Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Kutyna took a look and realized that he, too, had to get the information out without leaving a trail to the original leaker. So he figured out a way to plant the concept—rubber O-rings, cold weather—into the mind of Feynman, the maverick Nobelist with whom he’d struck up a friendship. Feynman never knew the source, but he got the connection. And he knew how to illustrate the problem. At the commission’s next public meeting, he tightly compressed a sample of the rubber O-rings used in the shuttle’s solid rocket motors with a small clamp, then dunked it into glass of ice water. When he pulled it out and released the clamp, he discovered that the rubber didn’t stretch fully back into shape for several seconds. The ice water had significantly reduced resiliency—a critical factor for a material needed to seal the gap in the contracting and expanding joints of the shuttle’s rockets.

  “I believe that has some significance for our problem,” he announced.

  Feynman’s show-and-tell made the evening news that night and made clear what had happened to Challenger. “I thought it was pretty cool,” Sally told me. “It was a good illustration for the public.” She never connected his demonstration to her information, never let me in on the secret. Only after her death did General Kutyna reveal the story.

  But testimony uncovered a problem within NASA, even deeper than that of the O-rings: a culture drowning in flawed decision making and an unrealistic launch schedule that put pressure on everyone to sign off on equipment before it was ready to go. Management, Sally wrote in her notebook, had been “stretched to the limit” during Steve’s last launch just two weeks before Challenger.

  Sally dove in with her usual intensity and energy. She often worked eighteen-hour days, analyzing data, interviewing her own sources, digging up information, parsing the testimony for inconsistencies. She spoke regularly with Crippen, with Steve (still “A2” in her notes), and with a host of other astronaut friends, each of whom had been assigned some area to help. And she constantly checked in with the investigators hired for the commission. During the hearings, she and Neil Armstrong sat in the front row, flanking the chairman, occasionally exchanging glances of disbelief as they heard from people at the Marshall Space Flight Center associated with the solid rockets. As Sally listened to witnesses, she took meticulous notes on lined paper in a spiral-bound notebook on whose cover she had pasted the patch of the doomed mission, the names of the seven crewmembers clearly visible every second of every day. In fine black pen, she drew neat bullet points outlining her questions about the revelations. There were no doodles in her notebook, no unnecessary sounds or words in her inquiries. And as the truth came out, she got tougher, and angrier. When one manager rationalized the dispute over the temperatures by saying that every new flight “has had to break frontiers,” Sally, agitated, said, “The time you go through frontiers is during testing, not during the flights. That’s the way it’s supposed to work!” When another testified about damaged O-rings in an earlier flight (there would turn out to be fifteen such examples) an aerospace reporter in the audience, whose mouth had dropped open in shock, happened to catch Sally’s eye. “She looked at me across twenty-five meters,” he said, “and just rolled her eyes to heaven like, ‘Oh my Lord.’ ”

  I am not ready to fly again now. I think there are very few astronauts who are ready to fly again now.

  —Sally Ride, March 1986

  Sally was deeply moved by the testimony of two engineer-managers for Morton Thiokol, the maker of the solid rockets. At a closed session at the Kennedy Space Center, Roger Boisjoly said that in the prelaunch meeting, managers (from Thiokol and from NASA) had acted exactly opposite to the approved standard. “We normally have to absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have the ability to fly,” he said. But Boisjoly said he and others were having to prove why “we couldn’t [emphasis added] fly at this time, instead of the reverse.” It was a reckless violation of NASA’s own rules, and Boisjoly had risked his career to speak out against his company.

  In her notebook, Sally wrote, “CRIP: ‘prove to me you’re ready to fly’ is normal NASA philosophy.” She added that John Young, head of the astronaut office, had said, “if the risk is unassessable, don’t take it … ‘don’t know, don’t go.’ ”

  Another Thiokol engineer, Allan J. McDonald, dropped his own bombshell. He said he spoke out at the launch decision meeting about the effect of cold on the O-rings, but that no one would listen to him. “And I still didn’t understand how NASA could accept a recommendation to fly below forty degrees… . I made the statement that if we’re wrong and something goes wrong on this flight, I wouldn’t want to have to be the person to stand up in front of board of inquiry.”

