by Jay Barbree
Thiokol built the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle, and after further research, I learned the concerned person was senior rocket booster engineer Roger Boisjoly. Boisjoly had raised questions about earlier problems with the joints between booster segments, and Thiokol managers decided to alert managers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Marshall oversaw the booster’s design and production, and Thiokol decided to tell NASA management that the cold weather could seriously affect the shuttle booster’s joints.
Boisjoly’s concern was with the synthetic rubber O-rings designed to seal the joints and prevent hot gases and flames from escaping. On several shuttle flights, the primary O-ring had suffered severe hot gas erosion, and in a few instances minor erosion was found on the secondary O-ring seals. The problem was simple: The lower the outdoor temperature, the greater the erosion.
I learned that five months before Challenger’s accident, on August 19, 1985, Marshall Space Flight Center and Thiokol officials briefed NASA headquarters for the first time on the history and potential of the O-ring problem. They had not recommended halting flights, saying that continuing to fly was an acceptable risk while the joints were being redesigned.
Acceptable risk?
I phoned Cecil Houston, Marshall Space Flight Center’s manager at the Cape, and asked him what in the hell was going on.
Cecil told me he had chaired two teleconferences the night before launch, and everyone decided the O-rings would not be a problem. “Everybody signed off on it, including Thiokol,” he said. “We agreed we should fly.”
“With the freeze we had you guys didn’t think the O-rings would be a problem?”
“Naw,” he assured me. “It was one of the engines.”
“You know that for sure?”
“No, not yet,” he insisted, “but we’re looking. Something came loose.”
“Like a fan?”
“Could be,” Houston agreed, but quickly added, “Don’t go with that yet, Jay. That’s what we think happened. I’ll let you know when we’ve got something.”
Cecil Houston was a damn good engineer and a devoted manager. I knew he would be the last person to deliberately put an astronaut at risk, but nevertheless I could not believe the lack of concern about the O-rings.
I thanked Cecil and decided to phone a longtime friend who’d been brought to the space program by Gus Grissom before any astronaut crawled into a spaceship: Sam Beddingfield, the man who had retired only a couple of weeks before as deputy director of Shuttle Projects Management—the same Sam Beddingfield who told Gus Grissom he didn’t need a parachute because he wouldn’t have time to put it on. The same Sam Beddingfield who Gus told, “Put the parachute in my Mercury capsule anyway. It’ll give me something to do until I hit.”
Sam Beddingfield’s experience and contacts were definitely what I needed. If anyone could find out what the brass on headquarters’ fourth floor was up to, it was Sam.
I grabbed the phone, dialed, and listened to the rings. “Hello.”
“Sam, this is Jay Barbree.”
“Yeah, Jay, what’s up?”
“I was sitting here wondering what’s going on down at headquarters this morning. Especially with senior management on the fourth floor?”
“I know what they’re doing,” Sam grunted. “They’re running around, pointing fingers, protecting their asses.”
“Most likely,” I laughed, quickly adding, “Why don’t you go down there and check it out?”
“I could,” he smiled. “I still have a senior management badge.”
“You want a job?”
“Doing what?”
“Working for NBC News as a news analyst.”
“That sounds good. It’d keep me outta the pool halls.”
“It would at that,” I said, laughing. “Take a drive down to the fourth floor, check out what all your old buddies are talking about, and swing by the press site. If you’ll work for us through the Challenger coverage, I’ll clear it with Don Browne.”
“Who’s he?”
“Our Miami bureau chief. He’s in charge.”
“I’ll think about it, Jay, and I’ll take a drive by my old office.”
“Do that, Sam. Keep in touch.”
I put the phone down, suddenly feeling I was making progress. This just could work!
For the next twenty-four hours Sam Beddingfield parked himself in the executive offices at NASA headquarters, visiting old friends, listening to everything being learned about the accident. Most of the NASA managers simply thought Sam was still on the job and in the middle of the afternoon, January 30, 1986, two days after Challenger disintegrated nine miles above the Atlantic surf, Sam called me.
