Strong, decisive leaders are essential. But Bob Crippen and Jay Honeycutt also brought invaluable organizational and team-building skills to the group headed by Admiral Truly.
Crippen had been vice chairman of the NASA investigation from the beginning. He provided continuity among the leaders and the various committees. Within the first few days there were about six hundred people directly involved. It required spending most of his time in meetings with the various groups.
Chuck Hollinshead had been named public affairs representative for the NASA portion of the investigation. Widely respected across the agency, he was able to keep everyone in public affairs on the same page as far as what was known, thereby keeping the media from leaping to unwarranted conclusions.
When he was in town, Crippen met with Hollinshead or me every morning to review what was happening with the news media. He worked with each of the dozen other committees on an almost-daily basis to provide coordination and guidance. Crippen could be counted on to make quick decisions or find the right answer in a hurry. It was essential to making progress.
Honeycutt, who had worked with both Crippen and Truly in the past, helped bring some needed order in Washington.
“When the Presidential Commission was appointed by President Reagan,” Honeycutt recalls, “everyone was given a set of NASA phone books. Each Commission member had a number of other people working for [him or her]. They all needed information and would look through the phone books, find branch chiefs and section heads that sounded like they were the right person, and call them with questions.”
The directors of the various NASA centers grew concerned about the number of requests and whether the right people were being tasked with answering them. They asked Admiral Truly for help.
Truly designated Honeycutt to be NASA’s liaison with the Commission, directing him to sit down with Executive Director Dr. Alton Keel and figure out how to give Commission members what they wanted.
“After the meeting, ” Honeycutt says, “I called George Abbey and asked to borrow Astronaut Bryan O’Connor. Next we set up an office at NASA headquarters. Then if one of the commissioners wanted something, they wrote it down and gave it to Keel. He gave it to Bryan, who gave it a number, helped determine who should have the action, and tracked it. Every day we were able to report how many open actions we had, who was doing what, and when the Commission could expect their answer.
“Bryan did a great job,” says Honeycutt. “It completely settled the water between NASA and the Commission. I don’t recall one complaint.”
Honeycutt spent a lot of time going back and forth between Washington and KSC. He followed the salvage activities and watched over special projects. Although the Challenger mission had been unclassified, there were some classified electronic boxes that the Department of Defense was anxious to retrieve. Honeycutt had to report on the progress finding them every day until they were pulled from the water.
Although the Commission hearings, which started February 6, were of great import to the press and brought a lot of information to the table, the undersea search probably attracted more interest. One of the reasons was that very little information was emerging.
The navy and coast guard public affairs people did their best to brief the media on what was happening. The problem was that it was a very slow process.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was the lack of information about the crew and crew cabin. Finding the cabin and casting light on the last moments of national heroes would be big news. NASA wanted to protect the privacy and feelings of the families, but there simply wasn’t anything to report yet.
Convinced that NASA had declared a news blackout, the media did their best to work around it.
One of the young, electronically savvy reporters, William Harwood of United Press International (UPI), led the charge.
Harwood rigged up a high-frequency radio to a tape recorder to capture the chatter between the search ships and between the ships and shore beginning at five a.m. every day and continuing through the entire work period. That way he could go back and listen to everything that happened whenever he came to work.
Other media organizations soon made use of the UPI antenna. They were convinced that NASA, the navy, and the coast guard knew they were listening and therefore had some “code words,” which would come into play when they found the crew and crew cabin. Some guessed the code would be “T.J. O’Malley,” after the tough, no-nonsense launch director who had launched John Glenn. Others thought “rudder” and “speedbrake” were the code words.
All of the NASA people who should have known if there was a code still swear that none existed. That group includes Ed O’Connor, who would be the one to drive the crew remains to Patrick Air Force Base when they were recovered.
Meanwhile, CBS—with better funding—joined in the game. They had access to night vision cameras that allowed them to discern what was on any search ship that came in at night. They stationed themselves at Cape Canaveral’s Jetty Park to watch the ships come and go.
“Actually, I’m not sure it was worth it,” UPI’s Harwood says today. What did pay off was his dogged determination. He worked almost every day, and every day for more than eight hours. As a result, he was the only reporter there on the Sunday I was typing up a news release on how the crew cabin had finally been located.
On March 8, two divers, Terry Bailey and Mike McAllister, were almost out of breathing air and ready to go back to their ship for the day. The area they were in was smooth white sand, at a depth of ninety feet. Visibility was poor. Through the murky water they saw what looked like either another diver or an astronaut in a space suit. They knew the crew did not wear spacesuits during launch and realized it was the spacesuit that was on board Challenger in case an emergency spacewalk was needed.
They slowly moved forward and encountered the crumpled frame of the Challenger crew cabin—and within its twisted metal posts, the crew.
The best they could do with their remaining air supply was mark the find with a buoy and return to the ship.
During the next two days, the scene was documented, the bodies recovered, and the cabin lifted to the surface.
As I hovered over my word processor, Harwood said, “You look busy. What’s happening?”
“We found the crew cabin,” I told him.
“How much time do I have before you tell everyone else?”
“At least five minutes.” Actually, he had more than that. Since no other reporters were there, I had to go through a long callout list in order to notify them.
Bill had his story on the wire to every country in the world long before most reporters knew it had happened.
The greatest value of the sea recovery program was to add what is called “ground truth” in other fields.
The video, the photographs, and the telemetry signals from Challenger provided electronic evidence of what had happened during the accident. The actual pieces, burned and twisted though they might be, showed beyond a shadow of doubt the truth of what had happened.
The recovered parts confirmed the failure scenario suggested by the photographs and ruled out a number of other possibilities.