Rude Astronauts Read Free Page A

replayed endlessly, both in TV news film-clips and as a memory, like an afterimage ghostly printed on the retina of the mind’s eye: a fireball, a great blossom of smoke shot through with yellow and crimson, followed by two forking trails of solid-rocket boosters and tiny contrails of debris falling toward the ocean below. The image was played over and over, both on television and in the individual imaginations of those who were stunned by the occurrence. Everyone affected by that image has given it a label: the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up.
    A few hours after it happened, I was having a cigarette in the company’s lunchroom when I had a sudden, vivid recollection. The year before, I had been a news correspondent in Washington, D.C., writing for a couple of daily papers in Missouri and Vermont. Because I had always been a fan of the space program, I managed to talk the editors of those papers into letting me cover a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral. In this instance it was Mission 51-D on the shuttle Discovery , the one famous for sending Sen. Jake Garn into orbit. Two days before the launch, however, I had watched the shuttle Challenger being rolled from its hangar in the Orbiter Processing Facility to the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building.
    It was pushed out backwards by a tractor on that morning in April while a dozen or so photographers snapped pictures from the roadside nearby. It was a routine event, overshadowed by the upcoming launch of the Discovery , and the early morning hour in which the roll-out occurred accounted for the scarcity of reporters at hand, but for those of us who were there, it was a stirring moment. Challenger still bore the marks of its last mission; its re-entry tiles looked worn, its overall color was off-white, but it was still a majestic space vehicle. You couldn’t help but be awed by its beauty, its grace. Another orange tractor hooked up to its forward landing gear and began to pull it slowly toward the VAB a couple of hundred feet away, and as it was towed at a walking pace toward the massive building where it would be mated with its external fuel tank and solid-propellant boosters, I strode alongside it for awhile. I remember feeling a thrill when its right wing tip passed over my head, and thinking: this is a creature which has gone into space, felt starlight on its skin … this is what it feels like to be so close to a piece of history. It was a moment which I would not have forgotten even if it had not been later marred by horror and sudden death.
    Many months later, on the afternoon after the fireball, that moment would come back to me even as I tried to pull together a localized account of the disaster’s impact on the community. Few people seemed to be in their offices when I called. In a strange moment, I found myself on the phone with Worcester mayor John Anderson—a young reporter and the top city official conversing—with both of us shocked, saying to each other, “Oh, my God, what happened?” I remember walking through the Galleria at Worcester Center, noting that the usual midday crowd had thinned, and those who were there looked as if each had been given news of a sudden death in their families. On the Park Avenue bus going home from work, riders either pored over evening newspaper accounts of the event or stared out the windows. There were not even the usual paranoid glances at the passengers on either side, or the socially acceptable instant gazes into nothingness. Everyone had something on their minds that night, and it was not hard to see that behind the thoughtful eyes gazing at the passing streetlights was the image of a supersonic fireball arching over the Atlantic. New England, the United States, the world mourned its passage, along with the deaths of six NASA astronauts and a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The extent of the shock was enough to reach even a hardened city like Worcester, which was not the hometown of any member of the crew.
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