READY TO LAUNCH!

STS-136 is a mission undertaking the ambition of bringing the Space Shuttle back to its heyday a decade ago.

9 min readApr 8, 2022

T-20 minutes, countdown holding [1].

Leaving my eyes from the digital wall clock, I in turn glue them onto the handwatch, as no less of a disquiet habit. It is 20 minutes to 9am, September 10th, 2023. Staring out the tremendous glass window of Launch Control Room 4 at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, [I can see with my bare human eyes] a tall, arrow-shaped object standing upright on the 39A launcher. It is Nova — the space shuttle being mounted on that rocket base.

A few hours ago, at T-6 hours, countdown holding, all staff had left the launch base for the final cleanup, before 2 million liters of hydrogen and liquid oxygen were pumped into the external tank. The hangover was proportional to the fuel level — a feeling as if my heart had been pounding in alignment with every countdown second after that process. The launch of STS-136 was near. Soon, Nova would fly into space, carrying supplies, equipment and specialists to the ISS International Space Station.

The last time I could recall my repose was at T-3 hours — I was sticking to the countdown.

It was when the crew arrived at the launch base, entering the shuttle. The camera showed that four astronauts in flying suits, aided by personal support staff, were undergoing final checks. Pilots and commanders took in the front row of seats. Soon enough, they would return here as soon as the quest has been accomplished. In the back seats were 2 experts who, on the other hand, would stay at the station for a while afterwards. There I recognized my best friend, Bob on the right, camera-facing, cheerfully thumbing. I was calm back then, for I refrained myself from whispering into the microphone, “Good luck, Bob”, as the astronaut, via air-to-ground communication with the Control Room, announced that everything was fine.

“Hey, you! Yeah, you, focus”.

Startled, I realized the Chief Control Officer heading towards my direction. Out of the blue, he was standing there, on the observation podium of the senior personnel. His stern expression and finger pointing at bestirred me from the seemingly perpetual unblinking gaze at the shuttle, “turning my back” against the colleagues coevally busy note-taking every final instruction. Hastily turned my chair, I removed the pen hanging on my pocket and frantically [imitating others,] jotting down everything onto my notebook. Right in front of me was a screen overflooded with figures, graphs and an honorable title tag of “Surveillance Engineer of Flight Programming Systems on the Ground”, beside a mountain of ink-fully smelled documents.

STS-136 is a mission undertaking the ambition of bringing the Space Shuttle back to its heyday a decade ago. They named it Nova — a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness — every NASA’s enthusiasm. Every stage has been carefully conducted with ever-available resources to assure the highest successful launch rate. It did take a woefully enormous amount of time for this space mission had been pro tempore barred due to the unfortunate continuity of previous incidents.

To bypass the mistakes leading all the way to the crashes of the Challenger and Columbia (which is also narrated later on) — the very reason engendering the shutdown of the Space Shuttle program, we came up with a new design after some strict procedures [2]. It has to meet every prerequisite in payload and human transport, can be effortlessly manufactured and maintained, passes every quality test — from engineering to flight tests. Last, but not least — it costs the least.

After all, rocketing a shuttle into space, then flying it back is the woeful version of throwing a marble from the 100th floor onto an A4 paper on the ground, insofar as everything — from wind direction, gravity, time, the Earth’s orbits and other floating-out-there objects — requires perfect adjustment. Literally everything. The only difference is that this [gigantic] marble costs a few billion dollars, human lives and every hope, and is programmed to travel all the way back after the launch.

Imagine it this way: you get to a car showroom and ask for recommendation on a vehicle travelling at hundreds kilometers per hour, each replenishment allows you to go as far as hundreds of thousands kilometers, and is capable of self-repairing should some bad luck hold during the journey. At the same time, the car should not be overwhelmingly heavy, and it must cost, at most, a quarter of the price of older models.

And launching a spaceship into space, then flying back, is a more difficult version of throwing a marble from the 100th floor onto an A4 paper placed on the ground, and having to adjust everything from wind direction, gravity, time, orbiters of the Earth and other objects are also floating in space, such as television or communication satellites. A lot of things to deal with. The only difference is that these marbles cost a few billion dollars, carry a lot of lives and a lot of hope, and they have to be programmed to come back after they have been released.

Before you cackle in to laugh, this is a gentle reminder that humans used to dream of a horse running at hundreds kilometers per hour, carrying a family, baggage and playing music. The Industrial Revolution did offer an answer — car. By the same token, the Science-Technology Revolution has also engendered spacecraft to render the wildest dream since those horses were brought into being.

Excuse my being long-winded, it is an occupational disease. Needless to say, in aerospace, weight means money. In addition, let alone the lightest-possible end-result, spacecraft materials must be durable enough to withstand every extreme operational condition.

To put into perspective, it must bear with the sudden temperature spikes upon entering orbit, the space shuttle sequentially becoming an Earth’s obiter, respectively moving closer and further from the Sun. For example, Orion did experience a temperature range from minus 101 to 288 degrees Celsius [3]. The burden would get woefully crippling should it carry a crew; thus having to maintain the internal temperature at a constant bearable level. The extreme temperatures would be even unbearable as the vehicle leaves its orbit to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere while flying “up-side down” [4]. Travelling at over 10,000 m/s, air friction can subject the hulls to roughly 3,000 degrees Celsius. This problem has been addressed with disposable AVCOAT thermal protectors [5]. In addition, the previous-generation Nova space shuttles were even equipped with thermal protection systems with other specialized synthetic materials [6].

