This New Ocean, page 84
NASA officials decided to launch Challenger anyway. At 11:38 A.M., with a nearby thermometer reading thirty-six degrees—fifteen degrees colder than at any of the previous launches—and with its main engines and solid-fuel rocket boosters blasting, Challenger left its pad and headed for space. Seventy-three seconds later, at an altitude of 48,000 feet, the right solid-fuel rocket booster, which was leaking flame from one of its joints, broke loose and slammed into the external tank. The explosion turned the spaceship, its SRBs, and the external tank into a fiery flower that blossomed against the dark blue sky. It was clearly visible to the festive, momentarily disbelieving, crowd in the VIP section.
McAuliffe’s parents’ and her sister’s joy turned to sheer horror as they clutched each other and watched the grim scene. The image of the anguished couple and their daughter clutching each other as they saw Christa’s death unfold would flash around the world and then become one of the enduring icons of the space age.
Challenger’s crew compartment stayed intact, trailing a mass of umbilical lines like streamers as it continued to climb to 65,000 feet. Ten seconds after the explosion, the crew compartment went into free-fall. It slammed into the Atlantic two minutes and forty-five seconds after the blast at 207 miles an hour.
A report written six months later by Joseph Kerwin, director of life sciences at the Johnson Space Center, said that all of the crew members had remained harnessed to their seats and had been killed on impact. Kerwin noted that the forces acting on the stricken orbiter had been “probably too low to cause death or serious injury to the crew,” that the estimated force of the explosion would not have broken Challenger’s windows, and that three of four emergency air-supply canisters that were recovered underwater had been activated. While the findings were judged to be “inclusive” and the cause of death of the crew could not be positively determined, the report said, the gravitational forces endured by the seven were “probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury.” And, the carefully worded document concluded, “the crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness in the seconds” after the explosion. In other words, McAuliffe, Commander Francis Scobee, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, and Gregory Jarvis may very well have been conscious all the way down. Robert Crippen, who flew three shuttle missions, including the first on Columbia, said that in his opinion, the fact that the three emergency air canisters had been activated indicated that their users had made a “desperate” effort to survive their long plunge to the sea.
The Challenger Seven were martyred trying to carry a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite to orbit and do a Halley’s Comet experiment. TDRS-B, as the relay satellite was called, was the communication relay satellite that handled civilian and top-secret intelligence traffic. It would have been tasteless to mention it at the moment, but the fact of the matter was that seven people had died trying to get a satellite into orbit that could have been sent there on an expendable.
The explosion traumatized the nation. Like Kennedy’s assassination, most people would remember where they were when they first heard about it. They did not see it on commercial television because most of the news media, always hungry for drama and entertainment, had decided that the launches were too routine to cover. But replays of the scene, another wrenching blow from the sky, were aired almost immediately over all of the major networks and they kept airing all day. As the print and television reporters had carefully chronicled the advent of Sputnik and the ultimate triumph on the Moon, they now brought the exquisitely grotesque gnarled flower, its two smoking SRBs turning in on each other and then parting like missiles going berserk, into every home in the country and around the world that took a newspaper or caught the news.
Besides McAuliffe’s anguished family watching as their heroine turned into a martyr, there was Jesse W. Moore, the gray-faced and shaken associate administrator for space flight, telling reporters that “all of the people involved in the program, to my knowledge, felt Challenger was quite ready to go and I made the decision, along with the recommendation of the team supporting me, that we launched.” Moore, who had ordered the launch, had either been appallingly ignorant of all the warnings, which is next to impossible to believe, or he was reflexively spreading the blame for a decision that had monumentally grotesque consequences.
Only two years earlier, with the bungled handling of Grissom’s, Chaffee’s, and White’s deaths still in mind, NASA had asked some reporters on the space beat for their suggestions on how to handle similar disasters. Out of that came a document, issued in March 1984, that emphasized the importance of “a full flow of accurate, timely and factual information to the news media.” Yet NASA’s response to the Challenger disaster was a virtual repetition of its handling of the Apollo fire. More than seven hours passed before the space agency confirmed that everyone on board was dead. Worse, all flight data having to do with the mission were impounded, and even days after the accident, status reports were almost always restricted to a few sentences and contained little new information. Public affairs people would not even tell reporters what the temperature had been before liftoff, forcing them to ask the National Weather Service. And it was five days before the space agency finally released videotapes showing the “abnormal” plume of fire and smoke pouring out of the right SRB. Unconfirmed news reports had long since focused on the strong possibility that the explosion had begun there. One former NASA employee said that there had been an instinctive reaction to “draw the wagons in a circle” and fight off attacks on the shuttle program and the agency in general.
