Riding Rockets

I set aside the document completely befuddled. What did it all mean? Had someone in management commissioned McGuire to document astronaut frustrations and scientifically show how Abbey’s leadership style was the direct cause? If so, to what end—as justification to get rid of George? His comment “…never seen a more propitious time to institute change…” certainly sounded like a recommendation to somebody. It certainly wasn’t the type of statement you would expect to find in a technical paper written for publication in a medical journal. But I wasn’t about to go back to McGuire and question him. More than ever I felt like I was living in medieval times with plots swirling about. I had one objective…not to get burned by any castle intrigue. If somebody was attempting to assassinate John and/or George I wished them luck, but I didn’t want to be a participant. Like a serf in the field, I wanted to be invisible when the opposing armies swept past. I just wanted to hold on long enough to fly another space mission and then I would be gone from this madness.

*It did happen. Pre-MECO OMS burns are now regularly done during nominal ascents and are part of shuttle launch abort procedures.

Chapter 28

Falling

In mid-October 1986, astronaut medical doctors Jim Bagian and Sonny Carter presented theChallenger autopsy results. We expected to hear the answer to the question that had tormented all of us since the moment ofChallenger ’s destruction. Had the crew been alive and conscious in their fall to the water? I had been certain they had not. I had said it a hundred times to Donna, “At least they died or were knocked out instantly.” That belief was my security blanket. It was too great a horror to think they may have been conscious in the two-and-a-half-minute fall to water impact. New revelations throughout the investigation had given me momentary doubts but I had always managed to build a new scenario to hide behind. My “cockpit-shredding explosion” theory had long been proven wrong. The fire leaking from the right-side SRB had weakened its bottom attachment to the ET. As the SRB pulled free it ruptured the external tank, and the aerodynamic forces and the G-loads of the moment caused the catastrophic breakup of the stack. There had been no high-power detonation. The enormous “explosion” seen in the sky was merely tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen vaporizing and burning. NASA cameras had picked out the cockpit module as a piece of the fragmentation. It trailed some wires and tubing but otherwise appeared intact, suggesting it was bearing a live, conscious crew. But I created a scenario in which the cockpit G-forces at the moment of breakup had pulled the crew seats from their floor attachments and hurled them against the interior of the cabin, killing the occupants instantly, or at least knocking them unconscious. When engineers later determined that the cockpit G-loads were not incapacitating, much less fatal, I created a scenario in which a window had broken or, in some other manner, the pressure integrity of the cockpit had been explosively compromised, causing crew unconsciousness within seconds.

The first fact that Bagian and Carter put on the table was that the time of death could not be determined from an examination of the crew remains. I was not surprised. High-performance-vehicle crashes typically leave little of the human body for pathologists to work with. In the case ofChallenger, the weeks of immersion in salt water had resulted in additional deterioration of the remains. The story of crew survivability and consciousness would have to be told by the remains of the machine, not the crew. Bagian and Carter began that story.