Riding Rockets

CHAPTER 28 Falling

In mid-October 1986, astronaut medical doctors Jim Bagian and Sonny Carter presented the Challenger autopsy results. We expected to hear the answer to the question that had tormented all of us since the moment of Challenger’s destruction. Had the crew been alive and conscious in their fall to the water? I had been certain they had not. I had said it a hundred times to Donna, “At least they died or were knocked out instantly.” That belief was my security blanket. It was too great a horror to think they may have been conscious in the two-and-a-half-minute fall to water impact. New revelations throughout the investigation had given me momentary doubts but I had always managed to build a new scenario to hide behind. My “cockpit-shredding explosion” theory had long been proven wrong. The fire leaking from the right-side SRB had weakened its bottom attachment to the ET. As the SRB pulled free it ruptured the external tank, and the aerodynamic forces and the G-loads of the moment caused the catastrophic breakup of the stack. There had been no high-power detonation. The enormous “explosion” seen in the sky was merely tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen vaporizing and burning. NASA cameras had picked out the cockpit module as a piece of the fragmentation. It trailed some wires and tubing but otherwise appeared intact, suggesting it was bearing a live, conscious crew. But I created a scenario in which the cockpit G-forces at the moment of breakup had pulled the crew seats from their floor attachments and hurled them against the interior of the cabin, killing the occupants instantly, or at least knocking them unconscious. When engineers later determined that the cockpit G-loads were not incapacitating, much less fatal, I created a scenario in which a window had broken or, in some other manner, the pressure integrity of the cockpit had been explosively compromised, causing crew unconsciousness within seconds.

The first fact that Bagian and Carter put on the table was that the time of death could not be determined from an examination of the crew remains. I was not surprised. High-performance-vehicle crashes typically leave little of the human body for pathologists to work with. In the case of Challenger, the weeks of immersion in salt water had resulted in additional deterioration of the remains. The story of crew survivability and consciousness would have to be told by the remains of the machine, not the crew. Bagian and Carter began that story.

There was proof, in the form of Mike Smith’s Personal Emergency Air Pack (PEAP), that the crew had survived vehicle breakup. PEAPs were portable canisters intended to provide emergency breathing air to a crewmember escaping through toxic fumes in a ground emergency. They were not intended for use in flight. But Mike Smith’s PEAP, stowed on the back of his seat and only accessible in flight by mission specialist 1 or 2, had been found in the on position. Either El Onizuka (MS1) or Judy (MS2) had to have thrown the switch and there would have been only one reason to do so—they were suffocating. Breakup had ripped away their only source of oxygen, the tanks under the cargo bay. Within a couple breaths, the residual oxygen remaining in their helmets and in the feed lines would have been consumed. The fierce urge to breathe would have immediately driven all of the crew either to turn on their PEAPs or raise the faceplates of their helmets. Judy or El had turned on Mike Smith’s PEAP knowing he could not reach the switch himself. (Onizuka, sitting directly behind Mike, had the easiest access to the switch, though Judy, sitting to El’s left, could have reached it with some difficulty.) Enough pieces of one other PEAP were recovered to determine it had also been in the on position, but crash damage made it impossible to establish the seat location of that canister. The fact that two PEAPS had been turned on was proof the crew had survived Challenger’s breakup. I would later learn that some of the electrical system switches on Mike Smith’s right-hand panel had been moved out of their nominal positions. These switches were protected with lever locks that required them to be pulled outward against a spring force before they could be toggled to a new position. Tests proved the G-forces of the crash could not have moved them, meaning that Mike Smith made the switch changes, no doubt in an attempt to restore electrical power to the cockpit. This is additional proof the crew was conscious and functional immediately after the breakup. Mike Smith’s PEAP also provided proof the crew had been alive all the way to water impact. It had been depleted by approximately two and a half minutes of breathing, the time of the cockpit fall.

The question remaining was whether the crew had stayed conscious beyond the few seconds needed to activate their PEAPs and for Mike Smith to throw some switches on his panel. They could not have remained conscious if the cockpit had rapidly depressurized to ambient (outside) air pressure. Breakup occurred at 46,000 feet, an altitude 17,000 feet higher than Mount Everest, and the nearly Mach 2 upward velocity at breakup continued to carry the cockpit to an apogee of approximately 60,000 feet. To stay conscious in the low atmospheric pressure of these extreme heights, the crew would have needed pressurized pure oxygen in their lungs and the PEAPs only supplied sea levelair, a mixture of about 80 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen. But had there been a cockpit depressurization?

An explosive depressurization—due to a window breaking, for example—would have been a blessing and I prayed fiercely that had been the case. But Challenger’s wreckage said it didn’t happen. If it had, the cockpit floor would have buckled upward as the air in the lower cockpit rapidly expanded. The wreckage revealed no such buckling. That news was a dagger in my heart.

