Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger disaster - 31 January 1986

There came a moment that, to a normal ignoramus like me, was at the same time most beautiful and most baffling. A colossal, never before seen, firework display.

The puzzle was the tone of NASA’s public relations officer, the man calling off the technical process of the flight, was he not seeing what we saw, this huge spray of colour, against the very blue sky? He was not it was not his job to look at the monitor, he was watching the maze of ticking numbers, the lightning calculations done from the thousand sensors they are called, that the shuttle feeds into the telemetry, so while the enormous horror of the fireball was sinking into our numbed minds, he was saying his last words, "Obviously a major malfunction, we have no down link," surely the most leaden understatement of the year, for the shuttle has totally disintegrated in an instant and we have no word from the crew.

I doubt that many of us would have been watching this launching if the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe had not been aboard, there had been 56 manned space missions and in the past few years, only the manned flights had been televised and then, not always live. The lift-off is taped at the launching and then replayed briefly on the evening news.

For several years now the work of NASA, the national aeronautic and space administration, has been no big deal to the ordinary citizen, it’s become a familiar subject of special articles in magazines by such famous popularises as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and gets into the newspapers mainly when the space sub-committees of Congress, are arguing over the budget.

But the missions have become so routine that I suspect only space buffs, could call off many names – or any names – of the astronauts of the past few years. To most people, John Glenn, who has long been Senator John Glenn, is the one unforgettable name, the first American to orbit the earth, and that's coming up 24 years in February.

And I suppose a lot of Americans know by now, the name and face of Frank Borman, a later astronaut but only because he is the president of, and does the television commercial for, Eastern Airlines which, incidentally, is in dire financial trouble.

But it was the president's idea of putting a schoolteacher in space that galvanised and drew the popular interest. When the invitation went out over a year ago, there were over 11,000 applicants. Now, obviously, when you consider the rudimentary science skills required, and the length of the special training, and the physics and mental stamina that's called for, I imagine they could easily knock out 10,000 of those first eager applicants.

In fact the selection committee which combined a national council of school officers with a half-dozen experts from NASA went quickly through those 11,000 letters and chose only a 114 teachers to interview. All of them then submitted to thorough physical examinations and psychiatric screening, and were reduced to ten finalists.

Christa McAuliffe was 12 years old when Alan Shepard launched America’s manned space programme in May 1961 with a 15-minute sub-orbital flight that was inspiring stuff at the time, but dimmed nine months later by Glen’s complete orbit of the earth. Christa McAuliffe watched the Shepard lift-off, and in her letter of application she wrote to NASA, "I watched the space age being born, and I would like to participate."

She was not by a long shot the most brilliant intellectual of the applicants, or even of her high school class in small Roman Catholic school in suburban Boston. She graduated 75th out of a class of a 181. But her teacher added a note to her graduation report, "Tops," it said "in emotional stability, and seriousness of purpose." And that would outweigh the claims of many a high-strung applicant who was, say, a whizz at mathematics or physics.

In school she had been a long-distance runner, played tennis, volleyball, was a star baseball, softball player, she went on to a Massachusetts state college, not particularly science minded, though her father worked with an electronics firm and I imagine that the shop talk would come in handy later on. She took a bachelors degree in American history and secondary education and, having married a college friend, a lawyer from Maryland, moved there and taught high school English and American history.

And then, she took a masters degree in education and moved back with her husband to New England when he set up a law firm in the small town of Concord, New Hampshire, where she settled into teaching and where all the pupils of her school and the teachers would gather in the auditorium with whistles and blowers and little flags and bubbling high spirits, to watch the launching and the triumph of their Christa.

She was gone from Concord on a proudly granted leave of absence for six months of training with the crew of Challenger. And when she went off there she said, just as the pioneer travellers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveller, will do the same.

