By the time he stepped up to address the banquet audience in Washington, DC—offering a quotation from ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus by way of advice to the roomful of aspirant Teachers in Space—James Beggs was in more desperate need of support for NASA than ever.
Publicly, President Reagan remained an enthusiastic backer of the space program, and had recently given his blessing to Beggs’s plans for building a space station in Earth orbit. But Reagan’s second-term White House was now packed with officials who actively opposed manned spaceflight, and a few who detested Beggs himself. Although a shrewd political operator, since assuming control of the agency the NASA chief had alienated key West Wing insiders—those he considered “right-wing nuts”—with perceived slights that included inviting conservative bête noire Jane Fonda to the Cape to watch Sally Ride become the country’s first woman in space, and going behind their backs to win Reagan’s backing for the space station.
These men—including the President’s Science Advisor, who derided the idea of a permanent orbital base as “a motel in the sky for astronauts”—were reactionary ideologues with little interest in NASA’s peaceful objectives of exploration for all mankind. Instead, they wanted to annex space as a new theater of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, to be occupied by the nuclear-powered death rays and antimissile beam weapons of the Strategic Defense Initiative—the “Star Wars” program. Meanwhile, many members of Congress continued to regard much of NASA’s work as dangerous, wasteful, and expensive.
And the shuttle program itself had reached a crossroads: its future, and therefore the future of all US manned spaceflight, had now become dependent on proving that the orbiter really was the cost-effective space truck NASA had promised it would become. That meant delivering commercial satellites into orbit, and achieving the audacious launch schedule it had predicted back in 1972, flying as many as forty-eight missions a year.
But when NASA officials in Washington, DC, looked over those early projections in the spring of 1985, they could only close their eyes and sigh in disbelief: the true launch rate was a fraction of that. And the poor reliability and repeated delays of the shuttle had both impatient commercial customers and other government agencies looking elsewhere.
The upstart European Space Agency had already begun launching satellites at bargain prices aboard their unmanned, single-use Ariane rockets from a remote site in the jungles of French Guiana; both the Air Force and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had made arrangements to go back to the old way of doing things, launching their satellites on the same expendable military rockets the shuttle had been supposed to replace. In the meantime, the voodoo accounting that had underwritten the shuttle project from the beginning had finally been exposed for what it was: the true costs of the program were orders of magnitude higher than the Panglossian forecasts of Beggs’s predecessors. On some launches, the price of a payload flown aboard the orbiter was not the $270 a pound NASA had once promised, but as much as $5,200: almost twenty times more. “Nowhere was the fabric of the Emperor’s New Clothes thinner than on these missions,” Reader’s Digest space columnist Malcolm McConnell would observe.
The only way to bring down costs was to ramp up the pace of launches. Now Beggs had the ground crews at Cape Canaveral working around the clock in an attempt to rotate Columbia, Challenger, and Discovery more frequently into space, and prepare a fourth orbiter, Atlantis, for its maiden launch in the fall of 1985. He announced his intention to fly missions at least once—sometimes twice—each month in the coming year. But the reality was that the most complex machine in the world could not be flown on round trips into orbit like a jumbo jet, especially if the entire operation was being run on a shoestring. NASA estimated that, collectively, the crews at the Cape had to put in the equivalent of three years of work on the ground for every minute each orbiter spent in space.
Instead of the returning spacecraft being subjected to a few routine checks, cleaned up, and cleared for another flight, as the designers had once imagined, now every part of the orbiter had to be examined carefully before each mission, and often disassembled into its component parts. This intricate screening revealed unforeseen problems: the brakes and steering of the landing gear weren’t holding up to repeated use; the tires were at risk of explosion; the hand-built components of the main engines had proved even less robust than expected; and the tiles were an enduring worry. When Discovery returned from a mission in April that year, the astronauts discovered that part of the heat shield on the spacecraft’s left wing had come loose on liftoff, and during reentry hot gas had melted through a control flap; the resulting hole in the aluminum surface was a foot wide. Meanwhile, cost cutting meant that the program was chronically short of spare parts, so the engineers at the Kennedy Space Center were often forced to cannibalize components from one orbiter that had just returned from space to install on another waiting to leave on the next mission.
Inside the hangars of the Orbiter Processing Facility, work went on day and night, as three successive shifts of engineers and technicians labored around the clock to keep the shuttle fleet on schedule. As the flight rate increased, staff once used to the systematic focus of readying a single, unique, spacecraft for orbit were now assigned duties on two or three at once. In the interests of implementing airline-style efficiency, Beggs had placed control of the complex flow of tasks required to prepare the orbiters for launch in the hands of a single contractor, California-based aerospace giant Lockheed. Under the new regime, the number of quality control inspectors and safety checks in the process fell, while overtime hours increased.
