How tragic. Is that the one the schoolteacher was on? -- President Ronald W. Reagan Immediate reaction to news of Challenger disaster
What NASA did was illegal. Against the law. I don't know how to make it any plainer or what good it will do. The whole thing stinks. -- Dr. Ronald Wright Broward County medical examiner, on NASA's refusal to allow legally-required autopsies on astronaut's remains
The sacrifice of your loved ones has stirred the soul of our nation, and, through the pain, our hearts have been opened to a profound truth. -- President Ronald W. Reagan Eulogy for the Challenger Seven
30 December "Get them in the cans," a voice boomed. "What if they fall off the truck?" another voice asked with nervous hesitation. She feared that just such a disaster might happen. That somehow one of the garbage cans would roll off the truck and dump its contents onto Highway A1A. Dump a black body bag containing the water-soaked, shark-eaten remains of a Challenger astronaut. An ominous presence watched her in the night as she lifted one of the limp, heavy bags and lowered it into the trash can. It slid in like a sack of wet kitchen scraps. The body within was no longer whole; impact with the sea had torn it apart, sliced into pieces by its restraining straps. Safety belts, she thought with bitter irony, putting a lid on the first can and moving on to the second. She read the name tag on the bag and started to weep. "Keep going," the distant voice demanded. "We've got to bury the evidence." She stood now above the mouth of an open missile silo. An impossibly huge flatbed truck dumped the shattered remains of Challenger down into the black depths of the hole. Suddenly, her truck tilted, too, and the three garbage cans rolled off the back and into oblivion, followed by four more black, limp bags, then the volumes of the Rogers Commission report. "There," the voice said. "Out of sight, out of mind." Concrete poured into the hole, sloshing back and forth in a watery grey stream to drown the shattered orbiter and the seven bodies until nothing was visible but a flat circle of cement. Workmen troweled it flat. Children knelt at the edge to press their handprints into the fresh surface. She turned to face the voice. Behind her stood seven dark figures: five men, two women. They reached out to push her into a yawning chasm a hundred times larger than the burial shaft. Cold, clammy hands shoved her, sent her spiraling over the edge. Falling, falling into endless black. Tammy awakened overcome by a wave of nausea. Then she realized where she lay and what day it was. Today she would be the first commander of Shuttle Orbiter Constitution. * * * She could not shake the dreams. They always centered around Challenger. They always ended in falling; falling out of the sky or falling into darkness. She knew other astronauts sometimes experienced such nightmares, though how often was a question best left unasked. These images came to her on the average of once a week or more. She dared not mention it to anyone out of fear that she might be grounded. Far greater than blowing up was an astronaut's fear of being grounded. With so few Shuttle flights -- averaging five a year -- one could train for half a decade just to spend one week in Space. To be grounded was tantamount to professional death; any intentional act that resulted in a grounding the equivalent of professional suicide. More than any other factor, this fear of being yanked from the crew roster engendered the tight-lipped, frosty exterior many in the astronaut corps exhibited. Their stoic silence masked the quiet dread of losing their chance to ride that towering pile of high explosives into the unknown. Tammy remembered a time before the nightmares. A time when the world seemed fresh and open and beckoning to her. The feeling never lasted long. She celebrated her nineteenth birthday the day before Challenger flight 51-L, and took her car down to Cape Canaveral to watch the twenty-fifth Shuttle launch as her own private birthday gift. The nation's youngest astronaut trainee -- as the press billed her upon her acceptance the month before -- still found it necessary to use her good looks to finesse an automobile pass for the NASA Causeway from someone in order to park her car within view of Launch Complex 39. The chillingly cold day provided sharp and clear air. Everything stood out in crystalline relief like a snapshot of Heaven. For some, it was Heaven frozen over. Orchard owners struggled to save their orange groves, setting out heaters and smudge pots to fend off the ice. School children bundled up as they seldom had before. Waiting for their busses, they played breath-frost games under the deep blue, cloudless Florida sky. Commuters cursed their cars, some of which refused to start, some whose freeze plugs had pushed out, saving their engine blocks but disabling the machines for the day. At Kennedy Space Center, a larger piece of machinery stood immobile. Video cameras planted around Pad 39B channeled images back to the Launch Control Center. Everywhere they looked, long, clear icicles hung like crystal daggers from cables, tubing, hand rails and stairways. To Tammy, far from Pad 39B and away from her TV set, it was the most beautiful day imaginable. As she sat bundled up in her convertible with the top down and a thermos of hot chocolate, she pondered her bright future as part of NASA and its glorious mission. She felt a kinship with one of the crew members, and it wasn't the one with whom most of the nation identified. The press