To Absent Friends

[tracker7]

20 years ago this morning, my brother and I were snowed out of school. We were staying with my grandmother, as per usual. There wasn't much snow, to be honest, but because of the terrible quality of many of the county's roads, it didn't take much snow to shut down the schools.

A little before noon, we were setting up a boardgame and turned on the radio. The news had just started coming in.

Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded.

We went to the den and turned on the TV. CBS was showing the launch from every angle available. It's a sequence I'll never forget. Portside view of the shuttle on the pad. Engines fire. Shuttle clears the pad, 300 tons of machine riding a pillar of fire. View switches to a camera further away from the pad, and it's that classic shot of a shuttle launch - the tower in low-center, surrounded by steam and smoke, with the tower of smoke rising from the pad, the bright glare of the shuttle's engines and SRBs, and the shuttle itself.

Long-range shot, now, as Challenger has already started rolling and is heading downrange. Those perfect professional tones from Mission Control - "Challenger, go with throttle up."

And then, it happened.

A seal between two segments of one of the SRBs had failed, and the fuel was burning through the side. Imbalance of thrust, the SRB started to break away from the stack, and it penetrated the external tank. The stack lost aerodynamic integrity. Structures failed, tons and tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen blew out from the tank, and the Shuttle and tank disintegrated. She just broke apart.

The smoke trail, from the ground, looked like a misshapen Y. The SRBs continued to fire and roared off over the Atlantic. Where the arms and stem of the Y intersected, there was the cloud of liquid fuels converted to vapor, looking like a brightly-colored tumor.

Challenger's launch, STS-51L for those keeping score at home, was one of the first Shuttle missions that didn't get nationwide television launch coverage. The Shuttle program had been spectacularly successful, and the promise of routine spaceflight was coming true.

Six astronauts and a teacher were lost that day, along with the spacecraft. Challenger was the workhorse of the Shuttle program. The civilian-in-space program was cancelled.

32 months would pass before the next Shuttle launch. The belief in infallability was gone forever.

I believe, without condition or reservation, that space exploration and, yes, exploitation is among the greatest endeavors mankind can undertake. Even after Challenger and Columbia (the loss of which broke my heart, and hurt much worse than Challenger), I would go up tomorrow. There are riches of knowledge and science and ... everything. It's all out there. More than we can even imagine.

Comments

[kinepela.livejournal.com]

thanks for posting that. i was reminded of that event this morning (i was at school watching the launch) and was going to post about it - but i think you said it all quite nicely.

[tracker7.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I'm going to hate seeing the Shuttles retired in a few years, as they're the only American spacecraft I've ever seen launch. I have high hopes for the replacement system, especially since it's being built around the best parts of the Shuttle - the main liquid-fuel engines and those monster SRBs.

That was a defining day, to be sure. Our parents had JFK's assassination, we had Challenger. Somehow it makes sense, given Kennedy's commitment to space exploration.

[cc-wolff.livejournal.com]

We were out on snow that day too. That day, maybe, marked our first day of adulthood. The day that I read the after action report from the recovery of the crew cabin was the first time that I every got physically nauseated from reading non-fiction.

It was discussed recently with former astronauts and the team that lead the recovery of the crew cabin from the ocean floor that the crew cabin retained structural integrity until it impacted the surface of the water 2:45 after launch. It isn't something that NASA likes to talk about, because not only did the cabin retain integrity, but it was clear to the recovery teams that at least four of the crew, possibly all of them, survived the initial explosion and only perished upon impact with the surface of the ocean. That was the end of my innocence.

All said, though, I am go for the Moon, and Mars beyond. Develop a culture of safety, but also one willing to take the risks, to reach out, to see what's out there.

[tracker7.livejournal.com]

Omni (Heavens, how I miss that magazine) published a short story called "Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds" a couple of years after Challenger. In the story, a NASA engineer who had advocated Challenger's launch was to fly to a hearing with the other engineers who had felt the same. The guilt had destroyed him. Before the flight, he figured out at what speed and altitude the little corporate jet would be at where an accident would cause a 2:37 fall from the sky. He rigged a bomb on one wingroot and triggered it at the right moment.

Enough of that now, though.

Mars, and do it Zubrin's way.