Their eyes are watching. Some people know something is wrong. Others were slow to realize it. Soon, everyone fell into grief.
Forty years ago, the space shuttle Challenger climbed into the clear blue sky above Cape Canaveral. Young people across the country watched the game on television across the country and on school playgrounds in Central Florida.
Christa McAuliffe will be the first teacher in space.
But the streaks in the rocket plume don’t look right.
“We have absolutely no idea what was going on, but you could feel the energy of the teachers,” said Elizabeth Wisner Stroz, 51, who was in sixth grade at Brookshire Elementary School in Winter Park on Jan. 28, 1986, when she was 11 years old. “I remember they were rushing around the classroom and the teachers’ energy was gone.”
She was one of several students who spoke to the Orlando Sentinel the day Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Kennedy Space Center on the 25th mission of the space shuttle program. The crew included Commander Francis R. (Dick) Scobie, pilots Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Allison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnick and McAuliffe.
Over the past week, the Sentinel revisited some of the students and other witnesses, including former Sentinel employees, and found that the horror of the explosion still lingers. Challenger taught NASA hard lessons, including the importance of truly prioritizing safety, and the shame of failure. For those watching, the lesson is simpler, but no less profound: No matter what the experts say, tragedy can happen at any time. While events subside, they never truly stop hurting.
For Wisner Stroz, this launch is particularly exciting. The mother of one of her friends and classmates, elementary science resource teacher Suzanne Ackley, was a finalist for Florida’s Teachers in Space program, which ultimately received 12,000 applicants nationwide.
She said the teachers rolled out a large old picture tube television. The class then watched some coverage, but the teachers turned it off because they knew something had gone tragically wrong.
“I remember going home and praying for these families,” she said.
Photos of Stroz and her classmates Bobby Masonhold, Stephanie Hooks and Jimmy Smeench show sad faces, as if questioning how and why this happened.
“I just remember being sad,” she said. “Knowing they were dead… I remember it very clearly.”
The experience was so jarring for America’s young people that when President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation that night, he addressed the children directly who had witnessed the event.
“I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen,” Regan said. “It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of seizing opportunities and expanding human horizons. The future does not belong to the faint of heart, but to the brave. The Challenger crew is taking us into the future, and we will continue to follow them.”
have a job to do
For James Fisher, a 29-year-old Sentinel reporter at the time, the aftermath hit hard.
“When you’re a journalist, you think, ‘What’s the narrative here. I’m telling a story to people, my readers…What information do I need?'” he recalled. “So for about two to three days, that’s what I was thinking.”
He said that just after that, as he was driving back to his apartment in Cape Canaveral, he had to pull over.
“I started crying. I don’t know how long I cried in the car on the side of the road. It was the first time I was really… able to express it,” he said. “I burst into tears just thinking about it. You pick yourself up and move on.”
He covered the space shuttle program for much of the 1980s, recalling how NASA prepared to accelerate the pace of launches.
“There was a sense of trust. There was a sense that NASA was always going to cancel the launch,” he said, noting that the Challenger mission had already faced a series of cleanups that week. “There’s a sense of, ‘They know what they’re doing.'”
When he spoke to McAuliffe, she felt the same way.
“I asked her about it…’Essentially, you’re going to get killed by this bomb. Are you scared?’ She said, ‘No. “That’s what she said. “I believe they know what they’re doing. “
He continued to cover the Challenger inquiry hearings in Washington before retiring from journalism in 1989. The hearings revealed how engineers raised red flags about the dangers cold weather posed to O-rings inside the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, ultimately blaming the O-rings for the explosion. But these warnings were ignored.
“Watching them recount the back-and-forth conversations and the pressure they felt, and the stories of scientific evidence they presented based on their engineering skills, but were forced to cave in. … I saw what happens when someone is forced to break the sanctity of their own values and morals. It’s horrific.”
through lens
Sentinel photographer Red Huber, who captured most of the 24 previous shuttle launches, recalled the confusion among some in the crowd and the growing realization among others. He filmed the launch at Astronaut Road (where the Apollo Saturn V Center is today).
“When I saw the solid rocket booster leaning to the side, I said, ‘Oh, that’s not good.’ I knew something was seriously wrong,” he said. “When the explosion happened, when it started to break apart, I knew something was going on, but there were some ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the crowd, and I knew they had never seen it before, so they didn’t know what to expect. “
Huber continued to cover every shuttle mission thereafter, retiring from Sentinel in 2018. But he still remembers the excitement of the Challenger crew and the NASA employees who were there to cheer them on.
“To me, it’s shocking,” he said. “When they walked out of Astronaut Headquarters, there was so much energy in their step… it gave you goosebumps.”
Although the days that followed were filled with tragedy, the happiness of that moment stayed with him.
“The smile on Christa’s face, the wave, and the smiles of all the astronauts are always in my mind.”
Lessons learned
The Challenger explosion occurred 19 years after NASA’s first major tragedy, when three Apollo 1 astronauts died in 1967 during a routine launch pad test. Seventeen years later, in 2003, NASA suffered another loss when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed. Once again, NASA must look inward and challenge a culture that puts safety at risk for the sake of progress.
The agency now observes the day of remembrance every year on the fourth Thursday of January, as the anniversaries of the three tragedies are just six days apart.
NASA leadership says a renewed commitment to safety is now clearly a top priority.
“They are not statistics. They are colleagues, parents, friends and explorers who accepted risks because they believed in what we were doing. Their sacrifices were not in vain,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “They are why we improve safety, challenge outdated processes, and evolve our mission.”
These lessons are at the heart of the upcoming Artemis 2 mission, a 10-day crewed flyby of the moon. This is the first time humans have traveled this far from Earth since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
This risk is not lost on the Artemis 2 crew.
“I was walking with my kids and I told them, ‘Here’s the will, here’s the trust document, if something happens to me, this is what’s going to happen to you,'” Commander Reed Wiseman said. “It’s just part of life. I actually wish more people on a daily basis would talk to their families in this way because you never know what’s going to happen the next day.”
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