Of course, flying the shuttle is hardly a piece of cake, but it’s easy
to understand what Gibson is talking about.
Mercury was so tiny that Glenn’s fellow astronaut Wally Schirra once
quipped, “You don’t get into Mercury; you put it on.” Friendship 7 had no ability to change its orbit, and was
designed to be flown automatically, so its pilots had little in the way of real
flying to do. And in four decades, even
as spacecraft have become more complex, getting into orbit has become safer.
According to John Young, a six-time space flier and moonwalker who has
overseen safety aspects of space activities at NASA’s Houston space center, the
odds of a shuttle blowing up and killing its crew are now down to 1 in 248
launches, thanks to safety modifications made in the wake of the 1986 Challenger
disaster. That’s compared with about 1
in 75 for Glenn’s Atlas launcher, and 1 in 80 for the Saturn V moon
rocket. But as Young points out, space travel
is still far riskier than, say, commercial air travel: “The 777 [airliner] is 1
in a couple million,” Young says. “So
that just tells you that the space shuttle is still a developmental vehicle.”
Young also cautions that the reliability estimates don’t take into
account the aging of the shuttle fleet, which is expected to remain in service
for at least another 10 years, and possibly longer. Even now, post-flight inspections of the shuttle orbiter have revealed
corrosion, wiring problems, and other signs of wear and tear, requiring
painstaking inspections and repairs.
“Every time we fly, we discover something that, sometimes, we wish we
didn’t know it,” Young says. “But
that’s just the way the business is.”
And despite
the continuing risks of their profession, astronauts still say the experience
of flying into space is worth it.
“You’re on your way to the best ride in Disneyland,” says Hoot
Gibson. As soon as he reached orbit on
his first space mission in 1984, says Gibson, “I remember thinking to myself
two things, one of them being, ‘Oh, man, we made it! We made it all the way to cut-off!’ And the second one was, ‘Wow!
I wanna go do that again!’ I
hadn’t been there ten seconds, and I'm saying to myself, ‘I wanna go do that
again.’”
And unlike
Glenn, who had to wait 36 years for his return to space, most shuttle
astronauts have racked up several trips into orbit. “Back in the old days,” says Hoot Gibson, “if you had an
astronaut that had flown three times, man, he was the incredible tsar of
space. That was really incredible to
actually get to fly that many times, three times. And you know I’ll bet half of our astronaut corps has three
flights. And I got to go five times.”
And unlike Glenn, who had no one to share his experience with but
himself, shuttle flights carry up to seven astronauts – a fact that former
astronaut Jay Apt says was a distinct improvement. His first mission, Apt says, “was tremendously enhanced by the
fact that we were all close friends.
And we increased greatly each other’s enjoyment of the experience of
spaceflight. So actually, I think it’s
much better than a solo flight. Being
able to share the experience just gets [everything] to a new level.”
That’s something Glenn found out for himself when he made a second
spaceflight, at age 77, aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998. By that time, NASA was poised to begin
assembling the International Space Station, which represents the immediate
future of Americans in orbit. Right
now, with billions of dollars in budget overruns hanging over the station
program, that future is uncertain. But
it’s a sure bet that forty years from now, whatever happens in space, Americans
will still be looking back at the historic flight of Friendship 7 as the
moment when it all began.
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