By Brian Trompeter
Astronaut Tom Jones, who spent 53 days in space on four Space Shuttle missions, wants the world to know how special that space program was and what it accomplished.
“It became iconic,” said Jones, who lives in the Reston-Vienna area. “Everything we know how to do well in space we learned on the Space Shuttle.”
His seventh book, “Space Shuttle Stories,” is published by Smithsonian Books and features interviews with 133 people who flew aboard the five orbiters – Columbia, Atlantis, Discovery, Challenger and Endeavour. It also details all 135 missions and the Shuttle’s technical specifications and provides hundreds of stunning photos.
The U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and former B-52D bomber pilot discussed his latest book, which he will speak about and sign on Jan. 20 at 3 p.m. at Bards Alley Bookshop, 110 Church St., N.W., in Vienna.
How was your latest book different from previous projects?
“The challenge was try to do something that encompassed the whole 30 years of the Space Shuttle program, from 1981 to 2011 – to do something unique that hadn’t been done before. There are some good technical histories of the Space Shuttle, its development and flight history, and NASA put out a few histories of its own when [the Shuttle] retired in 2011. But what I noticed was there were no oral histories or personal stories that went into any of these books.
Why was that?
“There were 30 years of Shuttle astronauts and I hadn’t heard the stories of nearly enough of them. These are all my friends and colleagues, but we were so busy working at NASA that we never had the chance to sit down and share personal experiences to a great degree. This was my chance to capture the personal stories of one astronaut for every one of the 135 Shuttle flights.”
Which of those missions stand out?
“All of the famous missions to service or upgrade the Hubble Telescope. I think probably the most challenging one was the first one, which was STS-61 [in December 1993], and that was to correct the bad optics, the misshapen mirror, of the Hubble. The challenge there was to do five back-to-back spacewalks and install the critically corrective optics that would recover the original planned capabilities of Hubble. It all worked, amazingly.”
Any other noteworthy missions?
“We had the two lost Shuttles, Challenger and Columbia.”
You listed quotes from Challenger’s crew and an e-mail from space by Columbia astronaut Laurel Clark.
“Laurel was one of seven crew members and I could have obviously done a little bit of a clip from those seven individuals, who were all my personal friends. But when I saw Laurel’s e-mail, I thought, this captures the mood of the entire crew as I knew them. She captures the exuberance, the satisfaction they’re getting that all of their science is going well. It captures the camaraderie they were sharing aboard. She was a first-time flier [and] was just over-the-moon, so to speak, about how cool this experience was of working with her friends in space.”
Your four missions also are included.
“I did not put my four stories in there. I wanted to have a unique voice from almost every one of the missions. I did speak a couple of times in the book from my personal voice, on my first mission and last mission, where I got to do some spacewalks at the Space Station. I wanted to give everyone else a chance to speak.”
Any other memorable missions?
“The flight two missions after [Challenger’s final flight], STS-27, had brush with disaster where the heat shield was damaged by debris coming off of one of the solid rocket boosters. The crew saw this in orbit and saw hundreds of damaged tiles on the belly of their heat shield. They were really worried about their safe return to Earth. [Robert] Gibson was the commander and his first reaction was to say to himself, ‘We’re all going to die.’ Then, after talking about it with [Mission Control in] Houston and trying to get Houston to understand the depths of their concern, they were given clearance to come back home. “
What was the outcome of that flight?
“[Gibson] flew the ship back to landing, thinking every moment that this was going to be the last few seconds of their return. They got on the ground and saw hundreds of tiles were damaged and one was completely missing. The metal skin of the Shuttle at that point had almost melted through. So their experience was presaging what happened to Columbia 15 years later. I wish that NASA had remembered all of those lessons from 1988 in 2003 and worried more about what a compromised heat shield might mean.”
What was special about the Shuttle?
“It was a groundbreaking spaceplane that nobody had ever built before. It was mostly reusable. It was designed to be a money-saver for NASA, designed to provide routine and regular transport, almost like in an airliner style, into space. And on those two points – money-saving from a point of reusability and the routine operation, meaning safe – these were two objectives it fell short on.”
Did it meet those goals?
“It didn’t quite make the jump to a fully reusable, money-saving system. It never saved money for NASA and its safety record was, regrettably, the loss of two crews with a total of 14 astronauts and two of the five orbiters that flew into space. So it was a bridge to the 21st century.”
What is the program’s legacy?
“We learned from those shortcomings of the Shuttle in the systems that we’re operating today, which are much safer than the Shuttle’s safety record over three decades. We hope that these new commercial transports and the new NASA ship, the Orion, which is going to take us to the moon, will prove to be much safer and reliable than the 30 years of the Shuttle. But we learned from that machine. In fact, nobody else on the planet has built anything that was as capable and versatile as the Space Shuttle.”
Is reaching space still risky?
“It is very difficult to get to space, to propel a craft of any size into orbit. You have to unleash a lot of energy to get it going that fast and have it fall around the planet every 90 minutes. [Elon] Musk is going for a really big vehicle that can reach the moon and eventually be part of the solution to go to Mars. By putting all that energy behind this 400-foot-tall, Super-Heavy Starship, to control the release of that energy and not have it shake his vehicle to pieces is really a challenge. I give him a lot of credit for trying.”
Did you learn anything surprising in your research for the book?
“There were a lot of common experiences and reactions. Many [astronauts] talked about how moved they were by the beauty of the universe and the planet and came back with a renewed commitment to environmental protection. Human spaceflight different from sending a robot to Mars. We don’t get the emotion back.”
