Shuttle Explodes; Crew Killed : Challenger Blows Apart Shortly After Perfect Liftoff : President Mourns the Loss of Six Astronauts, Teacher

By PETER H. KING

Jan. 29, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The space shuttle Challenger blew apart shortly after liftoff Tuesday, killing all six crew members and a schoolteacher chosen to become the first private American citizen to venture into space.

The horrible spectacle occurred at 8:39 a.m. PST slightly more than one minute into what had appeared to be a perfect blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center.

It was witnessed with stunning clarity by thousands of spectators here and millions more Americans watching on television. Extraordinary attention was focused on the mission because of the presence aboard of Sharon Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school teacher from New Hampshire and a mother of two small children.

“This was truly a national loss,” said President Reagan, who last year declared that an educator should be the first everyday American to ride on a shuttle mission. “We mourn their loss as a nation together,” he said in a nationally televised statement.

The President postponed for one week his State of the Union address scheduled for Tuesday night.

‘Small Amount’ of Debris

After the explosion, helicopters and ships converged on an offshore point 18 miles downrange from where the Challenger disappeared from monitors. By nightfall, the searchers had found only “a small amount” of debris, including heat-resistant tiles from the shuttle, and no signs of survivors.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they did not know what triggered the fireball. An immediate internal investigation was ordered, and all shuttle activity was suspended. In his statement, Reagan vowed that there would be future shuttle flights.

The explosion came at one of the most critical points in the launch routine. One minute into the blastoff, commander Francis R. Scobee received preplanned instructions to restore engines to full power.

They had been slowed to decrease air pressure on the spacecraft, as well as on the expendable, auxiliary fuel tank and booster rockets needed to propel it into orbit. Pushing the engines back to full power would subject the spacecraft to the most extreme pressure during the entire procedure.

“Go with throttle up,” a controller in the Johnson Space Center in Houston told Scobee.

“Roger,” Scobee said, “go with throttle up.”

His were the last words heard from the shuttle. At the precise moment Scobee’s transmission ended, television replays showed, flames appeared to shoot from the rear of the main fuel tank, a rust-colored, 15-story cylinder loaded with 1,589,000 pounds of liquid fuel, attached to the shuttle’s belly.

In the next millisecond, the tank erupted. The force obliterated the spacecraft.

The two solid rocket boosters peeled away from the side of the apparatus and tumbled earthward. Dozens of smaller pieces of the shuttle craft rained down in lazy arcs, leaving eerie white contrails in the blue sky.

Many spectators here were novice shuttle watchers who mainly had been drawn by McAuliffe. They first thought that the fireworks-like spectacle was part of the normal procedure. They greeted it with cheers as they scanned the skies for a sight of the white-and-black Challenger.

At the press gallery, however, veteran space reporters and NASA public affairs officials sensed disaster. Some began speaking frantically in the technical, acronym-laden lexicon found in abundance here.

“RTLS! RTLS!” several shouted at once, indicating they believed that the boosters had been blown away to accommodate an emergency return to the landing site.

They looked in vain for the spacecraft and listened hopefully for the sound of the sonic boom that would signal a return approach.

“Where’s the bird?” a disbelieving Time magazine correspondent said, his eyes rimmed red with tears. “God, where’s the bird?”

It quickly became clear to all that something was terribly wrong.

The most noticeable sign was that the thunderous roar of blastoff had dissolved into a haunting and complete silence.

Subdued Voice

The calm but subdued voice of NASA Mission Control announcer Steven Nesbitt in Houston broke the quiet.

“Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation, obviously a major malfunction,” he said.

The announcement was followed by a tense, 40-second silence. Disbelief was the dominant emotion.

Then Nesbitt confirmed the worst fear: “We have the report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. The flight director confirms that. We are looking at, uh, checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point.”

At the spectator gallery, a few hundred yards from the press grandstands, the crowd of teachers, schoolchildren and family friends who had come to watch the blastoff stood stunned in the aftermath. One young man with a beard sat on the cold pavement, his legs crossed, sobbing as he clutched in his hands a camera brought to gather mementos of the event.

Some gathered in small knots, embracing one another. Many wore the bright lapel buttons bearing McAuliffe’s likeness that had sold briskly at souvenir stands.

Little schoolchildren stared in bewilderment at the adults’ abrupt change of emotion.

Jim Cole, an Associated Press photographer from Concord, N.H., where McAuliffe lived, was with the teacher’s parents and other family members in a special viewing area during the launch.

“The mother saw it first,” he said of Grace Corrigan, who only four days ago had confessed at a press conference a sense of nervousness that she described as a “knot in my stomach.”

Cole continued: “There was fear in her eyes. She knew it was going down. Then the sister caught on. Then the announcement.”

Leave Silently, Quickly

The crowd dispersed abruptly, shuffling silently into tour buses, and within only a few minutes the entire viewing section was emptied. Stacks of sodas brought for a post-launch celebration sat unopened under a bright yellow-and-white tent.

Overhead, the shuttle’s snaky contrail and the brilliant white cloud of smoke generated by the explosion slowly began to dissolve in the stiffening breeze.

