Painful Legacies of a Lost Mission

By Evan Thomas

Like a grim ghost ship, the broken space capsule sat on the ocean floor, 18 miles east of the launching pad at Cape Canaveral. Peering through the clear blue water of the Gulf Stream, U.S. Navy divers could make out the remains of several crew members of the space shuttle Challenger. The astronauts, some still strapped into their seats, had come to rest in 100 ft. of water after the long plunge from the sky on the icy morning last January that marked a crash landing for the U.S. space program.

The discovery of the bodies was a wrenching twist for the families of the Challenger astronauts. It came as the finger pointing and recriminations inside NASA spilled into public view with harsh accusations by veteran astronauts that the space agency had repeatedly placed expediency over safety. Reeling, NASA administrators were forced to concede in congressional testimony that the shuttle program has been seriously set back, so much so that the entire space effort may require a thorough reorganization.

NASA's woes were further accentuated by a Soviet coup. Just as U.S. television cameras were showing the Navy recovery ship, the U.S.S. Preserver, bringing to Port Canaveral its dolorous cargo in a flag-draped container last week, Soviet television was beaming to the world images of a triumph: the successful launch of a Soyuz spacecraft that carried a pair of cosmonauts to the Soviets' newest space station. Normally, the Soviets announce space shots only after they have been safely launched. Though last week's "live" telecast appeared to be risky--what if something had gone wrong?--the Soviets actually hedged their bet. They appeared to have built a 60-second tape delay into the broadcast of the launch.

NASA and the Navy have tried to keep a tight lid on the recovery of the astronauts' bodies, but some details inevitably came to light. Discovered resting on the ocean floor by the 15-ship search fleet that has been scouring the waters off Canaveral since the Jan. 28 disaster, the Challenger's crew compartment, 16.5 ft. by 17.5 ft. by 16.3 ft., was ruptured but not completely destroyed. The lower mid-deck, where Astronauts Ronald McNair and Gregory Jarvis and New Hampshire Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe had been seated, apparently absorbed the full force of the blast from the shuttle's huge external fuel tank and was nearly obliterated. The upper flight deck, where the commander, Francis Scobee, as well as Astronauts Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka and Judith Resnik were seated, was still partly intact. The Navy's team of 40-odd divers managed to bring to the surface the remains of the crew members. The divers also recovered the shuttle's four flight recorders, which might, despite a six-week soak in salt water, provide valuable data about the disaster. Although NASA had not announced it, within a few days of the crash U.S. Coast Guard searchers recovered three battered flight helmets and a plastic package containing materials McAuliffe had planned to use to teach schoolchildren "lessons from space."

NASA experts now believe that the Challenger crew members were aware for at least a moment of what was happening. "They went fast, thank God, but they knew they were in trouble," one astronaut told TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin. From interviews with NASA officials and members of the presidential commission investigating the disaster, Hannifin was able tentatively to reconstruct the astronauts' final moments. His report:

A shuttle takeoff is never a smooth ascent; heavy buffeting and shaking rattle the craft, and the crew is deafened by a clanking, metallic roar. Because of turbulence caused by sudden wind shifts, Challenger's crew had an especially rocky launch right from lift-off. Just 72 seconds into the flight--a second and a half before the explosion--the orbiter yawed suddenly to the right. As the righthand rocket booster broke loose, spewing superhot gases from a faulty joint, the shuttle's engines tried to compensate for the loss of pressure, and the crew must have felt swift side-to-side lurches.

An instant later the tip of the booster pivoted into the external fuel tank. The ensuing explosion rocked but did not obliterate the shuttle. "The orbiter itself seemed to float, very briefly, above the fireball of exploding hydrogen and oxygen," said one member of the shuttle inquiry panel. He was reminded of the way a bubble survives a cascade over Niagara Falls, "so fragile, yet with all that wild energy around it." Says a National Transportation Safety Board investigator: "The crew compartment was pressurized and sealed tight and welded into a kind of cocoon or bubble that may have suffered relatively little damage, briefly riding the top of that fire ball." Nonetheless, a pathology expert sent to examine the astronauts' remains at Cape Canaveral said, "it is likely that the crew was knocked unconscious immediately and felt nothing during the [three-to-four-minute] fall to the ocean. I want to guess that they were unconscious all the way down, if any of them really survived the fireball and breakup in flight." Some experts believed that the tremendous force of hitting the ocean after a 55,000-ft. fall did as much damage to the crew compartment as the explosion.

