Riding Rockets (41 page)

I asked Crippen what he thought had caused the tragedy. “I don’t know. But whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.”

He was right. Whatever it was, the same mechanism of death had been with all of us on every mission. How close had it come to killing me on STS-41D? A second? A millisecond? Had the
Challenger
SSME that failed (and I was
sure
one of them had exploded) been one of the engines powering
Discovery
on my first mission? It was entirely possible. The engines were frequently interchanged among orbiters.

As I fell deeper into melancholy another thought wiggled its way to the fore. I hated that I couldn’t keep it at bay but, like smoke under a door, it crept in to choke off every other thought.
What was
Challenger
’s loss going to do to me?
To ask such a question at this moment defined me as one sick bastard but try as I might, I could not stop it. I suspected every other TFNG was similarly stricken. Would the shuttle ever fly again? I thought of my morning run and how perfect my future had seemed, with images of polar orbit spaceflight filling my brain. Now those images blurred like a mirage.

Our flight entered the Ellington landing pattern, each pilot following Crippen’s peal-off “break” to circle for touchdown. As we were marshaled to a parking spot, I searched the guest waiting area, expecting to see someone from the press. I dreaded the thought of speaking to them. But the only person to greet us was Donna. Crying, she walked to the side of the jet and rushed into my arms.

At home my fourteen-year-old daughter, Laura, informed me that someone from the newspaper had called and when she told them I was out of town they interviewed
her.
I was outraged. They had taken advantage of her naïveté to ask questions about my STS-41D experiences with Judy. “Daddy, they asked me how you felt when you saw
Challenger
blow up.” It was a good thing I hadn’t fielded that question. I could imagine the answer that might have leaped from my mouth. I had already passed the denial phase of grieving and had entered the anger phase. I told the kids to let the answering machine take the calls. I didn’t want to speak to anybody in the press.

That evening there were church services throughout Clear Lake City. Donna, the kids, and I went to our parish church, St. Bernadette’s. It was packed. I wasn’t the only astronaut parishioner. There were a few others. Our friends and neighbors came to us and sobbed their condolences. Complete strangers did the same. The grief was beyond anything I would have ever predicted.

At the request of some of the parish members, my son had put together a slide and music show to play as people entered the church. Pachelbel’s Canon and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” accompanied slides depicting shuttle launches, spacewalkers, and other space scenes. There was a slide from STS-41D showing a grinning Judy with her cannon-cleaner weightless hair. When it appeared on screen, people were overcome, laughing and sobbing at the same moment.
Watch out for hair-eating cameras.
The slide resurrected from my memory the words I had spoken to her two weeks earlier. I closed my eyes. I wanted to cry, like the others around me, but I couldn’t. That gene just wasn’t in me. I was my mother.

The next day Donna and I drove to visit the widows. We first went to June Scobee’s home. The street in front of her house was a mob scene. A large crowd of the curious filled the neighbors’ driveways and lawns. The elevated microwave poles of news vans provided a beacon that drew a slow current of cars through the neighborhood streets. Power cables crisscrossed sidewalks. Technicians shouldered cameras and framed their news reporters with the Scobee home in the background. It would have been chaos but for a contingent of local and NASA police who kept everybody from June’s front door. Several NASA PR personnel were teamed with the police to recognize and allow astronauts and other NASA VIPs to enter the home. Donna and I were waved through the cordon.

The house was filled with family, friends, and several other astronauts and wives. June was the picture of exhaustion, her face puffy and tear-stained. She and Donna hugged for a long moment, each crying into the neck of the other. As they parted, I embraced June, clumsily mumbling my sympathies then fading out of the scene as another visitor came to her. I observed how much better the women were at handling the situation. They easily conversed with June. The men mimicked my awkward performance—a quick hug, a few words, and then escape to a corner where they fidgeted uncomfortably.

