“The most important course you’re ever gonna take,” tempered our simulation exhilaration after breakfast the following Monday. “Mishaps: Their History and How to Avoid Them.” The five-day, forty-hour course would take us through space tragedy in detail. Large, brilliant photos of the crews that suffered mishaps—Apollo, Challenger, Columbia—depicting their civilian and aeronautical lives greeted us each each morning and bade farewell each afternoon, beneath a quote in raised pewter lettering on the wall outside the classroom.
“The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” – Virgil “Gus” Grissom
NASA has had only three major mishaps. I say “only” because given the dangers of space travel, that’s incredible. Our instructor, Commander Shara Myles, was the first female astronaut to survive a near-mishap that came within one wrong move of killing her and her crew.
“You never get over it,” she told us. “They talk about survivors’ guilt. You can still have it, even when everyone survived.”
We watched grainy 2D video and vivid 3D projections about each calamity, starting Monday after lunch with Apollo One, the first manned mission in the Apollo series that would ultimately take us to the Moon. A routine “launch rehearsal test” of an Apollo capsule killed Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee almost seventy years ago. A spark—a simple spark—ignited oxygen in their cabin. No one imagined something like that could happen.
“That’s one reason mishaps are so important,” Myles said. “They show us what we need to imagine.” NASA wasn’t prepared, she told us, for safety problems with an exit hatch and flammable clothing.
“We’ve got a bad fire,” was one interpretation of Apollo’s last garbled transmission.
I broke out in chills and took Ali’s hand—she sat next to me—when Christa McAuliffe—beautiful, smiling, alive—appeared before us in a newly-rendered 3D projection Tuesday. There she was, sitting for an interview in a bright orange suit, wearing a pearl necklace you could reach out and touch.
“I would like to humanize the space age by giving a perspective from a non-astronaut, because I think the students will look at that and say, this is an ordinary person,” she said, with a slight Bostonian brogue. “If they can make that connection, then they’re gonna get excited about history, they’re gonna get excited about the future, they’re gonna get excited about space.”
“Christa had six lessons planned,” our instructor said. “Magnetism, Newton’s Laws, things she could demonstrate up there.”
McAuliffe was a teacher, and the first American civilian to venture into space. We watched her and the rest of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew—Dick Scobee, Ron McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, and Greg Jarvis—get into a van, and into the shuttle, for a second try at launch.
“T minus six minutes, thirty seconds and counting...four, three, two, one,” mission control counted down. “And we have liftoff! Liftoff of the twenty fifth space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.” That sounded like a reporter.
“Challenger now heading...good roll program confirmed...engines throttling down...normal throttles...three engines running normally...three good fuel cells...velocity: twenty two hundred and fifty feet per second—”
Scary fast. But everything was normal. Everything looked fine. We heard a calming beep tone, like a steady heartbeat, pinging in the background. Mission Control came on.
“Challenger go with throttle up.”
And then a blast. I jerked. Ali looked up. Smoke and debris littered the brilliant late-morning sky, and a white cloud that looked like a snail extending its antennae gradually ascended, the antennae separating, jellyfish-like smoke tentacles trickling to Earth, as the unimaginable gripped the sky. Another view showed us a crowd with children in viewing stands, every eye skyward.
“Picture you were just seeing is Christa McAuliffe’s parents, watching in horror,” a narrator said. “These are the students from her school. Just a huge fireball and a huge cloud of smoke. They may not realize yet what has happened.”
“Obviously a major malfunction,” said a mission control voice. “The vehicle has exploded. Awaiting word from any recovery forces.”
But there was nothing to recover. We watched the families of the astronauts in the viewing stands, crying, hugging each other, flailing their hands, bowing their heads.
“That was an O-ring,” Myles said. “The major malfunction that killed seven people just over a minute after launch was nothing more than a simple O-ring,” a rubber seal that failed in the cold.
Engineers from a contractor named Morton Thiokol had tried to warn NASA management about the potential for just such a failure. They had imagined the unimaginable, but couldn’t get management to do the same. We watched interviews with Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly, who worried about too-cold temperatures the night before Challenger launched. Cold stiffens rubber. Stiff rubber allows heat and gases to meet in places they shouldn’t and in this case, explode. But nobody with the power to stop the launch would listen.
“They were in such a ‘go’ mode,” another Thiokol engineer, Allan McDonald, recalled.
“These engineers lived with a form of survivor’s guilt,” Commander Myles said. “Maybe the worst kind: surviving the tragedy you tried to prevent.”
Catastrophes come in threes, they say, and we learned NASA was no exception on Wednesday and part of Thursday.
“Columbia Houston, UHF, Comm Check. Columbia Houston, UHF, Comm Check. Columbia Houston, UHF, Comm Check. Columbia Houston, UHF, Comm Check.”
Mission control’s last words, repeated over and over without response, to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia: Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, and Laurel Clark from the United States; Ilan Ramon from Israel. I wrote their names fully, slowly, taking notes for a test I hoped I’d never have to take.
