Funding for Frontline is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Tonight on Frontline, the ultimate adventure and the ultimate risk, flying the space shuttle.
You get that kick in the pants from a solid's light and you're up, up and away.
These men and women routinely put their lives on the line, reaching for the unknowns of space and flying the most complicated machine on earth.
You're just sitting there hoping like heck that nothing happens to any of the engines.
Tonight, the real stuff.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit and WGBH Boston.
This is Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening. This is the first program in a new season of Frontline.
This is our fifth year of broadcast and we'll be on the air every week until the middle of the summer.
We thank you for joining us.
But tonight is also a more somber anniversary.
Just a year ago, the entire nation and the world watched in disbelief as the shuttle Challenger exploded before our eyes.
We have chosen this moment not to explore where the blame lay, whether with faulty O-rings or the decision-making process at NASA,
but rather to spend some time with the men and women who in the aftermath of that tragedy have to go on, the astronauts.
They are not easy to get to know.
They are, for obvious reasons, protective of their privacy and their professionalism.
And they are not the sort of people to talk much about their trade.
They are, after all, in author Tom Wolf's words, made of the right stuff.
But Frontline correspondent James Reston Jr. has spent a great deal of time with the astronaut corps both before and after Challenger,
and this is his view from the inside about what it takes to ride the stack.
Our program is produced by William Cran and Stephanie Tepper.
It is called The Real Stuff.
In April 1983, the space shuttle Challenger is rolled out for the first time.
Three years later, on a mission called 51L, it will explode.
Is it risky?
Well, I think 51L sort of shows that it's pretty risky.
There's always been a possibility, I think, that you can lose people in space flight.
I was sure sorry to see it happen, though. I was hoping against hope it never happened.
It all has to go correctly, and there's risk in that.
There's so many things that can happen during that ascent.
Man is not perfect and his machines aren't perfect, so it's either going to be a crew is going to make a mistake
or something is going to happen to one of the machines that led to eventual loss of the vehicle and loss of the crew.
Progress is always made at the expense of some risk.
Almost without exception, there's a certain amount of loss of life, and it's just the way you play the game.
The people who fly the shuttle were aware of the risk, so we went ahead on that basis.
Before the Challenger accident, risk was a dirty word within NASA.
The space agency preferred to stress the routine nature of space flight.
We were told and we believed that the shuttle was a kind of space truck
so safe that even ordinary citizens could fly in it.
A congressman, a journalist, a school teacher.
In fact, risk was always part of the space routine.
This is the real stuff of space flight.
Without risk, there is no reaching for the unknown, no expanding the horizon, and no adventure.
There's a period of time up in the launch pad where you're standing up there
with all the searchlights playing up on the shuttle.
And here is this monster that you're about to climb into,
and because it's fully fueled, it's not going to be able to fly.
It's not going to be able to fly.
It's this monster that you're about to climb into, and because it's fully fueled
and there's a certain amount of boil off of the propellants, the liquid oxygen and so forth,
it seems like it's a hissing, breathing, alive machine.
And it's the first time that you've really, that I've felt that environment.
And it was awesome.
And the rest of the area is totally silent.
Nobody around.
Just a vehicle sitting there, quietly steaming, vapors coming off.
There's a guy to take you up in the elevator,
and a couple of fellows to put you in the vehicle and close the hatch.
The voice communications become quite silent in the last minute.
You do hear the counting down to T equals zero.
Seconds before that, though, you feel the ship move and the main engines come on.
And you can feel the rumble.
It seems a long, long way away, but you know it's just about, I guess, 100 feet below you.
Of course, that's, I guess, about one and a quarter million pounds of thrust
when they light those three engines off.
And, of course, it shakes the orbiter, so the thing bends.
You can feel the orbiter flex one way and then back the other way.
And as the rock relaxes and comes back, then there's a sound that is the sound of an explosion.
And you get that kick in the pants when the solids light,
and you're up, up, and away in a big hurry.
I guess I wasn't quite expecting the jolt that we got.
We're going something over about 100 miles an hour by the time we reach the top of the tower,
so it really is jumping right off the launch pad.
It's like a continuing train wreck in sound.
It is just an overwhelming bone-crushing, rattling, and shaking.
And then immediately you hit that roll maneuver.
And that's also the time that we start to enter what we call load relief,
which is where we'll steer the whole vehicle into the wind to minimize the wind loads on the orbiter.
