Derrol Nail:
The spotlights came on in the predawn hours of April 12th 1981, illuminating a spacecraft like no other, the space shuttle. Just before liftoff, Columbia’s crew climbed inside for the very first test flight into space. Today, we recall the amazing story of that first mission and listen to rarely-heard details from Columbia pilot Bob Crippen, next on the Rocket Ranch.
Launch Countdown Sequence:
EGS Program Chief Engineer, verify no constraints to launch.
Three, two, one, and lift off.
Welcome to space.
Derrol Nail:
Bob Crippen, was a rookie astronaut in 1978, when NASA assigned him and veteran astronaut John Young to train for the very first space shuttle flight.
Bob Crippen:
I was ready to turn handsprings at that moment.
Derrol Nail:
The launch was nearly perfect.
Bob Crippen:
Not a ride like it anywhere else.
Derrol Nail:
After getting to space, Crippen made a disturbing discovery. Some of the protective tiles on the spacecraft were missing.
Bob Crippen:
A lot of people on the ground worried that there were some missing there, maybe some were missing on the bottom, which would be critical.
Derrol Nail:
The fearless astronaut recounts the best stories from the first shuttle flight and shares his thoughts on the space shuttle’s legacy.
Derrol Nail:
I believe that some of those payloads helped us win the cold war.
Derrol Nail:
Here now, four time space shuttle astronaut, Bob Crippen. Welcome to the rocket ranch.
Bob Crippen:
Thank you very much, Pleased to be here.
Derrol Nail:
Oh, what was it like to be selected for this very first mission of the space shuttle?
Bob Crippen:
It was a very exciting moment for me. On the very first flight, John Young, who ended up being the commander was the most likely guy in the office to do it. He was our most experienced astronaut, flown four times, including Apollo 16 and walked on the moon. I expected him to be the commander of the first flight, but I expected the other seat would be occupied by somebody else that had flown before. I was very pleasantly surprised when George Abbey, who was our big boss at that time, asked me if I’d like to fly the first one. I was really turning handsprings at that moment, but I’d been working a long time towards it. I guess the powers that be decided they wanted to expand our experience basis as fast as possible. On the initial flights, they paired a guy who had flown before with a rookie like myself, and I ended up being lucky enough to be on the first one.
Derrol Nail:
Wow, I can imagine that moment when he told you that you were the guy, must’ve been incredible, like you said, you were doing handsprings.
Bob Crippen:
I joined the astronaut office in 1969, it had been a while working there towards the flight. In fact, Deke Slayton, when he hired us, told us we probably wouldn’t be able to fly it until around 1980.
Derrol Nail:
You and astronaut John Young, what an interesting pair you kind of mentioned it there. He had all this experience, here he was a veteran of NASA space flight, Gemini, Apollo, he walked on the moon. This was going to be your first flight, so a very unlikely pairing some would say. What was the relationship like?
Bob Crippen:
John was my big boss at that time, so I hadn’t really worked that close with him, but we developed a very close working relationship and friendship during the time training for the flight. We had more time to train them we had initially planned on. John was a great guy. When you’re a rookie going up for the first time, it’s great to go with a guy with that kind of experience. I’m just sorry that John can’t be with us here to celebrate this 40th anniversary with myself.
Derrol Nail:
Certainly understand that John Young passed away in 2018 at the age of 87, and he is missed. So the space shuttle, 10 years in the design process launched like a rocket, went into space for several weeks and then came back down like an airplane. This was a highly complex machine. Your job, I believe, was working with the computers and the electrical systems. How complex of a machine was this?
Bob Crippen:
It was a very complex machine, perhaps the most complex we’d ever built. We did have some initial problems technically because of that. It took us a while to get ready for that first flight. We had problems with our main engines and also with our thermal protection system, the tiles, and we had other problems as well, but those ended up being the big ones that caused the delay. It was a complex machine, and it was a fabulous machine in retrospect.
Derrol Nail:
What impressed you the most about it as a spacecraft, and then also as a glider?
Bob Crippen:
What impressed me most was that we would actually fly back in and land on the runway as opposed to parachute in the ocean some place to get picked up. As a pilot, that is a much more satisfying way to come back. It was overall the fact that it could carry very large payloads, and has allowed us to do some fantastic things with it. It was a great machine. I’m really proud of it.
Derrol Nail:
The only way of proving this space shuttle, that it would work, was to fly it with crew in it on the very first mission. It’s really incredible to think about you and John Young, flying the space shuttle, no previous test flight in a un-crewed position. Many of your contemporaries have said that this was for that reason that this was one of the boldest test flights in history. Did you have a sense of that at that time?