“I’ve got it,” he said flatly.
“The cause of the failure?” I asked anxiously.
“A rupture in a field joint splice.”
“An O-ring leak?”
“Right.”
“That’s for sure?”
“For sure.”
“How do they know?”
“They have pictures.”
“Whatta you mean?” I asked, my heart now racing.
“Pictures of the leak,” Sam explained. “They can see the flame blowing out of the sucker like a blowtorch.”
“Where did the pictures come from?”
“From a fixed engineering camera north of the pad.”
“Away from our cameras? Where we couldn’t see?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
“What did the torch do, burn into the tank?”
“Yep,” he said. “They think it burned through the insulation and everything blew.”
“We can’t see it on our launch tape?”
“No way.”
“Can you get your hands on a copy of that tape?”
Sam laughed. “You trying to get me shot?”
“This is great, Sam,” I told him. “Great work.”
I asked Sam to educate me on the booster segments, on the O-rings and the booster joints called “field joint splices,” and he told me how they were stacked here in the Vehicle Assembly Building. Once I was comfortable with what I needed to know, I thanked Sam again and told him to come by the NBC building when he could.
I phoned a confidential source at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and he confirmed what Sam had said. This was what we call in journalism a firm, second source, and I looked at my watch. It was 4:00 P.M. Eastern time, two-and-a-half hours to my buddy Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News, and suddenly I was playing mind games. I wanted Tom to have the story, but the next NBC newscast was the 5:00 P.M. radio network hourly, and, dammit, I thought, should I go with it now, before someone else breaks the story?
I was obviously sitting on the biggest story of my life, and I knew I had to dump it in Don Browne’s lap.
I left my office and went in to see Don. He sat talking on the phone, pretty obviously just chatting, and I held a finger before his eyes.
Annoyed, he looked up. “Just a minute, Jay.”
Not now, play big shit another time, Don, I thought to myself, and moved right into his face. “Now,” I said. “Get off the phone.”
Don Browne was temporarily in shock. He couldn’t believe I had spoken to him in that manner. He scanned my face, suddenly realizing I had something important to tell him. “I’ll call you back later,” he said, hanging up the phone.
I moved to within a foot of his face. “I got it.”
“Got what?”
“The story, the cause of the blowup, dammit.”
Don took a deep breath. “Let’s go somewhere else to talk,” he ordered, standing up and heading for the door.
Outside, I laid it out for him. “Let’s go into the radio booth and lock the door,” Don said. “We’ll call New York in private.”
Once out of earshot of everyone, Don phoned Executive Vice President of News John Lane and Vice President Joe Angotti. We filled them in, and Lane asked, “Who are your sources, Jay?”
Disbel
ieving that anyone in journalism would ask another journalist to reveal his or her sources, I took a couple of seconds, and answered: “With all due respect, Mr. Lane, I do not reveal my sources.”
“Well,” he said, “we have a policy, we have to know who the sources are before we put something of this magnitude on the air.”
I was stunned. Was I witnessing the death of journalism here? I stood firm. “Mr. Lane,” I began my answer, “I’ve been with this company for nearly twenty-eight years. I have broken my share of exclusives on NBC. I have never put any story on this network that wasn’t gathered under the guidelines of solid journalism. You have my reputation. If that’s not good enough, let me break it on radio’s 5:00 P.M. hourly newscast. I’m sure Jim Farley will be most happy to put the story on the air.”
“No,” he said, “we want the story on Brokaw’s show, but we have to be sure.”
“Dammit, John, I’m sure,” Don Browne spoke up. “Jay has the best sources here. He’s proved it time and again. Now let’s get Brokaw’s people on the phone, and let’s break it.”
I put the phone down. “You argue it out with them,” I told Don. “When you have their decision, call me.”
