Riding Rockets

by Mike Mullane

  “I don’t think so, Tarzan. It was Cheetah.” She was right about Hawley. Steve now had the unenviable record of nine strap-ins for two flights. Judy was only working on her sixth strap-in.

  I asked her how the launch looked for tomorrow. “Good, except it’s supposed to be cold, down in the twenties. We’re worried about ice in the sound suppression system.”

  “It’s all these shuttle launches that are changing the weather.”

  She chuckled at my reply.

  I kept the call brief knowing she probably had others to receive or make. “I just wanted to say good luck, JR. Please tell the others the same for me.” These were the last words I would ever speak to her.

  “Thanks, Tarzan. I’ll see you back in Houston.” These were the last words I would ever hear from her.

  The last hope to saveChallenger passed that night. When the Thiokol engineers learned of the extremely cold temperatures forecast at KSC, they convened a special teleconference with their NASA counterparts and argued that the mission should be delayed until the temperature warmed. Their justification was the fact that STS-51C, launched a year earlier with the coldest joint temperature yet—53 degrees—had experienced the worst primary O-ring blow-by of any launch. They suspected the cold temperatures had stiffened the rubberized O-rings and adversely affected their ability to seal. With an estimated joint temperature of about 30 degrees forChallenger, the same thing could happen tomorrow, they argued. They recommended the launch be delayed until the joint temperature was at least 53 degrees. The suggestion brought a fusillade of objection. One NASA official responded, “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Another said he was “appalled” by the recommendation to postpone the launch. They correctly pointed out that there had been blow-by observed after launches in warm weather, a fact that suggested there was no correlation between temperature and the probability of O-ring failure. The arguments continued for several hours but, in the end, Thiokol management caved in to NASA’s pressure and gave the SRBs a go for launch. The Golden Age had only hours remaining.

  Chapter 26

  Challenger

  After waking on January 28, I flipped on the TV to see what was happening withChallenger. The STS-51L countdown was running two hours late. I had plenty of time for my morning run so I dressed in my sweats and stepped into the crystalline twilight.

  Few cities in America are more beautifully sited than Los Alamos, New Mexico. Set on a shoulder of a dormant volcano at an elevation of 7,200 feet, it commands a godly view of the Rio Grande Valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. The city is built upon multiple mesas separated by dramatic mini-grand canyons. The soil is soft volcanic tuff and eons of erosion have sculpted the terrain into bizarre and breathtaking shapes.

  While Los Alamos was a joy for the eye, it was a pain for the lungs. In its thin air I was unable to keep the pace I regularly ran at sea level and I throttled back to a more leisurely jog. The dawn was pinking the eastern sky while a nearly full moon graced the west. I steered myself on a path through a forest of ponderosa pine, the scent of their needles perfuming the air. A herd of white-tailed deer, long accustomed to humans, didn’t bolt at my appearance.

  I ran for half an hour and then dropped into a cool-down walk, enjoying a moment of total contentment as I did so. I was in top physical condition. I was a veteran astronaut. I was in line for a second spaceflight, afantastic second flight. There were probably no more than six or seven missions between me and polar orbit. I could easily visualizeDiscovery on the Vandenberg pad, now that I had a photo on my office wall ofEnterprise on the same pad.*Several months earlier NASA had airlifted that orbiter to Vandenberg for a pad fit-check and the photos taken had captured her asDiscovery would soon be seen, standing vertical against a backdrop of California hills. It was an image that set my soul soaring.

  After a shower and breakfast, I rendezvoused with the rest of the crew and drove to the lab to meet the principal investigators of our payloads. By nowChallenger ’s launch was only a few minutes away, so we delayed our training to watch it. We knew this launch, unlike other recent ones, would be covered on TV because of the public’s interest in schoolteacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe.

  I couldn’t sit down. As a rookie, I had been fearful while viewing shuttle launches. Now, I held a veteran’s terror for what was at hand. I nervously paced behind the others. The TV talking heads focused on Christa, showing clips of her in training, then live shots of her students awaiting the blastoff. There was a carnival atmosphere among the children.

  As the NASA PR voice gave the final ten seconds of the countdown, I was in prayer-overdrive, begging God for a successful launch. My motivation wasn’t all selfless: There were still a thousand things that could come between me and my Vandenberg mission, and STS-51L was one of them. Another pad abort or, God forbid, an abort into Africa or Europe would have a serious impact on the launch schedule. The ripples of delay would push 62A even farther to the right.

  At T-0 the SRBs blossomed fire andChallenger was on her way. The TV only covered a moment of ascent and then cut to the trivia of the morning. Bob Crippen spun the dial to other stations hoping for more coverage but there was none. Even the novelty of a schoolteacher couldn’t buy NASA more than a minute of airtime.

  We turned off the TV and gave our attention to a principal investigator of an experiment that would be in our cargo bay. As we were about to follow him to the hardware, Jerry Ross decided to give the TV another shot, “Maybe they’ll have an update on the launch.” He turned it on. What we saw immediately shocked us to silence.Challenger ’s destruction had already occurred. We were seeing a replay of the horror. We watched the vehicle disintegrate into an orange-and-white ball. The SRBs twisted erratically in the sky. Streamers of smoke arced toward the sea.