Bob Crippen:
Not as much as some people have talked about and some of my aviator friends might argue this, some others rivaled it as well, but it was an interesting thing. I don’t know that we’ll ever do that again. The design of the shuttle was such that we had never designed to be able to fly without a crew. There was some discussion maybe about a year prior to flight as to whether we should do that or not, but it would delay us even more, and been very costly. John and I both thought that the best chance of the mission being a success was for us to be onboard. Thank goodness they ended up agreeing with us.
Derrol Nail:
Was there any hesitation, any worry or any concern in the lead up to launch?
Bob Crippen:
John and I both, we knew the vehicle very well and we knew the people that were working on it. We spent a lot of time going out to the various companies that were assembling it. We thought that we can handle any problems that were given to us. Maybe it’s because we were test pilots, we thought that we could deal with anything.
Derrol Nail:
You guys were certainly the right stuff. Let’s go back to that day, April 12th, 1981, here at the Kennedy space center, you’re strapped in the seconds are ticking down to liftoff. Kind of explain to me and take me through what you remember what you recall about those moments.
Bob Crippen:
I still remember them very well, I think. We actually tried on April the 10th for a launch, and we ended up with a computer problem that caused us to scrub. The vehicle was, as I said before, very complex. It didn’t surprise me that we scrubbed. When some people, smart people, solved that computer problem, and we tried again on the 12th two days later. I fully expected there was a good chance that we were going to scrub again. It was only when the count got inside of about a minute that I turned to John, and I said, “I think we might really do it.” I think it was at that point, my heart rate went up to about 130, it was probably one of the most exciting moments of my life. The flight certainly lived up to it.
Derrol Nail:
That’s funny that you mentioned that because I have the Today newspaper from after that flight with a headline, Columbia is a gem and there is the launch of the space shuttle in that. And it’s funny you mentioned your heart rate at 130, and that’s exactly what it was reported being. I’ll just read from this part right here, it said that “a cool collected 50 year old young, whose heartbeat was a steady 85 during liftoff commented, I’ve got a super spaceship under me, as he and Crippen whizzed around the Earth. ‘What a feeling! What a view!,’ said 43 year old Crippen, whose heartbeat jumped to 130 at liftoff.” So yours was 130 and his was 85. That’s a cool cat.
Bob Crippen:
He is although it wasn’t reported, but John’s heart rate on the landing was closer to my 130.
Derrol Nail:
Let the record show. Well, I tell you as it lifted off tell me about what kind of ride that was like.
Bob Crippen:
It was an exciting ride. Prior to that time, especially with the Saturns, it was very slow to lift off. But when the space shuttle was about to, lit the solid rockets, it lifted off with a nice fast acceleration. The only thing I’ve been able to liken it to was a catapult shot coming off an aircraft carrier. It got up and moved out I guess because it was winged. Most people had never realized that all of the other expendable vehicles tend to rotate right after they lift off to get themselves oriented in the direction they want to go. When we rotated, I understand it made a lot of the spectators kind of nervous because they thought something was wrong, but all it was doing was what it was supposed to do.
It was rather noisy, a lot of shaking going on with those solid rockets. I’ve likened it to driving my pickup down an old country washboard road, you just kind of shake it along but that lasts about two minutes and it’s quite a ride. You get up but the acceleration is not that much, you’re only three G’s, that’s the max. We throttled the engines actually to maintain that not for the crew, but for the payloads that we’d be carrying. After the solid rockets burned out, actually that really got my attention, because we went from three G’s down to about a half a G and it got very quiet, very still, no shaking. I thought for a moment, maybe the main engines had quit too, but checking the instruments that said they were still running. And then accelerating on out to three G’s again and eight and a half minutes ago in 17,500 miles an hour, not a ride like it anywhere else.
Derrol Nail:
I can only imagine, wow, just listening to your description of it is thrilling in it of itself. So you circled the earth 36 times, you were up in space about two and a half days. What were the most memorable moments from that flight?
Bob Crippen:
I like to use John’s phrase for that. The part between takeoff and landing, it was all memorable. First the ride up was exciting, and then all of a sudden you’re floating around and getting weightless experience for the first time. And then you look out the window and see this beautiful spaceship earth that we live on, all of that was remarkable. Perhaps the thing that got most people’s attention though was when I opened up the payload bay doors, we discovered that some of our thermal protection system, the tiles were missing off the rear end of the vehicle. John and I really weren’t that concerned about that because those were there for reusability only. But a lot of people on the ground worried that there were some missing there, maybe some were missing on the bottom, which would be critical, but there wasn’t anything that we could see or observe that would allow us to check that out, so there wasn’t any sense worrying about it as far as John and I were concerned.
Derrol Nail:
You didn’t worry at all?
Bob Crippen:
No, I was just enjoying the experience.