So it's a very dynamic, a very shaky, buffeting, vibrating time frame.
All space rookies, and I'll speak for myself, are slightly just hanging on during the first couple of minutes anyway.
You're just sitting there hoping like, heck, that nothing happens to any of the engines,
because your mind's clicking and thinking all the time, all right, what do I need to look for?
What do I need to be ready to do?
If an engine fails right now, or if another system fails right now,
what do I have to do to make sure that we can, one, hopefully continue on orbit,
two, get down safely, if we can?
This strange, loud, roaring staccato is somehow punctuated by another sound of an explosion.
And that's the solid rockets being released.
Just as they're jettisoned, there's a tremendous flash,
because we've got these smaller batch of rocket motors that pushes the solid rocket motors away from you.
And it looks like you're flying through a fireball when those things go off.
And that's a real thrill to see that for the first time.
After that point, it's very smooth, almost like you have electric motors.
Now the acceleration really comes up.
Of the three Gs when you're at that point, you feel like you could not pull your head off the seat to lean forward.
But it's a real push, it almost hurts to breathe, your chest is being compressed,
and you have to work to expand your chest and take in air against the acceleration.
Very suddenly, as you come up to 25,000 feet per second,
there is another sound as the computers shut off the main engines
and a lurch as the external tank is blown away.
And you feel yourself thrown forward in the shoulder straps.
And what you're feeling is the fact that you really weigh nothing at all.
You know that you've arrived in orbit.
The whole experience is just a tremendous adventure.
And it's the kind of thing that right when you get to main engine cutoff on my first flight,
I remember I smiled from ear to ear right when the engines went off,
and said, what an experience, let's go back and do that again, I really enjoyed that.
The space shuttle became a symbol of America.
It represented the best of American ingenuity and bravado.
We knew how to get to space safely and back,
but we had built the most complicated piece of machinery in the world.
Hundreds of critical functions had to work perfectly every time.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan
and astronaut Matthew in Hartsfield.
The fourth landing in the Columbia is the historical equivalent
to the driving of the Golden Spike, which completed the first transcontinental railroad.
It marks our entrance into a new era.
The test flights are over.
The groundwork has been laid. Beginning with the next flight,
the Columbia and her sister ships will be fully operational.
We sold it as being an operational vehicle.
We declared that it was operational because we were done with our four flight test program.
But I think the word operational, I think most of the astronauts
probably smiled a little bit when we said we're operational.
I was at Hoot-Gibson's last launch just three weeks before the Challenger accident.
Writing about that next to last mission, like so many of the press and public,
I grew impatient as scrub followed scrub.
Once at T minus 14 seconds, once for a stuck hatch.
With hindsight, that litany of difficulties was a warning.
This 24th mission would become the most delayed mission of the shuttle era.
As it attempted to get off the ground,
Challenger hovered in the background, waiting its final fateful turn.
On one of five attempts to launch Columbia,
18,000 pounds of liquid oxygen fuel had been mistakenly siphoned from the fuel tank.
Had there been a launch that day,
the shuttle would have aborted its mission within minutes of liftoff.
This is what would have happened.
High in the stratosphere with the fuel tank still attached,
Hoot-Gibson would have reversed direction.
He would then have attempted an emergency landing back at Cape Canaveral.
That's what the computer simulator said could be done.
In fact, this maneuver has never been flown by any powered flying machine.
The weather was another threat to the crew.
It was cold.
On this chilly December morning, it was 41 degrees.
We know now, but shuttle crews never knew,
that cold temperatures cause O-rings to fail,
and this caused the Challenger crash.
It took us five times to get off the ground.
We went through more abortions than anyone thought was ever possible.
We'd have to say someone was watching over us,
because in several of those instances it could have been very serious
if we had actually launched that day.
Clowning masked the tension,
but what were they really thinking as they marked the clapperboard,
Hoot rides again, take five.
We had an indication that we had a very big helium leak
in one of our tanks that supports one of the main engines.
So it was an apparent serious malfunction.
Helium is used in one of the turbo pumps,
and it's used to purge a cavity that's between the hydrogen and the oxygen.
If you lose that purge, you're going to blend those two together.
And it can explode?
And that, it will explode.
That's very definitely an explosion potential.
We say that we're operational,
but I keep looking back to a vehicle that we flew for years called the X-15.
We made over 200 missions with the X-15.
We never called that thing anything but an experimental rocket plane.
