Sometimes, it's all about who you know. Or, possibly, who knows you.
Sending human beings to live and work in the unforgiving vacuum of space involves many challenges. Many of them are technical. Some of them are political. The battle for political support and funding has faced NASA since its earliest days, and continues to this day.
Thirty-five years ago, for example, there was a particular senator from Indiana, Birch Bayh, who had developed a reputation with some in the agency as being "not a friend of NASA."
At the time, NASA was in the midst of the ALT flights -- the Approach and Landing Test flights of the orbiter Enterprise. The first space shuttle launch was still almost four years away, and NASA was very much in the midst of getting ready for the program to begin. The ALT flights were part of that preparation. Much analysis had gone into how the space shuttle would fly during its gliding reentry through Earth's atmosphere a the end of a mission, using everything from wind tunnels to simulators to a Gulfstream aircraft modified to fly as much like the shuttle was expected to as possible.
But while NASA had done several things that they believed would be like flying a shuttle, the only way to know for sure was to fly a shuttle. The first orbiter to be completed, for which one of the trainers at Space Camp is named, Enterprise wasn't spaceworthy -- it couldn't be launched -- but it was airworthy, capable of being lifted up into the sky and then gliding down for a landing.
Before the first free flight, Enterprise was flown five times completely atop a 747 carrier aircraft, from take-off to landing. This provided data on her aerodynamics, without the risk of something going wrong. Finally, thirty-five years ago this week, Enterprise made her first free glide flight. The orbiter was again lifted into the atmosphere on the 747, but this time was released to land on her own. Over the course of five more flights, NASA was able to gain extensive data about how the shuttle handled in the air and at landing.
Around this time, astronaut Joe Allen went to visit Senator Bayh's office, with a small gift for the woman who ran his office. The woman was from the small town of Rockville, Indiana, and Allen, himself from Indiana, happened to know something about the woman's town that she did not. The gift he brought her was a large photograph of Enterprise being carried atop the 747. Allen proceeded to tell the woman about the picture, how the airplane was worth $300 million, and the orbiter it was carrying was one of NASA's most valuable assets at the time. He then went on to tell her about the pilot of the 747 during the flight -- one Tom McMurtry, of Rockville, Indiana.
"She said, ‘That’s being flown by Tommy McMurtry?’" Allen recalled in an Johnson Space Center Oral History Project interview. "I said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ She said, ‘Golly. How much is all of that worth?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s about a billion and a half dollars.’ ‘Lordy,’ she says, ‘I remember when Tommy’s daddy wouldn’t let him drive the Buick.’ ... She immediately put the picture up on the Senator’s wall, and to my recollection the Senator never voted against NASA again, ever, not once.”
Contributing Author: David Hitt
