Like most nights in the Mojave Desert, a billion stars floated in the predawn sky over Edwards Air Force Base that April 14th, thirty years ago. The difference was that one of those specks was Columbia, the first manned Space Shuttle to orbit the Earth. In just a few hours, piloted by Robert Crippen and John Young, it would attempt the first dead-stick landing from outer space on the runway in front of us.
Holly and I sat atop our motorhome parked by the fence along Runway 23 on Rogers Dry Lake, invited by a friend who worked at NASA Dryden. As a baby-boom space fan, I’d read every book about it, done science fair projects, watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, but I had never had the chance to see a spacecraft launch… and certainly not land!
I was too excited to sleep, and just walked the runway fence in the starlight, past a ragtag collection of cars, pickups and campers, finally reaching the TV network sets, which lit up the runway. Sadly, Cronkite had retired the previous month, but I saw Brokaw talking live to his east coast audience. We could hear the intermittent conversations between Columbia and CAPCOM in Houston, amplified by speakers on poles around the base. Crippen and Young were awake already, reporting their stats with an economy of words. No extraneous tasks to do on this flight, which had been delayed 2 years while NASA replaced many of the crucial ceramic heat-shield tiles. All they had to do was launch, orbit, land… and survive.
As dawn broke, we learned Columbia would land shortly after 10 AM, re-entering the atmosphere above Santa Barbara and falling like a controlled lump of metal with no engine thrust, toward the longest landing strip in the world, giving them lots of margin for error, but no second attempts. No error was allowed in the angle of re-entry though. We all learned during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo that if they hit it right, they continue safely down… but hit it wrong … they burn up. The hours from dawn to 10 were actually kind of boring. The Edwards announcers added to the CAPCOM transmissions with their own info for the layman. We were warned that, like on every flight, there would be a period of radio silence during re-entry, maybe as much as 15 minutes. As Columbia approached the west coast and the clock neared 10, we were all stunned by something many had feared.
Suddenly, the base resonated with the sound of a huge explosion… no… two… one right after the other. Then silence. Nobody spoke. The loudspeakers were silent for the first time. The wind whispered that sound it only makes in the desert. No one wanted to think what we couldn’t help but presume. The quiet seemed endless. Then the speakers crackled to life with, “Houston, this is Columbia.” A cheer swept across the Mojave like a wave. Every car and truck honked its horn and people started to sing. The Edwards PA system made it official by playing the “Star Spangled Banner.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the desert. That unanticipated sonic double-boom was the probably the scariest noise at that runway since Chuck Yeager had echoed across the Mojave in 1947 aboard “Glamorous Glennis.”
Soon, those of us with scopes could see a sparkling light in the northern sky. I had put a 3x extender on my 70-210 lens and gave Holly a running account, shooting way too many pictures of this tiny speck. Finally, it became a real plane…a space plane… and the landing gear swung down as the T-38 chase pilot called out the feet to touchdown. Columbia’s nose stayed in the air for the longest time, but slowly, Bob Crippen let the nose wheel kiss the salty clay of the lake bed. As luck would have it, they rolled to a stop directly in front of us… but a half-mile away. Holly and I cheered and hugged, as did most families, friends and total strangers, many waving American flags. A few NASA trucks drove out to Columbia and then… nothing happened… for a very long time. Anticlimactic, certainly, but they had to carefully inspect for chemical and even biological contamination. The crowd headed for the exit, but we just didn’t want the moment to end, so we went to the tiny Edwards Gift Shop, then gave some sunscreen to a very pale AP photographer turning lobster red. Later we saw Columbia be loaded into the Mate-Demate Crane to prepare for her flight back to Florida atop a 747. Close-up, you could actually see the spaces where heat-shield tiles were dangerously missing. After that day, shuttles landed routinely at Cape Canaveral, but nothing can match the thrill of being in the desert on the morning of April 14, 1981 to really witness “the Right Stuff,” when Crippen and Young successfully ended “the boldest test flight in history.”