The video from Mission Control started the same way as Challenger, with a crew member documenting the day’s normalcy. “Control’s been stable, I see good trims. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
About twenty minutes before touchdown, the first hint of a problem. “I’ve just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle: the hydraulic return temperatures.”
I squirmed in my seat. I knew what was coming, but not what form it would take, what unimaginable would swipe the sky this time. The calm before the storm set in after a final, “Roger, that,” from the shuttle crew.
“Columbia Houston, Comm Check.”
The flight director at Mission Control, a young guy, looked pensive. His body language was so telling, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He put his hand on his forehead and rubbed the distress with the tips of his fingers. He kept his hand in front of his face, and we couldn’t see his expression. I saw his wedding band, his thumb against his cheek, and through a shadow around his eye, suggestions he was on the verge of tears. When he finally took his hand away, his eyes looked moist, his expression lost, his gaze searching. Every moment of the loss of this spacecraft and its crew played out in the way he looked and moved.
“No phone calls,” he said into the microphone around his head. “Lock the doors.”
At first, his index finger did not leave his lips. Then he rubbed his chin anxiously, touched his face, looked at screens and fellow controllers. He folded his arms, paced the floor, commanded calmly yet emotionally. His name, we learned in a subsequent video, was Leroy Cain, and even years after the Columbia disaster, he still looked devastated.
“The unimaginable here was almost as simple as a frozen O-ring,” Myles said. “A piece of insulating foam had hit a wing during takeoff two weeks before. The gouge absorbed more heat than the rest of the wing as the shuttle re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, and it broke apart.”
Turns out NASA knew about problems with the foam insulation, too. It was applied to keep ice from forming and breaking off during launch, but had itself become the thing that broke off, often in well-documented particulate cascades that hit the shuttle’s wings, thermal tiles, and other components. None of the particles had been large enough to do serious damage until Columbia. Engineers had actually seen the deadly piece of the foam break off and hit the wing, eighty one seconds after liftoff, but not until a video replay the day after. The flying foam didn’t look to have done anything, and they didn’t think much of it—especially given how many times foam disintegration had been observed, without incident, before.
“Foam” was probably misleading, the word itself creating a false sense of no big deal. It wasn’t like styrofoam. It was hard, with fewer air pores. And when it broke off, it hit the wing with about one ton of force. We watched a film demonstrating the impact, on a scorching hot Texas day, when engineers and astronauts gathered to see a simple piece of foam fired at a reconstructed shuttle wing with the same force. It blew a big hole in the wing instantly.
After the crash, which looked strangely like E.T.’s glowing fingertips caressing the sky, twenty thousand people—ten people for every square mile of debris field—scoured the ground for Columbia and her human remains. They identified the foam culprit after re-assembling about forty percent of the downed craft, but it should have come as no surprise. As with the Challenger, engineers had begged and pleaded for a better examination—using satellite cameras, telescopes, even a spacewalk—of the shuttle exterior before it returned from space. They’d seen the foam hit the wing. But management turned their pleas away. A “routine email” informed the crew, too. “There’s absolutely no concern,” it said.
“Our astronauts, our mission control, our managers: We’re like a family,” Myles said. “And part of the family, we all felt, had failed the rest.”
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board “found that Mission Management decision- making operated outside the rules, even as it held its engineers to a stifling protocol. Management was not able to recognize that in unprecedented conditions, when lives are on the line, flexibility and democratic process should take priority over bureaucratic response.”
“Amen,” I heard our ASCANS say, as these official findings scrolled before us with voice-over narration.
“Amen,” I agreed.
It was “bureaucratic response,” after all, that had brought me here, kept Crimsy up there, and in a real way now dawning, was endangering me and the DSG crew by creating tensions and encouraging if not forcing unnecessary travel. Crimsy would be home without the risk of any lives, had she been permitted the entry she and everyone working this mission had fought so hard to secure. She had been found, collected, and returned by robots and other machines. Not one human life was jeopardized.
“The great irony here is that without the Columbia disaster, none of you training for Mars would be here. Jennifer,” and Commander Myles looked at me, “wouldn’t be here, either. NASA refocused, and decided to get serious about a program that had been drifting for years. If you’re gonna risk lives, risk them for a purpose, right?”
Columbia and Challenger crew family and friends—survivors—spent the latter half of Thursday talking to us, answering our questions, reliving.
Friday brought resolution—and exhaustion. We’d been running, lifting weights, doing emergency drills, surviving simulations, studying, taking notes and tests. But nothing had produced greater emotional fatigue than this past week. I’d even forgotten to try home again. I still hadn’t heard from anyone and I was still worried, but I just couldn’t muster the emotional reserve.
