Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (47 page)

Space shuttle
Columbia
returns to land on California’s high desert. (NASA)

Crip’s disreputable pickup fell far short of anything worth locking and the two went happily about executing mission planners’ short flight of 54 hours. The bosses wanted safety margins as wide as possible for the new machine and John and Crip checked and rechecked all its systems. When done the two fliers glided their new ship to a perfect touchdown on California’s high Mojave Desert—the same runways where Neil Armstrong landed his X-15 rocket plane twenty years earlier.

*   *   *

Neil was enjoying life back on the farm but he could not help feeling a little twinge of missing it all as he followed the new space shuttles’ flights. When the shuttle fleet approached its fifth anniversary, Neil was impressed the winged ships had flown 24 times.

“Spaceflight is becoming as safe as flying on a commercial jetliner,” said some NASA executives and, with President Ronald Reagan’s blessing, the agency went off and conducted a nationwide contest for a teacher to fly in space. They wanted a teacher to teach from orbit, and out of thousands who applied, they found the perfect candidate—a smiling, next-door girl clean of heart and spirit named Christa McAuliffe.

The teacher would ride aboard
Challenger.

Some warned that NASA was overconfident, risking flight safety. The harbinger of that warning was rolling southward. The omen was a bitter cold wave freezing and crippling everything in its way.

America’s girl next door, New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. (NASA)

TWENTY-THREE

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

Florida’s rare, bone-chilling freeze stiffened and split tropical flora as fire and smoke rose from smudge pots in citrus groves. It brought the nation’s spaceport to a slow crawl in the predawn hours of January 28, 1986.

For the first time anyone could remember frost appeared on windshields. Icy fog formed above canals and lagoons. The living shivered. The disbelieving recorded 27 degrees before sunrise with not a single tropical insect moving. Birds accustomed to warm ocean breezes huddled. The space shuttle
Challenger
stood bathed in dazzling floodlights, seeming to ignore it all. Its metal and glass and exotic alloys unfeeling as the great ship of science rose 34 stories above its concrete and steel launchpad. Night slipped away and sunrise brought the first touch of warmth.

The space plane’s crew of seven appeared on the launchpad. Among them was Sharon Christa McAuliffe with a smile as wide as her New England roots. She had been selected from thousands of applicants to be the “First Citizen in Space.”

But McAuliffe wasn’t going into orbit as a tested scientific or engineering member of the crew. The social-science teacher from space was going to teach Earthbound classrooms of awestruck students.

Following a morning with a stop-and-go countdown waiting for the temperature to rise, Launch Director Gene Thomas polled his team for a critical litany of last-second review. Every response was “Go!” Not a single call to halt the count as NASA commentator Hugh Harris reported the final moments. He spoke into a microphone that carried his report into officialdom and every media outlet worldwide. He watched the numbers shining brightly before him. Green and flashing, they gave him an update with each passing second, and as the seconds grew shorter he reported, “T-minus ten, nine, eight, we have main engines start, three two one…”

Ignition began as a coruscating fire, a sudden giant flash, and the towering space plane kicked free of its launchpad, spreading its rolling thunder and flames as Harris shouted, “Liftoff! We have a liftoff of the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission.”

On board, the astronauts felt
Challenger
come alive and when the boosters ignited crew commander Dick Scobee shouted, “There they go, guys.” Beneath him on the middeck Christa McAuliffe shouted words for her students into her tape recorder. She took just enough time to remind herself to grip her seat tightly for the ride that those who had gone before promised would be better than anything offered by Disney.

*   *   *

No one knew at the moment of solid rocket ignition, but something sinister was happening. Barely apparent beside the opening fiery blast, a puff of black smoke shot forth from the lower joint of the right booster. Almost as quickly as it happened, it was gone. Later examination revealed that the smoke had spewed from a sudden, tiny gap in a critical O-ring. Last night’s freeze had robbed the critical seal of its ability to flex, to expand and seal. The puff of black smoke was
Challenger
’s death warrant.

High above and unaware they were in mortal danger, the astronauts shouted with excitement where the wind howled horizontally at hurricane speeds.
Challenger
pushed into Max-Q with determined power—but this flight was carrying a terrible flaw.