She had, of course to bone up on the basic mathematics, physics and electronics involved in any space flight, while picking up from the rest of the crew, the residue of their considerable experience of the theory and practice of flying. The black man was a veteran test pilot, the Hawaiian was an air force flight test engineer with one space flight behind him. Three of them – a physicist who was going to launch a science platform to observe Halley’s comet, an air force aerospace engineer and the other woman, Judy Resnick, an electrical engineer, who was on a space mission in 1984 – all three had been astronauts since 1978.

This left the pilot of this mission, Michael Smith, a navy man who had never been in space but had logged well over 4,000 hours of flight time in jets mostly, and flown in 28 different kinds of civilian and military aircraft. Living and working with this crew for six months, Christa would obviously absorb a lot of practical expertise, but of course she had to go through the 180 hours of training manuals, learning to manoeuvre through weightlessness in training jets, and the way that daily habits of a human being are adjusted to life in orbit. And many many rehearsals of procedures for dealing on the hop with space accidents and emergency landings.

She had come through all this so well that she was going to give, from space, two science lessons over the public television system to schoolchildren and then to stay with the space agency till September, as a lecturer around the country to schoolchildren and civic groups and the like.

Most of all this we learned about in the weeks before Challenger was to take off, and if not the space star of the crew she became the vivid human link with all of us, for while the senator who had completed a space mission was a veteran fighter pilot in Vietnam, Christa McAuliffe was the first ordinary citizen to go into space. No wonder President Regan, when he had the appalling news, was dazed for a time and said, "I can’t get that schoolteacher out of my mind."

The broadcast, the telecast, began with the crews' jolly breakfast together and went on with their being rigged up in space suits to boarding the shuttle, to lift-off, the cataclysmic explosion and after that, on and on through the whole sad day.

Frank Borman the ex-astronaut, the Eastern Airlines president said, now, a thousand experts will come out of the woodwork who don’t have the faintest idea what they are talking about. Well it didn’t happen. The anchormen of the network, many independent stations, were anchored to their microphones for something like eight hours, but they are not the chosen half- dozen for nothing.

In this country, anchormen and women are not pretty faces, if they are that's incidental with charming voices, they are not and are not known as newsreaders. They are, even the youngest of them, early forties, veteran reporters, the first generation that went from radio to television, men like Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow were war correspondents in the second war.

The next, the present, generation – and I am thinking of the half-dozen familiars every night on NBC, CBS, ABC and the public non-commercial network – between them can log up many years, as war correspondents in Korea or Vietnam, have been newspaper and/or TV correspondents in Moscow, Paris, London, Budapest, Tokyo. All of them have covered many space flights and learnt the elements of the game, and of course, they were backed up by a flock of network science correspondents, and the staff correspondents – each network assigns to the three space headquarters in Houston, in Pasadena and at the launch pad itself, Cape Canaveral.

Naturally, the first thing and the second thing, all of us onlookers wanted to know, was, what went wrong? And since NASA itself quite rightly wasn’t saying, it was up to the anchormen and their back-up specialists to speculate. They didn’t, they tapped experts from former astronauts to space scientists and John Glen and the flying senator, and research scientists, and nobody the first day and the second day, certainly, had a dogmatic theory. They knew too much, they all stressed that the astronauts know at the start that the perfect shuttle has not been invented. And they all know, and don’t talk about, the fairly certain prospect that one day what had never happened, a crew killed in space, would happen.

And if there was a consensus among the old astronauts and the new and the space experts in Congress, it was that safety first, second and third, is NASA's obsession, and that while the manned flights are frozen for the time being and likely to be so for a long time – no early take-off for the sun or Jupiter – the space programme will recover and push on.

To me, when the nightmare sharpness of the horror has blessedly blurred with time, there will be, I am afraid one picture that will retain its piercing clarity. It’s the picture of an inquisitive, innocent couple, middle-aged woman and her affable big husband, Christa McAuliffe’s parents, craning their necks and squinting into the Florida sky and watching the sudden fireball and looking a little puzzled, as first-time spectators might. As if this were part of the show. All part of the unexpected magic.

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