Derrol Nail:
Wow. So the flight is completed. You’re getting ready to land, and as you’re coming down I can imagine the re-entry of this vehicle for the first time. How did it perform when it was coming back into Earth’s atmosphere?
Bob Crippen:
It was fantastic, there were a lot of aerodynamic things that we had to worry about, but the vehicle flew beautifully. It did reach some limits that we had to be a little bit concerned about with the way our body flat was moving and a few other things. In essence, it was a beautiful landing all the way up from when we did the deorbit burn to touchdown. John took over a few times during entry during the roll reversals, just to get the feel of the vehicle. When we came out of blackout, the ground got excited because they knew we hadn’t, the tiles must’ve been okay because we’d survived that. I remarked as we came over…
Derrol Nail:
Wow.
Bob Crippen:
…the California coast, that that was a great way to come to California. It was a beautiful day in California too, we could see Edwards Air Force Base our landing site from well over a hundred miles away.
I believe we could have just flown in visually, but we had good guidance. John took over, and finally just as we came overhead, about 40,000 feet and started a big roll reversal. When he rolled left, I looked out his left window and I looked down at the lakebed and there’s thousands of people out there. I said to John, hope they’re not on the runway. They weren’t thank goodness. John brought the vehicle around and did a marvelous landing like I knew he would. John was about as excited at that point as I’ve ever seen him.
Derrol Nail:
225,000 people it was reported Bob, were there on that dry lakebed watching, what was that site like?
Bob Crippen:
Well, as I said, it got my attention when I first saw them, but after that we weren’t paying any attention to it. However, after we got out of the vehicle and the docs had checked us over, they had a little ceremony out on the lakebed with the governor of California, and some other dignitaries. The crowd was out there as well. I remember very well when I was a kid growing up in the Houston area we used to go to the rodeo every year. One year they’d have Gene Autry, another year they’d have Roy Rogers. I’d always go down to the edge of the arena and hold out my hand, and they’d ride around and shake hands with everybody. As I was sitting there on the podium after landing, I looked down at the crowd and there was Roy Rodgers, so I got up and walked over and shook hands with him.
Derrol Nail:
What a special moment that must’ve been.
Bob Crippen:
It was.
Derrol Nail:
So you’re there on the ground, and there were celebrities everywhere. You mentioned Roy Rogers, what was your sense of the moment, what you had accomplished after getting out and being welcomed back home to such a grand affair?
Bob Crippen:
It’s hard to capture emotions like that but both John and I were on a high. We were really excited the vehicle performed as well as it did. I was excited I hadn’t screwed up. But we were just enjoying the moment.
Derrol Nail:
After STS-1, Crippen was selected for three more space shuttle missions. And the program was flying high in the first five years, until the Challenger accident in 1986, and then the Columbia accident in 2003. Together, those accidents claimed the lives of 14 astronauts.
Derrol Nail:
Bob, you flew four space shuttle missions on two orbiters, Columbia and Challenger, and both were destroyed in mission accidents we know in 1986, and in 2003, and of course 14 astronauts lost. I know you knew many of them, you were close to many of them. In fact, you flew with Dick Scobee, I believe who was lost in Challenger. Would you share what kind of impact those accidents had on you personally and professionally being that you flew on both of those?
Bob Crippen:
They were terrible tragedies, probably one of the worst experiences I ever had in my life. I was actually training for a fifth flight that we were going to do out of California to launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base on the space shuttle. I was in Los Alamos, New Mexico, working with the crew training on one of our payloads when we watched the launch of the STS-51L, and we were irritated at the TV coverage because they showed the liftoff and then they cut to a soap opera or something. And we were saying foul words walking out of the room when the picture came back to the terrible sight of the solid rockets peeling off of the space shuttle. And, well, I knew as soon as I saw the accident that the crew was lost. I had very good friends onboard, just as you said I flew with Dick Scobee. He was on my third flight. He was my pilot on that.
It was a sad moment, one that I’ll never forget. Every anniversary it tears me up a little bit. This year was the 35th anniversary of that, that terrible tragedy. But NASA did what it usually does in that kind of thing, it pulled itself together tried to correct the mistakes, and got back flying again. I was part of the investigation. I ended up making a recommendation that we ought to put more operational people in the management of the shuttle. My boss told me if I believe that I’d come help him manage the program. That was when I hung up my flying boots, and tried to get the shuttle back flying again, which we did eventually.
I was completely retired when we lost Columbia. I have a daughter who works there at the Johnson Space Center, Susie Crippen, and Susie called me up on the day the vehicle was re-entering, and said they lost contact with it. She and I both knew that meant that they lost the vehicle and the crew as well. I knew some of the crew, I didn’t know them nearly as well as I did the 51L crew, but it was another sad day.
