COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER : Challenger’s Last Flight : 4. FIRST FLIGHT : ‘The Launch Will Be Guaranteed’

For all time, the first flight of the space shuttle is preserved in three freeze-frames: the hauntingly beautiful launch of Columbia into the early April morning of 1981, the bull’s-eye landing in the high California desert two days later, and mission commander John W. Young throwing a triumphant fist in the air, celebrating the dawn of the shuttle age.

The ordinarily laconic astronaut had reason enough to let off steam and say in all earnestness, “We’re not really too far, the human race, from going to the stars.”

No other American space mission except the December, 1968, Apollo 8 flight around the moon had undertaken to break so much new ground with so little flight experience behind it.

Young and Robert L. Crippen rode into orbit using spacecraft engines never flown before, engines that had failed frequently and disastrously in early tests. They were the first ever to lift off a launch pad with solid rocket boosters, rockets which they could neither shut down nor discard. They flew a vehicle using a radically new system to protect them from blazing re-entry temperatures--fragile tiles glued to the orbiter’s skin to withstand temperatures reaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the spacecraft’s nose and wings as they scorched down into the atmosphere. They were the first to bring an American spacecraft down on terra firma.

Gone were the days of parachuting backward into the sea to bob uncomfortably until fished out by a helicopter.

America had its new flagship on what John F. Kennedy had called the “New Ocean” of space. No longer was it bound to a wasteful necessity of destroying its spaceships in the process of using them.

Columbia, so NASA said, was the harbinger of a day when shuttles would fly into space more than once a week, making a journey to orbit as routine as a sojourn in Des Moines.

In the two years immediately following Columbia’s tryout, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration planned more space flights than it had carried out in the two decades since Alan B. Shepard rode a diminutive Redstone rocket to the edge of space and thrilled the country with the report that he was “A-OK.” On the books for the next dozen years were no less than 487 flights.

NASA had tied its string, its whole future, to the shuttle’s tail, and so, to an important extent, had the U.S. Air Force.

Cost overruns have been enormous: From a 1972 projection of $5 billion the program has ballooned to today’s reality of $18 billion. Schedules have slipped and costs have soared. Far from paying for itself, the shuttle was collecting only 24 cents from commercial and military customers for every dollar spent by NASA.

Even before the Challenger disaster, commercial customers were looking more favorably toward unmanned launches offered by a European consortium. The Pentagon, meanwhile, was moving to shift some of its business to unmanned rockets launched from California and had won approval to build 10 large unmanned rocket boosters to place military satellites in orbit.

NASA had believed that frequent flights would mean lower costs for paying customers. Low Earth orbit, in addition to being a scientific and military outpost, would become the ultimate suburban technology park where manufacturers would grow crystals, fashion perfect ball bearings and mass produce pharmaceuticals of unsurpassed purity.

But by the time Young and Crippen lifted off, their flight was nearly three years behind schedule. The program NASA dreamed of in the afterglow of Apollo had been reshaped by reality. The flight schedule NASA still considered official was widely held to be a fantasy.

From day one of the shuttle program, NASA’s dreams had dwarfed its grasp.

Planners envisioned a fleet of 10 orbiters, 60 flights a month, even the prospect of their aerospace planes touching down at commercial airports.

NASA Associate Administrator George Meuller, the outspoken champion of space manufacturing, pointed to a day when shuttles would launch cargo for $5 per pound, compared to $100 to $150 for conventional rockets.

But in the end, the space agency was forced to accept higher operating costs down the road in order to get lower development costs and stay within the dictates of the Office of Management and Budget.

It therefore postponed and then abandoned the fly-back booster, opting for an orbiter with new, incredibly high-performance hydrogen engines and strap-on boosters that could be recovered and reused.

From these compromises flowed two decisions bearing heavily on the Challenger tragedy. To save weight, save money and increase payload, designers eliminated nose-mounted escape rockets from the orbiter plans.

Until then, every U.S. manned spacecraft had been equipped with a powerful rocket mounted at its tip, an escape device capable of pulling astronaut crew compartments to safety in the event of a booster explosion either on the launch pad or at any time during the flight to orbit.

