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The Secret to Landing a Space Shuttle is a Stylish Executive Jet Plane

Next time you applaud your airline pilot for making a "perfect" landing, consider the Space Shuttle.

Next time you applaud your airline pilot for making a "perfect" landing, consider the Space Shuttle.

Space Shuttle Endeavour, which made its dramatic and final landing early this morning in Florida, isn't a plane so much as a delicate instrument designed to get the astronauts to and from space. Much like the way it leaves the Earth, the orbiter returns in surgical-like fashion, barreling out of space on fire, towards a tiny concrete strip at speeds twenty times faster – and at an angle seven times steeper – than your average commercial airliner. Unlike an airliner however, the craft has no engines to use during landing. Known as a "flying brick," a landing Shuttle is a glider. The landing must be flawless: there are no second chances.

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To ensure that the $1.5 billion, 100-ton glider touches down perfectly, astronaut commanders and pilots practice in a sophisticated ground-based simulator. But they also spend countless hours in an actual simulator: a modified 30-year-old Gulfstream II – the craft of choice for the Rolex-wearing, burgundy-suited executive of the 1970s.

Tempting as it may be to imagine shiny-space-suited champagne-sipping astronauts luxuriating in leather-appointed interiors, watching the finals with former baseball players and rappers, NASA's G2 is all business. The modified jet, based on a model produced between 1966 and 1979, isn't made for jetting around the globe. It's central purpose is to practice safe landings at speeds of 300 miles per hour, from initial angles of attack of 30 degrees, with precision that bests that of an aircraft carrier landing – all without engine power.

To simulate the shuttle's extreme descent, NASA pilots break all the flying rules—dropping the main landing gear at 37,000 feet, reversing engine thrust, diving at sharp angles, and playing with flaps – ones that can go upward as well as downward, in order to either decrease or increase lift. The aircraft's exterior has also been modified, with new wing control surfaces and landing gear that can deal with the kind of aerodynamic forces that would tear into a Delta plane and make the hair on John Travolta's goatee fall out.

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The most bling in this jet comes courtesy of a bank of Shuttle-simulating computers that take the place of several passenger seats in the back, assisting a cockpit outfitted to look just like the shuttle, with a hand controller for pitch and roll rate commands; rudder pedals to command a sideslip angle; and shuttle instruments — including attitude indicators and tape meters for airspeed, altitude, and rate of descent. Each pilot has a heads up display device; the windows are covered up to look just like the real thing. The computer, working with faster-acting hydraulic actuators and bidirectional flaps, can accurately simulate the shuttle's attitude, angle of attack, airspeed, roll and pitch response, and the pilot's eye height at touchdown.

Jack "Triple" Nickel, a research pilot legendary at NASA for running the trainings at White Sands Space Harbor, in New Mexico (and for being a pretty great amateur astronomer) calls the experience as "scary":

"We use the very slick, sports car-like feel of the STA to simulate the 'falling brick' of the Space Shuttle… You know when a commercial plane lands and you're thrown forward after the wheels touch down? We do that at 30,000 feet.

It's still scary… In a plane like this, a corporate jet, there is no sky visible out the front cockpit. All you see out the window is dirt, there is absolutely no sky. So it's a very ominous feeling. With the engines in reverse thrust, you're hanging in your harness.

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To perfect their landings before they get to fly the real thing, shuttle pilots practice their adrenaline-pumping corporate jet daredevilism no less than 1000 times. That's on top of hundreds of aircraft carrier landings: like many other Shuttle pilots, Commander Mark Kelly is on loan to NASA from the US Navy.

During most exercises, the trainer never actually touches the runway. If its speed is correct, a green light on the instrument panel simulates shuttle landing when the pilot's eyes are 32 feet (10 m) above the runway, which is the exact position that the pilot's head would be in during actual landing. In actuality, the STA is still 20 feet (6 m) above the ground; the pilot instructor stows the thrust reversers and flies around the runway for another go (see the video below).

Four versions of the plane have been used by NASA since the late 1970s, when the Shuttle was getting ready to make its first flight. In spite of concerns by engineers and managers that the Gulfstream wouldn't be able to withstand the G forces or perform as nimbly as a fighter jet, for instance, the STA has remained a reliable and realistic way to simulate landings, and there's no been no need for major improvements. Added bonus: the awesome factor of being able to say you trained to land the Shuttle in an executive jet.

In 2001, a Gulfstream II sold on eBay for $4.9 million, setting a record for the auction site. There's no word yet on what will happen to NASA's four trainer Gulfstreams when the Shuttle program retires this summer. But the agency could sure earn some extra cash by auctioning one of these bad boys off to a banking exec or space tycoon. There may be no better way to seal a deal or seduce a date than a perfectly safe, oh-my-god-we're-gonna-die landing.

A version of this post was published in February 2010.