Dan Snow's History Hit - The Space Shuttle

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Over a period of 30 years, NASA's Space Shuttle program contributed to some of space exploration's most important achievements, as well as some of its greatest tragedies. Affectionately known as 'space trucks', the reusable shuttles hauled crew, satellites, parts of the Hubble Space Telescope and modules for the International Space Station into Earth's orbit across a staggering 135 missions. However, two of these missions would end with catastrophic failure and the deaths of 14 crew members. Joining us today is Kevin Fong, award-winning broadcaster and host of an upcoming podcast on the Space Shuttle, 16 Sunsets, to help make sense of the program's complex legacy.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got one of the great space communicators on the podcast today, Professor Kevin Fong. He's an award-winning author, broadcaster. He worked for the UK government during COVID. He's worked at NASA. This guy has got a CV like nothing I have ever seen in my little old life. He was also the host of the smash hit podcast, 13 Minutes to the Moon. He's got degrees in astrophysics, aerospace engineering, and he now wants to turn his big brain and his talent for communication to the shuttle program. Having done the Apollo missions in his 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast, he's now keen to do the shuttle, which he assures me is even more interesting and important than

Apollo. What was the point of shuttle? How did it fit into the history of space exploration? And why did it get retired? These are questions that we talk about in this podcast. If you like what you hear, you can go to Kevin's Kickstarter. He's funding this next one himself because he wants to go deep. He wants to make a lot of content and he doesn't think a broadcaster is going to have the stomach for it. So go to Kickstarter and either type in Kevin Fong or 16 Sunsets and you can unleash that team on this. They've got the NASA astronauts standing by, they've got scientists, the engineers, the family standing by. They're going to make the most amazing podcast series. So please go and support them. In the meantime, here is one of the most talented folks you'll hear on this podcast.

Kevin Fong. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Kevin Fong, great to have you back on the pod, buddy.

Great to be here. Last time you and I chatted, we were talking about the Apollo mission, which is a gigantic rocket. It looks like a goddamn rocket. It goes straight up in the air and it goes to the moon. Okay, that is space travel. I can get my head around. What is with the shuttle and the kind of odd passenger aircraft

vibe? It's just such a crazy idea. And the more you look at it, the more you can't quite believe they dared to make it in that particular era. It's a nonsense of a vehicle. It's a launch vehicle for the first eight and a half minutes, and then it gets into orbit and becomes this sort of laboratory for space exploration and something that can rescue satellites. Then it becomes a re-entry vehicle and then has this phaser, this ridiculous glider thing that falls out of the sky like a safe with its door open and then lands on the runway like a conventional aircraft. So it is crazy, and they were probably crazy to try and build it. So why did they build it? What happened to going to the moon in a big rocket? Well, that of course was Project Apollo,

which was all surrogate battlefield for nuclear war. And it had a war budget with it. I mean, it was at one point, nearly 5% of American GDP went into that program. And you come into the 80s and NASA's budget is falling off very rapidly. In fact, before that, by the 1970s, it's falling off really quickly. And they need a new game and the new game becomes Shuttle. And Shuttle is born out of the fact that you've got this extraordinarily optimistic agency, who after all, had done what Kennedy had told them to do. He's got on the moon before the decade was out. And they thought they could do anything. And when people asked them to build Shuttle, it sounded like an impossible challenge. But they said, well, we're going to do it anyway.

And they built it. And they wanted this next generation thing. They wanted it to become routine. This was supposed to be a vehicle that was supposed to get off the deck two, three times, possibly a week even. And why do they want to go into space that often? It's really interesting, isn't it? Because when you look back at historical feats of exploration, this is what happens. Someone, usually a nation state, lost leads it, both in terms of the risk and financially. They do it very expensively and very riskily. And then no one really does it again for about 50 years. And you saw that with Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe. You see it with Antarctica in 1912. The first time anyone sets foot at the South Pole again after Scott and Amundsen is 56. And so NASA want to just fast forward. They just want to press fast

forward on that tape. They want to get spaceflight to be routine and sustainable. And so the launch rate is born out of their desire to make this thing sustainable. And the only way to make it sustainable is to get it off the deck really, really often. And you mentioned a lab. So obviously not going to the moon, not going to any extraterrestrial bodies, just going to orbit and hanging out and doing science. And what they want is like the ultimate multi-purpose space vehicle here. They want it to be doing everything. They want it to be a laboratory in space. They want it to be able to launch satellites. They want to be able to retrieve satellites. They want it to be able to build a space station should they desire to do that. And they just want it to be able to do everything.