The other decision was to use solids rather than liquid-burning rockets as the strap-on boosters, another sharp departure from the past. In the Mercury and Gemini manned orbital flights of the early ‘60s, the United States had used first-generation Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, the Atlas and Titan, both liquid fueled.

For the Apollo program, NASA contracted with the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation, now Rockwell International, for a powerful new hydrogen-burning engine, vastly increasing the country’s ability to put heavy payloads in space.

In the wake of that effort, Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team that guided development of the Saturn launch vehicles for the lunar exploration effort remained believers in liquid fuels. Liquid engines could be test fired, taken apart, reassembled and launched. Some old timers recoiled at the thought of placing a manned spacecraft atop a solid rocket.

But the arguments for solid boosters were insurmountable. They were smaller, simpler, vastly cheaper to build and fly, and Air Force experience made it fruitless to argue any longer about their reliability.

Three months after Richard M. Nixon announced that the United States would go forward with the shuttle development, NASA cast its lot with the solid boosters. They would be the largest solid rockets ever launched. Winning the contract to build them, Morton Thiokol nosed out three other competitors, and four years later test fired the first motor in Utah.

What most perplexed NASA was not development of the booster but the technological new ground to be broken for the orbiter’s hydrogen engine and the protective tiles for the shuttle’s skin. Both headaches were shared by the government and North American Rockwell.

Not surprisingly, the aerospace giant, with its hydrogen engine experience and its role as the Apollo spacecraft contractor behind it, won the $500-million contract for the new engine and a $2.6-billion assignment to produce five orbiters.

The new engines required turbo-pumps the size of automobiles, generating 75,000 horsepower to force liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into combustion chambers. The leap into the future pressed engine technology to the wall. In the Santa Susanna Mountains above the San Fernando Valley and in the piney woods and swamp grass of southern Mississippi, the mighty engines thundered and roared, caught fire, wrecked test stands and tore themselves to bits.

As vexing as the temperamental engine was, it was matched by the task of fitting 31,000 tiles to their assigned places on the orbiter’s skin, gluing each securely enough to withstand the buffeting of launch and the more violent plunge back to earth. Each tile was unique, machined for one specific place on the spacecraft’s skin. Thousands of them were attached to the first shuttle after it was shipped to Florida; in one disheartening setback, 25,000 of them had to be removed and reglued. At one time, despairing NASA officials thought of equipping astronauts with kits so they could replace tiles in space, in case so many fell off during launch that it would be dangerous to attempt descent.

But in their public pronouncements, NASA officials had only lofty words for the space shuttle. “We have indeed entered a new world,” NASA Administrator James Fletcher told a convention of scientists in Anaheim in 1976. “In less than two decades, we have closed the book of science fiction and have reached a point of pragmatically assessing the uses of outer space for all people of the world.”

And for the business customers NASA was currying, Fletcher had assurances of a businesslike approach. “Launch contracts will be for a firm, fixed price set at the time of contracting, and the launch will be guaranteed.”

In fact, by the time Challenger rolled out of its hangar to become the second shuttle of the U.S. fleet, by then limited to four orbiters, the obstacles posed by the new engine and the tiles had been largely overcome.

Less than three months after Young and Crippen landed Columbia, the sparkling new Challenger was towed from a hangar at Palmdale through the streets of Lancaster to the applause of many of the 27,000 Californians who had taken hand in its creation.

At Edwards Air Force Base, it was bolted to the top of NASA’s Boeing 747 carrier and flown cross-country to the Kennedy Space Center, eventually to be bolted to its solid boosters and its external fuel tank in preparation for its first flight.

Long forgotten in the mists were NASA’s decisions to forgo an escape rocket system on the new shuttle fleet and its choice of a solid rocket booster that made astronauts captives until they reached an altitude of 24 miles.

On the 25th shuttle launch, on Challenger’s 10th flight, on Sharon Christa McAuliffe’s big day, the two decisions came into fatal conjunction. There were two freeze-frames of Challenger’s mission 51L.

In the first, the teacher from New Hampshire strode toward the launch pad as confidently as John Young went out to board Columbia in April of 1981.

In the last, a deathly white “Y” formation of smoke and steam stretched out of a fireball toward infinity.