Nightmare of Fire and Ice

It is an image forever seared in our national memory, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Kent State shootings, a video frame that still seems so fresh, so recent, it might as well have happened yesterday.

The space shuttle Challenger, with seven Americans aboard, soared into the clear, cold Florida sky at 8:38 a.m. PST 10 years ago today. At 24,000 feet, as the craft rammed through the sound barrier, the mysterious plume of flame first appeared, licking at the booster rocket. We saw the fireball and, 73 seconds after liftoff, the titanic explosion and pieces of metal crashing toward the ocean.

At Mission Control in Houston and across the land there was a stunned moment of silence, then, as in a national utterance, we exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”

For some Americans, the experience was life-changing. In the decade that has passed, some family members of the Challenger seven have maintained a public silence; others have lectured and written as advocates of space exploration. Many of the NASA engineers and scientists are back at the same consoles guiding new missions into orbit.

Somehow they and others found the strength to heal, to move on.

This is what they remember:

The night before liftoff, engineer Roger Boisjoly had implored his superiors at Morton Thiokol--the Utah company that made the solid rockets that boost the shuttle into orbit--to recommend that NASA delay the launch. The cold, he said--temperatures would fall to 27 degrees that night--might affect the rubber O-ring seals, thus allowing exhaust gases to leak from the rocket joints. If that happened, he said, Challenger could explode on the launch pad.

But Mission 51-L--America’s 53rd manned space flight--lifted off without a hitch, riding a shaft of fire toward orbit seven minutes away. In Morton Thiokol’s conference room, Boisjoly turned away from the TV and remarked quietly to fellow engineer Bob Ebeling, “Well, we dodged a bullet on that one.” And Ebeling replied, “I whispered a prayer of thanks.”

Seconds later Boisjoly was fighting back tears. He struggled into his office, staring at the walls, his mind blurred by images of fire and the contrail of smoke and steam stretched across the sky. A colleague came in to ask if he was OK. Boisjoly nodded.

Weeks later, after testifying before Congress about his unheeded warning and the effects of cold on the O-rings, Boisjoly had become an outcast at Morton Thiokol, shunned by fellow workers who considered him a whistle-blower and believed him responsible for layoffs that followed the disaster. He soon left the company on disability, suffering double vision and other stress-related ailments.

Boisjoly, 57, today runs his own company, which does forensic engineering for law firms involved in product-liability cases. He earns $1,500 for speeches to university and business groups about Challenger, teaches Sunday school in a Mormon church--something he says he wouldn’t have considered doing before the explosion--and has come to grips with the role he played in the tragedy of Challenger.

“I now enjoy a wonderful quality of life,” he said.

For the Challenger mission, Robert B. Sieck was director of shuttle operations at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center--a position he still holds. He is also 57, balding and soft-spoken. On the wall of his second-floor office is a formal portrait of the Challenger crew, autographed by all seven members. There is also a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that he hung after the explosion.

It says: “. . . The credit belongs to the man who . . . spends himself in a worthy cause; and if he fails, at least he’ll never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor its pursuit.”

“There was a high level of schedule pressure,” he said of 1986. “They wanted us to go from eight, nine launches a year to 14 to 18, while reducing costs at the same time. What management wanted was better, faster, cheaper. . . . We were cranking out flights. And we were too busy.

“How fast do you get to wondering if it was your fault? Pretty quickly. The hardest thing for me to overcome was my sense of guilt. Although a review showed that nobody at Kennedy Space Center was to blame, we were all members of a team that allowed a launch to occur which shouldn’t have occurred. There is the feeling that it’s our fault, and some still carry that today.

“In hindsight . . . we had never flown on a day that cold. There was ice on the pad. We could have said, ‘OK, let’s not do this today.’ ”

Grey Katnik, a NASA engineer, made two trips to the launch pad to assess the ice buildup. “There was ice all over the place, and 3-foot icicles on the tower, hanging above us like daggers,” he said. Fearing the ice would be sucked toward the spacecraft when the booster rockets ignited, he recommended after the first inspection that the launch be scrubbed. But 20 minutes before launch time the sun was out and ice was melting. “We were physically scooping ice out of the way of the boosters. . . . At that point I was content to let the leader make the decision to go,” he said.

For three hours the crew members had waited on their backs inside Challenger, strapped in steel chairs . . . T minus 6 . . . They placed the airtight plastic faceplates on their helmets over their eyes . . . T minus 3 . . . The two largest solid-fuel rockets ever built burst to life. And toward the serenity of orbit hurtled the Challenger seven, under the command of Francis R. Scobee, who earlier that morning had told the ground crew: “My kind of weather. What a great day for flying!”

Two days later Katnik--now 37 and chief of NASA’s volunteer ice inspection team--called his father, a neurologist, and said he was afraid to go back to work. “I said I was afraid of making a decision that would get somebody killed,” Katnik recalled, “but Dad encouraged me, and I forced myself to go, and I got so busy I forgot to be afraid.”

