Christa McAuliffe arrived in Houston to begin her astronaut training on September 8, 1985, just a few days after dropping her daughter, Caroline, off for her first day at kindergarten in Concord. Before leaving, she had bought her husband, Steve, a microwave and stocked up on cornflakes, to help him start his planned twelve months as a single parent. In Clear Lake, McAuliffe and her backup, Barbara Morgan, checked into a motel, and the next morning drove to the Johnson Space Center to collect their NASA flight crew passes. The months since her selection had done nothing to dim the celebrity of the Teacher in Space, and as she signed the paperwork for her security badges McAuliffe was mobbed by press and TV cameras. Later that day in Building 4, in the large office allocated to the astronauts of mission 51-L, the two teachers met the other members of the Challenger crew for the first time. They lined up awkwardly together in front of a row of desks while a NASA photographer took their picture. Dick Scobee posed holding a small red apple—for the teacher—with McAuliffe. Judy Resnik leaned over between clicks of the camera shutter: “That’s the apple with the worm in it,” she said, and smiled.
Like many of the veteran astronauts who still publicly opposed it as a hazardous publicity stunt, Resnik had little time for the Space Flight Participant Program. Not only did amateur astronauts pose a potential danger to the professionals in orbit—getting in the way, panicking if things went wrong—but they were also taking hard-won opportunities away from Mission Specialists like her: every seat on the shuttle assigned to a teacher or a politician was one snatched from a scientist or engineer who had spent years training, and waiting, for their chance to fly in space. McAuliffe’s own astronaut training was scheduled to take just a few months, including 114 hours of instruction packed into the time remaining before Challenger’s January launch: half of that would be spent reading NASA manuals, which provided instructions on how to enter and exit the orbiter, and how to conduct herself in zero gravity and use the space toilet. Much of the rest would be spent in the shuttle mock-ups in Building 5, where McAuliffe began to choreograph the two twenty-minute lessons she was scheduled to teach live from orbit: one, titled “The Ultimate Field Trip,” would conclude with a five-minute Q&A with her class back in Concord. She would also conduct a series of six science demonstrations, to be recorded on video and distributed by NASA to an audience of 18.5 million US schoolchildren.
But over the weeks McAuliffe spent in Houston, Resnik’s feelings about the teacher began to change. Watching the way her new crewmate navigated the exotic demands of the shuttle training program, as well as handling the burden of media attention and the expectations of being an articulate spokesperson for millions of American teachers—all while isolated from her friends and family—the astronaut’s sympathy for McAuliffe grew. And when the social studies teacher discovered that—for all her intelligence—there were some scientific concepts underlying the lessons she planned to teach from space that remained elusive, Resnik stepped in to help. Meeting McAuliffe for coffee, and between training sessions, the engineer explained celestial mechanics, the finer points of magnetism, and the combustion process of the shuttle’s main engines. “It’s not as hard as they make it sound,” Resnik told her.
Greg Jarvis had spent much of the summer back at work in the Hughes Space and Communications plant in Los Angeles, waiting for a new mission assignment; when they passed in the hallway, his colleague John Konrad would ask, “Have you heard anything?” But no word came. At last, in September, Jarvis learned that another Hughes satellite would be part of the cargo for the last shuttle mission of the year, scheduled to launch on December 20 aboard a refitted Columbia—and he had been selected to escort the company’s hardware into orbit. Jarvis began commuting between California and Texas to train several days a week with a new crew, led by Commander Hoot Gibson, the charismatic Navy aviator who had piloted Ron McNair’s first mission into space; the other five men assigned to the flight teased him that by now he was already the best-trained payload specialist at NASA. At the end of the month, the Hughes engineer joined Gibson and the rest of the crew to pose in sky-blue flight suits for their official portrait. But just a few days later, George Abbey summoned the crew to his office in Building 1. The Director of Flight Operations told Jarvis that he would—once again—be bumped from his seat aboard the shuttle by a politician.
This time, it was Representative Bill Nelson, the boyish Florida Democrat whose district included Cape Canaveral—and who had recently maneuvered his way into the chairmanship of a House subcommittee on space science. Nelson had long made it plain to Administrator James Beggs that he wanted a ticket to orbit, and his position gave him a crucial grip on NASA funding. Beggs, seated precariously at the head of a chronically cash-strapped agency facing congressional suspicion, public apathy, and growing hostility from inside the White House, could hardly say no.
