Bloomsbury/Walker is releasing my new YA novel TAKING OFF today. And while I'm thrilled about that, I'm also a little somber. The book centers around the Challenger disaster (the 25th anniversary is coming up on Jan 28th) and the inspirational Christa McAuliffe. I was working at NASA at the time and had trained two of the astronauts from the Challenger crew - Judy Resnik and Ellison Onizuka, both amazing people, smart, extraordinarily capable, and lovely. So while I'm very excited about the book's release, it also brings back many sad memories, as did the writing of it.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting Challenger and Christa McAuliffe memories and references. If you have a memory you'd like to share, please do so in the comments. I would like to read what you were doing on that day and how you remember it. We in the NASA community were struck hard by the event, but I know that those feelings were shared by the nation.

The first memory I'm posting is from a dear long-time friend of mine, Mary Cerimele. Thank you, Mary, for sending me your very moving memories of Challenger and of Christa McAuliffe:


My thoughts on Challenger
Mary Cerimele

I watched every launch. From my work as an engineering student co-oping at JSC in 1980, I had learned a lot about the launch contingency called Return To Launch Site. I had even sat in on a demonstration of one in the motion-based simulator. From what I knew, it would be a harrowing, dicey attempt to save a failed launch. I knew enough to worry that the Orbiter wouldn’t even survive the aerodynamics of a RTLS. But I also knew that as risky as RTLS could be, Mission Control couldn’t even attempt it while the Solid Rocket Boosters were burning; during that first two minutes of flight, not even a dangerous back-up plan was available. So I watched every launch, with my fingers secretly and superstitiously all crossed, my hands hidden in my pockets. My first breath of relief always came with the separation of the SRBs. But I didn’t relax until Negative Return, the point beyond which we wouldn’t try that dreaded RTLS.

I was a full-time engineer when, a few months before STS-51L, I had occasion to meet with Christa McAuliffe and her back-up, Barbara Morgan, regarding one of the experiments Christa was going to conduct during her mission. They were a bit like local celebrities to us NASA people, celebrities that were pleasant, eager, and genuinely happy to work with us. Their office was directly under mine in building 32, and everyone in our building felt an extra sense of ownership in their adventure, whether we worked on their flight or not. We gathered in the conference room next to their office to watch each launch attempt with a growing sense of frustration each time it was scrubbed.

On January 28th, I made a mental note to get down to that conference room by 10:30 to get a seat before it filled up. I was engrossed in writing a technical paper about a manned Mars mission when Doug Whitehead came and leaned on my office doorjamb. Doug, who was always lively with a quick, sharp wit, looked pale and absolutely blank. I asked what was wrong, and he said, “The Shuttle blew up” in a completely deadpan tone. I looked at the clock and saw it was 10:40 and jumped out of my chair, thinking Crud, I missed the launch! I thought this was Doug’s way of ribbing me for losing track of time and not showing up downstairs. I told him, “Doug, that’s just not funny.” He agreed it wasn’t funny and repeated that it had blown up – exploded - as if I needed a synonym. I told HIM again that it wasn’t funny and he said he didn’t know what else to say.

I explained to him that it wasn’t possible. It was Challenger, our most trouble-free vehicle; it had a TDRS satellite on it, and a SPARTAN vehicle that I had modeled analytically, and for heaven’s sake, Christa McAuliffe, our teacher-in-space and a wonderful lady! Every school was broadcasting the launch to inspire students to pursue their educations, because now even regular people are able to go to space. It couldn’t just blow up. That was preposterous! He must have misunderstood. But I also knew that Doug was one of the smartest people around and he was an expert at launch aerodynamics. With growing dread, I went into the hall and saw my coworkers returning to their offices, walking like zombies. Suddenly, everything we’d been working on an hour earlier was meaningless.

I’d watched every launch, except for the one that mattered. I felt guilt over not being in the room to share that horrible moment with coworkers and the nice people from the Christa’s office. And I felt a stupid sense of remorse that I hadn’t done my superstitious finger-crossing that morning, because I’d been preoccupied. It’s odd how often that bugged me in the days afterward – like I could have prevented the whole catastrophe.

I spent the next couple days watching video of the launch over and over again in a little room in Building 8, looking for signs of anomalies in the exhaust plumes, which were my niche. I saw the telltale puff of black smoke at ignition and told my boss that, subjectively, the exhaust plume looked more turbulent, as if its boundary layer had been tripped. That was all I could to do “help."

There was at least some comfort in sharing the grief and mourning with thousands of my coworkers. Besides the loss of bright, talented people, I also grieved the loss of my favorite Orbiter, the work I had done on the mission, and NASA’s reputation for excellence. I didn’t talk about that side of it much, because the loss of the crew was too sharp. Whether you knew the crew or not, there was plenty of heartache to go around. We weren’t even sure if the Shuttle Program, or NASA itself, would be allowed to continue.

We spent almost three years working on deserving another launch attempt and learning to cope with a new reality. The loss of Challenger affected every facet of how we did business, from what the crew would wear during launch to how we talked to each other at meetings. I got a new perspective on RTLS; it might be risky, but at least it was something. With the SRB’s still burning, the Challenger crew never even got a chance to try it.

It was terrifying and gratifying to see STS-26 launch in September 1988.

I wish I could say that the scars from Challenger helped prepare me for the loss of Columbia in the skies over Texas in 2003, but they didn’t. In 1988, I knew only one of the crew, Christa, and only from a distance, and that was bad enough. By 2003, I knew several of Columbia’s crew fairly well, so the burdens of the last time were compounded by the loss of friends. Again, we’ve rebounded since then, personally and as an agency and the resilience is a blessing. These days, I remember to value the lessons of the past because of the high price we paid to learn them.