JOURNALISTS STILL WANT THEIR SHOT INTO SPACE

It may be the ultimate paradox of this age that the technology that assaults us is the technology that comforts us. When Challenger exploded Tuesday, Americans turned to their electronic hearth, first to confront unthinkable horror and then to seek an understanding of it. Calendar’s Jay Sharbutt and David Crook talked to many who covered the tragedy. They didn’t have many more answers, but they did have pictures, words and, perhaps above all else, presence--eloquence for an age of images.

ABC’s space-beat reporter, Lynn Sherr, was riding on a California freeway when the big story exploded Tuesday over the Atlantic Ocean.

For most reporters who cover shuttle flights, their big story was yet to come in fall when a journalist was scheduled to become the second private citizen to soar beyond the wild blue yonder. The first was to have been high school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

“Of course, you have second thoughts,” Sherr said during a break in her coverage of the shuttle tragedy. “But I believe, as a class, reporters still need to be on the shuttle. I will probably keep my application in.”

Earlier this month, Sherr had joined Walter Cronkite, Geraldo Rivera and 1,700 other local and national broadcast and print journalists in submitting their applications to the Journalist in Space program.

In the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, Sherr and other reporters still want to take the risk, but not soon and not before the questions about what happened to Challenger are answered.

Cronkite, commenting from vacation in South America, said: “After nearly a quarter of a century of successful space flight, this is a reminder that there is considerable danger involved. But I don’t believe that will or should deter our continued exploration of space, and I still would like to be a part of it.”

At 69, Cronkite is believed to be the oldest journalist applying for a spot in orbit.

Kent Shocknek of KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles has less experience than Cronkite covering space. He’s covered nine earlier space shots.

Seeing the explosion “makes you reevaluate your priorities,” Shocknek said. “I’m not interested in bailing out, but I want to know what happened in this problem.”

In New York, Lou Adler, news director at independent station WOR, said he didn’t have any second thoughts at all. “I feel even more strongly that I want to go,” he said. “That’s not going to be hampered by what is a tragic aberration.”

For reporters assigned to the space beat, this week’s big news story wasn’t supposed to be the relatively routine 10th launch of Challenger. None of the three networks even planned live coverage of the space shot.

The big story was to be the coverage of the Voyager 2 Uranus flight from its command center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena. That’s where reporters and editors such as Roy Neal and Robert Bazell of NBC and ABC Science Editor Jules Bergman, who has covered the space program since the days of Mercury, had been working for days.

That’s also where Sherr was headed when she heard the news of the shuttle tragedy. Among the seven victims was astronaut Judith Resnik, whom Sherr had come to know well while covering the shuttle program.

“This has been a heartbreaking, horrible day,” Sherr said. “I don’t like reporting the death of anybody. I certainly don’t like reporting the death of a friend.”

Sherr never made it to JPL. She headed instead for ABC’s news bureau in Hollywood.

“Do I regret that I didn’t stand there watching the shuttle blow up?” she asked. “No.”

After a call to network headquarters in New York, Sherr settled in for the long, hectic, sad work day that went on into the night. She made live appearances throughout the day, delivered a frame-by-frame analysis of the videotape of the Challenger explosion for “World News Tonight” and reported during the network’s live prime-time special.

At one point in the night, she put a question to Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton that seemed to come from the heart of someone contemplating space travel.

“What happens to your head when you’re slated to go up in a similar machine?” she asked. “How does one convince one’s self to go back in?”

Slayton, one of the daring pilots first chosen to travel in space, had his profession’s answer. The possibility of death, he said, “is kind of the price of the ticket.”

All through the day, Sherr thought about death and dying. She didn’t immediately think of herself when she heard the news, she said, but of the “any number of other astronauts” she has come to know who might have died instead.

“I was shaken. I was stunned,” Sherr said. “I was fortunate that I didn’t have to go on the air right away. I had half an hour or 45 minutes of driving. I got to react privately, all by myself.”

As Sherr and the other journalists on the space beat worked the Challenger tragedy, officials with the Journalist in Space program at the University of South Carolina in Columbia continued their selection process without knowing what impact the day’s horror would have on their plans.

The 1,703 applications, said Jack Bass, program public affair coordinator, are “in the process of going out now” to five regional review committees that will select 100 semifinalists. The schedule called for the winning journalist to be selected on April 17 and for him or her to go aloft this fall.

With the entire shuttle program postponed, that schedule is unlikely to be met, however.

Bass declined to identify reporters who had submitted applications and referred all other questions to NASA in Washington.

Later, the head of the program administered by the Assn. of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications, issued a brief statement: “Our hearts go out to the families of the crew members aboard the shuttle.”

Another veteran journalist, Fred Friendly, also was thinking of the families, hoping that TV reporters would allow them their “privacy of grief. I hope they (reporters) don’t treat the widows and orphans of these brave astronauts the way they have treated” the families of hostages.

Former president of CBS News, Friendly is now professor emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York. To many journalists, he has become the unofficial conscience of the profession. He recalled Tuesday the early TV coverage of the Mercury and Gemini programs.

“We were always concerned that something would happen early in the morning when all those kids were watching,” Friendly said.

Cronkite also remembered those early days, when he sat out on the Cape, hoping and cheerleading with the nation: “I think that all of us who watched the beginnings of the space program with unmanned rockets blowing up on the pad or shortly after takeoff have always had, locked somewhere in the back of our memories, the thought that someday this same sort of an accident might overtake the manned program.”

Despite Tuesday’s tragedy, Friendly said, he still believes journalists should make the trip. “It goes with the job,” Friendly said. “Journalists have always taken chances.”

And good reporters always have worked past the headlines of their big stories.

That, said ABC’s Sherr, is what journalists should concentrate on now--what happened on the other side of the continent Tuesday. Why did the 25th flight of an American space shuttle end so horribly?

“The next flight,” she said, “will get an enormous amount of coverage. These review boards have been set up and the investigations are coming. . . . That’s what we, as reporters, have got to find out about now.”