The Space Shuttle: 9. What is it all for?

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Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

A low, flat-roofed, concrete and wood building.

It's tucked into the sand dunes at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

We're at a beach house and a little history here is needed to understand how this came to be.

On the seaward side of the building, steps lead up to a broad open balcony.

It looks out over the dunes towards a long stretch of sandy beach and beyond that, the pounding Atlantic Ocean surf.

Back in the 50s before the space race started, this area was a retirement community and they had

hundreds of single-family homes out here.

But now this land is part of Kennedy Space Center.

All the houses are gone, except for one.

They kept this house as a refuge for the early astronauts to come out and visit privately with their families given the stresses that everybody was under, particularly before a launch was coming up.

It stands in a place shuttle astronaut Mike Malain calls as isolated as Mars.

And it has remained here and been used for the same purpose through the space shuttle program.

It's only a couple of miles from the launch pad where shuttle astronauts begin their journey into space.

To be out here, particularly at night, and see the shafts of xenon lights that are lighting up the space shuttle.

You couldn't see the space shuttle from here, but the salt air would capture the lights.

It looked like a scene that Hollywood had created.

It was so dramatically beautiful and emotional.

The beach house is a place for astronauts and their families to spend time together, but also to say their goodbyes.

And it was the most emotional, gut-wrenching experience that I've ever lived through.

Everybody knows at the time that this could be the last goodbye.

And you walk this lonely beach out here, people would scatter alone with their spouses.

Spaceflight is dangerous.

Long before astronauts fly, long before they're assigned to a mission.

In fact, from the moment they're selected, they have to be ready to face the risks.

The possibility that they might not make it home.

So that reality was there, and I never hid anything from my family.

I told them from the very beginning this is going to be the riskiest flying I ever did and be aware of it.

I told them if I die on it I die doing what I had to do.

It was in my DNA.

I had to fly in space and

I couldn't turn my back on it.

It's something I had had to do, wanted to do, dreamed of doing and

just understand the risk is there.

So in my opinion, we're standing here on a sacred place, certainly sacred for astronauts, sacred for their families.

In the case of Challenger, it was the final goodbye.

From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle.

I'm space scientist Maggie Adarin Pocock.

Episode 9 of 10.

What is it all for?

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans.

It's the evening of Tuesday, the 28th of January, 1986.

Only six hours ago Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart in a ball of flame.

US President Ronald Reagan addresses the nation from the White House.

Today is a day for mourning and remembering.

Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the Shuttle Challenger.

We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country.

This is truly a national loss.

He sits at his desk in the Oval Office.

Behind him, there's a shelf of family photos.

Curtains frame a window looking out onto trees and the fading light of a winter dusk.

The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honored us for the manner in which they lived their lives.

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Thank you.

That image of the Challenger 7 leaving the astronaut crew quarters, waving to the crowd of well-wishers, is almost unbearably poignant.

The crew had a whole NASA family.

The trainers, flight controllers, ground crew, fellow astronauts.

What happens as a crew is getting ready to leave to go to the Kennedy Space Center to launch, they do a three-hour ascent sim.

And so

after they got out of the motion base, that little hallway where you walk up to the motion base simulator, they were coming out and they walked past us as we were walking in and were, you know, hugging and

shaking hands and wishing them good luck and a successful mission.

I'm so glad I had that chance to see them that one last time as we passed in that hallway.

Dick and June Scobie were good friends of mine.

I'd hosted co-op students that June knew from her teaching that roomed at my house for a number of years, off and on.

They knew their kids.

So, you know, I mean, Dick was just a sterling character.

Mike Smith,

similarly.

And Ron, Iron McNair, I mean, he was,

you couldn't not love Ron McNair.

Ron McNair, PhD in electrical engineering, suit for sharp, played the saxophone.

You know, got to meet Kristen McAuliffe on several occasions.

And you could tell she was just in awe of, you know, what she was about to be a part of.

So, you know, talked to SCOBY for a little bit.

And Ellison Onizuka was, you know, he was just known as quite the character.

The 51L crew was my first lead position as their EMU, their extravehicular mobility unit, their suit instructor.

And Ellen Azuka was

very much a fun-loving person.

He liked to make a lot of jokes.

And we had an ongoing joke about, you know, he better be nice to me because if he needs help on orbit, I might not be on console.

And there was an ongoing joke about how I might be called out in real time if that were to happen.

And so while I was in quarantine,

the crew signed a picture for me because I happened to be there.

And they wrote, thanks for all your help.

And then Elle had written help kind of in block letters like he was yelling for help.

So it was

sitting on my coffee table when I left for work that morning.

