Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 26 Challenger

After waking on January 28, I flipped on the TV to see what was happening with Challenger. The STS-51L countdown was running two hours late. I had plenty of time for my morning run so I dressed in my sweats and stepped into the crystalline twilight.

Few cities in America are more beautifully sited than Los Alamos, New Mexico. Set on a shoulder of a dormant volcano at an elevation of 7,200 feet, it commands a godly view of the Rio Grande Valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. The city is built upon multiple mesas separated by dramatic mini-grand canyons. The soil is soft volcanic tuff and eons of erosion have sculpted the terrain into bizarre and breathtaking shapes.

While Los Alamos was a joy for the eye, it was a pain for the lungs. In its thin air I was unable to keep the pace I regularly ran at sea level and I throttled back to a more leisurely jog. The dawn was pinking the eastern sky while a nearly full moon graced the west. I steered myself on a path through a forest of ponderosa pine, the scent of their needles perfuming the air. A herd of white-tailed deer, long accustomed to humans, didn’t bolt at my appearance.

I ran for half an hour and then dropped into a cool-down walk, enjoying a moment of total contentment as I did so. I was in top physical condition. I was a veteran astronaut. I was in line for a second spaceflight, a fantastic second flight. There were probably no more than six or seven missions between me and polar orbit. I could easily visualize Discovery on the Vandenberg pad, now that I had a photo on my office wall of Enterprise on the same pad.[5] Several months earlier NASA had airlifted that orbiter to Vandenberg for a pad fit-check and the photos taken had captured her as Discovery would soon be seen, standing vertical against a backdrop of California hills. It was an image that set my soul soaring.

After a shower and breakfast, I rendezvoused with the rest of the crew and drove to the lab to meet the principal investigators of our payloads. By now Challenger’s launch was only a few minutes away, so we delayed our training to watch it. We knew this launch, unlike other recent ones, would be covered on TV because of the public’s interest in schoolteacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe.

I couldn’t sit down. As a rookie, I had been fearful while viewing shuttle launches. Now, I held a veteran’s terror for what was at hand. I nervously paced behind the others. The TV talking heads focused on Christa, showing clips of her in training, then live shots of her students awaiting the blastoff. There was a carnival atmosphere among the children.

As the NASA PR voice gave the final ten seconds of the countdown, I was in prayer-overdrive, begging God for a successful launch. My motivation wasn’t all selfless: There were still a thousand things that could come between me and my Vandenberg mission, and STS-51L was one of them. Another pad abort or, God forbid, an abort into Africa or Europe would have a serious impact on the launch schedule. The ripples of delay would push 62A even farther to the right.

At T-0 the SRBs blossomed fire and Challenger was on her way. The TV only covered a moment of ascent and then cut to the trivia of the morning. Bob Crippen spun the dial to other stations hoping for more coverage but there was none. Even the novelty of a schoolteacher couldn’t buy NASA more than a minute of airtime.

We turned off the TV and gave our attention to a principal investigator of an experiment that would be in our cargo bay. As we were about to follow him to the hardware, Jerry Ross decided to give the TV another shot, “Maybe they’ll have an update on the launch.” He turned it on. What we saw immediately shocked us to silence. Challenger’s destruction had already occurred. We were seeing a replay of the horror. We watched the vehicle disintegrate into an orange-and-white ball. The SRBs twisted erratically in the sky. Streamers of smoke arced toward the sea.

For several heartbeats there was not a sound in the room. Then the exclamations came. “God, no!” Guy Gardner bowed his head and cried visible tears. I just stared in a dazed silence. Most of the others did the same. A few of the lab personnel wondered aloud if the crew had bailed out. I answered their question. “There’s no ejection system on the space shuttle. They’re lost.”

The TV focused on Christa McAuliffe’s parents. They were in bleachers in the press area and appeared merely confused. I could read the question on their faces: Are the smoke patterns in the sky part of a normal launch? Their daughter was already dead and they didn’t know. I silently cursed the press for continuing to focus on them. It was the ultimate obscenity of that terrible morning.

I phoned Donna. She was sobbing. Even though the NASA PR announcer was only saying it was a major malfunction, she was familiar enough with the shuttle design to know it had no escape system. I didn’t have to tell her the crew was dead. I suggested she pick up the kids from school. The press was going to be everywhere and I didn’t want them shoving a camera in their faces. “Just keep them at home.” I told her to expect me that afternoon. I knew we wouldn’t be staying in Los Alamos.

