The transistor radio crackled as we eavesdropped in on NASA’s Mission Control.
T minus 15 seconds. T minus ten…nine…eight…seven…six…
We have main engine start…four…three…two…one…and liftoff!
Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle Mission and it has cleared the tower!
I was just eight months out of engineering school on January 28, 1986 — a pup engineer, 22 years old and working on Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program at Hughes Aircraft Company.
Our team had gathered around a lab bench to listen to the launch. A festive atmosphere filled the room, inspired by prior Shuttle project stories from the older engineers. The younger engineers hung onto every detail, hoping that we’d each get to work on our own Shuttle project one day.
The space program likely influenced my decision to become an electrical engineer. Having grown up in the ’60s and ’70s, I’d spent many a day sitting too close to a television set while watching an Apollo rocket blast off into space or parachute out of it. I was six years old when Neil Armstrong made his famous small step, seven for Apollo 13, ten for Skylab and twelve when the USA and USSR put their political differences aside for Apollo–Soyuz. I decided to become an engineer somewhere between those events, building kit radios and flying model rockets.
The radio crackled again.
Velocity twenty-two-hundred fifty-seven feet per second. Altitude 4.3 nautical miles. Downrange distance three nautical miles.
Engines throttling up. Three engines at one-hundred four percent.
Challenger, go at throttle up.
Roger. Go at throttle up.
We listened with a sense of pride. The Space Shuttle represented the pinnacle of engineering achievements — a reusable spacecraft that began like a rocket, became a spaceship, before acting as a glider for a soft runway landing. Challenger was a perfectly designed piece of machinery.
Or so we thought.
Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink.
The report cast a spell of confusion upon us. A major malfunction? No downlink? What did that mean? We’d never heard Mission Control utter such words.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. We just stared at the mute radio that should have been squawking telemetry readings.
We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. Flight director confirms that. We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point. Contingency procedures are in effect.
Exploded? Recovery forces? Contingency procedures?
We will report more as we have information available. Again, to repeat, we have a report relayed thought the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. We are now looking at all the contingency operations and are awaiting word from any recovery forces in the downrange field.
The air thickened and the lab fell silent.
I shook my head in disbelief. The shuttle couldn’t have exploded. No way. There had to be some sort of mistake. My mind searched for a more plausible explanation, but couldn’t find one.
Three-thousand miles away, my grandfather watched an infinite loop of the 73-second flight on the local television news. The retired electrical engineer’s mind filled with the same questions that we struggled with in the lab. This was the 25th shuttle mission and the 10th time that this particular vehicle had flown. It just didn’t add up. Space travel had become almost routine, so much so that Challenger had a civilian high school teacher aboard.
Unlike me, who was surrounded by engineers, he had no outlets for his technical thoughts, and so the questions in his head compounded. His blood pressure rose. My grandmother called to him from the kitchen, and when she couldn’t understand his unintelligible response, she repeated the question. He mumbled again. The old engineer had just suffered a minor stroke.
A pall came over the lab. The young engineers looked to the older engineers for some piece of wisdom — anything that could shed light on the situation. Wisdom comes from experience, and since this situation was new to them, they had none to share. And so we each retreated inward, young and old, grieving the losses of human life, a national treasure, and the unshakable confidence that we once had in our profession.
I can’t believe that it has been thirty years since that day. Thirty years? The memory is so vivid. I can still see the drab colored walls of that old laboratory. I can still smell the solder that the techs used to build my test boards. And finally, I can still hear the transistor radio relaying Challenger’s last transmission:
Roger. Go at throttle up.
Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Newton understood that each generation is only a little smarter than the generation before it. Over time, these tiny knowledge increments compound upon themselves, creating much larger leaps in human understanding.
But each of these increases comes at a cost. Some only need mental effort and time. Others require men and women who are willing to throw themselves into the unknown — heroes that accept the physical risks so that we can reap the knowledge rewards.
And so on this 30th anniversary of losing our Challenger Giants, I’d like to express my gratitude. Thank you, Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik for allowing us to stand on your shoulders so that we can see the new horizon.
