Shuttle — D.C. Onley

Edwards Air Force Base: the giant Hypersonic Jet Yorktown with the Shuttle Columbia clasped to her back, climbs to the sky. Their pioneering mission: to launch the Shuttle into space from the edge of the atmosphere. Neither craft will reach its destination. One will never return. Fact and fiction combine in this dramatic, bestselling novel of a space shuttle mission that goes perilously wrong. With the shattered craft locked in fatal orbit, their crew running a desperate race against time, Mission Control mounts a last ditch effort that must not fail. The result is a stunning story of rescue is space that grips to the very last page.

First published in 1981 in the flowering of manned space travel it is now re-released as the era comes to a close.