And when I came back that night, that was the first thing I saw when I opened the door.

Another person in that photo is mission specialist Judy Resnick.

The day before Challenger launched, I called her up at the Cape

and we were going over some

procedures.

I don't even remember what they were now, but

I remember her voice and saying, oh, just call whenever you need to, and no problem.

You know, and

I worked so hard to earn her trust

because JR was

one of the toughest astronauts that you could find

but

if she respected you

you felt really good about yourself because she had very high standards

I called

wished her good luck.

I teased her because on my first mission, we had a IMAX camera and when her hair was all bushed out by zero gravity and the IMAX camera had a belt-driven magazine and her hair got caught in that and jammed the camera.

And

I teased her when I called her to say goodbye before

her second mission.

I said, watch out for hair-eating cameras.

And her answer to me on a lot of things was always, screw you, Tarzan.

That was my call sign, Tarzan.

Remember, those are last words I ever heard from her.

And

the,

you know, when it occurred, you know, it just, you know, ripped my heart out.

When the accident happens, Mike Mullane is in New Mexico.

He's with Bob Crippen and the rest of the crew preparing for the first flight from a new shuttle launch facility on the west coast.

But as soon as they hear the news, they dash back to Albuquerque, where their T-38 jets are waiting to start the journey back to Houston.

On the flight back, I was in Crippin's backseat.

The controllers cleared us direct to Houston and at each handover, they would offer their condolences, the only just lost compatriots.

and then it was silenced.

It didn't bother us the rest until we got to the next place to hand over and the controller would come on, offer their condolences, and clear direct Houston.

No chatter on the radios, no chatter

amongst the flight.

There were four T-38s.

I remember looking out that cockpit and seeing the vapor trails streaming off behind,

just so

crushed in despair and pain that we had just lost, lost these people.

In the aftermath of Challenger, everybody working on the shuttle program feels that despair and pain.

and a collective sense of loss and responsibility.

The last time I saw the crew was the night before they flew to Florida.

They were in quarantine.

Astronaut Dick Covey was Capcom on the morning of the accident.

His was the last voice heard by Challenger's crew.

The team was

shaken to its core.

Anybody and everybody that had been a part of the process of putting 51L together and launching it felt this personally because they did that for every flight.

I mean, every time the space shuttle flew,

thousands of people that touched it, did something,

they're eating it up.

I mean, they did that.

It's their thing.

And the crew got back safely.

That's their thing.

And so something like this happens,

you know, they're Everybody's second-guessing their own feelings and their own thoughts and their own actions.

If you ever worked on something and put your heart and soul into something that ends up causing people to lose their life

for 30 days, I think I just was depressed.

I just didn't know.

All the excitement that I talked about earlier, all the anticipation, everything that made my career in this job so exciting now just became a...

I was at a loss.

I actually can still get emotional thinking about it.

At the time of the accident, Bill Carr was pad leader for Launch Pad 39B, where Challenger lifted off.

Like many of his co-workers, he's asking himself if he is somehow responsible for what happened.

Yeah, what have we done?

What did we do to contribute to that?

I mean,

I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue.

I wasn't sure where

my career would go.

I wasn't sure if this was something I want to still be a part of

jerry miller the cruise suit instructor also began to question how he should respond it was extraordinarily difficult from a personal standpoint to the extent that i i considered leaving the program

but i really

felt after giving it some additional thought that that was not the right answer for honoring my friends that were in the picture on my coffee table,

that I could do them a much greater service staying with it.

After any tragedy or loss, you lose a family member, there's a point of grieving, and you don't really think much about the future other than the loss and how it affects you.

But beyond that, you know, we're all resilient, and you have to get back up and figure out where you're going from here.

But for NASA, it isn't as easy as simply getting back up.

There was little rumblings in the early aftermath of Challenger of maybe NASA can't do this anymore.

Maybe we just stop.

Astronaut Kathy Sullivan.

And I mean, that just annoyed the daylights out of me.

We were not doing this for fun television.

There's a purpose here that's worth...

continuing and worth pursuing.

And if we're going to bail out because we had one bad day and lost seven lives, then

maybe I made the wrong calculus when I made my own equation of what is this for?

What is it worth?

Why are the risks involved with this worth taking?

I thought there were really substantive reasons the country cared about that we were doing this, and we all knew what the risks were.

If you were going to cancel on one bad accident, then I was mistaken.

That desire to push forward doesn't just come from inside the shuttle program, but from across the United States, including the generation that Krista McAuliffe was recruited to inspire

there was an outpouring of letters and an outpouring of phone calls and an outpouring of pictures from kids everybody wanted the future to go on everybody wanted

Everybody wanted space exploration to continue.

