Challenger: The Final Flight

Meanwhile, the crew is going through the routine

of having breakfast just before they take them out to the pad.

This will be the second countdown

for what's going to be known as "The Teacher Flight"

because it will feature lessons to be taught a little bit later

by Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher from New Hampshire.

And this is a departure for NASA

because this will be the first time that a real person, if you'll pardon me,

will be allowed to participate in one of these flights,

and it portends more of availability of flights for common ordinary citizens,

and it kind of demystifies and takes some of the mystique away

from the old astronaut tradition.

This is Mission Control Houston at the T-minus nine-minute mark.

Nine and counting.

All orbiter systems continue to function normally,

and Mission Control is ready for the launch this morning.

This is Mission Control Houston.

Roger Wilco.

Christa McAuliffe and her six crewmates are preparing for a go.

Many people around the country

will think of it as the first flight of a private citizen.

And because she is a civilian, a private citizen,

she's drawn a lot more attention around here

than the astronaut members of the crew.

Good morning. I'll introduce the commander of the flight, Dick Scobee,

and Dick will introduce the rest of the crew.

It's a pleasure being here with y'all this morning.

This good-looking group off to my right, I'd like to introduce them one at a time.

Ellison Onizuka is our expert on the tracking data relay satellite.

I've been looking forward to this for a long time,

and I hope to stay with the space program, fly more missions.

Ron McNair is our expert on the Spartan Halley,

the comet research satellite.

My sense of anticipation is greater this time than the first.

I know how much fun it is and how fascinating the entire experience is.

- T-minus three minutes and counting. - 3:30 and counting.

Judy Resnik, who's our flight engineer.

Probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the Astronaut Office.

I've pursued my career on my own merits,

and this is my second flight,

and I'd like to stay with the space program

as long as they want me, because I think it's very important.

And we see the 51-L crew. Big smiles today.

Greg Jarvis, one of our payload specialists.

I've been charged up since last March,

and so this is kind of a culmination of a dream come true.

Mike Smith, our pilot.

What I'm really looking forward to is the experience of seeing all the things

that everyone comes back and talks about while they're on orbit.

Just a couple of minutes,

the closeout crew will be closing the cabin door

and preparing the white room for launch.

And, of course, Christa McAuliffe, our teacher in space,

who will be doing teacher activities the whole flight.

As the first Space Participant,

I am very delighted to be part of the program.

I think it's gonna be very exciting for kids to be able to turn on the TV

and see that space is for everybody.

The ground launch sequencer

has started retracting the orbiter crew access arm.

The commander of the flight, Dick Scobee.

If somebody's gonna light a six-and-a-half-million-pound candle

under you and send you off into space, it's gotta be exciting.

But there's some apprehension involved.

A crowd of some 500 spectators,

including Christa McAuliffe's parents

and 18 visiting schoolchildren

from McAuliffe's hometown of Concord, New Hampshire, wait anxiously.

T-minus 15 seconds.

T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six…

We have main engine start.

…four, three, two, one…

And liftoff.

Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.

-Roll initiator. - Roger roll, Challenger.

Good roll. Program confirmed.

Bye, Christa! Bye, Chris!

Challenger now heading downrange.

Three engines are running normally. Three good fuel cells. Three good APUs.

Three at 65.

65 FIDO.

- 2257 feet per second. -Thank you.

Altitude 4.3 nautical miles, downrange distance three nautical miles.

Engines throttling up. Three engines now at 104%.

Challenger, go with throttle up.

Roger, go with throttle up.

Obviously a major malfunction.

This is unheralded in the history of the space program.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have covered the space shuttle launches

since the very first launch, since before the first launch itself,

uh, going way back, and nothing like this has ever happened.

These are the spectators watching.

Families of the astronauts.

Christa McAuliffe's parents.

I thought the flight was going fine.

And then I heard them say "major malfunction,"

and then the person beside me said, "It's exploded." And it was…

I couldn't speak. It was…

Seven really brilliant and beautiful people got killed.