  When asked whether he felt “unusual pressure from NASA officials, to go ahead with the launch,” McDonald answered, “That is an accurate inference, yes.” McDonald also said that he refused to sign off on the decision, a highly unusual action.

  The statements riveted the commission. “When I got done, I could hardly contain myself,” McDonald tells me today “I had tears coming down both sides of my eyes. It didn’t have to happen. And Sally Ride could see that, and that was kind of at the end of the meeting. And she got up out of her chair, came over and gave me a hug and said, ‘God, I’m glad somebody finally told us what really happened. That took a lot of guts.’ And then Roger [Boisjoly] got up, and she walked up and hugged him too.”

  No reporter witnessed the exchange—it was a closed session—and when I mention to McDonald that the hugs sound out of character for Sally, he agrees. “It surprised me as well.” Sally never spoke of it.

  • • •

  All along, I’d been asking her for an exclusive interview, something to get behind the scenes. She’d declined at first, immersed in her homework, too busy or too tired to consider it. She looked pale and drawn, and I didn’t push. Finally, she agreed.

  We were in Florida that week, at the Kennedy Space Center, where the hearings were being held. At 7:30 on the morning of March 6, evading the rest of the press, she came to my motel room at Cocoa Beach, sat down, slipped off her shoes, and for the only time during the life of the commission, had her say. She wouldn’t discuss the investigation itself but conceded that the revelations about the flawed decision-making process and the lack of rocket testing had affected her deeply.

  Lynn Sherr: Were you angry?

  Sally K. Ride: I was disturbed, I think is a good way to put it.

  LS: The shuttle management has said that the program is fully operational. Do you agree?

  SKR: If you mean, did I believe that we could launch every three weeks? That was really stretching the system, I think. Just from the point of view of putting a lot of stress on a lot of very competent engineers and possibly spreading the people and the resources a little bit too thin.

  LS: What about private citizens on the shuttle? Like Christa McAuliffe. [I did not have to say, “Like me, the one you wrote the recommendation for.” We were both thinking it.]

  SKR: I think that we may have been misleading people into thinking that this is a routine operation, that it’s just like getting on an airliner and going across the country and that it’s safe. And it’s not. Now, maybe they did understand the risks, maybe they didn’t, and I think that that’s NASA’s responsibility and I’m not sure that NASA had carried out that responsibility.

  Her final comment is the one that grabbed the headlines.

  LS: You’ve flown on the shuttle twice. Knowing what you know now, would you fly again?

  SKR: I am not ready to fly again now. I think there are very few astronauts who are ready to fly again now.

  By the time the final report was presented to President Reagan in June 1986, five months after the accident, the indictment of NASA was complete: the O-rings were flawed, the signs of danger had been ignored, the risks minimized. Moreover, the flight rate was unacceptable to guarantee crew safety. In a separate appendix to the commission’s findings, Richard Feynman compared launch decisions at NASA to Russian
roulette. He concluded, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

  The shuttle program was shut down for more than two years while the rockets were redesigned and management reconfigured. Plans were abandoned to fly private citizens, meaning the end of the Journalist-in-Space competition. Of the 1,703 applicants, I had made it to the last cut, one of forty semifinalists. But neither I nor Walter Cronkite nor any of the others on that list would become the first reporter in space. As Rick Hauck told me in 1988, just before he commanded the first return-to-flight mission on Discovery, “I think maybe we were beginning to think we were infallible.”

  The findings were profoundly disturbing to Sally, the experience even more so. As one of her colleagues put it, “The giants we thought would make the right decisions were not giants at all.” And Sally had to censure those giants, some of the same ones who got her into space in the first place. “It was a very, very difficult time for me,” Sally later confessed, “for all the reasons you might expect. It was very hard on all of us. You could see it in our faces … I looked tired and just kind of gray in the face.” At one point, during a break in the testimony, she had slipped away with Tam to a cottage in La Jolla, California, to walk on the beach and watch the sun set over the Pacific, a few days of soothing reassurance in the face of death. A chance to mourn quietly.

