Good FLYING Reads: ‘Waiting for Spaceships’

The shuttle was launched on the back of a rocket, then at the completion of the mission, returned to Earth an airplane. It was something to witness, as you will learn if you read Waiting for Spaceships: Scenes from a Desert Community in Love with the Space Shuttle by aviation writer and photographer Ted Huetter.

Through the narrative and photographs, Huetter takes you back to the golden age of the shuttle program, when hundreds of people traveled to the Mojave Desert in California to watch the return of America’s technological triumph.

It wasn’t so much a visit as a pilgrammage. A day before each shuttle landing, Edwards Air Force Base allowed people to park and camp in the area known for military test flights. The campers were a few miles from the shuttle runways, and they had to leave after the spaceship arrived, but they got to be there for touchdown and rollout.

In the 1980s, the shuttle program dominated popular culture. There were plushy shuttle toys, models, and posters. A then-fledgling cable television channel called MTV used the image of the shuttle in its advertising, and the shuttle was part of school science curricula. Many of my classmates who had parents who worked in the aerospace industry brought shuttle tiles to school for show-and-tell. The really cool kids got to travel to the desert with their parents to watch the shuttle's return to Earth. I was not a really cool kid, but I feel as though I have been there now after reading Huetter's photo-intensive book. As the pages note, being there made you part of a community and a moment in history.

One of the most poignant returns was that of Discovery, which launched as STS-26 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on September 29, 1988, and returned on October 3. This was the seventh flight of Discovery, but the first shuttle mission since the loss of Challenger in January 1986. Attendance was high and the crowd in Mojave was enthusiastic and ready to welcome the spaceship home. It was more than a return of the shuttle. It was a testament to overcoming adversity.

The shuttle program ended in 2011. By 2012 the shuttle—and the procedures trainer (a full-scale mock-up of the spaceship)—were removed from service and assigned a new mission: education. The orbiters were sent to aviation museums around the country for display.

The Full Fuselage Trainer is currently located at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where Huetter serves as the senior public relations manager when he's not out flying or taking photographs of aviation.

More information on the book, which sells for $24.99, can be found here.