Enterprise
Astronaut Robert Crippen had seen some amazing things in his life, but in September of the year 1976, his jaw hit the floor.
He was standing among a gaggle of other newly winged astronauts at North American’s assembly facility in Palmdale California, excitement and anticipation growing in his chest, as the doors to the massive factory inched open. Then slowly, something that until now he had only seen in pictures and technical drawings, rolled out in front of him real as life. Perched atop a 747 jumbo jet was the newly completed Space Shuttle “Enterprise”, the first of her kind. To Crippen, the veteran flier, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“Enterprise” was designed to be the initial testbed ahead of a fleet of new spaceships that departed radically from everything that came before. The next step after the heroic adventure of Apollo, the Space Shuttles were designed for a more practical approach to space. They launched like rockets, but could land as aeroplanes on any large runway. The shuttles would launch satellites, they would act as space laboratories, they’d deliver space station modules, and they'd conduct on-orbit repairs to damaged spacecraft that would otherwise become multi-million dollar junk. Most importantly, while each half-billion dollar Apollo spaceship was single-use only, the Shuttles could fly over and over again.
Just five months after he first clapped eyes on “Enterprise”, Bob Crippen and his buddy John Young, veteran astronaut and Apollo 16 moonwalker, were watering at the mouth as a 747 carried the Space Shuttle into the air. Flying alongside in their little T-38 jet, Young and Crippen watched every tiny move of the Shuttle. Then, very suddenly, “Enterprise” was released from the back of the jumbo jet, and pilot Fred Haise glided her silently back to the runway. With a soft touchdown at Edwards Airforce Base, Haise proved that the futuristic spaceplane was no pipe dream. She could fly! As they soared overhead, Young and Crippen were desperate to take her to the next level, and do what she had been built for.
The testing of “Enterprise” was gloriously successful, and it taught NASA a string of lessons about how to build the rest of the fleet. Though it had always been intended to eventually make “Enterprise” spaceworthy, so many little changes had come up during her testing that it was finally decided more economical to build “Challenger” instead. “Enterprise” would never fly in space.
But work did press ahead on the first mission-ready orbiter, “Columbia”, and in the spring of 1981, she was bolted to her Solid Rocket Boosters and External Tank, and rolled out to the launch pad. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo had flown their first missions without astronauts aboard, to prove it was safe first. It was a smart idea, because some of those uncrewed missions went very wrong. But “Columbia” needed pilots to bring her home, so the very first mission of the Shuttle would have astronauts aboard. On April 12th, twenty years to the day since the first human had gone into space, John Young and Bob Crippen walked out towards the steaming, hissing, living spaceship towering above them, and fearlessly climbed aboard. A bold new era in the exploration of space was about to begin.
to begin the space shuttle era.