The appearance of a silvery parachute emerging from the explosion’s cloudy aftermath gave a few onlookers a moment of hope, but it carried no astronaut and instead was believed to have been one of the chutes that normally would have brought the booster rockets back to earth two minutes into the launch.

Jesse W. Moore, NASA’s associate director of space flight and the official who gave final approval to commence the flight, refused to speculate about cause, or about several of the rumors that immediately spread through the space center.

Interpretations of footage of the explosion varied, as some experts who watched replays said it appeared that the first flames appeared in one of the two solid rocket boosters, rather than the fuel tank.

There also were questions about how the cold weather might have contributed to the calamity. It was 32 degrees when the launch began, and temperatures had dropped much lower throughout the night, for a time endangering the launch.

Before blastoff, an eight-member “ice team” had been dispatched to the pad to chip away icicles as long as two feet. A meeting among top NASA officials about the potential dangers associated with the ice halted the countdown for half an hour.

The mission, the 10th for the shuttle Challenger and the 25th of the 5-year-old program, already had been delayed three times in three days by weather conditions and the tardy delay of a previous mission, also caused by bad weather.

Denies Pressure

Moore was asked at a brief press conference Tuesday afternoon if NASA had felt pressed into pushing forward with the mission.

“There was absolutely no pressure to get this particular flight up,” he said. “We have always maintained that flight safety was our top priority.”

Moore said that before the launch his top advisers “to my knowledge all felt that Challenger was ready to go, and I made the decision that we launch.”

Moore said that a hasty review of all flight information recorded in Houston gave no indication of anything but a normal flight before the explosion.

Moore ordered an immediate internal investigation and appointed a five-member interim review team of high-ranking NASA officials. By law, NASA must commission a full review of the explosion. Moore said all NASA film, notes, tapes and other data relating to the launch was to be “impounded” to assist the inquiry.

He said an official outside investigation by experts also would be organized by the space agency.

The Defense Department handled the rescue effort. At its height, 13 aircraft and 7 vessels foraged the choppy waters off the Florida coast for remnants of the disaster. By dark, the effort had netted only a few small pieces of debris, officials said. The ships were to search throughout the night.

The searchers had not been able to move into the zone beneath the explosion for an hour. because debris dropping from high altitudes created a danger.

“Anything in the area would have been damaged,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Robert W. Nicholson Jr.

Deliver Condolences

Flags were lowered to half-staff at the space center. Vice President George Bush, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the first American to orbit the Earth, and Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), who last year rode on a shuttle, all came to deliver condolences to families of the crew members.

The center’s large digital clock that depicts the amount of time the mission has been in space continued to count forward, providing a strange effect throughout the grim day.

The images of the late morning and in afternoon were in sharp contrast with earlier in the morning, when McAuliffe and other crew members boarded for the flight.

The crew had been awakened at 6:18 a.m. EST and ate breakfast a half-hour later. After a 10-minute briefing, they departed for the flight pad, arriving at 7:48 a.m.

They all were full of smiles and pleasantries for the ground crews before they entered the spaceship shortly before 8:30 a.m. McAuliffe was presented with an apple by one of the technicians who helped her don her helmet.

McAuliffe had been one of more than 11,000 teachers from around the nation who answered Reagan’s call and applied for a seat on the shuttle.

She was selected last July, and since then had been in rigorous training for the mission. She thrived on it. She was to have taught two classes from space.

Her mother had said of McAuliffe at a press conference only late last week: “She is as happy as a clam. We saw her just 15 minutes ago and she was bubbling all over. But she is anxious to go.”

Other crew members were Scobee, 46, the commander; pilot Michael J. Smith, 40; mission specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, 39, an Air Force lieutenant colonel; Ronald E. McNair, 35; Judith A. Resnik, 36, and Gregory Jarvis, a 41-year-old payload specialist who works for Hughes Aircraft Co.

In his statement, Reagan praised the entire crew as pioneers, heroes of space-age exploration.

“We’ve grown used to the idea of space,” the President said. “Perhaps we forget we only have just begun. We are just pioneers.”

Reagan had a message to the millions of schoolchildren who had witnessed the tragedy from their classrooms across the nation:

“I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like his happen. . . . It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future does not belong to the fainthearted.”

Finally, the President promised that this would not be the last shuttle mission:

“We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews, and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here.”

Challenger’s Path -3.5 seconds--Ignition of three orbiter engines. 3 seconds--Solid rocket boosters ignite, all five engines burning. 7 seconds--Rocket and orbiter roll, leaving Challenger upside down. Shortly thereafter, throttle is eased to about 65% of maximum thrust. 1:09 minutes--Maximum pressure of atmosphere and speed exerted on the rocket. Throttle goes to full power, with an increase in acceleration and stress. It is just after this point that flames may have begun erupting from the solid rocket booster to the left of the Challenger. 1:15 minutes--Almost immediately, an explosion rips the rocket apart. Challenger was 4.9 miles high, moving at 1,977 m.p.h. 2:04 minutes--Where separation of solid rocket boosters would normally occur. Rescue crews dispatched to a sea position 18 miles off coast at 28.64 latitude, 80.28 longitude.

Related stories in Part VI, Page 1. Times Television Critic Howard Rosenberg describes a front-row seat to a horror story. And at KABC Radio, callers reflect the nation’s pain, sorrow, love.