In the era of routine spaceflight,
the right stuff of the 1950s and 60s seemed like a thing of the past.
Ready to launch now.
You're running at 30 percent.
30 percent?
How are we going, Roger?
Roger, you're going by Mud Lake.
It looks like a landing at Mud Lake.
Roger.
And now we have an orbiter, a space shuttle orbiter,
that's about 50 times as complex as the X-15 was,
but it was operational after four flights.
And I think it just says, Jim, that we are operating a machine
that by its very nature is going to be somewhat of an experimental device,
somewhat of a research and development vehicle,
and it's not going to be operational until we've got 200 or 300 flights on the thing.
In 1963, NASA began uncertain experiments with so-called lifting bodies
that could fly in space, glide to Earth, and land on an airstrip.
Different designs were tested at Edwards Air Force Base
with mixed results.
Here, Maxime Faget, the legendary designer of the Mercury capsule,
holds his early design for the space shuttle.
The designs went through many incarnations.
The engineers wanted a Cadillac.
They got a Chevy.
It would be reliable, but sometimes short on options.
Risks were built in.
The vehicle was a glider.
Once it reentered the Earth's atmosphere,
it had one chance only to land somewhere.
It needed tremendous boost to get its bulk into orbit,
but the boosters propelled by the more efficient solid fuel
could not be turned off once they were lit.
And if they were flawed, they could not be jettisoned.
Astronauts considered the solids fail-safe until the Challenger disaster.
The only way that the crew on 51L had of getting it solid was to wait for them to burn out.
It is an image burnt in our collective consciousness.
We had accepted it as flawless,
but it was designed by a bureaucracy and built by humans.
After the accident, there was an effort to apportion blame.
But in the end, we were thrown back on technical explanations.
You've got to remember that the thrusting solid rocket
has really got a lot of thrust.
So the minute you let that go, you're separating highly stressed structure,
which in itself could be destructive.
If you're not exactly the right angle of attack,
it could tear the orbiter up.
That's essentially what happened on 51L when it came apart from the stack,
and then of course they had pressure wave pushing against it too.
It was aerodynamically broken up.
And the other thing is that you got a wild solid rocket the minute you separate it,
because it's getting all its steering signals from an umbilical to the orbiter.
The minute you cut that umbilical,
it could steer itself right into the tank or into the wing or anything.
After the Challenger accident,
I returned to the Johnson Space Center to find a very different place.
Before the accident, I had been swept up by the giddy vitality of Johnson Space Center.
Now I wondered what the recovery process would be like,
and what its effect would be on those who had placed such ultimate faith in the system.
I knew the reconstruction would be painful.
I wanted to know how fundamental would be the overhaul.
Prouded by the Rogers Commission,
meetings on every aspect of the shuttle system are taking place.
Today's meeting was to probe the agonizing topic of emergency escape.
The study was to include egress and escape,
and we set some constraints for ourselves
and that we considered from on the pad to orbit,
and then from orbit to landing.
Now we have not taken on orbital rescue.
Engineers and managers reevaluated the risks they had accepted
and balanced them against the gains they had sometimes overestimated.
Here they reconsidered yet again
whether it had been a mistake to have no escape system for the shuttle crew.
It is not an easy question.
In the enterprise of space, there is no such a thing as perfect safety.
To add, complicated explosive ejection systems for crew escape
can actually increase risk rather than diminish it.
I'd like to remind everybody here, there are some failures, no matter what I did,
for what you asked us to do, we could not solve.
There are some failures for which no escape system is going to help you.
Even before the Challenger tragedy,
crews trained in escape procedures,
knowing full well that their real chances for escape in an emergency
were confined to a few benign scenarios.
The basic design of the shuttle was on a certain premise,
and within that premise, I think the design was right.
We could have done a number of things that have been brought up since then.
We could have put escape capsules in the shuttle, but that's been mentioned.
In earlier programs, crew capsules could be blasted away.
With the shuttle, baskets, slide wires, and a ride in a speeding, armored personnel carrier
provided a quaint system for escape from a conflagration or an explosion on the launch pad.
Senior astronaut Henry Hartsfield has charge of a post-Challenger committee on crew safety.
In fact, it wouldn't do you much good, even if you got away from the initial fireball,
to get away and land out there and have it all come down on you.
Pieces could be raining down.
As you know, there's a heck of a lot of energy stored there.
If it really did explode, it could send debris pretty long distance.