I next called my mom and dad in Albuquerque. Dad, the big-hearted, sensitive Irishman, was crying. As always my mom was unbendable iron. I knew she was dying inside, but there was no way she could verbalize those feelings.

As expected, Crippen wanted to get back to Houston as quickly as possible. We drove to the Los Alamos airport and took the lab charter flight to Albuquerque. Within an hour of our arrival there, we were in our ’38s headed home. I was in Crippen’s backseat, in the lead aircraft of the three-ship formation.

As we climbed to altitude, ATC cleared us direct to Ellington Field and added, “NASA flight, please accept our condolences.” I was certain those same sympathies were being offered to NASA crews everywhere as they hurried home. The entire nation was grieving.

The rest of our flight continued in silence. At each ATC handover the new controller would offer a few words of comfort and then leave us alone. There was no chatter among our formation on our company frequency. Crippen was silent on the intercom. We were each cocooned in our cockpits, alone with our grief. I watched the contrails of the other ’38s streaming away in billowing white and prayed for the Challenger crew and their families.

My thoughts returned to the last time I had seen the crew—before they entered health quarantine—more than two weeks ago. I passed them on their way to a simulation. Each wore the thousand-watt smiles of Prime Crew. I shook their hands and wished them good luck and added a hug for Judy. With my arms around her I whispered, “Watch out for hair-eating cameras.” She laughed. It was the last I would see of her and the others. Now, their shredded bodies were somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic. Friends whose joyous faces I had watched only two weeks ago were now being discussed by the TV talking heads as “remains.” I could feel Judy’s arms on my back and her hair brushing my cheek in that last hug. Now those arms, that hair, her smile were gone. They were just…remains. Though I’d known it would happen to some of us one day, I still could not come to grips with the reality of it. They were gone. Forever.

My only comfort was in my belief that their deaths had been mercifully quick, the instantaneous death we all hope for when our time comes. In one heartbeat they had been feeling the rumble of max-q (maximum aerodynamic pressure) and watching the sky fade to black and anticipating the beauty of space and then…death. I was so certain of it. How could anybody have survived the ET explosion? The cockpit was only a few feet from it. There were more than a million pounds of propellant still remaining in the tank when it detonated. The explosion must have destroyed the cockpit and everything in it. The more I dwelled on it, the more certain I was. They died instantly. I would later learn how wrong I was.

My thoughts drifted to the cause of the disaster. The video replays on TV showed fire flickering near the base of the orbiter just before vehicle destruction. Had an SSME come apart as so many of us had feared would one day happen? I was certain the SRBs had nothing to do with the disaster. They were seen flying after the breakup. It was to be expected their flight would be unguided and erratic, but other than that they appeared fine. Again, I would be proven wrong on all counts.

I asked Crippen what he thought had caused the tragedy. “I don’t know. But whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.”

He was right. Whatever it was, the same mechanism of death had been with all of us on every mission. How close had it come to killing me on STS-41D? A second? A millisecond? Had the Challenger SSME that failed (and I was sure one of them had exploded) been one of the engines powering Discovery on my first mission? It was entirely possible. The engines were frequently interchanged among orbiters.

As I fell deeper into melancholy another thought wiggled its way to the fore. I hated that I couldn’t keep it at bay but, like smoke under a door, it crept in to choke off every other thought. What was Challenger’s loss going to do to me? To ask such a question at this moment defined me as one sick bastard but try as I might, I could not stop it. I suspected every other TFNG was similarly stricken. Would the shuttle ever fly again? I thought of my morning run and how perfect my future had seemed, with images of polar orbit spaceflight filling my brain. Now those images blurred like a mirage.

Our flight entered the Ellington landing pattern, each pilot following Crippen’s peal-off “break” to circle for touchdown. As we were marshaled to a parking spot, I searched the guest waiting area, expecting to see someone from the press. I dreaded the thought of speaking to them. But the only person to greet us was Donna. Crying, she walked to the side of the jet and rushed into my arms.

