Challenger Explosion Scarred a Generation

They were so pretty, so dazzling, the bright trails of smoke and rocket fire arcing down through the sapphire Florida sky. But funny, it hadn’t looked like that before. Was this a new way of launching the space shuttle into orbit? Or was something wrong?

There were several seconds of silence on the official broadcast, and then mission narrator Steve Nesbitt, knowing that he had to say something, trying not to be wrong, began speaking. “Flight controllers are looking very carefully at the situation,” he said evenly. “Obviously a major malfunction.”

Indeed. In the lovely rain of fire and smoke was New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, hurtling toward the ocean floor, just 73 seconds into her flight as the first “average American” in space.

Years later, Columbia University academic Arthur Levine would ask 9,000 college students on 28 campuses what political and social event had the most impact on their lives. AIDS? The collapse of Communism. The Gulf War? Overwhelmingly, they said it was the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986--an explosion that took not only the lives of seven astronauts, but also America’s bold commitment to explore the reaches of space, and the easy national confidence that American technological ingenuity could overcome any obstacle.

It was, Levine said later, “their first encounter with institutional failure.”

An earlier generation would remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed; the one after that, when John F. Kennedy was shot. For this generation of kids, many watching the broadcast live at school because a teacher was on board, it was the day that Challenger commander Francis R. Scobee said, “Roger, go at throttle up,” and then became a bright flash in the sky, the first fatality in 56 U.S. manned space flights.

Months of investigations disclosed definitively that engineers at Morton Thiokol Inc., manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid fuel rocket boosters, had warned repeatedly about the possibility of failure of the boosters’ O-ring seals in cold temperatures. They had issued new cautions the night before the Challenger launch, when ice crystals were forming on the chilly launch pad.

Other engineers and NASA officials decided they were wrong. What now was the nation to think when its best minds had been overruled by bureaucrats in Washington, whose new watchwords for American spaceflight were, as shuttle operations director Robert B. Sieck put it, “better, faster, cheaper”? This was rocket science, and it had erred.

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Perhaps the generation of youths that was watching the Challenger launch that day has since become inured to such foibles. A president has been impeached for lying. The Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was lost in September, when engineers failed to convert vital programming data from English measurements to metric, a $125-million error whose apparent stupidity stunned anyone who heard about it. Then, this month, there was the $165-million Mars Polar Lander, which slipped into the Martian atmosphere and was simply never heard from again.

But no one died on the Orbiter or the Lander, certainly not a 37-year-old mother of two, a social studies and English teacher who carried her son’s stuffed frog with her into the only piece of space she ever saw.

NASA got the message, perhaps too well. The accident, still the worst space disaster in U.S. history, marked the end of the space agency’s boldest risk-taking.

After Challenger, the agency launched a major redesign of the solid rocket booster rings and shuttle safety systems, reducing the chances of a shuttle explosion to a fraction of what they were. But the original grand plan of flying 40 shuttle missions a year never materialized, and probably never will. A year before 2001--the time for which the book and movie by that name foresaw fully operational space stations, missions to Jupiter and workstations on the moon--a mere seven shuttle missions are on the books for next year.

The students who watched their teacher don an astronaut suit may never see a manned spacecraft on Mars. They may never even see another man or woman on the moon.

NASA has sent its most expansive probes out in the form of telescopes and scientific instruments controlled safely by human hands on Earth. Even those unmanned probes have become, in their way, less daring. The crash in 1993 of the unmanned Mars Observer probe, loaded with scientific instruments, cost the government $2 billion. The relatively tiny Orbiter and Lander sent out on its heels represented a mere $290-million setback.

America, for the moment, is unwilling to stake blood, or even much hard cash, on charting the untraveled reaches of space. It may be that the newly cynical youngsters who watched their teacher die would have it so.