Shuttle Workers Put Lives on Line After Landings : Work: Edwards AFB crew spends five days preparing craft for transfer to Florida. Risks include fuel leaks, exploding tires, delicate crane maneuvers and chronic job insecurity.

The thunderous sonic boom of a space shuttle coming in for a landing can wake people from a deep sleep.

But for Ken Pilkington, it is the starting gun for a five-day work marathon.

“When that sonic boom goes off, I get goose bumps,” said the mechanic, who works at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

Every arrival of Discovery, Endeavour, Columbia or Atlantis converts Dryden’s sleepy shuttle operations center, Area A, into a boom town.

Edwards has rolled out the red carpet for the shuttle more than 40 times since Columbia made its debut flight in 1981. But landings here have been less frequent since Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral took over as the primary site for landings as well as launches. Edwards now is used only as a backup in case of foul weather at the Cape.

While the shuttle flight may mean dangers for the crew, even a safely landed craft poses risks for Pilkington, 32, and his colleagues as they prepare the craft for its return to Kennedy aboard a 747.

“Everybody who works on it knows the dangers involved, and there are dangers on all of it,” Pilkington said. “If you aren’t out there doing what you are supposed to be doing, it can be deadly.”

It begins at touchdown. A few technicians--nicknamed “canaries” after the test birds that miners once carried to warn them of gases--cautiously approach the shuttle in environmental suits to test for leaking fuel gases, which can ignite on contact with oxygen.

At a safe distance of about 700 feet, Pilkington waits in a mobile air-conditioning and cooling unit, one of about 150 pieces of support equipment to be attached to the shuttle.

At the all-clear, Pilkington moves in, wearing flame-retardant coveralls. He hooks up the air-conditioning unit, pumping in 16 gallons of Freon a minute to cool the shuttle’s systems and the astronauts inside.

“If we don’t cool it off,” Pilkington said, “the temperature in there can reach 130 degrees for the crew.”

Exterior temperatures can be deadly too. Technicians must stay at least 50 feet away from the hot landing gear for 45 minutes after landing. “It gets hot enough to blow the tires off,” Pilkington said. “Rubber shrapnel can fly around like 20 shotguns going off at once.”

Several hours pass before the ship is safe enough to tow to Area A. Then, after a mandatory eight-hour sleep at home, Pilkington is back for his most hazardous shift of the operation: Before the shuttle can be lifted atop the 747, Pilkington must purge the rest of its explosive liquid fuel. Escaping fumes are so dangerous--even a rusty nail can ignite them--that no one but Pilkington and a few others are allowed within 1,500 feet.

“If you breathe the fumes, you die,” said Pilkington, who wears an environmental suit and breathing apparatus for the operation. “Your lungs blister and they fill up with liquid and you suffocate.”

But the job that makes Pilkington most nervous is the next on the list: He must work blindly with four joysticks, relying on a spotter to help him operate the crane that lifts the 2,250-ton shuttle atop the 747.

“It’s scary enough when the weather is calm,” Pilkington said of the eight-hour procedure. But when desert winds rock the suspended orbiter, “it’s like flying a big kite. If you damage the orbiter, you can impact the space program and put you and everybody else out of a job.”

Like many NASA employees, Pilkington worries about his future in the space program. When Challenger exploded in 1986, he lost his job as a shuttle technician at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Two and a half years passed before he could get back into the space business, this time at Kennedy. He finally moved back to California in 1989 to work at Dryden.

To Pilkington, a married father of two and a full-time Lockheed contractor caring for shuttle support equipment, the overtime paycheck generated by a shuttle landing is a welcome bonus. Although the shuttle has landed at Edwards five of the last seven missions, there is no knowing when it will return.

“We used to get the shuttle in here eight to 11 times a year,” Pilkington said. “Now we only get it a few times a year.”

Recently, the House of Representatives proposed slashing 300 Dryden positions to make NASA smaller, but Dryden Director Ken Szalai said none of the cutbacks is expected to affect Dryden’s shuttle-related jobs. Other streamlining measures considered by NASA, however, could affect contract workers such as Pilkington.

As if the physical perils weren’t enough, Pilkington said, “this has got to be one of the most stressful types of jobs as far as worrying about keeping your job.”