Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

I ran for half an hour and then dropped into a cool-down walk, enjoying a moment of total contentment as I did so. I was in top physical condition. I was a veteran astronaut. I was in line for a second spaceflight, a fantastic second flight. There were probably no more than six or seven missions between me and polar orbit. I could easily visualize Discovery on the Vandenberg pad, now that I had a photo on my office wall of Enterprise on the same pad. *Several months earlier NASA had airlifted that orbiter to Vandenberg for a pad fit-check and the photos taken had captured her as Discovery would soon be seen, standing vertical against a backdrop of California hills. It was an image that set my soul soaring.

After a shower and breakfast, I rendezvoused with the rest of the crew and drove to the lab to meet the principal investigators of our payloads. By now Challenger ’s launch was only a few minutes away, so we delayed our training to watch it. We knew this launch, unlike other recent ones, would be covered on TV because of the public’s interest in schoolteacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe.

I couldn’t sit down. As a rookie, I had been fearful while viewing shuttle launches. Now, I held a veteran’s terror for what was at hand. I nervously paced behind the others. The TV talking heads focused on Christa, showing clips of her in training, then live shots of her students awaiting the blastoff. There was a carnival atmosphere among the children.

As the NASA PR voice gave the final ten seconds of the countdown, I was in prayer-overdrive, begging God for a successful launch. My motivation wasn’t all selfless: There were still a thousand things that could come between me and my Vandenberg mission, and STS-51L was one of them. Another pad abort or, God forbid, an abort into Africa or Europe would have a serious impact on the launch schedule. The ripples of delay would push 62A even farther to the right.

At T-0 the SRBs blossomed fire and Challenger was on her way. The TV only covered a moment of ascent and then cut to the trivia of the morning. Bob Crippen spun the dial to other stations hoping for more coverage but there was none. Even the novelty of a schoolteacher couldn’t buy NASA more than a minute of airtime.

We turned off the TV and gave our attention to a principal investigator of an experiment that would be in our cargo bay. As we were about to follow him to the hardware, Jerry Ross decided to give the TV another shot, “Maybe they’ll have an update on the launch.” He turned it on. What we saw immediately shocked us to silence. Challenger ’s destruction had already occurred. We were seeing a replay of the horror. We watched the vehicle disintegrate into an orange-and-white ball. The SRBs twisted erratically in the sky. Streamers of smoke arced toward the sea.

For several heartbeats there was not a sound in the room. Then the exclamations came. “God, no!” Guy Gardner bowed his head and cried visible tears. I just stared in a dazed silence. Most of the others did the same. A few of the lab personnel wondered aloud if the crew had bailed out. I answered their question. “There’s no ejection system on the space shuttle. They’re lost.”

The TV focused on Christa McAuliffe’s parents. They were in bleachers in the press area and appeared merely confused. I could read the question on their faces: Are the smoke patterns in the sky part of a normal launch? Their daughter was already dead and they didn’t know. I silently cursed the press for continuing to focus on them. It was the ultimate obscenity of that terrible morning.

I phoned Donna. She was sobbing. Even though the NASA PR announcer was only saying it was a major malfunction, she was familiar enough with the shuttle design to know it had no escape system. I didn’t have to tell her the crew was dead. I suggested she pick up the kids from school. The press was going to be everywhere and I didn’t want them shoving a camera in their faces. “Just keep them at home.” I told her to expect me that afternoon. I knew we wouldn’t be staying in Los Alamos.

I next called my mom and dad in Albuquerque. Dad, the big-hearted, sensitive Irishman, was crying. As always my mom was unbendable iron. I knew she was dying inside, but there was no way she could verbalize those feelings.

As expected, Crippen wanted to get back to Houston as quickly as possible. We drove to the Los Alamos airport and took the lab charter flight to Albuquerque. Within an hour of our arrival there, we were in our ’38s headed home. I was in Crippen’s backseat, in the lead aircraft of the three-ship formation.

As we climbed to altitude, ATC cleared us direct to Ellington Field and added, “NASA flight, please accept our condolences.” I was certain those same sympathies were being offered to NASA crews everywhere as they hurried home. The entire nation was grieving.

The rest of our flight continued in silence. At each ATC handover the new controller would offer a few words of comfort and then leave us alone. There was no chatter among our formation on our company frequency. Crippen was silent on the intercom. We were each cocooned in our cockpits, alone with our grief. I watched the contrails of the other ’38s streaming away in billowing white and prayed for the Challenger crew and their families.

My thoughts returned to the last time I had seen the crew—before they entered health quarantine—more than two weeks ago. I passed them on their way to a simulation. Each wore the thousand-watt smiles of Prime Crew. I shook their hands and wished them good luck and added a hug for Judy. With my arms around her I whispered, “Watch out for hair-eating cameras.” She laughed. It was the last I would see of her and the others. Now, their shredded bodies were somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic. Friends whose joyous faces I had watched only two weeks ago were now being discussed by the TV talking heads as “remains.” I could feel Judy’s arms on my back and her hair brushing my cheek in that last hug. Now those arms, that hair, her smile were gone. They were just…remains. Though I’d known it would happen to some of us one day, I still could not come to grips with the reality of it. They were gone. Forever.

My only comfort was in my belief that their deaths had been mercifully quick, the instantaneous death we all hope for when our time comes. In one heartbeat they had been feeling the rumble of max-q (maximum aerodynamic pressure) and watching the sky fade to black and anticipating the beauty of space and then…death. I was so certain of it. How could anybody have survived the ET explosion? The cockpit was only a few feet from it. There were more than a million pounds of propellant still remaining in the tank when it detonated. The explosion must have destroyed the cockpit and everything in it. The more I dwelled on it, the more certain I was. They died instantly. I would later learn how wrong I was.

My thoughts drifted to the cause of the disaster. The video replays on TV showed fire flickering near the base of the orbiter just before vehicle destruction. Had an SSME come apart as so many of us had feared would one day happen? I was certain the SRBs had nothing to do with the disaster. They were seen flying after the breakup. It was to be expected their flight would be unguided and erratic, but other than that they appeared fine. Again, I would be proven wrong on all counts.

I asked Crippen what he thought had caused the tragedy. “I don’t know. But whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.”

He was right. Whatever it was, the same mechanism of death had been with all of us on every mission. How close had it come to killing me on STS-41D? A second? A millisecond? Had the Challenger SSME that failed (and I was sure one of them had exploded) been one of the engines powering Discovery on my first mission? It was entirely possible. The engines were frequently interchanged among orbiters.