On Monday, November 24th, 1997, while most of America was shopping for cargo pants at a new store called Old Navy, two men stood on the outside of a space shuttle more than 170 miles overhead. Only straps on their boots held them in place. They were waiting to catch a tumbling 3,000-pound satellite with their gloved hands, and almost nobody down on the ground was paying attention.
Earth had other things going on. Ally McBeal ruled television, Mortal Kombat Annihilation was the country's number one movie, and a thrilling new thing called text messaging worked only if the sender and the receiver were on the same cellular network. Titanic was about to open in theaters. Everyone was eating fistfuls of Nabisco SnackWell's cookies, since fat-free supposedly meant you could eat all of them.
Sold on a modest budget
The story begins in January 1972, when NASA announced the space shuttle program under President Richard Nixon. The government official pitching it skipped all the lofty talk about frontiers and the unknown. His case was that the shuttle could be built on a modest budget, that it would make space operations less complex and less costly, and that "the space shuttle is needed to do many useful things." He also promised it would be open to all the nations of the world.
Things moved fast anyway. Within four years NASA was testing the Enterprise orbiter. Columbia later circled the Earth 37 times before landing safely at Edwards Air Force Base with Robert L. Crippen and John W. Young aboard. Hardly anyone can name them, yet everyone can name the whole Scooby Doo gang. By 1984 Bruce McCandless II was floating untethered outside Challenger, and that crew landed right where it had launched, which is more than an airline can always promise.
Grief, then a blurry telescope
In 1986, 73 seconds into its 10th mission, Challenger broke apart in flight. All seven crew members were killed, including a schoolteacher. That night President Ronald Reagan told a grieving nation that the crew had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God." The shuttle program survived, but NASA's civilians-in-space initiative did not. Civilians would wait another 35 years to go up, until billionaire Richard Branson beat billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by eight days.
The wins kept coming. In 1990, Discovery's crew deployed the Hubble telescope, which cost more than a billion dollars, at the highest orbital altitude the shuttle program had ever attempted. Then everyone learned that a mistake in making Hubble's primary mirror had left its view a little blurry. Three years later, two teams of astronauts made a world-record five spacewalks and fixed its eyesight.
A flip to save a few bucks
In November 1997, Columbia launched on its 24th mission, a routine one. Racing toward orbit at 13 times the speed of sound, it rolled 180 degrees. NASA said the move wasn't dangerous, just necessary. Its tracking station in Bermuda was about to be shut down to save money, and without the flip the crew couldn't make radio contact with the satellites that relayed its communications.
This crew included astronauts from Japan, Ukraine and India. Twenty-five years late, "foreign visitors from all over the world" were finally riding the shuttle, just as promised. Their job was to release a small satellite called Spartan, which would spend two days studying the sun's outer atmosphere, solar winds and charged particles. That kind of solar activity can wreak havoc on power grids and radio systems back on Earth. After that, the crew would bring Spartan back aboard.
In 1997, NASA's fix for a broken, tumbling 3,000-pound satellite was to send two astronauts outside with only their boots strapped down. They waited more than three hours to grab it with their gloved hands, and both had to grab it at the same instant.
The satellite wouldn't dance
Astronaut Kalpana Chawla released Spartan, and it failed to perform what NASA calls a pirouette, the move that shows all of a satellite's systems are working. She tried the space version of turning it off and on again: grabbing it back with Columbia's 50-foot robotic arm. Anyone who has lost a stuffed Pikachu to an arcade claw game knows how that went. Worse, the failed grab set the satellite slowly spinning, and that put it all but out of the arm's reach.
Spartan was five feet square, weighed 3,000 pounds and cost $10 million, at a time when NASA couldn't afford a tracking station in Bermuda. Letting it fall back to Earth and burn up was out of the question. So astronauts Doy and Winston Scott suited up and stepped out into minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit, moving at about 17,500 miles an hour with the whole planet floating in front of them.
One chance, by hand
For safety, they stood at opposite ends of the cargo bay, their boots strapped down more loosely than you'd be buckled into a roller coaster. Columbia inched toward the tumbling satellite. Both men had to grab a telescope sticking out of Spartan's side at exactly the same instant, timed to the second. They had one chance. The wait stretched past three hours. At any point they could have asked to come back inside, and a fraction of a second too early or too late would have ruined the whole mission.
Instead, they snatched the dead satellite out of its doomed tumble and saved NASA $10 million. Then they calmly asked whether they could bring it aboard, sounding about as excited as someone asking for the salt.
Columbia would later meet a heartbreaking end, but not on this trip. Scott later tried to put the feeling into words. On his first spacewalk, he pulled himself up the side of the payload bay and looked down at the Earth racing by far below. "And I had the sensation I was falling." He was sure he would tumble over and hit the ground. He was falling, of course. That's what orbit is.