New Book Recalls Time Covering Space Shuttle

My new book is called Rocket Reporter- Elvis, Huntsville, and the Space Shuttle Remembered. It is about the two years I worked as a local television news reporter in Huntsville, Alabama.

The reporting assignment included the first three launches of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Huntsville was the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The northern Alabama city was a company town that centered on the space program.

The book is also about the three visits made to Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.

I’ll share more about that part of the book later this summer. But for now, the focus is on a twenty-four year old newly married man who has taken his wife on a new journey to a seemingly foreign place.

The move from upstate New York to the heart of Dixie might be seen as an extreme culture shock. But for my wife and me, it was a new adventure. Here’s a preview:

April 1981

As the managers for the Shuttle Columbia got ready for lift off from the Kennedy Space Center, our television news department in Huntsville, Alabama was getting ready to cover the historic moment as a local news story.

Our local news department philosophy was that the network (in our case ABC News) was handling all the specifics about the lift off and mission.

As a local network affiliate, we saw our role as explaining to our viewers what contributions were being made by local employees at the Marshall Space Flight Center and any space-related subcontractors.

My job as the space beat reporter was to cover those local aspects of the bigger story. Every night leading up to the launch, I would report on some facet of the local impact of the shuttle on northern Alabama.

I would attend satellite news conferences first with the crew, and as the launch got closer, with the launch director and key members of his team. Satellite news conferences were a relatively new technology back in 1981, but that did not matter to any of us. The manager of the news conference would start the briefing.

After the launch director and members of his team spoke, the conference manager would have an engineer switch the audio to each of the NASA centers including the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Edwards Air Force Base in California, White Sands in New Mexico, and eventually to Huntsville.

We would ask our questions of the launch director or whoever was on the dais, and try to connect the answer to the local impact the space shuttle would have on viewers in our audience.

The weekend prior to the launch, I co-anchored the six PM newscast from the Marshall Space Flight Center.

But we had serious transmission problems getting the signal from Marshall to our receiver on Monte Sano Boulevard.

Most of that live reporting was lost due to those problems, but it turned out to be a good thing for the station.

After the weekend snafu, the station’s engineering department scouted out new locations on the Marshall property and performed signal tests.

They found a better location to originate our live reports for the upcoming launch. Had we not attempted the weekend live report, we might have lost an opportunity to do live reporting on the day of Columbia’s liftoff.

Much like NASA doing a shake-down test of systems prior to a launch, our station did a pre-launch shake-down of our Live Eye capability on the weekend newscast prior to the start of the mission.

The day of the launch (April 12, 1981) achieved exactly what we had hoped it would accomplish. NASA had a successful liftoff, the station delivered stories on the local efforts that helped make the mission a success, and our live signal from the Marshall Space Flight Center was clear.

Everything, to use NASA nomenclature, was nominal.

If there was such a thing as a club for journalists covering the space program, I guess I was now a member.

From Rocket Reporter- Elvis, Huntsville, and the Space Shuttle Remembered, by Steve Newvine. Available now at Lulu.com ROCKET REPORTER (lulu.com) Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He thanks the members of the Merced Senior Club for inviting him to talk about his books and his twice monthly Our Community Story column at one of the group’s meetings recently.