Columbia Returns

About this episode

April 12th 1981. Bob Crippen and John Young are in orbit around the Earth. Travelling at 17,500 miles an hour, with the world turning majestically beneath them, they witness 16 sunrises and sixteen sunsets every 24 hours. They have survived the violence of launch but the mission has run into a potential life-threatening problem. Crippen has just beamed footage down to mission control of missing tiles on the Shuttle’s OMS pods. If tiles are missing there, what about the underside of the orbiter, where the heat of reentry could cause catastrophic damage? Whilst Gene Kranz tries to re-assure the world’s press that everything is under control, elsewhere in NASA, a covert operation is underway to discover whether or not Clumbia’s maiden voyage into space could be its last. Ever wondered how the Space Shuttle came to be? Welcome to a new podcast series, 16 Sunsets. In this episode, Host Dr Kevin Fong reveals the inside story of the plan to save the first Shuttle mission from disaster. Featuring: Tom Moser, Chuck Lewis, Dottie Lee, Marianne Dyson, Gene Kranz, Bob Crippen, Robert Kelso, Bob Stewart, Don Pettit, Gerry Griffin, Charlie Bolden, Bonnie Dunbar, Neil Hutchinson,