STS-7 was my was my third launch. And it was only the second launch after the challenger accident. Well, I will never forget. We maneuvered the arm and Mike Mullane was my arm operator, so he moved the arm over there and we brought up the television image of the right wing. And I looked at what I was seeing and I said to myself, we are going to die. SCS-27 was my was my third launch and it was only the second launch after the challenger accident. So we lost challenger January the 28th 1986. It took us nearly three years to redesign, recertify, rebuild and we went through everything on the shuttle, not just the solid rocket boosters which caused the accident. We had to redesign those and re recertify. them for flight. And. The folks out in Utah, Thiokol, Morton Thiokol, and Thiokol incorporated, just did such a brilliant job on the redesign and the the way we mechanized the booster rockets. After challenger that we had just about zero problems with the booster rockets for the whole rest of the Space Shuttle program. But we had to we had to go through everything, not just the booster rockets, the external tank, the orbiter, everything about it. And then we were finally ready to launch again. And the first launch was Discovery launched in September of 1988. And then I got assigned to command the second launch of STS-27 aboard Atlantis. And. That was kind of interesting because I flew the last successful launch before challenger before the Challenger accident, and then I flew the second launch after we started up again. I almost flew back-to-back missions. And we were a top secret classified Department of Defense mission. So to this day, if I told you what we carried, you could never leave this hangar. So go ahead. Never had anybody tell me that before. careful what you wish for. But yes, it was a top secret classified mission. And one of the fascinating things about it was that my crew and I got briefed into what our capabilities in space are in terms of in terms of the military. And again, it's not weaponry. We don't put weapons in space. So it's not weaponry, but it's intelligence gathering, it's surveillance and. So we we were the second launch after after challenger accident after Discovery had flown in September. We launched on December the second of 1988. So it took us almost exactly three years to redesign and rebuild. And it was interesting being a top secret mission because there was a ton of press and media interest in the fight before mine, STS-26. And now here comes the top secret mission. Don't try to ask us any questions because we won't tell you anything. We can't cover what we're covering on this mission, and we're trying to avoid the press. And the press was just ferociously interested in anything space shuttle after the Challenger accident. In fact, the press had changed overnight prior to challenger the press. Talked about NASA and they said, OK, well NASA says they're going to do this and they're NASA. So they will do it and they'll make it work, they'll pull it off, that'll that'll be a. We're forecasting success already. After challenger, they flip-flopped. They were the opposite. It seemed like no matter what we were doing, they questioned it all. They were. They were. They were. Not agreeing that we were just going to go accomplish what we were going to go accomplish, but Even so, they sure wanted to be there for every little thing on the mission. So we actually tried to launch on December, the first of 1988 and the winds up at altitude were were raging. So this was December. So we've got winter winds up there and the jet stream during launch. Looks like 140 mile an hour wind shear to us because here's our jet stream flowing along from West to east and here we come up in our shuttle and by the time we got to where the jet stream was, we're going fast. We're probably up to Mach Oh golly Mach 2 at least. And so it looks like a sudden wind shear. So December the first we had winds that were out of limits. We can launch if our structural indicators say we've got 100% design load, we can launch at 100%. We can't launch at 101% design load. So on December the 2nd. We sat on the launchpad for about 4 1/2 hours and used up the whole entire launch window hoping for the winds to die down and right about the end when it looked like. We're not going to get the launch today either. The winds died down enough to where they where they concluded that we are at 100% design load, OK, we can launch. So we launched and we had very little. Time left I want to say seconds, maybe 30 seconds left in the launch window. So we just barely made it into space that day. Unbeknownst to us. During the launch, the nose cap of the right hand booster rocket, that's the big white rocket that's on the side of the thing. The nose cap has a coating of ablative material on it, and the ablative material obviously wasn't strong enough. It broke loose and pieces of it showered my right wing on Atlantis, so of course we couldn't see any of that. But the ground always goes through all the launch. Footage. All the movies, all the stills, everything to look for this sort of thing. So the next day. After we had gone to orbit and on the first day, we deployed a major new intelligence satellite for the United States. And that's about as much as I'm allowed to say about it, even to this day. This was 1988. So what's that? 34 years ago and we I still, I'm still not allowed to say what it was we carried, but I am allowed to say it was a a major new intelligence satellite. Mission Control called us and said: "Hey. Hoot during launch, we saw something hit your right wing". We want you to take the robot arm, which is they call it the RMS, the remote manipulator system. It has a television camera on the end of it as part of the system. So we want you to hang it