Riding Rockets (45 page)

John Young answered him. “NASA is protecting NASA.” He had it right again.

After the meeting broke up, I went to the gym for a run. It quickly became a sprint. I wanted to punish myself. I wanted the agony of burning lungs and a pounding heart and aching legs to overwhelm me so I wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of what I had just heard. Sweat stung my eyes but I made no effort to wipe it away. I had become a self-flagellating penitent. Pain was good. I relaxed my jaw to its limits and tilted my head back, trying to form a straight pipe to my lungs. Strings of saliva grew from the corners of my mouth and were jerked away by the pounding of my legs. My respiration took on the sound of an emphysemic wheezing and gasping for breath. Several NASA employees passed opposite me and I caught the question in their eyes: “What’s he running from?”

I was running from my thoughts…and predictably losing. Judy or El had flipped Mike’s PEAP to on. There had been no cockpit floor buckling, therefore no explosive decompression. Those twin facts opened the door to the possibility that the cockpit had held its pressure as tightly as a bathysphere and the crew had been conscious throughout the fall. Try as I might I could not find shelter in the evidence of crew inactivity. Would I have written a note? I seriously doubted it. Would I have jettisoned the overhead hatch? No. Of that, I was certain. Had I been Scobee or Smith, I would have been fighting to regain vehicle control all the way to the water, knowing that if I didn’t, death was certain. The hatch on-off status was irrelevant to survivability. I also thought it was a big leap to assume the crew would have felt it necessary to raise their visors and communicate by direct speaking. I had been in the backseat of F-4 jets when the intercom had failed and hand signals had worked fine. And Scobee and Smith, sitting side by side, had the advantage of being able to see exactly what the other was doing. If I had been in their position and was conscious with the helmet visor down, would I have taken the chance of raising it to communicate? To do so would have meant overcoming years of jet crewmember training, which emphasized keeping your mask
on
during flight, particularly if there was any hint cockpit pressure integrity might be compromised. The mask in this case would have been the helmet visor. I would have kept it down.

Like everyone else I wanted to believe the crew had been unconscious but there was no hard proof. I kept seeing the horrific
other
possibility, that they had gone down in
Challenger
like galley slaves chained to the benches of their sinking ship and been aware of every torturous second. They had been trapped. They had no escape system. They were flying an
operational
space shuttle.

I couldn’t go on. I hit my wall. I slowed to a walk, steered off the track, found a tree, and collapsed against it. There would be no escaping the projector of my mind as it played what might have been the last moments of
Challenger.

“
Challenger,
you’re go at throttle up.”

Scobee answered, “Roger, Houston. Go at throttle up.”

Mike Smith watched the power tapes climb toward 104 percent. Even as he was doing so, the stack was disintegrating

The leaking fire had weakened the bottom SRB attachment strut. The right-side booster snapped free, rupturing the ET. Tons of propellant poured from the gas tank. The left-side booster ripped from its struts and joined the right-side SRB in chaotic, unguided flight.
Challenger
’s fuselage and wings were broken into multiple parts. The cockpit was torn from its mounts.

At the instant of vehicle breakup the crew was whipsawed under their seat harnesses. Checklists were snatched from their Velcro tabs and jerked on their tethers. Pencils and drink containers separated from their tabs and were hurled through the volume. The noise of debris crashing into the outside of the cockpit added to the chaos. Exclamations of surprise came from some of the crew’s throats, but fell dead in their microphones. All electrical power had been lost at the separation of the cockpit from the rest of the fuselage.

The mayhem of breakup lasted only a moment before the equally startling calm of free fall began. While the cockpit and the other debris were still moving upward at 1,000 miles per hour, they were freely under the slowing influence of gravity. Like human cannonballs, the crew had experienced a momentary violence, followed immediately by the silence of gravity’s grip. They floated under their harnesses. Pencils and pens spun in the air around them. Checklists floated on their tethers.

The crew was alive but suffocating. They turned on their emergency air packs. Judy or El switched on Mike Smith’s PEAP.

