Sometimes I write because something needs to be said or brought to the attention of our readers. Other times I write because something is just simply so interesting I must tell someone about it. On rare occasions I write because I have to.
This is one of them.
This evening Channel 4 showed a documentary “Challenger: Countdown to Disaster”. I tend to avoid such programs but this time I decided to watch. I was actually quite surprised by the instant and gut-wrenching emotional impact it had on me. Christa and the rest of The Seven marching out with smiles on their faces. The family and teachers and friends in the viewing stands. The black puff of smoke. The demon mask in the sky. The long fall.
To this day it just rips me apart inside.
I doubt many of you watched and doubt even more that those who did felt anything other than interest in the story. For me it is very different and that difference is why I am writing. Anyone who reads Samizdata knows I have a fair knowledge and perhaps a few contacts in the field of aerospace. Well, it is a lot more than that. Space flight, whether NASA or private or defense contractor is populated by people for whom space is not a job. It is a dream that is in their bones. That is why ‘Space’ is a family. Like any family it can be fractious but when a family member dies or is in trouble everyone pulls together. Pains and emotions are shared only within the family and not with ‘outsiders’. I am a part of that family and have been for a very long time.
I heard about the Challenger explosion when I arrived at my office in the 3rd floor of Wein Hall at CMU. There was a cryptic note sitting on my desk chair, a message taken by my office mate. I immediately returned the call. The message did not give the full gravity of what happened. I did not get that until the friend blurted it out on the phone. I am certain I went pale. Another friend of mine had been talking to Dick Scobee a couple days before; one of the members of Pittsburgh L5, the chapter I had founded in 1980 and built up to where it was about to run an International Space Development Conference, was one of the 104 Teacher In Space candidates and was in the viewing stands with all the others. Judy Resnick was a CMU electrical engineering grad who was one year ahead of me when I was an undergraduate and shared an advisor with me. I remembered her well because in 1971 there were not very many women in EE. There were, in fact, two. Judy and a friend of hers.
By this time nearly everyone in our chapter knew about it. There was no way I was going to get any research work done the rest of that day so I started making phone calls. First I rang Johnson Spaceflight Center to see if they needed a manual I had in my office. You see, I had the controls manual for the Challenger, one of a limited number of sets. It was part of the research I was doing on ‘virtual control panels’ on a NASA research contract. The fellow at Johnson told me they did not need that copy returned right away… and then the two of us commiserated. It was a death in ‘our family’ although neither of us voiced it that way. It was just automatic. Astronauts live in Houston. He knew them and had seen them not long before they left JSC for KSC.
Then I got a call from the woman and close friend who handled PR and media relations for the chapter. Channel 4 WTAE-TV wanted us to supply a local Pittsburgh angle on the tragedy. The good side of this was it gave us something to do. The bad side was that we spent hour after hour going over the satellite backhaul footage she had videotaped of the launch. We fastforwarded; slow motioned; stopped on frames. Over and over and over and over. By the time I left in the wee hours of the morning the devil cloud in the sky was burned into my brain. But I had as good an idea then as just about anyone of what had happened.
With minimal sleep I showed up at the agreed location, a conference room at a Mellon Bank management office where she worked. I brought along a model of the Shuttle Challenger I had built some years before for use in our displays at the Space Days we organized with Buhl Planeterium. I still have it and it is in near perfect shape to this day, despite being shipped across the ocean and traveling with me through my rather severe personal trials in Belfast. There was over a hundred hours of labour in it. It was gap puttied, sanded, primered and air brushed in multiple coats to the point at which it was more than good enough to be a star of the WTAE TV News. I used it to show how a burn through at the aft field joint had taken out a strut and the tank had then come apart, the Hydrogen slamming into the LOX tank up front. I missed a lot of fine detail but I was pretty spot on. I must also admit I was talking with many others about it. In fact, if you are really interested, you can still read the discussions and relive the disbelief, the attempts to deal with it by talking about the engineering, the attempts to understand. I have it all because I was the last of the Keepers of the Archives of the ARPA Internet side of the sci.space news groups. If you open up that tar.gz file and start reading from January 29, 1986 you will feel like a time traveler.
A few days later our resident Teacher in Space returned. We dedicated a meeting to Challenger and she described what it was like being in the stands. She was next to Christa’s family and I believe I spotted her in the film on tonight’s documentary. She told us how the teachers were chanting and stamping their feet to keep warm; how when the launch went off everyone was cheering. Then there came the uncertainty. The strange cloud in the sky… but due to the distance and the speed of sound they were still hearing the roar of the distant engines for almost a minute. They all grew silent. Then the engines stopped. People began to sob.
