April 12, 1981. In a classroom on the second floor of “B” building at Western Albemarle High School, I, my friends David Sparks and Kirk Steele, and a number of other students, all fans of manned space flight, stood anxiously watching a big RCA TV monitor on a cart. It had taken a lot of convincing, cajoling, and outright whining to get this thing turned on and plugged in, and now only minutes remained before the launch of America’s first Space Shuttle on mission STS-1.
Veteran Gemini and Apollo astronaut John Young, the mission commander, and pilot Bob Crippen were the only two crewmembers on this first flight, which was being launched on the 20th anniversary of the first manned space flight. The machine these two men sat atop was so untried and so experimental that it actually had ejection seats. No cargo was aboard other than instrumentation necessary to document the vehicle’s performance and the stresses placed on it. There were many systems aboard that had not been — and could not be — tested on the ground. This was the first time in space program history that a manned spacecraft was launched in the absence of any prior unmanned test flights.
Our hearts were in our throats as the countdown progressed. It wasn’t like the earlier Apollo launches — there were unfamiliar callouts, strange language, and lots of acronyms none of us understood, but it was exciting and thrilling. I remember ignition of the main engines, and seeing the whole vehicle tilt a little … thinking, “uh-oh,” and then heaving a sigh of relief as the solid rocket boosters lit and the whole screen filled with smoke and fire. We must have disrupted every class on the entire hallway, whooping and yelling, “GO!”
It wasn’t a textbook flight. Some things broke, others failed to work as expected. It was a safe flight, though, and when the landing came, it captured our attention perhaps even more strongly because no one had ever seen a spacecraft land like an airplane. Of course, airplanes don’t generally plummet like well-stabilized bricks, don’t generally cross the landing threshold at over 300 miles per hour, and don’t drop their nosewheels after landing with a tremendous slap, but it was a landing that Crippen and Young walked away from, and Columbia (after considerable refurbishment) flew again, too.
January 28, 1986. I was driving down Afton Mountain, on my way home to my house in Greenwood, Virginia after an urgent errand to Waynesboro. My timing had been horrible, and I was going to miss seeing the launch of STS-51L unless I drove like a maniac; I was doing that very thing. The radio was turned up so that I could hear the countdown over the roar of the slipstream and the small crunches as my big Ford Granada plowed Hondas, Toyotas, and Subarus out of its way. I was nearly home when the ground launch sequencer took over at T minus 31 seconds, and I roared into the driveway spraying gravel, leapt from the car, and ran into the house. I turned on the TV and stood in front of it, breathless. The old set warmed up just in time for me to see Challenger rising from the pad and to hear the public affairs officer announce liftoff. Whew — I’d made it. I began to catch my breath. The shuttle reached its critical point of maximum aerodynamic pressure, which I now knew was called Max Q, and I heard the call that the engines were throttling down as was normal at this time. I then heard the call, “Go at throttle-up,” and heard commander Scobee acknowledge that call. Just as I prepared to step back from the TV and sink into my favorite chair, something didn’t look right. There was a strange flare, and a kind of jerk — was that the tracking camera jerking?
Suddenly there was a burst of static in the audio and a cloud of smoke. I couldn’t see anything of the vehicle. The smoke turned into a big ball, and then, to my horror, two projectiles emerged — the solid rocket boosters, flying free of the stack and completely unguided. I fell into my chair, mouth agape, unable to process what I was seeing. The NASA public affairs officer, Steve Nesbitt, uttered one of the most monumental understatements of all time when he said, “…obviously a major malfunction.” In the background, we heard an ominous conversation over the flight director’s loop:
GC: Flight, GC, negative downlink.
FLIGHT: Copy.
FDO: Flight, FIDO.
FLIGHT: Go ahead.
FDO: “RSO reports vehicle exploded.”
(long pause.)
FLIGHT: Copy.
The words, “vehicle exploded,” were too much for me, and that’s when the tears came. Seven stories had just ended. At the speed and the altitude at which that vehicle was traveling at the time of breakup, there could be no survival.
We all thought the dream was dead. A memorial was erected to the lost astronauts — a very special one which tracked the sun, with mirrors that shined light through the transparent names of not only the Challenger astronauts, but also those who had died in other activities related to manned space flight. The Challenger crew’s names joined those of Grissom, White, and Chaffee from Apollo 1, as well as a few others. That memorial still exists today, and can be seen near the Kennedy Space Center visitor center. Its sun-tracking function, however, was turned off some years ago; apparently it was too difficult to maintain. It’s conventionally lit now.