Among the fourteen thousand contractors and NASA employees at the Kennedy Space Center, many senior managers and engineers were soon working twelve-hour days, seven days a week—often for months at a time, without a day off. Numbed by overwork, driven by the relentless drumbeat of the launch schedule, the staff did their best to keep up with the laborious procedures and paper trail the agency required for every minor modification and repair performed on the orbiter’s hundreds of systems and subsystems. But mistakes were inevitable.
In the meantime, the three shuttles kept launching—and soon the long-promised goal of flying two missions a month no longer seemed quite so impossible; the fruits of the effort on the ground were realized in April 1985 when Discovery and Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral within seventeen days of each other. But in the all-important sphere of public relations, the work was counterproductive. Although it was still far behind schedule, in just four years NASA had all-too-effectively fulfilled its promise of making space travel seem quotidian; and just as had happened with the moon landings, the grand spectacle of shuttle launches now seemed to be taking place so frequently that they were rarely carried live by the major networks.
In the same week the competing teachers gathered in Washington, DC, the agency successfully returned the one-hundredth American astronaut from space, aboard Discovery: a mission chiefly notable for carrying a member of the Saudi royal family into orbit. And with each successive launch, there were fewer and fewer journalists assigned to the Cape; many of those who remained were on a “death watch”—ensuring that they would be there to provide on-the-spot coverage in the event of a catastrophe.
Christa McAuliffe had prepared with characteristic care for her interview with the judges in the L’Enfant Plaza, researching their backgrounds and rehearsing her answers to the questions she imagined they would ask. Although the interview itself was only fifteen minutes long, the panel also reviewed the application forms every candidate had so laboriously completed earlier in the year, and a conversation on video they had each filmed in advance. When the judges met to decide on the ten finalists who would be sent to Houston for physical and psychological evaluation, their deliberations went on for hours—but the one candidate they agreed on almost immediately was McAuliffe; they were all impressed with her spirit, her eloquence, and her ideas about communicating the experience of spaceflight. Of the six women and four men—aged between thirty-three and forty-five—they chose, McAuliffe did not have the most impressive résumé, or the most elaborate idea of what she would do if she reached space. Among the nine others was a woman who had climbed the Andes, crossed the Atlantic in a thirty-one-foot sailboat, and was planning an expedition to Antarctica; a former Air Force fighter pilot from Greensboro, Vermont; another candidate who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford; and a charismatic local activist who had written prize-winning plays, gone to jail twice as part of a campaign to improve conditions for local teachers, and recently published an essay in Newsweek defending the Space Flight Participant Program against its critics. Between them, the projects they had suggested carrying with them into orbit included the study of space sickness and experiments surveying the gravitational field of the moon. After all her deliberations, McAuliffe had simply proposed that she would keep a journal of her experiences, like the pioneer women of the Old West.
Yet NASA, already overstocked with seasoned adventurers, multidisciplinary geniuses and scientists, was looking for something else. What the agency required from the first teachernaut it chose to ride the shuttle was a charismatic cheerleader for manned spaceflight, an ordinary person with a gift for communication who could carry the broad promise of the High Frontier into living rooms and classrooms across the United States. And when she and the other candidates arrived in Houston early in July 1985, McAuliffe’s performance stood out.
The week of medical and physiological tests, and public appearances before the press, helped dispel any romantic notions the candidates may still have harbored about what lay ahead—there were lessons on decompression sickness and spatial disorientation, blood work, X-rays, and musculoskeletal analysis; a trip on the Vomit Comet and fifteen long minutes spent zipped into the Personal Rescue Enclosure. The press, with a newfound enthusiasm for the space program energized by the novelty of the search for a teachernaut and its high-stakes talent contest dynamics, turned out in force. After the ten candidates dined in the Johnson Space Center cafeteria with Bob Crippen and Judy Resnik, autograph hunters swarmed after the teachers, yet the two astronauts walked away almost unnoticed.
