Article September 16, 2002 Issue

My first flight into space

By Guion Bluford

"Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Liftoff, Liftoff of STS-8, on The First Night Launch Of The Space Shuttle. " With these words from Mission Control, I began my first adventure into space.

It was dark at 2:30 a.m. But as the solid rocket boosters ignited and the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off, the night sky seemed to turn into day. The two rocket boosters plus three shuttle rocket engines thrust us upward. Inside the shuttle, we were hanging upside down, being bounced around in what felt like a fast and noisy elevator. No wonder it sounded so loud and felt so fast. In just two minutes, we were traveling three times the speed of sound and were already 22 miles above the ground! It takes a passenger airplane over ten minutes just to reach five miles above ground.

Suddenly, the ride became smooth and quiet as the shuttle released the solid rocket boosters, and we surged forward to 18,000 miles an hour on the three main rocket engines. As the engines propelled us even further into orbit, we were pressed against our seats with the force of three G's—or three times our body weight on earth. We certainly couldn't move around much under all that pressure. But I could move my head enough to look out the window. We were hurtling across the Atlantic Ocean just in time to see the sun peek out from behind the earth and light up the African continent with the rays of dawn. In a wide arc, the sun touched down on the tan of the deserts and the greens of the grasslands and the forests. This was a unique and spectacular view.

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