Scobee and Smith were test pilots and reacted as they had been trained. Even the brief, wild ride through breakup would not have mentally incapacitated them. They had faced countless serious emergencies in their flying careers. They knew the situation was perilous, but they were in a cockpit with a control stick and there was a runway only twenty miles away. They believed they had a chance.

They snapped their attention to the instruments hoping to identify the problem, but the cockpit was electrically dead. Every computer screen was a black hole. Every caution and warning light was off. There were no warbling emergency tones. Every “talk back” indicator showed “barber pole”—its unpowered indication. The attitude indicator, the velocity, acceleration, and altitude tapes were frozen with OFF flags in view. They had nothing to work with. As they attempted to make sense of the situation, Scobee’s hand was never off the stick. He fought for vehicle control, oblivious to the fact there was no longer a vehicle
to
control.

“Houston,
Challenger
?” He and Mike Smith made repeated calls to MCC, but those were into a lifeless radio.

With no instrument response and an apparently dead stick, Scobee and Smith mashed down on their stick “pickle buttons” to engage the backup flight system. It was the emergency procedure for an out-of-control situation. If the problem was due to a primary flight system computer failure or software error, the BFS computer would jump online and bring life back to the cockpit. Again and again their right thumbs jammed downward on the spring-loaded red buttons. Again and again they searched the instruments hoping to see life in them, hoping to have something, anything, to work with. But
Challenger
was now a blossoming cloud of debris. No switch was going to put her back together.

Very quickly the crew realized the futility of their actions. The upstairs crewmembers—Dick, Mike, El, and Judy—had window views of the disaster in which they were immersed. As the tumbling cockpit moved ever higher those views became more synoptic. They looked downward to see the white-orange cloud marking the place of
Challenger
’s death. They saw the billowing trails of the disconnected SRBs.

The downstairs crewmembers—Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Greg Jarvis—were locked in the most horrifying of circumstances. They had no windows, no instruments. They were totally dependent upon the upstairs crewmembers to keep them informed on the progress of the flight. But no words came. At the instant of breakup the intercom went dead and the mid-deck lights went out. They were trapped in a tumbling, darkened, silent room.

As the cockpit arced across its apogee, the upstairs crew saw the sky turn space-black,
Challenger
’s lost goal. The silence was nearly total, just the merest whisper of wind. Then, the two-minute fall to the sea began. The rippled blue of the Atlantic filled the windows. The noise of the wind rose to a loud rush as the cockpit quickly reached a terminal velocity of nearly 250 miles per hour. The upstairs crew watched the finer details of the sea become visible: rumpled wind-blown areas, the froth of whitecaps, and brighter splashes marking the impact of other pieces of their machine. The horizon rose higher and higher in their windows, the blue reaching toward them until…blessed oblivion.

Chapter 29

Change

On January 9, 1987, Abbey made a rare and impromptu appearance before the astronaut office. Since his prior visits had almost always included flight assignment announcements, there was a buzz on the walk to the conference room. I couldn’t believe my name would be on any press release. I had significant doubts I would ever see my name on a crew list again. But hope springs eternal in the souls of astronauts. The fact that the meeting was unscheduled, on a Friday afternoon, no less, suggested something unusual was in the offing.

As always, Abbey spoke at low volume and everybody craned forward to listen. For ten minutes he discussed some changes in the management structure of HQ, a topic none of us believed was the reason for the meeting. We were right. He concluded his HQ remarks and then, almost offhandedly, mumbled, “The crew for STS-26 will be Rick Hauck as commander, Dick Covey as pilot, and Dave Hilmers, Pinky Nelson, and Mike Lounge as MSes.”

For a long moment the room was gripped in a stillness that rivaled deep space. We were hoping Abbey would continue with more crew assignments, or at least tell us when those might happen. But there was nothing. Except for the lucky five, who wore embarrassed smiles, the rest of us slumped in crushing disappointment. Why didn’t Abbey get it? If he was the power monger that many believed him to be, couldn’t he see the power to be gained with one hundred faithful-unto-death astronauts? With a little communication, that’s exactly what he would have had. But he didn’t offer a single hint regarding the timetable for other assignments. In the enduring silence, I noticed some of the faces around me hardening into glares of something beyond anger. If I were Abbey I would hire a food taster.

