Stayed with a guy once who worked for IBM. Was their Nasa manager from the last Appollo missions through to the first 5 or 6 shuttle missions.
Had some good stuff in his house such as moon rock, shuttle tiles etc.
The pilots actually practise the approach in a specially modified G11, with shuttle instrumentation, HUD, etc on one side and conventional on the other. They go up to 45000' have a set configuration for the aircraft which follows the shuttle profile and fly the approaches.
He had been up a few times with the guys as during the early days they used to go up before the shuttle committed, and fly the proposed approach a few times to see if everything was working.
Also said on the computer side of things that they tried to tell Nasa that the onboard computers needed x amount of time to fire up and cross check and align each other before a launch. It was somethig like 45 minutes. Nasa decided that in their launch sequence they wanted the computers to start doing their stuff at 40 minutes. Thus the delays with some of the early launches because of computer problems. Actually nothing wrong with them, just not enough time. Needless to say the pre launch sequence was changed!