At home my fourteen-year-old daughter, Laura, informed me that someone from the newspaper had called and when she told them I was out of town they interviewed her. I was outraged. They had taken advantage of her naïveté to ask questions about my STS-41D experiences with Judy. “Daddy, they asked me how you felt when you saw Challenger blow up.” It was a good thing I hadn’t fielded that question. I could imagine the answer that might have leaped from my mouth. I had already passed the denial phase of grieving and had entered the anger phase. I told the kids to let the answering machine take the calls. I didn’t want to speak to anybody in the press.

That evening there were church services throughout Clear Lake City. Donna, the kids, and I went to our parish church, St. Bernadette’s. It was packed. I wasn’t the only astronaut parishioner. There were a few others. Our friends and neighbors came to us and sobbed their condolences. Complete strangers did the same. The grief was beyond anything I would have ever predicted.

At the request of some of the parish members, my son had put together a slide and music show to play as people entered the church. Pachelbel’s Canon and Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” accompanied slides depicting shuttle launches, spacewalkers, and other space scenes. There was a slide from STS-41D showing a grinning Judy with her cannon-cleaner weightless hair. When it appeared on screen, people were overcome, laughing and sobbing at the same moment. Watch out for hair-eating cameras. The slide resurrected from my memory the words I had spoken to her two weeks earlier. I closed my eyes. I wanted to cry, like the others around me, but I couldn’t. That gene just wasn’t in me. I was my mother.

The next day Donna and I drove to visit the widows. We first went to June Scobee’s home. The street in front of her house was a mob scene. A large crowd of the curious filled the neighbors’ driveways and lawns. The elevated microwave poles of news vans provided a beacon that drew a slow current of cars through the neighborhood streets. Power cables crisscrossed sidewalks. Technicians shouldered cameras and framed their news reporters with the Scobee home in the background. It would have been chaos but for a contingent of local and NASA police who kept everybody from June’s front door. Several NASA PR personnel were teamed with the police to recognize and allow astronauts and other NASA VIPs to enter the home. Donna and I were waved through the cordon.

The house was filled with family, friends, and several other astronauts and wives. June was the picture of exhaustion, her face puffy and tear-stained. She and Donna hugged for a long moment, each crying into the neck of the other. As they parted, I embraced June, clumsily mumbling my sympathies then fading out of the scene as another visitor came to her. I observed how much better the women were at handling the situation. They easily conversed with June. The men mimicked my awkward performance—a quick hug, a few words, and then escape to a corner where they fidgeted uncomfortably.

The rest of the day was a blur of grieving women and children as we made our rounds to the other widows. Lorna Onizuka was incapacitated by her loss. She refused to see anybody and rumors circulated that she had not given up hope that the crew would be found alive somewhere.

A few days after the tragedy, I flew to Akron, Ohio, for a memorial service for Judy. Most of the astronaut office made the trip. On the flight Mike Coats astounded us with news on the cause of the disaster. “It was a failure of the O-rings on the bottom joint on the right side SRB. There’s video of fire leaking from the booster.” He had been appointed to the accident board and had seen the films at KSC. Just by happenstance the video had been recorded by a camera whose signal was not being fed to the networks. Nobody at the LCC or MCC had been aware of the leak. We were all stunned. The SRBs had never been a major concern to us. So much for being certain an SSME had failed, I thought.

Mike also recounted his disgust with how the families had been handled immediately after the disaster. He had encountered them in the crew quarters three hours after Challenger’s destruction. They were clamoring to return to Houston but NASA was holding them at KSC, supposedly to retrieve their luggage from the condos for the return flight. But Mike didn’t believe it. “The women said they didn’t care about the luggage. They wanted to leave immediately. They were being held so Vice President Bush could fly to the cape and offer the nation’s condolences.” He sarcastically added, “The wives had to cool their heels so the VP could feel better.” I didn’t blame Bush—his intentions had been noble. But the incident was just another example of how useless NASA HQ was when it came to standing up to politicians. They should have explained the situation to the White House and immediately flown the wives to Houston. The VP could have consoled them there.

Judy’s hometown memorial service was held at Akron’s Temple Israel. A photo of her replaced a casket. Death in the arena of high-performance flight frequently left only that, a memory. Judy and the others had been perpetually frozen in their vibrant youth.

Judith Arlene Resnik, dead at age thirty-six, was eulogized into a person I didn’t recognize, as heroic as Joan of Arc and flawless as the Virgin Mary. In multiple Houston ceremonies I had heard the same glowing praise bestowed on the other crewmembers. I excused the excess. It was the perfection the living always demand of their fallen heroes and heroines.

