At 9:04 in the morning on 30 March 1982, Space Shuttle Columbia came out of a clear desert sky over southern New Mexico and settled onto a runway made of gypsum. Around it, for miles, there was nothing but more of the same.

It was the end of STS-3, the shuttle’s third flight, and the strip was called Northrup Strip, on the White Sands Missile Range. No shuttle had landed there before, and none ever would again. In thirty years of shuttle flights, it remains the only shuttle landing anywhere other than Edwards Air Force Base in California or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A Lakebed Under Water

STS-3 was still a test flight. Columbia carried the OSS-1 science pallet with nine experiments, and for the first time the shuttle’s robot arm lifted a payload, the Plasma Diagnostics Package, out of the cargo bay. The crew also spent days pointing the orbiter’s tail, nose and open payload bay at the Sun to see how the structure and the heat-protection tiles coped with long thermal soaks.

The landing site was decided before the flight even started. The early shuttle missions were meant to land on the dry lakebed at Edwards, which gave the pilots miles of margin. In March 1982 that lakebed was covered by several inches of rainwater. Four days before launch, NASA Administrator James Beggs approved the alternative: Northrup Strip, a lakebed runway on the White Sands Missile Range that shuttle crews already used for landing practice. Landing equipment followed by rail, in 38 railroad cars.

This is the part the internet usually gets wrong. Columbia was not diverted at the end of its mission; it launched on 22 March already knowing it would come home to New Mexico.

Waved Off by a Sandstorm

The landing was planned for 29 March. That morning, astronaut John Young was flying weather checks over the strip in a jet trainer, and what he found was a sandstorm. Winds were far beyond the limits and visibility in the blowing gypsum had dropped to almost nothing. “I think we ought to knock this off,” he radioed, according to NASA’s mission report. Columbia was waved off before the deorbit burn, and the mission was extended by a day. Overnight, ground crews used a grader to repair the wind-damaged runway.

A Wheelie on the Gypsum

On 30 March the weather held. Lousma flew the early part of the approach by hand, engaged the automatic landing system at about 15,000 feet and, by his own account, took manual control back at 150 to 200 feet. Columbia touched down on Runway 17 at 9:04:46 a.m. local time.

Then the nose came up. After the main wheels touched, Lousma tried to hold the nose off the ground and Columbia pitched up sharply before he got it back down, a moment that went down in shuttle history as the White Sands “wheelie”. The explanations differ. Lousma later described an unexpected, rapid pitch-up caused by a control-software problem. Fullerton said the gains linking the stick to the elevons were tuned for flight and were wrong once the wheels were on the ground. Either way, the landing was safe, and Columbia rolled 13,732 feet in 83 seconds.

Lousma never considered it dangerous. In his oral history he said that at no time did he feel a safe landing was jeopardized.

Gypsum Everywhere

The trouble started after the landing. A second windstorm swept the strip before the ground crew had fitted all of the protective plugs, and fine gypsum dust blew into the orbiter. Grady McCright, who ran NASA’s technical support office at White Sands, summed it up in his own oral history: “Gypsum can get anywhere.” Columbia’s turnaround for its next flight took 53 days.

Bolden’s memory is the best evidence that the dust lingered for years. The often-repeated claim that gypsum was still turning up in Columbia’s wreckage in 2003 rests on little more than his own guess in the same interview, and should be treated as a guess.

Home on the Back of a 747

Columbia flew out of New Mexico on top of NASA’s Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, the modified Boeing 747 numbered 905, in early April. It stopped overnight at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where about 100,000 people came out to see it, and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center on 6 April 1982.

Northrup Strip, Now White Sands Space Harbor

The strip’s odd spelling is a typo. It was built for the Northrop company’s target drones, and a clerical error turned it into “Northrup” for good. Six weeks after the landing, on 11 May 1982, President Reagan signed a law sponsored by New Mexico senator and former Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt that renamed it White Sands Space Harbor. So the viral posts that say Columbia landed at “White Sands Space Harbor” are describing a name that did not yet exist on the day.

No shuttle ever landed there again, but the strip stayed busy. It remained a backup landing site until the end of the programme, and shuttle pilots flew most of their practice approaches there in NASA’s Shuttle Training Aircraft, Gulfstream jets modified to fly like a gliding orbiter. NASA left in 2011 when the shuttle retired and handed the site back to the Army in 2012.

Sources: NASA, “40 Years Ago: STS-3, Columbia’s Third Mission to Space”; NASA mission page STS-3; NASA STS-3 mission report (NASA-TM-84864); NASA Johnson Space Center oral histories of Jack Lousma (2010), C. Gordon Fullerton (2002), Charles Bolden (2004) and Grady McCright (2000); Historic American Engineering Record NM-28, White Sands Space Harbor; White Sands Missile Range Museum; US Army, “WSMR’s 40-year space shuttle landing anniversary”; Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (Public Law 97-175)