Bagian and Carter explained there was still the possibility of a nonexplosive but rapid enough depressurization to cause quick unconsciousness. Such air leakage could have occurred due to numerous penetrations at the rear cockpit bulkhead. These provided pathways for wire bundles and fluid lines to pass between the cockpit and the rest of the orbiter. At breakup those wires and tubes were violently ripped apart, and it was possible the pressurization sealing for those manufactured penetrations could have failed. There was also evidence of breakup debris striking the cockpit from the outside. A piece of steel had been found jammed into a window frame. While that particular piece of debris did not penetrate the cockpit, other debris might have, resulting in a depressurization rapid enough to cause unconsciousness.

But it was all conjecture. There was no way to know the pressure integrity of the cockpit and, therefore, the state of crew consciousness. Bagian and Carter did have some ancillary evidence suggesting crew inactivity, which some thought could be a signature of crew blackout. Every piece of paper recovered from the wreckage was examined to see if any crewmembers had written a note. Nothing had been discovered. Neither had the cockpit overhead emergency escape hatch been blown. Some astronauts had suggested they would have jettisoned it as they neared the water to facilitate escape if impact was survived. The status of Mike Smith’s PEAP also hinted at crew inactivity—the canister was only depleted by two and a half minutes, which meant his visor had remained closed during the fall. If it had been open, all five minutes of PEAP air would have leaked out. But, if the crew had been conscious, wouldn’t they have raised their visors to talk to one another in their fight for survival? That was Bagian’s and Carter’s hypothesis. After all, we were trained to react to emergencies as a team and that required communication. At breakup the intercom failed, leaving visors-open, direct speaking as the only means of communicating. (Crash damage had obliterated all the helmets and all but Mike’s PEAP, making it impossible to know if the visors of the others were up or down.)

After the presentation was concluded, someone put the escape question to Bagian and Carter. “If this had occurred during OFT [the first four shuttle flights in which the two-man crews had ejection seats], do you think the crew would have been able to bail out?” Their answer was a definite yes. The OFT crews had worn pressure suits. Even if cabin pressure had been lost, those suits would have kept the crew conscious and they would have been able to pull an ejection handle.

Carter next informed everybody that the flight surgeon’s office was going to archive a clip of our hair and a footprint to facilitate our identification in the event of a future shuttle loss. That comment suggested how difficult identification of the Challenger crew remains had been. Even dental records hadn’t been enough. John Young sagely observed, “When extraordinary methods are being taken to make sure you can be identified after you’re dead, everybody ought to think twice about the job they’re in.” He was right.

He was also right when he added, “We shouldn’t fly again until we have an escape system.” Already some NASA managers were suggesting we should return to flight as quickly as possible and the escape system modifications could catch up. As much as I disliked Young for his attempts to torpedo my astronaut career, the position he took on some issues were the right ones.

Carter reminded everybody, “Keep the information you just heard to yourselves.” At that Dick Richards (class of 1980) lashed out, “Who does NASA think it’s protecting? The families? They don’t care if the information is released.”

John Young answered him. “NASA is protecting NASA.” He had it right again.

After the meeting broke up, I went to the gym for a run. It quickly became a sprint. I wanted to punish myself. I wanted the agony of burning lungs and a pounding heart and aching legs to overwhelm me so I wouldn’t have to deal with the reality of what I had just heard. Sweat stung my eyes but I made no effort to wipe it away. I had become a self-flagellating penitent. Pain was good. I relaxed my jaw to its limits and tilted my head back, trying to form a straight pipe to my lungs. Strings of saliva grew from the corners of my mouth and were jerked away by the pounding of my legs. My respiration took on the sound of an emphysemic wheezing and gasping for breath. Several NASA employees passed opposite me and I caught the question in their eyes: “What’s he running from?”

I was running from my thoughts…and predictably losing. Judy or El had flipped Mike’s PEAP to on. There had been no cockpit floor buckling, therefore no explosive decompression. Those twin facts opened the door to the possibility that the cockpit had held its pressure as tightly as a bathysphere and the crew had been conscious throughout the fall. Try as I might I could not find shelter in the evidence of crew inactivity. Would I have written a note? I seriously doubted it. Would I have jettisoned the overhead hatch? No. Of that, I was certain. Had I been Scobee or Smith, I would have been fighting to regain vehicle control all the way to the water, knowing that if I didn’t, death was certain. The hatch on-off status was irrelevant to survivability. I also thought it was a big leap to assume the crew would have felt it necessary to raise their visors and communicate by direct speaking. I had been in the backseat of F-4 jets when the intercom had failed and hand signals had worked fine. And Scobee and Smith, sitting side by side, had the advantage of being able to see exactly what the other was doing. If I had been in their position and was conscious with the helmet visor down, would I have taken the chance of raising it to communicate? To do so would have meant overcoming years of jet crewmember training, which emphasized keeping your mask on during flight, particularly if there was any hint cockpit pressure integrity might be compromised. The mask in this case would have been the helmet visor. I would have kept it down.

