Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

With more than seventy feeds to choose from, Nesbitt had his regular preferences: “Flight Ops Procedures,” which included data on the shuttle’s engine performance, and the “Trajectory” display, which showed its speed, altitude, and downrange distance. Even with all this at his fingertips, Nesbitt found the live commentary nerve-racking, and practiced often. He took his duty of public service seriously, and hated it when other commentators took flight with flowery language, like Hollywood PR guys. He wanted to play it straight.

And yet, suffering from the effects of a cold he’d picked up the day before, even as the final countdown began, Nesbitt would have welcomed another launch delay: his throat was sore, and he wasn’t certain he could talk through the whole ascent without his voice straining or cracking. He waited in silence for his cue: for the shuttle engines and the giant solid rockets to light; for his counterpart at the Cape to announce that Challenger had cleared the tower.

It was almost exactly 11:38 in the morning when Nesbitt saw the numbers on his screen start to move, and a few seconds later keyed his mic to speak:

“Good roll program confirmed. Challenger now heading downrange.”

At the console position next to him, the flight surgeon—a Navy doctor in full uniform—had her eyes on the big TV set across the room. It was a perfect launch. Challenger was less than half a minute into flight when Nesbitt gave his next update.

“Engines beginning throttling down, now at 94 percent,” he said. “Normal throttle for most of the flight is 104 percent. We’ll throttle down to 65 percent shortly.”

The flight surgeon watched the shuttle climb higher into the cloudless sky over the Atlantic; Nesbitt kept his gaze on the monitors. “Velocity 2,257 feet per second,” he said. “Altitude 4.3 nautical miles, downrange distance three nautical miles.” The numbers all looked good; at sixty-eight seconds, he reported the next key moment on the list in front of him. “Engines are throttling up. Three engines now at 104 percent.”

Ten feet away, down on the next row of consoles, astronaut Richard Covey confirmed the change with the shuttle commander: “Challenger, go at throttle up.”

“Roger, go at throttle up.”

The spacecraft was one minute and ten seconds into flight.

Four seconds later, Nesbitt heard a loud crackle in his headphones.

Beside him, the surgeon saw Challenger abruptly obscured by a ball of orange and white flame.

“What was that?” she said.

But Nesbitt was staring at his monitors.

“One minute fifteen seconds. Velocity 2,900 feet per second,” he said. “Altitude nine nautical miles. Downrange distance seven nautical miles.”

Then Nesbitt looked up, and followed the surgeon’s gaze toward the TV set. Something terrible had happened. There was no sign of Challenger, just the expanding fireball where it had once been—and the exhaust trails of the shuttle’s two booster rockets, twisting in opposite directions across the sky. His console was no help: the data streams had frozen. Around him, the other flight controllers sat stunned, faces slack with shock. No one said a word.

Nesbitt knew he had to speak, but he had no information to explain what he was witnessing. His mind raced. He thought of his responsibility to the public, and to the astronauts’ families. He thought, suddenly, of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life nearly five years before: in the confusion that followed, CBS news anchor Dan Rather had announced that White House press secretary James Brady had been killed—only to discover that Brady, despite the bullet in his head, remained very much alive. Nesbitt didn’t want to make a mistake like that.

A few moments of quiet extended into half a minute. An agonizing silence enveloped the NASA commentary loop; an eternity of dead air. On the TV screen, the cloud drifted in the wind; fragments of debris fluttered toward the ocean. The Flight Director polled his team in vain for answers.

It was forty-one seconds before Steve Nesbitt spoke again.

“Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation,” he said, his voice flat and impassive. “Obviously a major malfunction.”

