_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [99]
He simply could not explain what had really happened. He had to report only what he knew for certain. “Obviously,” he heard himself saying, “a major malfunction.”
There was nothing left to do. He leaned forward and turned off his mike.
Back in Launch Control at the Cape, Hugh Harris fared no better than Steve Nesbitt. He was stunned, in shock, staring vacant-eyed through the big window. Even as he searched the tumbling, burning debris and corkscrewing smoke trails for some sign the crew was still alive, the scene before him refused to penetrate his own reality, that there could be that much fury and destruction.
It was…unbelievable. So inadequate a word! What made it all the more terrible was the tremendous personal emotion he felt for Challenger’s astronauts. Harris had shared with these people a professional and personal alliance. He stood in his emotional cocoon of shock and kept asking himself how in the name of God this could have happened.
On the roof observation deck of the Launch Control Center, in the brilliant sunlight beneath the pockmarked sky, NASA escorts were doing everything possible to move the distraught, sobbing families away from the horrifying spillage of charred debris raining downward to ocean waters.
The children of Challenger’s pilot Mike Smith stood rooted to where they had been when the blast split the heavens.
“I want my father!” they wailed as one voice. “I want my father! He told us it was safe!” Then they lost their voices in tears and choking misery.
In the bank where she worked in Cocoa Beach, my wife Jo and her colleagues stood watching Challenger’s remains fall toward the ocean. No one had a clear understanding of what had just happened, but Jo had been around space flight long enough to know something was terribly wrong.
Family friend Loverne Holt drove her car up to the drive-in window, and Jo waited on her. Loverne’s car radio was blaring with an uninformed news type telling his listeners the astronauts had aborted the flight, and they had been ordered to return to the Cape and land.
“I don’t think so,” Jo said quietly. “I don’t think so.”
Harry Kolcum, veteran editor of Aviation Week, stood in front of the press site’s bleachers, staring at something he knew he would think about, and have dreams about, for the rest of his life. He didn’t really want to call the office, to talk to anyone about what had just happened, but he had no choice. He turned and started walking toward his phone in the press dome.
Harry was a gentle man, a religious man. “God, be merciful,” he prayed quietly.
Reuter’s Mary Bubb left the stands with that terrible image in her mind. She knew Challenger’s loss would be with her forever.
Along the way radio reporter Mercer Livermore came running up to her. “Did you see the faces? The faces, I’ll never forget the faces.”
Veteran ABC space reporter Bill Larson was driving through the streets of downtown Chicago. Suddenly his radio’s program was interrupted with the following bulletin: “The space shuttle Challenger has exploded in the skies over Cape Canaveral. There’s no immediate word about the fate of the seven astronauts on board. It’s apparently a major disaster.” Immediately Larson’s mind took him back to the Apollo 1 fire, back to the loss of his friends Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
He quickly drove his car to the curb, and in spite of the heavy traffic and blaring horns, he stopped. “Dammit!” he pounded his steering wheel and screamed. “Not again! Damn! Not again!”
Inside the Associated Press trailer, veteran aerospace editor Howard Benedict worked furiously to get out the story to the world as quickly as possible. He was dictating over the phone to the AP’s New York desk. His first paragraph was already available as a news bulletin in every newspaper and network and magazine in the world, and he was into his second paragraph:
“There was no immediate indication on the fate of the crew, but it appeared that nobody could have survived that fireball in the sky.”
Howard felt a chill pass over his perspiration-soaked