Boldly going nowhere: the checkered career of the space shuttle Enterprise.
What can you do with a spaceship that can't fly in space? Not much, it turns out.
Forty-seven years ago today, on August 12, 1977, a flight of an unusual craft occurred over the California desert near Edwards Air Force Base. The pilot’s name was Joe Engle, the flight lasted 5 minutes and 21 seconds, and the craft wound up on a dry lake bed. Though not very long in duration, this flight was historic: it was the first free flight of a spaceship, the space shuttle Enterprise. After Apollo and Skylab, the space shuttle program was to be America’s next bold venture in space, and this flight was a crucial test that would help make it happen.
The novelty of the space shuttle program was that it wasn’t a capsule, which all previous human space missions had been. The shuttle, or “orbiter” as NASA called it, was designed to be launched like a rocket from a launch pad, orbit the Earth, then re-enter and land on a runway like a terrestrial airplane. That’s easier to do on paper or in a laboratory mockup, though, than in real life, chiefly because the space shuttle weighs far more than a normal plane, and its engines only work in space—when it’s in the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s a glider. Actually landing it is a tricky business. But on that August day, Joe Engle managed to pull it off, and demonstrated the viability of the spaceship that, at least in 1977, was supposed to revolutionize human spaceflight.
