Commuting in Space

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, scientists with business on the moon board a Pan American space liner and make the flight as casually as today's businessmen take the Eastern Airlines shuttle between Washington and New York. U.S. airlines may never offer trips into space, but NASA is well on the way toward achieving regular space flight, pointing toward the day when craft will shuttle men and materials between earth and orbiting space stations. The agency is assembling the first reusable spaceship, and has begun to train astronauts to fly the new space shuttle, which will be ready to go into orbit in 1979.

Quite Economical. The basic concept of the shuttle has changed little since the $5.25 billion project was approved by President Nixon in 1972. The plan calls for five airplane-like orbiters that can fly up to 100 missions without major overhaul, and the aim is to mount some 60 missions a year. The first of the 122-ft.-long, delta-winged ships now being assembled at Rockwell International in Palmdale, Calif., is about the size of a conventional DC-9 passenger jet, but double the weight. It will lift a pay load of 65,000 Ibs. in a cavernous cargo bay big enough to hold two of the fighter planes that flew from the decks of World War II aircraft carriers. This capacity, and the fact that the shuttle is reusable, should make the orbiter quite economical by space-age standards. On Apollo missions, it cost $600 to lift each pound of pay load into space. The cost with the shuttle is estimated to be only $160.

The shuttle was also designed to be comfortable. Its spacious three-level cabin will provide ample room for seven, including pilot and copilot, to move around in shirtsleeve comfort in an earthlike pressure and atmosphere. It also contains enough amenities to shatter any sex barriers to space travel. "We've been asked if we would be able to fly women," said one NASA official. "The last guy who said no got fired."

Should a mission run into trouble, the shuttle has some unique rescue equipment. Stranded or disabled crewmen will be transferred to a rescue shuttle in pressurized 33-in.-diameter spheres of Neoprene-coated nylon. The transfer will be made either on a clothes-line-and-pulley system or by a cranelike device operated by pressure-suited, space-walking astronauts from one of the ships.

Dead Stick. Launching the shuttle should be relatively easy. Fastened piggyback style to two 149-ft. boosters and a 154-ft. tank of liquid propellant, the ship will lift off from Cape Canaveral. After separation, the solid fuel boosters will be parachuted back into the ocean, to be picked up and reused. The liquid-propellant tank, jettisoned after sending the shuttle into orbit, will not be reused.

From the moment of leaving orbit to touchdown, landings can be automated; all the crew will have to do is sit tight as the computer brings the shuttle in. But should something go wrong that would require the pilot to take over, the trip home could be tricky. The shuttle is designed to descend toward its final glide path at an angle of 24DEG, not the nearly flat approach followed by conventional jetliners. This means that the craft will descend from 20,000 ft. to the ground in less than two minutes. It will land at about 210 m.p.h., some 40 m.p.h. faster than the hottest jet fighters. Such a maneuver will require exquisite timing. The shuttle is designed to land with a "dead stick"--without power--which means that the pilot must set it down successfully on his first try; the ship has no capacity to go around again.

Pilots who have flown the shuttle in simulated flights say it has all the maneuverability of a stone. "The shuttle must have been designed by a brick mason," says Astronaut Karol Bobko. "If the wings fell off would the pilot even notice it?" TIME Correspondent David Lee, who flew the simulator during a visit to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, reports: "The ship is so skittish and its speed so great that the pilot has no room for error."

The Rockwell International and Lockheed engineers responsible for the shuttle admit that their hybrid--part spaceship, part aircraft--is tricky to fly. "It is an unforgiving aircraft," agrees Test Pilot Fred Jackson. "Make a mistake and it can be fatal in a very short time." But the astronauts are certain that they can handle the shuttle, and Milton Silveira, NASA'S deputy manager of the program, is confident that the craft will be making regular flights within a few years after its initial 1979 launching. Indeed, he predicts that shuttles will be used for assembling permanent space stations by the year 1990.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.