It was very quiet in the firing room. For a brief period, it seemed that everyone held a collective breath.
I, and probably most other people there, had seen large unmanned rockets explode during flight. We had seen the twisted metal remains that were recovered. I don’t think anyone really believed the astronauts had survived. Nevertheless, we all watched the tracking camera feeds in hopes of seeing the Challenger orbiter emerge, intact, from the ball of flames that covered several square miles of sky.
It didn’t happen. Later analysis of the footage revealed that the crew cabin was ripped from the orbiter, continued upward to sixty-five thousand feet, then began its long fall downward. It impacted the ocean minutes later.
Then, after a stunned silence and despite many wet eyes, professionalism took over.
The team began emergency procedures. The pad was returned to a safe condition. An announcement was made on the public-address system that anyone leaving the firing room had to sign out and could not take any papers or notes they had made during the launch process. All documentation was to be impounded in case it might shed light on the cause of the accident.
In a slightly shaky voice, Marvin Jones, who had recently joined NASA, after serving as the air force commander of the Eastern Test Range, called his successor and told him what we were seeing and to expect requests for air force helicopters and other assistance.
Center Director Dick Smith turned to Launch Director Gene Thomas and said, “What happened?” Smith later recalled his question as “probably the most stupid statement I’ve ever made in my life. It was obvious what happened. You just were not willing to accept it.”
Actually, it was exactly the question that everyone was asking.
I picked up the phone and called Gatha Cottee, one of our KSC television producers. “Copy all of the videotapes right away. Security will be coming to impound the originals for the investigation.” In typical Cottee fashion, he overreacted and locked all the doors to the television building so the guards couldn’t get in.
He also forgot that guards have master keys. I needn’t have worried, though. Fletcher Hildreth, our RCA Contractor Television Director, and Producer Bill Johnson had it under control. Tapes were already being duplicated and both of them were calmly orchestrating the television coverage. Hildreth deftly kept the NASA public-affairs cameras from showing a parachute that deployed. He knew it would only confuse any viewers; the only parachutes on board were for the nose cones on the booster rockets. The Challenger was the first American spacecraft to carry astronauts but have no escape system.
Meanwhile, one of the volunteer helpers ran along the front of the press site grandstand yelling, “RTLS! RTLS!” RTLS stands for “return to launch site abort.” All of us in the firing room knew that would not happen. An RTLS required both the solid motors to stay attached throughout their burn, and the main engines, fueled by the hydrogen and oxygen in the external tank, to slow the orbiter down. Instead, those propellants had created the fireball.
On top of the vehicle-assembly building, the photo escorts were told by Ed Harrison, the NASA KSC photo chief, via walkie-talkie: “We don’t know what is going to happen; move the photographers to the northwest corner. If the shuttle is able to come back, that will be the best shot.”
On top of the launch control center, where the immediate families of the astronaut crew watched in horror, Nancy Gunter helped form a line with the guards to make sure the other guests did not rush over to the families. The families were escorted off the roof by the public affairs escorts, Libby Wells and Bob Harris, and Astronaut Escort Frank Culbertson. There are always several people assigned to stay with astronaut family members during a launch to guide them to various locations and answer their questions.
This time, no one had any answers.
The families boarded their waiting bus and were whisked back to astronaut crew quarters to await new information. Several were taken to the Patrick Air Force Base hospital, as a precaution, to be treated for shock.
NASA’s general manager, Philip Culbertson, was also watching from the roof, along with his daughter, Camden, and his two grandsons. As soon as he saw the fireball, he turned to them and said, “You’ll have to find your own way home.” Luckily his secretary was there to escort them back to their car.
At the VIP site, adjacent to the press site, several public affairs officers grabbed hands to say the Lord’s Prayer—then ran to the press site to help answer the storm of incoming phone calls.
Richard Nelson, a senior design engineer, was at the VIP site that morning. “When my fellow engineers and I saw what was happening we sat down and started worrying that we had missed something. Our job was ensuring that we could detect and prevent any hazardous gases from building up in the vehicle during processing and launch. This included hydrogen that could cause an explosion or fire.”
Nelson said, “Everyone was cheering and shouting as Challenger lifted off. The cheering went on even after the vehicle started to break up. We knew the families who were still cheering didn’t realize what was happening.”
According to Nelson, as the shouting ceased and the horror of the scene started to sink in “Steve Dutchak and some of the other public affairs escorts stepped out in front of the stands. In a kindly but professional way, almost like it was rehearsed, he told them to take their time, but when they were ready, the buses would take them back to their cars or offices.
“When I came down from the stands,” Nelson says, “I had to walk in front of the bleachers where the family members were. There was a little girl standing by the white picket fence crying. Apparently she was one of Christa’s students. There was a photographer with a camera that had a huge lens just taking picture after picture of her. I walked in front of the photographer, put my hand over his lens, and said, ‘Stop that!’ He said, ‘I’m only doing my job …’ and I told him, ‘With that lens you can do it from a lot farther away’…”
Back in the firing room, I hurried across the top row to the operation support room where Chuck Hollinshead and Shirley Green were sitting. We discussed the long-established contingency plan, which called for NASA commentary to switch back to KSC. We would then report to the media and guests on what steps were being taken by the launch team and emergency personnel. I was told not to resume commentary.