The meeting broke up and I drifted back to my office. Several other TFNGs came by for a losers’ commiseration session. The USAF contingent was angry that a navy astronaut, Rick Hauck, would be commanding the return-to-flight mission. Rick would be making his second flight as a commander while his PLT, fellow TFNG and air force colonel Dick Covey, had yet to command his first mission. Others were livid that Pinky Nelson had been assigned to the flight. While Pinky was well liked, he had taken a sabbatical to the University of Washington after
Challenger
. The rest of us had stuck around to do the dog work and be brutalized by Young in the process. In our minds Pinky hadn’t paid the dues to have received such a prize as the first post-
Challenger
mission. It was also a sore point that his last mission had been the flight prior to
Challenger,
so he had the additional plum of having back-to-back missions. Norm Thagard was certain Abbey had picked Nelson just to show the rest of us how unfair and capricious he could be. I recalled a line from McGuire’s astronaut leadership document, “Inconsistency, ambiguity, silence, evasion…all have their place in his studied unpredictability.”

There were other aspects of this crew selection that would have angered us even further had we known about them. Years later, at our TFNG twentieth-anniversary reunion, Rick Hauck would tell me that Abbey had allowed him to select Dick Covey as his pilot. No other TFNG commander I ever spoke with had been given that responsibility. Abbey had always named the mission crews, the CDRs, the PLTs, the MSes, everybody. Hauck also revealed he had been told six months prior to the press release that he would command the return-to-flight mission but had been sworn to secrecy by Abbey. I wondered how many times during those six months other hopeful commanders had been in Rick’s company wondering aloud who would command STS-26, and Rick had pretended to wonder with them. Deep secrecy. It was Abbey’s style and it was killing astronaut morale.

My winter of discontent continued. As we had anticipated, the lightweight SRB program was canceled and, along with it, all Vandenberg AFB shuttle operations were terminated. I would never see polar orbit.

Challenger
’s wreckage—
all of it
—was sealed in a pair of abandoned Cape Canaveral missile silos. It was another head-shaking moment for me. Pieces of the wreckage should have been retained for permanent display in key NASA locations as reminders of the cost of leadership and team failure. At a minimum, displays of the wreckage should have been placed at NASA HQ and in every NASA field center’s headquarters’ building. The LCC and the MCC buildings needed a similar display. Even the astronaut office should have been the site of an exhibit. Other astronauts agreed. I heard Bob Crippen remark that every astronaut should be
required
to view the wreckage before it was sealed away, adding, “I don’t think some of the civilian astronauts yet appreciate the risks they are taking when they climb into a space shuttle.” But no such displays were established.
Challenger
’s broken body was sealed away as if the very sight of it was somehow obscene.

I continued to be beaten up by John Young any time I had anything to say about range safety or pre-MECO OMS burns. Every Monday rumors of his and Abbey’s imminent removal swept through the office like blue northers out of the panhandle. But come Friday, nothing had changed. A good night’s sleep had long become a memory. I would get up at weird hours and take walks or go for a run. Donna and I talked ad nauseam about leaving NASA. I had my twenty years with the air force. I could retire from it and NASA, go back to Albuquerque, and get a job. But every time I thought of giving up the T-38, of never hearing, “Go for main engine start,” of never again seeing the Earth from space, I would get angry. I was doing my job. I was doing a good job. Why should I be driven away for that?

In the spring of 1987, I got a temporary reprieve from astronaut frustrations. With the shuttle grounded for at least another year, the USAF decided it would be a good time to reacquaint their astronauts with air force space operations. The navy planned to do the same for their astronauts. Both services referred to the program as a “re-bluing,” a reference to the fact we would be back in our blue military uniforms. We would travel to various United States and overseas bases to be briefed on how military space assets were being used to counter the Soviet threat.