But McAuliffe seemed at ease with the attention. She went through one newspaper interview after another with “a nervous giggle and the gee-whiz bounce of a camp counsellor,” handling questions on everything from the safety of spaceflight to teachers’ salaries with an engaging openness. In one training session, the ten teachers were sealed in a hypobaric chamber to experience the symptoms of high-altitude oxygen starvation. One member of the group became so belligerent under the influence of hypoxia that the trainers had to overpower him, forcing him back into his breathing apparatus; McAuliffe sat through it all with patient serenity. When the same psychologist who had examined the TFNG astronaut candidates years earlier subjected each of the would-be teachernauts to a two-hour interview and an hour-long written test, he rated McAuliffe the most well-adjusted of them all. “I know this doesn’t sound very scientific,” he said, “but I think she’s neat.”
On the last of their seven days in Houston, the finalists were escorted to Building 30, to witness the latest launch of the spaceship that would soon take one of them into orbit. Gathered alongside Bob Crippen in a row of theater seats at the back of the Flight Control Room, the ten teachers listened as a voice from the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral described the final countdown for Challenger’s eighth mission. McAuliffe leaned forward in anticipation, resting her face in her hands, as the shuttle’s three main engines lit—but then, just three seconds before the solid rocket boosters reached ignition, abruptly shut down again. As the spigots of the pad fire suppression system spewed water across the hot engine bells and steam billowed into the air, the teachers sat transfixed. Crippen began to explain what was happening inside the orbiter, and the NASA official running the Teacher in Space program once more brought up the risks of spaceflight; would any of them like to withdraw?
They would not.
The name of “the first private citizen passenger in the history of spaceflight” was due to be revealed by James Beggs and Vice President George Bush in an event attended by all ten teachers at the White House at 1:00 p.m. on July 19, 1985. By that time, the story was such hot national news that reporters tried everything they could—phoning the candidates in their hotel rooms in the small hours of the morning, prowling the corridors of NASA headquarters, appealing to contacts in the Senate—to find out the name of the winner before it was announced.
The teachers themselves hid from the press in an unoccupied office at NASA, where the chairwoman of the selection committee finally told Christa McAuliffe: “You’re the one.” Drawn together by the relentless pressure of the previous two weeks, McAuliffe’s nine colleagues gathered in a crescent around her and, one by one, held her in an embrace. Kept incommunicado, the ten teachers were then driven to the White House in a pair of gray government station wagons.
Only when Beggs leaned into the microphone in the Roosevelt Room, facing the clattering shutters and flashes of a phalanx of photographers, did McAuliffe begin to grasp what was about to happen. Her previous life as a small-town schoolteacher was over; she would soon be more famous than Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon. When the Vice President announced her name—and that of her backup, thirty-three-year-old Idaho elementary school teacher Barbara Morgan—she was overwhelmed.
“It’s not often that a teacher is lost for words. I know my students wouldn’t think so,” she said. “I’ve made nine wonderful friends over the last two weeks. When that shuttle goes, there might be one body—” At this, her voice broke; her eyes brimmed with tears. She stopped and steadied herself, pressing a finger to her lips.
“But there’s going to be ten souls that I’m taking with me. Thank you.”
Back in Concord, inside the shingled Victorian on Pine Ridge Drive, McAuliffe’s mother-in-law answered the first of hundreds of telephone calls from across the country; outside, reporters waited for the opportunity to talk to the world’s most famous teacher, while two helicopters from TV stations in Boston buzzed the house from the air. Christa’s five-year-old daughter, Caroline, ran around the house in a bathing suit, greeting visitors with a bag of popcorn. She told them she was looking forward to going to Cape Canaveral to watch her mother’s launch; she pointed through the kitchen window into the sky beyond.
“They go wa-ay up in space,” she said.
Her brother Scott, eight, already wanted the whole thing to be over.
“Nana,” he asked his grandmother again and again, “when is the phone going to stop ringing?”
Two weeks after the ten teachers had witnessed the hair-raising last-minute launchpad abort, on July 29, 1985, Challenger blasted off from the Cape bearing a crew of seven and a package of some of the most sophisticated experiments ever carried into space. Although some of the scientists aboard had spent seven years preparing for the mission, it had attracted more attention for what NASA called the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation. In the first orbital battle in the so-called Cola Wars between Coke and Pepsi, the astronauts had instructions to try out competing can designs the two corporations had devised to make it possible to drink the first carbonated soda in space.
The Coca-Cola Company, reeling from the disastrous launch of its reformulated New Coke earlier in the year, had initially persuaded NASA to take only its drink on the mission, until Pepsi intervened by directly lobbying the White House to add its to the flight manifest. As the launch approached, senior officials told the crew to take photographs of the respective containers they tested—and to make sure that both brand logos were visible.
