by Lynn Sherr
Sally was the only person to sit on both the Challenger and Columbia investigation teams. She was also, Gehman says, “the only one of the thirteen people on the board anybody wanted an autograph from!”
Once again Sally found herself putting in sixteen-hour days to understand how astronauts had died. Once again she examined NASA work schedules and interviewed shuttle personnel, penciling her notes in yet another little notebook with the mission patch of a dead crew on the cover (and, on her To Do list, a memo to call A2—Steve Hawley—to get his thoughts). And while the shuttle had disintegrated during entry, the problem had begun, again, at launch. This time, it wasn’t O-rings. A backpack-sized chunk of insulation foam from the external fuel tank (where it was connected to the orbiter) had cracked off and struck the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing, punching a hole in the tiles that protected its vulnerable aluminum frame. In space, it didn’t matter. But as the orbiter passed through the turbulence of the atmosphere on its way home, the breach was penetrated by superhot gases, compromising the integrity of the craft and ripping it apart. Once again, the crew didn’t have a chance.
“Follow the foam,” Sally jotted down, looking for new problems. But the similarities to what she’d seen with Challenger made her realize that little had changed. There had, it turned out, been previous such foam strikes, essentially ignored, just as with Challenger’s O-rings. The old Apollo culture that said, “Prove to me that this will work” had been supplanted by “Prove to me that this is unsafe,” just like the decision to launch Challenger. And the pressure of trying to launch too many shuttles, too quickly, had once again impacted human life. Sally isolated the problem quickly.
Lisa Reed was a former shuttle training instructor enlisted to help with the investigation. One day, at the CAIB offices across from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, she lined up all her documentation on a twenty-foot-long table and asked Sally to take a look. Reed thought there was evidence that shuttle maintenance and training schedules were becoming very compressed, leaving less time between missions to prepare both the crew and the orbiter. Everyone was feeling the squeeze as the tempo picked up to meet the flight schedule; pressure had built up to a dangerous level. But she didn’t divulge her conclusions. Sally, she says, “came in and started at the left end. She grabbed a handful of Goldfish snacks from the bowl in the middle, and with her hand on her chin, popping the Goldfish, made her way from one end of the table to the other. She would ask a few questions, look at the material. And she analyzed the situation so quickly, she found the exact same things I was seeing. She understood.”
The chill of history repeating itself crystallized Sally’s thinking. At a briefing for the press in Houston’s Hilton Hotel ballroom on April 8, 2003, she articulated it for the world: “I’m hearing a little bit of an echo here.”
“You could have heard a pin drop in the room,” says Gehman. “We were kind of sniffing around this idea that the engineering at JSC had failed again, but we hadn’t zeroed in on it. Hadn’t made it a priority. We were still looking for widgets and brackets and foam. That single statement significantly reinforced in us the need to change the direction of the investigation. She caused us to reconsider where our priorities were.” Specifically: NASA’s culture, engineering, management and risk assessment. It wasn’t just what happened, it was why. “It was a giant contribution,” Gehman adds, “like changing the course of a ship. Subtle but profound.”
Sociologist and author Diane Vaughan, who had analyzed the 1986 Challenger explosion and famously coined the phrase “normalization of deviance” to characterize the problem, was also invited to testify before the CAIB and aligned her theories with Sally’s “echoes” statement. She believes that “the power of encapsulating it that way—to put it before the public in one simple sentence—was really stunning.” Equally impressive, she says, was Sally’s demeanor. “She clearly had an investment in terms of her personal, emotional level,” Vaughan says. But in meetings with her team, Vaughan found that Sally “wasn’t outraged. It was a research task for her. Everyone else was very excited—as if NASA were the enemy and this was the elite team trying to find out what happened. Sally, of course, having been an astronaut and also on the Challenger commission, was more deeply affected than anyone but remained truly professional.”
And she had learned how to move mountains without leaving fingerprints.
During the Challenger investigation, she’d secretly given the information about the O-rings to another commissioner, to keep her name from implicating the NASA source. With Columbia she would do her end run around her former bosses by using the press.
The CAIB investigators were concerned about NASA’s continued insistence that nothing could have saved the crew. The impact area was not visible to the seven astronauts onboard, but despite requests from some engineers, mission managers never tried to get images—through spy satellite telescopes—to examine the foam damage while Columbia was in orbit. There was, they said, no point: a spacewalk would have been fruitless because there was no way to repair it.
The board wasn’t convinced and directed NASA to put together a team to test the theory. Their conclusion: if NASA had recognized the fatal damage to the left wing, a rescue mission using another shuttle, and a string of spacewalks, might—might—have been successful. The CAIB folks prepared to announce the results at a briefing the next day but worried that NASA management might get wind of it and try to discredit their findings. So the investigators decided to leak them to a reporter. Sally was the leaker; Todd Halvorson of Florida Today (and her former Space.com colleague), the leakee. Sally made the phone call.
