All but forgotten amid America's sudden love affair with the shuttle were its $9.9 billion price tag (at a 30% cost overrun), all those loose tiles, the exploding engines, even the last-minute computer failure, to say nothing of the inevitable jokes about America's "space lemon" and "flying brickyard." Could past scorn actually have increased the passion of this new embrace? The shuttle had become a kind of technological Rocky, the bum who perseveres to the end, the underdog who finally wins. Columbia's success, explained Milwaukee Sociologist Wayne Youngquist, "ties in with so many of our cultural themes. It's Horatio Alger. It's The Little Engine That Could. "

Perhaps. But the infatuation also had a boisterous, abrasive, decidedly chauvinistic tone. Out in the desert, many among the nearly one-quarter of a million people who had gathered to welcome the shuttle home sported T shirts emblazoned EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, RUSSIANS. In a New York bar, after watching the landing, a patron boasted: "The French and the Brits can't do anything like that. Neither can the Russkis."

The French and the British, not to mention the Germans and Japanese, were not about to disagree. In London, the mass- circulation dailies exploded in a chorus of adulation. FANTASTIC! exclaimed the Daily Mail. WOW! trumpeted Rupert Murdoch's Sun. Most Britons, rather than showing concern over the shuttle's military potential, seemed to welcome it. Said the London Times: "The conquest of space is both a necessary expression of man's drive to explore and understand his environment and a military requirement if the West is not to be dominated by Soviet activity in space."

The West Germans had special reason to celebrate. They are the prime builders of Europe's main contribution to the shuttle program: the Spacelab, a selfcontained scientific compartment for up to four experimenters scheduled to be carried aloft in 1983. Said one official: "Success for America means a breakthrough for us too and signals the entry of Western Europe into aerospace." The French, who are building a conventional rocket launcher called Ariane, which could draw away some of the shuttle's business, were no less effusive. Said Le Figaro: "After their political and military failures of recent years, our friends [the Americans] needed a big technological success. And they've got one." The French public wanted to share that success. During the very hour of Columbia's homecoming, France's government-run television was to air a required, equal-time political broadcast for the April 26 presidential balloting. But viewers protested so vociferously that only twelve minutes before touchdown, France's election commission scrubbed the broadcast with the candidates' belated assent, and the French got to see le shuttle's return. "Reason," intoned Le Figaro, "triumphed at the last moment."

For Japanese televiewers, the landing occurred in the early hours before dawn, local time. But in a country that both admires and competes with American technology, some 2 million households tuned in for the event. In his message of congratulations to the U.S., Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki said of the shuttle: "It is the crystallization of your nation's highly developed technologies and scientific achievements and symbolizes the beginning of an 'American renewal.'"

The Soviets, again, complained that the shuttle is mainly a military vehicle. But they did show 30 seconds of the landing on televison. Chinese Communist newspapers, though fascinated by the idea of products labeled "made in space," excoriated both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for casting a "shadow of war" over space.