  For several heartbeats there was not a sound in the room. Then the exclamations came. “God, no!” Guy Gardner bowed his head and cried visible tears. I just stared in a dazed silence. Most of the others did the same. A few of the lab personnel wondered aloud if the crew had bailed out. I answered their question. “There’s no ejection system on the space shuttle. They’re lost.”

  The TV focused on Christa McAuliffe’s parents. They were in bleachers in the press area and appeared merely confused. I could read the question on their faces:Are the smoke patterns in the sky part of a normal launch? Their daughter was already dead and they didn’t know. I silently cursed the press for continuing to focus on them. It was the ultimate obscenity of that terrible morning.

  I phoned Donna. She was sobbing. Even though the NASA PR announcer was only saying it was a major malfunction, she was familiar enough with the shuttle design to know it had no escape system. I didn’t have to tell her the crew was dead. I suggested she pick up the kids from school. The press was going to be everywhere and I didn’t want them shoving a camera in their faces. “Just keep them at home.” I told her to expect me that afternoon. I knew we wouldn’t be staying in Los Alamos.

  I next called my mom and dad in Albuquerque. Dad, the big-hearted, sensitive Irishman, was crying. As always my mom was unbendable iron. I knew she was dying inside, but there was no way she could verbalize those feelings.

  As expected, Crippen wanted to get back to Houston as quickly as possible. We drove to the Los Alamos airport and took the lab charter flight to Albuquerque. Within an hour of our arrival there, we were in our ’38s headed home. I was in Crippen’s backseat, in the lead aircraft of the three-ship formation.

  As we climbed to altitude, ATC cleared us direct to Ellington Field and added, “NASA flight, please accept our condolences.” I was certain those same sympathies were being offered to NASA crews everywhere as they hurried home. The entire nation was grieving.

  The rest of our flight continued in silence. At each ATC handover the new controller would offer a few words of comfort and then leave us alone. There was no chatter among our formation on our company frequency. Crippen was silent on the intercom. W
e were each cocooned in our cockpits, alone with our grief. I watched the contrails of the other ’38s streaming away in billowing white and prayed for theChallenger crew and their families.

  My thoughts returned to the last time I had seen the crew—before they entered health quarantine—more than two weeks ago. I passed them on their way to a simulation. Each wore the thousand-watt smiles of Prime Crew. I shook their hands and wished them good luck and added a hug for Judy. With my arms around her I whispered, “Watch out for hair-eating cameras.” She laughed. It was the last I would see of her and the others. Now, their shredded bodies were somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic. Friends whose joyous faces I had watched only two weeks ago were now being discussed by the TV talking heads as “remains.” I could feel Judy’s arms on my back and her hair brushing my cheek in that last hug. Now those arms, that hair, her smile were gone. They were just…remains. Though I’d known it would happen to some of us one day, I still could not come to grips with the reality of it. They were gone. Forever.

  My only comfort was in my belief that their deaths had been mercifully quick, the instantaneous death we all hope for when our time comes. In one heartbeat they had been feeling the rumble of max-q (maximum aerodynamic pressure) and watching the sky fade to black and anticipating the beauty of space and then…death. I was so certain of it. How could anybody have survived the ET explosion? The cockpit was only a few feet from it. There were more than a million pounds of propellant still remaining in the tank when it detonated. The explosion must have destroyed the cockpit and everything in it. The more I dwelled on it, the more certain I was. They died instantly. I would later learn how wrong I was.

  My thoughts drifted to the cause of the disaster. The video replays on TV showed fire flickering near the base of the orbiter just before vehicle destruction. Had an SSME come apart as so many of us had feared would one day happen? I was certain the SRBs had nothing to do with the disaster. They were seen flying after the breakup. It was to be expected their flight would be unguided and erratic, but other than that they appeared fine. Again, I would be proven wrong on all counts.

  I asked Crippen what he thought had caused the tragedy. “I don’t know. But whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.”

  He was right. Whatever it was, the same mechanism of death had been with all of us on every mission. How close had it come to killing me on STS-41D? A second? A millisecond? Had theChallenger SSME that failed (and I wassure one of them had exploded) been one of the engines poweringDiscovery on my first mission? It was entirely possible. The engines were frequently interchanged among orbiters.

  As I fell deeper into melancholy another thought wiggled its way to the fore. I hated that I couldn’t keep it at bay but, like smoke under a door, it crept in to choke off every other thought.What was Challenger’s loss going to do to me?To ask such a question at this moment defined me as one sick bastard but try as I might, I could not stop it. I suspected every other TFNG was similarly stricken. Would the shuttle ever fly again? I thought of my morning run and how perfect my future had seemed, with images of polar orbit spaceflight filling my brain. Now those images blurred like a mirage.

