Riding Rockets

After the White House learned of the O-ring history, it concluded there was no way NASA could conduct an impartial investigation into itself. President Reagan ordered the formation of the Roger’s Commission to take over the investigation. (The commission was named for its chairman, former attorney general William P. Rogers.) As I followed their reports, I learned that my rookie flight, STS-41D, had been one of the fourteen O-ring near misses. In fact it had been the first to record a heat blow-by past a primary O-ring. As Bob Crippen had said, “Whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.” I wondered why STS-51L had been lost and not 41D? Would the “bump” of just one more max-q shock wave onDiscovery ’s flight have opened the SRB joint seal enough for total O-ring failure and death? Only God knew that answer. But on August 30, 1984, the breeze from Death’s scythe had fanned my cheek.

In the weeks afterChallenger I went to work each morning wondering why. I had nothing to do. A handful of astronauts were appointed to support the Roger’s Commission but I wasn’t one of them. My phone rarely rang. There were no payload review meetings to attend, no simulations to fill the hours. In the astronaut office safe was a preliminary copy of my classified STS-62A payload operations checklist, something I had been devouring in my pre-Challengerlife. But now it sat abandoned. I saw no reason to continue my training for the Vandenberg mission. It was obvious the shuttle would not fly for a very long time and when it did it wouldn’t be from California. Rumor had it the USAF was going to bail out of the shuttle program altogether and go back to their expendable rockets. They had never been fans of launching their satellites on the shuttle in the first place. Congress had rammed that program down their throats. The air force had rightly argued that when expendable rockets blew up, they could be fixed and returned to flight status within months, whereas the human life issue of manned vehicles could delay their return to flight for years. During that lengthy delay national defense could be jeopardized. That was exactly whereChallenger had put the air force. It was easy to believe the rumors that the air force was going to walk away from their investment in the Vandenberg shuttle pad.

There was also a very big technical reason Vandenberg was dead. Because rockets being launched into polar orbit lose the boost effect of the eastward spin of the Earth, they cannot carry as much payload as eastward-launched KSC rockets. To recover some of that payload penalty, NASA had developed lightweight, filament-wound SRBs for use on Vandenberg missions. If Thiokol had been unable to seal asteel booster, the thinking went, how much more difficult would it be to seal one made of spun filament and glue? No one expected the lightweight Vandenberg SRBs to be certified now. The space shuttle would never see polar orbit, and neither would I. I removed the Vandenberg photo from my wall and placed it in the bottom drawer of my desk. I didn’t want to be reminded.

It was impossible to escape the torment that wasChallenger. In a walk down the hall my eyes would catch the 51L office nameplates. On a visit to the mail room I encountered the staff moving theChallenger crew photos to the “Deceased Astronauts” cabinet. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stand there and just weep. But the Pettigrew in me denied that release.

The flight surgeon’s office informed everybody that Dr. McGuire—one of the psychiatrists who had interviewed us during our TFNG medical screening, in what now seemed like a different life—would be available for counseling. Some of the wives sought his therapy, Donna included. Most people in my mental condition would have jumped at the opportunity for some help. But most people were not astronauts. I was dyed through and through with the military aviator’s ethos that psychiatrists were for the weak. I was an astronaut. I was iron. So I held it all in. If I could hold an enema for fifteen minutes, I could hold all this in and deal with it myself. I would cure myself of depression or survivor’s guilt or post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever it was that ailed me…probably all of the above.

Six weeks afterChallenger, NASA announced they had found the crew cockpit wreckage in eighty-five feet of water. It contained human remains. I had been hoping the wreckage would never be found, that the cockpit and crew had been atomized at water impact. If it had been me, that’s how I would have wanted it. Let the Atlantic be my grave. But as shallow as the wreckage rested, NASA had no option but to pull it up. Otherwise it would eventually be snagged on a fishing net or discovered by a recreational diver.