When exactly do astronauts receive their 'badass soundbite' training?
Universally, they've a knack for memorable space-quips. Apollo 14 veteran Edgar Mitchell gave us "From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say 'look at that, you son of a b***h'."
John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, described the tension during countdown as "knowing you were sitting on top of two million parts - all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract". My personal favourite analysis of a space shuttle launch comes from real life TOPGUN graduate Hoot Gibson, who flew five of its 135 missions. "You just hear a massive explosion and pray you're going up."
Close your eyes for a second and remember the shuttle. You're imagining the launch, aren't you? An undeniably spectacular sequence of mechanical, chemical and sonic events as 2,000,000kg of hardware, humans and fuel roared off the pad, doing 0-60mph slower than a Honda Civic Type R but breaching the sound barrier less than a minute later, on the way to 17,500mph. Five miles a second.
Bringing the orbiter (that's the black and white winged bit where the astronauts and cargo sit - only when the orange external tank and twin solid rocket boosters (SRBS) were attached was the whole assembly strictly a 'space shuttle') back to Earth was just as treacherous as firing it skywards. As I'm sure you know, the whole point of the shuttle was reusability. Unlike the Mercury and Apollo rockets designed to jettison spent stages into the ocean, the orbiter was Earth's removals lorry, lugging experiments and equipment into orbit then 'gliding' home. The SRBS parachuted into the ocean after launch. Only the relatively cheap liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel tank was allowed to burn up in the atmosphere.
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