We spent the rest of the school day watching the footage of the explosion replay over and over on TV. It was odd, seeing the launch from the start, because every time it seemed as though this time it might get off okay. Even the most cynical of us couldn’t help but respond to the poetry of countdown, to the three—two—one—. Even the coolest of us looked up at that sudden flash of light, held our breaths at the moment of ignition, the strange fire and shudder. At liftoff, the bolts detached, and for a second we could imagine the thunderous thrust of the rockets. For one long minute, the shuttle rose on a fat column of puffy steam.
Then the white pop in the sky. Something unscripted had happened—though it took a long time for the voice of the announcer to acknowledge it. Not until the next day was it clear that there was no hope that the crew might have survived. A lot of people, telling this story now, describe seeing a fireball on their televisions and knowing instantly that the crew was dead. But if you watch the unedited footage again, you might remember that feeling of uncertainty and dread as pieces slowly rained down from an altitude of eight miles, tracing fingers of white contrails across the bright blue Florida sky.
At school that day, some kids were visibly upset, crying or burying their faces in their crossed arms on their desks, but a more common response was blankness, a weirded-out adolescent whateverness. Some kids went straight to malicious laughter and making up Challenger jokes. (What kind of grades did Commander Scobee get in flight school? Below sea level! What do the Challenger and a penguin have in common? They’re both black and white and kinda cute, but neither one can fly!) Widespread tears were reported among teachers and principals. Some teachers made efforts to explain what had gone wrong, though no one on that day fully understood what had gone wrong; no one would for many months. Some teachers shut off the televisions and changed the subject, leaving the task of explaining the unexplainable to our parents. Other teachers tried to draw larger lessons, to talk about mishap and risk and death. My brother’s fourth-grade math teacher had the children flip to the page in their textbooks about astronaut Ronald McNair, one of a series of biographies intended to show children examples of women and minorities who use math in their jobs. Under his name was printed “1950– ,” and my brother and his classmates followed their teacher’s instructions to carefully write “1986” in the blank space.
We wouldn’t know it for a while, but that explosion marked the beginning of the end of American spaceflight. Mission STS-51L had been plagued by many slips and scrubs, the most frustrating of which had been the day before the launch. A special tool used to close the hatch to the crew compartment had broken off, and technicians had been unable to remove it within the launch window. If Challenger had taken off that day, a day much warmer than the fateful January 28, the rubber O-ring in the right solid rocket booster probably would not have stiffened with cold, and burning gases probably would not have escaped to detonate the external tank. Engineers, already aware of the O-ring problem, might have had a chance to fix it before the next attempt to launch in unusually cold weather. The space shuttle program might have moved forward as was intended, with the Department of Defense continuing to use it to deploy spy satellites. A second launch and landing facility might have been built, as planned, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Flights might have continued at a steadier pace, and the shuttle might have made itself more useful, might have earned more of a place in the national consciousness. A Congress and a public more convinced of the shuttle’s accomplishments might have been more likely to fund the next steps in spaceflight—a habitat on the moon, a trip to Mars. Instead, the space shuttle has quietly wound down without any spacecraft planned to follow it.
Frank Izquierdo was in Launch Control for Challenger’s last launch. When he tells me about it twenty-six years later, his memory seems precise and undistorted by emotion. Flight controllers dress up in suits and ties on launch days, partly a tradition of respect, but Frank also mentions that he was always glad to wear long sleeves and layers in the Firing Room, which was kept very cold to keep the computers safe. By the time the cryo tanks were being filled, Frank was chilled to the bone as well. When I ask Frank what it was like in the Firing Room that morning, he answers by telling me the facts—what happened in what order—rather than talking about emotions.
“First we lost comm,” he says. “Then we lost data. We were all looking at our screens trying to make sense of what we were seeing.”
“How long was it before you knew it hadn’t been caused by the main engines?” This is a polite way of asking how long it was before he knew the accident hadn’t been his fault. The engines were the most complex component, thought to have the highest risk of failure, and many people had assumed at first they were to blame for Challenger.
“It wasn’t too long,” he recalls. “They figured it out by looking at video and still images rather than telemetry. I’d say it was days rather than weeks.”
I comment that Frank must have been relieved to learn that the disaster had been caused by a faulty solid rocket booster and not one of his engines. But in his memory of that time, this distinction doesn’t seem to be nearly as relevant to him as I would have guessed.
“We all worked on shuttle,” he explains. “I worked on one part of it for a while, and then I’d be given more responsibility, and the parts I was responsible for would change. But we all worked on shuttle. We all worked to keep the astronauts safe.”
Months later, the presidential commission tasked with investigating Challenger issued its report. The cause of the explosion had been the solid rocket boosters, whose faulty design combined with the unseasonably cold weather in Florida to create a catastrophic failure. A picture in the paper showed Richard Feynman, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, smirking and holding up a piece of O-ring he’d been soaking in ice water to show that it became brittle. Sally Ride, also on the commission along with Neil Armstrong, sat a few seats away, looking pissed. She’d trusted her life to Challenger twice. Only recently, since her death, has it come to light that the key piece of information about the O-rings had been supplied to another member of the commission by Sally Ride herself.
