by Jay Barbree
The man arguably the closest to the investigation, and in my mind the best of the lot in shuttle pilots, veteran astronaut Robert Crippen, is convinced Challenger’s seven survived only a short time after the breakup.
Why?
Because of the three facts stated before: power, pressure, and oxygen.
“Without pressure and oxygen at those altitudes, you don’t stay awake very long,” astronaut Crippen said flatly.
Challenger broke apart at 48,000 feet, and its crew cabin climbed to 65,000 feet before gravity grabbed it and brought it back to Earth. During that two-minute-and-forty-five-second flight, Crippen feels, all members of the crew surely would have lost consciousness.
Dr. Gene McCall, recently retired chief scientist of the air force’s Space Command, agrees with Crippen. Dr. McCall told me, “Pressure is only 20 percent of normal at 48,000 feet where the Challenger breakup occurred, and the pressure at 65,000 feet, the crew cabin’s highest altitude, is only 7.5 percent of normal. At those altitudes the time it would take to lose normal brain function is nine to twelve seconds, and at these very low pressures even 100 percent oxygen will not keep you alive. These altitudes and pressures and times in the Challenger accident would have rapidly caused loss of consciousness, and the crew would certainly have been unconscious, even if alive, at impact.”
The bottom line and most accepted and informed conclusion?
Challenger’s seven were asleep at the end.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sudden Death
The recovery of Challenger’s debris and its seven astronauts’ remains ended sixteen months of high-stress and flat-out competition. It ended with me satisfied I had done my best. I had broken the cause of the Challenger accident, as well as filing some seventy Challenger recovery stories on Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News and the Today Show. My body felt like it had aged sixteen years instead of sixteen months and despite having to cover out-of-town stories while NASA redesigned the Space Shuttle’s boosters, I still needed to train for the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Journalist in Space Project. For eleven years, jogging had been my answer to keeping in shape, and the hard sands of Cocoa Beach offered the perfect place to run.
May 28, 1987, was a typical late spring day. The temperature was in the mid-80s, and I had wrapped myself in the comforts of being home. Since Challenger’s loss, I had spent my working hours at the press site and on other assignments. It was time for some serious jogging, time to reintroduce my lungs to the cleanliness of the salt air.
I hurried over our home’s sand-dune walkover to the beach, submerging myself in the ocean breeze. The brilliant white surf was just that, brilliant, and I squinted to stare across the ocean blue. A distant cruise ship hung like a slow-moving cloud on the horizon, and I stopped just short of the water. It was great to dig my jogging shoes into the wet sand where I began my series of warmup stretches. I was fifty-three years old, but I was trying to be thirty-three. Most of the semifinalists to be the first journalist in space were younger, one of the few exceptions being the man himself, Walter Cronkite. When it came down to it, I was confident I could do at least one more pushup than the trusted network anchor.
America was blessed to have such network news anchors as Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. They had been entrusted with their anchor chairs by such names as Murrow, Huntley, Brinkley, and Chancellor, and as my thoughts return to my jog, I knew they both fit nicely in those chairs. I turned into the wind. My fast-paced walk continued my bodily warmup. I felt the ocean breeze in my face. It smelled wonderfully clean, and I grinned widely, remembering Cronkite. He’s just a hell of a fellow. He and Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra were some team covering the Apollo landings. Even today, Wally loves telling the story about what Cronkite said on the air when Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon.
Walter Cronkite tells Jay Barbree, “I hope they get the Shuttles’ plumbing fixed so we can fly before our plumbing stops working.” (Barbree Collection).
Schirra, the worrier, kept bugging Cronkite. “Whatta we gonna say when they land on the moon? It’s gotta be historic, right?”
“Don’t worry about it, Wally,” Cronkite assured the astronaut. “I’ll have something to say. It’ll be fine.”
Yep, it was.
After fighting off computer problems, Eagle landed softly on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Millions were listening to what the New York Times called Walter-to-Walter coverage as Neil Armstrong reported: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Capsule communicator Charlie Duke answered, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
The first humans were on the moon. It was Cronkite’s job to string profound words together—words for the history pages. Viewers listened intently. The master wordsmith sighed and said, “Oh, boy! Whew! Boy!”
I laughed aloud. Walter Cronkite was simply the greatest. We all did our best to emulate this genuine and loved man. The truth was, we did no better than he. You’ll not find our words in print recording the century’s most historic event.
Suddenly I was back to the present. I moved my jog into a perfect rhythm—running with the wind, matching my speed with the sea gulls flying and darting overhead. Stress had fled. The “runner’s high” would soon be flooding my body.
I let my mind drift into the future. What if I should be selected as the first Journalist in Space? A magnificent obsession. My listeners would hear a commentary of absolute candor. That was a given. They would hear my reports of fears, of sensations, of exuberance, of wonder. I would take them along for the thundering and rattling ride through clouds and sky, through the heavens themselves, into orbit. Together, we would tumble as softly as a falling snowflake into weightlessness. There we would experience the thrill of swift sunrises and sunsets, of the whirling galaxies, the dancing nebulas, and the stars—so many, we so few.