Don Browne argued and won. Tom Brokaw and I broke the story, the biggest of my life, and I did it with the New York Times’s reporter Bill Broad standing at my feet, taking notes.
The Challenger disaster would later be voted the number-one story of 1986, and I received a write-up in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in Newsweek, in Time magazine, and on all the wire services. Larry King in his USA Today column wrote, “Jay Barbree of NBC News is arguably the best correspondent to ever cover the space program.”
I could not help but notice that the breaking of the Challenger story failed to bring me a single nomination for any journalism award—a nomination generally entered by one’s company, and, even though the great news producer Jim Kitchell had gotten our unit an Emmy for the Apollo landings in 1969, in 1986 no grunt in the field was to be nominated for anything. Our industry was obviously on a slippery slide into show business. Journalism was an afterthought. Our future was the star system, where the greed of the world’s multimillion-dollar news anchors would suck a network’s news budget dry.
Two months later I was selected as one of the semifinalists in the Journalist in Space Project. Our number was 1,769 at the beginning, and those of us who were left in the final stages had to go before a selection board made up of six journalism professors and five peers. We were questioned by a live TV interviewer, and when it was over, there were eight of us left in the Southeast—five in the Washington Press Corps, two in Florida, and one in Virginia. My boss Jim Farley was proud. He was the one member of NBC News’s senior management who had been helping me pull the Journalist-in-Space wagon down the road.
In March 1986, I settled in for what was ahead. There would be two-and-a-half years of covering NASA’s recovery from the Challenger accident and “return to flight,” and all the while I had to keep mind and body in shape for the Journalist in Space project.
It was a time of little sleep and many frustrations. Only minutes after Challenger’s remains tumbled into the sea, the largest naval search-and-salvage operation ever was launched. Six thousand people, fifty-two aircraft, thirty-one ships, three submarines, and five robot subs were used. The real pressure began the day civilian divers discovered the astronauts’ remains. They were in Challenger’s crew cabin in one hundred feet of water seventeen miles northeast of the Cape. Every news editor in the world wanted to know if and when Challenger’s crew had been recovered, and the American public wanted to know when each astronaut had been reclaimed from the sea for interment by their family.
It was a time your best simply wasn’t good enough.
TWENTY-THREE
An Eternity of Descent
The water was murky, swirling from surface winds, keeping divers Terry Bailey and Mike McAllister from seeing more than an arm’s reach in front of them. They had been diving for days, recovering Challenger’s debris, and, now, on this dive, they had only six minutes left in their tanks.
They were about one hundred feet down, moving across the sea floor, when they almost bumped into what at first appeared to be a tangle of wire and metal. It was nothing that unusual, nothing they hadn’t seen on many dives before. Then, they saw what was different: a spacesuit, full of air, legs floating toward the surface. There’s someone in it, Bailey thought.
No, that’s not right, he admonished himself. Shuttle astronauts do not wear pressurized spacesuits during powered flight. They wear jumpsuits. They carry along two pressure suits if they should be needed for an emergency spacewalk.
He turned to his partner. They just looked at each other and thought, “Jackpot!”
They had found the crew cabin but they were low on air, so the two divers made a quick inspection, marked the location with a buoy, and returned to their boat to report the find.
Early the next morning, the USS Preserver recovery ship put to sea. The divers began their grim task of recovering the slashed and twisted remains of Challenger’s crew cabin and its seven occupants.
On first inspection, it was obvious the crew vessel had survived Challenger’s fiery demise and its descent to its watery grave. A two-year-long investigation into how the crew cabin, and possibly its occupants, had survived was begun.
Veteran astronauts Robert Crippen and Bob Overmyer, along with other top experts, sifted through every bit of tracking data. They studied all the crew cabin’s systems down to the smallest, most insignificant piece of wreckage. They learned that at the instant the external fuel tank was breached by the rotating right booster, igniting 500,000 gallons of fuel, when a sheet of flame swept up past the window of pilot Mike Smith, there could be no question Smith knew—even in that single moment—that disaster had engulfed them. Something awful, something that had never before happened to a shuttle, was upon them.