PART ONE The Last Man on the Moon

CHAPTER ONE FIRE ON PAD 34

Martha Chaffee was in her kitchen, making hot dogs for the kids’ dinner, when she saw Michael Collins at the front door; in that moment she realized she was a widow. The astronauts and their families formed a small, tight group in the neighborhood—“Togethersville,” they called it—and that evening a few of the wives were already gathering in the living room of the Chaffees’ yellow-brick house on Barbuda Lane. Someone had mentioned an accident, but at first there seemed no reason for Martha to worry: the cars pulling up on the street outside could be part of the routine Friday-evening exodus from work. Besides, although Martha’s husband, Roger, was away, training down at Cape Canaveral, he wasn’t even scheduled to fly. Yet now Collins was standing on her doorstep, solemn and alone. There could be only one explanation.

“I know, Mike,” she said. “But you’ve got to tell me.”

She turned, and Collins followed her silently down the narrow hallway. In the den where her two children were watching the TV, someone reached over to turn it off before the news bulletins began. It was January 27, 1967.

At thirty-one, Roger Chaffee was the youngest and most inexperienced of the three astronauts assigned to the crew of Apollo 1—NASA’s first manned test flight in the new rocket program intended to eventually land men on the moon. Dark-haired and good-looking, Chaffee had been an astronaut for a little more than three years, and had yet to fly in space. His rookie status was exaggerated by his baby face, his slight stature, and his archetypal straight-arrow background: a Boy Scout whose obsession with flight started early, building model planes with his barnstorming pilot father; a punctilious Navy aviator with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Purdue, where he had met Martha, the college homecoming queen; a devoted husband who drew up the blueprints for their home in Houston, and liked to relax by building his own rifles and making ammunition, which he carried on weekend hunting trips. The mission commander, veteran astronaut Gus Grissom—the second American in space, a short, plainspoken forty-year-old test pilot with a reputation for drinking and skirt-chasing—told reporters that Chaffee was “a great boy”; over the months they spent training together, the younger man showed his admiration for his commander by adopting parts of Grissom’s distinctive body language and salty vocabulary, an affectation so incongruous that Chaffee’s friends often teased him about it. The final member of the crew was the senior pilot, Ed White, another veteran astronaut and a lithe athlete whose image had been stamped on the consciousness of the nation when he became the first American to make a space walk, leaving the capsule of Gemini IV to drift high over the Pacific Ocean, tethered only by a gilded umbilical cord feeding him oxygen.

By the time Chaffee, White, and Grissom learned of their assignment to fly Apollo 1—in which they planned to spend up to fourteen days in Earth orbit, giving them time to check out the many complex new systems developed to take later missions to the moon and back—the space race with the Soviet Union was entering a white-knuckle phase. At the moment in May 1961 when President Kennedy had committed the country to land an American on the moon before the end of the decade, the recently established National Aeronautics and Space Administration had not yet managed to put a human being into Earth orbit, but instead suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of the Soviets. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space just the month before.

But over the next five years, a growing team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, engaged in a project of experimental engineering on a scale nearly unprecedented in history, achieved a series of developmental leaps that enabled NASA to close the gap with the Soviet program: in February 1962 John Glenn became the first American in orbit, helping to make him and the other six astronauts of the Mercury program into national heroes; in June 1965, Ed White embarked on his spectacular space walk, and later that year the crews of Gemini VI and Gemini VII made the first successful orbital rendezvous. In June 1966, Surveyor 1, a three-legged robot spacecraft, made the first American controlled landing on the lunar surface and transmitted more than eleven thousand photographs back to Mission Control in Houston. The prospect of eventually following Surveyor with a manned mission no longer seemed entirely out of reach. Even so, the obstacles to sending men to walk on the moon and then returning them safely to Earth remained daunting. Although Kennedy’s final deadline to do so lay just three years away, the technology necessary to accomplish the task—the massive Saturn V rockets, the Apollo capsules that would carry the three-man crew across 250,000 miles of deep space to their destination, and the delicate, insect-like lander intended to deliver two of them to the lunar surface—was still being designed and built. And the process was proving fraught with problems.

