The business of risk

I was headed out the door Saturday to scout 12-year-old baseball recruits when the call came: A space shuttle had disintegrated over Texas, and all on board were dead. At that moment, it was no longer a bright California morning, full of the promise of a new baseball season.

At that moment, it was Jan. 28, 1986, again, and I was standing in front of the grandstands at Cape Canaveral, watching pieces of the Space Shuttle Challenger splash down into the sea. The experience was an ugly one, and never quite forgotten.

For a long time, though, there at least had been the consolation that this one “bad day,” to use NASA-speak, might have the power to prevent future ones, that the scales balancing acceptable risk with lethal gambles would be recalibrated in a lasting way.

But now, on the family room television, the same erratic vapor trails that had filled the Florida sky 17 years ago were being etched across the blue Texas sky.

And frame by frame, it began to come back.

The Challenger launch was the first -- and, if I have my way, last -- I ever covered. I had not been keen on the assignment. At the time, I was deep into research for an in-depth feature on the San Joaquin Valley raisin trade. That dried grapes held more excitement than a space mission can be seen as a measure of where the shuttle program stood in those days. Nobody at The Times, it seemed, wanted to cover the launch. Shuttle flights had come to be seen as ordinary business, an image advanced by the NASA public relations machine. Indeed, the only reason the editors insisted on sending a reporter at all to the Challenger launch was that a New England schoolteacher would be on board -- the first “ordinary American,” as the phrase went, to fly into space. Next up: the first “journalist in space.”

One need not carry a black belt in cynicism to grasp NASA’s unstated agenda by adding novelty members to its crews. Routine space flight was one thing. Ignored space flight was another. A nation -- and Congress -- bored with its space program might begin to question the vast piles of money it must consume.

In any case, there I was, on a freezing cold morning, watching the large digital clock near the pad count down toward zero. On the launch pad, a shuttle seems all but incapable of flight, lashed to a giant, unpainted fuel tank that resembles, more than anything, a rusted-out grain silo.

Most Americans have vivid memories attached to that awful morning. What I remember is the sight of a NASA official literally running around in circles, shouting, “Where’s the bird, where’s the bird?”

I remember the disorienting way sound came down, mismatched with what we were seeing. While we could see the shuttle blowing apart, the sound of the launch still was normal, a steady roar. Several seconds later, after pieces already had begun to rain down, came the thunderclap that shook the metal grandstands -- the sound of the explosion itself.

I remember the dazed, wounded expressions of NASA officials at a press briefing in the late afternoon. “Hit with a two-by-four,” my notebook describes. At the time I thought it would be impossible to figure out what happened, what with the shuttle scattered across the seafloor in thousands of pieces. I was wrong. The NASA hierarchy, in fact, had known almost immediately what had gone wrong. Even as they spoke, that first afternoon, about impounding data and ruling out no possibility and all that, they knew. There had been, it would come out later, urgent prelaunch warnings from engineers about the effect of cold on the performance of crucial rubber rocket seals. Launchpad cameras had captured an ominous black puff of smoke from one of the rockets, indicating a seal had been blown. And in the last seconds of flight, computers picked up a telltale loss of power in one rocket.

They knew.

Anger, again

On the drive to the ball fields Saturday, the car radio was filled with eyewitness reports from Texas, with experts running through the possible causes. They know, I said, thinking of the NASA inner circle. I would bet they knew almost from the moment communications with Columbia were lost over Texas what went wrong, maybe not with the precision necessary for public disclosure, but in their stomachs.

At the field, we ran 50 eager boys through the paces, hours of grounders, fly balls and turns in the batting cage. The day was drop-dead gorgeous, a bright blue sky and a warm sun. There was a low buzz among the adults about the shuttle, but the baseball went forward.

In one dugout a radio brought bulletins about body parts and suspect tiles. As I listened, one of the young prospects sidled over and stood beside me. “I’m scared,” he whispered.

“What are you scared about?”

“I’m scared I won’t make a team. I don’t want to be cut.”

I told him to keep his eye on the ball, and clicked off the radio.

All through the day, I found myself experiencing alternate waves of sadness and anger -- sadness over the human loss, and anger fed by the eerie feel of sequel. I was revisited by a strange thought about farm workers that had popped into my head hours after Challenger exploded. By nightfall the press room had begun to fill with reporters and camera crews from all over the world, Japan, France, every corner of the U.S. Seven people had died on their way to space, and now all the world wanted to know about it.

As I watched the newcomers frantically setting up equipment, demanding interviews, I began to brood about the farm worker wrecks that occur every year in the vine and orchard country of the San Joaquin Valley, where I grew up -- five grape pickers dead in a head-on here, eight pruners lost in a van rollover there. I tried to imagine what it might be like if one of those wrecks drew the same sort of coverage that the Challenger disaster was going to receive -- slow-motion images of a harvest crew jauntily bouncing into a van, tearfully rendered tributes to the fallen, moment-by-moment chronologies of what went wrong on Avenue 17.

What was the difference between going to work in a spacesuit and going to work with a hoe? Dead is dead, right?

Looking back, I suppose my brain simply was trying to cope with the shock over what I’d witnessed, contriving a way to shove aside grief, and the guilt of spectators at a circus act gone awry, and replace it with a sort of anger, rational or not.

In the months after Challenger, I covered the investigations and along the way interviewed many astronauts. They certainly had never been duped by headquarters prattle about routine spaceflight. They did not buy into the notion, expressed by a teacher who trained as McAuliffe’s backup, that “the space program doesn’t belong to just astronauts and science. It belongs to everybody.”

No, the astronaut mind-set always has been more in tune with the late Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist who took a star turn in the Challenger probe, and concluded: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Astronauts know the risks and, oddly enough, I doubt that they will be disappointed if the Columbia loss does not generate the sustained national focus that followed the Challenger explosion. That event all but stopped the nation for days. Yet by Sunday, little more than a day after Columbia blew apart, it was possible to find the NFL Pro Bowl on TV, live from Honolulu, with Al yakking it up with Dan and Swannie and the rest.

Risks and gambles

Perhaps we’ve come to understand that shuttle flight always will be dangerous. After all, two of the five shuttles have wound up in pieces, not a happy percentage. It’s a matter of weighing risks and battling false confidence. This was something one of the astronauts told me in the summer of 1988. After a two-year paralysis, the shuttle program was preparing to fly again -- this time with the world certain to be watching. His theme was that there’s a difference between acceptable risk and foolish gambles, and he illustrated it with a story.

Once he’d been launched through a rain cloud. Large raindrops, it was known, could damage the shuttle’s tiles. Small raindrops would not. After the return to Earth, he asked the engineers how they had known “itty-bitty raindrops would not turn into big raindrops.” They told him they had not known.

This was not a comforting answer.

“That was just taking an unknown risk, and not realizing you were taking a risk,” he said. “If you know what the risk is and you are willing to take it, it’s OK. But when you do things that you don’t realize are risks then you are going to have an accident.” He added one final thought. The first flight after Challenger, to be undertaken amid so much scrutiny, “is going to be a very good first flight. But it’s the 40th or 50th flight down the line that everybody ought to worry about.” His math wasn’t perfect. More than 80 missions were flown between the Challenger explosion and the loss of Columbia. Sadly, though, it appears his larger point was dead-on.