The commission’s report also revealed that the crew cabin had remained intact after the explosion, that the astronauts had been alive, though not necessarily awake, for the two minutes and forty-five seconds it took them to fall back to Earth. This revelation struck us children as horrifying, yet it somehow made sense. We’d already grown used to that portrait of the seven smiling astronauts standing for TRAGEDY rather than ADVENTURE. We’d seen updates about Christa McAuliffe’s family, her two small children readjusting to life without a mother. We had already come to realize that the adults in charge of making the world run smoothly actually had no idea what they were doing.
Challenger changed Americans’ perceptions of spaceflight irrevocably. Shortly after the disaster, a poll found that 47 percent of Americans reported their confidence in NASA had been shaken. Two years later, only one-third of that group indicated that their faith had been restored. If the first disaster during a launch had taken place during the heroic era, people might have understood the astronauts’ deaths to be a sacrifice in the name of progress. This certainly seemed to be the case for the Apollo 1 fire. But the disaster-free launches NASA ran from 1961 to 1986 gave people the sense that astronauts’ safety should be guaranteed. Losing a crew during the shuttle’s operational period seemed a worse failure, a worse betrayal of trust, than losing a Mercury capsule might have. Though the investigation into Challenger didn’t end the space shuttle program, as some feared it would, American spaceflight would never entirely recover.
Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter in 1988, and though the shuttle was still associated with a new sense of danger, people soon got used to the idea that things had been fixed. Another successful period followed, from 1988 to 2003, during which fewer missions flew, many of them devoted to delivering components of the International Space Station.
The overly ambitious pace of the early eighties had been found to be partly to blame for Challenger, so the idea of making the shuttle pay for itself was officially abandoned.
As the oldest of the orbiters, Columbia was a bit heavier than the others—it missed out on a technological breakthrough involving stronger and lighter alloys—and as a result Columbia somehow always seemed bumbly, a chunky older sister forever dropping crumpled tissues from her sleeves. The fact that in coming years Columbia had a disproportionate number of delays compared to the others did nothing to contradict that dundering image.
Because they were lighter, Challenger and Discovery were always the ones to fly high-profile missions taking heavy and important cargo to space. Columbia became, unofficially, the science-mission orbiter. Predictable, reliable, unadventurous. It doesn’t seem right, then, that Columbia was the one that gave way to structural weakness, the heat of reentry sneaking itself between the tiles and pulling the ship apart over Texas on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members aboard. Debris was strewn across three states.
Maybe losing Challenger taught us how to say good-bye to space shuttles and their crews. Or maybe it was because the terrorist attacks of 2001 fell in between, forever readjusting our scale of horror. Either way, there was much less fanfare, much less hand-wringing, when we lost Columbia. Challenger’s disaster had been so dramatic, breaking up visibly in the sky during launch, during those two minutes when everyone was watching, tracking the bird through the clear Florida sky. Far fewer people turn out to watch landings; far fewer people were there with their faces turned up expectantly for Columbia. Even for those who were there, the only sign of Columbia’s demise was its absence. Columbia was supposed to land that morning, and simply did not.
Norman Mailer says of the Apollo astronauts, operating with the risk of their own deaths, “Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose.” He was fascinated with the possibility of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin dying on the moon. On the one hand, the loneliness of that final resting place was terrifying to contemplate; on the other, Mailer considered the prospect of the souls rising—as so many who have had near-death experiences describe—rising faster, more cleanly than those earthbound, into a “transpostmortal insertion to the stars.”
As with Challenger, an investigation followed. Sally Ride became the only person to serve on the investigation boards for both Challenger and Columbia. As was expected, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB, pronounced “cabe” by insiders) found that the immediate cause of the disaster was a chunk of foam falling onto the tiles and that the organizational cause was a pattern of dismissing problems too easily, the “normalization of deviance” as Diane Vaughan put it so memorably in her study of Challenger. When a shuttle flew with a known issue and came back safely, the tendency among managers was to assume that the issue was not in fact a risk, using the previous success as “evidence.” “Try playing Russian roulette that way,” Richard Feynman remarked after Challenger. CAIB found that after a short period of vigilance, the same error of thinking had crept back into NASA decision making. The board stated in the report that “the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed.”
The return-to-flight mission after Columbia was on Discovery, as the return-to-flight mission had been after Challenger. This one was commanded by Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle mission and one of only two women ever to do so. I remember seeing the front page of the newspaper the second day of that Discovery mission; a large color photograph showed the full black underside of Discovery pointed at a satellite to have its tiles examined, a new protocol demanded by CAIB. The tiles were found to be undamaged, and Discovery returned home safely, as has every shuttle to fly since then.
