_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [94]
Congressman Bill Nelson’s flight was the twenty-fourth for the Space Shuttle.
Christa McAuliffe’s launch was to be the twenty-fifth.
Challenger was rolled to its launch pad.
A bitter cold wave was rolling, too!
Southward.
TWENTY-ONE
Challenger: A Disaster
In late January 1986, a frigid weather front rolled southward out of Canada and headed straight for Florida. The rare, bone-chilling freeze gripped unsuspecting palms and palmettos, stiffened and cracked rolling groves of citrus, and froze Florida’s sprawling Kennedy Space Center to a slow crawl. The spaceport—making use of the latest electronic miracles and a step ahead of the cutting-edge of technology—had never felt such cold.
During the predawn hours of January 28, temperatures fell below freezing. Frost appeared on car windshields and ice fog formed above canals, swamps, lakes, and saltwater lagoons. Alarmed forecasters predicted a hard freeze in the 20s by sunrise.
Not a single tropical insect moved in the frigid stiffness. Birds accustomed to warm ocean breezes huddled in stunned groups. Fire and smoke rose from smudge pots set across Florida’s citrus belt in last-ditch attempts to save the budding produce.
Along the beaches beneath the towering rocket gantries, only the sparkling white form of the Space Shuttle Challenger appeared in dazzling floodlights, its metal and glass and exotic alloys unfeeling of the arctic air—the great ship of space rising like a monstrous ice sculpture above its steel foundation. Finally, night slipped away and sunrise brought the first hope of warmth. Challenger’s seven astronauts appeared on the launch pad. Their number included the courageous social-science teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who had a smile big enough to adorn any magazine cover. She was a brilliant selection by the National Teachers’ Union for the coveted role of the planet’s “first citizen in space.”
She had emerged from the enthusiastic wave of applicants giving all to become the one individual selected for NASA’s acclaimed Teacher in Space Project. Those who wished her well went far beyond her contemporaries and the everyday citizens who prayed for her success. Millions of schoolchildren eagerly awaited her departure from Earth.
McAuliffe wasn’t going into space as a tested scientific or engineering member of the crew. She was leaving Earth to command the attention of the world, including awestruck American schoolchildren. Having squirmed beneath congressional brickbats and attempts to slash NASA’s budget, even to do away with the superbly engineered Space Shuttle program, the space agency stoked the Teacher in Space Project as the perfect response to dull the political ax held at its head.
Citizen-in-space Christa McAuliffe is seen here (third from right) with her crew days before the seven would be lost in the Challenger accident. (Michael R. Brown/Florida Today).
You could scrub an astronaut, cancel a mission, condemn a fleet—but you did not mess with Apple Pie, Mom, and Our Sainted Teacher.
“This is a beautiful day to fly,” Challenger’s commander, Dick Scobee, said as he stopped on the walkway to the entry hatch. To the veteran astronaut, the cold, cloudless sky was perfect—conditions that experienced pilots called severe clear. It was true: On such a clear day you could see forever, and from nineteen stories above ground the crew beheld a sparkling, shining string of ocean breakers in the curving surf along the Cape’s coastline to the south.
One by one, the space-farers donned their helmets and, with the assistance of the specialist, climbed through the hatch into the deep and wide recesses of the crew compartment. As McAuliffe prepared to enter Challenger, a member