When the side-loads of the winds smacked into the right booster, they struck an already weakened rocket. The force of 84-miles-per-hour may have reinitiated or magnified the leak. Either way flames were now impinging on the external tank. The vehicle structure was compromised beyond its design limits.

There was nothing left to hold back the raging fire and enormous pressure that was generating the solid rocket’s thrust. A spear of flame gouged through the small hole, carving an instant opening and spewing a blowtorch.
Challenger
was 58 seconds into its flight. Nothing could keep the winged space plane from coming apart.

Challenger
begins breaking up in its climb above its frozen launch site. (NASA)

Not one of the astronauts knew their right booster was already shredding itself.

The pilot’s seat was on the right side of the spacecraft, nearest to its disintegrating booster rocket where suddenly a sheet of intense flame swept across pilot Mike Smith’s window. In whatever instant of time was available to Mike, he knew something terrible was happening. He had just enough time to utter, “Uh-oh!” The cutting torch slashed through the lower half of the external fuel tank that stored liquid hydrogen. It collapsed and instantly disintegrated. Where there had been only blue sky pierced by bright flame below a climbing space shuttle, a hellish fireball grew.

Where there had been blue sky
Challenger
comes apart in fiery twisting smoke. (NASA)

Two corkscrew spears of white smoke spun twisting paths even higher, the rocket boosters flaming out of control. The instant fire in the sky continued to expand in a scattering of flaming debris, creating hundreds of burning, twisting fingers of smoke that seemed to be running from the growing conflagration.

In one ghastly moment, the very air over America’s spaceport burned. Thunder echoed and boomed downward. It kept booming and thundering for the longest of unmeasured time.
Challenger
was breaking and shredding itself into millions of pieces, while beneath this sky of ominous groans, thin wailing cries and screams rolled upward from Earth to where
Challenger
died.

*   *   *

Neil Armstrong was devastated. He couldn’t believe NASA had dropped the ball so badly, killing seven of its best. The very next morning the president was on the phone. Mr. Reagan was asking Neil to join the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. The president had asked former Secretary of State William P. Rogers to chair the commission, and now he was asking Neil to serve as vice chairman.

Neil Armstrong appointed vice chairman of the
Challenger
Investigation Board by President Reagan. (The White House and NASA)

The commission was given the job of learning in the next 120 days what happened to
Challenger
. Bill Rogers would work the politics, grease all the needed palms, and Neil would run the operational side—form committees and lasso investigators who knew where to look.

“I had enormous admiration for Bill Rogers,” Neil would say. “He had a very good appreciation of Washington and what the needs of the public and press and the Congress were. He was to be ‘Mr. Outside,’ and he asked me to stay inside. I explained I didn’t know the inner workings of the shuttle’s systems, components, but I knew the program in a macro sense—objectives, techniques, and general strategies, and I knew the people who knew.”

“That’ll work,” said Rogers, and Neil went out and grabbed the best hard-core investigators he could, not wishing to throw a wrench in NASA’s own investigations. Neil knew in the long run both groups would be working together.

*   *   *

The locust arrived overnight. Hundreds of top names and known faces in the television world devouring everything in their way. This grunt in the field, who had covered every mission flown by American astronauts—56 at the time—suddenly had a whole bunch of best friends and nationally known talking heads to bow before.

In its wisdom NBC News decided my experience and well-placed sources could best be used for investigative reporting. I was off poking my nose in places where it came close to getting chopped off. I was eavesdropping on every meeting and skull session I could to learn what went wrong. Then I locked myself in my office and worked the phone, talking with other grunts, including those who turned the wrenches and cleaned up the messes, as well as supervisors and management types. I kept getting the same responses: no facts, only opinions.

A full day passed, and suddenly a brick hit me in the head: Sam Beddingfield, the man who had retired only a couple of weeks before as deputy director of space shuttle management; the same Sam Beddingfield who told Gus Grissom he didn’t need a parachute because he wouldn’t have time to put it on; the same Sam Beddingfield who Gus told “Put the parachute in my Mercury capsule anyway. It’ll give me something to do until I hit.” That Sam Beddingfield had all the experience and contacts needed to rub elbows with all the NASA brass on headquarters’ fourth floor. I grabbed the phone.

“Hello.”