Live From Cape Canaveral : Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today

by Jay Barbree

  Unaware they were in mortal danger the astronauts waxed enthusiastic, shouting with excitement as Challenger hammered its way higher and higher.

  “Go, you mother!” Mike Smith shouted as the Shuttle charged ahead, heading faster into space.

  “LVLH,” Judy Resnik announced, reminding the two pilots to check Challenger’s ADI (attitude determination indicator) on the cockpit panel for the ship’s local vertical and local horizontal attitude.

  “Ohhhkaaaaay,” Dick Scobee agreed, grinning.

  Sound and fury washed through our studio windows at the press site. Lights, cameras, and anchor platforms shook as walls rattled and floors rumbled. Beyond the window, red became orange, leaving behind a dazzling trail of golden fire.

  Something told me to grab my telephone and move outside.

  No matter how many of these shattering launches you have seen, no matter how many times you have felt the body-shaking impact, the shock waves rippling your clothes and skin, you never feel at ease. I phoned editor Jim Wilson at the New York radio network desk. Space Shuttle launches had become so safe and ordinary that even with the first citizen passenger on board, the only broadcast news service covering it live were our friends at CNN. This made me uneasy. Something told me all was not well.

  Veteran space reporter Mary Bubb of the Reuters News Agency sat in the press site’s grandstands with tightened fists. She tilted her head slowly to keep the climbing Shuttle with its attached booster rockets in clear view. Unthinking, she groped for the hand of the reporter seated next to her.

  Mary was an original. A pioneer female reporter, she had been ill for months, but she was dedicated, undaunted by her ailing body. She had been covering space launches from the time the first rockets tried desperately to lift from their pads, and she would never be absent for any launch, especially a Shuttle.

  Today, something felt different. It was not the chill of the morning’s freeze that swept her body.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, her voice barely heard over the battering vibrations and crackling roar. “I’m afraid for them.”

  High above Challenger’s launch pad, the wind howled, blowing horizontally with hurricane speed of eighty-four miles per hour—some of the fiercest ever recorded for a Shuttle ascent.

  The big spaceship accelerated with determined power into the area of Max Q, where its building speed created shock waves from the resisting air through which it had to fly. Inside the Shuttle the astronauts felt the side loads, felt Challenger meeting the invisible forces.

  Space Shuttles had flown through high winds before. “Yeah,” Dick Scobee announced in recognition of the sudden shaking, “it’s a little hard to see out my window.”

  It was a moment with far greater impact than anyone could have known, for this mission carried with it a terrible flaw.

  When the side loads of the winds smacked into the right booster, they struck an already weakened rocket. The winds were physical impacts. They jarred loose the aluminum oxide particles that at launch had sealed the lower joint where the O-rings had failed. Now the aluminum oxides broke up and spat away from the booster.

  There was nothing left to hold back the raging fire and enormous pressure. A tongue of dazzling flame burst through the joint opening, creating a fearsome blowtorch of immense power precisely fifty-eight seconds into the flight.

  No one in the crew cabin knew what was happening.

  “Okay, we’re throttling down,” Scobee called out as he began the reducing the power of the main engines. This would safely diminish the howling thrust behind them as Challenger knifed its way through the combination of powerful shear winds and maximum aerodynamic pressure.

  Then, as suddenly as they had entered, they were through Max Q and commander Dick Scobee went back to full power, throttling the engines to full thrust.

  “Feel the mother go!” yelled Mike Smith.

  “Woooooohooooo!” another crew member shouted, swept up in the acceleration.

  “Thirty-five thousand going through one point five,” Smith reported.

  Challenger was now seven miles high and booming past one-and-a-half times the speed of sound.

  “Reading four-eight-six on mine,” Scobee acknowledged.

  Smith agreed with the routine airspeed check. “Yep, that’s what I’ve got, too.”

  Scobee heard Mission Control report his three main engines were again running fine at full throttle. Every instrument reading of the Shuttle’s flight and power systems was transmitted automatically, in real time, to Houston.

  Mission Control kept up its steady monitoring, telling the pilots everything was “Go!”

  No one knew the fiery blowtorch far below the crew cabin was already ripping apart the right booster while the crew worked smoothly, flawlessly.

  “Roger, go at throttle up,” reported Scobee. His steady voice amazed the world audience.

  Suddenly a sheet of intense flame swept swiftly over Mike Smith’s window.

  The pilot’s seat was on the right side of Challenger, nearest to the disintegrating booster rocket. In whatever instant of time was available to Mike Smith, he knew something terrible was happening. He had just enough time to utter, “Uh-oh!”

  TWENTY-TWO

  What Happened?

  Flames from inside the booster rocket had escaped through the failed O-ring seal. They enlarged the small opening and grew into a monstrous blowtorch. The torch then slashed through the lower half of the external fuel tank that stored the liquid hydrogen. The lower half collapsed, with the entire tank following in swift disintegration.

  The bottom strut attached to the right booster had broken away. The blazing rocket had swiveled on its upper strut and had sent its nose crashing through the skin of the tank. That had freed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to mix disastrously and ignite.