A Presidential Commission was convened to investigate the cause of the accident; it was a star-studded panel that included astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, Generals Chuck Yeager and Donald Kutyna, and most importantly, Nobel laureate physicist and colorful character Richard Feynman.
The Commission wasted a lot of time, in my opinion, and arrived at the proximate cause of the disaster, a poorly designed field joint between two segments of a solid rocket booster. Hot gases burned past an O-ring, leaked out as a plume of flame, burned into the external tank, and caused a structural failure that disintegrated the vehicle. It didn’t really explode so much as fall apart after being thrown into a decidedly un-aerodynamic configuration. A lot of fuel did burn in a very short time, though, and looked a great deal like an explosion from the ground.
Feynman took a different tack. The proximate cause was obvious, he argued, but the important thing to know was how such a failure was allowed to occur. He uncovered a most appalling climate of inexplicable reasoning, a huge divide between what NASA management and NASA’s engineers thought was safe. Feynman was able to show that NASA management was effectively playing Russian roulette, gambling that if they’d gotten away with something once, they could certainly get away with it again. Such a failure and loss was inevitable under those conditions. He related his findings in an addendum to the Commission’s report and refused to have his signature affixed to the report without that addendum attached.
He also famously simplified the problem for the press during a televised meeting. Surreptitiously stealing the rubber from a model of the field joint, he clamped it with vise-grip pliers and dunked it in ice water for several minutes. At the right moment, he attracted the chairman’s attention and produced the rubber. As he removed the clamp, all present could see that at near-freezing temperatures, the rubber had no resiliency and could not have produced an effective seal. NASA’s decision to launch at such temperatures was immediately seen as the unwise gamble that it was, and NASA was lambasted in the press for ignoring the advice of the SRB’s designers NOT to launch under those conditions. Feynman was a class act.
NASA fixed its problems, or at least seemed to have fixed them. Some of us began to think, as Walter Cronkite had intoned in the landmark IMAX film of 1985, that the dream was alive.
September 29, 1988. STS-26, the first “return to flight” mission, launched from Kennedy Space Center as I watched from my living room in Charlottesville, Virginia. A short, nearly textbook flight saw shuttle Discovery deploying a tracking and data relay satellite (TDRS) and returning to earth after only four days on orbit.
From 1991 until 1995, I lived near Orlando, Florida and took advantage of every possible opportunity to take the one hour drive to Titusville and watch Space Shuttle launches. The first launch I saw with my own eyes was Endeavour’s first flight in May, 1992, STS-49, and I witnessed many more after that. Every one was a thrill. There is no experience quite like seeing that big, heavy stack of hardware go from 0 to 100 miles per hour — straight up — in less than ten seconds, and there’s no sensory experience that can quite equal the rumble of that distant, tightly bottled explosion rolling over your body, taking a full minute to reach you over the 11 miles of river and marsh that separate you from the pad.
February 1, 2003. I was driving from Atlanta back to my home near Winston, Georgia after going out to get something to eat. Space Shuttle Columbia, having been in orbit on its 28th mission, was due to return to Kennedy Space Center, and I was rushing to get home to see the landing on NASA TV. It looked as though I’d be home in ten minutes, and the orbiter had just reached EI (Entry Interface), so I’d have plenty of time. I was listening to a rebroadcast of the NASA audio via ham radio as I drove.
Presently I heard a call which I didn’t expect, and which instantly grabbed my attention. First, there was a garbled fragment of a message from Columbia. Seconds later:
CAPCOM: Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last.
CDR: Roger, uh…
For the next five minutes, NASA had no downlink (no data and no communications) from the orbiter. At the same time, on my car radio, ABC News mentioned unconfirmed reports of flames in the sky over Texas. My accelerator went straight to the floor, and I’m absolutely certain I caught air at the railroad crossing on the way to my house. I walked into my living room to find the ugly tableau already displayed on my TV. A trail of debris stretched out for miles. It was clear that the orbiter’s thermal protection system had somehow failed, allowing the vehicle to burn up as the atmospheric friction tore it apart. The plume was visible on National Weather Service NEXRAD radar. Dozens of private citizens shot videotape of the breakup. None of us would know for weeks that what we were witnessing was not an accident but a case of negligence and overconfidence of the very sort that sent Challenger to her destruction. For now, we were simply shocked and in mourning.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, lacking the star power of the board that investigated the Challenger disaster, produced a report that, while soft-pedaling a lot of NASA’s failings, correctly called to attention the severely broken safety culture at NASA. It stops short of assigning blame, although if any one person is most responsible for this mission’s loss, it is without a doubt Linda Ham. It was she who refused opportunities to inspect and image the orbiter’s wing, investigations which would clearly have brought the danger to light early in the mission. It is not known, of course, that knowledge of the damage could have saved the orbiter or its crew, but what is certain is that the crew deserved to know the condition of their craft, and Ham denied them that knowledge. It is very fortunate for her, and unfortunate for the cause of justice, that all Ham lost was her job after the accident.