Apollo is all about getting up onto the moon, showing you plant flag there, and you can visit, just about get away with it, sort of bank job science that. But shuttle is about persisting there, putting up this vehicle so regularly that it becomes commonplace, and then building a platform in which you have permanent presence. And that's what it's all about. You know, we talk about the space age, and ordinarily people think about Mercury and Apollo. But for me, the true space age, really, space age proper is shuttle, because shuttle is when space becomes this ever-present theme in our lives it's there in the backdrop of the news it's there and we just assume it's going on and

that is what nasa wanted to do yeah that rings true of my childhood just you saw shuttles coming and going and just felt like we had regular commerce with space it wasn't noteworthy and that was part of the thing because in a way i I think that's what NASA sort of tripped themselves up with. They began to believe the hype themselves. They began to believe that this thing of spaceflight could become routine. But anything that involves that much energy, and you have to remember that shuttle is still a vehicle that has the explosive capacity of a small nuclear weapon that goes from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour over eight and a half minutes, that comes scorching through the sky at mark 25 on the way home, and its outer surface is as hot as the surface of the sun at points. None of that is ever going to be routine. But I think, if not necessary as an agency, then elements of the operation began to think,

we can do this. It's kind of like routine. And of course, it never was. What's the heritage of a fixed-wing reusable space vehicle? Who came up with the idea first? So you look at Apollo, and it is incredibly wasteful, right? This 300-foot tower that literally towers over Cape Canaveral. You launch it into orbit and you throw all of that stuff sequentially away as it stages and gets itself out into space. And then they come back in a capsule and the capsule splashes down

and the capsule gets towed off and stuck in a museum. None of that, none of that gets used again. And that makes it extraordinarily expensive. And so NASA, with this idea of sustainability, thinks, well, we want a reusable space vehicle. We want the Flash Gordon of space vehicles that you can take off, we can reuse it again. And so that's what they set out to build. Now, it doesn't quite become that because quite a lot of the apparatus that becomes the space shuttle system, we call it space shuttle, but it's actually a space transportation system. A lot of that gets thrown away. The external tank, that big orange tank, straddled by those boosters. Those boosters

are kind of reusable, but they have to be reconditioned a lot once they're splashed down. And so they're trying to make this thing the future of spaceflight. And if they want to continue, they want it faster, better, and cheaper. And that's the goal with it. What's the hardest bit? Is it getting into space, getting back to Earth? What is the toughest ask on this kind of reusable airframe? Rocket scientists have this old adage, which is the two hardest feats in all of human spaceflight are starting and stopping. And that has always been true. And if you look at the accidents that they've had, Challenger in 86 is 73 seconds into launch. That's starting. And Columbia in 2003 is as it

comes through Mark 16 on re-entry. So that's it trying to stop. And the reason that that's so difficult is because, you know, this is old fashioned GCSE science here. You're trying to take this enormous chemical potential energy that's stored in the fuel and turn it into this ridiculous amount of kinetic energy, the energy by virtue of movement. Anything that you move, you accelerate from 0 miles an hour to 17,500 miles an hour has got an insane amount of energy. Imparting that energy to the vehicle without disintegrating it, and then on the way back, bleeding off that energy so you can bring it to a standstill on the runway is incredibly

difficult. And that is where most of the problems were. How many flights were there? In all, 135. 135 missions. And this is why it's so different from Apollo. Apollo spans a decade, but in the end, it culminates in these six missions to the moon and of course the all-fated Apollo 13. Shuttle is there for 30 years and flies 135 times and in that time endures two fatal accidents with the loss of vehicle and loss of crew, Challenger and Columbia. And people focus on that but actually I'm always amazed that they just didn't lose 135 vehicles. The challenge is so extreme. And so it's an incredible vehicle, an incredible achievement, the most complicated vehicle ever built.

You can see what's happening with the current rockets. They've stepped back towards the Apollo architectures, right? So everything that's going up now looks very much like the Apollo architectures, capsules going up on rockets. And that's because Shuttle was beautiful, elegant, complex. But complex is bad when it comes to spaceflight. You don't want complex. You want simple.

You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Shuttle. We're coming up. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented Podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own.

