Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011

by Rick Houston, Jerry Ross (Foreword)

Humanity’s first reusable spacecraft and the most complex machine ever built, NASA’s Space Shuttle debuted with great promise and as a dependable source of wonder and national pride. But with the Challenger catastrophe in 1986, the whole Space Shuttle program came into question, as did NASA itself, so long an institution that was seemingly above reproach. Wheels Stop tells the stirring story of how, after the Challenger disaster, the Space Shuttle not only recovered but went on to perform its greatest missions. From the Return to Flight mission of STS-26 in 1988 to the last shuttle mission ever on STS-135 in 2011, Wheels Stop takes readers behind the scenes as the shuttle’s crews begin to mend Cold War tensions with the former Soviet Union, conduct vital research, deploy satellites, repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and assist in constructing the International Space Station. It also tells the heart-wrenching story of the Columbia tragedy and the loss of the magnificent STS-107 crew. As complex as the shuttle was, the people it carried into orbit were often more so—and this is their story, too. Close encounters with astronauts, flight controllers, and shuttle workers capture the human side of the Space Shuttle’s amazing journey—and invite readers along for the ride.

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Genres: Space, History, Nonfiction, Science, American History

456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Gary Schroeder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth book I’ve read in the excellent “People’s History of Spaceflight Series,” the prior books covering Projects Gemini, through Apollo, ands finally, Skylab. “Wheels Stop,” familiar to space-watchers as the final call heard from Mission Control at the conclusion of a Shuttle mission, is a solid addition to the series, covering the highlights of the Space Shuttle program from 1986 to 2011.

I have to say up front—and as you might suspect—due to the nature of the Shuttle program, much of the narrative is a bit less thrilling than, say, the books covering the exploits of the Apollo program. Having said that, I have to praise author Rick Houston for doing a fine job. It’s no easy feat to summarize twenty five year’s worth of shuttle flights in a single volume. (What should be highlighted? What should be left out? Who should be specifically mentioned?) I think Houston handled it about as well as anyone could, deftly weaving together many personal stories gathered in dozens of interviews with the astronauts and engineers behind the program.

A trap for this book could have been to approach 25 years’ worth of shuttle missions sequentially, which might have been a recipe for a plodding—even boring—narrative. Houston avoids this by delivering a non-sequential format focused instead on major themes: missions to Mir, Hubble Telescope servicing missions, and assembly of the International Space Station. And, of course, the devastating loss of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.

I’d say the the most compelling sections of the book are those that deal with the loss of Columbia and the subsequent “Return to Flight,” as it was known to program insiders. There are passages in these sections which are, to this day, 11 years after the accident, simply searing in their intensity. It’s hard to read them without feeling in a knot welling up in your gut. Those who stood by to pick up the pieces, determine the causes and correct the system were all deeply affected by the experience. Most were changed forever. Houston takes the reader as close to being a NASA insider as an observer can get.

The list of personalities and interviews that are assembled for this book are impressive and, as with past volumes in this series, really form its backbone. Many astronaut interviews are presented verbatim in extended quotes that really allow the reader to get into their thoughts. Some of the names are familiar, but many are not. The program lasted for such a long period of time and flew so many different astronauts that, unlike programs such as Apollo, the stories are less easily associated with famous characters. However, their personal stories are key to understanding the feeling of “mission” that each of the Shuttle astronauts seemed to feel so keenly.

Despite the achievements of the Shuttle program, the spectacular engineering of mankind’s most complex flying machine, and the impressive dedication of the teams that put it all together, there is a lingering question that hangs over the entire book: what was the value of it all? Was the Shuttle a 30-year detour from more productive efforts in space exploration? Aside from Hubble servicing missions and ISS assembly, was repeatedly sending humans into low earth orbit necessary or the best expenditure of our national resources? That’s a question that’s difficult to answer and how you feel about it most likely depends on who you are. Houston recognizes this 800-pound gorilla in the room and acknowledges it but does not try to present a pat answer. And that’s a credit to him. Many more years will likely have to pass before we can evaluate this program objectively. In the mean time, you can best formulate your personal answer by reading “Wheels Stop.”

[kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wheels Stop (a "partner" book to Bold They Rise ) focuses on NASA's shuttle program from 1986 through its final flight in 2011, covering some of the dizzying heights of a human presence in space (the Hubble missions; visiting the Mir; assembling the ISS)—and of course, one of its staggering tragedies (the loss of Columbia on February 1, 2003).

