Leaving Orbit (22 page)

When I first saw
Columbia
roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on TV as a third-grader, the launch vehicle was an ungainly appealing sight, a lash-up of orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters. I had never seen anything like it. The orbiter, the space plane, clung to the external tank affectionately, like a baby animal to its mother.

Columbia
first took to the sky on April 12, 1981, flown by Apollo veteran John Young and pilot Robert Crippen. The launch was a success, and more journalists came out to KSC than had appeared there since Apollo 11. John Young, who was fifty, became the hero of the transition story—he had not only walked on the moon on Apollo 16, but before that had flown with Michael Collins on Gemini 10. His presence symbolized that shuttle was a natural and logical vehicle to follow Apollo-Saturn, and his age implied that the task of flying the shuttle was different from that of flying an Apollo mission—a man well into middle age could safely do it.

The shuttle encountered problems on each of its four test flights, but it was declared operational and began flying missions with full crews and cargo, most often commercial satellites. A second orbiter,
Challenger
, made its maiden voyage in 1983. From the start, the idea of the shuttle had been an idea for a
fleet
, with the reliability that comes with multiple identical vehicles. One orbiter could be prepared for flight while another was in space and yet another undergoing repairs. Ultimately, the fleet was to consist of five orbiters, taking astronauts and cargo to space with a regularity more like a commercial airline’s than the risky one-off ventures of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

The space shuttle
Challenger
was named for HMS
Challenger
, a British Royal Navy warship that in 1872 undertook the first global marine research expedition. HMS
Challenger
sailed the world, making the first thorough survey of the oceans and discovering forty-seven hundred previously unknown species; the expedition is credited with giving rise to the field of oceanography. In preparation for the expedition, HMS
Challenger
’s guns were removed and its interior outfitted with laboratories, an operation that will strike some as reminiscent of the swords-to-plowshares process of converting missiles into rockets for the peaceful exploration of space.

In its three years of use, space shuttle
Challenger
flew more often than any other orbiter. No doubt there is a technical reason for this, but to young space fans it felt as though NASA simply
liked Challenger
the most. To me,
Challenger
will always be a bear cub, or some other kind of mammal—maybe a sweet and solid dog of unpretentious pedigree.
Challenger
is the fuzziest, friendliest of the orbiters, its edges somehow more rounded than the others’, yet also the most dependable.

Some of the bright cheer and innocence of the eighties sticks to it—I suppose because
Challenger
is the only orbiter that resides forever in the eighties—or perhaps it’s the innocence of my childhood. Maybe I’m getting some interference from Christa McAuliffe’s personality, her bubbly motherly sweetness, since the name
Challenger
is forever connected with her fame, and her death.

On
Challenger
’s second flight, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space. Its third mission flew the first African American astronaut, Guy Bluford, and on its fourth mission
Challenger
landed at Kennedy Space Center rather than the lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, the first time a spacecraft landed back at its launch site. A third orbiter,
Discovery
, was added in 1984, the same year two women went to space together for the first time. In 1985, the fourth orbiter,
Atlantis
, made its first flight.

In all, twenty-four missions launched and landed successfully between April 1981 and January 1986.

We said good-bye to
Challenger
first. It broke up in the skies above the Kennedy Space Center seventy-three seconds into flight on January 28, 1986, at 11:38 a.m.

If you were born between 1968 and 1980, you were probably in school that morning. If you went to a public school, chances are decent that you watched the events of that day unfold live. The year before, NASA had run a contest for a teacher to fly in space, the first step of what was to be an ongoing civilian-in-space program. The teacher chosen for the flight was Christa McAuliffe, a likable social studies teacher from New Hampshire. Because of McAuliffe’s inclusion on this mission, NASA had made special efforts to make this launch available to schoolchildren, including arranging for many public schools to receive a live feed. No national networks outside of the Space Coast area carried the launch live, so it’s one of the ironies of the day that the only people to have witnessed the disaster in real time on TV were children, those least prepared to deal with what they saw.

We watched in school multipurpose rooms, sitting cross-legged on the floor. We watched in classrooms, bored, staring at TVs on rolling carts, the blinds drawn against the glare of the morning. We watched the seven astronauts emerge from their quarters, single file, waving to a rising cheer and the flashes of cameras, watched them climb into the van that would take them to the launchpad. I was in the eighth grade, and starting to understand that it wasn’t cool to get visibly excited about something like a space shuttle launch. For my friends and me, any disruption to the normal school day was a fresh opportunity to make an elaborate show of being unimpressed.

I didn’t happen to be in a classroom with a TV during the launch that day, though other classrooms in my school carried the live feed. I didn’t hear what had happened until lunchtime, less than an hour later, when kids who had been watching the launch live were busy spreading the news. I remember feeling shocked but not particularly traumatized, as so many people my age say they were. I didn’t know until later that my favorite astronaut, Judith Resnik, had been on board
Challenger.
I didn’t know yet what far-reaching consequences this seemingly simple explosion would have. No one did, I guess.

