• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Then one night she went to a party at the Bel Air Bay Club, and met a man who knew a bit about that moon.

14

NEW BEGINNINGS

WHILE LOIS WAS PLYING THE SLOPES OF SUN VALLEY, SKIING from January to the end of March, I plunged back into my regular activities, trying to promote space exploration. I had an important meeting coming up in which I planned to present my proposals for the Aldrin Mars Cycler, so it was a busy time for me. I had given my first technical paper on the subject to a handful of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Cal Tech in October 1985, just before Lois and I went to Egypt. JPL has been at the forefront of space technology since it created America’s first artificial satellite, Explorer I, in 1958. The engineers there encouraged me to develop my presentation further. Consequently, I immersed myself in the project. I never called Lois during those months, and she never called me.

Then, on January 28, 1986, I grieved along with the rest of our nation as I watched the fateful launch of the Challenger, NASA’s second space shuttle. The Challenger had already flown nine successful missions from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launches had become routine since the shuttle fleet first started flying in 1981. But this Challenger flight seemed in trouble from the beginning. It had been delayed several times, and finally lifted off at 11:38 a.m. (EDT). Friends, family, and the world watched in awe as the Challenger cleared the launch tower and streaked into the clear blue sky, but no one could see that an “O-ring” seal in the solid-fuel rocket booster on the Challengers right side had failed. The faulty design of the seal, coupled with unusually cold weather, allowed hot gases to leak through the joint. Rocket booster flames were able to pass through the failed seal, enlarging the small hole. These flames then burned through the Challengers support bracket that attached the booster to the side of the tank. That booster broke loose and collided with the tank, piercing the tank’s side. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels from the tank were ignited by the flames of the solid rocket booster, and after being in flight a mere seventy-three seconds, the Challenger exploded right before our eyes. Few people who saw the horrific sight can ever forget it, as all seven crew members perished. The commander of the mission was astronaut Dick Scobee, who had been a student at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base during my tenure as commandant. I had been impressed with his flying abilities then. He would be greatly missed.

The tragedy was particularly grievous, since the brave crew members who died included Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had been chosen from more than 11,000 educators who wanted a chance to participate on a shuttle flight under NASA’s Teacher in Space program. She had taken a yearlong leave of absence from her teaching position to prepare for the mission. Through no fault of her own, NASA’s first attempt to take an ordinary citizen into space had failed abysmally.

The evening of the explosion, President Reagan paid tribute to the fallen astronauts. “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us in the way in which they lived their lives. We’ll never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God.”

Manned spaceflight is dangerous and dramatic. When an ambitious mission succeeds, as did the moon landing flight of Apollo 11, astronauts like me are hailed as triumphant national heroes for doing our jobs, and the flight directors, contractors, and engineers responsible for the success are applauded as visionary geniuses. But when a supposedly routine flight, like the January 1986 mission of the Challenger, ends in disaster, the accident assumes the proportions of epic tragedy, replete with victims and villains. The Challenger incident certainly