1. Overall, I found this entry very uneven. The shuttle program's focus changed after the Challenger disaster, and Wheels Stop jumps right in with a scattered, unfocused chapter on "all but one" of the "science missions" of the 1990s. There's no clear organization or purpose beyond getting the science missions out of the way, and it's capped off with some of the sloppiest "foreshadowing" I've witnessed in a non-fiction book.

(This is where, for those of you who may not be Space Nerds, I explain that the final "science mission" of the shuttle program was STS-107 in 2003, aka the final flight of Columbia. This flight is not covered in the "science mission" chapters. Alluding to it as the "all but one" in the opening chapter is ... a decision.)

Following that, the book then diverts to talk about Hubble, with some sloppy timeline stuff happening: some Hubble missions happened before 2003, and one after—but we haven't talked about Columbia yet so don't ask any questions. The information is interesting, but also superficial. I know how important Hubble is (or was, if you're a Webb stan) to science, but not because of anything in this particular book. Which is fine! This isn't a book about Hubble, but it really showcases just how little context there is for the larger impact of the shuttle program.

(Also if you haven't explored Hubble's mirror issues, check that out.)

Next are the Mir missions, and then the Columbia tragedy, before a rather slapdash wrap up of the final ~22 (minus SM4 / Hubble service flight) shuttle missions. (And honestly, realizing that there were TWENTY TWO post-Columbia missions is kind of shocking since the final potion of the book was really, really mushy.)

2. I want to talk about the portion of the book that looks at the Columbia disaster. Overall, Houston (the author, not the mission control) does a decent job of introducing the astronauts, what brought them to NASA, the forces at play at NASA while STS-107 was still in orbit (and the ultimate decision to NOT seek out additional imaging following the foam strike that doomed the shuttle), and the various reactions of grief and rage and frustration and horror that enveloped the astronaut and NASA community in the days and months and years afterwards.

Here's the thing: Houston opens the book with a forward that's pretty....religiously toned, and his focus on the crew of STS-107 definitely echoes that bias. There's a small note that Husband led the crew in prayer before launch in January 2003, for example, and it's presented as a good thing.

...But STS-107 was also the first flight of an Israeli astronaut, Ilan Roman, and the second flight of Pakistani-born Kalpana Chawla, and it's just so obvious that there's a Christian flare to Houston's presentation that it really, really disgusted me.

(It's not helped by the fact that there are several sections where the astronaut blurbs veer off into heavily Christian-focused exposition. There's one section in particular where an astronaut talks about how he asked "his Almighty' to either get him in the program or take his dream away before he "falls to his knees" in gratitude once he gets in. These sections are particularly frustrating because there's no equivalency in the text; these stories are promoted because they (seemingly) align with Houston's preferred belief system, and therefore deserve unnecessary space in a book allegedly about the shuttle program. Not, you may note, the religious beliefs of the astronaut corps.)

3. The epilogue, for some reason, focuses on two specific astronauts and I honestly have no idea why? One does mission trips, so I can make some assumptions about why that guy gets special page time, and the other ... eventually climbs Everest. O....K?

5. Seriously, this book was really disappointing. I did enjoy the parts NOT mired in religion, but it was much more disappointing than Bold They Rise. 2.5 stars, rounding up.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's in the book is fairly interesting and well-conveyed, but it suffers from some baffling editorial choices. Focusing on the story of the Space Shuttle after Challenger and until its final flight I guess makes some sense, but there's absolutely no history of the development of the space shuttle, it's structure, what the interior was like, or any other background detail. It's almost like some odd quirk of Houston's that he assumes readers know the overall story and doesn't bother with the context. For example, the Columbia incident gets discussed in detail but without really an explanation of what the foam hitting the underside of the ship even did. And in probably the most frustrating instance, Houston never actually explains why they decommissioned the shuttle. Maybe it's because this book is part of some history of space flight series that it's covered elsewhere, but I cannot fathom why an editor allowed a book about the triumph and tragedies of the space shuttle to not even touch on the reasons for ending the program.

So instead of the larger story you get fairly detailed descriptions of the different missions run and the people involved in them. It's clear Houston conducted a bunch of interviews and some of them yield really good stories about the building of the International Space Station, docking with Mir after the Cold War ended and repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. At the same time, one gets the sense that he doesn't have the greatest distance from his subject matter. That's not inherently a problem since he doesn't really bother to describe most big picture choices made, but it does come across a bit odd in describing the response to Columbia.

All in all it's not bad, but I feel like a history of something shouldn't require me to turn to Wikipedia to fill in obvious blanks.

