CAPE KENNEDY, Fla. – This time of year dredges up painful feelings for those involved in the launch of space shuttle Challenger 30 years ago: sadness at the loss of seven astronauts, and speculation about what might have been done to prevent the tragedy.
“When Jan. 28 comes around, it comes back,” said Bob Sieck of Viera, now 77, who was Kennedy Space Center’s director of shuttle operations. “It’s-gee, maybe we could have done better and precluded it, and the guilt that goes with that.”
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News 6 partner Florida Today said NASA on Thursday will mark the 30th anniversary of the explosion that destroyed Challenger 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, after a failure in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster.
Investigators didn’t hold KSC workers responsible for the disaster, but the loss of a crew and an orbiter that they’d helped prepare for launch was a severe blow.
Thirty years later, it is a time for reflection about the astronauts and what future programs can learn from their sacrifice.
To start with: Don’t give up.
“The entire team, you stop and think about the loss, and what the astronauts would want you to do and their families, and that’s to keep going,” said Chris Fairey, a 69-year-old Titusville resident who was then the shuttle project engineer at KSC. “Even though it’s a horrible situation, you hope that they don’t dwell on the bad things but the good things that this agency is trying to do for everyone.”
NASA is preparing to launch astronauts to the International Space Station on private rockets and spacecraft while developing a giant Saturn V-class rocket to return people near the moon.
The vehicles will be very different than shuttles, in many ways simpler and safer, with capsules riding on top of rockets and giving astronauts a chance to escape launch failures.
But recent failures by unmanned SpaceX and Orbital ATK rockets, and a Virgin Galactic test flight fatality, are reminders of a lesson that Challenger brought home: Space flight remains far from routine, despite aspirations to make it more like aviation.
“It’s not a routine business,” said Jim Harrington, 80, of Viera, who oversaw Challenger’s preparations for launch at KSC as the orbiter’s flow director. “You’ve got a lot of forces that act against you when you’re going that fast, particularly in the atmosphere.”
The shuttle was supposed to make space flight routine. After nine missions in 1985, the most in any calendar year, policies called for increasing to as many as 24 flights annually.
Challenger’s 1986 flight was the shuttle program’s 25th mission, and its crew included a civilian, teacher Christa McAuliffe.
Veterans of that period at KSC said they already knew the shuttle was too complex a system to achieve such ambitious flight rates.
But that mismatch between expectations and the reality grasped by people working on the vehicles remains instructive for any space program.
“The program took a step back and looked at itself really hard and said, "We’re going to change direction here, and really do things right,” said Harrington, who, like Sieck, is a former shuttle launch director. “Things had to slow down.”
Senior launch managers were concerned about the cold weather forecast for Challenger’s countdown, when temperatures dropped below freezing.
Apart from warnings about the solid rocket boosters that never reached top levels, teams fretted over the possibility that ice on the launch pad could strike and damage the shuttle.
In hindsight, some launch managers can’t help wondering what might have been if they had followed their gut feelings about the unusual conditions rather than launch criteria that proved flawed.
“We shouldn’t be working to find rationale that it’s OK to fly this thing today in spite of the environmental conditions,” Sieck imagines the team agreeing. “Let’s just call it quits and go for a warmer day. But we didn’t do that.”
Said Fairey: “You can’t get launch fever.”
One key to ensuring that sounds simple enough, but must be ingrained in engineers and technicians at every level and suppliers dispersed around the country or even the world.
“Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that there’s people on top of rocket or the spacecraft, and it’s all about them and their mission,” said Sieck, who serves on the NASA Advisory Council. “I can only hope that the companies out there that are building stuff that goes into future spacecraft and rockets are attuned to that.”
KSC personnel often get to know the astronauts before they fly. The Harringtons became particularly close to Challenger pilot Michael Smith, who visited for dinner and played with their children, once letting their son climb up on the wing of his T-38 training jet.
“He was just a great guy, he really was,” Harrington said. “He was very down to earth, didn’t have any kind of attitude that you might think that, ‘I’m an astronaut.”
Several days after the Challenger accident, after a memorial service in which President Ronald Reagan participated at Johnson Space Center, KSC held its own service.
The final step called for Harrington to board a NASA chopper with the ceremony’s floral wreath. Hovering above the Atlantic Ocean where shuttle debris had fallen, he tossed the wreath into the water.
He couldn’t see it at the time, but later saw a video of what happened next.
A group of dolphins — seven, Harrington says, as if each represented a Challenger crew member rose from the water near the wreath, then swam away.