  • • •

  The Challenger explosion and its aftermath would likely have been a turning point under any circumstances; given Sally’s personal situation, even more so. But she was buoyed by her colleagues in Houston. “Just seeing how the accident hurt them,” she would later say, “how much effort they put into the investigation and how important it was to them to understand what had happened, sort of restored my confidence. I really saw NASA responding the way I always assumed that NASA would respond.” As usual, she did not dwell on catastrophe. In a spiral-bound notebook like those in which she’d recorded the proceedings of the hearings, Sally jotted down her observations of her fellow Commissioners, with her familiar entertaining and unvarnished take on a special group of individuals coming together at a unique time.

  Neil Armstrong had been her hero from the time she watched him land on the Moon, but she couldn’t resist noting that he struck her as “a little paunchy … wearing a slightly baggy, slightly ‘hick’ suit—color of bale of hay and alfalfa.” And that he stumbled coming down the steps into the conference room. And lit a cigarette. For all that, she felt a special kinship with him and described a scene that surely would have made headlines, had any of the press been quick enough to notice: After their first meeting during a cold, snowy day in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, she and Armstrong wanted to evade the media out front. So they ducked out a side entrance and decided to walk to the hotel, about half a block away. Armstrong had come straight from the airport, with luggage, and “I offered to carry his brief case,” Sally wrote. Then they turned a corner, and found themselves walking “down the street behind [the] press—unnoticed—me carrying one of Neil’s bags.”

  Richard Feynman, she said, was “eager to investigate on his own … chomping at the bit,” wearing “sick green shirts, non-descript slacks.” But, she noted, the physicist had “2 new 3-piece suits (and a haircut) for [the] White House ceremony.” Sally was impatient with his ego, noting that he used NASA offices “at [a] time when [Chairman] Rogers wanted to establish independence” from the space agency. And that he talked to himself and “beat drums on [his] desk”—holding imaginary drumsticks over the surface.

  One commissioner was “puffy,” with a “red face/red-nose.” Another, “a little ‘stilted’ … in an old-fashioned way … called me ‘Dr. Ride’ even in informal situations.”

  Sally was sensitive to how she was addressed. Several of the witnesses, most of whom she’d never met, had called her “Sally.” Then, “it looked as though someone put out a memo that said, ‘don’t do that,’ because soon even people I knew well were using ‘Dr. Ride’ in the hearings.”

  Sally particularly liked her co-commissioner Dave Acheson, a “tall, well-built” lawyer in “crisp, fashionable shirts [and] Washingtonian suits,” who “looked like [he] enjoyed tennis, boating, etc.” He also “looked like he should have a pocket watch.” Sally called him “invaluable toward the end—long hours, steadying influence, mode of equanimity, very thorough editor.” He had, she noted, been given the job of “containing” the irrepressible Feynman.

  The best surprise was Art Walker, her Stanford thesis advisor, with whom she had fun reliving the “student/prof relationship.” Walker told her, “I guess I won’t win all of our arguments.” She also noted, without comment, that her distinguished African American mentor “was taken for a waiter/maître’d at an early function,” either by a member of the commission or a NASA official.

  The one member about whom she had nothing nice to say was Chuck Yeager, the sound-barrier-busting test pilot who had given both the Mercury astronauts and Kathy Sullivan such a hard time. “[I] never met him,” Sally wrote. “Saw him for about 1 hr. at one of our early closed-door sessions in DC … he left early. That was his only appearance (asked no questions, looked bored).” Yeager did not participate further. “Showed some class by not coming to final ceremonies,” Sally wrote, adding, “would have shown more by resigning from Commission.”

