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Tuesday, January 28, marked the 17th anniversary of the Challenger accident. Seven astronauts were killed and a shuttle was lost due to the management decision to launch in too cold conditions despite recommendations not to launch by engineers. (The previous day marked the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire caused by an electrical short, suffocating the three astronauts in a capsule on the launch pad.) It's a NASA tradition to remember the Challenger astronauts with 73 seconds of silence--the length of time Challenger flew before it was destroyed.
Columbia’s astronauts followed the tradition. Rick Husband said, "We've got an announcement we'd like to make on behalf of the STS-107 crew. It is today that we remember and honor the crews of Apollo 1 and Challenger. They made the ultimate sacrifice giving their lives in service to their country and for all mankind. Their dedication and devotion to the exploration of space was an inspiration to each of us, and still motivates people around the world to achieve great things in service to others. As we orbit the Earth we will join the entire NASA family for a moment of silence in their memory. Our thoughts and prayers go to their families as well." An audio clip of Rick’s remarks is on this book's website.
None of Columbia’s crew was with NASA at the time of the Challenger accident. According to their bios, Husband was an instructor pilot at George AFB in California, McCool was in flight training, Chawla was working on her doctorate degree at the University of Colorado, Brown was a flight surgeon on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, Anderson was assigned to Randolph AFB, Clark was studying for her medical degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ramon was a student at the University of Tel Aviv.
STS-107 was only the third time NASA has had a shuttle in space on the Challenger anniversary. The previous flights were another microgravity research mission in 1992, and Mike Anderson's first mission, STS-89, in 1998. Mist scientist Angel Abbud-Madrid was in a meeting with a group of engineers, troubleshooting his experiment, when the anniversary took place. At 10:38 Central Time all work stopped for the moment of silence. Abbud-Madrid recalls, “And then we just started up again without losing a beat.”
JSC did not have a formal ceremony, but groups of workers planned their own get-togethers to commemorate the Challenger crew.
I asked STS-107 manager Phil Engelhauf, mission scientist John Charles, and scientists Arny Ferrando and Scott Smith about their recollections of the Challenger accident.
Phil Engelhauf, now a lead in Mission Control, was a flight planner in 1986. He said, "I was in a conference room. It was the third floor of building 4 [at JSC] with a bunch of my cohorts in a conference room watching the launch. I'm not sure I can adequately describe publicly the reaction each of us had. These were our friends that lived down the hall in our offices. They were heroes every day to us. This was our life, our job, our career. There was a lot of uncertainty as to what this was going to mean. Within hours people had adjusted to a state of optimism that we were going to find out what happened and pick up and carry on. 17 years later here it's kind of nice to see we did that and picked up with that legacy and are here today with a space station occupied 365 days a year and an independent shuttle program servicing the space station and the broader science community and the objectives that all those people stood for."
Dr. John Charles recalled, "I had just come from an off-site meeting and parked my car to go to the conference room in building 37 to watch the launch. So I arrived just in time to see everything unfold. The rest is as Phil said, the uncertainty and then followed very quickly to do whatever we had to do among the scientific community to get the program back going again."
Protein Turnover scientist Arny Ferrando remembered, "I was in active duty officer in the Army at the time, an instructor pilot. We actually watched [the launch] between flight shifts. Back then [shuttle flights] were still very novel and everything came to a halt. This was at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the Army's training site. So it was quite a sobering event as you can imagine."
In contrast, Dr. Scott Smith, the Calcium Kinetics scientist, was a graduate student with no connection to the space program. He said, "I was working in a basement laboratory without any exposure from the outside. So it actually took 30 minutes to an hour before somebody called down to let us know what happened. The reaction's hard to describe. But obviously to be here 17 years later is an incredible testament to the people who come before us and continue to strive to take that next step."