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So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. so shuttle perhaps not unlike concord ahead of its time we've actually we've gone back in some ways have we shuttle is very very much like concord in terms of this sort of we built it because we could and huge confidence in our engineering and a community that is not so risk averse, but realizing that actually that's not what we need right now. I mean, I think those parallels are very close, very much like Concorde. And I was there when the last one landed and I had this

sense that this is the last time we see this thing for a long time. I remember standing on the edge of the runway in the middle of the night as it came down. It was actually really, really early morning at Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center. I'll never forget. This thing comes in, you hear a couple of sonic booms as it comes in, it turns around the heading alignment cone. So it's doing this big steep bank and you can't see it because it's nighttime and you can't hear it because it's gliding in. You sort of hear this weird rustling sound. And then it's on the runway. And then it's sort of scampering through the spotlights. And then it's gone.

And I still remember thinking it's like some mythical creature disappearing into the darkness forever. It was really quite a poetic moment. And I felt that sadness because I thought, I know what comes next. And it's nothing that looks like that. So it glided in with no power yeah yeah that's the most crazy thing about it so i remember once i gave a lecture after rick searfoss who was a shuttle commander who'd flown it and i sort of afterwards i said rick you know you've flown it what was it

like to fly and he said oh it flies it flies like a safe with its door open it just falls out the sky like it doesn't want to fly and that's because it's got quite narrow wingspan, big vehicle. And it descends, I can't remember now, I think something like 20,000 feet per minute. And that's really falling with its nose about 20 degrees down. So when you're in your jumbo jet, you're maybe six degrees, seven degrees nose down. This thing's 20 degrees nose down. And I know that because I've flown on the shuttle training aircraft, which is the aircraft they practice the shuttle landings on. And that is

an insane vehicle. So final mission, STS-135, I find myself wandering out towards this Gulfstream aircraft. It's like a Learjet, basically, but it's specially adapted where half of its controls are built like the space shuttles. And there's a guy wearing a proper space suit who's in the left seat flying it, who takes you up to 37,000 feet. And then to make it handle as badly as the shuttle handles, they put the landing gear down, but that's not enough. They put the landing gear down and then they put both of the engines in reverse thrust, and then the thing handles as badly as the space shuttle. The nose goes down.

You watch the altimeter plummeting away 20,000 feet per minute, and you can see the runway looming really hard and fast, and it dumps it down, and they pull the nose up just at the last minute, and they go up, and they do it again and again and again. So we did that 10 times, I'm telling you. It's quite a ride that sounds terrifying why that night when you were watching cape canaveral why did it come to an end it's a really good question and when they talked about bringing shuttle program to an end there were many people who thought it could go on actually because they felt like they'd learned a lot about the vehicle in that time.

The shuttle and any vehicle you fly is never more dangerous than when you first fly it. So in the first few missions, it's incredibly dangerous because there is predicted failure rate and there's real failure rate. And the predictions were ridiculous. You know, they thought the failure rate was going to be like one in 10,000. The actual failure rate for shuttle in the end was about 1 in 50. But for all of that, by the time they'd flown it 135 times, they thought they knew it pretty well. They thought they'd fixed most of the things that were really going to go wrong with it. And they thought that they knew it well

enough to keep flying. But there were a lot of people who thought, that's easy to say, this is a complex vehicle and we can't see all the way inside it. It has elements of it that just are there to jump up and bite you. And I think that we should retire while we're kind of ahead and move on to the next generation. And also shuttle can't get out of low earth orbit. And all of the next generation stuff is back to the moon on the way to Mars or somewhere else. And so it kind of had to go. It had done its job. It had built a space station. It had given us regular access to space. It had extended our reach and made us understand how we behave in the environment of space and its job was done. So I guess that's why I think they thought,

look, we can't lose a third crew on this thing and there's a good risk that we might. So, yeah, let's talk about some of those successes and the contributions. I guess things like the Hubble Space Telescope, right? I mean, the things that we now think of as part of our space architecture, the space station, they were put there by shuttle, were they? Yeah, absolutely. Shuttle was so versatile, right? It's so versatile in terms of what it can do. It is a space truck.

It's not comparable to the vehicles that are now going to fly. It has an enormous payload bay. You can stick laboratories in that payload bay. You can stick satellites in that payload bay. You can stick bits of space station in that payload bay. And Shuttle did all of that. Hubble Space Telescope is a massive high point for Space Shuttle, partly because without Space Shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope would have been a white elephant in space. Famously, when it space telescope is a massive high point for space shuttle, partly because without space shuttle, Hubble space telescope would have been a white elephant in space. Famously, when it launched, the lenses weren't properly aligned. So it had all these sort of blurry shots of the galaxy that no one could see anything useful. So shuttle went up and basically put a pair of contact lenses on it and charmed it up. And I remember the first surfacing mission in 1993. I'm finishing my