For the first three and a half minutes after launch, Challenger’s ascent went exactly as planned: the engines lit, the shuttle rolled away from the tower, accelerating downrange, out over the Atlantic, high into the blue sky over the Cape. But down on the “booster” console in Mission Control, twenty-nine-year-old Jenny Howard was watching closely as the columns of gray figures on the three screens flickered, rose, and fell. And, three minutes and thirty-one seconds into the flight, the fluctuating readout from one temperature sensor in the central main engine was replaced by the word FAIL; a second followed two minutes later: the first signs of a problem that would soon threaten the lives of everyone aboard the spacecraft.
Howard had been in Houston for five years, a graduate of the aeronautical and astronautical engineering course at Purdue University, and one of only a handful of women on the consoles in Building 30. She had been fascinated by the space program since she was a teenager in Indianapolis, collecting newspaper clippings and mail-order NASA newsletters about every launch, which she stuffed into a suitcase in her bedroom. Above all, she wanted to be an astronaut; by the time she arrived at Purdue to study rocket propulsion in 1973, Howard still had no idea that girls weren’t even expected to become engineers. She was astonished when, during one parental visiting day, a professor took her mother and father aside to tell them that he knew Jenny had only enrolled there to find a husband—and that by doing so she was depriving a serious male student of a valuable place.
When she began her internship in the wind tunnel department at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, at first the men there refused to speak to her: “We had a girl once, and she didn’t work out,” one explained. But when she arrived in Houston in 1980, she was welcomed into the close-knit team at Mission Control, training among the veteran flight controllers and rocket engineers who had put men on the moon. Assigned to the booster console, Howard became responsible for all of the Space Shuttle’s propulsion during ascent: the three big main engines, the solid rocket boosters, and the numerous thrusters and maneuvering jets known collectively as the Main Propulsion System.
The role of the Booster Systems Engineer was one of the most stressful in the Flight Control Room. It took just ten minutes for the shuttle to travel from the launchpad into orbit—but command of every ounce of power that the spacecraft relied on to get there ran through Howard’s console; for that brief time the lives of the astronauts rested in her hands. And Booster decisions had to be made in seconds; there would be no time for discussion: she had to understand and prepare for every eventuality long before the mission clock began to run.
In years of simulations and months of on-the-job training, in trips to the manufacturing plants of Rocketdyne and Thiokol in California and Utah, and meetings at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, she learned everything she could about the shuttle’s main engines and solid rockets: gathering data about their idiosyncrasies, their software, design issues, and manufacturing problems. Among the anomalies that bothered Howard most were persistent problems with the temperature sensors in the high-pressure fuel turbopumps of the main engines and repeated reports of failures in the joints of the solid rocket boosters. But she and her colleagues talked often about the dangers of the Space Shuttle Main Engines, and all shared the conviction that if a catastrophe ever occurred, the engines would be the culprit. Computer resources in Houston were scarce and strangled by bureaucracy, so Howard spent more than $2,000 of her own money on one of the first Apple computers and ran technical analyses at home, writing reports in the evenings and on weekends, and tracing performance trends among the key engine components that might lead to a failure.
By the end of July 1985, when Challenger took flight with its cargo of hard science and experimental soda, Jenny Howard was a veteran of fourteen shuttle launches; she felt the quirks of the main engines with the intuition of an old friend. Before the boosters lit, she was always nervous. Yet as soon as Challenger cleared the tower, the rocket engineer was overtaken by a calm born of years of experience: her mind fell into the patterns of her training, programmed as reliably as any computer processor by years of simulations, the stages of ascent called out in a familiar cadence: roll program; go at throttle up; SRB separation… And even the failure of the two temperature sensors caused her little alarm. Howard had seen it happen half a dozen times before; the damned things were just unreliable: a redesign was in the works. The exchanges over the Mission Control communications loop were crisp, but relaxed.
“Booster—Flight,” the Flight Director said. “How’re the engines looking?”
“Lookin’ fine,” Howard said.
But at five minutes and forty-five seconds into the flight, with the shuttle traveling at three thousand miles per hour, she heard the commander on the loop. In a detached, emotionless voice he said, “We show a center engine failure.”
“We copy. Stand by.”
There was a brief pause, and a crackle of static. Howard suspected there had been nothing wrong with the engine itself—but the shuttle’s onboard computers had shut it down because faulty sensors had failed. Still ascending, and at an altitude of seventy miles, flying on two engines: she knew it was just possible for the shuttle to make it into space.
