Before Lift-Off
The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew
Cooper, Henry S.F. Jr.
First Edition.
With a foreword by Astronaut David C. Leestma.
For eight days in October 1984, seven men and women orbited the Earth on Space Shuttle Mission 41-G. The mission had begun a year earlier, however, with the selection of its crew.
Before Lift-off is the extraordinary day-to-day story of these astronauts' training and flight - and is as close as most of us will ever come to flying on the space shuttle.
New Yorker writer Henry Cooper obtained unprecedented permission from NASA to follow the 41-G crew from its formation through the completion of its mission. He was even given access to the heart of the training program: the crew's sessions in the shuttle mission simulators.
A space mission is flown only once; the simulators are where it must come together. In replicas of the shuttle cockpit, the astronauts rehearse every aspect of the mission while a team of instructors manipulates the "flight conditions" through a bank of computers. Some of this playacting is scripted, some of it impromptu. Both crew and training team run the exercises with a surprising blend of intensity and playfulness as the instructors program all of the "malfs, glitches, anomalies, nits, and bites" that could conceivably come up during the flight.
More than a chronicle of different phases in the astronauts' learning process, Before Lift-off tells the story of the bonding of these men and women. It would be Captain Robert Crippen's fourth space flight, his second command in six months, and Sally Ride's second shuttle voyage. For rookies David Leestma, Jon McBride, and Kathy Sullivan, and for two payload specialists, the experience would mark an initiation into the most elite of groups - those people who have ventured into space.
Shuttle flights came to an abrupt and tragic halt in January 1986. In retrospect, signs of stress in the program are painfully apparent - the increasing frequency of flights and the resulting schedule problems, the pressure to carry commercial payloads, the tendency to view missions as routine. With the explosion of Challenger an innocence was lost, and the infectious enthusiasm and confidence captured in these pages now seems a thing of the past. But exuberance will one day return to America's space program, Cooper writes, and "the training of 41-G can be looked back upon for insight and inspiration."
HENRY S. F. COOPER, JR., writes for The New Yorker and has covered the space program for twenty years. His previous books include Apollo on the Moon, A House in Space, and The Search for Life on Mars.
Hardcover with dust jacket
271 Seiten / pages
with photos
very good condition
Baltimore - London - 1987 - The Johns Hopkins University Press
Art.Nr. 7850