The seemingly endless replays of the explosion, with anchormen like CBS’s Dan Rather interviewing experts and trying to pinpoint the first trace of fire on the SRB with stills of the launch and the seventy-three-second ride to oblivion, put more cracks in the altar of technology and laid bare the fragility of trust. A Hollywood version of the disaster would have lasted at least half an hour, allowing plenty of time for desperate heroics, painful good-byes, at least one sacrifice, and soliloquies. But in real life the external tank, still loaded with more than 300,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and 100,000 gallons of oxygen, turned into a bomb that exploded in a flash. The shuttle had defied gravity, defied the atmosphere, and even defied the motion of Earth itself. Then it defied its masters and the result was terrible.
A blue-ribbon presidential commission headed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers was convened to find the cause of the worst space accident. Its fourteen members included Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, an iconoclastic Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate named Richard P. Feynman, Air Force Major General Donald J. Kutyna, and Albert “Bud” Wheelon, whose biographical sketch mentioned that he was executive vice president of Hughes Aircraft Company but carefully omitted the fact that he had also supervised the design of satellites in the Corona and other deep-black intelligence programs, including the superfast SR-71 spyplane, when he had been the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology in the early 1960s. Chuck Yeager, by then a retired Air Force brigadier general, was also appointed to the commission. Thanks to The Right Stuff—the book and the film—he was widely taken to be the ultimate test pilot, the embodiment of cool courage and selfless dedication. It was therefore ironic that he showed up on the first day the commission met, said, “Go get ’em, Doc,” to Rogers, and disappeared until the time came to sign off on the five-volume report.
The commission concluded in June that Challenger was lost because an O-ring in the right SRB that was supposed to seal two of its sections had been hardened by the cold and ruptured under the tremendous heat and pressure. At one point Feynman publicly dropped a sample of the O-ring rubber into his glass of ice water and then easily snapped it in two to dramatically demonstrate that it had become brittle. (He was widely credited for thinking up the clever stunt, but he himself would say later that someone else with an agenda had put him up to it.)
Feynman was far more critical of NASA than was Rogers, who ended the commission’s report by saying that it applauded the agency’s “spectacular achievements of the past and anticipates impressive achievements to come.” But the plainspoken, free-spirited, self-proclaimed “explorer” from Brooklyn’s Far Rockaway would have none of that. He castigated the space agency for allowing recklessness to override safety and solid engineering. The O-rings that held the SRBs’ sections together had a troubled history that was effectively ignored, Feynman charged. In fact, NASA officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center and headquarters had ignored several test reports from Thiokol showing that O-rings had partially burned through, eroded, and became brittle when they were cold.
But the real culprit was not rubber and putty. The pressure that really caused the rocket booster to burst was political, not physical, and it came from the unrelenting need to keep launching in order to justify the program. “It is not clear to the Committee why so many warnings went unheeded by NASA personnel that morning,” the House Committee on Science and Technology would note in its own report. Of course it was. It was absolutely clear.
For one thing, the space agency was embarrassed because a program that had been sold as providing what amounted to scheduled airline service was operating like a charter carrier in a banana republic. Like a nuclear industry that had once advertised its product as “too cheap to meter,” NASA had sold the Space Transportation System as a low-cost, frequent, and routine way of getting to space. The Fourth Estate, long since grown out of its cheerleading role (and perhaps because of it) had been barbing the space agency, first because of the shuttle’s notorious development problems and then because of its inability to stay on schedule, even to the point of making reference to “the little shuttle that couldn’t.”
A second reason to launch that day had to do with Christa McAuliffe’s contribution. She was locked into giving two lessons on the fourth day of the mission, putting it on Friday if Challenger lifted off on Tuesday. A twenty-four-hour hold would have effectively killed the lessons and their considerable public relations value, since no one but custodians and janitors would have been in school on Saturday, and not many of them at that.
Finally, Reagan was supposed to deliver his State of the Union Address that night (it was postponed). NASA had already proposed that he mention the mission this way: “Tonight, while I am speaking to you, a young elementary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, is taking us all on the ultimate field trip as she orbits the earth as the first citizen passenger on the space shuttle. Christa McAuliffe’s journey is a prelude to the journeys of other Americans.” In a book published seven years later, McAuliffe’s mother, Grace Corrigan, stated flatly that her daughter had said the day before the launch that NASA intended to send Challenger up no matter what. “The word was out that today was the day—definitely,” she would quote her daughter as having said. The White House, knowing that even a hint that there had been pressure to launch because Reagan wanted to mention McAuliffe in his speech, adamantly refused to comment on whether he planned to do so. As was the case with the orbiter’s remains, which were sunk in concrete, not sent to the Smithsonian, the matter was quickly buried.
Isaac Asimov and Feynman both took the occasion to go after the manned space program’s deceptive public relations. “It frightens people,” the prolific and wide-ranging Asimov said of an accident for which the public had not been adequately prepared. “All of a sudden, space isn’t friendly. All of a sudden, it’s a place where people can die.… Many more people are going to die. But we can’t explore space if the requirement is that there be no casualties; we can’t do anything if the requirement is that there be no casualties.”