We spent the rest of the school day watching the footage of the explosion replay over and over on TV. It was odd, seeing the launch from the start, because every time it seemed as though
this
time it might get off okay. Even the most cynical of us couldn’t help but respond to the poetry of countdown, to the
three—two—one—.
Even the coolest of us looked up at that sudden flash of light, held our breaths at the moment of ignition, the strange fire and shudder. At
liftoff
, the bolts detached, and for a second we could imagine the thunderous thrust of the rockets. For one long minute, the shuttle rose on a fat column of puffy steam.

Then the white
pop
in the sky. Something unscripted had happened—though it took a long time for the voice of the announcer to acknowledge it. Not until the next day was it clear that there was no hope that the crew might have survived. A lot of people, telling this story now, describe seeing a fireball on their televisions and knowing instantly that the crew was dead. But if you watch the unedited footage again, you might remember that feeling of uncertainty and dread as pieces slowly rained down from an altitude of eight miles, tracing fingers of white contrails across the bright blue Florida sky.

At school that day, some kids were visibly upset, crying or burying their faces in their crossed arms on their desks, but a more common response was blankness, a weirded-out adolescent
whatever
ness. Some kids went straight to malicious laughter and making up
Challenger
jokes. (What kind of grades did Commander Scobee get in flight school? Below sea level! What do the
Challenger
and a penguin have in common? They’re both black and white and kinda cute, but neither one can fly!) Widespread tears were reported among teachers and principals. Some teachers made efforts to explain what had gone wrong, though no one on that day fully understood what had gone wrong; no one would for many months. Some teachers shut off the televisions and changed the subject, leaving the task of explaining the unexplainable to our parents. Other teachers tried to draw larger lessons, to talk about mishap and risk and death. My brother’s fourth-grade math teacher had the children flip to the page in their textbooks about astronaut Ronald McNair, one of a series of biographies intended to show children examples of women and minorities who use math in their jobs. Under his name was printed “1950– ,” and my brother and his classmates followed their teacher’s instructions to carefully write “1986” in the blank space.

We wouldn’t know it for a while, but that explosion marked the beginning of the end of American spaceflight. Mission STS-51L had been plagued by many slips and scrubs, the most frustrating of which had been the day before the launch. A special tool used to close the hatch to the crew compartment had broken off, and technicians had been unable to remove it within the launch window. If
Challenger
had taken off that day, a day much warmer than the fateful January 28, the rubber O-ring in the right solid rocket booster probably would not have stiffened with cold, and burning gases probably would not have escaped to detonate the external tank. Engineers, already aware of the O-ring problem, might have had a chance to fix it before the next attempt to launch in unusually cold weather. The space shuttle program might have moved forward as was intended, with the Department of Defense continuing to use it to deploy spy satellites. A second launch and landing facility might have been built, as planned, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Flights might have continued at a steadier pace, and the shuttle might have made itself more useful, might have earned more of a place in the national consciousness. A Congress and a public more convinced of the shuttle’s accomplishments might have been more likely to fund the next steps in spaceflight—a habitat on the moon, a trip to Mars. Instead, the space shuttle has quietly wound down without any spacecraft planned to follow it.

Frank Izquierdo was in Launch Control for
Challenger
’s last launch. When he tells me about it twenty-six years later, his memory seems precise and undistorted by emotion. Flight controllers dress up in suits and ties on launch days, partly a tradition of respect, but Frank also mentions that he was always glad to wear long sleeves and layers in the Firing Room, which was kept very cold to keep the computers safe. By the time the cryo tanks were being filled, Frank was chilled to the bone as well. When I ask Frank what it was like in the Firing Room that morning, he answers by telling me the facts—what happened in what order—rather than talking about emotions.

“First we lost comm,” he says. “Then we lost data. We were all looking at our screens trying to make sense of what we were seeing.”

“How long was it before you knew it hadn’t been caused by the main engines?” This is a polite way of asking how long it was before he knew the accident hadn’t been his fault. The engines were the most complex component, thought to have the highest risk of failure, and many people had assumed at first they were to blame for
Challenger.

“It wasn’t too long,” he recalls. “They figured it out by looking at video and still images rather than telemetry. I’d say it was days rather than weeks.”

I comment that Frank must have been relieved to learn that the disaster had been caused by a faulty solid rocket booster and not one of his engines. But in his memory of that time, this distinction doesn’t seem to be nearly as relevant to him as I would have guessed.

“We all worked on shuttle,” he explains. “I worked on one part of it for a while, and then I’d be given more responsibility, and the parts I was responsible for would change. But we all worked on shuttle. We all worked to keep the astronauts safe.”

Months later, the presidential commission tasked with investigating
Challenger
issued its report. The cause of the explosion had been the solid rocket boosters, whose faulty design combined with the unseasonably cold weather in Florida to create a catastrophic failure. A picture in the paper showed Richard Feynman, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, smirking and holding up a piece of O-ring he’d been soaking in ice water to show that it became brittle. Sally Ride, also on the commission along with Neil Armstrong, sat a few seats away, looking pissed. She’d trusted her life to
Challenger
twice. Only recently, since her death, has it come to light that the key piece of information about the O-rings had been supplied to another member of the commission by Sally Ride herself.