Riding Rockets

We turned off the TV and gave our attention to a principal investigator of an experiment that would be in our cargo bay. As we were about to follow him to the hardware, Jerry Ross decided to give the TV another shot, “Maybe they’ll have an update on the launch.” He turned it on. What we saw immediately shocked us to silence.Challenger ’s destruction had already occurred. We were seeing a replay of the horror. We watched the vehicle disintegrate into an orange-and-white ball. The SRBs twisted erratically in the sky. Streamers of smoke arced toward the sea.

For several heartbeats there was not a sound in the room. Then the exclamations came. “God, no!” Guy Gardner bowed his head and cried visible tears. I just stared in a dazed silence. Most of the others did the same. A few of the lab personnel wondered aloud if the crew had bailed out. I answered their question. “There’s no ejection system on the space shuttle. They’re lost.”

The TV focused on Christa McAuliffe’s parents. They were in bleachers in the press area and appeared merely confused. I could read the question on their faces:Are the smoke patterns in the sky part of a normal launch? Their daughter was already dead and they didn’t know. I silently cursed the press for continuing to focus on them. It was the ultimate obscenity of that terrible morning.

I phoned Donna. She was sobbing. Even though the NASA PR announcer was only saying it was a major malfunction, she was familiar enough with the shuttle design to know it had no escape system. I didn’t have to tell her the crew was dead. I suggested she pick up the kids from school. The press was going to be everywhere and I didn’t want them shoving a camera in their faces. “Just keep them at home.” I told her to expect me that afternoon. I knew we wouldn’t be staying in Los Alamos.

I next called my mom and dad in Albuquerque. Dad, the big-hearted, sensitive Irishman, was crying. As always my mom was unbendable iron. I knew she was dying inside, but there was no way she could verbalize those feelings.

As expected, Crippen wanted to get back to Houston as quickly as possible. We drove to the Los Alamos airport and took the lab charter flight to Albuquerque. Within an hour of our arrival there, we were in our ’38s headed home. I was in Crippen’s backseat, in the lead aircraft of the three-ship formation.

As we climbed to altitude, ATC cleared us direct to Ellington Field and added, “NASA flight, please accept our condolences.” I was certain those same sympathies were being offered to NASA crews everywhere as they hurried home. The entire nation was grieving.

The rest of our flight continued in silence. At each ATC handover the new controller would offer a few words of comfort and then leave us alone. There was no chatter among our formation on our company frequency. Crippen was silent on the intercom. We were each cocooned in our cockpits, alone with our grief. I watched the contrails of the other ’38s streaming away in billowing white and prayed for theChallenger crew and their families.

My thoughts returned to the last time I had seen the crew—before they entered health quarantine—more than two weeks ago. I passed them on their way to a simulation. Each wore the thousand-watt smiles of Prime Crew. I shook their hands and wished them good luck and added a hug for Judy. With my arms around her I whispered, “Watch out for hair-eating cameras.” She laughed. It was the last I would see of her and the others. Now, their shredded bodies were somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic. Friends whose joyous faces I had watched only two weeks ago were now being discussed by the TV talking heads as “remains.” I could feel Judy’s arms on my back and her hair brushing my cheek in that last hug. Now those arms, that hair, her smile were gone. They were just…remains. Though I’d known it would happen to some of us one day, I still could not come to grips with the reality of it. They were gone. Forever.

My only comfort was in my belief that their deaths had been mercifully quick, the instantaneous death we all hope for when our time comes. In one heartbeat they had been feeling the rumble of max-q (maximum aerodynamic pressure) and watching the sky fade to black and anticipating the beauty of space and then…death. I was so certain of it. How could anybody have survived the ET explosion? The cockpit was only a few feet from it. There were more than a million pounds of propellant still remaining in the tank when it detonated. The explosion must have destroyed the cockpit and everything in it. The more I dwelled on it, the more certain I was. They died instantly. I would later learn how wrong I was.