by Jay Barbree
A female cosmonaut was one of Russia’s first space fliers.
In 1978 and 1979, NASA selected eight qualified women and began their training. After sending eighty-two men into space in twenty-two years, the United States finally was ready to launch a woman. Her name was Sally Ride, and on June 18, 1983, as the Space Shuttle Challenger thundered from its pad, my colleague Steve Porter was shouting into his mike, “Ride Sally Ride.”
Ride did her job exceptionally well, reporting, “It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” and proved women were just as adaptable to space-flight as were men, and in some cases better. Two months after Sally opened the space door to women, another door was opened. America’s first black astronaut, electrophoresis engineer Guion Bluford, Jr., flew aboard Challenger.
Astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, talks with Mission Control. (NASA).
Shuttle flights were happening so fast and successfully that a smiling NASA was realizing its dream of routine access to Earth orbit. There were problems, however. Computers did terrible, unpredictable things by halting countdowns, shutting down main engines after they had ignited, and, as computers can, just being shits. Of course, there were also the nit-picking mechanical problems, and the weather—always the stinking Florida weather halting one launch attempt after another and diverting landings to Mojave’s high and dry desert lake bed.
But America’s Space Shuttles flew and flew, and their crews delivered satellites and brought some back for repair. Astronomy astronauts gazed at the heavens while other astronauts tested space-station assembly techniques, conducted extensive medical research, and when no one was looking, dropped off secret spy stuff for the military.
Missions were coming and going so fast the media and a large percentage of the public were becoming bored. After all, Space Shuttles were only circling Earth. Many Americans had been rocked to sleep with NASA’s “can do” attitude and safety record. Forget about the fact space flight could be a killer.
The public at large believed the winged spaceships were as reliable as a passenger jet. The fact U.S. Senator Jake Garn was permitted to go into orbit didn’t help discredit that fantasy. As chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversaw NASA’s budget, the senator joked in a meaningful tone that he would not vote for the space agency’s budget if he didn’t get a shuttle ride. When NASA finally said okay, critics accused Garn of using his political clout to make the ultimate congressional junket. But the former navy pilot brushed off the carping and, after four months of training, he rode the shuttle Discovery into orbit on April 12, 1985—four years to the day after Columbia’s maiden launch.
To make himself useful on the journey, Garn volunteered to be a medical guinea pig. NASA needed to better understand space motion sickness. More than half of Shuttle fliers were experiencing the malady. Well, by crackey, Jake Garn turned out to be a perfect subject. It seems, because he’d used his senatorial clout to get his ride, the good senator’s proper meds to reduce space nausea were somehow misplaced. His crewmates returned to Earth hysterical with laughter. They told me Garn was sick the whole flight and, when he appeared just once before the television camera to speak to the voters back home, he was held upright and steady and stuck to Discovery’s cabin wall by Velcro. Since that day, Shuttles fly with the “Memorial Jake Garn Wall” for all those who need a barf bag, and sick astronaut upchucks are measured in one, two, or three Garns.
One might think flying nonessential astronauts in space would have ended there.
Well, it didn’t. NASA now had a congressional problem of its own making. The agency felt it simply could not fly the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversaw its budget without inviting his counterpart in the House of Representatives. Congressman Bill Nelson didn’t ask to go. The gentleman of our capital city would never impose on anyone, but when NASA insisted, he climbed aboard the shuttle Columbia and was given the proper meds. Nelson made it through his flight without once turning green.
And as the old saying goes, when it comes to climbing on the bandwagon, going all out to get what you want, we are all prostitutes. For years we reporters had been told the first citizen in space would be a journalist, and I found it easy to imagine myself an astronaut only temporarily earthbound. I had visions of broadcasting every second of the thundering and rattling ride into orbit no matter how scared out of my wits I was, but President Ronald Reagan was on the prowl for votes he didn’t need. His 1984 reelection campaign went after the large National Teachers’ Union with the promise “a teacher will be the first citizen in space.”
The people voted, and Reagan swept the country and kept his promise. No one could disagree. The teachers’ choice, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, was simply perfect. She was a thirty-seven-year-old social sciences teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who planned her assignments with all the enthusiasm of a senior going to her prom with permission to stay out all night. Smart and sharp, she won her ride into orbit over eleven thousand other applicants, and we reporters heaped on the deserving praise while the program to select one of us among 1,769 applications moved ahead.
The application to participate in the Journalist in Space Project was itself a trap. It was managed by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, and it was very specific and discouragingly long. It was filled with demanding essays and structured questions, and the impatient simply tossed it into the nearest waste can.
The selection committee wanted to weed out the “never finish anything you start” bunch from the opening bell. More traps came not only with the requirement of precise answers and essays, but with requests for references qualified to judge your work. The selection committee was not impressed with whom you knew, but with those references who had the expertise to judge your talents. While others put down governors, senators, astronauts, and movie stars, I gave the committee Dixon Gannett, John Chancellor, and Martin Caidin as references—each established and respected in my field. When the 1,769 were whittled down to national semifinalists, I was most pleased to learn I was among them.