Both Katnik and Sieck agree that although the wounds of Challenger will never quite heal, the heritage of science is to overcome problems and move on. Said Sieck: “That’s why I don’t like the 10th anniversary. It’s a distraction; it pulls out the old pain. It’s not forward-thinking. To remember, to reflect on it is one thing, but to dwell on it serves no purpose.”

A Routine Mission

The shuttle had been letter perfect. It had been blasting off and landing for five years, and the missions had become so routine that Challenger, on the 25th shuttle flight, was even going to carry a teacher--an “ordinary person,” Sharon Christa McAuliffe called herself--into space.

Although Scobee had expressed concern, telling his wife, June, before McAuliffe’s selection, “I don’t think the time is right to take private citizens,” it was the very presence of the vibrant, startlingly normal teacher that rekindled an emotional spirit and public interest in the shuttle.

McAuliffe, 37, who taught social studies in Room 350 at Concord High School in New Hampshire and was chosen from 11,400 applicants, became the media darling of Mission 51-L. She got the questions at news conferences and she bubbled with enthusiasm when asked about the two school lessons she planned to teach during the mission, one of which was titled, “Where we’ve been, where we’re going, why.” She went into space carrying her grandmother’s watch and her son’s stuffed frog.

The crew itself, in fact, seemed the embodiment of everyday America: two women, a Jew, an Asian American, an African American, a Vietnam War hero, a test pilot who began his flying career as an 18-year-old enlisted Air Force mechanic.

Concord (population 35,000), one of the nation’s smallest capitals, became, along with its most famous resident, the symbol of the nation’s grief. Hundreds of reporters descended within hours of the explosion. Money and poems and eulogies poured in from around the country. A man from Las Vegas arrived with a promise of $500,000 to build a monument to the seven space voyagers in a downtown square.

“We turned down his offer,” said then-Mayor James MacKay, a psychotherapist. “I didn’t see how Christa’s children could walk by a statue of their mother every day. What we wanted to do in Concord was deal with this in a personal way. But we couldn’t do that because of all the attention. There was never an opportunity for closure.

“The feeling here was--and still is--a desire to protect Christa’s family from intrusion. This is Yankee country, and people tend to keep their feelings private.”

McAuliffe’s husband, Steven, has never spoken publicly about the accident. Their son, Scott, 19, is a college freshman in Maine. Their daughter, Caroline, 16, is a high school student who spends her spare time riding her horse, Glory. Now a federal judge in Concord, Steven is remarried, to a teacher.

McAuliffe’s father, Ed, died of lymphoma in 1990; her mother, Grace, now 71, lectures often on behalf of space exploration and the educational centers and scholarships established in the crew’s names.

‘Major Malfunction’

As always, the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral had handed over control of the flight to the Johnson Space Center in Houston as soon as the shuttle cleared the tower. Steve Nesbitt’s job in Houston was to relay the mission’s progress to the public, using technical data on two 9-inch monitors perched above his seat.

Everyone tuned to CNN--the only network covering the launch live--saw the fireball and fatal explosion, but Nesbitt’s monitor showed nothing unusual. In a calm monotone he continued: “We’re at a minute 15 seconds, velocity 2,900 feet per second, altitude 9 nautical miles . . . “ Then his screen filled with an “S,” meaning static--his computer wasn’t receiving any information.

“What was that?” the flight surgeon seated at Nesbitt’s left exclaimed. The tone of her voice jarred him and he glanced up at the TV screen.

Nesbitt knew something was terribly wrong. His mind, he said, raced with the memory of Dan Rather incorrectly announcing Press Secretary James Brady’s death after the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. He had no information, didn’t want to be wrong and knew he had to say something.

Finally, after a 10-second silence, he said in an unrattled voice: “Flight controllers are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink [communication].”

Ruefully, Nesbitt, 44, now NASA’s chief of external affairs in Houston, admits his remark came to haunt him. At home he heard his voice saying “major malfunction” over and over on television. He received about 20 letters from people commending him for staying calm, but everyone else used comments like “the understatement of the century.”

“People thought, ‘What a dumb thing to say,’ ” Nesbitt recalled. “They had no idea of the circumstances.”

For several years after the explosion, Nesbitt marked the anniversary date sitting at the flight commentator’s console, reflecting. He narrated, at his request, the mission of Challenger’s successor, Discovery, in 1988. “I didn’t want to end my flight-commenting career with a failure,” he said. “ . . . It meant a lot to me.”

Seven Black Balloons

Even before the wind had swept the last traces of Challenger from the skies, America mourned, as if there had been a death in the family.

Flags were lowered to half-staff. The Olympic torch at Los Angeles’ Memorial Coliseum was lighted and homeowners in Illinois kept their porch lights on overnight. McAuliffe’s alma mater, Framingham State College in Massachusetts, sent seven black balloons aloft. TV networks switched to live coverage of the disaster’s aftermath; ABC fielded 1,200 complaints about preempted soap operas.