Like everyone else I wanted to believe the crew had been unconscious but there was no hard proof. I kept seeing the horrific other possibility, that they had gone down in Challenger like galley slaves chained to the benches of their sinking ship and been aware of every torturous second. They had been trapped. They had no escape system. They were flying an operational space shuttle.

I couldn’t go on. I hit my wall. I slowed to a walk, steered off the track, found a tree, and collapsed against it. There would be no escaping the projector of my mind as it played what might have been the last moments of Challenger.

“Challenger, you’re go at throttle up.”

Scobee answered, “Roger, Houston. Go at throttle up.”

Mike Smith watched the power tapes climb toward 104 percent. Even as he was doing so, the stack was disintegrating

The leaking fire had weakened the bottom SRB attachment strut. The right-side booster snapped free, rupturing the ET. Tons of propellant poured from the gas tank. The left-side booster ripped from its struts and joined the right-side SRB in chaotic, unguided flight. Challenger’s fuselage and wings were broken into multiple parts. The cockpit was torn from its mounts.

At the instant of vehicle breakup the crew was whipsawed under their seat harnesses. Checklists were snatched from their Velcro tabs and jerked on their tethers. Pencils and drink containers separated from their tabs and were hurled through the volume. The noise of debris crashing into the outside of the cockpit added to the chaos. Exclamations of surprise came from some of the crew’s throats, but fell dead in their microphones. All electrical power had been lost at the separation of the cockpit from the rest of the fuselage.

The mayhem of breakup lasted only a moment before the equally startling calm of free fall began. While the cockpit and the other debris were still moving upward at 1,000 miles per hour, they were freely under the slowing influence of gravity. Like human cannonballs, the crew had experienced a momentary violence, followed immediately by the silence of gravity’s grip. They floated under their harnesses. Pencils and pens spun in the air around them. Checklists floated on their tethers.

The crew was alive but suffocating. They turned on their emergency air packs. Judy or El switched on Mike Smith’s PEAP.

Scobee and Smith were test pilots and reacted as they had been trained. Even the brief, wild ride through breakup would not have mentally incapacitated them. They had faced countless serious emergencies in their flying careers. They knew the situation was perilous, but they were in a cockpit with a control stick and there was a runway only twenty miles away. They believed they had a chance.

They snapped their attention to the instruments hoping to identify the problem, but the cockpit was electrically dead. Every computer screen was a black hole. Every caution and warning light was off. There were no warbling emergency tones. Every “talk back” indicator showed “barber pole”—its unpowered indication. The attitude indicator, the velocity, acceleration, and altitude tapes were frozen with OFF flags in view. They had nothing to work with. As they attempted to make sense of the situation, Scobee’s hand was never off the stick. He fought for vehicle control, oblivious to the fact there was no longer a vehicle to control.

“Houston, Challenger?” He and Mike Smith made repeated calls to MCC, but those were into a lifeless radio.

With no instrument response and an apparently dead stick, Scobee and Smith mashed down on their stick “pickle buttons” to engage the backup flight system. It was the emergency procedure for an out-of-control situation. If the problem was due to a primary flight system computer failure or software error, the BFS computer would jump online and bring life back to the cockpit. Again and again their right thumbs jammed downward on the spring-loaded red buttons. Again and again they searched the instruments hoping to see life in them, hoping to have something, anything, to work with. But Challenger was now a blossoming cloud of debris. No switch was going to put her back together.

Very quickly the crew realized the futility of their actions. The upstairs crewmembers—Dick, Mike, El, and Judy—had window views of the disaster in which they were immersed. As the tumbling cockpit moved ever higher those views became more synoptic. They looked downward to see the white-orange cloud marking the place of Challenger’s death. They saw the billowing trails of the disconnected SRBs.

The downstairs crewmembers—Ron McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Greg Jarvis—were locked in the most horrifying of circumstances. They had no windows, no instruments. They were totally dependent upon the upstairs crewmembers to keep them informed on the progress of the flight. But no words came. At the instant of breakup the intercom went dead and the mid-deck lights went out. They were trapped in a tumbling, darkened, silent room.

As the cockpit arced across its apogee, the upstairs crew saw the sky turn space-black, Challenger’s lost goal. The silence was nearly total, just the merest whisper of wind. Then, the two-minute fall to the sea began. The rippled blue of the Atlantic filled the windows. The noise of the wind rose to a loud rush as the cockpit quickly reached a terminal velocity of nearly 250 miles per hour. The upstairs crew watched the finer details of the sea become visible: rumpled wind-blown areas, the froth of whitecaps, and brighter splashes marking the impact of other pieces of their machine. The horizon rose higher and higher in their windows, the blue reaching toward them until…blessed oblivion.