This was the first decision that contradicted the contingency plan—and a bad one. The plan prescribed that we get a top NASA official to the press site within an hour to tell the media what was happening. When it actually took five hours to hold a press conference, it meant the flow of information stopped, and NASA looked like it was hiding from the world.
Engineers and scientists hate to talk to anyone, let alone the press, when they don’t know all the facts. Associate Administrator of Space Flight Jesse Moore and the other managers spent that five-hour period reviewing film and telemetry information and organizing the investigation. At the end of the five hours, they still didn’t know all the facts. But the delay was the beginning of a great loss of credibility for the agency.
Steve Nesbitt, the commentator in Houston, continued calmly for as long as he could. Twenty-one minutes after the accident, his final comments were:
“This is mission control, Houston. Repeating the information that we have at this time. We had an apparently nominal lift-off this morning at 11:38 eastern standard time. The ascent phase appeared normal through approximately the completion of the roll program and throttle down and engine throttle back to 104 percent. At that point, we had an apparent explosion. Subsequent to that, the tracking crews reported to the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle appeared to have exploded and that we had an impact in the water down range at a location approximately 28.64 degrees north, 80.28 degrees west.
“At that time, the data was lost with the vehicle. According to a poll by the flight director, Jay Greene, of the positions here in mission control, there were no anomalous indications, no indications of problems with engines or with the SRBs or with any of the other systems at that moment through the point at which we lost data. Again, this is preliminary information. It is all that we have at the moment and we will keep you advised as other information becomes available. … This is mission control, Houston.”
Back in Florida, other contingency activities were going well.
Within two minutes of the accident, the landing and recovery director and the booster recovery director notified the SRB recovery ships, Liberty Star and Freedom Star, of the approximate latitude and longitude of the impact area. The two ships had been battling the Atlantic’s waves to stay as close as possible to the normal SRB recovery area. Because of the clouds, those onboard had not seen the accident.
Now the ships turned eastward and increased their speeds to fifteen knots. As they went, they started finding and recovering pieces of floating debris.
An H-1 helicopter was notified to take off but hold short of the danger zone. Debris was estimated to continue falling for approximately fifty-five minutes.
The entire space-center phone system went out shortly afterward because of the volume of people calling in and out. What we didn’t know immediately was that the telephone system for the entire area, including parts of Orlando, had simply overloaded and crashed. Restoring normal phone service took almost five hours.
Luckily, the intercom system continued to function, along with the walkie-talkie system the press site used. The combination was enough to coordinate the essential tasks.
All across the space center and throughout the surrounding community, people were coming together to express their collective sorrow. At the press site, one well-known broadcaster walked slowly into the office of Diana Boles, who was in charge of logistics and maintenance of the press site. She had been struggling with finding workers to fix the broken heating system, and the press dome was freezing that morning. Without a word, he gave her a hug and walked back out to do his job. It would not have been noteworthy except that their interactions were often contentious. But, for that moment, they were conscious of a shared sense of loss.
Makeshift memorial set up near Launch Pad 39 B by pad workers and guards shortly after the accident. Photo courtesy of NASA.
Back in the launch control center, Chuck Hollinshead and I were trying to get Associate Administrator of Space Flight Jesse Moore to commit to a press conference within the next hour. At the same time, Phil Culbertson had asked him to chair a meeting of senior managers associated with the launch to begin the process of organizing the investigation.
To keep the importance of a press conference in Moore’s mind, we followed him down to the television control room to watch as tapes were played and replayed. Nothing definite that could have caused the accident popped out of the images immediately.
Press conferences were secondary in most of the managers’ minds, but having one soon was uppermost in mine. Luckily, my office had the best news and audiovisual chiefs in the agency. Dick Young had been a newspaper reporter for years before joining NASA and was expert at working with the reporters. Ed Harrison started his career at Langley Research Center, where he photographed everything from work in wind tunnels to the earliest astronauts during their emergency training. Because they were handling things, I had the luxury of single-mindedly pursuing Jesse Moore for a press conference.
It took hours for Moore to work through the process of appointing the primary panel of experts. The center directors of the Kennedy Space Center and Marshall Space Flight Center, Shuttle Program Manager Arnold Aldrich, KSC Spacelab Director James Harrington, and NASA Consultant to the Administrator Walt Williams were primary members. Next came the development of a long list of action items.
Five hours passed from the time of the accident to the beginning of the press conference. The press was not happy. The delay allowed more media people to arrive, and there would have been even more if the phones had not been out. Within twenty-four hours the press corps would grow by another thousand.
There wasn’t room enough for the media to crowd into the normal indoor space, so we quickly set up a table and microphones outside in front of the 350-seat grandstand. I introduced Jesse Moore, and he did the best he could with the sparse information we had at that point, telling the group:
“It is with deep, heartfelt sorrow that I address you this afternoon.
“At 11:40 this morning, the space program experienced a national tragedy with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger approximately a minute and a half after its launch from here at the Kennedy Space Center.
“I regret that I have to report, that based on very preliminary searches of the ocean where the Challenger impacted this morning, that these searches have not revealed any evidence that the crew of Challenger survived.”
During a brief question-and-answer period he announced that he was suspending shuttle operations. He added, “We will not pick up any flight activity until we understand what the circumstances were.”