She had a tape recording and she played it all for us. We heard the whole thing. I heard Christa’s family crying. That tape will probably never be played again within any of our lifetimes, nor will I assist anyone with more information. It is only for ‘the family’ and outsiders need not apply.
My own feelings came out in a song:
ONE OF OUR OWN
song and lyrics by
Dale Amon
Pittsburgh, 3/24/86
(all rights reserved)The seven stepped out,
On that cold, frosty morning.
Crista was smiling,
And marching in time.
The teachers were chanting,
From the viewing stand.
And they cheered,
And they cheered,
And they cheered,
For one of their own.Challenger awoke,
And she rose with a roar.
Just like she’d done,
So many times before.
But something was different,
A dark puff of smoke.
And they cheered,
And we cheered,
And I cheered,
For one of our own.A smokey white arrow,
Through the burning blue.
Scobee read his flickering screens,
“Go at throttle up”.
Fire spurt and fire ball,
Demon mask in the sky.
And they cried,
And we cried,
And I cried,
For one of our own.BRIDGE
Ride the wild rockets,
Up to the sky.
For death or for glory,
For dreams or for hopes.
The bold own the future,
Put your lives on the line.
The meek get the Earth,
And the rest…
Inherit the stars.Out there on the shores of space,
A thousand years from now.
Our petty wars and our politics,
Will be forgot.
But Challenger will still live on,
In the pioneers.
And they’ll dream
As we dream,
And I dream,
For more of our own.
I do not remember if it was that night or another, but Pittsburgh is a very Irish town so a group of us went out to the local, The Squirrel Hill Cafe, and held a sort of wake. Seven classic Pittsburgh drinks: 7 Boiler Makers. We went around the table and toasted each of The Seven in turn. By the time we were done a friend from CMU Robotics had joined us and we ended up over in his house where we killed another bottle of whiskey.
Our chapter was in the run up to our own conference the next year so a bunch of us were at the ISDC in Seattle that year. The word about my song had gotten around so I was invited to play it at a ceremony down by the harbour. I sat there looking out over the water and as I played the song they set off seven sky rockets, one after another. The seventh one blew up a few feet off the ground, right at my eye level. How I managed to keep singing and not go to pieces I do not know.
I think it was during that summer that CMU unveiled a small memorial to Judy Resnick in front of Hammerschlag Hall. In any case I was invited and surprised to run into Judy’s friend and classmate. She and I talked and were together through much of the ceremony.
Another incident I remember was dropping in on a friend from my undergraduate days at her house. She and her three sisters were all close friends of many years and the youngest was working with the Navy and was home for a visit. She had been in a blockhouse at the Cape and gone outside to take her own photographs of the shuttle spearing into the blue and of the cloud of water from the burn off of all those many thousands of gallons of Hydrogen and Oxygen. They were taken from a different angle than any others I had seen.
My conference was long enough in the future that we were able to do quite a bit more than Seattle. We gave an award to the guys at Morton Thiokol who tried to stop the flight. MT paid for Arnie Thompson to come and receive it at our awards banquet. Despite being exceedingly busy with the behind the scenes running of this complex event, I did manage to talk to him for a little while. He thanked me for the award and I thanked him for what he tried to do. By the way, I would almost swear they used that very same plaque in the scene where Beaujolais was packing! It was there and gone too quickly for me to be sure.
We had about 400 Pittsburgh area students in for a session with an Astronaut friend of ours and three of the Teacher In Space candidates, including Dick Methias whom you saw on the documentary.
We had the Civil Air Patrol dealing with our security and such and they also helped out in other ways. On early Sunday morning we had a ceremony near the fountain in Point State Park with the CAP kids as the Color Guard. They flew in Judy Resnick’s Rabbi from her home town in Ohio in a light plane especially for the ceremony. We also had a Priest and a Minister.
The loss of those seven members of the Space community was a blow, but it was one we all knew we would one day face. Space is a frontier. People die on frontiers. Contrary to what the documentary said, no one seriously believed we would not lose a Shuttle or two before they were retired. The only question was when and the shock was of the, “Why this time? Why these seven?”, sort.
Christa and all of the Teachers knew what they were doing. Our own local friend knew those dangers and knew that Christa knew. All astronauts are aware of their mortality and the fragility of our primitive systems. Even if the danger were far greater, they would still step forward and say “I want to go.” A new age is dawning now and space is becoming a place for anyone who wishes to test their mettle and their courage. Ronald Reagan said it best:
The future does not belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the brave.
