Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) Read Online Free PDF Page B

quick. The entry is more civilized but exposes the orbiter to actually a greater danger than the ascent, as far as the influence of the atmosphere on the orbiter. The temperatures on the outside of the orbiter really get hot on reentry, and that’s not the case on ascent.
    Astronaut Charlie Bolden flew on the Space Shuttle four times, two of those as commander, and became NASA administrator in 2009. A former naval aviator, Bolden described landing the Space Shuttle as a unique experience. “The entry and landing is unlike almost anything you ever experience in any other kind of aerospace machine because it’s relatively gentle,” Bolden said.
In terms of g-forces and stuff like that, it’s very docile. Unless you do something wrong, you don’t even get up to two gs during the reentry, the entire time of the reentry. When you bank to land, you come overhead the landing site, and then you bank the vehicle and you just come down like a corkscrew. . . . It feels likeyou’ve got gorillas sitting on your shoulder because you’ve been weightless for x number of days. And so it’s just a really different feeling. You have to hold your head up because you’ve got this big old heavy helmet on and it probably weighs [a few] pounds, but it feels like it weighs a hundred. It takes a little bit of energy to get your hands up off the console, because once you start feeling gravity again, your hands just kind of go down and they want to stay there; everything does. So the two pilots on board are doing a lot of isometric exercises all the way down.
    Even when an astronaut lands the shuttle for the first time after a mission, Bolden said, it already feels very familiar because of all the training in preparation for the missions. “It’s like you’ve done it all your life, because you have,” Bolden said.
You’ve done it thousands of time by now in the shuttle training aircraft for real, and you’ve done it probably tens of thousands of times in the simulator. So it doesn’t look abnormal at all; it’s just something that you’re accustomed to. When you touch down, if you do it right, again, you hardly know you touched down. As big as the orbiter is, the way that we land it is we just get it into an extremely shallow approach to the landing, and so it just kind of rolls out on the runway, and if you do it right, you all of a sudden notice that things are starting to slow down real quick and you’re hearing this rumble because the vehicle’s rolling down the runway on this grooved runway. So you know you’re down, put the nose down and step on the brakes and stop. That’s it. And then you go, “Holy G. I wish it hadn’t been over so quick.” I don’t think it makes a difference how long or how short you’ve been there, it’s over too quick. You’re ready to come home, but once you get back, you say, “Boy, I wish I had had a few more days,” or something like that. And for me, my last two, being the commander and actually being the guy that had the opportunity to fly it to touchdown, was thrilling.
    Once the landing is completed and the orbiter is safely back on Earth, the crew begins the process of reacclimating to the planet’s strong gravity after days of feeling weightless. Charlie Walker, the first commercial payload specialist, who flew on the shuttle three times, recalled waiting in the orbiter at the end of the mission.
The guys on the flight deck were going through the closeout procedures. Ground crews were closing in. We sat unstrapped, but we would sit in our seats for another ten, fifteen minutes as the ramp was brought up, the sniffers checked for ammonia leaks and/or hypergolic propellant leaks, found none, and put the stairway [up to the hatch], and opened the hatch. All that time, all of us are beginning to get our land legs back, unbuckle, start to try to stand up. “Ah, this doesn’t feel good yet. Wait a little bit longer.” So you kind of move around, move your arms first, your feet