Media Mass for Shuttle Launch

Like most major news organizations, CBS, NBC and ABC didn’t have large staffs covering what proved to be the fatal launch of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986.

The launches had become so routine that the networks didn’t put it on live, leaving that to the Cable News Network--which gave the nation its first horrified look at the fiery blast that killed the Challenger’s seven-member crew, including schoolteacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe.

Until Challenger exploded, “everybody thought they (NASA) had an airline going,” said Jay Barbree, a veteran launch reporter for NBC who lives and works in Cocoa Beach, Fla., not far from Cape Canaveral.

“People had forgotten just how unsafe space flight is. We were all guilty of it, including yours truly.”

That won’t be the case Thursday when the shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch at 6:59 a.m. PDT from the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral. A record 5,000 print and broadcast staffers have been accredited to cover it, and more requests are still coming in, a NASA spokesman said. So many are coming that NASA set up a temporary second press site for the overflow.

The largest previous press crowd, NASA said, was 2,700 members--on three occasions: the July, 1969 launch of the historic Apollo 11 shot that put men on the moon, the launch of the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, in December, 1972, and the inaugural shuttle launch in April, 1981.

Only 500 showed up for the ill-fated Challenger launch in 1986.

But back then, the launches had become so seemingly unextraordinary, so ho-hum, almost, that only CNN still aired them live. CBS, NBC and ABC usually did that only if the launch occurred during their morning news programs.

This time, CNN will be joined by the three networks and their top anchormen. If the launch is still on schedule Thursday, CNN will begin its coverage at 6 a.m. PDT, the other three networks at 6:30 a.m.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’ Dan Rather will be at the Cape, backed by a full complementof correspondents and a total of six current or former astronauts there and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

CBS’ ranks include correspondents Bruce Hall, David Martin, Peter Van Sant and Harold Dow, and former Apollo astronaut Michaels Collins and current astronaut Jeff Hoffman. ABC is fielding correspondents Lynn Sherr, Jim Slade and Morton Dean, and former astronauts Eugene Cernan and Joe Allen. NBC has correspondents Robert Bazell and Dan Molina lined up, likewise astronauts Joe Kerwin and John Blaha.

CNN’s 26th live launch telecast will be anchored by Bernard Shaw. The cable news channel also will have five correspondents and the only female astronaut-turned-broadcaster, Bonnie Dunbar, in its Cape Canaveral-Houston lineup.

All this is a far cry from that cold January morning when the Challenger blasted apart. Only a small number of staffers from the three networks were on the scene.

Jennings and Brokaw were at a White House briefing on President Reagan’s planned State of the Union speech. They hustled over to their networks’ Washington studios to succeed fill-in anchors.

Rather was in New York, and quickly bustled into the “flash booth” set aside for news bulletins.

As the day wore on, the networks scrambled to report on the tragedy, running time and again, in regular speed and slow-motion replay, the spacecraft’s fiery end 18 miles off the coast of Florida.

When the Challenger was launched, NBC’s Barbree--who has covered all 57 manned space launches, going back to the Mercury program in the early 1960s--was in a studio near Cape Canaveral, watching it lift off.

At the same time, CNN anchor Tom Mintier was in a studio at CNN headquarters in Atlanta, watching a TV monitor and providing running commentary on the launch.

The two were perhaps the first national broadcasters on the air with the tragedy. Barbree reported it for NBC Radio, then NBC-TV, aiding the network’s assigned television correspondent, Steve Delaney.

Barbree, who spoke in a phone interview last week, said he had just filed a newscast for the NBC Radio network in New York when the launch began.

“I don’t believe in premonitions, but I did have a premonition about this one,” he said. “Thirty seconds before it (the Challenger explosion) happened, I got this tremendous feeling that something was going to happen.

“I was in the process of dialing New York to get on the air when this thing actually happened. The phone was ringing when it happened.”

“It was something I’ll never forget,” said CNN’s Mintier, who during the Vietnam War was an Army combat cameraman and already had seen his share of horror, including the bloody Hamburger Hill battle of 1969.

Now covering the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, he said the Challenger explosion “is like one second in my mind--frozen in time for the rest of my life.”

He and Barbree each have a strikingly similar thought in recalling the tragedy.

Mintier: “You remember the picture of the fire and smoke, the fireball. I just kept hoping against hope that something (the shuttle craft) would fly out of the back of it.”

Barbree: “Watching the fireball, I was thinking of the astronauts, hoping that a complete shuttle would come out of it, that there was some way that these guys would be intact and could ditch in the ocean.”

Each was in NASA’s proposed journalist-in-space program at the time. Mintier since has been dropped for reasons unrelated to the Challenger disaster. But Barbree says he still is in it.

Although Mintier said he “most definitely” will be watching Thursday’s Discovery launch on television, he wouldn’t fly on the next shuttle even if given a chance.

Why not? “I’m not sure they’ve got it all together yet,” he replied. “I still have lingering doubts.”

Not Barbree, who will be at Thursday’s launch--working, he said, as a backup reporter for NBC News’ television team and as a staff reporter for NBC Radio, now owned by Westwood One.

“I think it’ll be perfectly safe,” he said of the Discovery launch, “because it’s going to be like a test flight again, a very basic mission. . . .”

Another reason, he said, is that the shuttle’s booster rockets have been redesigned and exhaustively tested.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to ride in this shuttle,” Barbree said.

Almost wistfully, he added, “It’ll be quite a while before they do that.” Odds of a journalist in space are extremely doubtful for perhaps a decade.

PBS’ “Mission of Discovery” profiles astronauts tonight. Review on Page 9.