Sally Ride by Sue Macy

Author:Sue Macy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

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I While most satellites use solar energy to run their electronics and communications systems, they use a liquid fuel called hydrazine to power the engines that keep them in the right orbit.

CHAPTER 8

DISASTER

IT WAS LATE MORNING ON Tuesday, January 28, 1986, and Sally Ride was on a commercial airplane flying to Houston, Texas. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, seven astronauts were strapped into their seats aboard the Challenger, ready to lift off for NASA’s twenty-fifth space shuttle mission, STS-51L. Four of the crew were members of Sally’s 1978 astronaut class: Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, and commander Francis “Dick” Scobee. The pilot, Michael Smith, joined the astronaut corps in 1980. Gregory Jarvis, an engineer with Hughes Aircraft, was a payload specialist on the mission. So was Christa McAuliffe, the high school teacher who had trained with the crew for close to six months.

Before this, Sally had watched every shuttle launch since the first one in 1981 as it happened, either in person or on TV. But this mission had been rescheduled or scrubbed five times, first because of the delayed takeoff of the previous shuttle flight and then because of bad weather. Now, as Sally sat on the airplane, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom with a startling announcement. There had been an accident on the Challenger, he said. No one was certain of the details or whether the crew had been hurt. Sally was out of her seat in an instant. “I pulled out my NASA badge and went up to the cockpit,” she would remember. “They let me put on an extra pair of headsets to monitor the radio traffic to find out what had happened. We were only about half an hour outside of Houston. When we landed, I headed straight back to the Astronaut Office at JSC [ Johnson Space Center].”

Sally quickly learned that the accident had been catastrophic and none of the crew had survived. The Challenger was only about ten miles from Earth when Commander Dick Scobee heeded mission control’s direction to open up the shuttle’s throttle, sending fuel to its engines. “Roger, go with throttle up,” confirmed the commander. Then Americans, including thousands of schoolchildren who had tuned in to watch a teacher journey to space, saw the worst kind of history play out on their TVs. Soaring against a clear blue sky, the shuttle suddenly exploded into a burst of flames, followed by two divergent trails of smoke. NASA’s public affairs officer, Steve Nesbitt, who had been narrating the launch from mission control in Houston, paused a moment before declaring, “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.”

It fell to President Ronald Reagan to try and comfort the stunned nation. In doing so, he directly addressed the children who had witnessed the tragedy. “I know it’s hard to understand that sometimes painful things like this happen,” he said. “It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons.

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