_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [97]
“Ohhhkaaaaay,” Dick Scobee agreed, grinning.
Sound and fury washed through our studio windows at the press site. Lights, cameras, and anchor platforms shook as walls rattled and floors rumbled. Beyond the window, red became orange, leaving behind a dazzling trail of golden fire.
Something told me to grab my telephone and move outside.
No matter how many of these shattering launches you have seen, no matter how many times you have felt the body-shaking impact, the shock waves rippling your clothes and skin, you never feel at ease. I phoned editor Jim Wilson at the New York radio network desk. Space Shuttle launches had become so safe and ordinary that even with the first citizen passenger on board, the only broadcast news service covering it live were our friends at CNN. This made me uneasy. Something told me all was not well.
Veteran space reporter Mary Bubb of the Reuters News Agency sat in the press site’s grandstands with tightened fists. She tilted her head slowly to keep the climbing Shuttle with its attached booster rockets in clear view. Unthinking, she groped for the hand of the reporter seated next to her.
Mary was an original. A pioneer female reporter, she had been ill for months, but she was dedicated, undaunted by her ailing body. She had been covering space launches from the time the first rockets tried desperately to lift from their pads, and she would never be absent for any launch, especially a Shuttle.
Today, something felt different. It was not the chill of the morning’s freeze that swept her body.
“I’m afraid,” she said, her voice barely heard over the battering vibrations and crackling roar. “I’m afraid for them.”
High above Challenger’s launch pad, the wind howled, blowing horizontally with hurricane speed of eighty-four miles per hour—some of the fiercest ever recorded for a Shuttle ascent.
The big spaceship accelerated with determined power into the area of Max Q, where its building speed created shock waves from the resisting air through which it had to fly. Inside the Shuttle the astronauts felt the side loads, felt Challenger meeting the invisible forces.
Space Shuttles had flown through high winds before. “Yeah,” Dick Scobee announced in recognition of the sudden shaking, “it’s a little hard to see out my window.”
It was a moment with far greater impact than anyone could have known, for this mission carried with it a terrible flaw.
When the side loads of the winds smacked into the right booster, they struck an already weakened rocket. The winds were physical impacts. They jarred loose the aluminum oxide particles that at launch had sealed the lower joint where the O-rings had failed. Now the aluminum oxides broke up and spat away from the booster.
There was nothing left to hold back the raging fire and enormous pressure. A tongue of dazzling flame burst through the joint opening, creating a fearsome blowtorch of immense power precisely fifty-eight seconds into the flight.
No one in the crew cabin knew what was happening.
“Okay, we’re throttling down,” Scobee called out as he began the reducing the power of the main engines. This would safely diminish the howling thrust behind them as Challenger knifed its way through the combination of powerful shear winds and maximum aerodynamic pressure.
Then, as suddenly as they had entered, they were through Max Q and commander Dick Scobee went back to full power, throttling the engines to full thrust.
“Feel the mother go!” yelled Mike Smith.
“Woooooohooooo!” another crew member shouted, swept up in the acceleration.
“Thirty-five thousand going through one point five,” Smith reported.
Challenger was now seven miles high and booming past one-and-a-half times the speed of sound.
“Reading four-eight-six on mine,” Scobee acknowledged.
Smith agreed with the routine airspeed check. “Yep, that’s what I’ve got, too.”
Scobee heard Mission Control report his three main engines were again running fine at full throttle. Every instrument reading of