In the Atlantic, an armada of ships using sonar fanned over 20,000 miles of ocean looking for debris from Challenger. The remains of the crew were recovered and identified. Retrieved wreckage was studied and sealed in a capped silo at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where it remains. In Concord, the Parents Assn. labored to catalog the thousands of mementos the high school had received from throughout the country. They are kept today in a storage locker.

“Dick and I began talking about the dangers of his job when he became a pilot,” recalled June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger’s commander. “We talked about death and we accepted the possibility. We agreed [that] without risk there is no discovery, no new knowledge, no advancement.”

Rodgers, who lives in Chattanooga, Tenn., and is married to a retired three-star Army general, could not talk about the accident for years. Last year she wrote her memoirs.

“When I gave the manuscript to my children to read, it was as though we finally had closure,” she said. “Silver Linings,” an inspirational chronology, has just been published, and when a “lost man” formation of F-16s flies over the Super Bowl today in Tempe, Ariz., the lead pilot will be her son, Rich, an Air Force captain.

Jane Smith Wolcott, widow of mission pilot Michael J. Smith, also remarried, to a retired Navy captain who was a classmate of Mike’s at the Naval Academy. They live in Norfolk, Va. “For me,” she said, “it wasn’t so much a matter of closure as it was just getting on with our lives. I miss Mike daily. But I’m fortunate to be married to someone wonderful who understands this totally. We talk about Mike. It’s not a hidden thing between us. I’m very comfortable with my sadness now.”

‘Abandon’ the Shuttle

Within a week of Challenger’s failed mission, President Reagan appointed a high-profile, 13-member commission to determine the cause of the explosion. It responded with a 256-page report less than six months later that, while not assessing blame, cited a single physical cause: the failure of the O-ring that Boisjoly had warned about. It said a wide range of management problems within NASA and Morton Thiokol led to the failure.

The commission’s chairman, William P. Rogers, says he remains shocked at the failures he found. “It is a great lesson in human nature,” said Rogers, a New York City attorney and former U.S. secretary of state. “When responsibility is diverse, so that no one person is singled out as the person responsible for failure, then it is much easier for everybody to rely on the judgments of other people.”

Added Washington attorney David C. Acheson, another commission member: “We never did fix the fundamental thing, which is that the shuttle is a monster--terribly complex and costly. We always felt that the shuttle was a white elephant, but it was not in the [charter] of the commission to say we should abandon it. I believe we should have . . . and gone on to something else.”

Institutional Failure

In 1993, Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, surveyed 9,000 college students on 28 campuses to find out what political and social event had the most impact on their lives. His list included the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism, AIDS, the Persian Gulf War, the Rodney G. King beating. Overwhelmingly, they choose an event he hadn’t suggested: the destruction of the Challenger.

“I was astounded,” Levine said. “But . . . they all remembered where they were when they heard the news. They used words like ‘wake-up call for America’ to describe their reaction. In the end, I think the disaster helped breed a lot of cynicism. This is a generation of kids who distrust every social institution in the country, particularly politics, and Challenger was their first encounter with institutional failure.”

America has done much to honor the Challenger seven--Scobee, Smith, McAuliffe, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith Resnik and Gregory B. Jarvis. There are 25 Challenger Learning Centers to encourage grade-school students’ appreciation of science, and a Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord. A street was named after Onizuka in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. The highway between Florence and Charleston, S.C., was renamed Ron McNair Boulevard. Challenger commemorative license plates remain the best-seller among the 30 special tags Florida offers, having raised $28 million since 1987 to build and maintain a granite memorial to the 15 astronauts who have died in accidents and under other circumstances while working for NASA.

“If it had all gone according to plan, we’d be a lot happier,” said Barbara Morgan, 44, an elementary schoolteacher in McCall, Idaho, who trained with the Challenger crew as McAuliffe’s backup. “Everybody, except for young children, has lost someone. It’s just another reminder of what’s important.”

No “ordinary person” has flown aboard a space shuttle since McAuliffe’s attempt, but 17 days ago six astronauts strapped themselves inside the shuttle Endeavour on launch pad 39-B. It was 44 degrees, the coldest liftoff temperature since the Challenger disaster, 48 manned missions ago. The predawn sky was clear and the crowd along the Florida shoreline sparse.

At 4:41 a.m. Florida time, the earth rumbled and Endeavour soared skyward, trailing a 600-foot tongue of 5,000-degree flame. The spacecraft wheeled about gracefully and climbed toward orbit on an easterly trajectory, at last disappearing into the blackness.

It was, as Dick Scobee might have said, “a great day for flying.”

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Times staff writers Ralph Vartabedian in Washington, Lianne Hart in Houston, Doug Conner in Seattle, Anna Virtue in Miami and special correspondent Mike Clary at Cape Canaveral contributed to this story.