Nobody knew their names. That’s what’s most striking to me about the seven astronauts who climbed aboard the elevator for the long ride up the gantry alongside the space shuttle Challenger on a frigid January morning 25 years ago this Friday, (January 28, 1986).
What a far cry it was from the heady space race days of Project Mercury some quarter of a century before that morning, when the American public knew every intimate detail about each of the famed Mercury Seven astronauts…or at least every intimate detail that the tightly-controlled NASA public relations department allowed the American public to know.
It’s a fair bet that most Americans who were alive at the time can still, some half a century later, reel off the names of most, if not all of those first American astronauts. How strange, then, yet somehow appropriate, that while we can easily recall Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Wally Schirra and Donald “Deke” Slayton, names with which we are intimately familiar from the dusty newsreels of history, the names of the Challenger 7 who perished aboard STS-51L stir only faint embers of recognition.
That's because even in those relatively early days of its existence, the shuttle program had already developed the mundane, anonymous, routine workhorse attitude that NASA had promised the public. Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Sharon Christa McAuliffe probably preferred it that way. They knew that the glamour days of space exploration were but distant memories; that the time had come for the United States to embark upon the business of space flight.
It wasn’t about moon shots or beating the Soviets anymore. It was about establishing, step by painful step, a permanent human presence in space, and adapting to that hostile environment for the benefit of mankind.
Challenger’s cargo on that last, fateful mission was a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, or TDRS, intended to improve communications between space shuttles and mission control, as well as a miniature space probe intended to observe and study the tail of Halley’s Comet. Nuts and bolts space infrastructure with a dash of good old-fashioned space science.
Similarly, the crew of the Columbia who died when America’s original shuttle orbiter disintegrated on reentry February 1, 2003, was on their way home from an equally unglamorous mission. Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark, and Israel’s Ilan Ramon had just spent 16 days in space on STS-107, minding an assortment of microgravity and Earth science experiments contained in the SPACEHAB science module that was mounted inside Columbia’s payload bay. Like the Challenger 7 before them, the Columbia 7 died doing what they loved; work they felt was of critical importance to our species.
These fourteen astronauts weren’t the first to die pushing the boundaries of space. Back in the beat-the-Russians-at-all costs days of the early American space program, Mercury and Gemini veteran Grissom, Edward H. White, II, (the first American to “walk” in space), and rookie Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire inside their Apollo 1 capsule during a test on the launch pad on January 27, 1967.
Thanks to the endless replays shown on cable news networks at the time, however, and the fingertip access to video footage and stills available on the web, the Challenger and Columbia tragedies were the first to sear themselves into our national psyche.
How ironic it is, that all three of NASA’s great space disasters occurred within a 1-week calendar span, albeit spread across the decades. So how best to honor those who were lost? By carrying on their work and ensuring that the exploration of space continues in the years and decades ahead.
As NASA draws the curtain on its space shuttle program, with just two, or possibly three more missions scheduled to close it out this year, it’s good to know that the gigantic International Space Station will serve mankind for the next 10-20 years, that plans are in the works for the next generation of space vehicles, and that private companies are finally set to begin carrying out the kinds of space operations that only NASA and other international government agencies like it could handle before.
While we may not recall their names in the years ahead, as we pause to remember those lost aboard Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, let’s also celebrate the fact that their sacrifices have helped return us to the stars from which we came.
That’s the cause for which they gave their lives.