NASA officials acknowledged last week that the impact of the crash on the U.S. space effort has been to ground the shuttle program for at least a year, and perhaps as long as 18 months. A study by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that redesigning the flawed rocket booster and replacing the shuttle's cargo, a tracking satellite, will cost some $440 million. If a new orbiter is built to replace Challenger, it would cost at least $2.3 billion and take three or four years to complete. When NASA does resume shuttle operations, its overambitious aim of launching 24 flights a year by 1988 will be scaled down to no more than nine the first year, 14 the next, 18 the following year. Even that schedule may be unrealistic: NASA has never managed to launch more than nine shuttle flights in a twelve month period.

The backlog of unlaunched satellites and space experiments is already mounting. The shuttle launches of the Jupiter probe Galileo and the solar probe Ulysses, originally scheduled for this May, have been put off for more than a year, and then only one of the two craft may fly. NASA has had to tell paying customers of the shuttle to look elsewhere. The Pentagon, a prime NASA customer, will have to put off plans to conduct certain top-secret experiments in space for President's Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Always suspicious of the shuttle's reliability, the Air Force last year won congressional approval for a $2 billion program to build ten unmanned rockets for satellite launch by 1988. A federal interagency task force set up to make U.S. space policy decided last week that the military may need to buy ten more of these missiles.

NASA began de-emphasizing unmanned rockets about ten years ago in order to push the shuttle program. "NASA put all its eggs in one basket, and the basket fell on the concrete," says Wilbur Pritchard, president of Satellite Systems Engineering, Washington consultants to satellite makers. Space agency officials now ruefully admit the error. Last week NASA Acting Administrator William Graham urged private industry to try to develop unmanned rockets to launch satellites. Some private aerospace executives, however, bitterly noted that before the Challenger disaster, NASA had actively tried to discourage private industry from competing with the shuttle for satellite business. They also pointed out that it will still be difficult for private companies to underprice the space shuttle and Europe's Ariane system, both of which are government subsidized.

The shuttle had originally been designed to construct and then service an $8 billion space station to be in use by 1992. Even before the Challenger disaster, that date had slipped to 1994. The purpose of the program is to provide a platform for conducting scientific experiments, some with commercial applications like zero-gravity manufacturing, and to provide a base for further exploration.

The new Soviet space station, named Mir (Peace), was put into orbit last month to serve as the core of a planned complex of living quarters and laboratories. Many experts believe that the Soviets, who have concentrated on space-station technology while NASA focused on reusable shuttle craft, are years ahead of the U.S. in establishing a permanent space presence. The Soviet space program picked up more plaudits last week as its probe Vega 2 passed within 5,125 miles of Halley's comet. Meanwhile, NASA's $1 billion space telescope designed to peer to the edge of the universe, originally scheduled to be launched by the shuttle this fall, sits uselessly on the ground.

As the investigation of the shuttle disaster continues, evidence is piling up that NASA might have been a victim of some managers' can-do spirit. To justify congressional support, NASA officials felt compelled to prove that the shuttle program could be made self-supporting by launching as often as every two weeks. But in internal NASA memos that have leaked out, Chief Astronaut John Young charges that safety was sacrificed to "launch-schedule pressure." Young, 55, a highly respected veteran of shuttle or bits and Apollo moon flights, warned of an "awesome" list of safety problems, including a runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center that is too short, too rough and subject to erratic weather. While gliding the 100-ton shuttle into Kennedy rather than onto the dry lake beds at Ed wards Air Force Base in the California desert "may be a wonderful political policy," Young wrote his NASA bosses in January, "it is not an intelligent technical policy." Shuttle Inquiry Commission Member Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate, charged last week that the shuttle blew up because of "hopeless" design flaws in the booster. He blamed "attitudinal problems" in NASA's management.

Some NASA officials have scrambled to pass off blame for the Challenger disaster. The brass at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have been trying to point the finger at Kennedy Space Center for botching the assembly of the solid rocket booster. Marshall's bureaucrats are accused of ignoring the warnings of engineers at Morton Thiokol, maker of the solid rocket booster, to postpone the launch because the cold weather could have damaged the O rings that sealed the segments of the booster. The evasions and backbiting have shocked members of the presidential panel. "A whole new NASA has got to come out of this mess, not only a new solid rocket booster design," says a commission member.

Despite the disclosures of flawed judgment and mismanagement, the families of the dead astronauts have tried to keep faith. Said Astronaut Mike Smith's brother Tony: "I still think NASA knows what it's doing." But the growing evidence that Challenger should not have been sent aloft can be rendered only more painful by the recovery of the astronauts' remains. "It just brings it all back again," says Dr. Marvin Resnik, father of Judith Resnik. The Resniks want no funeral service; they have asked NASA to cremate their daughter's remains and scatter them over the ocean, where Challenger met its end. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral