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2. In the Beginning Arguably, it could only have happened when it did. Astronaut John Young, who would go on to become the commander of the first Space Shuttle flight, was standing on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972 when he heard the news that Congress had approved vital funding for the development of the shuttle in its budget for fiscal year 1973. He reportedly jumped three feet into the air on the lunar surface upon hearing the news. The Space Shuttle would be the most complex piece of machinery built by humankind. It was an incredible challenge and a daunting undertaking. At another point in history, a decade earlier or even a decade later, it might have seemed too challenging, too ambitious. But the project was born when men were walking on the moon. From that perspective, anything was possible. It would be, far and away, the most versatile spacecraft ever built. But to many of the early astronauts who were involved in its creation, it was something even more fascinating—an aircraft like no other. Talk to the astronauts brought in as pilots during the 1960s, and there’s a fair chance they’ll refer to the orbiter as “the airplane.” Many of them will talk about its development not in terms of rocket engines and life-support systems but in terms of avionics and flight control systems. They had been pilots, many of them test pilots, and they had come to nasa to help the agency fly capsules through space. But now—now they were aircraft test pilots again, helping to design an aircraft that flew far higher and far faster than any aircraft before. Since the selection of the first astronauts, members of the corps had been involved in the development of new spacecraft and equipment, providing an operator’s perspective. These were the people who would have to use the things that the engineers were designing, so it was their job to give the engineers feedback on whether the things they were designing were actually usable. For much of the time the Space Shuttle was being developed, most in the beginning | 21 of the astronaut corps was grounded, with only a dozen flying between the last moon landing in 1972 and the first shuttle flight in 1981. As a result, there was plenty of opportunity for astronauts to be involved in the development of the shuttle, and they participated more in the development of this vehicle than any before. Even so, there were some at nasa with the idea that the moon would be just the first step into the solar system, who were concerned about what the shuttle wouldn’t be able to do—go beyond Earth’s veritable backyard. In January 1973 astronaut T. K. Mattingly was assigned to be head of Astronaut Office support to the shuttle program. This was around the same time that the contracts were being awarded to the companies that would be responsible for making the shuttle’s various components. Mattingly, who had orbited the moon on Apollo 16 while Young was walking on it, recalls talking to Deke Slayton, the head of flight crew operations at nasa’s Johnson Space Center (jsc) in Houston, Texas, about the assignment. “When I got back from Apollo 16, Deke asked me, he said, ‘You know, there’s only one more flight, so if you really want to fly again anytime near-term, you might want to take the backup assignment on [Apollo] 17,’ he said. ‘Chances aren’t very good, but we do know that we replace people occasionally. So if you would like to have that chance, you can do it, or you could work on the shuttle program.’ Really, I hadn’t paid much attention to it,” Mattingly said of the shuttle program at that point. I kind of knew the work was going on, but I didn’t know what it was, because my ambition had always been—I didn’t think I would go to [walk on] the moon, but I was really hoping that I’d get to be on the Mars mission, which I was sure was going to happen the following year. To a young kid, it just seemed obvious that the next step is you go to the moon, then you sharpen your tools and you go to Mars, and I thought, “Boy, that’s where I’d like to go.” Even by then it...

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