Belief Is What Made the Shuttle Succeed

The tragedy of the Challenger explosion is immense. It has us in its grip like a bad dream. But, like a bad dream, our grief will run its course and we will move on. This is a tragedy, not a disaster.

Those of us who have faced the physical risk of space, and those who have faced the emotional risk of having us there, know those risks, prepare for them, face them as required, and then grasp the chance to move on with all our being. The crew members of the beautiful spaceship Challenger were no different. It must always be remembered that all of us who accepted risk, whether we lived or died as part of the experience, were exactly where we wanted to be at the moment before triumph or tragedy.

In the earlier Apollo program, in which I took part, the spacecraft and its launch vehicle were designed to allow a survivable separation of the crew module from the rocket. This did not mean that every conceivable failure could be survived, as we saw so tragically in 1967, but we were prepared to deal with a situation that allowed at least a few seconds’ warning.

In sharp contrast to Apollo, the early years in the design and development of the space shuttle were played out in a far more constrained fiscal environment (about $5.5 billion for the shuttle, compared with about $22 billion for Apollo). Design and testing of multiple engineering concepts were not possible for very long before commitments had to be made on which way to proceed. The Apollo concept of having a full team of NASA engineers shadowing the design, development and production efforts of contractors had to be significantly curtailed. Finally, the extraordinary diversity of test programs had to be scaled down in favor of less expensive computer modeling of launch systems.

There were many of us “old Apollo heads” who, on detailed exposure in 1973 to the near-final concepts for the space shuttle, felt that the new program was underfunded by a factor of three or four. The politically sensitive but historically naive Nixon Administration had forced the abandonment of NASA’s original post-Apollo plan for a space station served by both a fully reusable launch vehicle and a shuttle orbiter. The remaining vestige of this plan, the orbiter, was itself an extraordinary technical challenge. It would require more than just state-of-the-art engineering to take a spacecraft as big as a DC-9 into orbit, make good use of it in the harsh environment of space, fly it on return through hypersonic speed ranges never before experienced by aircraft, land it on a standard airport runway, and then recycle it for reuse within a few weeks.

Those of us who were skeptical about NASA’s ability to succeed in this endeavor were wrong. We were wrong for two reasons. We were part of one reason. We had no warning of the other. First, we underestimated, as so many have, the unexcelled motivation and heart of the NASA family. Space and space flight generate a belief in hundreds of thousands of Americans that working on the exploration of this new ocean is the most important endeavor of their lives. The nation’s and humankind’s return on this investment in “belief” is as incalculable as it is unparalleled in peacetime.

We could not know then that President Jimmy Carter would be persuaded in 1978 that the space shuttle was essential to the verification of the SALT II treaty, in which he, if not the Senate, believed so strongly. I was serving in the Senate at that time, and it became clear to me, and to others, that the day of reckoning had come for the early underfunding of the shuttle program. The necessary delays of critical development milestones in order to pay for the solutions to unexpected problems (something that can be avoided only by large budget reserves for contingencies) had created a fence of future critical milestones that only large doses of additional funds could break through. Thus the President put his office behind the necessary supplemental appropriations that finally resulted in the successful test flights of the shuttle Columbia.

Buried in all these political and fiscal considerations is the fact that NASA made a decision in the early 1970s to not attempt to develop a means to separate the shuttle orbiter or the crew while the solid rocket boosters were burning. After ignition, the shuttle crews are committed to ride them for more than two minutes until they are burned out and jettisoned. This difficult management decision has been justified through 24 successful launches of the space shuttle. It also appears that a capability to abort while the solid rockets were burning would have made no difference in the outcome of the Challenger accident.

This is the type of retrospective analysis that will be part of NASA’s and the nation’s look at Challenger’s last flight. In the larger view of history, however, it is incidental to the commitment made by Mike, Dick, Judy, Ron, Ellison, Greg and Christa. As thousands of American explorers and pioneers before them had, they believed in what they were doing. The nation also believes in what they were doing. Their commitment will continue to be our commitment. This belief and commitment can be no less than it was as we built a continental nation, as we became a seafaring power, as we “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and as we face the continuing challenge to freedom in space.