As the summer of 1966 drew to a close, Chaffee, Grissom, and White flew to California to attend a conference with senior NASA engineers and North American Aviation, the contractor responsible for building their spacecraft—and one of thousands of private corporations hired by the government to design and manufacture the hardware for the lunar program. The meeting was held in a low fieldstone building amid the sprawling complex of hangars and industrial spaces at the company’s Downey plant, ten miles east of Los Angeles International Airport. Formally known as the Customer Acceptance Readiness Review, the conference was intended to be the final step before North American shipped the crew’s Apollo capsule to Florida for handover to NASA. Work had been slow, and the contractor’s final testing of the capsule wasn’t complete. But Joe Shea, who ran the Apollo spacecraft program, told everyone that he intended to go through with the review anyway. Shea—arrogant, charismatic, and a gifted systems engineer—had been hired years earlier as an enforcer to help integrate the numerous moving parts of the moon program, someone who could both handle the demands of its management and understand the finest details of its experimental technology. With his compulsion for puns, his trademark red socks, and his relentless dedication to the job, Shea had won the admiration of his staff and built a public profile as a spokesman for NASA that would soon approach that of the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, father of the US space program.

The list of enduring problems with Chaffee, Grissom, and White’s capsule, known as Spacecraft 012, was long, and the crew had become intimately familiar with its deficiencies during previous visits to the Downey plant. Many of the astronauts were not merely skilled pilots, but technicians with expertise and advanced qualifications in aeronautical engineering and celestial mechanics. From the very beginning, they recognized that they were placing their lives in the hands of government contractors who were often inventing the technology of space travel as they went along. When asked what he was thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury-Redstone rocket, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had infamously replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”

Now all of the Apollo astronauts were involved in helping devise design changes and revisions to the equipment that would carry them toward the moon. Gus Grissom rarely let Spacecraft 012 out of his sight: during all of 1966, Grissom’s son Mark reckoned he spent no more than eighteen days at home with his family. And, in private, the Apollo 1 commander was deeply concerned by what he saw at Downey: poor design and shoddy workmanship plagued the capsule. To the astronauts, half the staff at the California plant seemed diligent and careful—but the other half were clueless and incompetent. Roger Chaffee challenged the North American engineers over the faults he found, and sketched out possible solutions on the factory floor. But some of the most serious failings of the spacecraft were persistent and intractable. The environmental control system—which supplied oxygen and maintained the temperature inside the capsule—was prone to leaks of ethylene glycol solution, and had already caught fire in one test. The thick bundles of electrical wiring that snaked through the interior of the spacecraft were badly installed, and their insulation often frayed, increasing the risk of sparks and short circuits in the cabin. The main hatch was a clumsy, three-layer design that opened inward into the cramped cockpit, and—unlike those on the earlier Mercury and Gemini capsules—could not be jettisoned in an emergency by explosive charges. Instead, it required Ed White, lying prone in the middle of the three crew couches, to reach behind his head and use a ratchet handle to operate a mechanism securing the six latches holding it shut. Even under ideal circumstances, it would take three men between forty and seventy seconds to open the hatches and get out of the spacecraft. Almost without exception, the Apollo astronauts detested the hatch design, and had lobbied to have it replaced with one that could be quickly and easily opened from the inside. Joe Shea refused. “Too much money and not enough time,” he told them.

Leading the Acceptance Readiness Review meeting for Spacecraft 012—surrounded at the conference table by the crew, the North American executives, and colleagues from NASA including spacecraft designer Max Faget, Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft, and more than a dozen officials from Houston—Shea was upbeat and lighthearted. Talk was punctuated by laughter and wisecracks. The major faults with the spacecraft were not on the agenda, and the discussion focused mainly on a succession of minor glitches or issues that had been discussed before. Nevertheless, the meeting wound on for six hours. At one point late in the day, their attention turned to the question of flammable materials in the cockpit. Since the beginning of the space program, astronauts had used nylon netting and strips of Velcro glued to the walls of the spacecraft to corral checklists and pieces of equipment that might otherwise fall beneath their couches during tests, or float around in zero gravity. And the cabin of Spacecraft 012 was no exception: it was festooned with Velcro installed at the request of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. But all of it was flammable. This was a long-standing concern for the NASA engineers not just because of the risks of a fire breaking out in space—they still had no idea how flames might behave in zero gravity, and attempts to develop a workable fire extinguisher for use in orbit had come to nothing—but because the cockpit atmosphere was composed of pure oxygen, pressurized at launch to more than sixteen pounds per square inch.

