Space Shuttle – Chapter 4 – The Atlantis Close Call

On the 2nd of December, 1988, the Orbiter Atlantis successfully took off from Kennedy Space Center at 09:30 EST, carrying a crew of five. The STS-27 mission was top-secret, one of those rare occasions when the Space Shuttle program was used for military purposes. Tucked inside the cargo bay was a surveillance satellite, commissioned by the US Department of Defense.

NASA launched Atlantis right on schedule, and the lift-off procedure was flawless. It was the second Space Shuttle flight after the loss of Challenger and tensions were very high.

The ship reached its orbit as planned but there was a minor hiccup during the deployment of the satellite and the crew had to perform a spacewalk to fix it. At the end of the day, the secret device was released and the current progress of the mission has been satisfactory.

On the third day in space, the crew received dreadful news from ground control; footage of the launching showed that a piece of the insulator from the right side solid rocket booster broke away and the debris damaged the fragile thermal protection of the orbiter. The crew used the camera installed on the robotic arm to assess the damages. They found out that one of the thermal titles was missing, and several others were damaged. To make matters worse, the arm couldn’t reach the area on the leading edge of the wings, the part of the orbit that experiences the most heat during reentry.

The crew sent the pictures taken by the robotic arm to NASA, but since this mission was highly classified, they had to use encrypted software and the images received had a very low resolution, making it impossible for the engineers to access the extent of the damages.

At this point, there was nothing the crew or NASA could do other than pray. On December 6th, Atlantis started its journey back home, the reentry was initiated while the ship was flying over the Indian Ocean, as the Commander was aiming to land at Edwards Air Force Base.

To everyone’s relief, they made it through the atmosphere and safely landed at Edwards. When the technicians came to ship and inspected the damages, they were in disbelief, the level of breakage was way worse than what they were expecting. The fact that Atlantis didn’t burn during the reentry was nothing short of a miracle.

Now that we know how close the mission STS-27 came to a disaster, we can only speculate that the loss a second orbiter in such a short period of time would have caused the termination of the entire program.