If you have a big fire outside the vehicle, such as we had for a while on 41-D,
and nobody realizes it's there, you might get very crispy heading for it.
So you'd worry about that.
The crowds that flocked to shuttle launches as a social event
were three miles away from the pad for a very good reason.
On a 1984 mission commanded by Hartsfield,
the countdown proceeded normally until the main engines fired.
Then, just before the point of no return, the main engines shut down.
T-minus four seconds was a terrifying moment.
We immediately got a master alarm, which is a tone that goes off in the cockpit,
which we hear in our headsets.
There are several different kinds of tones we can hear.
This one was almost the most severe tone you can hear,
so we knew we had a very serious problem.
There was some misunderstanding on the part of the life's control team
on whether we still had an engine running or not.
Brake, brake, brake, brake.
Not shut down.
I think it was about 10 or 12 minutes after the actual shutdown
that somebody said they saw a fire.
I noticed a small flame on monitor 58 on the main engine.
And that's the first point that I perked up.
Fire? I don't like fire.
On the main engine?
I'd like to check that we'd have no fire detectors going off on the zero level.
In my mind, the only thing we could do was get out of the bird in a heck of a hurry
if there was something bad going on.
Hydrogen burns without visible flame,
and the only time that you really can see fire in that situation
is when part of the orbiter begins to burn.
So there was some fire coming up the side of the vehicle we found out later
that could have been heating the area that we would have had to go out across
to get out to the slide wires,
and we wouldn't have known that was there because it was invisible
and could have gotten burned.
You people are famous for understating situations.
It's more than just perking up, isn't it?
Well, I think, you know, we say, well, he got our attention,
and let's put it that way.
The first four flights of the shuttle did have ejection seats,
but successful ejection was only possible close to the ground,
at a slow speed,
and not available for the mid-deck passengers who were added later.
There were some parts that we were very much concerned ejecting in first stage
because you would go through the plume of the ship
because you would go through the plume of the solid rocket motor,
and, of course, all the metallic particles in that plume would probably eat you up,
eat the suit up in the chute or anything else you had.
The ejection seats provided only escape for the pilot and the commander,
two out of the six or seven crew members you may have.
Furthermore, they represent a great deal of weight.
And finally, they represent a very small amount of safety.
So one of the problems we have with a bailout is that
we already have a blowout hatch on top.
Well, why don't you just go out the top?
But you hit the vertical tail and those big ohm spots in the back.
And if you blow the side hatch and go out, you hit the wing,
or if you make it over the top of the wing, then you hit the ohm spot.
There were two in a few missions where we had ejection seats still in there,
where two people had ejection seats and two did not,
and the ejection seats were disarmed.
Wouldn't it make you nervous to go on the airliner
and the pilot and the co-pilot walk down the aisle with the parachute on?
I think that would bother me.
I think everybody ought to have a chance to get out of the vehicle.
If you're going to provide an escape means, then you need to provide it for everybody.
With no effective means of escape, the safety of the crews
depends upon the sharp response of the spacecraft pilots.
Half of the 80-member corps is made up of pilot astronauts.
NASA provides T-38 trainers to them to keep their flying edge.
I was interested in what happened to a man like Rick Halk, whom I knew in high school.
Commander Halk, Navy carrier pilot, Vietnam veteran, test pilot, has flown two missions,
and he was scheduled to fly the Challenger on its next flight after 51L.
What does a man do who's been trained to a fine edge
and then suddenly must wait two years to fly again?
In NASA's downtime, Commander Halk had to take a desk job in Washington,
and he was also worried about keeping his place in line to fly one of the early missions
once shuttle flights begin again.
So he returned to Houston regularly to train in the shuttle simulator.
Booster, engines.
Three ready.
Max, APUs.
The simulator receives its crews in shifts
as if there were still a space flight every six weeks.
It reproduces the cockpit of the shuttle exactly.
As far away, the system that encases the cockpit is reexamined item by critical item.
Houston, time check.
Can you call us Columbia?
Discovery.
Roger.
Ladder clear, House.
Confirmed.
Liftoff.
Right trim switch to inhibit, please.
Liftoff confirmed.
Roll program.
Roll.
Those winds are bumping us around a little bit.
Houston, IMU-2 and Accelerometer number two are showing down.
Mission control guides the simulation as if it were a real mission.
What you hear in the headsets is a full dress rehearsal for potential catastrophes.
