It was very quiet in the press site dome while President Reagan was speaking. Even the phone-call volume dropped. However, it picked up again as soon as he finished.
The press site received 6,500 calls between five p.m. on the day of the accident and midnight on the first of February. Another six hundred calls couldn’t get through because the lines were jammed. That’s an average of more than two calls a minute, around the clock. It might have been more if the phone system hadn’t failed.
Calls to the press site were supposed to be from journalists only, but we encouraged the operators to route calls to us if they didn’t know how to handle them.
Many of the callers just wanted to express their sympathy about the astronauts and urge us to get back to flying safely as soon as possible. There were psychics who were sure they knew the cause of the disaster. Sabotage, which was ruled out very early in the investigation, was a favorite assertion.
Like many people who worked at the press site, Lisa Fowler, who was in charge of press accreditation for KSC, had some long days coming. She came to work at five a.m. launch morning and stayed until midnight, then was back at four a.m. the next morning. Following the launch, she badged 554 new reporters, more than had been badged in the weeks leading up to the launch.
The pressure on our public affairs personnel was extreme, but it was even greater on some of the individual reporters. Within forty-eight hours, there was a thundering herd of a couple thousand newspeople at the Kennedy Space Center, financed to the tune of millions of dollars by their organizations. Hundreds more descended on the Johnson Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and other NASA centers. Their editors wanted good value for their money. They wanted the answers now, and they wanted them exclusively.
Worse, many of the reporters had never been to KSC or written about the space program before. But having reporters who needed a lot of help was not the biggest problem faced by press site personnel.
In normal times, we could call on engineers from every discipline to talk to reporters or explain how something worked. All of the experts were now assigned to various parts of the investigation.
NASA headquarters public affairs decided to make all substantive questions not asked at press briefings go through the Freedom of Information process. This process, usually reserved for legal or policy questions, slowed down our ability to supply answers.
Another decision that stirred up our working relationship with the media involved photography. During launches, photographers from the wire services, newspapers, and magazines are allowed to place cameras much closer to the pads than people are allowed at launch time. These cameras are automatically triggered by the sound or light as the rocket engines ignite.
Investigation managers decided that one or more of the media cameras that had recorded the launch might reveal the cause of the accident and, therefore, NASA needed to process the film and examine the images before the press could have them. It was not intended to prevent the news organizations from using the pictures, only to ensure they were preserved for the investigation.
The New York Times sued NASA.
Ed Harrison, our photography chief, worked tirelessly for several days to catalog, follow the processing, and return the pictures to the right media organizations.
Taken together, these decisions created a contentious relationship between the media and NASA, replacing the professional and harmonious atmosphere that prevailed before the accident.