Today we learned about all the fixes, from streamlined designs—like putting crew quarters on top of, instead of alongside—the launch vehicle, where they can’t be hit by flying debris; and collaborations, under NASA contractors like SpaceTek, TeloSky and CloudSpark, that had gone farther than ever imagining the unimaginable.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Shara Myles said. “Too many chefs in the kitchen, too many spices in the soup. We haven’t had a mishap in decades because we cut out a lot of the complications.” (NASA wasn’t part of the Intercity Rocket explosion, a one hundred percent corporate disaster with its own strange history of mistakes, conflicts, and even skulduggery).
“As the crew looks back at our beautiful planet, and then outward to the unknown in space, we feel the importance, today more than any time, of space exploration to all those who are living on Earth.” These were our parting thoughts, delivered by Shuttle Discovery Commander Eileen Collins decades ago, in orbit. “Our flight is the next flight of many in the human exploration of the Universe. Finally, we reflect on the last several missions, the great ship Columbia, and her inspiring crew: Rick, Willie, Mike, K. C., Dave, Laurel, and Ilan. We miss them. God Bless them. We are continuing their mission.”
“If we die, we want people to accept it,” Ali told me that Friday afternoon, quoting the rest of Gus Grissom’s admonition. “We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program.”
I lay on my bed in the hotel room staring at the ceiling, wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. Would mom, David, Mike Brando, Nathaniel Hawthorn, the rest of my crew be watching me fall back to Earth in a blaze of sorrow?
“You as exhausted as I am?” I asked.
“If you mean has bawling my eyes out after class and crying myself to sleep fatigued me—” She stretched out on the bed next to me. “Hell yes it has.”
“You flew fighter jets,” I said.
She joined me in staring at the ceiling. “I’ve never lost anyone,” she said. “I can’t imagine it.”
“I—”
“Fighter jets fly themselves, by the way. I was just along for the ride.”
“I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded grave, even to me.
“Don’t know what?”
I had never felt survivor’s guilt about my father or brother, maybe because I spent all that emotional energy somewhere else. I didn’t know what I felt now, not exactly anyway. Fear was part of it. Anguish, worry, grief. I started feeling it during the survivor seminar, when one of Christa McAuliffe’s students, now a retired physician, told us that had it not been for her, he never would have given medicine or any other difficult journey a second thought. His voice broke. He had trouble going on.
“I was in a really bad car accident,” I told Ali. “No one thought I’d make it.”
She turned to me.
“I can’t put anybody through that,” I said. “I don’t agree with Gus Grissom. It’s not worth it.”
“Jennifer,” she said. I felt her turn and she put her arm across my chest.
“I can’t die again,” I said.
“You didn’t die.”
“I did.”
“What are you talking about?” Ali asked.
I didn’t know how to articulate it, exactly. But I was dead as far as my family was concerned and I knew damn well as far as the doctors were concerned. My father did die. And I hated him for everything about it, from the way it happened to the leaving, the abandoning, the cold isolation of waking up every morning in my healing-but-hurting body knowing he would never return. I had never felt guilty about coming through, but I had been terribly aggrieved. I turned to Ali. She looked me up and down with her wide, beautiful eyes, breathing against my cheek. I could see a strand of hair rise and fall with her breath. The sun was setting beyond the window and shadows were creeping into the room.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” she whispered. And she kissed me, not on the lips but on my cheek, tenderly, just above the curve of my chin. My body ignited. It was the most thrilling feeling, that single kiss, which she slowly withdrew.
“Long time, no effing hear from,” I said to Nathaniel Hawthorn. I felt bad about the bravado, but didn’t want to let on just how wonderful I felt hearing his voice.
“I’m flattered,” he said. “You actually picked up.”
“I’m dying here,” I said. “I wanna know everything.”
No one ever arrested Dr. Marcum for violating the “Invention Secrecy Act.” Malachi Shonstein kept asking when I was “landing on the Moon.” Parada had been sick and Dr. Levitt took some family leave time to care take.
“Anything serious?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Levitt hasn’t said much and isn’t around much.”
Dr. Cooper was back and forth from Harvard. And my mom and Dr. Hale had some kind of fight.
“Where did you hear this?” I asked.
“Cooper,” Nathaniel said.
“Is it like, did they break up?”
“He said something about an unstoppable force and an immovable object. That’s all I know.”
Nothing new there. Still, I didn’t know whether to sigh in relief or gasp in panic.
“Mike and Lexi Brando are doing great,” he said. “I think he actually has her more than his ex.”
“Did I ever thank you for all your help with that?” I asked.
He didn’t answer immediately. “I think so,” he said.
“If you were here—”
“Your turn,” he said. “I wanna know everything.”
I think I covered everything, but since the mishaps class was so fresh on my mind, probably that more than anything else. I told him about landing in the infirmary. I told him about Ali, but not everything. I worried about wording her narrative in a way that might have...I don’t know. I’m probably being presumptuous.
“I almost forgot the best news of all,” he said. “We’re no longer incommunicado here.”
“With DSG?”
“Back online.”
“I can’t wait to get up there,” I said.
“I can,” he said.