The Space Shuttle's Wild Youth
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“Come Fly With Us: NASA’s Payload Specialist Program,” Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas, 2019.
Depending on your age, you’ll probably have a time which you consider “your” human space program. Some people remember the first satellite shocking the world. Others, the moon landings. Many adults have never spent a day of their lives without someone aboard the International Space Station.
“My” space program was the time between 1981 and 1988 – the early space shuttle program. From watching the first shuttle launch live on television, to the shock of the Challenger disaster, to the triumphant return to space on the day I legally became an adult, those first years seemed filled with hope and possibility, punctuated by tragedy. The shuttle was asked to do things it never did again. It pushed the limits. Then, sadly, it exceeded them.
But for those few hopeful years, recording the evening news on scratchy video and waiting eagerly for the next issues of space magazines, I watched people do things that were previously science fiction. And in the middle of this Wild West era of spaceflight, I noticed a different group of people were flying aboard the shuttle too. They weren’t all the same white male test pilot types. There were women. People of color. People from many different countries. Some had never piloted an airplane. Some arrived to train mere months before their mission.
Croft and Youskauskas found these people, talked to them at length, and have brought this overlooked era of space travel to vivid life again.
It’s a wonderfully dynamic book. Engines scream. Space vehicles shudder. But it’s also an entertainingly deep dive into NASA internal rivalries and office politics. It’s never sensationalized, but it’s also never boring.
There’s an understandable tension between career astronauts who felt they could operate any experiment in space (and generally could), and non-astronauts who’d spent a lifetime working on an experiment who wanted to test it in space themselves. The latter were speedily trained on how to live in a shuttle, and essentially not get in the way of the others. They had the experience of a lifetime.
I’ve been fortunate to know many of the people described in this book. One signed my paychecks for a number of years. I was at the wedding of another. And yet there’s a wealth of first-hand stories in here that were new to me. I learned how German astronaut Reinhard Furrer helped with a tunnel allowing East Germans to escape under the Berlin Wall. I gained an in-depth, new appreciation of the Spacelab missions I never had before. I learned how military astronauts found themselves awkwardly positioned between NASA and the military solving programs as basic as – can this payload be plugged in? Is it too big? When everything was new, there were no right answers, and people learned as they went. We may see an era like it again – but we haven’t yet, and it won’t be exactly like this.
Any story that takes a bunch of outsiders and drops them in a new situation is generally fascinating. When you set two talented writers on it, it becomes even more so. It’s no wonder the book is already winning awards. Best of all, the stories are all true.