over the right side of the orbiter and look at your right wing and tell us what you see. Well, I will never forget. We maneuvered the arm and Mike Mullane was my arm operator, so he moved the arm over there and we brought up the television image of the right wing and I looked at what I was seeing and I said to myself, we are going to die. Because we could see a vast amount of tile damage on the right wing. So I keyed the mic and I told told the Capcom, if I remember right, the capsule communicator or Capcom was Dave Hilmers. And I called him and I said, Dave, we're seeing a lot of tile damage on the right wing. And he said, OK, we'll, we'll, we'll get back to you. So they went away for a while and it turned out. Department of Defense. Didn't want any video coming down. Just in case we would have the death ray in the picture. OK, we didn't have a death ray. Just in case there would be something classified. Yeah. Yeah. The flux capacitor, like, yeah, from back to the future, yes. So DOD didn't want anything. Video any kind of imagery at all coming down from the mission. In fact, every photograph that we shot over the whole course of it was only 4 1/2 days. But one of the goals that you had as a shuttle crew was to shoot up every frame of film that you had on board. You didn't want to come back and land with any unexposed film. But DOD had to go through every single frame with a microscope and make sure there was nothing classified that accidentally showed up in any of these, any of these things. So for example, a a shot looking out the window. Of the earth and a particular point on the earth if somehow the time of that frame showed up. In the frame that was going to be a classified item because where we were at any particular time was going to be secret, although. You could pretty well tell where we were, but anyway, so DOD finally relented and said OK, since you really need to take a look at your right wing, we'll let you send down encrypted video. OK, well encrypted video isn't very good. It doesn't have very good resolution. And I guess what it does, it shoots A-frame and it takes about 3 seconds to encrypt it and record it, and then another frame another three seconds. So the resolution was so poor that down on the ground unbeknownst to us. Mission Control looked at it and said. That's not tiled damage, that's just lighting and shadows that these boys are looking at. Hoots all screwed up. Well, did they ever tell us that? No. They came back I guess after 24 hours because I think they looked at it for a full day before they came back. And Dave hilmers. Called and said OK uh, hey Hoot, we've got the we've got the resolution on your tiles. And I said OK yeah, great. Go ahead. Dave. What? He said it's no problem just re enter just like we always do. Well, I was incredulous. I couldn't believe it. And I called the Mike and I said Dave. What are they basing that on? And he said, OK, we'll stand by because he had to get the rationale from the engineers and all. And it came back about 10 minutes later and he said Hoot they looked at it and they said it's no worse than what we've seen on other missions. Notice they did not say. We don't think you're seeing tile damage. We think you're just seeing lighting and shadowing. He didn't say that, so this is called a failure to communicate. Now I think I was communicating because I said, Dave, we're seeing a lot of tile damage on that right wing. So they came back and said, meh, it's no worse than what we've seen before. Well, I said. Well, you know what, I've been here since before STS-1, the first shuttle launch, and I have never seen anything like this. And then I did something that I shouldn't have done. I kind of gave in. I said OK, but you guys are the experts. I should have dug my heels in and said, hey, let's talk about this, because I'm definitely seeing serious tile damage. But I think the big failure to communicate was on Mission Control. They never said to me. You are not seeing tile damage Hoot, You're just messed up. It's just lights and shadows. Because if they had done that I would have said OK, I'm sending you clear TV. Because I'm definitely seeing tile damage. Uh, but I caved in because it was always and still is, considered bad form for an astronaut to get into an argument with Mission Control. In fact, it's career limiting for you to get into a contest. A fighting contest with Mission Control. So I gave in and I shouldn't have, I should have made them talk about it some more. And so there were some, ah, there were some funny things that came out of it the night before re-entry. I remember one of the astronauts, one of the astronauts was talking about how. He was a little bit more than nervous about this reentry tomorrow. And, and I said to him, ah, come on, don't feel that way. No use dying all tensed up. And so you know this is fighter pilot humor, you know or you know gallows humor and. However, all the way down on re-entry I was watching the elevons. I can see right where the left elevons are and where the right elevons are on my display, and I knew that if we started to burn through the right wing, what I would see. Is we would build up more drag on that right wing and to balance the amount of drag, the left elevon would be going down and that creates drag. That's how we create drag with an elevon at this 40 degree angle of attack that we fly re-entry at. And so all the way down I have the audio that I that I made from the re entry, that we made, the crew made for the reentry, and all the way down in the atmosphere about every two minutes. I'd say guys, that controls look good, the elevons look good. So we watched them all the way down because I knew what I'd see as I'd see a split. The right elephants would be going up, the left elephants would be going down. Oh, and