We picked up a leak in APU number two. It's pretty big.
Throttle up, 104.
Capcom, go with throttle up.
Capcom, Houston, go with throttle up.
Roger, go with throttle up.
Looks like the engine went down.
Push the button.
Lift engine out, booster.
Looks like the engine's down. You need to push the button.
Check confirming cues, push the button.
Item two.
We've got the board light.
Copy, board on two left.
Of course, we don't expect to see failures in the first place,
but some of our simulations are failures piled upon failures.
We just got a red light on a center engine.
The lights are flashing. This electrical system's down.
The hydraulic system's quit.
The computers of one of them has quit.
Houston, we just got a red light on the center engine,
although everything else looks nominal.
But the important thing there is that, just like everything else,
you want to ensure that you've trained to a level much higher
than you could ever expect to have to exercise in a real flight.
Eugene Krantz is another fabled figure in NASA.
He was a flight director for the moon landings
and a pivotal person in the return of the crippled Apollo 13.
Now he heads flight control operations.
The training process is such that you really do not truly feel
or experience emotion because you are expected to act,
lead a team, and move on.
The core of the training process is what we call our simulation supervisor.
The simsup devises the mals, malfunctions, and the nits, nitpicks,
and piles them one upon another in split second time.
In their scripts, mals and nits can very well disguise the major malfunction.
They're a special breed with an odd sense of humor.
That's true, a simsup generally works a lot with Murphy's Law.
Anything that could go wrong will go wrong,
and that's generally what we cause to happen.
But I think there is a sadistic streak associated with these folks
that they basically want to try to penetrate the individuals,
and they'll use any approach or method available to them to do that.
They know and they can observe those people who are tired.
They'll attack the first woman that will put on the team
to find out if she can stand up to the pressures.
Houston, we're working a helium problem on the center engine.
The simulation supervisor will attack every facet of the human,
whether it be his ego, his knowledge base,
near to the point of destroying that individual to strengthen him
and to develop the judgment that he needs to participate in a mission.
Good, nose wheel steering. GPC-2 just failed, that takes out nose wheel steering.
No, it's not a game.
You can sit around a table all day and debate something for hours,
but in some situations you have to make a decision now.
Snap decisions come naturally to test pilots.
Edwards Air Force Base, with its own private rituals, is their mecca.
There is no escape.
After the Challenger accident,
Colonel Roy Bridges came back here to command a test wing.
Congratulations, sir.
I forgot all about this. I honestly have forgotten all about it.
Like all shuttle pilots, he was a military test pilot
before he went to NASA to ride the stack.
It's a great machine. You guys have done well over the years.
That thing is relatively fast.
It was on this training ground for the legendary Wright stuff
that Bridges first learned to live on the edge of the envelope.
He makes a science of keeping emotion out of the business.
Ceremonial coach. Certainly.
The Eagle drivers, past, present, and future.
He talks coldly of risk assessment and hazard analysis.
Most of all, the astronauts were once test pilots,
so we all come from pretty much a common pool,
and we tend to do similar things, whether we're here or whether we're at NASA.
As test pilots, we try to find every way possible to cut down on the risk.
We try to have several options for all the unknowns.
There is quite a bit of similarity in how we approach a risky business.
Roy Bridges would need all his professional cool
when he piloted 51F, the 19th shuttle mission.
The mission 51F read like one of the worst SimSoup scripts.
The liftoff and the separation of the solids were normal.
Five minutes into the flight, just after the routine call of Presta ATO,
one of the three orbiter main engines abruptly shut down.
Standby for Presta ATO.
Challenger Houston, Presta ATO.
I was just starting to feel comfortable after the Presta ATO call,
and I have a lot of switches overhead that I need to see if I can reach and see
under high RG conditions, and I was just starting to conduct a little evaluation,
looking up at the overhead panels and reaching, and then the incident happened.
And I feel a decrease in the acceleration.
My eyes went immediately to the engine instrumentation,
and I saw that we'd lost the center engine.
Of course, the master alarm came on, and then you fall back on your training.
We've had lost many engines and simulators, and so now you just do the switch throws
and the things that you've always trained to do.
Copy, stand by.
Flight motto, abort ATO.
Abort ATO.
Challenger Houston, abort ATO.
Abort to orbit was the call.
Continue to press uphill.
But seconds later, a sensor indicated a second engine overheating.
Normally, the engine would automatically shut down lest it explode.