Barbara Morgan was McAuliffe's backup as teacher in space.

And an example of that, I'll never forget this one.

We got a call from someone who had told us that after the accident, their kids were outside playing in the snow and it was getting dark and they called for their kids to come in and the kids wouldn't come in.

And they called again and the kids wouldn't come in.

And finally they said, what are you guys doing out there?

And they said, we can't come in.

We're building a space station and we're not finished yet.

That was their way of saying, there's a future, keep it going.

NASA, the US government and some of the public believe there is a future for the shuttle program.

That it's possible to move on from the tragedy of Challenger to start a new chapter.

But it will involve a fundamental reassessment of every system on the spacecraft, of NASA as an organization, and of the very purpose of the shuttle.

This is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

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safe home

We described it as a white knuckle experience.

Whenever we would launch, I would watch the launches, but I'd be clenching my hands to show my white knuckles, and I would have knots in my stomach.

In January 1986, Brown Russell was a young engineer at Morton Thycoal, the company which builds the shuttle's solid rocket boosters.

And I would have knots in my stomach of concern that, hey, are we going to be okay on this flight?

And

that was...

I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt that way.

Russell was part of a group of engineers working on the O-rings that helped seal the booster joints.

The day before Challenger, they had concerns about how the O-rings would perform and the extremely cold temperatures forecast for launch day.

Concerns that were ultimately dismissed by others.

In the months after that, My personality completely changed.

I couldn't see anything.

It just seemed like that explosion was in the front of my mind for four straight months.

I couldn't get rid of it.

I couldn't talk about anything else of meaning.

There were times that I felt very depressed about it.

There were times I felt

very guilty about it.

There were times I felt extremely sorrowful about it.

And there were times I felt angry about it.

And these emotions just seemed to repeat themselves.

After four months, it started to dissipate and we started to really dig in.

In the aftermath of the Rogers Commission, the presidential body tasked with investigating Challenger, the ThyCol team began a comprehensive review and redesign of the solid rocket boosters.

For now, there are no flights.

The shuttle program is grounded.

And so about the summer of 86,

we went after things in earnest and we divided ourselves up into groups.

Russell's group is responsible for the joint and the O-rings that are meant to seal it.

And we looked at different O-ring materials, we looked at different sizes, we looked at changing the groove sizes.

The team scrutinize from every possible angle how they can prevent a future failure of the joint.

And

we did test after test after test.

And gradually...

Heat tests and assembly tests.

They work.

Toughness tests of the rubber, just all sorts of things towards a solution.

First, they redesign the case of each segment of the solid rocket boosters.

Secondly, they add an additional third O-ring.

We called it a wiper o-ring that acted essentially as a sacrificial barrier.

They also redesign the insulation.

The rubber pieces actually compressed against each other.

They put the grooves the o-rings sit in deeper into the joint.

So that if the pressure was able to get that far into the joint, the O-ring would respond.

And the final modification.

They wrap heaters around the joints.

So whatever the external conditions, even if it's as cold as the morning of the Challenger launch, the O-rings will stay at around room temperature and remain flexible.

The redesign is a challenging and intensive process.

But for Brian Muscle, there's also a sense of redemption.

Yeah, I felt I wanted to be part of the solution also.

The redesign that we came up with was so marvelous, I don't think we'd have gone to that extent had we not lost that mission and crew.

And did it take the deaths of those seven astronauts to lead us to truly fix the problem?

And I think, is that our human story, that that's what it takes to shake us into, we really do need to fix this and not just keep marching along.

And it makes me sad to think that it seems to me that the answer to that is yes,

even though that's the wrong answer.

The reality is, NASA, they did not get tunnel vision on just fixing the O-ring problem.

The question was asked agency-wide, what else is out there ready to bite us?

We're not returning to flight until we fix it.

Astronauts like Mike Mullain are involved in these fixes.

The teams at NASA make hundreds of adjustments to the shuttle's systems, equipment, procedures, including what shuttle astronauts wear during launch and re-entry.

You'd walk out in coveralls and fly on the shuttle, which is very comfortable.

Up until now, during the hazardous ride into orbit, an equally hazardous return to Earth, shuttle crews have worn pretty much the same clothing as a train engineer.

The reality there is then now is that you don't have any protection from a cabin depressurization.

So if you ever had a reason that the cabin depressurized, you're going to die.

There's no question about it.

From now on, astronauts will wear pressure suits.

NASA also introduces, for the first time since the shuttle became operational, an escape system.

The shuttle was never designed to have an escape system, a permanent escape system, because it would be flying up to 10 people and you can't have 10 ejection seats on the vehicle.