As I listened to Hebrew prayers being said for my friends, guilt rose in my soul. Every astronaut shared in the blame for this tragedy. We had gone along with things we knew were wrong—flying without an escape system and carrying passengers. The fact that our silence had been motivated by fear for our careers now seemed a flimsy excuse. There were eleven children who would never again see a parent.

The news of NASA’s and Thiokol’s bungling of the O-ring problem quickly reached the astronaut office and had a predictable effect. We were bitterly angry and disgusted with our management. How could they have ignored the warnings? In our criticisms we conveniently forgot our own mad thirst for flight. If NASA management had reacted to the O-ring warnings as they should have and grounded the shuttle for thirty-two months to redesign and test the SRB (the time it took to return the shuttle program to flight after Challenger), some of the loudest complaints would have come from astronauts. We were as guilty of injecting into the system a sense of urgency to keep flying as the NASA manager who had answered the Thiokol engineers’ worries with “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?” Only janitors and cafeteria workers at NASA were blameless in the deaths of the Challenger Seven.

After the White House learned of the O-ring history, it concluded there was no way NASA could conduct an impartial investigation into itself. President Reagan ordered the formation of the Roger’s Commission to take over the investigation. (The commission was named for its chairman, former attorney general William P. Rogers.) As I followed their reports, I learned that my rookie flight, STS-41D, had been one of the fourteen O-ring near misses. In fact it had been the first to record a heat blow-by past a primary O-ring. As Bob Crippen had said, “Whatever it was, we’ve all ridden it.” I wondered why STS-51L had been lost and not 41D? Would the “bump” of just one more max-q shock wave on Discovery’s flight have opened the SRB joint seal enough for total O-ring failure and death? Only God knew that answer. But on August 30, 1984, the breeze from Death’s scythe had fanned my cheek.

In the weeks after Challenger I went to work each morning wondering why. I had nothing to do. A handful of astronauts were appointed to support the Roger’s Commission but I wasn’t one of them. My phone rarely rang. There were no payload review meetings to attend, no simulations to fill the hours. In the astronaut office safe was a preliminary copy of my classified STS-62A payload operations checklist, something I had been devouring in my pre-Challenger life. But now it sat abandoned. I saw no reason to continue my training for the Vandenberg mission. It was obvious the shuttle would not fly for a very long time and when it did it wouldn’t be from California. Rumor had it the USAF was going to bail out of the shuttle program altogether and go back to their expendable rockets. They had never been fans of launching their satellites on the shuttle in the first place. Congress had rammed that program down their throats. The air force had rightly argued that when expendable rockets blew up, they could be fixed and returned to flight status within months, whereas the human life issue of manned vehicles could delay their return to flight for years. During that lengthy delay national defense could be jeopardized. That was exactly where Challenger had put the air force. It was easy to believe the rumors that the air force was going to walk away from their investment in the Vandenberg shuttle pad.

There was also a very big technical reason Vandenberg was dead. Because rockets being launched into polar orbit lose the boost effect of the eastward spin of the Earth, they cannot carry as much payload as eastward-launched KSC rockets. To recover some of that payload penalty, NASA had developed lightweight, filament-wound SRBs for use on Vandenberg missions. If Thiokol had been unable to seal a steel booster, the thinking went, how much more difficult would it be to seal one made of spun filament and glue? No one expected the lightweight Vandenberg SRBs to be certified now. The space shuttle would never see polar orbit, and neither would I. I removed the Vandenberg photo from my wall and placed it in the bottom drawer of my desk. I didn’t want to be reminded.

It was impossible to escape the torment that was Challenger. In a walk down the hall my eyes would catch the 51L office nameplates. On a visit to the mail room I encountered the staff moving the Challenger crew photos to the “Deceased Astronauts” cabinet. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stand there and just weep. But the Pettigrew in me denied that release.

The flight surgeon’s office informed everybody that Dr. McGuire—one of the psychiatrists who had interviewed us during our TFNG medical screening, in what now seemed like a different life—would be available for counseling. Some of the wives sought his therapy, Donna included. Most people in my mental condition would have jumped at the opportunity for some help. But most people were not astronauts. I was dyed through and through with the military aviator’s ethos that psychiatrists were for the weak. I was an astronaut. I was iron. So I held it all in. If I could hold an enema for fifteen minutes, I could hold all this in and deal with it myself. I would cure myself of depression or survivor’s guilt or post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever it was that ailed me…probably all of the above.