  Where there had been only cold blue sky pierced by bright flame atop a climbing white smoke trail, there grew a hellish fireball. No explosion, just an instantly growing monster of fire where metal tore, where it shattered into burning jagged debris that would continue to climb before tumbling and cartwheeling through curving arcs until gravity commanded its downward fall.

  Nearby, two corkscrew spears of white smoke spun twisting paths even higher, the rocket boosters flaming out of control. The instant fire in the sky continued to expand in a scattering of flaming debris, creating hundreds of burning and twisting fingers of smoke that appeared to be running from the terrible blast.

  While eyes were focused on the burning chunks of Challenger fluttering and whirling toward the ocean, a hairline streak of red arched up and then over in a curving line. It would be long remembered. Challenger’s crew vessel with its seven astronauts was fleeing the flames and devastation.

  In this ghastly moment, the very air over America’s spaceport burned. Thunder echoed and boomed downward. It kept echoing and booming for the longest minutes. We were hearing Challenger breaking and shredding itself into hundreds, then thousands, possibly millions of pieces while beneath this sky of ominous groans, thin wailing cries and screams rolled upward from Earth to where Challenger died.

  Inside Mission Control near Houston, NASA commentator Steve Nesbitt followed his flight-mission script. He kept up his litany of progress, reporting the main engines were now burning at their full thrust of 104 percent. He continued to read his prepared notes to match flight times and progress. He was simply unaware of what had happened to Challenger.

  “One minute and fifteen seconds, velocity two thousand nine hundred feet per second, altitude nine nautical miles, downrange distance seven nautical miles.”

  Nearby, a flight controller gestured frantically. Nesbitt turned to see where the controller was pointing with such agitation. He stopped reading, disbelief gripping him like a giant fist. He was staring slack-jawed at the expanding fire cloud on the huge television screen before him, at the twisting smoke trails, and the flotsam of burning debris raining toward the ocean.

  He slumped into his chair,
embarrassed, and afraid for the crew. Most of them were his friends, and Steve Nesbitt was above all else a gentleman and a professional. He hurt as if the weight of Earth had been dropped in his lap.

  Tears started crowding into his eyes, but he was on duty. Nesbitt still had his job to do. He shook off the helpless feeling, rallied his senses, and keyed his microphone. “Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation.”

  He simply could not explain what had really happened. He had to report only what he knew for certain. “Obviously,” he heard himself saying, “a major malfunction.”

  There was nothing left to do. He leaned forward and turned off his mike.

  Back in Launch Control at the Cape, Hugh Harris fared no better than Steve Nesbitt. He was stunned, in shock, staring vacant-eyed through the big window. Even as he searched the tumbling, burning debris and corkscrewing smoke trails for some sign the crew was still alive, the scene before him refused to penetrate his own reality, that there could be that much fury and destruction.

  It was…unbelievable. So inadequate a word! What made it all the more terrible was the tremendous personal emotion he felt for Challenger’s astronauts. Harris had shared with these people a professional and personal alliance. He stood in his emotional cocoon of shock and kept asking himself how in the name of God this could have happened.

  On the roof observation deck of the Launch Control Center, in the brilliant sunlight beneath the pockmarked sky, NASA escorts were doing everything possible to move the distraught, sobbing families away from the horrifying spillage of charred debris raining downward to ocean waters.

  The children of Challenger’s pilot Mike Smith stood rooted to where they had been when the blast split the heavens.

  “I want my father!” they wailed as one voice. “I want my father! He told us it was safe!” Then they lost their voices in tears and choking misery.

  In the bank where she worked in Cocoa Beach, my wife Jo and her colleagues stood watching Challenger’s remains fall toward the ocean. No one had a clear understanding of what had just happened, but Jo had been around space flight long enough to know something was terribly wrong.

  Family friend Loverne Holt drove her car up to the drive-in window, and Jo waited on her. Loverne’s car radio was blaring with an uninformed news type telling his listeners the astronauts had aborted the flight, and they had been ordered to return to the Cape and land.

  “I don’t think so,” Jo said quietly. “I don’t think so.”

  Harry Kolcum, veteran editor of Aviation Week, stood in front of the press site’s bleachers, staring at something he knew he would think about, and have dreams about, for the rest of his life. He didn’t really want to call the office, to talk to anyone about what had just happened, but he had no choice. He turned and started walking toward his phone in the press dome.

  Harry was a gentle man, a religious man. “God, be merciful,” he prayed quietly.

  Reuter’s Mary Bubb left the stands with that terrible image in her mind. She knew Challenger’s loss would be with her forever.

  Along the way radio reporter Mercer Livermore came running up to her. “Did you see the faces? The faces, I’ll never forget the faces.”