“Challenger—Houston,” said the CapCom. “Abort ATO. Abort ATO.”
On the flight deck of the shuttle, the commander reached for the abort switch, twisted it to the setting for ABORT TO ORBIT, and pressed the button to engage the emergency flight program.
But just two minutes later, Howard saw the same sensors, this time in the right engine, exceeding their temperature limits. To prevent a fire or explosion, the shuttle’s avionics computers were now programmed to shut this engine down, too. Flying on one main engine alone, Challenger could never make it into orbit, and would be at risk of tumbling out of control, or falling back under its own weight to crash into the ocean.
Inside the shuttle cockpit, flight engineer Story Musgrave opened his checklists, preparing to try for an emergency landing on the other side of the Atlantic, at the designated military airstrip in Zaragoza, Spain. His fingers snapped rapidly through the pages, rehearsing the procedures he would have to recite to the pilot if a second engine went out.
As he worked, he sensed the eyes of the Mission Specialist seated nearby, fifty-eight-year-old Karl Henize, boring into him. Henize was an astronomer, an astronaut-scientist who had personally discovered two thousand stars; he hadn’t trained for this, and had little idea what was going on. But it looked bad. Through the shuddering noise filling the cabin, he finally spoke:
“Where are we going, Story?”
Musgrave didn’t look up.
“Spain, Karl.”
But down in Mission Control, Jenny Howard believed this was just another sensor malfunction: the rest of the data on her screens looked good. She didn’t want to lose one more of her perfectly good engines, and she didn’t want Challenger’s crew to attempt a return to Earth that could end in the ocean—and almost certain death.
Howard could recommend that the shuttle commander override the computers—“inhibit limits,” in NASA jargon—and keep the engine running for long enough to reach orbit. But if she was wrong and the turbopump really was overheating, it would soon catch fire and explode—destroying the orbiter and killing everyone aboard.
She had only seconds to make a decision. But when she spoke, her voice betrayed no urgency; she might have been discussing weekend plans over an afternoon coffee.
“Flight—Booster,” she said into her headset mic. “We lost another sensor. I’m tempted to inhibit limits.”
The Flight Director barely hesitated; it was already too late for the shuttle to return to Earth. “Inhibit limits,” he said.
In the shuttle cockpit, the commander flicked the switch to override the onboard computers, allowing the two remaining engines to burn on for nearly a minute longer than planned—and, at last, Challenger limped safely into orbit. Down in Houston, it was only then that Howard began to think about what had happened, and asked her colleagues in the Booster section whether she had made the right call. The rocket engineer would eventually receive an award from the National Space Club for her quick thinking, and her hometown newspaper ran a front-page interview with her in which Howard was characteristically self-effacing: “I earned my pay, I guess,” she said.
But few beyond the perimeter of the Johnson Space Center understood how close the shuttle had come to calamity—still less how it had been saved by the split-second decision-making of one person.
Two days later, 1,300 miles away in Burbank, California, Christa McAuliffe was sitting onstage with Johnny Carson, her hands folded neatly in her lap. After the first few minutes of genial banter—discussing her students, the idea of the Space Flight Participant Program, and the elimination process that led to her selection—the host turned to more serious matters. Carson, a keen amateur astronomer, had begun at The Tonight Show in the same year that John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, watched the liftoff of Apollo 11 from the bleachers at Cape Canaveral, and interviewed the crew of Apollo 13 from behind the same desk at which he sat now; he understood the risks of space flight only too well.
“When is this scheduled for?” he asked. “Do they have a target date for you to, as they say, blast off?”
“The target date is January 22,” McAuliffe said. “But with the missions being bumped up a little bit with the problems that they’ve had, I would assume that it’s probably the beginning of February now.”
“Are you in any way… frightened of something like that?… Because just the other day it was kind of frightening—I mean, one of the engines went out.”
“Yes,” McAuliffe said carefully, and began to formulate just the kind of oblique answer with which astronauts had dismissed such inquiries since the earliest days of manned spaceflight. “I really haven’t thought of it in those terms, because I see the shuttle program as a very safe program. But I think the disappointment—”
Carson cut her off with a smirk and a knowing glance at the camera.
“Who was it once said—Deke Slayton, I think.… I may be giving credit to the wrong astronaut. But they said, How do you feel when you’re up there in that capsule? And he said, ‘It’s a strange feeling to realize that every part on this capsule was made by the lowest bidder.’ ”
It was an old line, but a good one.
Christa laughed, and the studio audience laughed, too.