I only hope that I and my close knit family can live up to those words. It is up to us to make those Seven proud to have led us.
All I remember is that a new drink was invented:
7 Up and a splash of Teachers
Challenger was sad for everyone. It’s important to not be stopped by such tragedies, and to support those going into space, within reason. When I first heard that a modern adventurer, Branson, had been knocked back in his attempt to build a space port in New Mexico, I thought this might be another example of provincialism. Then I read further, and discovered that he was looking for tax-payer-funded support for his venture! The Americans already have one such Agency, NASA, they don’t need another!
I commiserate with you over Challenger, and all the lives lost in space, and still hope to have a Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster with you on Pluto some day!
Dale, thanks for writing this and reminding us that space flight is dangerous and requires brave people to drive it forward. I was at college when he accident happened and full remember the shock. I also recall reading about it at the time when the late Richard Feynman worked to find the cause of the accident.
It is sobering to remember all the men and women who lost their lives doing what they love, such as Gus Grissom and the Challenger astronauts. Rest in peace, all of them.
The thing to remember about Feynman’s experiment was that he made obvious what we all knew: the aft field joint burned through.
Anyone who has time will find it quite interesting to read the archive I posted as you’ll see the ‘real time’ chatter of scientists and students from all over. This was from back in the day when the Internet was a research facility. You won’t get anything from the guys in the upper echelon but you certainly get as good a feel for when people knew what as you would have by being there.
I very much doubt Dale has any plans to visit a minor planet. But y’all welcome to visit my beach house on Titan and Midwesterner can figure out the intricacies of sailing on a methane sea. Bring a bottle.
Space a Family? Yes it is.
I’m doing my PhD with a guy from the Saudi Space Institute. Now it’s no secret that in addition to work on the FedSat satellite, I’ve also done work on the Combat System on Israeli subs. That I’m an ardent Zionist. And I’m a woman, another complication for him to deal with.
Yet we share a bond the other PhD students don’t. We’re Believers – him in more ways than one, of course.
This ball of rock is very nice, could be made nicer, but it’s a cradle and it’s time we left it. Or the next chunk of wandering rock, only 2-300 cubic km, could write Finis to our story, the story of the only sapient life in our vicinity.
btw, I have just added another paragraph as another memory hit me this morning. Another woman friend of mine was on the Cape as part of her job in Naval Research. She was with ONR in DC for a number of years.
Hi Dale
My cousin was down there when it happened, her husband had worked on the mini sat that Challenger was carrying.
It was a shock, The Shuttle of course was starved of development funds while being designed in the early 1970s. If anyone deserves the blame it is Nixon and Ted Kennedy.
Spaceflight is and always will be a risky business, but anything truly wothwhile is going to be difficult and dangerous, the crews are heroes, just like the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will not forget them.
I was a freshman in college when the disaster happened. I was especially drawn to the event since my very favorite highschool science teacher, Mr. Rigell (picture James West (Robert Conrad) with a creative, quirky, soft side), was runner up to Christa. We were sorry he wasn’t going but proud that he got so close.
My schoolmate and I sat in the cafeteria on the local college, sipping our coffee and waiting for the event. Pride, anticipation, a gleeful anxiousness. Naturally, Mr. Rigell had pumped us all up for the importance of this type of science adventure.
And when the tragedy became obvious…well, I can’t describe my feelings of that moment. It was drawn out in the excruciating way the television kept repeating the film clip, over and over and over again, like some sick clockwork orange visual exposure. Whoosh…kaboom, whoosh…kaboom, whoosh…kaboom, whoosh…kaboom, all fucking day. It was like visual dry heaves that would subside.
Oh how sad and sick I was for those astronauts, it makes me tear up even now. But how very, very, grateful I was that my beloved Mr. Rigell didn’t make the cut.
I watched the Challenger launch and Tommy Cooper’s final performance. Both reinforced my belief in the human animal. I found this posts proximity to the post on extending human lifespan prescient. I wish there was more public attention paid to what glories humanity may achieve in the future rather than all the doom mongering. I hesitate to paraphrase Ronald Regan but I would make it:
The future does not belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the to the brave and imaginative.
Tommy shows us, no matter what, you’ve got to keep laughing.
Sorry about the first comment Dale. Obviously we have a ‘value jumper’ around.
Now, the Challenger failed because of not listening to the engineers.
NASA is a political organisation.
Nuff said?
As for the second loss(couple of years ago), that was because state regulations prevented the originally engineered foam from being applied to the tank, and the inferior replacement fell off and damaged the wing.