  Veteran ABC space reporter Bill Larson was driving through the streets of downtown Chicago. Suddenly his radio’s program was interrupted with the following bulletin: “The space shuttle Challenger has exploded in the skies over Cape Canaveral. There’s no immediate word about the fate of the seven astronauts on board. It’s apparently a major disaster.” Immediately Larson’s mind took him back to the Apollo 1 fire, back to the loss of his friends Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

  He quickly drove his car to the curb, and in spite of the heavy traffic and blaring horns, he stopped. “Dammit!” he pounded his steering wheel and screamed. “Not again! Damn! Not again!”

  Inside the Associated Press trailer, veteran aerospace editor Howard Benedict worked furiously to get out the story to the world as quickly as possible. He was dictating over the phone to the AP’s New York desk. His first paragraph was already available as a news bulletin in every newspaper and network and magazine in the world, and he was into his second paragraph:

  “There was no immediate indication on the fate of the crew, but it appeared that nobody could have survived that fireball in the sky.”

  Howard felt a chill pass over his perspiration-soaked body, and he paused for a long moment—a long moment he didn’t have time to spare.

  Howard Benedict needed to cry.

  Next door, inside the United Press International wire-service trailer, aerospace writer Bill Harwood was madly typing copy into his computer terminal. Harwood was fast and he was good, and his copy was speeding over his worldwide wire as quickly as possible when he suddenly stopped, fighting back tears. They’re dead, he thought soberly; they’re all dead.

  In the press site’s broadcast studios, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC were all on the air live.

  Tom Brokaw, just possibly the greatest of the network anchors, was in the nation’s Capitol, and he raced to our NBC Washington studios to anchor Challenger’s coverage.

  I was on the phone with news editor Jim Wilson, and before we went on the air I told him to give me a couple of seconds. I pulled the phone down by my side and focused on the destruction in the sky above me. I kept looking for Challenger. I kept hoping it would reappear out of that growing fireball—hoping, just possibly, it could escape and make a pancake landing on the Atlantic. No Challenger. No miracle. They were gone…

  I bit my lip, wiped the wetness from my face, and told Jim, “Let’s go…”

  Wilson sprung into action. He had never been better. He called the normally, unflappable Cameron Swayzee into the studio to anchor the hotline bulletin.

  A nervous, out-of-breath Swayzee took his cue: “This is an NBC News Hotline Report. This is correspondent Cameron Swayzee at NBC News Headquarters in New York.

  “There has been a major malfunction problem with the Space Shuttle Challenger which moments ago lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Details are not certain yet, but let’s go to Cape Canaveral and try to bring in correspondent Jay Barbree, who’s standing by.

  “Jay, are you there, and what can you tell us?”

  “Cameron, we’re looking at a disaster in the blue skies above this spaceport—a major disaster. The Space Shuttle Challenger, only a minute or so after liftoff, exploded. We have nothing but fire and debris above us…”

  It was obvious the astronauts were dead but in journalism, in reporting death, you wait. You must wait.

  The disaster was only minutes old as thousands of journalists were seen running for planes, headed for the Cape, and NBC News was no exception. We were moving troops in from our Miami Bureau as well as New York City, and in the New York newsroom they were madly searching for material, new information, any kind of facts about what had burned in the Cape Canaveral sky, but NASA had simply slammed their information door shut, not one syllable of official information coming from anywhere.

  All videotapes, film, and pictures of the disaster were being gathered on news chief Hugh Harris’s orders, and as the bucket of information ran lower and lower, NBC-TV decided they needed me on the air with Tom Brokaw. They needed to reach back into the history of the space program, and I could take them there; more important, I had the sources that could reach through NASA’s closed information door and tell NBC’s viewers why Challenger was lost. This was the time when solid reporting counted; not capped teeth, good looks, slick vowels and consonants.

  The out-of-breath television producer in the next studio, Kelly Rickenbacher, came bursting into the radio booth. “They want you on television,” he said.

  I stared back at him. “I’m on radio, Kelly, I can’t leave my assignment.”

  The television producer could not believe what he was hearing. “But they want you on television,” he shouted, his tone implying television was obviously more important than radio.

  �
��Let me check with the radio desk,” I said, turning to pick up the open line with New York.

  “Hell, no, you can’t leave radio for television,” Jim Farley screamed the words down the line. “You’re our man. We need you there.”

  Jim Farley was vice president of Radio Network News, and he went on to tell me he would take the heat for his decision. I explained this to Kelly, and the television producer left madder than a rained-on setting hen only to return two minutes later to tell me Larry Grossman, the president of NBC News, was ordering me to move to television. I told the radio desk I wasn’t going to disobey Mr. Grossman, and soon I was running back and forth between the radio and television studios, scouring every available detail from my sources. Tom Brokaw and I were beating the pants off the competition, and in spite of the major tragedy it felt good.

  That evening, the executives in New York decided I had the best chance of breaking the story of what caused Challenger’s accident, and they sent in all the help we could use. The next morning I hit the ground running.

  I locked myself in my office and started making phone calls, talking with the grunts that turned the wrenches on the launch pad as well as supervisors and management types. I kept getting the same. No facts. Nothing. Just opinion.

  I kept getting the same until one source made an off-hand comment about a concern raised the day before the launch by a Morton Thiokol engineer in Brigham City, Utah.