Judy Resnick in Space: Full Throttle Up

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Pushkin.

It was Tuesday, June 26, 1984.

On a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, The Space Shuttle Discovery was preparing to take its first voyage into orbit.

there were six astronauts on board, harnessed into their seats, lying on their backs, facing up towards the cosmos.

The hatch to the crew compartment closed.

The astronauts felt a pop in their ears as the cabin pressurized.

And then they waited,

nervous.

Their chit-chat and jokes fading into silence.

Soon, the only sound was the whoosh whoosh of the cabin fan.

At T minus two minutes, the astronauts closed the visors on their helmets.

Good luck, everybody, their mission commander said.

This is it.

Do it like we've trained.

Eyes on the instruments.

At T minus 31 seconds, Discovery's computers assumed control of the countdown.

We have a better auto sequence start.

The astronauts' hearts were racing.

They focused their whole beings on what was about to happen,

on everything they had trained for years to do.

We have a go for main engine start.

At T minus 10 seconds, six high-pressure turbo pumps began to work.

sending thousands of pounds of propellant to the shuttle's three main engines.

At T minus six seconds, the the cockpit started to shake and rattle violently.

The first engine had lit.

This was it.

Liftoff was about to begin.

And then suddenly, the vibration stopped.

The cockpit was as silent and eerie as a tomb.

The crew knew instantly that something was very, very

wrong.

They were only seconds away from lighting the solid rocket boosters.

Two giant canisters of fuel that would propel the shuttle into orbit.

If they ignited now, while the shuttle was still on the launch pad, they would generate more than 6 million pounds of thrust.

It would rip the shuttle apart.

Everyone on board would be dead.

Instantly.

The astronauts weren't sure exactly what was happening, but they knew they were sitting on a bomb that might be about to go off.

I'm J.R.

Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

In this episode, you'll meet the recipient of a different kind of medal, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

It was authorized by Congress in 1969 and since then has only been awarded to 30 astronauts.

It is given to those men and women who distinguish themselves through quote, exceptionally meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of the nation and mankind.

And just like the Medal of Honor, it has to be approved by the President of the United States.

The Space Medal of Honor doesn't award heroism in battle.

It rewards the heroism you need if you're going to push to the farthest edges of our frontier.

That heroism tells us every bit as much about the nature of courage and sacrifice as the classic Medal of Honor does.

This story is about Judith Resnick.

one of the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on that summer morning in 1984.

Judy was a brilliant engineer who joined NASA along with five other women in the late 70s and went through years of grueling training to qualify to be on that shuttle.

She was the second American woman in space after Sally Wright

and she understood deep in her bones how risky her assignment was.

But she did it anyway.

She persisted through that danger.

Not because she wanted to be a woman in space as some kind of token or ceiling breaker.

She did it because she had a job to do.

A job she was doing for her country, for all of us.

She would do that job until the morning she died at the age of 36,

free falling through the clear blue winter sky.

By the time Judy Resnick decided to become an astronaut, she had been the only woman in the room, literally dozens of times.

That's what you got from being a female math genius and engineer in the late 1960s and 70s.

She was born in Akron, Ohio in 1949.

Her parents were first-generation Jewish Americans.

Judy was exceptional from the start.

She trained to be a concert pianist and she was amazing at it.

She spoke French.

She was the only girl in the math club in high school.

She graduated first in her class and she was accepted early to the famous Juilliard School of Music.

But then, Judy scored an 800 on the math portion of her college SATs, the only female high school student in the country that year to achieve a perfect score.

So she switched gears and enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University to study electrical engineering.

There were barely any other women in the department, but she was getting used to that.

Judy graduated first in her class.

and promptly started adding to her expertise, designing radar control and rocketry circuits at RCA, working in biomedical engineering at the National Institutes of Health, getting her Ph.D.

in electrical engineering with honors.

But while success came easily, finding something to spark her interest was harder.

That all changed in 1977.

when NASA finally opened its applications to women.

Judy was 27.

NASA's decision was a long time coming It was American men who first walked in space

and Then set the first human footprints on a planet other than Earth

and Subsequent flights have remained a sort of free-floating bachelor party This is from a documentary made in 1983 I can't tell if it's meant to be funny or what.

From 1960 until 1977, for reasons that will forever remain unclear, NASA was unable to find a single qualified woman candidate.

Or as one woman put it, they trained a Tim Pan Z to go to space before they trained a single female astronaut.