To soar through space was indeed a magnificent obsession, and jogging was a minor price for me to pay for so much promise.
Running was not only a time to dream. It was also a time to think, to reflect, and give thanks. I’m not a staunch religious man, but I feel there is something more—something beyond this life.
My wife, Jo, and I had a son born five weeks premature November 22, 1964. The local hospital failed to take proper precautions. Our baby developed Hyland’s Membrane Disease a day after his birth, and we were doing everything we could to see he survived his underdeveloped lungs.
I had to visit longtime friend John Rivard, and during our conversation I received a thought message that our son had died. I visualized my wife sitting up in her hospital bed, crying. She needed me. I repeated the message I was receiving to John and headed for the hospital. We had named our son Scott, and when I arrived I found the scene precisely as I had received it in my mind.
“Scott’s dead, Jay,” Jo cried.
“I know,” I answered, “about ten minutes ago.”
We comforted each other, and, as John Rivard and I have agreed many times, my experience was real. I had in fact received the message by thought. Was it mental telepathy? Was it heaven sent? Whatever, it happened, and as my friend Dr. Gene McCall, the Princeton physicist told me, “There is much that cannot be explained by science. Perhaps, one day,” he added, “but not today. Just be grateful you had such an experience.”
I wiped the wetness from my face and turned my thoughts back to my run. I was growing tired. I was aware of the increasing strain on my body, but there was no cause for alarm. I imagine the strain was due to the extra pounds I had gained the previous eight days covering the arrival at Jacksonville’s Mayport Naval Station of a destroyer that had been hit by an Iraqi missile. Nevertheless I could feel the heavier air. My breaths were increasing in rapidity. My lungs were burning, but I reminded myself, no pain, no gain. Ahead I could see the finish line. I was tired, more tired than on any run I could remember, but I
was determined to finish. No giving up…no quitting. If I was to be the first Journalist in Space, I must be willing to pay the price.
I was not aware of what was going on inside my chest. There was no pain. Only exhaustion. I was collapsing tired, and I looked up at our house, at the gray walkover above the sand dunes leading to the backyard. Suddenly, there was a rocking flutter inside my chest. It was there…
Blackness…
Only blackness… a pure, deep blackness, absent of dreams.
Doctors call it “sudden death.”
The little girl stared at my stilled body. She snickered as she watched the surf wash foam around my jogging shoes.
Her name was Christy. “Look at the funny man, Mommy,” she said. “He’s getting his shoes all wet.”
“Come on, Christy,” her mother ordered, grasping her little girl’s hand. “He’s drunk, honey. Stay away from him.”
I was later told that others near my lifeless body paid little notice. It wasn’t all that unusual to see a person lying on the crowded sand. Puzzling, but not alarming to most who made it a practice not to get involved.
David Frank, an engineer for RCA, was well into his daily walk as he approached my lifeless form.
“My God,” he spoke to no one. “That guy just jogged by me.”
He hurriedly knelt down and felt for my pulse. There was none.
Frank had spent many years on the Eastern Missile Range, assigned to island tracking stations where CPR was a necessity learned—where doctors and trained medical personnel were a scarcity. He knew what had to be done.
Quickly he began CPR, pumping my chest and blowing air into my lungs, and he would later tell me I coughed, tried to breathe on my own. But there was no luck. The breathing stopped again. Frank turned, looking for help. “Call the Rescue Squad,” he shouted to passersby.
One block north, Pat Sullivan, a college student, was at work at the restaurant Coconuts. He was carrying supplies into the dining room when he noticed the small group of people standing around my body.
“What’s going on down there?” he yelled to a man on the beach.
“It looks like a drowning to me,” the man replied.
Sullivan turned to his fellow workers. “Any of you know CPR?”
None responded.
He quickly ran the block to where David Frank was on his knees.
He stared at my lifeless body and froze. “My God,” he shouted. “It’s Mr. Barbree.”
“You know him?” David Frank asked.
“I sure do,” the young man responded. “His daughter Karla and I are friends,” he said as he turned and pointed. “They live right up there, that house on the ocean.”
My attempted revival was taking place within the shadows of the Park Place Condominiums. There, Debi Hall was busy preparing dinner, annoyed with her detective husband for leaving the police radio on. The constant 10–4s and law-enforcement chatter were getting on her nerves.
She paid scant attention to the call that a man was down on the beach and the Rescue Squad was rolling, until she heard the location. Then she ran to the balcony, looked down, and saw two men working on a lifeless body.
On her way out the door, she stopped only long enough to turn off the stove.
Debi Hall had been trained as an emergency medical technician to react quickly to any life-threatening situation. Her job was to take care of workers on the nation’s spaceport, including the astronauts.
Within seconds she was on the beach, moving Pat Sullivan and David Frank aside. First she checked for my pulse. There was none. Then she resumed CPR. She knew it was critical to keep oxygen and blood moving to the brain and other vital organs.
