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Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
By Rowland White and Richard Truly
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
A book “no aviation buff will want to miss” (The Wall Street Journal) and “the perfect tale that educates as it entertains” (Clive Cussler, #1 bestselling author), Into the Black recaptures the historic moments leading up to and the exciting story of the astronauts who flew the daring maiden flight of the space shuttle Columbia.
Using interviews, NASA oral histories, and recently declassified material, Into the Black pieces together the dramatic untold story of the Columbia mission and the brave people who dedicated themselves to help the United States succeed in the age of space exploration. On April 12, 1981, NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral. It was the most advanced, state-of-the-art flying machine ever built, challenging the minds and imagination of America’s top engineers and pilots. Columbia was the world’s first real spaceship: a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, and capable of flying to space and back before preparing to fly again.
On board were moonwalker John Young and test pilot Bob Crippen. Less than an hour after Young and Crippen’s spectacular departure from the Cape, all was not well. Tiles designed to protect the ship from the blowtorch burn of re-entry were missing from the heat shield. If the damage to Columbia was too great, the astronauts wouldn’t be able to return safely to earth. NASA turned to the National Reconnaissance Office, a spy agency hidden deep inside the Pentagon whose very existence was classified. To help the ship, the NRO would attempt something never done before. Success would require skill, perfect timing, and luck.
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Into the Black is a thrilling race against time and the incredible true story of the first space shuttle mission that celebrates our passion for spaceflight.
Using interviews, NASA oral histories, and recently declassified material, Into the Black pieces together the dramatic untold story of the Columbia mission and the brave people who dedicated themselves to help the United States succeed in the age of space exploration. On April 12, 1981, NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral. It was the most advanced, state-of-the-art flying machine ever built, challenging the minds and imagination of America’s top engineers and pilots. Columbia was the world’s first real spaceship: a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, and capable of flying to space and back before preparing to fly again.
On board were moonwalker John Young and test pilot Bob Crippen. Less than an hour after Young and Crippen’s spectacular departure from the Cape, all was not well. Tiles designed to protect the ship from the blowtorch burn of re-entry were missing from the heat shield. If the damage to Columbia was too great, the astronauts wouldn’t be able to return safely to earth. NASA turned to the National Reconnaissance Office, a spy agency hidden deep inside the Pentagon whose very existence was classified. To help the ship, the NRO would attempt something never done before. Success would require skill, perfect timing, and luck.
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Into the Black is a thrilling race against time and the incredible true story of the first space shuttle mission that celebrates our passion for spaceflight.
Author
Rowland White
Rowland White is the author of three critically acclaimed works of aviation history: Vulcan 607, Phoenix Squadron, and Storm Front. All three have been Sunday Times top ten bestsellers. His most recent novel is Into the Black.
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Reviews for Into the Black
Rating: 3.9875000375 out of 5 stars
4/5
40 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The “extraordinary untold story of the first flight of the space shuttle Columbia and the astronauts who flew her” is a real-life thriller that traces the historical background that led to the development and launch of the first space shuttle. The unfolding of the story is a riveting précis of the space program in the United States, a tribute to those who strove for the success of America’s first steps into space. Detailing the true story of the first space shuttle mission, the narrative replays the “space race” during the Cold War of the 1960s and reminds readers of the time when all Americans turned their eyes to skies and thrilled to the wonders of astronauts and space exploration.Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Too superficial (picks up on many technical issues but never goes into any detail) and needlessly sprinkled with hooks straight out of fiction (talking about style, not content), like jumping around chronologically. I would understand if this was the history of the construction of the M1 but you're writing about people going into space - how much more exciting do you need to make this?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For the dedicated enthusiast. I'm not so interested in the Space Shuttle program, but White still tells a good story. He is completely uncritical of NASA and the program, however. In his eyes, NASA can do wrong. He does not mention any of the big management failures leading to the Challenger disaster, and skips over the program's failure to achieve affordable space access, or anything particularly significant. Boondoggle though it may have been, it was still a cool spaceship, and White engagingly tells the story of its development, testing, and first mission to orbit.