The shuttle is "right on the money" and gives the U.S. a mighty lift
Suddenly shouts rose from the hot, sunbaked desert floor in Southern California. There it was, high over the distant buttes, a tiny, gleaming dot in the pale blue sky, an apparition from space returning to earth.
Inside the cockpit, the 50-year-old commander, with glasses specially fitted into his helmet to correct the farsightedness of middle age, took over the controls for the final critical maneuvers. Expertly, the veteran pilot guided his craft through a long, easy turn. When he completed the maneuver, the ship was lined up perfectly with a runway marked in the ancient, arid bed of Rogers Dry Lake six miles away. "Right on the money, right on the money!" encouraged Mission Control.
Then John Young edged the "stick" forward, and his ship's porpoise-shaped nose dropped slightly. Plunging earthward, Columbia was falling at an angle about seven times steeper than a normal airliner's descent and was traveling half again as fast. Powerful as it had been on takeoff, the ship was now functioning as a 102-ton glider with no engine to correct its course.
At 1,800 ft. and 35 sec. from landing, Young pulled back the stick to check his dive. Only Columbia's stubby wings and slightly flared underbelly were giving it lift. But, to his delight, he found the craft far more aerodynamically buoyant than expected. Nineteen seconds before landing, he dropped his wheels.
"Gear down," reported a chase jet, buzzing alongside and counting off the altitude: "50 feet . . . 40 . . . 5—4—3—2—1—Touchdown!" As its rear wheels made contact, the flight director in far-off Houston told his tense crew: "Prepare for exhilaration." Nine seconds later, the nose wheels were down too. Columbia settled softly onto the lake bed. Young had floated the shuttle along 3,000 ft. beyond the planned landing spot, able to use its surprising lift to make a notably smooth touchdown. As it rolled to a stop through the shimmering desert air, The Star-Spangled Banner rattled forth from hundreds of portable radios tuned to a local station. From Mission Control in Houston's Johnson Space Center came an exuberant "Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful. Beautiful."
So it was: simple and flawless, almost as if it had been performed countless times before. Yet the picture-perfect landing on California's Mojave Desert last week all but obscured the historic nature of those last, breathtaking moments of Columbia's 54½-hr. odyssey. Gone were the great parachutes and swinging capsules of earlier space missions, splashing into the sea, never to travel into space again. For the first time, a man-made machine had returned from the heavens like an ordinary airplane—in fact, far more smoothly than many a commercial jet. So long delayed so widely criticized, Columbia's flight should finally put to rest any doubts that there will one day be regular commuter runs into the cosmos.