July 8, 2011. I was standing on a concrete walkway on the shore of the Indian River, just north of where Cheney Highway meets Route 1 near Titusville, Florida. The crowds were unprecedented. At my shoulder was a hand-held radio tuned to the UHF communications between the flight director, the firing room at KSC, and the Space Shuttle herself. Before me were two cameras, ready to record the very final space shuttle launch. Across the river and across the cape, 11 miles away, Atlantis stood ready. The weather had looked very bad for the last couple of days but miraculously, the clouds were breaking up, and the few thundershowers in the area were moving slowly away from the launch complex. Around me, hundreds watched expectantly. The radio crackled; we were go for launch. The countdown picked up from its built-in hold and everyone concentrated on that distant launch pad. Fingers rested on shutter buttons. Cell phones were held aloft.
T minus 31 seconds — and there was a hold. A vent arm from the launch tower had retracted, but hadn’t sent the proper signal to confirm that it retracted. Launch controllers quickly turned a camera and visually verified that the arm was out of the way. A waiver was issued, quickly and efficiently, and the countdown picked up. The final seconds ticked down, 3…2..1…a cloud of smoke belched out to the right, indicating that the main engines had ignited. A cheer began to build. Another smoke plume to the left as the SRBs ignitde, and there she was, riding on tongues of flame. My shutter clicked. Beside me, my friend BC’s camera shutter banged away, too. Go, GO, GO! The whole crowd was yelling as the sky became even brighter by the light of the shuttle’s engines. One minute and countless camera frames later, the rumble reached me, still looking through my lens, still clicking.
Atlantis slipped out of sight behind a cloud deck and was gone. I had just witnessed this beautiful, awe-inspiring event for the very last time. That took a long time to sink in, even though I’d been thinking about it for weeks. The last launch. From now on, this favorite spot of mine will be just another stretch of sandy marsh along the edge of a brackish river of no particular interest. The thunder won’t roar here, the crowds won’t come, and the sky won’t light up anymore.
July 21, 2011. My alarm goes off at 4:40 AM, and I reach for my iPhone, accessing NASA TV to watch the deorbit burn as Atlantis prepares to land at Kennedy Space Center. The burn is perfect. I anxiously watch the coverage as NASA tracks the orbiter’s arrival at EI, then its entry into the roll and roll reversals that manage its energy during re-entry. This time, all is well. The fully automated re-entry and approach to the HAC are so routine that at one point, the commander looks down and opines that he must be over the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. He is, in fact, over the west coast of Florida, as CAPCOM quickly informs him. Minutes later, he takes over manual control of the orbiter, deftly rounds the HAC, and flies down to a picture-perfect night landing, rolling to a stop. Across the room, my wife has tears in her eyes. I notice that I do, too.
Walter Cronkite is not alive anymore. With this, the end of this final Space Shuttle mission, the dream is no longer alive, either. Manned spaceflight in the United States is a memory. Our astronauts will still visit the International Space Station, which was built by our Space Shuttle program, but they’ll have to hitch a ride with the Russians to get there. President Obama, in one of the most ill-considered, short-sighted decisions since Prohibition, has eliminated Constellation, which would have been the logical continuation of our manned space program. Without it, there’s very little on the drawing boards, and even less money to put anything there. Space exploration will, apparently, be left to more developed nations.
At the very least, I will have some tremendous stories to tell to my grandchildren. I will tell them of the time when the United States stood for exploration, for the spirit of adventure, for discovery. I will show them the photographs and make sure that they never forget that once, for a few decades, America was a leader in aerospace. America had heroes, and those heroes explored the heavens, advanced science, and sometimes bought information about our planet, our moon, and space itself … with their lives. They won’t believe me, but I will tell them anyway.
I was there.
