Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

As I fell deeper into melancholy another thought wiggled its way to the fore. I hated that I couldn’t keep it at bay but, like smoke under a door, it crept in to choke off every other thought. What was Challenger ’s loss going to do to me? To ask such a question at this moment defined me as one sick bastard but try as I might, I could not stop it. I suspected every other TFNG was similarly stricken. Would the shuttle ever fly again? I thought of my morning run and how perfect my future had seemed, with images of polar orbit spaceflight filling my brain. Now those images blurred like a mirage.

Our flight entered the Ellington landing pattern, each pilot following Crippen’s peal-off “break” to circle for touchdown. As we were marshaled to a parking spot, I searched the guest waiting area, expecting to see someone from the press. I dreaded the thought of speaking to them. But the only person to greet us was Donna. Crying, she walked to the side of the jet and rushed into my arms.

At home my fourteen-year-old daughter, Laura, informed me that someone from the newspaper had called and when she told them I was out of town they interviewed her. I was outraged. They had taken advantage of her naïveté to ask questions about my STS-41D experiences with Judy. “Daddy, they asked me how you felt when you saw Challenger blow up.” It was a good thing I hadn’t fielded that question. I could imagine the answer that might have leaped from my mouth. I had already passed the denial phase of grieving and had entered the anger phase. I told the kids to let the answering machine take the calls. I didn’t want to speak to anybody in the press.

That evening there were church services throughout Clear Lake City. Donna, the kids, and I went to our parish church, St. Bernadette’s. It was packed. I wasn’t the only astronaut parishioner. There were a few others. Our friends and neighbors came to us and sobbed their condolences. Complete strangers did the same. The grief was beyond anything I would have ever predicted.

At the request of some of the parish members, my son had put together a slide and music show to play as people entered the church. Pachelbel’s Canon and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” accompanied slides depicting shuttle launches, spacewalkers, and other space scenes. There was a slide from STS-41D showing a grinning Judy with her cannon-cleaner weightless hair. When it appeared on screen, people were overcome, laughing and sobbing at the same moment. Watch out for hair-eating cameras. The slide resurrected from my memory the words I had spoken to her two weeks earlier. I closed my eyes. I wanted to cry, like the others around me, but I couldn’t. That gene just wasn’t in me. I was my mother.

The next day Donna and I drove to visit the widows. We first went to June Scobee’s home. The street in front of her house was a mob scene. A large crowd of the curious filled the neighbors’ driveways and lawns. The elevated microwave poles of news vans provided a beacon that drew a slow current of cars through the neighborhood streets. Power cables crisscrossed sidewalks. Technicians shouldered cameras and framed their news reporters with the Scobee home in the background. It would have been chaos but for a contingent of local and NASA police who kept everybody from June’s front door. Several NASA PR personnel were teamed with the police to recognize and allow astronauts and other NASA VIPs to enter the home. Donna and I were waved through the cordon.

The house was filled with family, friends, and several other astronauts and wives. June was the picture of exhaustion, her face puffy and tear-stained. She and Donna hugged for a long moment, each crying into the neck of the other. As they parted, I embraced June, clumsily mumbling my sympathies then fading out of the scene as another visitor came to her. I observed how much better the women were at handling the situation. They easily conversed with June. The men mimicked my awkward performance—a quick hug, a few words, and then escape to a corner where they fidgeted uncomfortably.

The rest of the day was a blur of grieving women and children as we made our rounds to the other widows. Lorna Onizuka was incapacitated by her loss. She refused to see anybody and rumors circulated that she had not given up hope that the crew would be found alive somewhere.

A few days after the tragedy, I flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial service for Judy. Most of the astronaut office made the trip. On the flight Mike Coats astounded us with news on the cause of the disaster. “It was a failure of the O-rings on the bottom joint on the right side SRB. There’s video of fire leaking from the booster.” He had been appointed to the accident board and had seen the films at KSC. Just by happenstance the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to the networks. Nobody at the LCC or MCC had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs had never been a major concern to us. So much for being certain an SSME had failed, I thought.

Mike also recounted his disgust with how the families had been handled immediately after the disaster. He had encountered them in the crew quarters three hours after Challenger ’s destruction. They were clamoring to return to Houston but NASA was holding them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage from the condos for the return flight. But Mike didn’t believe it. “The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave immediately. They were being held so Vice President Bush could fly to the cape and offer the nation’s condolences.” He sarcastically added, “The wives had to cool their heels so the VP could feel better.” I didn’t blame Bush—his intentions had been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless NASA HQ was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.

Judy’s hometown memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight frequently left only that, a memory. Judy and the others had been perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth.

Judith Arlene Resnik, dead at age thirty-six, was eulogized into a person I didn’t recognize, as heroic as Joan of Arc and flawless as the Virgin Mary. In multiple Houston ceremonies I had heard the same glowing praise bestowed on the other crewmembers. I excused the excess. It was the perfection the living always demand of their fallen heroes and heroines.

As I listened to Hebrew prayers being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong—flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our silence had been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy excuse. There were eleven children who would never again see a parent.

The news of NASA’s and Thiokol’s bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight. If NASA management had reacted to the O-ring warnings as they should have and grounded the shuttle for thirty-two months to redesign and test the SRB (the time it took to return the shuttle program to flight after Challenger ), some of the loudest complaints would have come from astronauts. We were as guilty of injecting into the system a sense of urgency to keep flying as the NASA manager who had answered the Thiokol engineers’ worries with “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger Seven.