She completed her first sequence and shouted in my ear. “Don’t go to the light! Don’t go to the light! You’re gonna be all right.”
She kept the rhythm going tirelessly. “Where the hell is that Rescue Squad?” she yelled.
Ed Clemons and Lee Proctor were busy with firehouse maintenance duties when the call came in. They both stopped and looked at each other. Clemons, a paramedic, had seen it all too often before, and the outcome was all too predictable. But they had to do what they could. Once in a great while they did get lucky, and maybe this call would be the rarity.
One thing in my favor? I was lucky enough to drop dead within a block of the Cocoa Beach Fire Station and the city’s Rescue Squad.
The rescue unit screamed out of the firehouse and headed for the beach. Clemons hit the ground first.
He stared at me dressed in jogging shoes, dry shorts, and a shirt wet with sweat. “This guy didn’t drown,” he protested to his partner. “He’s a jogger.”
“That’s right,” Debi Hall told them. “He went into v-fib while jogging.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between the two firemen. “Did you bring a defib pack?”
“No,” Clemons said. “The ambulance is on its way with that gear.”
He read the disgust in Debi’s face but let it pass. He and Proctor took over, first checking for a pulse. It still wasn’t there.
“Don’t go to the light,” Debi screamed again in my ear. “Stay here with us.”
“What’s wrong with this woman?” Clemons mumbled as he instructed his partner, Proctor, to resume CPR chest compressions, manually moving the blood through my stilled heart into my lungs to pick up the fresh oxygen and send it to my brain and other organs.
My color began to return and occasionally I would attempt to breathe, what medical people call agonal respiration.
The rescue work continued until the ambulance arrived with the defibrillators.
Emergency medical technician Chris Bedard leapt from the vehicle with the defibrillator pack and immediately checked for my pulse. Still there was none.
He reached for my eyelids and checked my pupils. Good, he thought. They haven’t dilated.
Bedard and his partner hooked leads to my chest and checked the monitor. The screen displayed what appeared to be chicken scratchings. It told the medical team my heart was in ventricular fibrillation, disorganized electrical patterns causing the organ to quiver instead of pumping normally.
“Stand back,” Bedard ordered as he removed my shirt and placed the defibrillator’s paddles on my chest.
Bedard set the equipment for two hundred joules shock, and the two hundred newtons of electrical energy lifted my body several inches above the sand.
The jolt did nothing.
Bedard set the equipment for a heavier force—three hundred joules shock. Again the electrical energy jolted my body off the ground.
Nothing.
The equipment was reset for a third shock, more energy, 360 joules.
Again my body was jolted into suspension above the sand.
Still nothing.
Bedard looked at the others. “Continue CPR,” he ordered, moving to get an IV needle in one of my arms.
He started heart-stimulant drugs into the bloodstream as fresh oxygen continued to flow into my lungs. The CPR moved the drugs and fresh blood into the heart muscle itself.
While the medics worked feverishly to revive me, life in my home, only one hundred yards away, continued unaware that I had fallen victim to sudden death.
We had moved into the seaside house only four months before, and Jo was still busy decorating. She was painting in the garage when Pat Sullivan, face white, banged on the window.
“Mrs. Barbree,” he called. “Your husband has fallen on the beach.”
Jo’s mind was suddenly numb. She paid little attention to what Pat was saying. All she could think about was that Jay had had a heart attack, just like his brother Larry, just like all of his family. The Barbree curse, she thought.
She started over the dunes overpass; to her left she could see the crowd, the fire department’s rescue vehicle next to the county ambulance.
Jo watched as they loaded me into the ambulance, and she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder. “I’ll take you to the hospital, Mrs. Barbree,” Serg
eant Duane Hinkley said.
The medics continued the procedures inside the ambulance to keep my brain and other organs enriched with fresh blood and oxygen as the vehicle, sirens screaming, raced from the beach and down A1A toward the hospital.
“Let’s hit him with the paddles again,” Chris Bedard said.
Bedard kept the defibrillator set at 360 joules, and with everyone clear, he sent another shock of electrical energy through my chest.
They stared at the monitor. A HEARTBEAT! Not perfect, but a heartbeat!
The medics stared at each other. Their lips stretched into economy-size grins. “I don’t know who you are, buddy,” Chris Bedard laughed, “but the sonofabitch didn’t win today. You are one lucky sucker.”
The sonofabitch referred to by Bedard was death, and Ed Clemons said quietly, “Welcome back from the dead, Mister. This is one time we guys won.”
“We’re not outta the woods yet,” Bedard reminded them.
“Nope, but it’s a hell of a start,” Clemons grinned.
They sat quietly for the rest of the ride, tracing the restored heartbeat across the monitor. Each knew if it had not been for the CPR efforts of David Frank, Pat Sullivan, and Debi Hall before their arrival, there was no way they would have won this day.
The odds simply were not with them. Only 25 to 30 percent of “sudden deaths” are brought back with the immediate attention of trained emergency medical technicians. But by the time they reached the Cape Canaveral Hospital, I was fighting back.