I keep thinking that The Dream Is Alive was a portrait of the space shuttle at its most hope-filled, and it is. But when I look up the date of the film’s release, I discover that the earliest I possibly could have seen it was June 1985. Six months after the film came out, Challenger exploded and one of the film’s stars, Judith Resnik, was dead. I’m not sure I ever got to enjoy this golden period of shuttle history that I’ve come to associate with my childhood. It may be that by the time I had any understanding of shuttle at all, Challenger was already lost, and that was the beginning of the end.
My students think spaceflight is cool. They are openly jealous that I got to see a launch. As we talk through the counterarguments to the hoax conspiracy theories, my students seem relieved to be able to believe in the triumphs of the heroic era; spaceflight is one of the few legends of the past they can feel an unambiguous pride in. They are saddened that shuttle is being shut down and would like to know whom to blame. Yet they misunderstand the vehicle’s capabilities and estimate insanely high numbers for its cost. Will they hang on to the new numbers I have given them and a new idea that a government agency has achieved a lot with a little?
We’re always being told unkind things about this generation of Millennials—that they are annoyingly attached to their devices and social networks, that their sense of entitlement leaves them without any work ethic, that their helicopter parents have made them helpless to care for themselves or others. This has not been my experience of them. Like young people of any generation, they think they are the first to experience everything. Like young people of any generation, they lack a sense of history. They are alarmingly vague about the events that seemed so earth-shattering to their elders, but so was my generation and so was my parents’. The ignorance is as unchanging as the outrage, as the belief that we were smarter when we were young. We were not. I had thought my students would have at least a sketchy idea of what their country has accomplished in space, and I had worried that they might be too cool to care about it. I was wrong on both counts. In other words, despite how much things have changed, not much has changed.
The space shuttle project never did get us any closer to Mars, but it deployed more than half the cargo ever carried to space and sent three hundred fifty-five people into orbit. Shuttle allowed repairs on satellites that could be fixed only by human hands, including repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, an instrument that has changed our view of the universe. Shuttle pieced together the International Space Station bit by bit over twelve years and carried thousands of experiments small and large for investigators ranging from National Science Foundation–backed scientists to elementary school children. The ISS alone is cited by many space advocates as having made the whole shuttle project worthwhile. The orbiting laboratory has been occupied nonstop since November 2, 2000—in other words, November 2000 was the last time all human beings were on the surface of the earth at once.
Is $209 billion a lot of money for the entire space shuttle program, or too little? Is 0.4 percent of the national budget way too much for NASA, or way too little? In comparing the two eras of American spaceflight, I’ve heard it said that Apollo was a mission in search of a vehicle while the space shuttle was a vehicle in search of a mission. This comparison is generally meant to be at the expense of the space shuttle, though I have never understood why shuttle has to suffer from the observation. Or rather, assuming that the comparison is an insult to shuttle reveals the speaker to be a heroic-era space fan who values “firsts” over all else. My parents’ generation tends to take it as an article of faith that setting a goal (“let’s go to the moon”) and then slapping together an odd-looking agglomeration of incredibly expensive single-use components to reach that goal was inherently cooler than designing a reusable and upgradable space vehicle from the ground up. Fewer people grasp the achievement of shuttle, suitable for many possible uses, some of which had not yet been dreamed of when Columbia was first being assembled.
Consider that the people who know best how to feel about the space shuttle might be the people who worked on it every day. I have heard spaceworkers call the shuttle “a magnificent space vehicle,” “an elegant space plane,” “the
most complex human invention ever built,” and “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I have always wondered whether the space shuttle’s workaday name robs it of some of the wonder it deserves. A “shuttle” is what you take from an economy parking lot to an airport terminal, not a beautiful machine. A name pulled from mythology, like Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo, might have better told us how to feel about it.
At any rate, the people who knew the shuttles best, the workers at Kennedy, tend to talk about individual orbiters and call them by name—they know what was accomplished by Endeavour, what was accomplished by Discovery. They believe these spacecraft are the best things that have ever flown, and they are proud to have helped make them fly.
The ground trembled…. These artificial clouds unrolled their thick spirals to a height of 1,000 yards into the air. A savage, wandering somewhere beyond the limits of the horizon, might have believed that some new crater was forming in the bosom of Florida, although there was neither any eruption, nor typhoon, nor storm, nor struggle of the elements, nor any of those terrible phenomena which nature is capable of producing. No, it was man alone who had produced these reddish vapors, these gigantic flames worthy of a volcano itself, these tremendous vibrations resembling the shock of an earthquake, these reverberations rivaling those of hurricanes and storms; and it was his hand which precipitated into an abyss, dug by himself, a whole Niagara of molten metal!
—Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 1865
CHAPTER 5. Goodbye, Endeavour
STS-134: May 16, 2011
On May 16, 2011, nearly three months after the launch of Discovery, my phone alarms me out of sleep at 4:00 a.m. I wake and wonder where I am for a few seconds in this strange room with its cheap slick bedspread, its seventies-era brown color scheme, a smell of cheap air freshener barely covering cigarette smoke, faint mildew, and underneath that, the salt of the ocean.
Leaving Orbit Page 15