The nuns rarely turned on the big television that sat atop its high rolling stand in the front corner of our classroom. Absent the rare educational tape, it sat quiet, brooding, keeping a watch over us from its perch. But that day felt unlike any that I had experienced before. The entire country’s attention focused on the unfolding drama that the Apollo 13 mission had become. After days of tension and concern that the astronauts might not make it home alive, the drama would end with a Pacific Ocean splashdown. Or not.

I sat at my little desk wondering about the sort of tempered steel from which these amazing men had been forged. Nobody knew what had happened, or why the Apollo spacecraft had suddenly become so badly crippled. We could not imagine that a devastating explosion had blown away an entire side of their service module, their source of life support and propulsion to get home. The astronauts themselves had heard a loud thump, had seen their instruments go haywire, and had felt their capsule shimmying across space. But we heard only the calmly businesslike, utterly unflappable statement that had burned itself into the national consciousness: “Houston, we have a problem.”

I ached to join the ranks of these astronauts, a fact blatantly apparent to all. For years, with the help of my parents, I had collected newspaper clippings and magazine articles about the space program, saved away in a drawer in my bedroom. My 3^rd grade teacher knew, and my classmates knew, that I desperately wanted to fly in space, a yearning that would remain so strong within me that it would govern my choice of college and focus of study. And so, as we sat in tidy rows watching the big television, waiting to learn if the crew of Apollo 13 would live or die, my teacher asked me, in front of the entire class, “Mark, do you still want to be an astronaut?” My answer issued forth crisply and without hesitation: “Yes.”

*                      *                      *

During the four and a half years I spent as an engineer at Boeing Aerospace, I ate lunch in the cafeteria almost every day, but I breakfasted there only two or three times. Typically, I left my bachelor digs in the morning - or in the afternoon - well fed and ready to program. On one of those rare breakfast occasions, Neil and I went over to the cafeteria to grab a bite. As usual, we lingered too long, chatting and not wanting to return to the mainframe computer that awaited me, and the hardware design that awaited him. At long last, however, we kicked ourselves into gear and returned to the 18-21 building.

As we found our metal desks among the endless rows of cubicles and bays, one of my co-workers said, “Did you hear about shuttle? It’s in the drink.” “What,” I asked, not comprehending what he had just said. “The shuttle exploded. It’s in the drink.” I felt taken aback by the crudeness that would inspire him to such a tasteless joke. But when the overhead speaker crackled to life for a rare announcement, I found to my dismay that I had heard no joke.

The company apparently felt concern about the cause of the accident since the shuttle’s cargo bay carried a satellite attached to an Inertial Upper Stage, a booster built by Boeing. Having no idea of the cause of the shuttle’s destruction, an IUS explosion seemed utterly plausible.

I, however, had no room in my thoughts for an IUS or anything else connected with my employer. I slumped in my chair in a state of shock and grief. Nobody had ever died in the US space program in my memory, and now seven of my heroes had fallen. My thoughts swam round and round the circumstances of the accident, repeatedly trying to imagine the astronauts’ point of view, then as quickly pushing the gruesome image aside. I wanted to know what had happened, and I wanted to know why. My productivity hovered near zero that day, not because I spent the day surfing online for information, for online surfing did not yet exist. Rather, I spent that day in a fog of grief, able to muster no real enthusiasm for the work in front of me.

My mind drifted back to a day during college when the aeronautical club had piled into private planes at Palo Alto airport for a flight south to Palmdale. There, we toured the Rockwell facility where they had new shuttle orbiters under construction. They allowed us into the construction area, to a scaffold above the wing of the orbiter closest to completion. The vehicle looked far too large and absurdly fat for the stubby wings that jutted optimistically from its underbelly. It looked like a machine that would never get off the ground and, if it did, would fly with all the grace and maneuverability of a river barge. But I had seen its sister ship, Columbia, perform with John Young and Robert Crippen in the cockpit, so I knew what it could do. I stood within a few feet of the orbiter’s metal skin, almost close enough to touch it, marveling at the thought that this machine would fly in space, still wanting to fly with it, knowing that my dream would likely remain just that. But I would watch the career of this second operational member of the shuttle fleet with special attention. And I would remember its name: Challenger.

When I finally arrived home from Boeing, I turned on the television to watch the news. There, I saw for the first time the videotape of Challenger exploding into a tremendous ball smoke and fire, its solid rocket boosters careening crazily away from each other, drawing an obscenely grotesque rabbit head in the sky. I turned off the television, vowing that I would never watch that explosion again. Once had proven far more than enough.

*                      *                      *

My mind drifted slowly from pleasant dreaming to groggy wakefulness. It felt like luxury to awaken on my own, without the mind splitting beeping of the alarm clock dragging me into the day. And since custody of my daughters belonged to my ex-wife that weekend, I knew that I would spend a quiet Saturday at my own pace, doing those things I needed to do in as relaxed and unhurried a manner as I chose.

I rose and made breakfast, then sat eating and enjoying the simple quiet solitude of the house. I meandered downstairs to my computer workstation to see what spam I needed to delete, to listen to a few MP3s, and to think about finally balancing my checkbook.

As I sat pondering new ways to fritter time away, the telephone rang. On the other end, I found a person I had been trying to contact about a financial matter. As we talked, she asked me for a phone number that I did not have handy. I asked her to wait a moment while I started up a browser to look up the number online. As I watched the little dinosaur plodding in place on my screen, telling me that the computer had heard my command and was working to comply, the two of us talked about other information she needed from me. The browser appeared on my screen, and my home page full of news sprang up in front of me. I continued to talk and jot down notes as my eyes briefly scanned the headlines before I clicked the yellow pages link. The page seemed to contain quite a lot of stories about the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and I wondered briefly if we had reached a round numbered year. Then, I looked more carefully and interrupted the woman on the other end of the phone: “Whoa, hang on – what happened to the shuttle??!” “Oh, you’re just hearing,” she answered slowly. All thoughts of our business fled my mind as I stared at the headline: Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas – No Survivors. “Oh no, not another one,” I moaned, feeling the physical pain of loss and an old familiar grief.

Somehow, I made it through the phone call; the woman at the other end clearly realized that I wanted to finish our business quickly so that I could find out more details. I hung up the phone, then went straight to the television to see what they show me, and hear what they could tell me. Almost immediately, the image of a brilliant point of light streaking across the sky appeared. I watched intently as bits of light separated and streaked separately, the primary ball growing smaller and less distinct as more and more pieces separated. I watched another amateur videotape, and then another, hanging on every word from Dan Rather and his interviewees. I sank into my chair, again trying to comprehend the catastrophe, again ripped apart by the loss of even more of my heroes. I knew that I would never join them in space, but they served as my eyes and ears there, and only they could bring that experience home to the rest of us.

As I listened, I knew that no shuttle would launch for some time. But I also knew that they would launch again. I knew that too many people like me would never rest content until they did. And I knew with all certainty that the 14 astronauts I had watched die would never want it any other way.

Copyright © by M. Carrington Adolph.  All rights reserved.