Feynman would not have quibbled with that. But he did fault the pervasive guile. Annoyed both at what he took to be Rogers’s excessively sanguine attitude about NASA, together with the space agency’s own relentlessly self-serving and hopelessly unrealistic one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance of a catastrophic accident, he penned his own “personal observations” in an appendix to the commission’s report.* “Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative,” he wrote. “ … For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Challenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency’s deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology—engineering—would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines without abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition—physical law, precision design, and testing—must defy chaos. No matter that astronauts and cosmonauts had perished in precisely designed and carefully tested machines. Solid engineering would always provide a safety margin because, the engineers believed, there was complete safety in numbers. That made them arrogant. It was arrogance and conceit that persuaded the managers of the manned program that six trips to the Moon and twenty-four shuttle flights around Earth without a deadly accident proved that technology would always triumph over fate; that their numbers were better than God’s.
“This,” said Feynman, amounted to “a kind of Russian roulette.…26 [The shuttle] flies [with O-ring erosion] and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time.… You got away with it, but it shouldn’t be done over and over again like that.”
What was left of the shuttle fleet was grounded for thirty-two months while design improvements were made by Thiokol and other manufacturers to the three main engines, mainly the solids, the external tank, the wings, and other hardware. And with the loss of the Challenger crew still fresh in the space agency’s collective mind, a way of getting them out of a stricken spaceship at relatively low altitude was also developed. They would bail out by sliding down a long pole, much the way firemen do on fire poles, and then parachute the rest of the way. But nothing would save them if another shuttle exploded without warning, like a bomb.
The Public Rallies
A study done by Northern Illinois University’s Public Opinion Laboratory and released almost a year to the day after the Challenger explosion noted that the subject of space itself was “not a salient topic to most Americans” in spite of the Apollo program and twenty-four successful shuttle flights before Challenger. Only a third of the people of the United States had a high level of interest in space activities, the report said. And 12 percent—about 20 million of them—could be called “attentive,” meaning that they not only had a high level of interest but considered themselves well informed about space. Thirty million more were interested in the subject but did not consider themselves well informed. They were called “interested.” Everyone else—the great majority—was put into a “residual” category. Three quarters of the “attentives” were men and 24 percent of all the “attentives” had college degrees.
Not only had the greatest catastrophe in space not soured the American public, the poll found, but it was actually interpreted positively a week after the accident. More than 70 percent of the space enthusiasts agreed that the shuttle was a complex machine and that accidents would continue. That was not especially surprising. What was surprising was that 86 percent of the general public—“residuals” who ordinarily did not care about space one way or another—felt the same way. Similarly, 59 percent of the “attentives” thought the accident had been a minor setback to the space program, while 44 percent of the “residuals” said they believed the same thing. Asked whether the shuttle was still an “outstanding” example of American technology, more than 95 percent in each category answered affirmatively.
Furthermore, while most Americans had said they favored keeping spending constant a year before the accident—a middle position—after the accident there was a clear mood to increase funding. This indicated that the loss of Challenger actually stimulated positive attitudes, or possibly because most respondents felt that it would be unpatriotic to do otherwise, possibly because of some kind of a you-don’t-quit-when-you’re-behind feeling.
A follow-up poll, taken after the Rogers Commission turned in its report in early June, showed that all segments of the public placed primary responsibility for the accident where it belonged: on NASA. It also showed that 72 percent of the “attentive” public and 63 percent of the general public thought that the United States ought to build a space station. And just about half of everybody who was surveyed was for a manned mission to Mars. Indeed, the exploration of the solar system was continuing at that very moment, though the main target was a long way from the Red Planet.
Voyager at Uranus
Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986, four days before Challenger was lost. The encounter was especially tricky because “the planet that got knocked on its side” and its moons were rotating at roughly a right angle to the rest of the solar system. That meant Voyager 2 was bearing in from the top of the planet and its circling moons, not horizontally through them, so this encounter would be even more challenging than usual. And at nearly 2 billion miles, it would take Voyager 2’s faint whispers almost two hours and forty-five minutes to reach the Deep Space Network’s giant ears.
Voyager had already plowed into the Uranian magnetic field. Now the whole spacecraft was rolling to keep its lenses trained on cratered moons like a tourist panning from an automobile to photograph a dimly lit monument in the dead of night. And it was imaging mysterious black rings. JPL’s flight controllers reported that their probe skimmed over Uranus’s hydrogen-, helium-, and methane-soaked bluish-green clouds at 12:59 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on January 24 going more than 50,000 miles an hour. The robot that was giving the people of Earth their first close-up look at the seventh planet from the Sun arrived at its destination slightly more than a minute late on a schedule that had been calculated five years earlier. It took nothing from Voyager’s science teams to say that the men and women who navigated and looked after it—the anonymous number crunchers in Bill McLaughlin’s Flight Engineering Office—had performed a feat that could only be called extraordinary.