There'd be no way of ejecting people from that lower deck.

No escape system whatsoever.

No capsule, no ejection seat, no parachute of any form.

So really,

when you think about it, The crew that manned STS-5, the first operational mission, was the first crew in the history of of anybody space program to fly with no means of escape from the vehicle, none whatsoever.

But after Challenger, NASA decides to take another look.

It's not an easy thing to do, but it was figured out how to make it possible for astronauts to bail out of a shuttle.

Astronaut Kathy Sullivan.

Well, if the shuttle could at least get to like 20-some thousand feet in gliding flight, you could get out the side hatch.

And the reason that was a little tricky with the shuttle is the big delta wing.

You had to be sure that you would drop below the wing and not hit the wing.

They came up with a slide pole.

Banana shaped so it would curve down and you had hooks on it.

But astronauts could hook onto you.

Hook a lander onto that, dive out head first, and that arcing shape of the pole would make sure that you ended up below the wing.

To open their parachutes.

So that's how post-Challenger you would bail out if you had to.

Now,

there's a very slim chance that would ever save anybody because most of the time you want to bail out of an aircraft, it's because it's out of control.

And if a vehicle's out of control, the G-forces are going to pin you inside.

You're not going to be able to do all this.

Some astronauts believe that had that pole system been installed on Challenger, that some of the people downstairs might have been able to get out.

But this time of rebuilding is about far more than just the shuttle's hardware.

Challenger showed there's a need to look at NASA as an organisation, the way it's structured, and particularly its lines of communication.

We need more operational people in the management of the program and we need a stronger safety program.

Since flying the very first shuttle mission, Bob Crippen has commanded three more.

Now, in the aftermath of Challenger, he gets a call from NASA's Associate Administrator for Spaceflight, Dick Trulli.

He asks Crippin to join him at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

to help him implement changes in the wake of the Rogers Commission.

And then one of the recommendations I made to

Trulli was that we ought to have the director of the space shuttle program be a headquarters employee out of the NASA headquarters.

And the director of the shuttle program, now based in Washington, D.C.,

should have two deputies.

One of them for engineering at Houston at the Johnson Space Center, another for operations at the Kennedy Space Center.

And truly told me if I really believed that, I'd take over the Deputy Director of Operations at the Kennedy Space Center.

Since I did believe it, he said, got to hang up your flying boots and come do that.

And so that's what I did.

It's the end.

of Bob Clippin's extraordinary and history-making career as an astronaut.

But his new role is no less challenging.

That's probably one of the most difficult tasks I've ever participated in.

We probably had more people telling us why we couldn't go fly than why we could go fly.

I put myself in a position where

I could give the final management go for liftoff from subsequent return to flight.

But beyond all the restructuring looms a bigger question.

Then Dr.

Fauge walked into the room, unzipped it, and pulled out this funny-looking boss wood plane, flew it across the room, and said, We're going to build America's spacecraft.

One that goes much further than the technical or organizational changes.

It's going to launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.

It's going to be reusable.

It's going to go about this high, do this.

What is the fundamental purpose of the space shuttle?

What is it for?

It's a question that goes all the way back to Max Fajet's original dream of a multi-purpose spacecraft.

I have a model here of the space shuttle.

Here's the bowtie-wearing visionary engineer himself speaking in 1972.

The need is to bring larger arrays of instrumentation up in space.

The need to provide man with a real capability to work up in space.

A spacecraft that will provide a platform for science in space and deliver satellites, both military and commercial, into orbit.

In a statement announcing his decision to go ahead with the system, the President said it will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it.

For years, the Space Shuttle team has worked to deliver that dream.

But now, there's a reappraisal of the idea that the shuttle can or should do everything.

That it's the all-purpose spacecraft.

Astronauts risk their lives when they fly.

So which missions and which cargo really justify that risk?

Well, one of the things they fundamentally did, which I didn't necessarily totally agree with, was the decision that

we shouldn't put payloads on board that didn't need a crew.

that if you had another way to launch them, that you should utilize that.

So that took away most of the commercial payloads that we were flying and took away eventually all of the military payloads that we were flying and just left us with payloads that were going to involve the crew.

So it took away, I guess, this fundamental pressure to try to fly as much as we'd been saying.

In the future, this commercial and military cargo will be put into space on expendable rockets.

If these flights go wrong, no human lives are lost.

Changing the kind of payloads that we're going to fly on the orbiter changed the basic concept of what the space shuttle was going to do.

We were trying to drive down the cost of getting payloads on orbit, and it depends on how many payloads you're flying.

And obviously that took away the number of flights we could have.