Anyways, in the late 1970s, NASA had developed the space shuttle.

Unlike the old spacecraft, it would be reusable, able to take several trips a year, which meant NASA would need more astronauts.

And so finally, women were allowed in the door.

Judy wasn't really that interested in space until she happened to see the NASA recruitment notice on some bulletin board.

This is Judy.

I decided to apply to be an astronaut when I was a graduate student finishing up my research work.

It was not something that I had planned to do for my whole life.

It was a case of being in the right place at the right time.

NASA was advertising for astronauts at the time that I was looking for a job.

If she made it sound easy, it wasn't.

More than 8,000 people applied to become astronauts that year.

Of those, a little over 1,000 were women.

Judy worked hard to stand out from the crowd, reaching out to astronaut John Glenn and Apollo 11 pilot Michael Collins Collins to learn more about the space program.

She got a pilot's license, and while she waited to hear from NASA, she moved to California and took a job with Xerox.

Soon enough, she was one of 200 finalists invited to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Of those 200, only 21 were women.

Judy submitted to a week of interviews, to physical tests and mental ones.

NASA recruiters needed to know if these potential astronauts would respond badly to stress.

In January of 1978, Judy got the news.

She would be one of six women accepted into the program.

At the press conference, she stepped onto the stage and smoothed her skirt.

She had straightened her dark curly hair and wore a nervous smile on her face.

Judith Resnick,

mission specialist.

Her residence is Redondo Beach, California.

Her present position is engineering staff, product development with the Xerox Corporation, El Segundo.

Judy moved to Houston with the rest of the 35 newly minted astronauts.

She would train as a mission specialist.

The mission specialist does things associated with the experiments on board or deploying the satellites while the pilots do most of the flying of the orbiter.

While she might not be flying the shuttle, the training was still brutal and it would last for years.

More than any other of the six women, Judy was determined to be seen as one of the boys.

As she once told her father, quote, Dad, I don't want to be a Jewish astronaut.

I don't want to be a Jewish woman astronaut.

I just want to be an astronaut, period.

I just want to go in space and do my job.

A few years into her training, Tom Brokaw asked her what it was like to break into that old boys' club.

Once you got into the program, wasn't there a little bit of resentment or a little bit of male chauvinism that was demonstrated to you?

This is a very male kind of fighter pilot world that you were entering.

Not at all.

As a matter of fact, I think everybody leaned over backwards to make sure that we were treated as equals right from the beginning.

This, of course, was not entirely true.

Mike Malane was also a mission specialist in Judy's class of astronauts, and he remembers the men oggling her, teasing her with dirty jokes.

It sounds like training with a bunch of teenagers.

One time, the guys put a live grass snake in her bag.

They waited in the other room to hear her open her purse and scream, which she did, I would have.

But they respected her brilliance and reliability.

Malane had served as an Air Force colonel before he joined NASA.

He was pretty tough.

He had flown 134 combat missions in Vietnam.

And he remembers Judy this way, quote, I'd watched her fly formation from the back seat of T-38s and lead instrument approaches in bad weather and do it as well as me.

I'd watched a rappel off the side of the orbiter mock-up in our emergency training, parasel into the water in our survival training, work 20 feet underwater in a 300-pound spacesuit.

In simulation after simulation, she had instantly and correctly reacted to countless emergencies.

The other astronauts felt that they could trust Judy with their lives.

Plus, she was a really good time.

Here's Rhea Sutton, who was one of the first female astronauts.

She was a really, really bright, obviously a very beautiful person, flirtatious, funny.

You know, she was just a live wire.

You know, we would do the happy hours or we would go on these NASA trips and Judy was just a star attraction.

She was just having a great time and was obviously friends with everybody.

NASA kept sending her out to do press, which Judy hated.

Journalists would ask her personal questions, questions they would never ask a male astronaut.

Like this, Jim, from Tom Brocco.

Are there discussions in Houston about what happens when men and women go into space for the first time together?

After all, if you're up there in some kind of a prolonged space mission, and there may be even relationships that will develop between men and women.

Well, I think from our point of view, since we're so used to working together professionally that we look at each other as professional colleagues on the ground and in orbit and whatever, and we view it that way.

Period.

Do you think the time will come when there will be romance in the outer space now?

Oh, gee, I really couldn't tell you that.

Tom,

what are you doing?

Understandably, Judy started to avoid the press.