made a big deal about Christa McAuliffe, the teacher, the first common citizen-astronaut, as if all Americans must cheer her on. Tamara Reis, however, admired the other woman on the flight, Judy Resnik, a trained and experienced astronaut. Tammy ran a hand through her dark hair, cut and curled to resemble Resnik's trademark shag style. She often fantasized how it would feel for her hair to drift around her as Judy's had in videos from her previous flight. The countdown proceeded on the car radio. At T-minus six seconds, the three shuttle engines flashed into life. At her distance, there was no sound at first, just an eerie silence. Then came the solid rocket ignition. Instantly, in a white-hot cloud of smoke and flame, Challenger leapt upward. The low roar of the engines washed over her, followed shortly by the stunning thunder of the SRB's. It struck her solidly, like humanity's fist pounding on the heavens. She gloried in the sound that enveloped her like the hand of a titan, watching the ascending column lengthen and thicken with every second as if it were that giant's arm reaching up into the sky. Within a minute, Challenger receded to near-invisibility. Only by the condensation trail it left could Tammy tell where it was. She hefted a pair of binoculars to track the dot of white at the top of the smoky pillar, just above an orange glow. "Go, Judy," she whispered, though she could have shouted and still barely have heard it above the receding thunder. "Go, space rats!" Paul had called her a space rat once, a term she immediately embraced with perverse joy. It was just about all she had left of him, now. After half a minute, she turned on the car radio to listen to the coverage. They should be throttling back the three main engines to sixty-five per cent power as they passed through Max-Q, the region of maximum dynamic pressure where the force of the supersonic spacecraft hitting the thin atmosphere nine miles up generated pressure of thousands of pounds per square foot on every forward part of the shuttle. Safely past that region, pilot Mike Smith would throttle up the ssme's to one hundred four per cent of their rated power. "Challenger, go with throttleup," the voice of Mission Control said. "Roger," Commander Dick Scobee confirmed. "Go with throttleup." Watching through the binoculars, Tammy saw something wrong. Something horribly wrong. Red-orange flames exploded around the spacecraft. Her breath froze in her chest as a cloud of vapor and smoke blasted outward from the shuttle, expanding to fill the view through her binoculars. Letting them drop, she stared at the sky in terror. There, at the top of the perfect arc of the exhaust trail hung a growing, billowing rust-hued cloud from which two horns of white emerged, corkscrewing wildly about. Below it, like a devil's beard, thin streamers of debris trailed smoke downward along ballistic trajectories. "One minute, fifteen seconds," Mission Control calmly reported, as if the explosion had not happened. "Velocity twenty-nine hundred feet per second, altitude nine nautical miles. Downrange distance seven nautical miles." No! her heart cried out as she watched transfixed. The cloud continued to expand, the SRB's flew uncontrolled on divergent paths, smoking pieces rained from the fireball. Then, its incomprehensible energy expended, the cloud ceased to billow, appearing to freeze in the icy air. Tammy searched the sky in vain for some sign that the shuttle still climbed. She tilted the binoculars in desperate hope of finding an exhaust plume, or the flash of sunlight on the orbiter's wings. Her mind screamed RTLS! RTLS! Deep inside, though, she knew there would be no return to launch site. The all-consuming blast erased Challenger from the sky, from her life, from their families, from the world. As if in a delirium, the voice of Mission Control spoke with a stunned incomprehension: "Flight controllers are looking very carefully at the situation." Then he added, with terrifying understatement, "Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink." A whirling emptiness grew inside the pit of her stomach. The high-altitude winds slowly dispersed the aborted trail that led halfway to heaven. No! was all she could think. No! As if the invocation could drive the flaming fuel back into its tank, as if the prayer of denial might pluck the pieces of Challenger from the sky and reassemble them, as if the force of her will could breath life back into the astronauts. It took her a moment to realize that the astronauts were dead. The orbiter contained no ejection seats, the crew wore no parachutes. If the blast consumed the orbiter, then all seven doubtless burned to death an instant before shattering at hypersonic speed against the wall of air from which Challenger no longer protected them. Around her, cars started up and moved down the causeway at a slow, somber pace. She once attended an air show where an old P-51-D flew into the runway after an inside loop. First came the shock of impact and the horrified cries from the onlookers, then the unforgettable sight of the fireball sliding down the concrete trailing oily black smoke, then a stunned silence as the audience wandered back to their cars in a daze. The show went on, though, for the other pilots always knew that death flew alongside them on every flight. Tammy Reis knew that the remaining astronauts would want to continue, but she also knew that NASA's show would not go on. And for two and a half years, it did not.
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