I watched live on NASA's internal tv network, surrounded by co-workers, all of us part of the Shuttle Program.
We built the tanks and shipped them by barge to the Cape for launch. I was recently graduated mechanical engineer working on robotic welding processes for the Shuttle External Tank. I watched as our pride and joy blew the Shuttle and its crew to pieces. (The External Tank is the piece that actually blew up. The starboard SRB caused the anomaly, and the two boosters continued off on their own rogue paths until the range safety officer destroyed them by command).
NASA had live TV monitors in the office corridors and on the plant floor at the Michoud Assembly Facility, where the tanks (and before that, the Saturn V) were manufactured. At launch time, employees were encouraged to watch their handiwork make the nine minute ascent before it was tossed away for destructive reentry over the Indian Ocean. We were on an ambitious plan to reach 60 tanks per year, corresponding to more than one Shuttle flight per week. After over twenty missions, launches were becoming routine and we were less compelled to see every one. I had already missed a few, but on this particular morning the skies that day over Michoud were crisp, cold, and crystal clear. I knew same air mass was over the Cape. That meant the television optics would be clearer than usual. With this unusual weather in mind, I planned to watch the launch.
General NASA and company policy encouraged employees to take a break and watch launches, but I unfortunately had a new boss who had come from some other non-NASA Martin division and he saw no point in the watching launch video. He kept us sitting around his office in a meeting as the launch started. When I asked if we could be excused to watch, he huffed and griped, but finally relented and agreed to pause our meeting.
I walked down the hall and could see that the launch vehicle had already lifted off and was well into its ascent. I came up upon the cluster fellow employees watching the monitor just as the vehicle trajectory was somewhere near or just after Max Q (maximum aerodynamic pressure, always a moment of concern for the External Tank team).
As I had expected, we had an unusually clear view of the vehicle. A flare of vapor emerged briefly--interesting, as I'd never seen that. Suddenly the image was all smoke and fire. I said "wow, what a spectacular SRB sep, it's not usually that clear." One of my co-workers said quietly "I think we're a little early on that". As he was speaking, the NASA camera pulled back. The SRBs were spiraling off on their own. Debris was raining down over the Atlantic. The audio was momentarily silent and then the announcer said "obviously a major malfunction". I can still hear that in my head as though it happened yesterday.
We stood there in shock for about ten minutes, watching the smoke trails with the cameras zooming in and out as the camera operator tried in vain to find the orbiter. Some employees began crying. A few minutes more and the screen cut to black abruptly, without comment. I walked back to my work area. My new boss said snarkily, "Once you're finished grieving, we can get back to work." To this day, that remains the coldest thing anyone ever said to me at a job. Many employees left at mid-day. In the afternoon, our division president appeared on the monitors looking forlorn. He cautioned about speculating or talking to the press. At day's end I passed out of the gate where local news crews were jockeying with microphones, hoping one of us would chat. I went home to flip between CNN and the big news channels, the 1986 equivalent of Google News and Twitter.
A "tiger team" was immediately convened and two train car loads of manufacturing records were brought in for forensics. A tank failure was the suspected culprit, so every weld x-ray and component flight certification would need to be reexamined. It seemed obvious the tank had exploded, and indeed the failure of the hydrogen tank and the collapse of the O2 forward ogive and intertank were the source of the combustion everyone saw on television. Within a couple of days, the blowtorch plume from the SRB leak was tentatively identified as the proximate cause of the tank's failure, and the investigation shifted its spotlight to Morton Thiokol. That still meant bad news for our operations, as fewer tanks meant less funding and fewer jobs. Ironically the maker of the bad part was awarded--by necessity--extra money to redesign and test the modified boosters.
At Michoud, we did get back to work, but on different projects. Instead of increasing our manufacturing capacity, we had to figure out how to store these tanks for months or years before launch. Would they need to be purged with nitrogen? Would the welds corrode over time? Who had capacity to house spare tanks, or could they sit out in the weather for years? None of that had been tested. The tanks were intended to be consumed within months of launch, and it was obvious there would be no more launches for at least that long. As far as robotic welding, that and all the other projects aimed at increased capacity ended. The workforce shrank from 4000+ to less than 2000.
Incidentally, in the 1970s Thiokol won the contract to build the SRBs over a bid from Aerojet. Aerojet had proposed to build boosters on the Mississippi coast near the NSTL (the propulsion test lab, now the Stennis Space Center). They would ship the boosters to Florida via barge, the same way the Saturn V and External Tanks were delivered. Because they would be built in Utah, Thiokol's design would require segmenting the SRBs into smaller pieces suitable for rail or truck shipment. That in turn would require using joints, and it was at one of these joints that a faulty (or just brittle from cold) O-ring would eventually down the Challenger. NASA had reservations about the segmented design for this very reason, but with the help of the Utah Congressional delegation, Thiokol ultimately won, O-rings and all.
Michoud is part of the Marshall Space Flight Center, which was responsible for the Shuttle's propulsion elements. I was in Huntsville a few weeks after the disaster when a friend who worked at Thiokol told me that quiet pressure had been on to get the bird in orbit with the teacher on board in time for Reagan's State of the Union speech, scheduled that same night. I thought this was interesting but gave it little thought until similar reports emerged in the news. Thiokol senior leadership must have been torn between angering senior White House leadership, possibly even Ronald Reagan himself, and heeding the maybe-it's-too-cold cautionary holds coming from rank-and-file engineers with first-hand knowledge of the systems. Mahogany Row always seems to win in these situations. During the investigation that followed, Richard Feynman put forward the definitive last word on this using only a section of O-ring and a glass of ice water.
On an earlier stint in Huntsville, I met Christa McAuliffe when she came through as part of a group of teacher-in-space candidates on a NASA tour. I don't remember Ms. McAuliffe specifically, but I can say that the whole group of candidates were among the sharpest, brightest, and most attentive people I have ever met. I gave a demo and the Q and A afterward was as fascinating for me as it seemed to be for them.
And that's where I was--personally, in my career, and in relation to the Shuttle--on this day thirty years ago.