Then comes another problem — gravity. To fly into space, we must first escape the gravity of the Earth. During launch, thus, sufficient thrust is a must, which, however, could subject the hulls to a force three times greater than gravity. In this manner, each component on board during launch is 3 times heavier than that on the ground [7]. Under that tremendous tension, merely a slight warping or breaking would engender a tragic end. Billions of dollars, thence, would reduce to ashes, literally.

Other material-related problems — from the radiation increase in space [8], the pressure difference between vacuum and the internal oxygenated environment, risks of corrosion and fire, to every launch vibration and the risk of impact as the shuttle re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere should also be taken into account.

Nova, thus, is a wonder of wisdom — a wonder made up of the most advanced materials in this human civilization: as tough as Kevlar (often wielded in bulletproof armor), as light as aluminum (in alloy from to meet the required durability), with heat-resistant reinforced carbon, and every other future super-materials.

That said, the ship is not capable of flying into space on its own with its engines — for it is still 70% contingent upon the rocket system [9]. To leverage an onerous mass — the ship, its own weight and that of the gigantic external tank — from the launch base to the required height, the system must demand powerful enough engines [10]. For example, the Saturn V booster NASA has been utilizing in Apollo missions and other shuttles’ launch is with a thrust of up to 3,500 tons, and carry a maximum of about 118 tons. Given the expansion of the potential outer-space market (tourism, mining and even alternative settlements to the Earth) [11], such figures would soar soon enough, since such private companies as SpaceX, Blue Origin and many others have placed their best bets on this lucrative market.

STS-136 is a special mission, for it MUST succeed. Since the Space Shuttle program was ceased at the behest of the US Government in 2011 [12], NASA has relied heavily on Russian Soyuz shuttles to maintain construction of ISS — at the price of 90 million US dollars per seat [13].

As an affiliated government agency, we were willing to offer opportunities for private contractors to enter this particular sector, who, indeed, did a great job. Not long ago, in 2020, SpaceX successfully launched the manual Crew Dragon Demo-2 in a similar mission [14]. We, however, still have to assure our pioneering position: let alone the burden of billions of dollars having drained from the budget, we also are shouldering the responsibility of bringing back scientific achievements to be discovered in the vast space.

This reasons out why innumerate scientists, engineers, and workers have been deployed into the making of Nova. However sophisticated it may be, we must not commit even the most trivial mistake. We will never let things fall apart again because an O-shaped rubber gasket shrunk under the freezing temperature, spilling hot air and causing the Challenger to explode within 70 seconds soaring from the launch base [15] . New designs in both the hull and rocket system, thus, prevent the insulating foam piece of Columbia’s external tank from bursting, breaching and damaging the left wing, leading to crashes while it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere [16]. That billions US dollars would reduce to ashes, inasmuch as a total of 14 astronauts did die away in those two crashes has been the reason to force shut this program.

It also reasons out my recent stress. Regaining my composure, I gave everything one last check. Let alone every terror-stricken technical issue, even a misplaced hyphen [17], or inconsistency between units of measure [18] can cease this unfledged attempt. Which took place, indeed.

T-9 minutes, countdown continues.

Having received the confirmation from my superiors, I pressed the button that started the ground launch sequencer. I felt my cheeks heat up as if I were standing in the engine combustion chamber heating up and enduring it for many minutes afterwards. When it is only 31 seconds left, I switch to automatic control signal transmission. Thick smoke begins to roll up towards the launch base.

3–2–1 — Launch!

There forms a gigantic ensemble of fire, and Nova soars, speeding away as a supernova.

At T-0, I see Bob smiling at me on the camera connected to the cockpit. His smile is as confident as when he told me about the tough training and flight test programs at last week’s snooker session. Then I will hear him talk about STS-136 again, with a slight smile — not the cheerful, congratulatory hugs of more than a hundred people in the Control Room right now.

To all appearances, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, in fact something went wrong and it all blew up. A simple math: the farther the journey is, the more it is set to go wrong; the more massive and complex the machine, the easier it bears small errors; the more detailed the process, the more straightforward it is to run into some problems — and carrying humans to the outer space converge all of which.

After all, we have succeeded, not once — no less of a demonstration of science power. Every seemingly woefully sophisticated machine, thanks to technology advents, has been unveiled, a series of complex elements have been processed through algorithms, and the formulas brought into being by Newton, Einstein or Maxwell (as well as every other scientist — a list long enough to never be fully listed).

It has all been science that wins us everything, while God only popped up once — when we celebrated our efforts — “Thank God” (he, nonetheless, might have been there all the time, albeit propelling forward literally nothing).

Yet to grasp the destiny of humanity, we, however, are building ours, piece-by-piece.

This article models on the spacecraft launch procedure provided in NASA documents, under an imaginary perspective of an employee at the center where the launch took place. This article does not necessarily accurately reflect the technical details of which, nor does it represent any organization. Monster Box’s responsibility is to assure the liability of information.

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References:

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mis.../shuttle/launch/countdown101.html

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Design-

[3] https://www.nasa.gov/.../top-five-technologies-needed.../

[4] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space-shuttle7.htm

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCOAT

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Space_Shuttle_thermal...

[7] https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=12034

[8] https://www.nasa.gov/ana.../nsrl/why-space-radiation-matters

[9] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space-shuttle1.htm

[10] https://www.technowize.com/worlds-most-powerful-rocket.../