degree in astrophysics. The first pictures from that clear signal are coming down. It's showing us a universe like we've never known before. That is an outstanding achievement. It's not just that. Shuttle helps to advance our knowledge of the human body in space like never before. We're flying crews of seven at a time up there. We're studying them. We're putting laboratories up to study the human being in space. And you have to remember that when shuttle starts flying, a handful of people have ever been into space. By the end of shuttle's era, 500, 600 people have flown in space and we've studied all of them. As it helped us look out across the galaxy, it also helped us to look in and understand ourselves and our place in the universe

and what we needed to do to keep ourselves healthy for the next stage of exploration. Kevin Fong, you had a massive success recently. You've written about it in The Guardian newspaper in the UK that you were almost part of that next stage of exploration. You got down to the last handful of people to be an actual astronaut, didn't you? Well, it was my second go. I got down to the last 91 out of 23,000 people to be a European Space Agency astronaut. This time I applied kind of symbolically. I applied in 2000, I guess it was eight, which was the selection in which Tim Peake got selected.

And this time when it came around again, they'd sort of raised the age limit a little bit. And I thought, well, I've got to have one more go just symbolically, just to see where I get to. And this time around, I did much better. I guess I got a little bit more on my CV and I got through the long listing and I got through the computer games in Hamburg, the DLR. And then I got through to Cologne where they do this whole day of just interrogation of you in groups on your own and pairs, the whole thing. And they really scrutinize you. Amazingly, I got through that. And then you're down to the last 91 and I went to Toulouse to have my medical. And that was the bit where until that point, I hadn't really thought there was any real chance I'd get it.

And then you're in the last 91. You're having someone check your dental work. And they're also wanting to take selfies with you. And when you say what you're doing, I say, well, one of you is going to walk on the moon one day. And you think, I guess one of us probably is. So unfortunately, didn't manage to make it through the medical. If you ever want to feel old, try being 50 and then taking part in astronaut physicals with a bunch of 35-year-olds.

That'll do it for you. But, you know, I was very, very pleased to be in the running. And, you know, that's all I ever wanted to do really was to get to the stage in selection where you've had your interview, you've sat opposite of an astronaut, and they've looked you up and down and they've told you really, you're probably good enough to have a go at doing the job. So yeah, sad not to be there, but gave it a good go. Kev, we're all really proud of you doing that. Now what's going on?

Because everyone loved your 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast, international smash hit. You've got another one coming, but this time slightly different setup. Just tell us how we can get involved in it. So we are going to make a new podcast series. We're going alone this time, but I've got the same production team with me, Rami Zabar and the genius that is Andrew Luck-Baker. So the same command module team

that made 13 Minutes of the Moon, but this time we're outside the BBC. We're going it alone. We wanted to tell this story in a different way, our way really. And this is the epic that is Shuttle. You wanted to tell this story in a different way, our way really. And this is the epic that is Shuttle. We've talked a bit about it, but that is a very, very small part of the story. There's so much more. It's a truly, truly epic story. And we're going to get this one done through a Kickstarter campaign. So we're in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for this new podcast that we're calling 16 Sunsets.

We're about halfway through the campaign. We need a bit more help to get it made. And we're about 300 followers in with it so far and about 22, 23 grand, I think, last I looked. We're trying to get to about 90 grand to get it made. And so we need your help, really. Please, everyone, head over to Kickstarter and put in Kevin Fong's name. And they are astonishing, astonishing historical records in their own right. I mean, you've got a lot of these astronauts on speed dial from your time working at NASA.

So you've got access to these men and women that is incredibly special. That's why we want to make it. I know these people. I worked alongside them. I was at NASA in the wake of the Columbia accident, working for Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at Johnson Space Center. But more than that, my big thing is I love understanding how systems work and how something comes together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's what we did with 13 Minutes to the Moon. And that's what I want to do again and really tear this thing apart and have a look at what it is.

So I'm really hoping that we get a chance to make this because I think this is a very, very special story and I think we could tell it in a very special way. Go to Kickstarter, everybody, and type in Kevin Fong or the name of the project, which is, Kevin, one more time? 16 Sunsets. So 16 Sunsets, and we're calling it 16 sunsets

because when you are in orbit whacking around at 17,500 miles an hour, you watch the sun rise and set every 90 minutes. So 16 times a day. And so that's why we called it 16 sunsets. Good luck, buddy. Very, very much looking forward to listening to it. I'm sure lots of people listening to this

will feel the same way good luck thanks Dan you