Six weeks after Challenger, NASA announced they had found the crew cockpit wreckage in eighty-five feet of water. It contained human remains. I had been hoping the wreckage would never be found, that the cockpit and crew had been atomized at water impact. If it had been me, that’s how I would have wanted it. Let the Atlantic be my grave. But as shallow as the wreckage rested, NASA had no option but to pull it up. Otherwise it would eventually be snagged on a fishing net or discovered by a recreational diver.

Having been at an aircraft crash site, I suspected the condition of the remains was horrific. The cockpit had been sheared from the rest of Challenger, and after a 60,000-foot fall had impacted the water at its terminal velocity of nearly 250 miles per hour. At that speed the Atlantic would have been as unyielding as solid earth. I couldn’t imagine the remains would allow the pathologists to learn anything. And I was equally certain nothing relevant to the tragedy would be discovered on the voice recorder, even if it was in good enough condition to be read. Dick Scobee’s “Go at throttle up” was uttered only a couple seconds prior to breakup and there was nothing out of the ordinary in his call. Obviously he and the rest of the crew were unaware of their problem. And nothing could have been recorded after breakup because the recorder lost electrical power and stopped at that instant. Not that there would have been anything to record. I remained convinced the crew had been killed outright or rendered unconscious when Challenger fragmented.

After the remains were removed, TFNG Mike Coats and several other astronauts examined the wreckage. Mike returned to Houston with the comment, “The cockpit looks like aluminum foil that had been crushed into a ball.” It was largely unrecognizable as a cockpit, a fact that didn’t surprise me. He added, “I saw a few strands of Judy’s hair in the wreckage…and I found her necklace.” He didn’t have to say any more. I knew the necklace. Judy always wore it…a gold chain with a charm displaying the two-finger-and-thumb sign language symbol for “I love you.” She had a hearing-impaired family member and the necklace was a display of her support for those with similar handicaps. The image Mike’s words conjured would not leave me. Like the flash of a camera, I continued to see it no matter where I looked—the crushed cockpit, Judy’s hair, her necklace.

The remains were held at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for pathologists to identify. A few weeks later I watched NASA’s TV broadcast as a procession of hearses drove onto the KSC runway and unloaded seven flag-draped caskets. Each was accompanied by an astronaut. A military honor guard reverently carried the remains into the belly of an air force C-141 transport aircraft. There was no dialogue to accompany the TV footage. The silence made the images even more heartrending. The camera followed the plane as it rolled down the runway and receded to just a dot in the sky. The Challenger crew was finally returning to their families.

On May 19 a horse-drawn caisson slowly bore the remains of Dick Scobee toward his final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery. The day was sultry and the air tinted with the odor of horse dung and freshly mowed grass. A military band, playing a medley of patriotic arrangements, led our procession. A formation of skin-headed GI pallbearers, dressed in mirror-polished livery, marched with them. Another group of buzz-cut soldiers bore the American flag and other standards streaming blue and red battle ribbons. Rivulets of sweat poured into their eyes from under their headgear, but they did not break the precision of their march to wipe it away. The astronaut corps and a handful of our spouses trailed the entourage. Between music selections the drummer maintained a solo staccato. The clop of hooves on the cobblestone mingled with the tapping of the women’s heels to compete with the drummer’s cadence. A symphony of other mournful sounds tugged at the heart: the choking sobs of women, the creak of the caisson, the groan of the leather tack, the jingle of a bridle.

The chaplain conducted a brief graveside service. Then an honor guard fired a rapid three-shot rifle salute, each shot punctuated by the metallic tinkle of the ejected brass. The young children and some of the adults startled visibly at the loudness of the firings. Other soldiers lifted the flag from the casket and folded it with machinelike precision. It was handed to George Abbey, who, in turn, presented it to June Scobee. A flight of four NASA T-38s zoomed into view in fingertip formation. Over the grave the number-two pilot jerked his plane upward and disappeared into the clouds leaving the missing man gap. Then the play of “Taps” drew out a new wave of sobs.

My grief wasn’t refreshed in any way by the scene. It couldn’t be. I had reached my limits of that emotion. But as the notes of “Taps” floated in the air I was stirred anew in my anger at NASA management. This should have never happened. It was completely preventable. There had been four years of warnings.