At the beginning of October, NASA Associate Administrator for Spaceflight Jesse Moore personally called Nelson to tell him he had been assigned to fly the five-day mission in December with Hoot Gibson’s crew, as a “Congressional observer.” Anxious to avoid being seen as merely a glad-handing joyrider, the politician signed up for a series of make-work orbital tasks, including photographing drought-wracked Ethiopia—made the subject of global attention by the summer’s Live Aid concerts—and conducting a crystal-growth experiment as part of a University of Alabama medical school cancer study. Behind his back, the astronauts mocked these endeavors as Nelson’s personal bid to “end the famine in Ethiopia” and “find the cure for cancer.”
With Jarvis’s seat on Columbia now taken by Representative Nelson, George Abbey shuffled his shuttle trip back once more, to the first launch scheduled in the new year. On November 11, Greg Jarvis was officially assigned to fly aboard Challenger in January 1986, as the seventh and final member of the crew of mission STS-51-L.
As the launch date drew closer, training now intensified—to the tempo of a schedule devised to ensure that every astronaut had drilled exhaustively in their mission responsibilities by the time the countdown clocks reached zero. Dick Scobee and Mike Smith flew hundreds of mock ascents and landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft, the Gulfstream executive jet that NASA had modified to mimic the unforgiving aerodynamics of the orbiter, and in the simulators of Building 5; there, Ellison Onizuka and Judy Resnik sat behind them in the positions they would take for launch—checklists and thick binders of flight information open on their knees, ready to call out prompts and procedures at key moments on the ride to orbit.
Onizuka and Ron McNair both trained to take space walks in an emergency, maneuvering the cumbersome Extravehicular Activity suits in the shuttle mock-up on the bottom of the WETF pool. Each of the Mission Specialists prepared, too, for the experiments they would conduct in orbit: McNair and Resnik rehearsed using the shuttle’s robotic arm to launch a small satellite designed to gather data from Halley’s Comet, which that winter would be making its closest visit to Earth since 1910. Onizuka practiced the use of a camera designed to take photographs of the comet as it approached the sun, while Greg Jarvis would be conducting his own experiments in fluid mechanics, intended to help develop more stable fuel tanks for satellites carried aboard the shuttle.
But by far the most important cargo aboard Challenger would be the second of the agency’s sophisticated Tracking and Data Relay Satellites—the largest of its kind ever built. Together with similar hardware launched aboard an earlier shuttle mission, the communications satellite was intended to provide the astronauts in orbit with almost continuous radio contact with Mission Control, removing their reliance on NASA’s far-flung network of ground stations—and the intermittent blackouts previous crews experienced as they circled the globe.
At the same time, McNair was collaborating in an ambitious new plan to play his saxophone in space—this time with the help of French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre. As part of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the state of Texas—and the twenty-five years since the Johnson Space Center had come to Houston—Jarre had been invited to stage an outdoor concert in the city in early 1986, and aimed to give NASA a central role in the performance. Jarre’s idea was to write a piece of music that he would play during the show with an instrumental part contributed live, over an audio downlink from space, by an astronaut orbiting the Earth in the shuttle. After learning that McNair was an able jazz musician, Jarre composed a piece for him to perform on saxophone during the impending Challenger mission. Inspired by the idea that, in the silence of Earth orbit, a spacewalking astronaut would hear nothing but their own pulse in their ears, Jarre arranged the song around a rhythm provided by a thirty-second tape of McNair’s own heartbeat—recorded during physiological tests at the Space Center and turned into a continuous loop in the musician’s Paris studio.
After the two men met in Houston, Jarre sent the score for the piece he titled “Rendez-Vous VI” to Ron to learn before the launch. Each week, the two men rehearsed the song together—either in person in McNair’s garage in Clear Lake or, more frequently, over the phone. In its almost improvisational form and its wandering melody, Jarre had sought to capture the spirit of McNair’s own style on the saxophone, as much as the sensation of being adrift in space—and did so with such success that, after he played it for the first time, the astronaut felt sure he had heard it before. Over the months that followed, McNair made tapes that he sent to Paris so Jarre could fine-tune the piece to better suit the astronaut’s style. They also made contingency plans in case the audacious live linkup proved impossible: in that case, they would record McNair’s performance and simply play the tape during Jarre’s Houston show. Even as the pressure of training mounted over the closing months of 1985, McNair remained committed to realizing the plan to perform the composition in orbit.