[victoria.p · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddly haphazard history of the space shuttle program beginning with Challenger, and I guess through the close of the program - I didn't make it to the end of the book before it was due back, at the library and I didn't feel compelled to renew it. The stuff about the shuttle/Mir and ISS missions was really interesting, and I think the best bits are about the final crew of Columbia - I definitely teared up more than once while reading - but it just wasn't organized in a way that worked for me. Also the ebook is riddled with spacing errors.

[Clay Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times a very melancholy read about human space travel.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars

Although there is enough of the nitty-gritty to satisfy the Shuttle layperson, if you've either read much of this series or much about the Shuttle program, you might feel left wanting.
Admittedly, the post-Challenger story of the Space Shuttle is one largely benchmarked in the public eye by a series of disasters (Columbia, the Hubble debacle, the end of the program itself). The rest of those 25 years barely resonate anymore, but a lot of good work was done, and without the Shuttle the ISS would've never taken its present shape, if built at all!
Houston, though, unlike the nice mix of people and process of other volumes in the Outward Odyssey> series, focuses a tad too much on the people bits, at the expense of the actual missions being flown, especially the latter section when the ISS was being constructed. Instead, there's a lot of inner office politics and career controversy interspersed with vague transitions between missions and near-non sequiturs on scientific topics.
I'm not trying to warn anyone off, but if you've made it this far in the history of the space program you might find yourself wanting a little bit more than is offered here.

[Trisan Huynh · Rating 4 out of 5]

yesssss this book was good 👍😀 bussin bussin no cap fire 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 sheeeeeesh

[Richard Lambour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another 3.5 star book (Goodreads should allow half stars!). I picked this up after reading Leaving Orbit, which was about the last three shuttle flights.

This book focuses on the space shuttle astronauts and their achievements starting with the Challenger accident and going through the end of the shuttle program in 2011. Most of us know the names of the Mercury 7 and many of the Apollo astronauts, but are probably less familiar with the many astronauts and people who worked with the shuttle program. This book tells some of their stories and is a very much worth reading as a tribute to the astronauts and the work they accomplished. Their accomplishments were done so well that they made space flight look routine for almost 30 years. As this book tells, it didn't look easy because the tasks were easy, but because these people were exceptional at what they did.

The book shines when in many places: describing the return to flight mission of STS-26, the Hubble deployment and servicing missions, the Shuttle-Mir program, an excellent chapter on the Columbia accident and return to flight, the last shuttle flight (STS-135), and following up on what some of the astronauts have done since leaving NASA. In each of these chapter the stories of the astronauts and the events are told engagingly and in detail and I came away with an good understanding of the magnitude of what was accomplished. Fortunately these chapters make up the majority of the book and are well worth reading.

The book falters in other areas. Chapter two attempts to describe the entirety of the science and DoD missions carried out on the shuttle and is a jumble, bouncing back and forth in time while introducing us to an almost overwhelming number of people in a short period of time (there were a lot of shuttle astronauts!). Even with the hilarious (in hindsight) broken toilet story of STS-33, this chapter almost caused me to put the book down, but I powered through and was rewarded with an excellent Chapter 3 (The Hubble missions). The book does a poor job of covering the construction of the International Space Station, with the chapters relaying anecdotes such as particularly challenging EVAs, but no sense of the scale or challenge of the task of constructing such a large structure in space. It's assumed the reader is familiar with the construction of the station and its many modules (I was not). If the book had a timeline and a list of personalities, it would have helped these two chapters a little. Finally there were several instances of stories that were related but not really seeming to be finished; I was left asking "and then what happened?"

The book has more strengths than weaknesses and I'd recommend it highly to anyone interested in the shuttle program.

[Paul Kinzer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chock full of information regarding the later STS missions and the Astronauts who flew them, this book unfortunately falls short of what it could have been. Poor organization, and a hard to follow narrative that seems to jump around far too often, makes it a chore to read. Still, though, it provides some really detailed accounts of the expectations and extreme challenges overcome by some of our countries finest.

[BreN · Rating 3 out of 5]

This should have been a fabulous book.

It is though let down by a lack of photographs/graphics.

For instance late in the book, Rick Houston describes an extraordinarily complex spacewalk to repair one of the ISS' solar panels, damaged by space debris. The section would have benefitted from either photos/stills or better yet, a diagram of the ISS and docked Orbiter showing the damaged section and how the astronauts worked a route to be able to repair it - without attracting an electric shock.

Much of the text is made up of short sections just describing various missions, or how individual astronauts/mission specialists came to be engaged.

