Review: Waiting for Spaceships

by Jeff Foust
Monday, November 25, 2024

Waiting for Spaceships: Scenes from a Desert Community in Love with the Space Shuttle
by Ted Huetter
Fonthill Media, 2024
paperback, 96 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-62545-135-4
US$24.99

I saw my first shuttle landing long before my first shuttle launch. While a student at Caltech in the early 1990s, our student group (a chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, or SEDS) was able to get car passes from JPL for an official guest viewing area at Edwards Air Force Base for shuttle landings. We would carpool up the 210 and 14 freeways, almost always in the middle of the night, to the base in time to see early morning landings. It would be a decade before I saw a shuttle launch, at a distance, and only in the final years did I get a closeup view at the KSC Press Site.

Those memories flooded back while reading Waiting for Spaceships by Ted Huetter, which offers a pictorial account of the public that attended shuttle landings at Edwards in the 1980s. In the early years of the shuttle, the base attracted large crowds fascinated with seeing the shuttle return. That included an estimated half a million people who attended the July 4, 1982, landing of Columbia for STS-4, which President Ronald Reagan also attended.

Huetter documents that experience in photos he took while at the base for seven shuttle landings from 1982 to 1989. People arrived early, driving everything from RVs to small cars, camping out and doing things you might expect to see from visitors in a state park: barbequing, sunbathing, and chatting with their neighbors. Canteens were available where you could by $2 pancakes and $1 beer. The one thing that perhaps made clear this was a space event and not a giant campout was the large number of souvenir vendors, selling shuttle-themed caps, t-shirts, photos, and more.

His photos, and a brief introduction, describe a community that quickly and briefly came together, drawn by a common interest in the shuttle. There was never any rowdiness that he recalled: “I like to think that the power of the desert environment had a calming effect.” The pictures are a time capsule from the 1980s, from the fashion statements (one person wearing a t-shirt showing a shuttle tearing a hole in the Soviet flag with the caption “We’re Back”) to banners, some produced on dot-matrix printers. One handmade banner declared “We ❤️” followed by illustrations of the American flag and E.T. (Again, it was the ’80s.)

The slender book is primarily photos, with a brief introduction by the author and a foreword by former astronaut Tom Jones, who recalled his visits to Edwards as an Air Force Academy cadet in the mid-70s and, years later, as an astronaut landing there on three shuttle missions. The photos include only brief titles, rather than longer captions, and some of the captions can be a bit cryptic: a man standing on top of an RV looking for the shuttle is titled “Fly Navy”; on closer inspection one sees a “Fly Navy” bumper sticker on the RV.

The emphasis in Waiting for Spaceships is on the “waiting” part, with the shuttle itself making only a cameo appearance in the final pages of the book. The photos capture the public fascination with the shuttle, one that was fleeting: as some of the photos in the book show, attendance dropped over time as the novelty of shuttle wore off. It is a fascinating book for people interested images of that era, although with only a minimum of text to go with it.

Shuttle landings eventually shifted primarily to KSC, with returns to Edwards only in rare situations, like extended poor weather in Florida. The community spirit of those landings, though, lives on in some respects: in 2004, thousands gathered just to the north of Edwards at Mojave Air and Space Port for the SpaceShipOne suborbital flights. More recently, many gathered in South Texas for Starship launches, with local officials reporting hours-long traffic jams exiting a state park at the southern tip of South Padre Island after the most recent launch last week. Both those show the same public interest, and formation of temporary communities, illustrated in Waiting for Spaceships.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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