Derrol Nail:
Thank you for sharing that with us. It’s interesting to me that you took it as a motivation to get into management, to be involved, to have… You were an astronaut, now you put yourself in the operations. Did that carry through with you throughout your management career?
Bob Crippen:
Well, you know, my initial thought was let’s get the vehicle back flying again and do it safely. At least, I personally believed that was what the crew that we lost would have wanted us to do. I did learn some lessons throughout that, that actually returned it to making that happen, which I worked with a lot of people like Tony Aldridge, who was the director of the space shuttle program at that point. And Dick Coors, who was looking over the engineering. The three of us worked hard for a couple of years to make that happen. We were all very proud of it when Rick Hauck, who I had flown with on my second flight successfully lifted off again.
Derrol Nail:
Bob, the collective history of the space shuttle program is impressive, right? It was used to repair damaged satellites while in orbit, the most striking being the Hubble telescope. It was also, it flew 37 shuttle flights, which were necessary to, to build the international space station, which 20 years after humans first got aboard is still up there doing great science; 135 missions, 542 million miles, it was a long program. What do you think the legacy of the space shuttle program is that all began with your first flight?
Bob Crippen:
I think it was one of undoubtedly the most fantastic flying machines we’ve ever built. As you said, it allowed us to do some great things. One early on, we were flying flights for the department of defense. And I believe that some of those payloads helped us win the cold war. And as you said, we also were able to do the great observatories, including Hubble, that’s enlightened us considerably about the nature of our universe and went on to build the International Space Station, which is still flying today. We had the two terrible tragedies that shouldn’t have happened in my opinion, but they did. It was a fantastic flying machine, but it was also a fragile one, took lots of TLC, and the people at Kennedy Space Center were very good at that. When Atlantis landed after the last flight, that vehicle was as good a condition as it could have possibly been, and was certainly capable of flying some more, but the politics, and the accidents spelled the end of that. It’ll be a long time before we have a vehicle that’s nearly as magnificent as the space shuttle was.
Derrol Nail:
It was certainly one of a kind and now as we see spacecraft manufacturers going back to the capsule design for all the advantages, it just certainly cements its place in history. For many reasons as you mentioned if not alone, just how unique it was. You had a career at NASA in management, so I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your time working out here at the rocket ranch, the Kennedy Space Center, what was that like?
Bob Crippen:
That was fantastic as director of the Kennedy Space Center. That was my dream job. The only better one was sitting in the cockpit of the space shuttle. I first visited them the Kennedy Space Center in, I believe it was 1967 before I was with NASA. I fell in love with the place. I always felt that was where the rubber hits the road as far as the space program is concerned. The people that work there from the janitors on up to the center director, love it. Love what they’re doing and they do a fantastic job of it.
Derrol Nail:
You’ve now got the new program Artemis, which we’ve got rocket parts inside the VAB right now. And you talked about what it was like to ride those solid rocket boosters that’s their plans to make that happen again. The SLS of course as you know has two solid rocket boosters so that ride’s coming back. What are your thoughts about Artemis going back to the Moon and then establishing a presence there so we can learn how to get to Mars?
Bob Crippen:
We do need to get out of Earth orbit. We need to go back to the Moon. That’s the right thing to do, we need to learn to live and work off of this planet. There are still some great things we can do on the Moon. A lot of people say we’ve been there, we’ve done that. But really those were like six camping trips. They didn’t last very long and we need to go back and learn to, to live on the Moon, then eventually fly on to Mars. That will happen some day. I don’t think I’ll be around to see it though.
Derrol Nail:
Bob, I’m going to leave you with this. I found this picture here. I’m going to put it up to the screen so you can see it. This is, this is you and John Young, 40 years ago. Handsome devil there signing autographs.
Bob Crippen:
We’ve done that a few times.
Derrol Nail:
What was that like to be an astronaut celebrity?
Bob Crippen:
Well, I guess it comes with the job, that wasn’t what John and I were fond of. But it was part of what we needed to do to make people appreciate what the space shuttle had done and what it could do. John and I spent a while after that first flight doing what I call the rubber chicken circuit, and signing lots of autographs and talking to people, and telling them about the program.
Derrol Nail:
Bob Crippen, pilot for the Space Shuttle Columbia, the very first launch of the space shuttle. Thank you so much for being on and stopping by the rocket ranch.
Bob Crippen:
Thank you for having me.
Derrol Nail:
And that’s going to do it for this episode of the Rocket Ranch.
A special thanks to our guest astronaut Bob Crippen. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe!
A special shout-out to our producer, John Sackman, and editor Chris Chamberland. I’m your host, Derrol Nail – reminding you that here on the Rocket Ranch you gotta keep looking up.