I was shocked. Reminded me a lot of President Kennedy's death in '63.

I don't know where the analogy comes, but it was a national tragedy.

The silence is deafening. There is no word from NASA,

no word from the rescue vehicles.

No-- No word whatsoever, uh, on what may have happened.

If I had to speculate,

I'd say it's probably 90% probability something with the main engines.

It was what engineers call a catastrophic failure,

several things had to go wrong at once.

The shuttle had an information stream

that was really unbelievable.

I mean, they had enormous amounts of data

all the way up to the moment they lost the orbiter.

So we're all thinking,

"They must know what happened, or have a pretty darn good idea."

GC, all operators, contingency procedures in effect.

Stay off the telephones. Make sure you maintain all your data.

Start pulling it together.

The space program experienced a national tragedy

with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger

approximately a minute and a half

after launch from here at the Kennedy Space Center.

The real question that remains to be answered of course is

was there some kind of incompetence

on the part of those people who are charged with the space shuttle program?

I'm only raising it as a question. We do not know the answer to that yet.

That will take a long and meticulous investigation

before we can determine that.

As I watched the different newscasts,

I began to feel that there was a cover-up in motion.

There were people in NASA who said a catastrophe would take place,

and all of the important players at NASA headquarters knew.

How could they live with themselves

for making a decision like that?

There was this pretty pink-colored glow out the windows.

I always likened it to riding down a neon tube.

As soon as we hit daylight, that pink color faded away.

I got a sense of speed coming in on entry.

The ocean and the clouds were really whizzing by.

Coming across the mountains and seeing the dry lake beds there,

it was very obvious where we were.

What a way to come to California.

We took a big left bank.

I looked out the windows,

and there were thousands of people out there on the lake bed.

And I thought, "Hope they're not on the runway."

Columbia, you're really looking good. Right on the money.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Thirty.

Down it came from space, 98 tons of deadweight glider.

Beginning of a new era in space.

Three, two, one… touchdown.

A triumphant return for the space shuttle.

A perfect landing here in the California desert.

On the other side of the country, there was jubilation

at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

John Young, Robert Crippen, and their magical spacecraft did it today.

The first flight of a reusable spacecraft in history.

I'd never seen John that excited after we landed,

and I was pretty excited myself. It was actually the highlight of my life.

There were tens of thousands of people around at that time.

Even Roy Rogers was there.

Stephen Spielberg was there as well.

I think we've got a fantastic and remarkable capability here.

We're really not too far, the human race isn't, from going to the stars.

Myself and all my compatriots

are gonna get many more opportunities to fly.

We are really in the space business to stay. Thank you.

I think this epic flight of Columbia proves once again

that the United States is number one.

The country was very proud because we were a success.

And it was a truly unique vehicle.

Nobody'd ever seen spacecraft come down and land on a runway.

That's one small step for man.

One giant leap for mankind.

Near the end of the '60s,

it dawned on NASA that we'd been so intense in our effort to go to the Moon

that we hadn't given adequate consideration…

to what would be done next.

I was the director of the Propulsion and Vehicle Engineering Laboratory at NASA…

so I was asked to organize this group.

We devoted ourselves exclusively

in laying out lower-cost means of getting to and from space.

When we developed an expensive vehicle like the Apollo

and used it one time, obviously that's not economically attractive.

So the idea was to do something reusable.

The president today authorized the development

of a five-and-a-half billion-dollar space shuttle.

According to the president, the shuttle will

transform the space frontier of the '70s into familiar territory.

Launched like a rocket,

orbiting like a satellite,

and landing on a runway like a plane to fly again.

In its 60-foot-long, 15-foot-diameter payload bay,

it will eventually carry cargo weighing up to 65,000 pounds.

The shuttle was gonna carry military payloads,

science payloads like the Hubble Telescope,

and commercial communications satellites.

You can think about the shuttle as being a space truck.

We're really setting up to take anything or anybody that wants to go to space.

The shuttle is what opened everybody's mind to the thought,