Curiously, Young's and Crippen's heartbeat patterns reversed on takeoff and landing. Both are normally in the 60s. At launch Young's rose only to 85 beats a minute, while Crippen's soared to 135. Returning, Young's pulse rate zipped up to 130 as he flew the craft in. Crippen's stayed around 85.

To be sure, Young's racing pulse slowed down soon after landing-and the nation's is likely to do the same. Says Forrest Berghorn, a political scientist at the University of Kansas: "The American spirit is too self-centered to concern itself with this for very long. The space shuttle success is in a class with our hockey victory over Russia." That may be too harsh a judgment; of late there have been signs of a renewed popular interest in space. Yet even those who want a redoubled U.S. space effort doubt there will be a lasting effect from the flight unless a profound change of mood occurs in budget-minded Washington. Says Jerry Grey, public policy administrator for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: "Right now, there is no real commitment to space, no strong proponent of it within the Administration."

There is no doubt of continued military interest in the shuttle. But in the realms of pure science and commercial enterprise, the future of the costly space shuttle seems far from assured.

In its struggle to get the shuttle launched, NASA has already been forced to drain funds from other areas, especially those concerned with the unmanned exploration of the solar system. TO NASA's great embarrassment, it has had to drop out of a joint effort to position two satellites-- one American, the other European-in great, looping orbits around the poles of the sun. These solar regions have never before been inspected by technically equipped robots from earth, and such satellites could help answer important questions about the behavior of our parent star: How does it affect terrestrial climate and weather? Is it warming up or cooling off?

The space agency has also been forced to delay until 1988 a project to orbit Venus with a satellite that will scan its cloudveiled surface with radar beams. In 1986, Halley's comet, perhaps a chunk of debris left over from the early solar system, will return to the earth's vicinity for the first time since 1910. So far the space agency has been unable to scratch up the money for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intercept this visitor from deep I space with cameras and other scientific instruments. Says George Rathjens, former chief scientist at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency: "Space science is in shambles. Planetary exploration is in shambles." Indeed, because of shuttle costs, NASA is so strapped that there is only one planetary exploration it can be sure of-and that the budget cutters cannot call off. Voyager 2, launched three and a half years ago and still speeding toward an August rendezvous with Saturn and its moons.

Though the shuttle's cost overruns have caused penny pinching on other scientific projects, the future in space should now brighten for scientists, even if their experiments must ride on military flights. In 1985, the shuttle is scheduled to hoist a large, remote-controlled telescope into orbit high above the earth's obscuring atmosphere. From there, astronomers should be able to see out 14 billion light-years (seven times farther than they can see using the biggest earthbound reflectors), expanding the volume of the known universe about 350-fold and bringing them very close to what is presumed to be its "edge." Says Physicist Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers): "We don't know what we'll find out there, whose hand we'll see at work." Also in 1985, the shuttle is slated to get the Galileo spacecraft on its way: an unmanned package of instruments that will drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter in search of organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Adds Jastrow: "The two great cosmic mysteries are the origin of the universe and the origin of life. The shuttle will give us a chance to probe both."