I wondered if any of them at that grave felt culpable. I suspected those who knew nothing of the O-ring problem, and most at JSC and HQ had not, felt they were off the responsibility hook. In my book they were not. It wasn’t an O-ring failure that brought us to this Arlington service. That was merely a symptom. The real failure was in the leadership of NASA. Over many years it had allowed the agency to degenerate into a loose confederation of independent fiefdoms. As proof of that, the Roger’s Commission was finding that many at MSFC had been aware of the O-ring issue, but the problem had not been communicated to the appropriate offices at HQ and JSC, including Young’s and Abbey’s offices. Neither did the Thiokol engineers’ eleventh-hour worries about launching in cold temperature get to the launch director at KSC. And astronaut concerns about the lack of an escape system and the passenger program were unknown to NASA’s senior management, of that I was certain. NASA was filled with incredibly talented people, some of the world’s best. But the agency lacked the leadership necessary to bind everyone together into an effective and safe team. The NASA administrators were largely budget lobbyists beholden to the White House and Congress. They didn’t lead NASA. They certainly didn’t lead me. I couldn’t recall any administrator ever visiting the astronaut office to solicit our opinions. I had heard one TFNG grumble, “We should fly every new NASA administrator on a shuttle mission. Maybe if they had the shit scared out of them they’d be more beholden to us.” That was a part-timer program I would endorse.

“Who led NASA?” was the question. Nobody. That’s why we were standing in Arlington listening to “Taps” for Dick Scobee. It was even a mystery to me who led my fiefdom. Who was in charge at JSC? George Abbey seemed to be absolute ruler of his own little duchy. Even now, a previously planned new astronaut selection was still rolling along. The shuttle wouldn’t fly again for years. Why bring in more astronauts now? We couldn’t understand why the JSC director or NASA HQ didn’t order a stop to it. It was more proof to us that when it came to anything associated with astronauts, everybody, including the JSC director and NASA administrator, worked for Abbey. He didn’t answer to anybody. How many other similarly independent fiefdoms existed within NASA? What were their kings like? What frustrations burdened their serfs? I could only speak of my own. Lack of leadership at JSC and in Washington, D.C., had allowed the astronaut office to become dominated by fear. Even outsiders had become aware of it. In a vitriolic March 12, 1986, memo addressed to John Young, Colonel Larry Griffin, commander of the air force detachment to NASA (he was not an astronaut), wrote, “…my personal experience in working with the astronaut office is that nearly everyone there is absolutely afraid to voice any opinion that does not agree with yours. You criticizing anyone for ‘pressure’ is ludicrous when the primary axiom in the astronaut office is, ‘Don’t cross John if you ever want to fly.’ That’s pressure!” Colonel Griffin had it slightly wrong. We were afraid to voice any opinion that did not agree with that of Young or Abbey. Did the JSC director or the NASA administrator have any idea how fearful we were of our management? If they had been involved in our lives, they would have known and could have fixed the problem. That’s what good leaders do.

I couldn’t point to any single individual and say, “He did it!” but, collectively, NASA management put Scobee and the other six in their graves. I wanted them all gone. So did most of the astronaut corps. But we were so jaded by our NASA experiences, we doubted it would happen. Already it was more than three months since Challenger and there had been no firings. I saw the future and it looked remarkably like the past. Of course there would be new “oversight committees” and a new “safety emphasis,” but to a significant degree the same people would remain in leadership positions and that meant nothing would really change. I would later hear a TFNG describe it perfectly. “You can paint a different tail number on the squadron dog [referring to the most malfunction-prone jet] but it’s still the same dog.”

I walked away from the Arlington ceremony angry, bitter, depressed, and guilt-ridden…making a mental note to tell Donna that if I died on a shuttle mission I didn’t want Abbey or Young or anybody from NASA HQ anywhere near my grave. I certainly didn’t want any of them handing her the flag from my coffin. (Upon my return to Houston, I did make that request of Donna.)

The only positive thought I could muster was that at least there would be no more scab pulling. The crew was buried. Now the healing could begin.

But God granted us only the briefest of reprieves. A week after Scobee’s funeral, astronaut Steve Thorne, class of 1985, died in an off-duty recreational plane crash. It was another body blow to the astronaut corps.