“You have no idea how important it is to me to do this,” he said.
And yet, whatever the scientific or artistic potential of Space Shuttle mission 51-L, the public increasingly regarded it simply as “the Teacher Flight.” Since her debut on The Tonight Show, Christa McAuliffe had become a nationally recognized celebrity: featured by all three national TV networks, and interviewed by magazines from Time and Newsweek to Ladies’ Home Journal; a photographer from the New York Times Magazine began shadowing her during training, and People started work on a Teacher in Space cover story to coincide with launch day. Deluged with interview requests, NASA assigned McAuliffe a dedicated publicist, but cut press access to two hours a week, and turned away inquiries from as far afield as Japan and India. Fan mail gathered in drifts behind the door of her home in Concord and arrived by the sackful in Houston; although NASA eventually prepared a form response letter and paid for an auto-sign pen, McAuliffe insisted on signing replies in person. In October, she was invited to dinner at the White House, attending a state banquet for the Prime Minister of Singapore. Other guests included Sylvester Stallone, Raquel Welch, and Michael J. Fox—but it was McAuliffe who was seated next to the President.
Back in New Hampshire, the chairman of the local Democratic Party began to groom McAuliffe for office, and while, in public, she was careful to disavow any interest in party politics, privately she admitted that one day she’d like to be able to influence education policy from the top. In Hollywood, the producers of the late-night talk shows had already begun competing over who would be first to have the Teacher in Space appear to describe her experience as soon as she returned from orbit.
Each morning that autumn, McAuliffe and Barbara Morgan left the temporary homes they had found at the Peachtree Apartments for the short drive to the Space Center and the office they shared, in a building adjacent to the astronauts’ in Building 4. Practice for the planned lessons and experiments in orbit moved into zero-g rehearsals aboard the Vomit Comet, and Dick Scobee took McAuliffe aloft in a T-38, to accustom her to the pitch, yaw, and g-forces she would experience during the shuttle’s ascent and descent. Hurtling through the sky over the Gulf of Mexico in the back seat behind Scobee on one trip, she was surprised when he suddenly told her she had control of the aircraft.
“What do I do?” she asked.
“Take the stick.”
“Then what?”
“Anything you want.”
Mrs. McAuliffe fearlessly swung the plane into a barrel roll.
By mid-November, all seven members of the Challenger crew had begun training together, conducting escape drills from an orbiter mock-up to practice for an emergency landing, and running through the procedures for the journey to orbit and reentry in the simulator. When McAuliffe joined him on the flight deck, Scobee told the teacher simply to make sure she didn’t touch anything. He was only half joking; the commander had repeatedly warned the two teachers of the real risks of flying aboard the shuttle, explaining how complex the technology was and how many things could go wrong; but, he said, the parts of the system most likely to let them down were people. In their free time, June Scobee often invited McAuliffe and Morgan over for dinner at their house on Brookpoint Drive, and the entire crew met for meals at Frenchie’s restaurant, where their pictures hung on the wall alongside those of other astronauts, and the proprietor called Scobee “il comandante,” and Resnik “mi bella mora.”
That same month, McAuliffe’s family came to visit her in Clear Lake, and during a tour of the Space Center, she took Steve, Scott, and Caroline to visit the mission commander in his office in Building 4. At first, Caroline was nervous about meeting him, and outside the door clung to her father’s leg, but soon discovered there was nothing to fear. Now forty-six years old, Scobee could still turn on a steely military bearing when he needed to, but had mellowed during his years in Houston. Earlier that year, his daughter Kathie had given birth to a son, Justin, making him a grandfather for the first time—an occasion marked by Scobee’s colleagues in the Astronaut Office, who gave him a new name patch for his flight suit that read GRANDPA. Scobee had already decided that the Challenger mission would be his last in space; on his return, he hoped to take a desk job, in charge of the recently completed facility dedicated to military shuttle launches at Vandenberg in California.
The walls of the commander’s cluttered office were hung with photographs, comic signs, and momentos of a long career in aviation. Among them was a framed copy of “High Flight,” the poem written by Royal Canadian Air Force pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr. a few months before his death in a midair collision over England in 1941. First made famous during World War II, Magee’s sonnet would become a favorite of US military pilots and, later, of astronauts: Michael Collins had carried a copy on his first journey into space, aboard Gemini X, fourteen lines of verse typed onto a small file card by his wife, Pat:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
On his return to Earth, Collins had marveled at the transcendent impressions of flight Magee captured from the cockpit of a Spitfire. “What could he have said after one orbit?” he wrote; he wept over the young pilot’s death.