As it’s been said, good news comes in bunches. The next morning the mailman brought me a higher-paying contract with NBC News, and wife Jo called the carpenter and had double doors put on the front of the house. She explained we needed the extra width to get my head through. Then she announced loudly, “Come summer, I will be leaving my job.” She reasoned that if her worthless spouse was finally earning enough to feed his family, there was little reason for her to stand on her feet most of the day punching dollars into complaining customers’ bank accounts.
Congressman Bill Nelson’s flight was the twenty-fourth for the Space Shuttle.
Christa McAuliffe’s launch was to be the twenty-fifth.
Challenger was rolled to its launch pad.
A bitter cold wave was rolling, too!
Southward.
TWENTY-ONE
Challenger: A Disaster
In late January 1986, a frigid weather front rolled southward out of Canada and headed straight for Florida. The rare, bone-chilling freeze gripped unsuspecting palms and palmettos, stiffened and cracked rolling groves of citrus, and froze Florida’s sprawling Kennedy Space Center to a slow crawl. The spaceport—making use of the latest electronic miracles and a step ahead of the cutting-edge of technology—had never felt such cold.
During the predawn hours of January 28, temperatures fell below freezing. Frost appeared on car windshields and ice fog formed above canals, swamps, lakes, and saltwater lagoons. Alarmed forecasters predicted a hard freeze in the 20s by sunrise.
Not a single tropical insect moved in the frigid stiffness. Birds accustomed to warm ocean breezes huddled in stunned groups. Fire and smoke rose from smudge pots set across Florida’s citrus belt in last-ditch attempts to save the budding produce.
Along the beaches beneath the towering rocket gantries, only the sparkling white form of the Space Shuttle Challenger appeared in dazzling floodlights, its metal and glass and exotic al
loys unfeeling of the arctic air—the great ship of space rising like a monstrous ice sculpture above its steel foundation. Finally, night slipped away and sunrise brought the first hope of warmth. Challenger’s seven astronauts appeared on the launch pad. Their number included the courageous social-science teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who had a smile big enough to adorn any magazine cover. She was a brilliant selection by the National Teachers’ Union for the coveted role of the planet’s “first citizen in space.”
She had emerged from the enthusiastic wave of applicants giving all to become the one individual selected for NASA’s acclaimed Teacher in Space Project. Those who wished her well went far beyond her contemporaries and the everyday citizens who prayed for her success. Millions of schoolchildren eagerly awaited her departure from Earth.
McAuliffe wasn’t going into space as a tested scientific or engineering member of the crew. She was leaving Earth to command the attention of the world, including awestruck American schoolchildren. Having squirmed beneath congressional brickbats and attempts to slash NASA’s budget, even to do away with the superbly engineered Space Shuttle program, the space agency stoked the Teacher in Space Project as the perfect response to dull the political ax held at its head.
Citizen-in-space Christa McAuliffe is seen here (third from right) with her crew days before the seven would be lost in the Challenger accident. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
You could scrub an astronaut, cancel a mission, condemn a fleet—but you did not mess with Apple Pie, Mom, and Our Sainted Teacher.
“This is a beautiful day to fly,” Challenger’s commander, Dick Scobee, said as he stopped on the walkway to the entry hatch. To the veteran astronaut, the cold, cloudless sky was perfect—conditions that experienced pilots called severe clear. It was true: On such a clear day you could see forever, and from nineteen stories above ground the crew beheld a sparkling, shining string of ocean breakers in the curving surf along the Cape’s coastline to the south.
One by one, the space-farers donned their helmets and, with the assistance of the specialist, climbed through the hatch into the deep and wide recesses of the crew compartment. As McAuliffe prepared to enter Challenger, a member of the closeout crew presented the teacher with a red apple. It was a nice public-relations touch for our television audience, including the families of the astronauts who sat in warmth three miles distant in their VIP suite.
But in spite of the public-relations portrait being painted, Challenger was in every respect a contained iceberg. That the presence of so much ice was a clear danger to the launch team was demonstrated when the countdown reached its standard ten-minute hold at T-minus nine minutes in the count. This time the call was heard loud and clear.
“Hold!”
Launch Control explained the delay. The standard hold of ten minutes would be extended. The count would be held at the T-minus nine–minute mark for hours, if necessary, until the temperature rose to 40 degrees. Everyone looked at the sun, beseeched its warming rays.
But the warmth of the sun on the outside could not solve the problem of the critical O-ring seals inside the solid rocket boosters. Without the direct rays of the sun, they would stay cold, hard, and brittle until the needed hours of warm outside temperatures slowly thawed the inner workings of the booster. Any first-year engineering student should have known that—known as well the fact that the more frozen the O-rings were, the longer you had to wait for them to thaw.
The synthetic rubber O-rings’ design purpose was simple enough: to seal the joints so tight they would prevent violently hot gases from escaping as spears of flame. It was a hard task for any piece of equipment, and the booster engineers felt helpless. For months, they had been studying the O-ring seal problem. They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, “Stop this train until it’s fixed.”