She sometimes would hide from reporters, using her fellow astronauts as human shields.

And then,

at the start of 1982,

it became clear that NASA was going to assign a woman to a shuttle crew.

Whoever it was would become the first American woman in space.

The female astronauts were more than ready.

Judy had a bright pink bumper sticker made that read, a woman's place is in the cockpit.

It looked like it was going to come down to either her or Sally Ride.

Ride was a brilliant physicist and PhD who had married a fellow astronaut.

Sally was comfortable with the press, calm and well-spoken on TV.

And then there was Judy, equally brilliant but single, who cursed like a sailor, went out dancing in nightclubs, and rolled her eyes whenever her gender became part of the conversation.

The decision, unfortunately, was probably pretty clear.

In April of 1982, NASA announced that Sally Ride would be the first American woman astronaut in space.

It would be two long years before Judy would have her first brush with space.

That day, when Discovery's engines shut down on the launch pad, and Judy realized she might be about to die.

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In 1984, Judy Resnick was finally scheduled for a mission to space.

It would be Discovery's maiden voyage.

Although, as Judy joked with the other five astronauts, who were all men, quote, there are no maidens on this voyage.

Judy, as an expert engineer, specialized in the operation of the mechanical arm, which was controlled from within the cockpit, but located outside the orbiter.

It was used to lift solar panels and position satellites.

Here's Judy describing what the team would be doing with the arm during a TV interview.

The remote manipulator arm will be used to take large satellites, for example, out of the cargo bay and put them into orbit.

The orbiter will act much like a bus and the satellite will be getting off at its bus stop, so to speak.

We get to the right place in the right time and we'll pick it up with the arm and we'll put it where we want to, let go, and then back the orbiter away and leave it there

operating the arm took incredible skill here's tom brokaw again talking about judy on a news broadcast despite her protestations that she couldn't do things better than some of the men all the men told me that when she operated that big arm at the back of the payload she had a great touch that she had real dexterity

Discovery was set to launch in June.

A few days before liftoff, Judy and a friend discussed who would inherit her things if the mission went wrong and she didn't return.

Her friend asked if she was ready for the risk and Judy replied, quote, oh yeah, I know what's involved.

But it was about to become very real for her.

The astronauts boarded the shuttle in the early morning of June 25th.

But there was a problem with the backup flight system computer.

The liftoff was scrubbed and rescheduled for the following day.

That was June 26th.

Same drill, an early morning wake-up, entry through the hatch, the astronauts' ears popping as the cabin was depressurized.

Judy's father, brother, and mother were watching from the launch control center, located three miles from the launch site.

At a safe distance from any potential explosion,

then came countdown.

The propellant flowed to the solid rocket boosters.

That pair of giant rockets connected to either side of the orbiter, which provided 85% of the space shuttle's thrust at liftoff and for the first two minutes of ascent.

We have main engine start.

And then

the terrifying silence.

Everyone on board the shuttle was worried that the solid rocket boosters would ignite when they were still on the ground, tearing the shuttle apart.

And then they heard crackling over the intercom,

there's a small fire on the launch pad.

Here's Mike Malane, who was on that flight with Judy.

And I'll never forget thinking, there's no such thing as a small fire when you're sitting on 4 million pounds of propellant.

That was a

real terror.

Hear the word fire.

That's the scaredest I think I've probably ever been in my life, sitting out there wondering what the heck's going on with that fire on the launch pad.

In the grandstands, spectators had seen a bright flash as the engines ignited.

Some were convinced that they had seen an explosion.

Judy's mother bent her head and rested it in her hands.

It looked like she was praying.

Water began to spray against the shuttle windows.

The crew unstrapped from their seats and debated opening the hatch to make an emergency escape.

They didn't know that the fire outside the shuttle was hydrogen, and hydrogen fires are invisible.

They might have unknowingly exited the hatch directly into the flames.

Fortunately, they decided to wait.

It was more than 40 minutes before the astronauts finally got out, but they survived.

At the press conference afterwards, they did what they had been trained to do.

They lied, and they said that they hadn't been afraid at all.

Judy said, quote, I was disappointed, but I was relieved that the safety systems do work.

It was unfortunate that we had to check them out, but it built confidence in the whole system.

In truth, The astronauts hadn't just been terrified of the rockets blowing them apart or of the fire.

Liftoff itself was dangerous.

And the shuttle wasn't designed with any way for the crew to escape once it was airborne.