When it came time to choose her own small selection of personal items to pack aboard Challenger, McAuliffe included the watch her grandmother had given her; Scott’s favorite stuffed animal—a plush frog named Fleegle; a cross and chain for Caroline; Steve’s class ring from the Virginia Military Institute; a selection of pins and medallions for friends and family; and her own copy of “High Flight.”
Behind the green doors of his office on the seventh floor of NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, Administrator James Beggs knew he was in trouble. The first hint that something was amiss had come at the beginning of September, when a pair of FBI agents had shown up at 600 Independence Avenue with a letter for him. They handed over the document, signed by a federal attorney in California, which explained that Beggs was the subject of a grand jury investigation into a defense contract he had overseen while still at General Dynamics, four years earlier. The case seemed bizarre. It was overseen by the same US Attorney whose office had infamously mishandled the case against maverick auto executive John DeLorean, who—despite being caught on videotape selling cocaine to the FBI—had eventually walked free.
Flabbergasted, Beggs immediately called the legal counsel at General Dynamics, who told him that the suit was one of several government anticorruption cases that had been rumbling on for years; it didn’t seem that important. Even so, the attorney advised caution: “I would recommend you get a lawyer.”
But by that time, President Reagan’s clique of far-right apparatchiks had concluded that Beggs—a lifelong Republican, but an old-fashioned conservative, not a damn-the-torpedos anticommunist ideologue—was not the kind of man they wanted at the head of the nation’s space agency. Hoping to militarize NASA and cannibalize the agency’s budget for the Star Wars program, they were plotting to impose one of their own on Beggs, in the vacant position of his immediate deputy. Beggs believed that their choice, William R. Graham—a humorless, gimlet-eyed technocrat with a background in defense consulting and nuclear weapons development who had never supervised an operation that approached NASA in size or complexity—was hopelessly underqualified for the job; colleagues warned him that Graham was a “kook.” Beggs agreed to interview him only to keep the White House quiet while they found a better alternative. But, before he knew it, the President’s signature was on Graham’s formal nomination.
Too late, Beggs realized that he had been outmaneuvered.
Graham arrived to take up his post as the second-in-command of NASA in the final week of November 1985. In the meantime, Beggs received written notification that he had become a central target of the grand jury investigation. When his lawyer flew out to California to meet the government prosecutor, he was offered a plea deal if his client pleaded guilty and turned on his codefendants. “Tell him to go to hell,” Beggs retorted. As soon as he returned from the Thanksgiving holiday, on December 2, James Beggs and a trio of General Dynamics executives were indicted on felony fraud charges, which alleged that they had conspired to bilk the US Army out of millions of dollars of payments in an antiaircraft system contract. The White House clearly expected Beggs to resign, but eventually agreed to let him to take a leave of absence while he organized a defense. Exactly one week after starting his new job as his deputy, William Graham stepped into Beggs’s place as Acting Administrator of NASA.
Beggs now had no doubt that this was the culmination of a deliberately orchestrated scheme to remove him from office and replace him with an extreme Reaganite who could hand the entire agency to the Pentagon. He warned Graham that the job might be tougher than he imagined: it was not an easy institution to run, and in the coming year he would have to get more than a dozen shuttle missions off the ground; he encouraged him to call if he needed advice. And publicly, Beggs offered his successor his support. But privately, he appealed to his friends on Capitol Hill to stop Graham’s position becoming permanent: “You can’t let him be Administrator. He is a disaster. He could do terrible damage to the program,” he said. For his part, Graham had little intention of sharing his newfound power with Beggs. “I’m in full charge,” he told a reporter on the day of his appointment, “and I intend to run this agency as though I am.”
And yet, although Graham moved into the Administrator’s office, Beggs did not leave the building, but took a desk down the hall—while senior members of the management down at Cape Canaveral and beyond continued to make clandestine reports to him about what his successor was doing. The open hostility between the two men only added to simmering strife at the top of NASA. More disruption would soon follow—including the departure of the agency’s experienced Head of Public Affairs, and of the Director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Morale at the agency plummeted to a new low. In the meantime, Graham’s first launch as Administrator was still scheduled to take place later that month: Commander Hoot Gibson’s Columbia mission, carrying Congressman Bill Nelson on his quest to cure cancer and bring hope to the starving of Africa.