The sooner people can ignore all these creepy bottom-of-the-class conscience-dwellers(for that is how they start out, by way of ‘Peace Studies’ at Bradford University etc), then the sooner the engineers will be allowed to design safe, affordable access to space.
Like Rutan, for example(I know, there are others too).
The very worst thing about Challenger, the thing that is the hardest for people in the “family” to face up to, is that they died FOR NOTHING.
The space shuttle is, has been, always was, a propaganda device. It was busywork. It was a jobs program: a way to keep former Apollo people employed without doing anything particularly necessary. Teacher In Space? Gimme a break. What was that going to accomplish other than marketing to the effect that the space shuttle is cool and, in some unspecified fashion, worth having?
For twenty years now the official space program of the United States has been to coast in endless circles in an overexpensive unreliable white elephant. This is the true crime. It is a betrayal of the dream, of everything the people in the “family” claim to be working for, and it is implemented and pushed forward by that exact same family. At best it makes them hypocrites, at worst it makes them traitors.
Which is why I must object to the recurrent tendency in some places to memorialize Challenger as something greater than what it was. It wasn’t a blow to space exploration – there was no space exploration going on. It was a blow to a government jobs program, a blow to those who pretended to be useful while taking taxpayer money. The people on board didn’t deserve to die, their families didn’t deserve the loss, but that’s as far as it goes: they shouldn’t have been on that thing in the first place.
Disband NASA. Fire everyone. Those who actually have something to contribute to space travel will rise to the top on their own merits, and we’ll actually start making progress in this field again, for the first time in a quarter-century.
The rest? Screw ’em.
Excellent post, Dale.
The night before the loss of Challenger, I had taken the latest edition of the American Rocket Company business plan to the printers. In the Competiton section I had written a discussion of the Space Shuttle and its strengths and weaknesses. The discussion included a sentence that said, approximately, “Due to the large number of unresolved technical problems with the Space Shuttle system, and the political need to maintain a high flight rate to fulfill promises made, the likelihood wihin the next six months of an accident sufficiently severe to ground the Shuttle fleet for an extended period of time is extremely high.”
It was widely discussed in the space engineering community knew that the Shuttle had many problems, that nobody wanted to have his system be the one that caused the stand-down, that the flight rate was unrealistic and straining the system severely, and that an accident was just a matter of time. I was expecting (and hoping for) something less than a catastrophic loss; a wheel-strut failure at a survivable speed on landing perhaps.
After a friend called me that morning (I was in California then, so it was early for us) and told me to turn on the TV, I watched, horrified for an hour or so, and then went to pick up the business plans from the printer. They had to be entirely re-written, of course. Talk about being overtaken by reality. It’s even worse when everybody you had been talking to had known somehing like this would happen one of these days, sooner rather than later.
It is of concern all of the talk about the people who saw it coming. In the late seventies and early eighties a very good friend of mine’s (we worked together on two different jobs, each being the other’s boss at times) dad was working for a sub contractor on the boosters. Both my friend and I were already prone to space obsession but with his dad’s work, it turned it into our primary topic as often as not.
One day, he tells me his dad quit the job. His dad won’t talk about it but seems angry. His work was classified and very relevent to military technology so his son and I didn’t learn any more but among our speculations was safety issues since it was manned technology.
About three years later, Challanger happened. I had moved out of state and my friend had moved across the country and we had lost touch. But I worried and worried that it was in the boosters. Then it was confirmed. I think my friend’s dad didn’t know exactly what would go wrong, but had been around long enough to know the danger signs and probably wore out his welcome at that job. His job had nothing at all to do with the seals and actually involved developing technology related to the fuel so I doubt he could have anticipated the actual failure mode, but I’ve always assumed he left because of fundamental flaws in the program.
Is seems in hindsight that so much was known about the system wide problems. Why were these concerns not out in the public domain?. Was there misuse of enforcement of security clearance rules for covering up problems? I was a space junkie during the time leading up to Challanger and all I heard was positive spin. What kept the lid on?
Nick M.- My Pluto reference was to an earlier column where Dale and me were slugging out the benefits and disadvantages of Light-Sails versus Rockets. If you want to join the race with your matter/anti-matter deterium rings, good luck!
Thank you for posting your personal recollections. I remember it vividly, in spite of having no particular technical or professional interests in the shuttle program. But I had a kindergartener who, along with his class, watched the launch on television. Many U.S. children did so, which meant that many parents, like myself, had a lot of discussions on matters of life, death, God, fear, hope, chance and purpose with youngsters that day.
I was sorry that these young, impressionable children had to experience a tragedy in that way. But, looking back, the practice came in handy 20 or so years later when we all had to help one another make sense of the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11.