Elevon is a combination aileron and elevator. So that's why it's called elevon. So that's what we have on the trailing edge of both winks. I'd see the right elevon going up and the left elevon going down. And if that happened, I knew that I might have 60 seconds to tell Mission Control what I thought of their analysis, but fortunately all the way down the the elevon stayed stayed matched. So that said to me, I'm pretty sure we're not burning through over on the right wing. But after we landed. There was amazement, there was absolute amazement. We had damaged 770 tiles. And I think 300 of them were serious damage to the tiles, chunks bigger than an inch that were chopped out of the tile. Just for perspective, what what percentage of the tiles is 770? It's not a real big percentage, but it was over on the right wing. It's enough to destroy the. Shuttle. on the right wing? Oh, absolutely. And and even more than that, John, we had one tile that was entirely missing, which we had not been able to see. With the robot camera, with the RMS camera, we had not been able to see that we had one tile entirely gone, and we almost burned through at that location. We lucked out many, many ways that we came back at all, but we lucked out. In that particular location where that tile had been mounted, there was a thick plate under it that I had something to do with a ground plane antenna. For the L band system. So there was a thicker plate there and it didn't burn through. If it had just been the regular aluminum surface, I suppose there's a chance that that might have burned through and if that had happened, we might have been the Columbia accident on only the second launch after the challenger accident. And if we had broken up at Mach 17, which is where Columbia broke up in 2003, if we had broken up at Mach 17, where were we? We were in the North Pacific, just South of the Aleutian Islands. We would have gone into the ocean when we broke up. There wouldn't have been much to find. That would have been the very end of us, of course, but it would have been the end of the shuttle program, because the discussion would have sounded like this. We gave you guys all this money to fix your space shuttles, and you lost the second launch after you started up again. It's the end. We can't afford to keep doing this. It would have been the end of the shuttle program. It would have been the end of us, of course, but. Where was the where was the big mistake? The big mistake was Mission Control didn't tell us what they were thinking. We definitely told them what we were thinking. And that's a an important lesson for leadership and for communication. Tell what you're thinking. And. I gave in and I shouldn't have done that. I should have said, hey, you know, you need to talk to me a little bit more about this, because I'm pretty darn sure that I've never seen anything like this before. So I I guess I'm partly to blame for us entering that way without knowing that Mission Control could have possibly looked at something. Maybe there was something we could do to fly a more gentle reentry. I don't know. When you got down and saw that tile damage, did you have to keep your hands in your pockets to keep from punching somebody in the face? Well, no, cause you know, we wouldn't have known who to punch. There probably would have been too many people for us to punch. But in the debrief this, you know, this won't give us any any great satisfaction whatsoever? I asked the lead Ascent and entry flight director. Who was responsible for Mission Control as the leadership and Mission Control? I asked him in the debrief. I said, OK, if you had listened to us, And paid attention to what we were saying and realized that we did have serious tile damage. What do you suppose we could have done? and he said; "I don't know". And that was as far as it went. So what did we do after STS-27? The only thing we fixed after STS-27 was we went to a stronger ablative. Remember several minutes ago I mentioned the ablative on the nose cone or the right booster rocket disintegrated. They went to a stronger ablative. So we had no more problems with that, ever Again. I don't know what an ablative is. Oh, that's that's a material that will erode under real high temperature and burn off very gradually. All the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft had an ablative heat shield. So it would burn and char and then the char would break away and then the next layer would burn and char and break away. And that was how you protected the aluminum surface of the of the vehicle. So that was to protect protect the the booster rocket nose caps because those could be reused. So or or just to protect them. I'm not sure those can be reused, but it was to protect the the rate gyros and things that would be up in the nose cone of the booster rocket. We went to a stronger ablative. We did not say, OK, if this happens again, we had to repair some tiles or repair a missing tile. Could we do that? We have looked at it very briefly. NASA had looked at it. Very briefly before the first Shuttle Launch STS-1 because after the trouble we had flying Columbia from California to Florida and had all these tiles come loose. There was talk about, OK, what if we get up there in space and there's a bunch of missing tiles? Can we come up with a a putty that we could putty up that that gap? That was done a little bit before STS-1, but then we saw that our tiles worked OK, so we never did anything else about it, so even after we had lost the tile. We never looked into what could we do to replace a tile on orbit, so we weren't prepared for this, and we weren't prepared when we lost Columbia either. And we didn't, we didn't look into Columbia as thoroughly as we should have. Maybe there was something that we could have done.