At about 11:00 A.M. Eastern time, Launch Control notified the Challenger crew that conditions were definitely warming up. The launch team anticipated resuming the count shortly.
“All right!” came the enthusiastic response from Challenger’s commander Dick Scobee.
At Mission Control in Houston, flight director Jay Greene polled his team for their final status report. At the Cape, launch director Gene Thomas ran through his checklist items with his team in launch control. It was a familiar and critical litany of last-moment review and checks.
Every response was “Go!” Not a single call to stop.
Inside Challenger’s crew cabin, the pilots, Dick Scobee and Mike Smith, went with precision through their final checks.
All seven astronauts locked their helmet visors in place. They rechecked their seat harnesses one final time. Every man and woman was strapped in securely. Commander Scobee told his crew, “Welcome to space, guys.”
In Launch Control, NASA commentator Hugh Harris reported the countdown’s final moments. His words spoken into the microphone that carried his official report to every media outlet worldwide. He watched the numbers shining brightly before him. Green and flashing numbers: They gave him an update with each passing second of the count while a television monitor showed him Challenger looming high on its icy launch pad.
But the NASA commentator wasn’t that comfortable relying on electronic vision. He found himself turning often in his seat to peer at the shuttle through the huge glass window trusting only his own eyes that all continued smoothly toward that critical moment of engine ignition.
Hugh Harris had been the “voice of Launch Control” for most of the previous twenty-four shuttle flights. As chief of information for the Kennedy Space Center, he knew the drill by heart and felt comfortable with the routine.
Last-second events kept Harris busy, providing a steady stream of information to the outside world. Through the news outlets carrying his running commentary, Harris’s microphone was the public’s link to the event.
“T-minus four minutes and counting…”
As the countdown rolled, the astronauts’ families were hurried from their VIP suite to an observation deck on the roof of Launch Control.
Ignition began as a flash of coruscating fire.
“T-minus ten, nine, eight…we have main engine start…”
Challenger came to life.
Searing orange light appeared in a swift rippling of unleashed power. This was the moment of the Shuttle’s savage fire birth. The light was so intense it forced tears to the eyes of many of the onlookers. Three engine bells, now lost in the controlled tornado of burning rocket fuel, cascaded their violent fire down the curving flame tubes. White clouds snapped into being as fire and water begat shrieking steam. Challenger shook, vibrating its flanks. A blizzard appeared about the huge fuel tank as thunderous vibration ejected the ice storm that had gathered on the outer-skin of the fifteen-story-tall external tank.
The main engines screamed in a hoarse bellow, waiting for the computers to sense that all three engines were running properly and had built to the required liftoff thrust.
They had. Relays clicked. Computers gave the signal to ignite and release the hold-down bolts of the two giant solid rocket boosters.
Two enormous fire plumes snapped into existence, gushed downward, and spattered away in every direction, raging, uncontainable.
“Five, four, three, two, one,” the words rolled strongly from the voice of Hugh Harris.
The giant spaceship kicked free of its launch pad and spread its flame in a visible blast, burning ever brighter, ever fiercer.
“Liftoff! We have a liftoff of the twenty-fifth Space Shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.”
Hugh Harris’s words were now barely audible over Challenger’s thunder, over the screams and shouts of the thousands of onlookers crying the prayer of the astronauts, “GO, GO! GO, GO!”
Almost at the same instant Harris spoke those words, the shock wave from the running engines arrived at the press site and the VIP bleachers three miles distant. The deck trembled and astronaut family slammed against family on the roof
observation deck. Sound crashed and rolled, tumbling and shaking ground and water and air…
On board Challenger, the seven astronauts felt the Space Shuttle come alive as its three main engines swiveled in a final pre-ignition check and then erupted in fire. Crew commander Dick Scobee shouted, “There they go, guys!”
“Allll riiight!” came the shout from veteran astronaut Judy Resnik.
“Here we go!” laughed pilot Mike Smith.
Christa McAuliffe shouted personal words into her tape recorder for her students. She gripped her seat tightly, heard the booster rockets roar to life, and felt Challenger leap from its pad.
While back on the roof deck of the Launch Control Center, the astronauts’ spouses and children stood stunned and awed, their bones vibrating from the mighty energy of Challenger. Sound engulfed and embraced them, a sonic juggernaut heralding a magnificent birth. They reached out, faces wet with tears, and sought each other’s hands. Fingers gripped tightly, unknowingly watching their loved ones permanently leave this Earth.
At the moment of solid rocket ignition, something sinister happened. Barely apparent beside the opening fiery blast, a puff of black smoke spat forth from the lower joint of the right booster. Almost as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. Much later, examination of every frame of film and every inch of videotape would reveal that the smoke spewed forth from a sudden, tiny gap. It was a death warrant.
The freeze had robbed the critical O-ring of its ability to flex, to expand and seal, and when the joint of the booster rotated, it created that tiny but critical gap. Searing gases rammed through and rushed past the breach. For two-and-a-half seconds, black smoke jetted out. Then, instantly, it vanished. For within the curving flanks of the rocket, aluminum oxide particles created by the burning fuel miraculously plugged the leak. Flame no longer escaped.