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As a child of the 80s the shuttle program has always loomed large in my imagination, so I found Rowland White's "Into the Black" a fascinating look at the development of the shuttle and Columbia's maiden flight.White's book is very well researched and includes some of the "side stories" of Columbia, including the pilots who flew chase during the shuttle's landing and the extraordinary efforts taking to get pictures of the orbiter's heat tiles when they were feared damaged. Rowland sometimes dips into technical details, but for the most part keeps the focus on the human players."Into the Black" is a great book for anyone interested in aviation history, manned space flight, or just thrilling real life adventures.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White's new book is a nonfiction account of the first flight of the first fully-operative US space shuttle, Columbia, April 12-14, 1981, with looks backward and forward to examine many of the factors and events affecting or affected by that flight. Most prominent of these factors are the mutual influences between the NASA civilian program and the parallel, military programs for space-based surveillance of the Soviet Union.White starts in the 1950s. As NASA human spaceflight progressed, the US Air Force recruited a separate cadre of astronauts meant to staff orbiting stations dedicated to reconnaissance. Automation outpaced human usefulness for this task, and the stations went unbuilt, with the now-unneeded flyers filtering into NASA, stuck with waits of many years until they might fly on the shuttle. Meanwhile, robot spacecraft photographed possible military sites and helped keep the peace.Military influence also filtered into the design of the shuttle, which eventually grew larger - and more expensive - than initially planned. These modifications were needed for the shuttle to launch new generations of spy satellites. Without the support of the military, the shuttle might not have been built at all, but the shuttle program would be in many ways hampered by its added role, a role it never filled as hoped. In the end, the launch facility at California's Vandenburg Air Force Base, intended to send off those spy satellite missions, would be mothballed without ever being used.Columbia's first launch from NASA's Kennedy Center went well, but when they reached orbit, astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen discovered that some of the heat-shielding tiles had fallen off the upper rear of the craft. As NASA engineers worked to estimate the danger those gaps might pose during atmospheric reentry, everyone knew that similar losses on the bottom of the orbiter would be even more dangerous. But the astronauts had no means to examine that part of the orbiter while in flight.To carry out that examination, the secret reconnaissance program was asked to photograph the shuttle using one of its spy satellites - a tricky problem in coordinating two fast-moving spacecraft, one of which was so secret the USA barely acknowledged its existence. This photographic feat is White's principal story: NASA was able to reassure its astronauts that the problem was not as severe as initially feared, even though the photographs supporting that view could not be shown publicly.[Into the Black] does well at describing the tremendous effort that went into designing, building, testing, and flying the shuttle. Technical details are explained for the nontechnical reader. If I have a complaint, it is that White tends to give the impression that most everything was done by the astronauts themselves. They appear to have been most of his sources, and, with some exceptions, the work of the vast number of NASA and contractor employees gets subsumed into tales of some astronaut or other taking a problem in hand.White's looks forward from 1981 cover the losses of Challenger and Columbia in later years, and judges the orbiters themselves to have been successful servants of the US space program for three decades. True, but it's important to remember that the overall program fell far short of its goal as an inexpensive, high-launch frequency, space cargo system, even as it overcame formidable technical challenges.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The best book on manned space flight is, without question, 'Carrying The Fire' by Michael Collins (the command module pilot on the Apollo XI mission). Rowland White runs Collins a very close second.This is an extraordinarily well-researched, detailed and immersive description of the development of the NASA Space Shuttle and the initial cadre of astronauts charged with actually flying the thing. As someone with a general interest in space flight who lived through the moon landings and actually touched the Enterprise prototype (at the New Orleans World Fair in 1984) I thought I knew the story pretty well. I found surprises, shocks and new data on almost every page of this book. The involvement of the US Air Force in space activities in general and the Shuttle in particular was new and astounding, along with the part that Vandenberg Air Force Base played in the story.White combines strong narrative flow with exceptional attention to technical details that draw the reader in. I cannot recommend this too highly.
Book preview
Into the Black - Rowland White
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