  Our flight entered the Ellington landing pattern, each pilot following Crippen’s peal-off “break” to circle for touchdown. As we were marshaled to a parking spot, I searched the guest waiting area, expecting to see someone from the press. I dreaded the thought of speaking to them. But the only person to greet us was Donna. Crying, she walked to the side of the jet and rushed into my arms.

  At home my fourteen-year-old daughter, Laura, informed me that someone from the newspaper had called and when she told them I was out of town they interviewedher. I was outraged. They had taken advantage of her naïveté to ask questions about my STS-41D experiences with Judy. “Daddy, they asked me how you felt when you sawChallenger blow up.” It was a good thing I hadn’t fielded that question. I could imagine the answer that might have leaped from my mouth. I had already passed the denial phase of grieving and had entered the anger phase. I told the kids to let the answering machine take the calls. I didn’t want to speak to anybody in the press.

  That evening there were church services throughout Clear Lake City. Donna, the kids, and I went to our parish church, St. Bernadette’s. It was packed. I wasn’t the only astronaut parishioner. There were a few others. Our friends and neighbors came to us and sobbed their condolences. Complete strangers did the same. The grief was beyond anything I would have ever predicted.

  At the request of some of the parish members, my son had put together a slide and music show to play as people entered the church. Pachelbel’s Canon and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” accompanied slides depicting shuttle launches, spacewalkers, and other space scenes. There was a slide from STS-41D showing a grinning Judy with her cannon-cleaner weightless hair. When it appeared on screen, people were overcome, laughing and sobbing at the same moment.Watch out for hair-eating cameras. The slide resurrected from my memory the words I had spoken to her two weeks earlier. I closed my eyes. I wanted to cry, like the others around me, but I couldn’t. That gene just wasn’t in me. I was my mother.

  The next day Donna and I drove to visit the widows. We first went to June Scobee’s home. The street in front of her house was a mob scene. A large crowd of the curious filled the neighbors’ driveways and lawns. The elevated microwave poles of news vans provided a beacon that drew a slow current of cars through the neighborhood streets. Power cables crisscrossed sidewalks. Technicians shouldered cameras and framed their news reporters with the Scobee home in the background. It would have been chaos but for a contingent of local and NASA police who kept everybody from June’s front door. Several NASA PR personnel were teamed with the police to recognize and allow astronauts and other NASA VIPs to enter the home. Donna and I were waved through the cordon.

  The house was filled with family, friends, and several other astronauts and wives. June was the picture of exhaustion, her face puffy and tear-stained. She and Donna hugged for a long moment, each crying into the neck of the other. As they parted, I embraced June, clumsily mumbling my sympathies then fading out of the scene as another visitor came to her. I observed how much better the women were at handling the situation. They easily conversed with June. The men mimicked my awkward performance—a quick hug, a few words, and then escape to a corner where they fidgeted uncomfortably.

  The rest of the day was a blur of grieving women and children as we made our rounds to the other widows. Lorna Onizuka was incapacitated by her loss. She refused to see anybody and rumors circulated that she had not given up hope that the crew would be found alive somewhere.

  A few days after the tragedy, I flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial service for Judy. Most of the astronaut office made the trip. On the flight Mike Coats astounded us with news on the cause of the disaster. “It was a failure of the O-rings on the bottom joint on the right side SRB. There’s video of fire leaking from the booster.” He had been appointed to the accident board and had seen the films at KSC. Just by happenstance the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to the networks. Nobody at the LCC or MCC had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs had never been a major concern to us.So much for being certainan SSME had failed, I thought.

  Mike also recounted his disgust with how the families had been handled immediately after the disaster. He had encountered them in the crew quarters three hours afterChallenger ’s destruction. They were clamoring to return to Houston but NASA was holding them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage from the condos for the return flight. But Mike didn’t believe it. “The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave immediately. They were being held so Vice President Bush could fly to the cape and offer the nation’s condolences.” He sarcastically added, “The wives had to cool their heels so the VP could feel better.” I didn’t blame Bush—his intentions had been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless NASA H
Q was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.

  Judy’s hometown memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight frequently left only that, a memory. Judy and the others had been perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth.

  Judith Arlene Resnik, dead at age thirty-six, was eulogized into a person I didn’t recognize, as heroic as Joan of Arc and flawless as the Virgin Mary. In multiple Houston ceremonies I had heard the same glowing praise bestowed on the other crewmembers. I excused the excess. It was the perfection the living always demand of their fallen heroes and heroines.

  As I listened to Hebrew prayers being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong—flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our silence had been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy excuse. There were eleven children who would never again see a parent.

  The news of NASA’s and Thiokol’s bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight. If NASA management had reacted to the O-ring warnings as they should have and grounded the shuttle for thirty-two months to redesign and test the SRB (the time it took to return the shuttle program to flight afterChallenger ), some of the loudest complaints would have come from astronauts. We were as guilty of injecting into the system a sense of urgency to keep flying as the NASA manager who had answered the Thiokol engineers’ worries with “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of theChallenger Seven.