Pure oxygen—rather than a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen similar to air—had been used in space capsules by NASA since the Mercury days, for both engineering and medical reasons. The designers regarded the equipment necessary to create a mixed-gas environment as too heavy and complex to carry into space, and flight surgeons feared that an astronaut breathing nitrogen and oxygen might suffer decompression sickness—the “bends”—if the capsule lost cabin pressure in orbit. And although in pure oxygen, fire spreads more quickly and burns more fiercely than in air, at first the risks seemed manageable. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the one-man Mercury capsules were so small that any fire starting inside would burn up the available oxygen supply in a few seconds and then extinguish itself. But the three-man Apollo cabin was almost six times larger than the Mercury capsule, with a corresponding increase in the danger of fire. So, at first, the contractors at North American planned to use a mixed-gas atmosphere. However, NASA’s then head of the spacecraft program disagreed, insisting once again on pure oxygen, leading to a heated meeting in which he confronted his opposite number at North American. The two managers began shouting at each other until, at last, the NASA official ended the argument. “You are the contractor,” he said. “You do as you’re told. Period.”

The agency understood the potential consequences of this decision. In July 1963, an internal NASA document reported that, in tests of the pure-oxygen atmosphere, “[i]t has been observed that a number of otherwise nonflammable materials, even human skin, will burst into flame.” But in the complex web of engineering compromises necessary to build a capsule light and practical enough to carry three men to the moon, on an almost impossible deadline, but without unduly endangering the lives of the crew, this was deemed an “acceptable risk.” The contingency plan outlined in the 1963 document was simple: “Fires in the spacecraft must be precluded at all costs.”

The regulations governing flammable materials in the cockpit of Apollo 1 were strict: none were permitted within four inches of any potential source of ignition, including the approximately fifteen miles of problematic wiring, 640 switches, indicators, computer controls, and circuit breakers that filled the capsule. So when the Readiness Review meeting in Downey considered the question, Joe Shea engaged in a few minutes of back-and-forth with the North American engineers before repeating the rules and issuing an instruction: “Walk through the goddamned spacecraft,” he said—and clean up all the Velcro and anything else that might feed a potential fire. A minor issue, easily addressed.

Finally, as the review wound down, Gus Grissom asked for the floor, and from a large envelope pulled two prints of a photograph. It showed him, Chaffee, and White sitting at a small table on which rested a scale model of the Apollo capsule. Facing it, the three astronauts had bowed their heads and pressed their hands together, as if in prayer, offering supplication to a higher power. Grissom handed one print as a souvenir to the executive in charge of North American’s Space Division. “We have one for Joe Shea also,” Grissom said. “Joe advised us to practice our backup procedures religiously, so here we are practicing.”

Laughter filled the room. Grissom handed the picture down the table to Shea, who saw that the three astronauts had each signed the print, and added a personal inscription: “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

At the outset of 1967, Joe Shea was on the verge of becoming a celebrity. He was already in demand as a public speaker, and hobnobbing with CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite. Now the editors of Time magazine were preparing a cover story on him timed to coincide with the launch of the first manned Apollo mission. But the spacecraft was still far from ready. It had arrived in Cape Canaveral from the North American plant in Downey on schedule, but half finished: accompanied by spare parts and uninstalled hardware, and a roster of tests that should have been conducted in California, but remained incomplete. The environmental control system continued to cause problems, threatening a major launch delay. The service module, which contained the spacecraft’s main engine, was damaged during testing. And the Velcro and nylon netting added to the cabin by the astronauts had not been removed as Shea had instructed; instead, there was more of it than ever in the cockpit.

