Tragedy 73 seconds in, legacy 30 years since
CHALLENGER DISASTER STILL STRIKES SOLEMN CHORD
Thirty years later, he remembers where he was that day with painful clarity: on the roof of the launch control center, with the families of the seven crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
Jim Voss, then a supporting player who would later fly five shuttle missions, recalls a sense of disbelief when the spacecraft broke apart high above Cape Canaveral, Fla., and claimed the lives of the men and women who had become his close friends.
“I think we all were trying to deny that the shuttle would not fly back out of the debris cloud and land at the Kennedy Space Center and everybody would be OK,” said Voss, who teaches classes on human space flight at the University of Colorado. “But once it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen, it was a pretty sad day in many ways.”
From astronauts to educators and everywhere between, the Jan. 28, 1986, tragedy still strikes a solemn chord and will be marked with remembrances in Colorado and across the country.
Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, and Ellison Onizuka, a CU alumnus, were among the dead, and both left significant legacies in Colorado.
Onizuka planned to conduct several experiments crafted at CU, including the launch of the Spartan- Halley satellite— it even featured the school’s logo — that would monitor Halley’s Comet.
“In fact, we said that was our shuttle mission,” said Robert Culp, now a CU professor emeritus who years ago served as Oni--
zuka’s academic adviser.
But the mission went awry 73 seconds after liftoff when a seal in a solid rocket booster failed and the craft plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean.
The accident triggered an investigation and critical examination of the way the National Aeronautics and Space Administration did business, and led to a nearly three- year pause in the shuttle program.
At CU, where Onizuka was a celebrated student and, later, a frequent visitor who interacted with aerospace engineering students, Air Force ROTCcadets will lead a memorial Saturday. As they do every year, they will remember 14 astronauts— those who died on Challenger and those who died on the shuttle Columbia.
Kalpana Chawla, who also attended CU, was among the Columbia crew who perished on re- entry to the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.
Memory of yet another tragedy, the Apollo I fire that killed three crewmembers on Jan. 27, 1967, makes this a difficult stretch of the calendar for many in the aerospace industry.
“You try to justify in your mind somehow that some things happen for good reason, that it wasn’t just a terrible loss,” Voss said. “We learned a lot of things from the accidents of both the Challenger and Columbia and before that, the Apollo I fire. They’re hard lessons to learn that way, and we wish we’d learned them another way. But NASA got better because of the loss of the crews.”
The space agency revamped its approach to safety and addressed management failures and other shortcomings in a self- examination that probably avoided additional disasters, Voss said.
“I like to believe it protected mewhen Iwas flying on the space shuttle, that my five flightswere done in a safe way and with thoroughness that ensured I was going to come back every time,” he said.
The Challenger losses alsowere intensely personal. Onizuka, who earned his bachelor’s and masters’ degrees from CU in 1969, became a fixture at the school even after graduation.
“After he became an astronaut, he was in great demand and would talk to my classes every time he came back,” Culp said.
Onizuka blazed a path through the ROTC and the military that many others have followed, said Penny Axelrad, chair of CU’s Department ofAerospaceEngineering Sciences.
“He was a very special student here, but there’s this legacy of students like him who are so interested in exploration but also service to their country,” she said.
The impact of the tragedy on education remains widespread.
More than 40 Challenger Learning Centers, including one in Colorado Springs, were launched by the crew’s family members as a living memorial that offers simulated space missions to students from grade five to adult.
The Colorado Springs center plans a ceremony Thursday night.
AlthoughMcAuliffe lived in New Hampshire, her name appears on a handful of schools aroundColorado — and dozens more across the country — that honor her memory as the first person selected from the Teacher in Space Project to travel aboard the shuttle.
AtMcAuliffe Elementary in Greeley, students will mark the tragedy with a writing project in which they’ll expand on her catch phrase “Reach for the stars” by sharing their own goals and dreams, said principal Jeff Petersen.
Students will gather outside and lower the flag to half- staff at 9: 39 a. m., the time of the launch, and sing the school song, which also invokesMcAuliffe.
Petersen, in his first year as principal, noted that next year the school will refocus on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — to “get back to our roots.” Part of the impetus for the naming of the school, he added, came from a teacher who ranked among the final dozen candidates for the spot McAuliffe ultimately filled.
Bob Stack, now a retired elementary schoolteacher in Greeley, knew Onizuka, from their time together in CU’s ROTC program, and McAuliffe, whom he met during the process that narrowed the field of about 80,000 applicants for the privilege of a seat on Challenger.
Although he had harbored the wish to become an astronaut since his youth and eventually joined the Air Force, he couldn’t qualify for astronaut training because he wore glasses.
But years later, as an educator, he filled out the 17page Teacher in Space application and made it far into the process. He became friends with McAuliffe and approached the launch buoyed by the fact that she would be performing an experiment he had suggested.
“Even though I didn’t get to go, one ofmy ideas got to go,” he said.
About 100 fourth- and fifth- graders gathered in his classroom to watch the launch. A month- long countdown gave way to hugs as the spacecraft lifted off — and then horror and tears as it came apart seconds later.
He suppressed his own grief as he went “on autopilot” to tend to the children.
“They were seeing this magical thing,” he recalled, “and all of a sudden it was all over the sky.”
Stack, 71, will mark the 30 years with about 50 other prospective Teachers in Space who have remained close, almost like family, and traveled to Florida for a commemoration of all those who died.
As much for catharsis as anything, he sat down recently and wrote about the Challenger from two perspectives. He recalled the shock and tragedy that fell over his students 30 years ago. Then he looked at the recent confluence of actual scientific discovery — water onMars— andaburst of cinematic space fantasy that propels the imagination.
In that, he sees the Challenger’s legacy.
“There’s this resurgence of the energy, the magic, the dreams,” Stack said. “There’s yourword: dreams.”