Only one engine would never get the shuttle into orbit,
and it would have to attempt an emergency landing at night somewhere in Africa
or the Mediterranean.
But was the sensor faulty?
Flight controller Jenny Howard had seconds to decide.
Her call was, inhibit the limits, override the sensor.
Unknown to us on the ground, they saw an engine sensor fail in one of the remaining engines.
And Jenny Howard, who was making that call that day,
recognized that it was definitely a sensor failure
and recognized the danger to us if we lost that engine in that mode
and very courageously and correctly made the call to the flight director
to have us inhibit those limits.
Attempted to go inhibit it. I know we're saying no engine capability.
Are we past TOW final?
Yes, we are, flight.
Limits to inhibit.
Challenger Houston, main engine limits to inhibit.
Now this was obviously called to prevent us from losing another engine.
We'll keep a good close eye on it.
Hey, which two sensors are you having trouble with?
It's the fuel turbine tent. That's what shut down the center.
We've lost another one on the right engine.
The A sensor's looking good.
Now this call has never been made before and is rarely exercised in simulations.
So it was obvious to us that there were some things going on with the other engines.
It was not good.
And I will always be in her debt for doing that, as will the rest of the crew.
All of us, I think, that have flown breathe a sigh of relief
once we reach main engine cutoff because now from then on,
in our minds, it's downhill. It's a piece of cake.
We are given the opportunity to carry some music on board, tapes to play in a pocket stereo player.
There's a song called The Southern Cross by, I believe it's Crosby Stills, Nash and Young.
And I remember one point looking out the window at the Southern Cross and playing that music.
You could spend days just looking out the window and taking it all in
and learning what the different continents look like.
I used to have the little dreams when I was a kid that I'd go running down the street
and jump up in the air and go flying and just fly through the air all by myself.
And that's what weightlessness is like.
We've been having a lot of fun up here and, of course, doing a lot of good work for the space program.
The first day or so when you're adjusting to it, you flail around a lot.
You reach for a switch and your feet swing around and hit the ceiling.
Zero-G just in itself causes you to find games.
I would be up on a flight deck working like a good pilot.
And I would hear these guys laughing and roaring downstairs.
And I'd say, well, I wonder what's going on.
Well, I finally went down and there they were doing this precision drill team stuff.
And it was fantastic.
We were constantly asking the question, where's Joe?
And lo and behold, what should we find?
But look at this.
We have discovered either an alien space creature or no.
No, it is.
It is Dr. Allen.
Large in personality but diminutive in stature,
he's managed to insert himself in yet another crevice.
In zero-gravity, the ultimate experience is the spacewalk.
Before Challenger, it was easy to ignore the peril to an astronaut like Joe Allen.
We saw only the romance in it.
Putting on a spacesuit always reminded me of the activity that a four-year-old youngster
is put through when his mother or father dresses that youngster in a very heavy snow suit.
Your mother doesn't bundle you up, but your shipmates do.
They put you in the spacesuits and oftentimes with a pat on the head
and a butter cookie for good luck, which they feed you.
You then put the helmet on the top, snap it into place,
and from that moment on, you float in the suit.
You don't stand on the boots.
From time to time, your toes will touch the boots or your head will bob up against the helmet.
But basically, you are floating in this cocoon, so to speak.
You float out through the hatch.
You're now then provided with what is literally a three-dimensional magic carpet.
You can, using the controls, maneuver yourself away from the mother ship.
You are orbiting the Earth as surely as the moon orbits the Earth,
and you are yourself a satellite.
There was always the danger that a faulty jet in the backpack
would spin the spacewalker uncontrollably into the void of space.
It all came to seem so routine, but it never was.
Launching commercial satellites from the shuttle was meant to defray the cost of operation.
After the Challenger accident, President Reagan has decided
that the deployment of commercial satellites is no longer worth the risk.
They're orbiting bombs when we carry them up in the payload bay.
They have volatile fuels, they have electrical power systems,
but they're designed to have all kinds of safety features within them.
You're working in an area that has the potential for some type of explosion.
Five times in the first 24 flights, the shuttle executed a rendezvous
with broken satellites in orbit.
I had always thought that rendezvous was a delicate but straightforward dance
between the orbiter, the satellite, and the computer.
But commanders knew that the hydrazine fuel in the satellites
made them giant firecrackers.
The problem is the hydrazine is a very deadly substance.