By the beginning of December, training for the Challenger crew was approaching a crescendo, with the most intensive period of drills and simulations scheduled for the final month before launch. On December 12, they assembled with their ground support team in Houston to meet the press for two final days of interviews. The media junket began with a formal press conference, in which Dick Scobee introduced each member of the crew and their responsibilities on the flight, followed by a second day in which they faced reporters one by one.
By now Christa McAuliffe was a seasoned veteran with the press, still filled with enthusiasm and folksy humor, but changed by her experience of celebrity. When asked about the journal she was to have been keeping since her selection, she admitted that she had tussled with NASA over her privacy: she told a reporter from USA Today that she had never agreed to make the entire diary public. Instead, she would release only some portions of it after the mission: “the golly, gee-whiz stuff,” her publicist said. What she didn’t mention was that no such journal yet existed. She had recorded her thoughts only on scraps of paper and in letters to friends, and planned to use a Dictaphone to record her impressions while she was in space.
There was more controversy when it was Ron McNair’s turn before the press, and he revealed that NASA had refused him permission to take his saxophone into space: his collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre was off; he refused to explain exactly why. “Well, let’s just say there’s some objection,” he said. “Someone in the chain of command objects to it this time.”
“Too frivolous for a space mission?” asked the science correspondent from the Dallas Morning News.
“No, it’s not frivolous at all. As a matter of fact, it’s everything but frivolous. It’s something meaningful.”
McNair expressed his support for the idea of flying civilian passengers aboard the shuttle, and one reporter asked about how he would calm any launch day nerves the Teacher in Space might have. “You never hear astronauts taking about being afraid,” another added.
“Well, I guess you don’t hear about it because—” McNair began, and then stopped himself. “Well, it’s not a frightening thing. It’s more like fun, a joyride. It’s not frightening.”
Ellison Onizuka told the reporters that he hoped for some technical glitch with the orbiter while they were in space so that he would have the opportunity to don a pressure suit and perform a space walk to fix it. He wanted to have the same experience he had enjoyed on his first flight, only better: “I saw things I never dreamed I’d see. I saw some of the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets you can imagine. I’ll remember those pictures forever,” he said. “God, I will remember them.” Greg Jarvis was so enthusiastic about the fluid mechanics experiment he was going to conduct in orbit that he overran the allotted interview time, and never managed to complete his explanation.
Judy Resnik—who by now had confided to friends that talking to the media made her feel “like a potted plant”—took a seat looking pale and brittle. She rolled her eyes in exasperation at one reporter’s question, and stared at the floor between sips of Diet Coke. After almost eight years in Houston, Resnik knew she would soon face important decisions about the future: although she had often said that she would stay with NASA as long as it would have her, she would have to choose whether to keep flying after her second mission was complete, move into management, or leave the agency altogether. But her personal life had also become complicated: she was dating fellow astronaut Frank Culbertson, who was recently divorced, but had three young children, and seemed more serious about the relationship than Resnik. At Christmas she would accompany Frank and his daughters to a performance of The Nutcracker at the Houston Ballet, but the day proved hard work. Accompanying the couple on a double date, Resnik’s friend Sylvia wondered whether Judy was ready to be a stepmother. The astronaut’s ambivalence would be clarified at a party on New Year’s Eve, when she confessed to June Scobee that she was in love with someone else—someone rumored around the Space Center to be another astronaut; a hero of the shuttle program, and a married man.
Sitting in the junket, and asked once more about the experience of being a woman astronaut, Resnik gave her traditional answer: “I’m just a person doing my job.” She couldn’t wait to get away.
Dick Scobee and Mike Smith arrived together, and joked good-naturedly about their expectations for the flight. By the time Challenger left the ground, Smith would have waited five years for his first mission, but had been promised another before the year was out. Asked about who had vetoed McNair’s musical performance from space, Commander Scobee cheerfully admitted it had been his call: “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I decided Ron could bring his sax if Judy could bring her piano.”
Ten days later, Challenger—mated to the giant orange external fuel tank and its towering solid rocket boosters, and mounted on the Mobile Launcher Platform—rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy. It took eight hours for the massive caterpillar-tracked crawler-transporter to move the orbiter the four and a quarter miles to Pad 39B, where it was positioned at the launch tower to await its moment of final departure.