  Sally’s final jibes pricked some of the more ludicrous moments of a group whose camaraderie and leadership otherwise impressed her. Among her observations:

  One technical writer tried to sell a very early draft of the report to CBS. He was fired.

  A note from the chairman answered the question, “How do you address a problem?” this way: “Dear problem.”

  And then there was the day when they were meeting in a windowless room at the Pentagon to discuss—no kidding—the color of the leather-bound cover of the report. When it came down to a choice between maroon and blue, Bob Hotz, an otherwise highly respected aviation writer and editor in chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology, made the politically unforgivable mistake of suggesting, as Sally noted, “that as the female I could be our color coordinator … I deferred.” The sexist faux pas horrified Don Kutyna, whose Air Force training had sensitized him to the virtues of gender neutrality in all situations. “After a painful pause, during which all could see Sally’s jaws tighten and eyes pierce, she replied slowly, firmly, ‘Why me?’ ” Kutyna recalls. “Deathly silence.” A vote was taken and maroon won—that was Sally’s choice, too. But Hotz, she wrote, “had apparently already given go-ahead for blue … when report showed up … it had a blue cover … and I was accused.”

  Sally’s copy of the (blue) leather-bound report, her name stamped in gold on the front, contains signatures of some of the commissioners, just like her high school yearbook. From Bud Wheelon, “Your calm company made this long journey wonderful.” From Dave Acheson, “I enjoyed making a new friend.” From Richard Feynman, “Great to get to know you—and share an office.” Sally said they never shared an office.

  SPLIT

  One Sunday that year—no one remembers the exact date—Sally went home to Houston and talked to Steve.

  “You’re going to hate me for this,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I think I don’t want to be married anymore.”

  Steve took a breath and said, “Remember when we got engaged? I told you that what I wanted for you in life was to be happy, and if that’s what you want to be happy, then okay.”

  And that, Steve tells me, was basically that. He was more than upset, his life torn apart. “But you know, it didn’t come as a big shock to me. In some sense it came as a relief.” He had, he says, “questioned her sexuality for quite a while, since we spent a lot of our marriage more as roommates than husband and wife. I had concluded by then that I didn’t really want a roommate. And I had begun to contemplate, ‘How the hell am I going to get out of this?’ ” The last year or so h
ad been difficult. “She was gone all the time, partly with the Challenger investigation. And even before that she was gone a lot—kind of doing her own thing. It doesn’t sound very charitable to say, but I always felt that her priority in our relationship was her and never me or us. Because I loved her, I tolerated that for as long as I could. But my sense was that she was beginning to sort of chart out what she was going to do next, and it didn’t look necessarily as if I’d be part of that.”

  I ask Steve if he thought at the time it had anything to do with Challenger.

  “Yeah, I did. She was clearly unhappy at NASA, and with NASA. And I thought part of it was she just had to get away from NASA, and if that meant getting away from me, that was what it was going to have to take. ’Cause I wasn’t going to leave NASA. She didn’t ask me, but I’m sure she assumed that.”

  Sally was on her way out of NASA, but not yet. And breaking up her marriage was difficult and painful. She had loved Steve and would remain friends with him for the rest of her life. But just as she had never told him about Molly, she would never tell him about Tam.

  8

  *

  NEW TERRITORY

  AUGUST 1986–AUGUST 1987

  The Ride Report.

  • Mail rent check

  • Start phone service

  • Rent furniture?

  • Call Crip

  • Need: Secretary/staff

  • Tickets and advance: HOU-DCA

  —To Do list from Sally Ride’s notebook, August 1986

  NASA HEADQUARTERS

  Washington, DC, in mid-August is no day at the beach. On the other hand, it’s not Houston. And Sally was very glad to be out of Houston. After eight years, she still found its climate—both meteorological and political—oppressive. And with the shuttle fleet grounded, the prospect of waiting at least two years for another flight held no appeal. So when her work with the Rogers Commission was done in June 1986, she made herself available to the new NASA administrator, James Fletcher.