In its gaseous form or its liquid form, when it turns to gas, it can kill you.
So we were concerned more about somehow or another the EVA crew members
being exposed to the hydrazine that would have caused them a health problem.
If the EVA astronauts, the spacewalkers, were contaminated with gaseous hydrazine,
they could poison the whole crew.
If they got it on the suit and then had to come back into the space shuttle,
we had to deal with the hydrazine that might be on our space suit
because the space suit, eventually that air comes back into the shuttle.
The achievement of this crew in November 1984 put them on the cover of Time magazine.
Commanded by Rick Hauck and piloted by Dave Walker,
the mission recaptured two malfunctioning satellites,
replaced them in the hold, and returned them to Earth.
Bringing the satellites back into the payload bay was full of uncertainty.
While the satellites had been in orbit for several months,
on board they had some fuel, hydrazine.
There was the potential that a freeze-thaw cycle could have ruptured
some piping with this hydrazine in it.
If this had occurred and we brought the satellites back to Earth,
there was a potential for spilling some of that hydrazine
inside the payload bay of the shuttle on reentry.
There could have been a fire in the payload bay.
After ascent, reentry and landing are the most dangerous time of spaceflight.
After closing payload doors, small jets are fired to slow the orbiter down.
At precisely this time, on his second shuttle flight,
Commander John Young heard a loud bang and a sickening thud,
which he compared to a sledgehammer hitting the underside of a table.
I can't tell you how nervous I was.
It was really a pretty grim time.
We'd been running on this one computer that failed a whole mission for ten days,
and it worked like a champ, and then all of a sudden it quit.
And so here we bring this other computer up, go a little further along,
and fire its thruster, and it quits.
And we were starting to roll and yaw very rapidly.
What you think about is getting some control on the vehicle
so that you don't build up in too rapid an acceleration.
This is free drift now we're talking about.
What are the dangers of extended free drift?
Extended free drift with a thruster going, effectively a small thruster going on,
would spin you up as fast as till the vehicle came apart
if you stayed there long enough.
Spin you up into outer space?
Oh, just around and around and around.
Traveling 65 miles high and 24 times the speed of sound,
the craft slows down with a series of roll reversals.
It really begins a half an earth away from where it ends.
In other words, if we're going to land in California,
we start reentry someplace over the Indian Ocean.
We start it by burning an engine.
You feel yourself begin once again to weigh a few ounces,
and the instruments in the ship that record the G levels
begin to quiver ever so slightly.
As the spacecraft enters the Earth's heavier atmosphere,
it encounters unimaginable temperatures.
The actual shock wave off the nose sticks out that far in front of the nose,
and then it's about four or five inches wide,
and outside of that is 4,000 degrees.
It's pitch black outside, but little by little you notice that there's a faint glow,
light being inside a neon tube.
A curious pulsing flame as the plasma sheath envelops the orbiter
creates a mesmerizing dancing core.
It is a phenomenon that physicists do not completely understand.
Then the glow gets brighter and brighter as you get into heavier and heavier atmosphere,
and you see it only upper around the windows, of course,
and you begin to hear the sound of wind.
When landing the shuttle, it's a glider.
You don't have an opportunity to take it around as you might with an engine aircraft,
so the first time you go into land, you are going to land.
Most landings have been on the dry lake bed at Edwards,
but the runway at Cape Canaveral was built for the shuttle.
The changeable weather in Florida, however, is the shuttle pilot's nightmare.
We were the first flight to make a landing at Cape Canaveral.
That was February of 1984.
We very nearly found ourselves turning into a fog bank when we got down there.
It's coming downhill at around 22,000 feet a minute,
and, of course, we hold that rate of descent right down to 1,700 feet,
and there's nothing like seeing the runway for being able to put the thing down on it.
And it's amazing how small 15,000 feet of runway looks.
When I looked out the window and looked at that great big 2.5-mile-long runway,
I looked out the window and thought to myself, that's too small, let's go somewhere else,
because we would be completely out of options at that point if the thing really did cover up in fog.
That would be very dangerous.
And when we actually came down and landed,
I'm sure you probably remember all the fog streaming off our wingtips,
and any time we moved the elevons, you could see the fog behind the shuttle.
We were lucky. I think about an hour after we landed,
the fog was a lot worse than it was right when we touched down,
so we had a little bit of luck working our way that particular morning.
