Word: crippen
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...ready to command the Columbia space shuttle on its maiden voyage, scheduled for March. A former Navy jet pilot who retired in 1976 with the rank of captain, Young logged four trips into outer space between 1965 and 1972. His co-pilot in Columbia will be Robert Crippen, 43, a Navy captain and jet pilot. The two have more than 12,000 hours flying time and an almost boyish sense of excitement about getting the chance to control the most sophisticated flying machine ever built...
Young and Crippen are just two of the 80 astronauts now being trained for shuttle flights at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. Most were selected from more than 11,000 applicants over the past three years. Of the group, 47 are pilots and the rest are mission specialists-mostly scientists and physicians who will operate the equipment aboard the shuttle. The trainees include eight women, three blacks, one Hispanic, and the world's first husband and wife astronauts, William and Anna Fisher...
With the other pilots, Young and Crippen began full-time training in January 1978. Each has received 25 hours of formal instruction a week in such subjects as navigation and astronomy, but each also spends many more hours poring over what Astronaut Crew Trainer Thomas Kaiser calls the "cookbook"-a 21-volume compendium of launch, orbit and descent procedures for piloting Columbia that will be on board during the flight. The manual is changed constantly; in the office shared by Young and Crippen is a stack of mimeographed revisions 2½ ft. high. The two men have also spent more...
...accustom themselves to the weightlessness of space, Young and Crippen have donned pressurized suits and entered a water tank, where they performed flight operations in an orbiter model. But perhaps the most important drills have involved the crucial moments of takeoff and landing. Unless the blast-off is precise, says Young, "you can almost leave the wings sitting on the ground. You have to thread that needle very carefully." The risk in landing is that Columbia will swoop down with no power; there would thus be no way of correcting a mistake...
...taken advantage of some of the delays to really put ourselves in a much better position to handle just about every contingency," says Crippen. Adds Young: "For example, what if you lost two of the shuttle's three main engines? The thinking was you had lost the whole vehicle. But now we've found we could land...