It would have benefitted I think with some recollections about how pilots controlled the Shuttle (or didn't if it was auto-piloted) in the landing approach. Perhaps some insight into how the Orbiter was upgraded, particularly in its onboard computer and avionics suite during the 1986-2011 years. More insight into the training regime for a typical mission wouldn't have gone amiss.

So basically, although very instructive and sometimes very insightful, I think Wheels Stop missed the chance to give a deep insight into the program and in particular, how the Shuttle evolved to take on new technology as it became available.

One other thing; the Forward by astronaut Jerry Ross is probably the worst Forward to a non-fiction book I've ever read. Jerry writes mostly about...Jerry, neglecting to mention the Shuttle itself until almost the very last paragraph of his contribution.

I'm hoping Wheels Stop is republished, perhaps giving Rick Houston to add/revise text. I'm afraid though the Forward from the revered Jerry Ross will have to go.

[Ishmael Soledad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd come to expect volumes in the University of Nebraska's 'A People's History of Spaceflight' to be of a really high standard, providing more than the usual insight into the people and events surrounding the various programmes of it's subject matter. This volume, out of all I've read, left me a touch deflated an underwhelmed. True, it starts out with the STS-51L accident, continues past STS-107 to the end of the Shuttle programme and the political machinations that left NASA without a real purpose or goal, so the book is by no means a rose-coloured, triumphant narrative. That much I expected. What I expected, but did not get, was any real insight into the people behind the Shuttle.

The narrative was disjointed at times, hard to follow at others, and after about the first 150 pages started to repeat itself in tenor and tone, if not in words. I felt a degree of haloing of the astronauts in the book, as if Houston was being careful not to put any noses out of joint with his work, and left at the end only being a little the wiser for the effort. True, some of the insights were new and descriptive (Story Musgrave's admission that he'd go to court to get onto a mission he believed he should be on, being one of them), but the majority fall into the 'gee-whizz all-American boy/girl' variety. These are humans we're talking about, not flag-impregnated drones, so all I can conclude is that Houston either chose his angles very carefully, or he failed to jump over the corporate-consciousnesses barrier NASA and her employees erected.

A disappointing volume with some redeeming features that failed to live up to the promise made by other volumes int he series. But that's about it.

[Joao Neto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Avoid the audible version at all cost. I have been listening to the audio version of all these books from this collection and have enjoyed them thoroughly except for this one. Horrible narration had me stop this book at 80%.

Regardless it is full of very detailed information about the second wind of the space shuttle program (post Challenger). I didn't find the information and mission detail as interesting as those first 6 years of flights.

There is very interesting stuff about the Hubble launch and repair, the first ISS missions, the first Mir dockings and the Columbia disaster, but frankly the rest ia fairly uninsteresting except for someone who wants to dive deep into every STS mission.

[Scott Kardel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taking on 25 years of human spaceflight on the Space Shuttle makes Wheels Stop an ambitious book. There's a lot to take in, at times almost too much, but it is an informative and enjoyable look at the post Challenger period of the Space Shuttle program.
3.5 stars.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

History of the Space Shuttle program, mostly told by the astronauts who flew the shuttle. The chapters are thematic and some are more engaging then others.

[Greg Sidor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I'd been so impressed by another book in the "A People's History of Spaceflight" series ("Ambassadors from Earth," about NASA's deep space probes). This book is a worthy addition to the collection.

It's by no means a technical chronicle. Instead, you hear a lot from the astronauts themselves. It's enlightening, especially since they run the gamut of personalities. From no-nonsense Marines to practical jokers, all kinds of people flew on the shuttle.

One point the book makes is that the shuttle was often hampered by politics. Designed to build and service a space station that didn't go into construction until almost 20 years after the first flight, the space shuttle sometimes seemed like it was all dressed up with no place to go.

However, the author highlights all the things this spacecraft could do. It could lift up to 7 astronauts at a time, and had a bus-sized payload bay for experiments and satellites. It lofted probes like Galileo and the Hubble Space Telescope, repairing the later when faulty engineering left it nearly blind.

There's also attention given to the dangers. The Challenger disaster gets coverage early on, and Columbia is documented towards the end.

Was the shuttle too expensive and risky? Perhaps. Was it the most capable spacecraft to ever fly? Absolutely. Hopefully we have something that comes close in the future.

[Dale W · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should have read the description more closely. It was an entertaining telling of anecdotes about the space shuttle program, but I was looking for more of a history of the program. It was an enjoyable enough read with some really good stories about the shuttle program, so if that is what you are looking for then this is a decent read.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one just a bit less than its later companion volume, simply because I find the early Shuttle history more interesting.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the space shuttle program from the loss of the Challenger to the last shuttle flight. Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about America's journey into space.