Of course, the Cape Canaveral runway doesn't have all the margin that we've got out at Edwards,
where we've got the lake beds, and we have several different lake bed runways that we could go to.
So whatever the wind happens to be at Cape Canaveral, if you have a crosswind, for example,
my wife's flight had a nine knot crosswind when they came down.
And there was some concern that we might have some problems with the orbiter.
The only problem that we did have was the commander who was flying the shuttle
had to apply brakes on one side a little stronger than the other
to keep us going down the center of the runway with a wind coming across the runway.
And in doing so, he heated up one braking system on a tire.
It locked, the wheels skidded, and when we were close to stopping, we had a tire that blew out.
Landing the shuttle is only the last of many risks
that are routinely accepted by those who fly what is still an experimental rocket plane.
Thousands of professionals stand behind the astronauts,
but it is the astronauts who put their lives to the test.
We enjoyed an extraordinary string of successes,
but in the world of flying machines, 24 test flights is a very small number.
It ended on January 28, 1986.
Going up and coming down will never be a routine for me, and I don't think it will be for anybody else.
If you're careful, maybe it wouldn't be risky.
You've got to be very careful all the time because there are situations you can get into
that if you're not real careful, you can't get out of them,
and you want to make sure that never happens to you.
You sort of realize that you have taken a major risk with your life.
After about a week in space, you begin to miss all the good things that you have on the ground,
and fresh air and children and things like that are particularly exciting to get back to.
They cultivated an air of invulnerability because they had to.
In their talk, they downplayed the risky side of their risky business.
In an ironic way, it made them seem less human.
Now, after Challenger, they are very human indeed.
I was nervous about this last afternoon together and thinking we should take walks on the beach,
holding hands and speaking profound things, and he spent the afternoon body surfing,
and I decided he obviously wasn't worried, and so there was really little reason for me
to spend a great deal of time worrying if he was perfectly content with where he was
and what he was about to do.
I never did get used to the fact that Joe was in this high-risk business.
It seemed strange to me that once Joe was assigned to a flight,
that for two years we would prepare for that day,
not knowing that something might happen or that he would come back from it with joy.
And that to me was a rather bizarre turn of events because any of us know that our husbands
can go to work in a car and possibly have an automobile accident and not come home that day,
but you never prepare for that day. It just happens, and then you take it from there.
I certainly knew that something was going to happen,
and I don't think that that's outside the realm of possibility in the future.
I mean, you can't fly X number of missions without something going wrong somewhere along the line.
Three hours and holding, here we see the 51L crew enjoying breakfast.
I think typical of every pilot who flies,
they always believe that they'll never be involved in the accident,
and if they do, through some miracle they're going to survive, but they don't dwell on it.
I think every individual who flies recognizes the risks involved in flight,
and they accept those risks.
Big smiles today, confidently getting into the van.
As they walked out to the pad, they were cheerful, they were exuberant,
they were ready to go, they were well prepared.
They had the exhilaration of liftoff, the initial powered flight,
and that's how I remember this crew.
We have main engine start, four, three, two, one, and liftoff, liftoff.
Liftoff confirmed.
Liftoff.
Roger, roger, roger.
Roger, roll, Challenger.
Good roll, Swyte.
Roger, good roll.
Velocity 2257 feet per second, altitude 4.3 nautical miles, downrange distance 3 nautical miles.
Challenger, go and throttle up.
Swyte, out trajectory.
Okay, everybody, stay off the telephones, make sure you maintain all your data, start pulling it together.
Swyte, do you see we've had negative contact, lost family.
Swyte, final.
Go ahead.
Fire sun reports vehicle exploded.
Copy.
Don't reconfigure your console, take hard copies of all your displays, make sure you protect any data source you have.
One year later, they are still trying to come to terms with the tragedy, but they will move on.
The next flight is February 1988.
Two weeks ago, NASA announced the crew for that first flight.
Navy Captain Rick Hauck will be the commander.
Air Force Colonel Dick Covey will be the pilot.
All of the five-man crew are veterans of past shuttle flights.
They will take our hopes and dreams with them.
I hope you'll join us next week for Frontline.
I'm Judy Woodruff.
Good night.
Next on Frontline, it will be a natural disaster which could devastate the entire country.
We know inevitably we're going to have recurrences of major earthquakes in the Bay Area and that people are going to be killed.
How do you truly prepare for enough injured to fill every emergency hospital bed in the free world?
Watch. The earthquake is coming. Next time on Frontline.
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