Here's Mike Mullane talking about the shuttle on a performance initiative podcast.

He makes it so clear why the shuttle launch was terrifying for everyone on board.

We didn't have any way of bailing out of the shuttle.

Of course, you're not going to be able to bail out of it in space or anything, but in the atmosphere, if you had an an escape system, you know, some type of injection seats or pods or something, you might be able to survive.

But the shuttle didn't have any of that.

So fear is very, very high on shuttle launch.

No way to escape.

Just let that sink in.

Maybe Judy had intellectually known the risk of what she was doing.

But now, I'm sure, she really felt it.

And yet, on August 30th, 1984, when NASA made its fourth attempt to launch Discovery, she was there.

And this time,

liftoff went exactly as planned.

Three, two,

one.

We have SRB ignition and we have liftoff.

Liftoff is missing 41D, the first flight of the orbiter discovery, and the tuttle has cleared the tower.

Judy Resnick became the second American woman in space.

She released satellites into orbit and conducted experiments on a giant folding solar panel.

This is the largest structure ever deployed in space.

All in all, it was a good flight test for large space structures with potential future use in either space-based construction or in space station operations.

Zero gravity turned Judy's curly hair into a cloud.

She had on gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and those short shorts everyone wore in the 80s.

She looked, well, glamorous.

Back on Earth, people weren't happy about that.

But Judy was just being herself, as usual.

While Discovery was circling our planet at five miles per second, the crew filmed themselves eating and sleeping, even running on a treadmill.

Exercise was part of our daily routine on orbit, just like it is back here on Earth.

Getting set up on the treadmill takes a little bit longer on orbit, but it feels just as good to quit.

But there was one episode that didn't make the highlight real.

The crew had been sent up with an IMAX camera.

While it was filming, the camera caught a lock of Judy's hair and sucked it into the mechanics.

Judy was upset, but not because the other astronauts had to cut off a chunk of her hair to set her free.

Let me tell you, the press had the women under a microscope and were looking for the slightest indication that a woman was different than a man and as a result the women were paranoid about displaying anything anything that would remotely be construed as oh you're different than a man mike malain remembers that when judy's hair jammed up the camera The commander, Hank Hartsfield, said he would call down to mission control control and tell them they were going to have problems filming for the day.

And Judy, you know, looked at him and I don't remember her exact words, but basically it was, you know, I'm going to cut your heart out if you so much as say a word over the air about my hair getting caught in this thing.

To us, it was baffling.

Like, why is it, what's the big deal?

But it quickly became apparent to us what her concern was, is that if that was...

blabbed to the whole world, it would be the thing.

It wouldn't matter how well Judy did on the mission.

All the things she did, she would be remembered as the woman who had her hair that jeopardized the IMAX.

And that, you know, women are different than men, their hair is long, you know, that type of thing.

That's what the press would pick up on.

She knew it.

They fixed the camera.

And after six days, they returned home.

Judy was thrilled.

Surely now she would be seen as an astronaut, not a woman astronaut.

But very soon, the whole world would know her name for a a different reason.

This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union.

Navy Federal can help you find and finance the right vehicle with ease.

And this summer, you're in the driver's seat with savings.

You can get a $250 bonus when you buy your next car through Navy Federal's Car Buying Service, powered by TrueCar and financed with Navy Federal.

With this tool, you can find the vehicle that's right for you as you search through inventory and compare models.

And you could get an amazing rate when you finance with Navy Federal.

Navy Federal strives to support all active duty veterans and their families to achieve their personal and financial goals.

And this partnership with TrueCar is one of the many tools Navy Federal uses to help its members.

Make your plan with Navy Navy Federal and TrueCar today.

Navy Federal Credit Union.

To qualify for the $250 bonus, car purchase and financing must be completed by September 2nd, 2025.

Terms and conditions apply and are available at navyfederal.org slash TrueCar.

Credit and collateral subject to approval.

Navy Federal is insured by NCUA.

In today's supercompetitive business environment, the edge goes goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

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With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

American Military University, where service members like you can access high-quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle.

With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Their preferred military rate keeps tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

And with 24-7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, AMU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military.

That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

In 1985, Judy got the news that she had been hoping for.

She was scheduled for a second mission to space.

It wasn't just because she had shown again and again how brilliant and professional she was.

It was also because, to boost public excitement, NASA had decided to invite a civilian to join the mission.

Her name was Krista McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, and they wanted a seasoned female astronaut to be on the flight with her.

