Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

by Adam Higginbotham

The Apollo launchpad fire was the most lethal accident in the short history of the US space program,

It took more than a year for the Apollo program to regain momentum after the disaster,

And when Neil Armstrong stepped from the footpad of the lunar lander into the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, an estimated 600 million people were watching live on television, and all three US networks dedicated their airtime to the events for thirty-six continuous hours.

In total the project would cost the country an astonishing $28 billion—the equivalent to a third of all US military spending for 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War.

To support its case and make the numbers more plausible, NASA sought support from the Air Force—and Pentagon backing proved decisive in finally winning presidential endorsement for the shuttle. But in exchange, NASA had allowed the Air Force to set two specifications for the orbiter that would profoundly complicate its design.

Other key parts of the original concept would soon be abandoned, too—including the rocket-powered escape system necessary to save the crew if the spacecraft faced imminent destruction, especially during launch.

Deke Slayton, one of George Abbey’s predecessors as Director of Flight Operations, had been a member of the original Mercury Seven, and at one point scheduled to be the second American in space.

Captain Dwight appeared on the cover of Jet magazine in his Air Force uniform, and on the front of Sepia clad in his flight suit beside the headline “US Trains First Negro Spaceman”; the Daily Defender went further still: “Negro Astronaut May Be First American to Reach Moon.”

This was Challenger, named after a Royal Navy ship that had led a landmark nineteenth-century oceanographic expedition. “The pioneer spirit still flourishes in America,” the President said.

It was then that they noticed a curious new anomaly: one of the synthetic rubber gaskets sealing the sections of the rocket together seemed to have been badly damaged—burned or partly vaporized—at some point during the course of its two-minute flight.

In the end, the divers found the remains of most of the Challenger crew still trapped inside the broken carcass of the cabin, along with their helmets, personal effects, clothing, and food from the lockers on the middeck, including condiments and an unbroken jar of Jif peanut butter. The Navy salvage teams also recovered many of the things the astronauts had carried with them, intending to return to friends and family as mementos flown in space: a ball from Janelle Onizuka’s high school soccer team; a rib from the oldest glider in Australia, carried by Dick Scobee; two hundred embroidered STS-51-L mission emblems; Ron McNair’s patch from the US Karate Association; and forty-seven copies of the US Constitution.

But amid the debris, the Preserver divers did manage to find the pieces of equipment that the crash investigators hoped would answer questions about how the accident had happened.

These included not just the cockpit instrument panels, with gauges and switches registering activity on the flight deck during Challenger’s final moments, but also every one of the five general-purpose computers that had controlled the spacecraft in flight, crushed flat by the impact with the ocean, yet otherwise intact. More important, the men of the Preserver brought up from the ocean floor the six tape machines that had recorded everything happening inside the orbiter during its seventy-three seconds of flight—including the two channels of the crew’s conversation over the internal intercom system, which had not been transmitted to Mission Control.

Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-five seconds for the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.

In the end, it would be almost three years before the shuttle flew once more. Late on the bright, almost windless, morning of September 29, 1988, Discovery cleared the tower at Cape Canaveral carrying a small veteran crew, equipped with a rudimentary new escape system, and riding on Thiokol’s redesigned solid rocket boosters.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board delivered its report on August 26, 2003, and concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded. The agency once again acknowledged its faults, and vowed more technological and management changes. Shuttle missions would eventually resume, orbiters docking each time with the International Space Station, in part to provide a safe haven in the event of an emergency.