Remembering Challenger

It's twenty years to the day since the Challenger exploded. I remember the day with amazing clarity. I was at school (Venice, Florida), and the science lab had just gotten some new telescopes (and other optical equipment). It was a physics class, so most of us were geeks, and we all enjoyed watching the shuttle go up. Some of us were going to try to follow the orbiter with the telescopes (which turned out to be a very difficult proposition).

It was quite cold that day throughout Florida. There were freeze warnings for the morning, and it was pretty chilly outside when we gathered to watch the launch. Venice is far enough from the Cape so that you can't see the orbiter, but you can clearly see the exhaust. If you've got sharp eyes (I do), you can see flames from the orbiter's engines.

We didn't have a radio to follow the launch, so we just scanned the sky until one of us spotted the exhaust. As I recall, it was Tony that saw it first - at his call of "There it is!", all our heads swiveled. All our heads nodded upward slowly as we followed the orbiter atop the pillar of exhaust. Suddenly, there was a hint of a flash, then the exhaust trail split in two. I wasn't the only one to loudly exclaim "What?!" - most everyone uttered some variant on that. I don't remember who first said "Oh shit", but that was at the same time as my own incredulous "No!". As a space geek, I knew that it was too early for the boosters to have been punched off. I started muttering "RTLS, dammit, RTLS..." like some kind of mantra.

RTLS stands for "Return to Launch Site", and is a so-called "Intact abort" that allows the orbiter to return to Kennedy Space Center. The RTLS is selected after SRB separation, and diverges from a nominal trajectory shortly thereafter. The orbiter is pitched around , and continues downrange until its direction changes (the main engines are still firing). After it begins heading back to the launch site, the mains are shut down, and the external tank is punched off. After some maneuvers to bleed off speed and a glide, the orbiter lands at the Shuttle Landing Facility at KSC.

Sound like a long shot? It is - the RTLS is dicey writ large. About 30 seconds after we saw the exhaust trail split, Dr. Hart (our physics prof) said "We better find a TV or radio". We went to the student center, and joined a growing crowd around a crummy cast-off TV set with rabbit ears and a marginal tuner. We were fairly close to the student center, so when we arrived, they were still discussing an "anomaly" and a "malfunction" in dry engineering jargon. Just about the time they started reporting on the realization that the orbiter was a catastrophic loss, we were packed 10 deep around the TV. Some stayed to watch the TV, some went to their cars to listen to the radio. Some teachers found TVs and set them up. Had the internet (as we now know it) existed, I'm sure we would have all run to the computer lab (although I don't know of a browser that would have run on Apple IIs or a VAX 11/750).

Some held out hope for some kind of abort maneuver. After all, an RTLS is about 25 minutes from launch to landing. Some of the newscasters engaged in wishful thinking, wondering if the astronauts could have ejected (the first orbiter was outfitted with two ejection seats for the test phase). After a little while, everyone was convinced the astronauts had perished. With an explosion and debris traveling that fast, there was no possibility that the astronauts were alive.

The photo above shows a plaque on the launch stand at Cape Canaveral's Complex 34. This was the site of the Apollo 1 fire, where astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee lost their lives. The phrase Ad astra per aspera (A rough road leads to the stars) held true then in 1967. These words held true in 1986 when the Challenger was lost, and into 2003 when the Columbia broke up on reentry.

God speed to the crew of the Challenger, and all those who reached for the stars...

In Memoriam

Valentin Bondarenko
Training accident: March 23, 1961

Theodore C. Freeman
T-38 flight: October 31, 1964

Charles A. Bassett, II
Elliot M. See, Jr.
T-38 flight: February 28, 1966

Vladimir Komarov
Soyuz 1: April 24, 1967

Clifton C. Williams, Jr.
T-38 flight: October 5, 1967

Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom
Edward H. White, II
Roger B. Chaffee
Apollo 1: January 27, 1967

Michael J. Adams
X-15 flight: November 15, 1967

Robert H. Lawrence Jr.
F-104 flight: December 8, 1967

Yuri Gagarin
Training accident: March 27, 1968

Georgi Dobrovolsky
Viktor Patsayev
Vladislav Volkov
Soyuz 11: June 7, 1971

Francis "Dick" Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Judith A. Resnik
Ellison S. Onizuka
Ronald E. McNair
Gregory B. Jarvis
S. Christa McAuliffe
Challenger STS-51: January 28, 1986

Stephen D. Thorne
Aircraft accident: May 24, 1986

Manley L. "Sonny" Carter, Jr.
Commercial flight: April 5, 1991

Rick D. Husband
William C. McCool
Michael P. Anderson
Kalpana Chawla
David M. Brown
Laurel B. Salton Clark
Ilan Ramon
Columbia STS-107: February 1, 2003