They would be on the space shuttle called Challenger.

Judy, like most of the astronauts in the shuttle program, was initially skeptical about sending a civilian into orbit.

But she soon realized how alone and overwhelmed McAuliffe felt.

So she set up a series of coffee dates and taught McAuliffe about celestial mechanics and how the combustion of the shuttle's engines worked.

She told her,

It's not as hard as they make it sound.

Judy was the only astronaut picked for the Challenger mission who had experienced that brush with death on discovery.

And yet, she had total confidence in the shuttle and in the program.

Here's a clip of her from an interview around that time.

Are you you a bit scared?

No, I'm not scared.

Why not?

We train so heavily for all the contingencies and we're so familiar with the procedures that we can almost do them in our sleep.

But there were things that NASA and the engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company that made the solid rocket boosters, didn't tell the astronauts.

Think of the rockets kind of like a giant stack of metal cans filled with highly explosive propellant.

Morton Thiokol had designed 13-foot rubber gaskets called O-rings to seal the joints of those cans and keep the gas inside from leaking.

If the O-rings didn't work, hot gas would escape through the casing of the rocket, causing an explosion.

burning through everything

and everyone inside the shuttle.

After Judy's first flight on Discovery, the engineers who inspected the rockets were alarmed to see that the O-rings had traces of soot between them.

That meant that for a few moments at least, the O-rings had failed to seal.

And as shuttle missions kept flying, it was clear that the issue with the rocket booster joints was getting worse.

There was one particular cause for concern, cold weather, which could make the O-rings more brittle.

A brittle O-ring would be too inflexible to create that all-important seal that kept the gas from leaking out.

But of course, the shuttle launched from southern Florida.

Freezing temperatures weren't supposed to be part of the deal at all.

The engineers and Morton Thiokol knew that in order to really address the issue, they would have to take the shuttles offline.

But this felt impossible.

For one thing, there was pressure within NASA to prove that the shuttle really could operate almost like an airplane, flying regular missions into space.

The launch scheduled was already plagued with delays and cost overruns.

Add to that, the public excitement over the Teacher in Space program, which put even more pressure on NASA to get the shuttle aloft.

Judy, like all the astronauts, knew that NASA would do whatever it took to make Challenger launch on time.

She even joked with Tom Brokaw about it.

I had an enthusiastic letter from her saying that she was hoping I could come down and watch this one because she was sure it was going to go off on schedule.

We used to have a running dialogue about whether NASA could keep to its schedule or not.

But Judy was wrong.

Liftoff was initially scheduled for January 22nd, 1986.

That was postponed again

and then

again.

Finally, on January 27th, it looked like Challenger would launch.

The crew made it inside the shuttle, strapped in, and then they were delayed by an issue with the handle on the hatch.

By the time it was fixed, the wind had kicked up, and the launch was scrubbed for the day.

Which brings us to Tuesday, January 28th.

The Challenger was scheduled to launch at 9.38 a.m.

But the forecast looked bad.

A record-breaking cold snap.

By the night before, it was clear to the engineers at Morton Thiokol that the shuttle should not fly.

They presented their concerns to their bosses and to NASA management.

But NASA didn't want another delay, not just because of the growing embarrassment, but because it would put the rest of the year's mission schedule off track.

And the executives at Morton Thiokol were just about to enter into negotiations to keep their lucrative contract with NASA.

The engineers insisted it wasn't safe.

The two sides argued deep into the night, and then the engineers gave in.

The launch would go ahead as planned.

None of the astronauts or the millions of people who would be tuning in to watch the first teacher go to space knew anything about any of it.

A few hours before liftoff, the temperatures bottomed out at 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Technicians used brooms to remove icicles, some of them two feet long from the shuttle and the launch pad.

At the crew quarters, the astronauts woke up before dawn.

They walked through press and cheering fans to the van that would take them to the launch pad.

Judy was smiling in her blue jumpsuit, her hair blowing in the cold breeze.

A handout, waving to someone in the crowd.

And here comes the flight crew now.

Commander Dick Scoven, followed by Mr.

Specialist, Dean Riff, Ron McNair,

and Pilot Mike Smith, followed by Kristen McCollough, teacher in space,

Ellison on Hizuka, and payload specialist Greg Jarvis.

Big smiles today.

Confidently getting into the van.

Once they reached Challenger, Judy took her seat at the flight engineer's position.

behind the commander's and pilots' seats.

