's our winner before I go on to two more poems. And he's a first time winner.

It's Andy Spafford in California. Congratulations, Andy, who indeed said Bishop, that commercial airlock from NanoRacks. He says, I discovered planetary radio about six months ago. Been enjoying it ever since. I was a Planetary Society member back in the late 80s, early 90s. I still have all those great magazines. We're still making those great magazines, Andy. Hint, hint.

Anyway, we're going to send Andy a copy of Spacefarers, How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond by Christopher Wanjack. So again, congratulations, Andy. I got two more for you. I'll squeeze these in if you don't mind. I would love it. Gene Lewin in Washington, one of our regulars. Birth to Tranquility, this module sets an airlock of nanoracks design, inspiring the name that this question seeks, though no miter on it will you find. It moves by means of a Canadian arm, though not limited to diagonal paths, assisting deployments of small satellites and sometimes used to just take out the trash. As maxims go in the game of chess, beginners should develop knights. But since the ISS has been up there more than 20 years, this Bishop Gambit seems to be all right.

Nice. Weren't you saying that you've taken up chess again? Yes, I have. I am spectacularly mediocre. And finally, from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, the Bishop is an airlock on the friendly ISS. It's made in Houston, Texas, so it's bigger too, I guess. It weighs 900 kilograms and NanoRacks is known for having this, the largest one that we have ever flown. And that completes the Poetry Corner of What's Up.

Wow. Actually, no, it doesn't because we still have those two haiku. You want to give us what's coming up for next week first? to haiku. You want to give us what's coming up for next week first? For next time, what famous band was so moved by the viewing of the launch of STS-1, the first space shuttle launch, that they wrote a song about it? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. That is very cool. All right, you have this time until the 14th. That'd be Wednesday, April 14 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. Now we have for your listening pleasure to haiku from that auction winner, PlanaFest auction winner, Susan Kotwicki.

Here is the first introduced by Susan herself. Invitation. Beyond we must seek. Our colorful, lush homeworld. Stars glisten, hello. And here's one more from Susan. Inherited. We question the skies, our ancestors, our children.

Stardust in our bones. Hello. That's it. Those were very nice. Yes, they were. Thank you, Susan. And that does now complete the first annual What's Up Poetry Festival.

Excellent. Congratulations. I didn't tell the prize for your new contest. It is a rather fascinating book, Mars in the Movies, a history by Thomas Kent Miller, published by McFarland and Company Publishers. I spent a couple of evenings just paging through this. It is dense. It is full of illustrations. It is every movie ever set on Mars, from Santa Claus versus the

Martians to The Martian. And actually a lot of silent films and a whole bunch of other stuff in between there. You know, one of my faves, Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It will go to the person who correctly answers Bruce's question. Now we're done. No, we're not, Matt. The day we're recording this is special and important. I wish you happy birthday, Matt Kaplan.

What? You didn't even get a quartet to sing happy birthday? Open your front door. Oh, no! Alright, everybody, go out there and look up at the night sky and think about what birthday present you'd like to give to our glorious Matt Kaplan. Happy birthday, Matt! Happy birthday!

So I do get sung, too. He's the chief scientist and vocalist for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena,

California, and is made possible by its courageous members. Find out how to become one of them at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And now, a special little Easter egg for those of you who have stayed till the very end. little Easter egg for those of you who have stayed till the very end. Remember that I said STS-1 launched on the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight? Here's what Bob Crippen told me when I asked if he and John Young were aware of this as they sat in Columbia's cockpit on April 12, 1981. Neither John or I, I think, thought about it. We were so wrapped up in trying to get the space shuttle flying that that wasn't where our focus was.

In retrospect, after we landed and somebody brought it up, I think it was pretty neat 20 years later. Ad Astra all.