The rest of the day was a blur of grieving women and children as we made our rounds to the other widows. Lorna Onizuka was incapacitated by her loss. She refused to see anybody and rumors circulated that she had not given up hope that the crew would be found alive somewhere.

A few days after the tragedy, I flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial service for Judy. Most of the astronaut office made the trip. On the flight Mike Coats astounded us with news on the cause of the disaster. “It was a failure of the O-rings on the bottom joint on the right side SRB. There’s video of fire leaking from the booster.” He had been appointed to the accident board and had seen the films at KSC. Just by happenstance the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to the networks. Nobody at the LCC or MCC had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs had never been a major concern to us.
So much for being
certain
an SSME had failed,
I thought.

Mike also recounted his disgust with how the families had been handled immediately after the disaster. He had encountered them in the crew quarters three hours after
Challenger
’s destruction. They were clamoring to return to Houston but NASA was holding them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage from the condos for the return flight. But Mike didn’t believe it. “The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave immediately. They were being held so Vice President Bush could fly to the cape and offer the nation’s condolences.” He sarcastically added, “The wives had to cool their heels so the VP could feel better.” I didn’t blame Bush—his intentions had been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless NASA HQ was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.

Judy’s hometown memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight frequently left only that, a memory. Judy and the others had been perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth.

Judith Arlene Resnik, dead at age thirty-six, was eulogized into a person I didn’t recognize, as heroic as Joan of Arc and flawless as the Virgin Mary. In multiple Houston ceremonies I had heard the same glowing praise bestowed on the other crewmembers. I excused the excess. It was the perfection the living always demand of their fallen heroes and heroines.

As I listened to Hebrew prayers being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong—flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our silence had been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy excuse. There were eleven children who would never again see a parent.

The news of NASA’s and Thiokol’s bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight. If NASA management had reacted to the O-ring warnings as they should have and grounded the shuttle for thirty-two months to redesign and test the SRB (the time it took to return the shuttle program to flight after
Challenger
), some of the loudest complaints would have come from astronauts. We were as guilty of injecting into the system a sense of urgency to keep flying as the NASA manager who had answered the Thiokol engineers’ worries with “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of the
Challenger
Seven.

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 on
Discovery
’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 after
Challenger
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-
Challenger
life. 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 where
Challenger
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 a
steel
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 was
Challenger.
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 the
Challenger
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 after
Challenger,
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.

Having been at an aircraft crash site, I suspected the condition of the remains was horrific. The cockpit had been sheared from the rest of
Challenger
, and after a 60,000-foot fall had impacted the water at its terminal velocity of nearly 250 miles per hour. At that speed the Atlantic would have been as unyielding as solid earth. I couldn’t imagine the remains would allow the pathologists to learn anything. And I was equally certain nothing relevant to the tragedy would be discovered on the voice recorder, even if it was in good enough condition to be read. Dick Scobee’s “Go at throttle up” was uttered only a couple seconds prior to breakup and there was nothing out of the ordinary in his call. Obviously he and the rest of the crew were unaware of their problem. And nothing could have been recorded after breakup because the recorder lost electrical power and stopped at that instant. Not that there would have been anything to record. I remained convinced the crew had been killed outright or rendered unconscious when
Challenger
fragmented.

After the remains were removed, TFNG Mike Coats and several other astronauts examined the wreckage. Mike returned to Houston with the comment, “The cockpit looks like aluminum foil that had been crushed into a ball.” It was largely unrecognizable as a cockpit, a fact that didn’t surprise me. He added, “I saw a few strands of Judy’s hair in the wreckage…and I found her necklace.” He didn’t have to say any more. I knew the necklace. Judy always wore it…a gold chain with a charm displaying the two-finger-and-thumb sign language symbol for “I love you.” She had a hearing-impaired family member and the necklace was a display of her support for those with similar handicaps. The image Mike’s words conjured would not leave me. Like the flash of a camera, I continued to see it no matter where I looked—the crushed cockpit, Judy’s hair, her necklace.