Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

The mayhem of breakup lasted only a moment before the equally startling calm of free fall began. While the cockpit and the other debris were still moving upward at 1,000 miles per hour, they were freely under the slowing influence of gravity. Like human cannonballs, the crew had experienced a momentary violence, followed immediately by the silence of gravity’s grip. They floated under their harnesses. Pencils and pens spun in the air around them. Checklists floated on their tethers.

The crew was alive but suffocating. They turned on their emergency air packs. Judy or El switched on Mike Smith’s PEAP.

Scobee and Smith were test pilots and reacted as they had been trained. Even the brief, wild ride through breakup would not have mentally incapacitated them. They had faced countless serious emergencies in their flying careers. They knew the situation was perilous, but they were in a cockpit with a control stick and there was a runway only twenty miles away. They believed they had a chance.

They snapped their attention to the instruments hoping to identify the problem, but the cockpit was electrically dead. Every computer screen was a black hole. Every caution and warning light was off. There were no warbling emergency tones. Every “talk back” indicator showed “barber pole”—its unpowered indication. The attitude indicator, the velocity, acceleration, and altitude tapes were frozen with OFF flags in view. They had nothing to work with. As they attempted to make sense of the situation, Scobee’s hand was never off the stick. He fought for vehicle control, oblivious to the fact there was no longer a vehicle to control.

“Houston, Challenger ?” He and Mike Smith made repeated calls to MCC, but those were into a lifeless radio.

With no instrument response and an apparently dead stick, Scobee and Smith mashed down on their stick “pickle buttons” to engage the backup flight system. It was the emergency procedure for an out-of-control situation. If the problem was due to a primary flight system computer failure or software error, the BFS computer would jump online and bring life back to the cockpit. Again and again their right thumbs jammed downward on the spring-loaded red buttons. Again and again they searched the instruments hoping to see life in them, hoping to have something, anything, to work with. But Challenger was now a blossoming cloud of debris. No switch was going to put her back together.

Very quickly the crew realized the futility of their actions. The upstairs crewmembers—Dick, Mike, El, and Judy—had window views of the disaster in which they were immersed. As the tumbling cockpit moved ever higher those views became more synoptic. They looked downward to see the white-orange cloud marking the place of Challenger ’s death. They saw the billowing trails of the disconnected SRBs.

The downstairs crewmembers—Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Greg Jarvis—were locked in the most horrifying of circumstances. They had no windows, no instruments. They were totally dependent upon the upstairs crewmembers to keep them informed on the progress of the flight. But no words came. At the instant of breakup the intercom went dead and the mid-deck lights went out. They were trapped in a tumbling, darkened, silent room.

As the cockpit arced across its apogee, the upstairs crew saw the sky turn space-black, Challenger ’s lost goal. The silence was nearly total, just the merest whisper of wind. Then, the two-minute fall to the sea began. The rippled blue of the Atlantic filled the windows. The noise of the wind rose to a loud rush as the cockpit quickly reached a terminal velocity of nearly 250 miles per hour. The upstairs crew watched the finer details of the sea become visible: rumpled wind-blown areas, the froth of whitecaps, and brighter splashes marking the impact of other pieces of their machine. The horizon rose higher and higher in their windows, the blue reaching toward them until…blessed oblivion.

Chapter 29

Change

On January 9, 1987, Abbey made a rare and impromptu appearance before the astronaut office. Since his prior visits had almost always included flight assignment announcements, there was a buzz on the walk to the conference room. I couldn’t believe my name would be on any press release. I had significant doubts I would ever see my name on a crew list again. But hope springs eternal in the souls of astronauts. The fact that the meeting was unscheduled, on a Friday afternoon, no less, suggested something unusual was in the offing.

As always, Abbey spoke at low volume and everybody craned forward to listen. For ten minutes he discussed some changes in the management structure of HQ, a topic none of us believed was the reason for the meeting. We were right. He concluded his HQ remarks and then, almost offhandedly, mumbled, “The crew for STS-26 will be Rick Hauck as commander, Dick Covey as pilot, and Dave Hilmers, Pinky Nelson, and Mike Lounge as MSes.”

For a long moment the room was gripped in a stillness that rivaled deep space. We were hoping Abbey would continue with more crew assignments, or at least tell us when those might happen. But there was nothing. Except for the lucky five, who wore embarrassed smiles, the rest of us slumped in crushing disappointment. Why didn’t Abbey get it? If he was the power monger that many believed him to be, couldn’t he see the power to be gained with one hundred faithful-unto-death astronauts? With a little communication, that’s exactly what he would have had. But he didn’t offer a single hint regarding the timetable for other assignments. In the enduring silence, I noticed some of the faces around me hardening into glares of something beyond anger. If I were Abbey I would hire a food taster.

The meeting broke up and I drifted back to my office. Several other TFNGs came by for a losers’ commiseration session. The USAF contingent was angry that a navy astronaut, Rick Hauck, would be commanding the return-to-flight mission. Rick would be making his second flight as a commander while his PLT, fellow TFNG and air force colonel Dick Covey, had yet to command his first mission. Others were livid that Pinky Nelson had been assigned to the flight. While Pinky was well liked, he had taken a sabbatical to the University of Washington after Challenger . The rest of us had stuck around to do the dog work and be brutalized by Young in the process. In our minds Pinky hadn’t paid the dues to have received such a prize as the first post- Challenger mission. It was also a sore point that his last mission had been the flight prior to Challenger, so he had the additional plum of having back-to-back missions. Norm Thagard was certain Abbey had picked Nelson just to show the rest of us how unfair and capricious he could be. I recalled a line from McGuire’s astronaut leadership document, “Inconsistency, ambiguity, silence, evasion…all have their place in his studied unpredictability.”

There were other aspects of this crew selection that would have angered us even further had we known about them. Years later, at our TFNG twentieth-anniversary reunion, Rick Hauck would tell me that Abbey had allowed him to select Dick Covey as his pilot. No other TFNG commander I ever spoke with had been given that responsibility. Abbey had always named the mission crews, the CDRs, the PLTs, the MSes, everybody. Hauck also revealed he had been told six months prior to the press release that he would command the return-to-flight mission but had been sworn to secrecy by Abbey. I wondered how many times during those six months other hopeful commanders had been in Rick’s company wondering aloud who would command STS-26, and Rick had pretended to wonder with them. Deep secrecy. It was Abbey’s style and it was killing astronaut morale.