My Truck Went to LEO Orbit to Hangout by tallpindo

Writers • Space • posted on Jul 23, 2017

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Description

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reason with reusable spacecraft. I was at McDonnell-Douglas. When Rockwell Standard bought North American Aviation they got the Downey facility where the Apollo capsule was manufactured. It was the old Jerry Vultee factory with roots with Eldon Cord. Once the winner of the Space Transportation System (STS) was announced the various engineers at McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics Corporation-West (MDAC-West) were offered positions at Downey at half salary. Many took this offer as they were near retirement and had a stable home environment in Southern California. I eventually in 1978 found myself at Cape Canaveral in June with my two sons. We were just poking around after I took an interview at United Technologies in West Palm Beach. The STS was three years late and over budget. The Cape looked abandoned. We went into all the old blockhouses that had supported Redstone and Atlas with various early payloads and then the manned flights of Mercury and Gemini. We looked at the earlier rockets out in the space park with Navajo looking most like an STS and Snark being a winged cruise missile I had met the program manager of in Dayton where he became System Program Office (SPO) manager of the Advanced Tactical Electronic Warfare System (ATEWS). Then we pulled up our jeans and headed over to the former Apollo area. The huge Bucyrus-Erie crawlers, that had taken the Saturn rockets from the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) to pads 39A and 39B, were in disarray with one having broken tracks. Bucyrus-Erie the maker was bankrupt. Who would refurbish them to carry the STS? Beside the VAB was a subscale mockup of the shuttle orbiter with what I knew to be DC-9 landing gear. My sons were a bit bored with this shabby unremarkable item. We departed for Walt Disney World in Orlando. I took one last shopping trip with my wife who had filed for separation. We entered Penny’s Pompano Beach location in the Fashion Square shopping center. She kicked at a mirror leaning on the floor and the floor walker came up and said,” Gee! If you don’t like our merchandise at least just walk out don’t kick it!” In the common area was an eclectic display of syncretic summary. NASA had supplied a magnetic hammer used to smooth out Titan booster skins and some other items. I was interested in a Rolling Stone magazine that featured a “Get Away Special (G.A.S.)” payload offer to let private individuals put a payload in a container on a rack in the shuttle payload bay. I bought a copy of the magazine to peruse the details. Eventually, I dreamed up a project to go on from an inertial reference that used a titanium ball spinning at 200,000 rpm. I mailed in my check for $500.00 as earnest money to the project office for G.A.S. at Goddard in Maryland. They sent me back the full flight package documents for the Space Transportation System. I was now a direct investor in something my new colleagues ribbed me about when the first flight of the shuttle finally was scheduled to go. They hoped it would succeed and a Centaur would be man rated for the shuttle payload bay and use their RL-10 rocket engines. The day before the scheduled launch was a Saturday. I drove up to the cape with my two sons to see this historic flight. The roads were jammed as we got close and we pulled off into an airport that had huge stones with port holes in them as a gate. We spent the night in our car and I drank my last couple of Pearl light beer. Morning came and we were excited as the countdown dragged on. Then two minutes before liftoff the clock stopped the count. I did not resume that day and we went home. The boys had to be in school and the shuttle was three years late and now with some unknown glitch. The next day at work the engineers had put a cartoon of a personal computer hooked by wires to the main shuttle console and the shuttle on the pad. The caption read “now hit it!!” Yeah! I waited and listened to the progress on the pad on my transistor AM/FM portable radio. At some point, I wandered over to the Otis Escalator part of the building in an old RCA computer manufacturing building. I walked out onto the porch and looked to the North. Soon, I saw a distant bright light and a thin line of vapor about where Merritt Island would be. So much for up. Now only down was left. The chaotic criticism of the reentry tiles proved to be a hoax. A few were damaged and some had to be replaced after it landed and was safed. Only one phase was left, flying it on the back of the shuttle carrier 747 to the Cape runway from Edwards. That happened in a few days.