Before she got strapped in, she turned to McAuliffe and said, quote, the next time I see you, we'll be in space.

At the grandstand, the crowd shivered in the icy air.

Judy's father was there.

So were the families of all the astronauts.

Krista McAuliffe's husband and kids, plus all of her son's third grade classmates, were there.

Cameras locked in on their hopeful faces.

The launch was delayed one hour, then another, and another, as they waited for the ice on the shuttle to melt.

Inside the crew cabin, the astronauts were convinced that it would be canceled.

Judy said, quote,

I hope we don't have to drive this down to the better end again.

But then,

at 11.29 a.m., the countdown began.

T-minus 15 seconds.

The engines were ready to fire.

The instrument panel in the cockpit showed the final seconds of the countdown.

The crew was ready.

Eight, seven, six.

We have main engine start.

Millions of kids in classrooms across the country tuned in.

So did the engineers at Morton Thiokol.

sitting in a conference room, sharing the same sick feeling,

holding hands.

And lift on,

lift off of the 25th Space Shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.

As the shuttle launched, sheets of ice more than three feet wide fell off part of the launch pad.

Even now, the O-rings were failing.

Hot gas at more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit leaked out of the side of a solid rocket booster.

A joint ruptured.

The astronauts wouldn't have known any of this.

Not yet.

The shuttle shook and rattled as it went higher into the atmosphere.

It was hard for the astronauts to read their instruments.

As they approached the speed of sound, Judy shouted in excitement, shit hot!

At 58 seconds into the flight, a bright orange flame flared at the bottom of the right booster and then it grew.

It crept around the fuel tank, acting like a blowtorch, cutting into the tank and igniting it.

But the instruments in the cockpit and at mission control still didn't show that anything was wrong.

Challenger, go with draw-up.

At 72 seconds, The fuel tank burst apart into a giant fireball.

You can probably picture it, right?

The huge white cloud and then two streamers of smoke curling away from one another out and down.

A big Y in the clear blue sky.

To the people in the grandstand and watching on TV,

it wasn't clear what they were seeing.

Was this the thing that always happened?

Their cheers faltered, then faded.

For a moment, Mission Control was silent.

And then...

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.

Obviously a major malfunction.

But inside Mission Control, they knew how bad it was.

There was no more data from the flight.

Communication with the astronauts, the downlink, was gone.

We have no downlink.

This is Mission Control Houston.

We have no additional word at this time.

The crew compartment had shot out of the blaze of rocket fuel.

Tumbling slowly, it was in a free fall towards the Atlantic Ocean.

It took two minutes and 45 seconds for it to hit the water.

It is believed that the seven members of the crew were alive the whole way down.

Their oxygen would have been disconnected when the shuttle blew apart.

It's likely that they were suffocating in their seats.

After all, there was no escape system.

No ejection seats.

No pods.

Nothing to do but watch out the shuttle's windows as the unforgivingly hard surface of the ocean got closer

and closer.

When we talk about heroism, particularly on this podcast, it's often in terms of saving lives, of remarkable one-man stands against terrible odds.

But I think think we can also agree that there is this kind of heroism that has less to do with saving others and more to do with putting yourself at risk in the name of a greater good.

The astronauts of the shuttle program and the ones who came before and after were serious scientists determined to learn more about the cosmos.

They were explorers at the outer edge of what we know about our world.

They weren't going to space for fun.

They were going there to work for us.

Judy Resnick was as clear-eyed and analytical as they come.

She knew exactly what kind of risks she was taking.

But she felt the rewards outweighed the peril.

They all did.

Ronald Reagan put it this way at the Challenger Memorial Service.

This America was built on heroism and noble sacrifice.

It was built by men and women like our Seven Star Voyagers, who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than was expected or required, and who gave it little thought of worldly reward.

They named a public elementary school after Judy in her hometown.

And every year, the students sing a song in her honor.

Call me a softie,

but it really hits me in the heart.

Judy is there,

never

I think that's heroism in a nutshell.

Knowing the risk and pushing ahead anyways, because you're serving something greater than yourself.

Full throttle up, all systems go.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jay Gorski.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

Original music by Eric Phillips.

Production support by Suzanne Gabber.

Special thanks to the NASA History Office, Performance Initiative Podcast, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

And don't forget, we want to hear from you.

Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

Just email us at medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

You might hear your stories on future episodes of Medal of Honor or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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