So it increased the cost of the shuttle operation, which is what caused a lot of negative reaction to the shuttle.

It said, hey, this is not reducing the cost of going on orbit.

So the more missions you fly, the lower the cost per mission.

And the shuttle was originally sold to politicians and the public on the basis of dozens of flights a year.

As one reporter put it, it was promised to take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.

So it fundamentally changed what the initial premise.

Although the initial premise was flying more payloads than I think was possible.

I do think we could have flown at a rate of around a dozen a year.

If the space shuttle's evolution was an inflection point for NASA, then the Challenger accident was another inflection point.

It changed everything.

Astronaut Dick Coffee.

After that, more of the focus was on what is the best use of the space shuttle incorporating the humans on board.

So, what's left when you take out commercial and military flights?

Researching the effects of microgravity.

Studying planet Earth.

Trying to understand the universe.

Mostly, science.

From now on, this is the shuttle's goal.

In the months after Challenger, the question every shuttle astronaut is asking themselves is, will I get a chance to fly again?

It's their job.

It's what they've spent years training for.

But right now, with their spacecraft grounded, the opportunity to get back into space feels remote.

But there's one astronaut who knows that when the shuttle flies again, so will he.

I had been told in private, in confidence, by Dick Trulli and George Abbey that I would command the next flight after the Challenger accident.

But you can't tell anybody.

Rick Haug is one of the astronaut class of 1978, the 35 new guys.

He's confident, uncompromising, and a natural leader.

At his very first Monday morning astronaut meeting, instead of going to the back with the other rookies, he dared take a seat alongside the veterans, people who'd walked on the moon.

He commanded the mission that captured those satellites lost in space.

He's been chosen as commander of the return to flight mission, STS-26.

Well, I was absolutely thrilled.

that I was

entrusted with that mission.

I think every member of the astronaut office, probably without exception, wanted to be on that flight.

The fact that I

couldn't tell people about it or speak about it publicly,

any concerns about that were dwarfed by the enthusiasm that I had knowing that

this gift was in my pocket.

Dick Trulli and George Abbey, the director of flight crew operations, sit him down to tell him the good news in the summer of 1986, a few months after Challenger.

So I remember George saying, I want you to be the commander.

Dave Hilmers will be on the flight.

Mike Lounge.

He says, I've called Pinky Nelson up at University of Washington to ask him if he'll come back.

And he said, who would you like to be your co-pilot?

And I don't know if he was really giving me a choice or just

humoring me when I said, Dick Covey.

Dick was the last pilot to fly in my class.

He's extraordinarily capable.

But George and Greene's.

So I got a call one day and said, would you like to join them for STS-26?

Well, yeah, of course I would.

People say, well, why would you want to fly that flight?

I said, because everybody wanted to fly that flight.

We all knew it was going to be an important mission, but it was also going to be incredibly safe.

And,

you know whenever you can be next that's a good thing.

The shuttle that the five strong crew will fly is partly a new vehicle.

It's been redesigned and rebuilt.

It has new systems and new procedures.

STS-26 will effectively be a test flight just like the very first mission back in 1981.

And more than that, it's a test of confidence.

A vital opportunity to show that the U.S.

adventure in human spaceflight will continue

and that the space shuttle is the vehicle to do it.

After 32 months of being grounded, after a number of delays, after certainly a great deal of soul searching, it looks like we're just about to get back in space again.

That's next time on 13 Minutes.

This has been episode 9 of 10.

Thank you for listening to 13 Minutes Presents The Space Shuttle from the BBC World Service.

It's a BBC Audio Science Production.

I'm Maggie Adarin Paycock.

13 Minutes wouldn't be 13 minutes without the people who made these space stories happen and then shared them with us.

Thanks to every single one of them.

We'd like to thank NASA for its archive sound and the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for its archive interviews.

In this episode, it's interviews with Ivy Hooks and Rick Hauk.

Some scenes in this series use recreated sound effects.

I hope you're enjoying listening to 13 Minutes as much as I have enjoyed presenting it.

You might like a couple of other BBC World Service podcasts, like The Bomb, which tells the story of the atomic bomb, or Witness History, told by the people who were there.

The 13 Minutes series producers are Florin Bohr and Jeremy Grange.

The assistant producer is Robbie Wojciechowski with additional research by Fabry Smallhart.

Technical production is by Jackie Marjoram.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg.

And produced by Russell Emmanuel for Bleeding Fingers Music.

The sound design is by Richard Gould from Skywalker Sound.

Our story editor is Jessica Lindsay.

The senior podcast producer for the BBC World Service is Anne Dixie.

The podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

And the series editor is Martin Smith.

This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.