Riding Rockets

The house was filled with family, friends, and several other astronauts and wives. June was the picture of exhaustion, her face puffy and tear-stained. She and Donna hugged for a long moment, each crying into the neck of the other. As they parted, I embraced June, clumsily mumbling my sympathies then fading out of the scene as another visitor came to her. I observed how much better the women were at handling the situation. They easily conversed with June. The men mimicked my awkward performance—a quick hug, a few words, and then escape to a corner where they fidgeted uncomfortably.

The rest of the day was a blur of grieving women and children as we made our rounds to the other widows. Lorna Onizuka was incapacitated by her loss. She refused to see anybody and rumors circulated that she had not given up hope that the crew would be found alive somewhere.

A few days after the tragedy, I flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial service for Judy. Most of the astronaut office made the trip. On the flight Mike Coats astounded us with news on the cause of the disaster. “It was a failure of the O-rings on the bottom joint on the right side SRB. There’s video of fire leaking from the booster.” He had been appointed to the accident board and had seen the films at KSC. Just by happenstance the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to the networks. Nobody at the LCC or MCC had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs had never been a major concern to us.So much for being certainan SSME had failed, I thought.

Mike also recounted his disgust with how the families had been handled immediately after the disaster. He had encountered them in the crew quarters three hours afterChallenger ’s destruction. They were clamoring to return to Houston but NASA was holding them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage from the condos for the return flight. But Mike didn’t believe it. “The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave immediately. They were being held so Vice President Bush could fly to the cape and offer the nation’s condolences.” He sarcastically added, “The wives had to cool their heels so the VP could feel better.” I didn’t blame Bush—his intentions had been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless NASA HQ was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.

Judy’s hometown memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight frequently left only that, a memory. Judy and the others had been perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth.

Judith Arlene Resnik, dead at age thirty-six, was eulogized into a person I didn’t recognize, as heroic as Joan of Arc and flawless as the Virgin Mary. In multiple Houston ceremonies I had heard the same glowing praise bestowed on the other crewmembers. I excused the excess. It was the perfection the living always demand of their fallen heroes and heroines.

As I listened to Hebrew prayers being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong—flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our silence had been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy excuse. There were eleven children who would never again see a parent.

The news of NASA’s and Thiokol’s bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight. If NASA management had reacted to the O-ring warnings as they should have and grounded the shuttle for thirty-two months to redesign and test the SRB (the time it took to return the shuttle program to flight afterChallenger ), some of the loudest complaints would have come from astronauts. We were as guilty of injecting into the system a sense of urgency to keep flying as the NASA manager who had answered the Thiokol engineers’ worries with “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of theChallenger Seven.