Enterprise's First Free Flight, August Twelfth, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, the Day a Wingless-Looking Brick Fell Off the Back of a Boeing Seven Forty-Seven and Glided Home to a Dry Lakebed

On August 12, 1977, the Space Shuttle Enterprise was released from the back of a modified Boeing 747 over California’s high desert and glided to a landing on the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. Flown by commander Fred Haise and pilot Gordon Fullerton, this first free flight lasted just over five minutes and answered the single question the entire Space Shuttle program hinged on: could a human pilot land a spacecraft like an airplane? The answer was yes.

Why the Space Shuttle Needed a Glide Test First

The Space Shuttle was built on a radical promise: a spacecraft that came home like an airplane. Wheels down on a runway, roll it into the hangar, service it, and fly it again. Nothing had ever done that. Everything that returned from space before it came down under parachutes and splashed into the ocean, requiring a Navy task force to recover it.

The catch is that a shuttle glides about as well as a set of car keys. It comes down steep and fast, with no engine to help on final approach. There is no go-around and no throttle to push if you come up short. Once an orbiter starts down, it is committed.

So before anyone would strap a crew atop a rocket, NASA needed to prove the gliding part in the atmosphere, where a mistake meant a rough landing rather than a fall from orbit. That job went to a dedicated orbiter, the first one off the line.

Why the First Orbiter Was Named Enterprise

Enterprise was originally slated to be named Constitution and unveiled on Constitution Day. But in 1976, fans of the television series Star Trek ran a letter-writing campaign, sending hundreds of thousands of letters to the White House. They won. The first Space Shuttle rolled out of the factory in Palmdale, California wearing the name Enterprise, unveiled with the show’s cast present and its theme song playing.

Enterprise would never reach space. She had no working engines and no reentry heat-shield tiles. She was a full-size, full-weight glider built to answer exactly one question: can a pilot fly this shape down to a landing?

How Do You Get a 150,000-Pound Glider Airborne?

You carry it. NASA took an old Boeing 747 airliner, stripped and strengthened it, and bolted three large struts onto the top of the fuselage. This became the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Enterprise, weighing roughly 150,000 pounds, rode piggyback on the jumbo jet, nose forward, as the 747 hauled the stack into the desert sky.

The program built up to the release deliberately. First came taxi tests. Then unmanned captive flights, with Enterprise bolted on top but no crew aboard. Then captive-active flights, with a crew inside the orbiter running through procedures while still attached to the mothership. Each step built confidence in the machinery before anyone let go.

The First Free Flight on August 12, 1977

The morning of August 12 opened dead quiet over Rogers Dry Lake, the cracked, flat lakebed at Edwards where test pilots had been breaking the sound barrier for three decades. Then four Pratt & Whitney engines on the 747 began to wind up.

In the cockpit of Enterprise sat two men. Commander Fred Haise had flown on Apollo 13, the mission that turned a Moon landing into the greatest rescue in the history of spaceflight after an oxygen tank exploded. Now he was about to fall out of the sky in an untested glider. Beside him in the right seat was Gordon Fullerton, an Air Force pilot known for his calm.

For this first flight, Enterprise wore a tailcone, a smooth fairing bolted over the blunt rear where her main engines would have gone. The real orbiter’s tail end is a mess of engine bells that create heavy turbulence. The cone smoothed the airflow, giving a cleaner ride, a longer glide, and gentler handling. It would come off in later tests.

The two aircraft climbed together to about 24,000 feet. The 747 then nosed into a shallow dive so that, on release, Enterprise would lift cleanly up and away rather than settle onto the carrier’s tail. Seven explosive bolts held the orbiter to the jumbo jet. On the call, they fired.

Enterprise was free. Haise pulled up and away as the 747 rolled hard left and dove right to clear the airspace. For the first time, a spacecraft was flying entirely on its own in the open atmosphere, with no engine at all.

How a Shuttle Glides Home

Once released, Enterprise came down fast, at times descending better than 10,000 feet per minute with the nose pitched steeply down. That steep, fast descent is normal for an orbiter. It trades altitude for speed because speed is the only thing keeping the wing flying.

Haise rolled into his turns and felt her out. The reports were good: she flew honestly and did what the pilot asked. He lined up on the lakebed, where the entire desert floor is landable, a mercy for a glider that gets one attempt. Enterprise crossed the fence at well over 180 knots, held her nose off, and the main gear settled onto the hardpan. The whole free flight had lasted a little more than five minutes.

What Came After the First Flight

NASA flew Enterprise four more times that fall. Partway through the program, crews removed the tailcone and flew her in her true, blunt-tailed shape. On one of those later landings she developed a pilot-induced oscillation, porpoising down the lakebed before settling. Engineers learned from that too. That is the purpose of a test program: to find the bad news yourself, on your own terms, in a glider at Edwards, where a bad day is a rough landing and not a funeral.

Every Space Shuttle landing that followed, well over 100 of them, traced straight back to that August morning. Enterprise herself never flew higher than a 747 could carry her. After further ground and vibration testing, she became a museum piece. Today she sits aboard a retired aircraft carrier museum on the Hudson River in New York, and many visitors walk past without realizing this was the orbiter that went first and proved it could be done.

Key Takeaways

On August 12, 1977, Space Shuttle Enterprise made its first free flight, gliding to a landing at Edwards Air Force Base after release from a Boeing 747.
The crew was commander Fred Haise, an Apollo 13 veteran, and pilot Gordon Fullerton; the flight lasted just over five minutes.
Enterprise was a full-size glider with no engines or heat shield, built only to prove a pilot could land an orbiter without power.
The orbiter was named Enterprise instead of Constitution after a 1976 Star Trek fan letter campaign.
The flight validated the shuttle’s steep, powerless approach and paved the way for more than 100 later orbiter landings.