In early October, Shea had received a letter from Hilliard Paige, a senior executive at the Missile and Space Division of General Electric, advising NASA on spacecraft safety issues. Paige had recently witnessed a combustion test conducted by one of his staff on samples of Velcro in a pure-oxygen environment. He had watched, aghast, as the material ignited in a flash and was abruptly consumed by flames. The technician told Paige that he had tried bringing the issue to NASA, but had found it hard to get their attention. Paige made his fears explicit: “I do not think it technically prudent to be unduly influenced by the ground and flight success history of Mercury and Gemini under a 100 percent oxygen environment,” he wrote. “The first fire in a spacecraft may well be fatal.”

In response, Shea delegated the issue to a deputy, who, held up by the thicket of other problems with the program, took seven weeks to respond, but finally assured his boss that newly completed risk assessments indicated they had little to worry about. Shea sent Paige a letter reassuring the GE executive that NASA engineers were working on the issue, and enclosed a copy of the new assessment. But in a handwritten postscript Shea revealed his own concerns. “The problem is sticky,” he wrote. “We think we have enough margin to keep fire from starting—if one ever does, we do have problems.”

At the same time, Gus Grissom had become increasingly angry about the condition of Spacecraft 012—and the flight simulator on which he and the crew were supposed to be training—as the launch date neared. He worried that both his crew and the technicians were distracted, in too much of a hurry to get off the ground, and that fundamental safety issues were being neglected. And it was growing obvious to almost everyone involved that the Apollo 1 vehicle was simply not in a state to fly: if Spacecraft 012 were a horse, one former NASA official observed, it would have been shot. Yet Grissom felt his warnings were going unheard. The NASA managers and astronauts alike were in the grip of what they would later recognize as “ ‘Go’ Fever”—the desperate drive to push on toward a launch and keep to the schedule, regardless of the problems, in the belief that if they just kept going they could fix all the faults along the way. This seat-of-the-pants approach had worked so far, with the triumphs of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which—despite some close calls—had progressed without a single serious accident. And now, with the deadline for a successful moon landing so close, “ ‘Go’ Fever” was more virulent than ever. When Grissom’s friend and fellow astronaut John Young asked the mission commander why he didn’t complain more stridently about the poor wiring inside the Apollo capsule, Grissom was blunt: “If I say anything about it, they’ll fire me.”

At the end of November 1966, the persistent problems with the spacecraft pushed back the expected launch date of Apollo 1 into the new year, and NASA announced that the schedule of subsequent flights was sliding back; one mission was canceled altogether. But in public, Grissom stifled his worries about Apollo’s first manned flight. In a round of end-of-year TV interviews intended by NASA to help build public support for the space program, he projected confidence that the mission was on track; only when answering a question about what would constitute a successful flight did he hint at his true feelings: “As far as we’re concerned, it’s success if all three of us get back,” he said. Most of those listening assumed he was joking.

With Christmas approaching, the three men returned to their families in Houston. Roger Chaffee learned that the ingenious illuminated display he had created in his front yard—topped with Santa and his reindeer galloping over the roof of the house—had won first prize in the Nassau Bay Garden Club competition for holiday decorations. On Christmas Day, he gave Martha a special Apollo pin he and his crewmates had designed to commemorate their flight. The astronauts had intended to take the pins on their mission and hand one over to each of their wives as a surprise on their return from space. But the three men had grown impatient, and made them Christmas gifts instead. By the new year, they had devised new mementos to carry into orbit for their wives: three gold charms, tiny replicas of the Apollo 1 spacecraft, each made unique by the setting of a single diamond representing the position the astronauts would occupy in the capsule: Grissom on the left; White in the center; and Chaffee on the right.

It was shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon on January 27 when the three astronauts stepped out of the elevator onto the scarlet-painted gantry of Pad 34 for a practice countdown, the full dress rehearsal of the launch of Apollo 1 known as the “plugs-out test.” Almost two hundred feet below them, the newly completed access roads of the sprawling Cape Canaveral Launch Complex stretched back toward the domed concrete Launch Control Blockhouse and, beyond that, to the ocean. The Atlantic glittered turquoise in the hard Florida light.