It was the most complicated machine in human history, with thousands of parts.
If any one of them had failed, the whole thing fails and the crew dies."
Do we walk away?
We want the space program to go on even more.
That’s how we want to honor the memories of our loved ones.
They were all on edge.
“Put on a motorcycle helmet, she said.
Lie on the floor with your legs up on a bed.
it’s possible for you to’t read, it’s possible for you to’t watch television.
You’re strapped down with oxygen lines and wires coming out of your suit.
Lie there for five hours and you’ll know how it feels.”
Today’s delay was an hour and counting.
Overnight, record-setting cold had frosted crops in the orange groves and strawberry fields near Cape Canaveral.
It was chilly on the flight deck Challenger’s cockpit.
Mission specialist Ellison Onizuka said his nose was frozen.
Mission specialist Judith Resnik claimed she had it worse: My butt is dead.
Below them, on the windowless middeck, payload specialist McAuliffe dozed through the latest delay.
Then the radio crackled.
This is NASA tower.
We are planning to come out of this hold on time the best possible news.
Commander Dick Scobee radioed back: Roger.
That’s great."
Six flight-deck windows gave Scobee a panoramic view of cold blue sky.
APUs coming on, he said.
Scobee checked his instrument panel.
Pressure on all three APUs.
Next he confirmed that each crew member was sealing his or her flight helmet.
Welcome to space, guys, he said.
There goes the beanie cap, Scobee said.
“Doesn’t it go the other way?
“God, I hope not … thirty seconds.”
Scobee said, Three at a hundred.
All three engines were at full power.
They were the most powerful rockets ever built.
Astronauts had a saying: Once those SRBs get lit, the stack’s going somewhere.
You just hope it’s the right direction.”
Eight massive bolts held the stack to the launchpad.
Each bolt was wired to an explosive charge.
Within a minute it was moving fifteen times as fast, the speed of a rifle bullet.
The crew held on while the two-billion-dollar shuttle shook and groaned like a rustbucket freighter in a typhoon.
No astronaut-training simulator came close to matching the bone-rattling racket of an actual launch.
But this was the moment she’d been dreaming of for the past year.
Commander Scobee and pilot Smith talked to Mission Control.
Mission specialists Resnik, Onizuka, and McNair had duties of their own.
McAuliffe, America’s Teacher in Space, had nothing to do but hold on.
She had spent four months training for this moment.
They studied the mission’s four-thousand-page flight data file.
Someone had written a greeting on the blackboard: HAVING FUN YET?
Christa personalized her desk with framed photos of her husband, Steve, and their kids.
They’re saving money on us!
A spacewalk was an EVA, short for extravehicular activity.
Gibson was a blond Navy flyer with a bristly mustache.
His favored flaming hooker was a brandy snifter filled to the brim with high-octane liquor and served on fire.
The idea was to finish the drink before it burned part or all of the drinker’s face.
Those who failed got razzed for the Band-Aids and singed mustaches they sported the next day.
Christa and Morgan stuck to beers and margaritas.
Like Christa and Morgan, he knew how it felt to be an outsider among the career astronauts.
Some nights he joined them for a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Are you a publicity stunt?
She thought about that.
It’s a bargain when you think of the students and teachers we’ll reach.
As for teachers salaries, I make a little over twenty thousand dollars.
I think that after twelve years of teaching I should be making more.
Are teachers salaries competitive?
I’m representing my profession, she said.
And she never missed her nightly phone call to Steve and the kids.
I’ll find out, she promised.
She thought the agency probably had a policy, if not an acronym, for amphibians in orbit.
“Not yet, honey.
I still have some homework to do.”
Excerpted fromTHE BURNING BLUE: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA’s Challenger Disasterby Kevin Cook.
To be published June 8 by Henry Holt and Company.
Copyright 2021 by Kevin Cook.