“I was in the media newsroom in Houston,” he tells me, revealing his source for the first time. “And I remember running outside when I saw who was calling on my cell phone.” Halvorson stood there scribbling down notes as Sally gave him the details. His paper ran the story the next day under a provocative headline:
DARING RESCUE MAY HAVE SAVED COLUMBIA CREW
QUICK ATLANTIS MISSION POSSIBLE, STUDY SAYS.
It quoted an unnamed “senior investigator” [Sally] as saying, “It would have been high drama, but there was a realistic chance … of returning the crew.” The “investigator” added that Columbia’s crew could have stayed in orbit for thirty days, plenty of time to get Atlantis off the pad and transfer the astronauts with spacewalks that “would have been sporty, but … not impossible.”
“It was all clearly very distressing to Sally,” Halvorson recalls. “And I became persona non grata with NASA at first for writing the story.” But the rescue scenario was included in the CAIB’s final report, along with harsh criticism of the space agency’s “[c]ultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety …” Or, as Sally later told me, shaking her head in sorrow, they knew both the O-rings and the foam had not performed properly on occasion. But “they never stopped to fix the problem, never stopped and understood it.”
Her anguish, and her anger, were palpable. In an email to her CAIB colleagues just before publication of the report, she provided, as requested, a summary of the earlier Rogers Commission’s findings. It was uncharacteristically late in delivery. “I’ve been putting this off,” Sally wrote, “because it’s so irritating to go back and read that report … Though the quotes aren’t as good as Yogi Berra’s, it’s definitely Deja Vous [sic] all over again.” At the very moment she was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of her historic flight, and being inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame, she was finding it harder than ever to support NASA. “There wasn’t any of that quality that Mission Control is almost famous for,” she told The New York Times, “which is grabbing onto the pants legs of a problem and not letting go until it understands what the problem is and what the implications are. And that didn’t happen in this case.”
The Columbia accident and subsequent inquiry didn’t tear Sally apart the way Challenger had. It did, however, shred her faith in the system. It would, she said, be her last accident
investigation.
Her service to the government, however, was far from over.
Sally was the top choice for anything space. People always wanted her involved. And she was there for everything.
—Lori Garver, Deputy Administrator, NASA, 2012
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Sally made it clear that she still wasn’t interested in the NASA Administrator job. Lori Garver, then the agency’s lead for Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team, remembers a conversation where Sally laughed and said, “I was wondering when you’d call!” But, Garver says, “it was really very obvious that she just didn’t want it. My takeaway was, ‘Please don’t have the president ask me.’ But she would help out in whatever way she could.”
She had endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket during the campaign and would serve as a consultant or on a number of government and private industry boards, including both the National Math and Science Initiative (2007), a program to invigorate K–12 science and math education by training teachers and recruiting college students to become teachers; Educate to Innovate (2009), a national campaign to stimulate science training, largely outside the classroom; and Change the Equation (2010), an industry-driven initiative to improve achievement in the field, especially among females and minorities. At a time when the US ranked twenty-first (out of thirty industrialized nations) in science, and twenty-fifth in math, it called for a more rigorous curriculum, to transform the national dialogue to include science, technology, engineering and math. At the press conference announcing formation of Change the Equation, Sally said, “Literacy is not just being able to read anymore. It’s being able to read, to calculate, to analyze.”
Earlier, in June 2009, she was asked to serve on yet another panel to determine America’s future in space. The Review of United States Human Spaceflight Plans Committee—known as the Augustine Committee, for its chairman, former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine—would be the initial blueprint for the Obama administration’s plans. Sally shoehorned it into her schedule. “Too busy,” she emailed me, “… just agreed to be on Norm Augustine’s committee reviewing the human spaceflight program (which is, by the way, in need of ‘review’).”
After Columbia, the shuttle had again returned to space, with safety-first modifications and rigorous new procedures. But it was scheduled to be retired in a year, and the International Space Station was destined to be deep-sixed in the South Pacific in 2015. Was that the right course? And should the US continue the George W. Bush–approved Constellation program, with new rockets to transport astronauts to orbit and beyond? With government dollars in short supply, the findings of the panel were especially critical.
Sally rolled up her sleeves for another labor-intensive summer, lugging her laptop to meetings and working through the night for four months. Augustine remembers getting her 2:00 a.m. emails about critical issues. He had enlisted her, he tells me, because she possessed “the credibility that comes from experience, the courage to say what needed to be said and the fact that she was not a zealot. Her strongest suit was judgment. To have good judgment you’ve got to be able to detach yourself from things you may care a lot about. You’ve got to have the ability to look at the facts, to look at the other side of the argument and to weigh it very fairly.” At the final public hearing in Washington, Sally stood at the microphone and presided over a set of slides and statistics for nearly two hours in a deft economic analysis of the existing NASA plan. The way things stood, she pointed out, the new rocket system would not be completed until after the Space Station was planned to be shut down. Or, as her fellow panelist and friend Wanda Austin, CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, tells me, “by the time you build the rocket to get there, the ‘there’ is gone.”
As a result of the committee’s report, Constellation was killed, the shuttle extended by a year (Sally had also considered longer options), and the Space Station extended to 2020. (It has since been extended to 2024.) To ferry our astronauts there, the United States agreed to buy space on Russian rockets—our former enemy, now a taxi service—and to actively support commercial ventures. Long-range goals would include Mars, its moons and an asteroid. “Sally really was a major architect of the report,” John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, tells me, “which in turn became a major shaper of President Obama’s space policy, and the plan ultimately worked out with the Congress. Sally’s fingerprints are all over that.”
And it set off a major controversy. Much of NASA, along with some of Sally’s closest colleagues—including Bob Crippen—argued vehemently that ending both shuttle and Constellation threatened America’s primacy in space. Neil Armstrong coauthored an op-ed with Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan saying the bold leadership of President Kennedy had been betrayed: “We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years… . John F. Kennedy would have been sorely disappointed.”
Space historian John Logsdon says the criticism from NASA’s “old guard” was understandable. “It threatened the heritage that they were so much a part of,” he tells me. “They underestimated the ability of a reformed NASA to carry out a human spaceflight program differently from the way they had known it.” For the Committee, it was all about their mission. “We tried to do what we thought was right for the country,” Norm Augustine explains. “It took a lot of courage for Sally to do what she did. Because she was a product of NASA, her name was built with NASA. She was challenging the organization of which she was the offspring.”
She was also trying to preserve it. “She had high expectations for NASA,” Wanda Austin tells me. “She knew what it could be.”
12
*
THE SECRET
2001–FEBRUARY 2011
At home with Tam and Gypsy, 1992.
They should let girls be who they want to be, and not pay any attention to the stereotypes.
—Sally Ride, 1986
Her life embodied authenticity, being true to herself and not having to conform to the demands of society or any other authority. That was also the far-reaching goal of Sally Ride Science: to allow children—especially girl children—to follow their hearts and minds into science or any other field, no matter what tradition dictated.
Ironically, and unfortunately, it was not how Sally felt able to live her own personal life.
Publicly, her relationship with Tam—the most significant and by far the longest lasting of her lifetime—yielded to a business decision.
“Corporate America is really nervous about gay women,” Tam tells me. “When we started Sally Ride Science, we were just worried that it would affect the growth of the company, the sponsorships. We both lived through Billie Jean’s horrors, of being gay and being in the public eye. And we both were afraid it would hurt the business. So we elected to be private about it.”
Tam prefers the word private to secret, and wonders if they might not have lived the same way in the non-business world. Sally had never announced their relationship in her previous careers, either; had never, in psychologist Kay Loveland’s terms, “claimed” Tam as her partner in public the way she “claimed” her male relationships. In a society still anxious about same-sex couples, it was a lot easier for a woman to say “my husband” than “my gay mate.”
Among their close group of gay and straight friends, Sally and Tam were not closeted, socializing at each other’s homes and in restaurants. They were regulars at the WTA Tournament in La Costa and always bought a table at the annual Billie Jean King and Friends fundraiser held in Pasadena, to which they invited old tennis buddies. They also traveled extensively, staying together in hotels and attending public functions together. In 2010 they went to the Masters Tournament in Augusta at the invitation of Exxon, their SRS partner. And they attended each other’s university events, as well as SRS occasions, including annual education conferences and meetings. Tam kept nothing from her best buddies, many of whom became Sally’s friends as well. But Sally told no one, not even the ins
iders.
Billie Jean King had been rejected by a world hostile to homosexuality nearly two decades earlier—before Sally first flew, before she even moved in with Steve. When Sally became a celebrity, she and King had often spoken about careers, about the special responsibility of being in the public eye. “She asked me things like, Why did I do what I did? How did it feel being the leader of a movement?” King tells me. “And you could tell by what she was thinking that she wanted to set the world on fire.”
But Sally never asked about the effect on King’s career of being gay.
“Never. I thought it was weird,” King says. “But she knew what I’d been through. At the time, it was on the news every night at six and eleven.” In the years since, society grew more educated and more tolerant, and King’s leadership in women’s rights was widely celebrated. She also spent time with Sally and Tam as a couple.
“Selfishly, I thought it would be great if Sally came out, and if Tam came out, but I knew they weren’t there. I thought it would be great for an example of being gay and being powerful and all the wonderful things, to be yourself and to be authentic. And also, if you see it, you can be it—you know? The more examples you have for children, it just empowers them, gives them hope. But it’s easy for me to say, I’m in a different place. When you’re not in that place, you’re just frightened.”
Because of her own experience, King says, “I would never ‘out’ somebody. I don’t believe in pushing. There are certain people who, when you’re around them, you know they don’t want you to go in a certain place. That’s the feeling I always got with Sally and Tam. They just didn’t want you to go there. You know, we’re friends, let’s enjoy each other, we’re gay, whoop-de-doo. But that was it.”
Tam confirms her friend’s observations. “We never publicly said, ‘We’re gay.’ We didn’t like labels of any kind, but especially the ones referring to sexuality: queer, lesbian, homosexual.”