Mike Smith uttered his final words for history, preserved on a crew cabin recorder: “Uh-oh!”
Immediately after, all communications between the shuttle and the ground were lost. At first, many people watching the blast, and some in Mission Control, believed the astronauts had died instantly—a blessing in its own right.
But they were wrong.
NASA’s intensive, meticulous studies of every facet of that explosion, comparing what happened to other blowups of aircraft and spacecraft, and their knowledge of the forces of the blast and the excellent shape and construction of the crew cabin finally led some investigators to a mind-numbing conclusion. The seven astronauts survived Challenger’s breakup.
Rob Navias, UPI’s outstanding radio voice who would later take a job with NASA, tracked the fate of Challenger’s crew intently. Navias, also a semifinalist in the Journalist in Space Project, told me NASA’s own forensic medical report, released July 6, 1986, concluded the crew most likely survived Challenger’s blast but was unconscious at impact.
Investigators found the explosive release of fuel that dismembered the wings and other parts of the shuttle were not great enough to cause immediate death, or even serious injury, to the astronauts. Challenger was designed to withstand a wing-loading force of 3 g’s (three times gravity), with another 1.5 g safety factor built in. When the external tank was ruptured and separated the two solid boosters, rapid-fire events, so swift they all seemed of the same instant, took place. In the shortest of moments, all fuel was gone from the big tank.
Navias said, “The computers still functioned and, right on design plan, dutifully noted the lack of fuel and shut down the engines.”
It was a supreme exercise in futility, because by then Challenger was no longer a spacecraft. One solid booster broke free, its huge flame a cutting torch across Challenger, separating a wing. Enormous g-loads snapped free the other wing. Challenger came apart—but the crew cabin remained essentially intact.
The explosive force sheared metal assemblies but was almost precisely the force ne
eded to separate the still-intact crew compartment from the expanding cloud of flaming debris and smoke. The best data told the experts that Challenger broke up 48,000 feet above the Atlantic. The undamaged crew compartment, impelled by the speed already achieved, soared to a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before beginning its curve earthward.
It was only when the crew compartment smashed into the sea’s surface, and like a speeding bullet drilled a hole from the surface down to the ocean floor, that the impact crumpled the crew vessel into the tangled mass found by divers Bailey and McAllister.
Other experts argued that even with the crew cabin intact, wouldn’t the violent pitching and yawing of the cabin as it raced toward the ocean create g-forces so strong as to render the astronauts unconscious?
But that was before the investigation turned up the key piece of evidence that led to the inescapable conclusion that they were alive: The commander and pilot’s reserve oxygen packs had been turned on by astronaut Judy Resnik, seated directly behind them. Furthermore, the pictures, which showed the cabin riding its own velocity in a ballistic arc, did not support an erratic, spinning motion. And even if there were such g-forces, commander Dick Scobee was an experienced test pilot. His body was trained and accustomed to such violent forces of flight and most likely could have handled the g-forces as did the bodies of Neil Armstrong and David Scott during the violent spinning of Gemini 8 if, and this is the big IF, Challenger still had power, pressure, and oxygen.
The evidence led most experts I’ve interviewed to conclude that the seven astronauts did not have power, pressure, and oxygen, and lived for only a short time after the blast.
Some dispute this conclusion, and the truth is there is no way of knowing absolutely at what moment the Challenger Seven lost their lives.
NASA made this official admission: “The forces on the Orbiter (shuttle) at breakup were probably too low to cause death or serious injury to the crew but were sufficient to separate the crew compartment from the forward fuselage, cargo bay, nose cone, and forward reaction control compartment.” The official report concluded, “The cause of death of the Challenger astronauts cannot be positively determined.”