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did it!” but, collectively, NASA management put Scobee and the other six in their graves. I wanted them all gone. So did most of the astronaut corps. But we were so jaded by our NASA experiences, we doubted it would happen. Already it was more than three months sinceChallenger and there had been no firings. I saw the future and it looked remarkably like the past. Of course there would be new “oversight committees” and a new “safety emphasis,” but to a significant degree the same people would remain in leadership positions and that meant nothing would really change. I would later hear a TFNG describe it perfectly. “You can paint a different tail number on the squadron dog [referring to the most malfunction-prone jet] but it’s still the same dog.”

I walked away from the Arlington ceremony angry, bitter, depressed, and guilt-ridden…making a mental note to tell Donna that if I died on a shuttle mission I didn’t want Abbey or Young or anybody from NASA HQ anywhere near my grave. I certainly didn’t want any of them handing her the flag from my coffin. (Upon my return to Houston, I did make that request of Donna.)

The only positive thought I could muster was that at least there would be no more scab pulling. The crew was buried. Now the healing could begin.

But God granted us only the briefest of reprieves. A week after Scobee’s funeral, astronaut Steve Thorne, class of 1985, died in an off-duty recreational plane crash. It was another body blow to the astronaut corps.

*Enterprise,the first orbiter, was never designed for spaceflight. It was used in pre–STS-1 glide tests off the back of NASA’s 747 carrier aircraft.

Chapter 27

Castle Intrigue

Several weeks afterChallenger I was finally given a job: to review the design of the Range Safety System (RSS). NASA wasn’t just focusing on the SRB O-ring design. It wanted to be certain there were no other deadly failure modes lurking in other shuttle components. Astronauts were assigned to work with experts from every subsystem to root out any safety issues. I was assigned the RSS, the system designed to terminate the flight of an errant shuttle. It would prove to be an assignment that would nearly terminate my career.

Most astronauts grudgingly accepted that the RSS was needed to protect civilian population centers. But there was no denying we hated it because it directly threatened our lives. Over several months I traveled to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to meet with the RSS personnel—they were not NASA employees. By congressional law the protection of the civilian population from rocket mishaps was the responsibility of the Department of Defense, and DOD had given the job to the USAF. And the only way the air force could guarantee that protection was to place explosives on everybody’s rockets, NASA’s as well as all military and commercial missiles. (On the shuttle, the explosives were placed on each SRB and the gas tank. While there was none on the orbiter, detonation of the other explosives would also destroy the orbiter and kill the crew.) During every missile launch, USAF officers, who served as RSOs, monitored the machine’s trajectory. If a rocket strayed off course, it would be remotely blown up to prevent it from falling on a city.

In multiple meetings I examined every aspect of the design of the RSS and the selection and training of the RSOs. (I would learn that RSOs routinely declined invitations to attend KSC social functions with astronauts. They did not want their launch-day judgment impaired by a friendship with crewmembers they might have to kill.) The system was as fail-safe as humanly possible. In these same meetings I also learned that the Range Safety Office was proposing some changes to shuttle launch abort procedures. They worried that in some aborts, pieces of the jettisoned gas tank could land in Africa. Their suggested solution was to have astronauts burn the OMS engines during these aborts. The additional thrust produced in the burn would result in an ET trajectory that would drop the fuel tank into the Indian Ocean.

When I brought this request