This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
History

My STS-1 Story

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 12, 2021
Filed under

Keith’s note: I had an interesting job at STS-1 – I was Jerry Brown’s advance man. I took a few days off from my job at Rockwell Downey where I stood inside of Discovery and Atlantis as they were being built to work for my old boss (I worked on his 1980 presidential campaign). The trip to the launch was insane. The area was still somewhat boarded up after the post-Apollo economic downturn and things were opening up for the shuttle era. So everyone was happy on the Space Coast.
At one point I: drove a large Chevy back and forth between the Mouse Trap and the old Holiday Inn (more than once) with Mercury and Gemini astronauts inside: tried to get Jerry to say hi to Christopher Reeve (he did, what a really nice guy he was); tried to keep Jerry away from Pat Boone (failed); set up a dinner with our group and (then) Rep. Bill Nelson – who then stood us up; and spent a lot of time talking to author James Michener about the new space book he was writing. The son of the President of Mexico, Nichelle Nichols, astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand were in our traveling entourage.
Before the launch I also spent a lot of time walking around with George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg (who joined our merry bunch) looking at IMAX cameras and bothering Tom Brokaw while a very patient Judy Resnik answered questions. We then walked down A1A to Al Neuharth’s Punkin Center. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” premiered 15 June 1981. Let’s just say I got a slight preview of coming attractions. I left them saying “keep doing what you are doing”. They did.
After the launch at Al Neuharth’s house I let Alan Shephard and Buzz Aldrin use my motel key to scratch their signatures on the viewfinder of the Hasselblad camera that our photographer Jamie Stoughton used – his father was JFK’s photographer (he also took the B&W photos of me and Jerry at the launch). An hour or so after the launch a helicopter flew over the house and dropped bundles of Florida Today newspapers showing pictures of the launch we just saw. The entire event was surreal.
Oh and then there was the landing. At the landing I offered Nastassja Kinski a donut on the bus up to Edwards and she acted insulted that I’d offer her junk food. At the VIP area John Denver and I were trying to figure out how to properly use the Canon A-1 cameras we had both just bought. And then the shuttle dropped like a brick onto the runway. I was 25. My feet never touched through ground through out this mission.
That is my STS-1 story.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

4 responses to “My STS-1 Story”

  1. Greg Clements says:
    0
    0

    What a cool perspective, Keith. . . I remember being a senior in high school during STS-1, and my entire class cheered when we heard that the launch was successful. Started me thinking about space, and I am still at it, forty years later. It never gets old.

  2. Marcelo Vazquez says:
    0
    0

    Keith, I was there as a fake journalist from Argentina, Incredible moment that changed my life. At the end, I worked for more that 20 years for NASA.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.c

  3. M Engle says:
    0
    0

    Great story Keith! What an exciting time that was. I was a fairly new NASA employee, having been hired almost exactly one year earlier. As a flight controller-in-training, I was put in charge of a group of co-op students tasked with monitoring Columbia’s skin temperature data. The idea was that if any tiles were missing on the belly, we could detect it by plotting the data from the skin temperature probes attached underneath the tiles (as I’m sure you recall, the thermal tiles were one of – if not THE – major concerns on this flight. By the way, the data was plotted by hand on engineering graph paper! Prior to the flight I built a large scale model of Columbia that we kept on our MCC backroom console, and when the first downlnked TV revealed some tiles missing from the OMS pods, we used a red marker on the model to color in the areas where they were missing. During one of the shifts when I was off-console, someone came in to borrow the model so they could show Vice President Bush the location of the missing tiles (or so the folks on console at the time told me). After the mission I went back to our room to get the model and it was gone. Someone, somewhere, has a great souvenir of that first mission.

  4. robert_law says:
    0
    0

    fantastic story Keith ! I watched it hear in Scotland live on tv it was so exiting time the dawn of a new space age .