Opinion

The space shuttle that never came home

Merritt Island, Fla., Tuesday, Jan. 28, 1986: 2 a.m.

High up on the 235-foot level at the top of the launch gantry, it was dark, and cold; the wind sang in the girders, and Charlie Stevenson did not like what he saw. As leader of the Kennedy Space Center Ice Team, Stevenson was responsible for checking the space shuttle Challenger for ice that might prove dangerous during takeoff. On previous launches, his inspections were usually confined to the external tank, which, although insulated with thick blocks of polyurethane foam, became so cold when filled with liquid oxygen and hydrogen that moisture in the humid Florida air often formed a thick rime across its surface.

But when he had arrived at work in the Launch Control Center soon after midnight, Stevenson discovered a far more threatening problem developing out on Pad 39B. The cameras monitoring the gantry and the mobile platform supporting the shuttle revealed that the plan to protect the plumbing on the launchpad from the freezing weather — forecast to be the coldest in Florida history — had backfired. Although the pipes hadn’t burst in the plunging temperatures, the water trickling through the sprinkler system and the emergency showers and eyewash stations, spilling across the catwalks and cascading down steel supports, had left the pad structures encrusted in ice. What he found when he and his team arrived to inspect the scene in person was unlike anything he had ever seen: Sheets of ice an inch and a half thick glistened underfoot; the route that shuttle commander Dick Scobee and his crew would take along the swing arm in an emergency — from the orbiter hatch to the slidewire escape baskets — was blocked by a dense slick of frozen water. Icicles a foot and a half long, like the pipes of a ghostly organ, dangled from handrails and walkways; they hung from the conduits, the cable trays and the gratings.

Stevenson feared that, when shaken loose by the violent concussions of Challenger’s launch, the falling icicles could strike the shuttle’s delicate thermal protection tiles — causing damage that would make the spacecraft vulnerable to disaster on reentry. He reported his concerns about the launch planned for later that morning: The ice was dangerous and growing worse, but if they stopped the water from running, the pipes would freeze.

“Then what choices we got?” the director of engineering asked.

“Well, I’d say the only choice you got today,” Stevenson said, “is not to go.”

Back in the Launch Control Center, Launch Director Gene Thomas didn’t want to hear it: “Boy, he’s really stretching it,” he said.

Thomas had already been delayed an hour by a computer glitch in the pad fire extinguishing system, moving the launch time back to 10:38 a.m.; if they were to have any chance of getting off the ground later that day, they would have to start filling the external tank with fuel — “tanking” — immediately. He told Stevenson to come back to the Firing Room to discuss their options, while he called in advice from the engineers at Rockwell International in California who had built the shuttle orbiter; they’d figure out some way of handling the ice.

The launch director gave the order for tanking to begin; the countdown continued.

It was still dark as Bill Lucas, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, which oversaw NASA rocketry, drove through the security checkpoint on Merritt Island. The bright moon hung low in the sky, and the cold sent him hurrying from the car, through the sliding doors and into the marble-floored lobby of the Launch Control Center. Inside, he took his seat among the uppermost tiers of consoles in the double-height space of Firing Room 3, reserved for senior mandarins from NASA.

Confined within a climate-controlled glass box, from here Lucas could look down over the rows of engineers stationed at consoles beneath him — and, when the moment came to launch, swivel his chair around to take in the view of the pad through the laminated two-story windows behind him, louvered with steel panels to shield them from the sun. Nearby, a color TV raised on an alloy stand also displayed a continuous feed of pictures from NASA Select TV. As Lucas sat down, he was greeted by his managers Larry Mulloy and Stan Reinartz, who gave him a succinct summary of a fraught teleconference they’d had the previous night with Morton Thiokol, the contractors in northern Utah who had made the shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters: The Thiokol engineers had expressed some concerns about the cold weather and its effect on the O-rings, which sealed the joints connecting the segments of the giant rockets, protecting them from dangerous leaks of burning propellant. But eventually, the two managers said, they had all agreed there would be no problem.

Mulloy handed Lucas a copy of the late-night fax sent from Utah summarizing the company’s official position — a single page of just 16 lines, typed above the corporate logo of Morton Thiokol Inc. At the bottom was a simple, unequivocal statement of the kind the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center preferred: “MTI recommends STS-51-L launch proceed on 28 January 1986.”

Over on the third floor of the Operations and Checkout Building, the seven Challenger astronauts gathered for a steak-and-eggs breakfast in the dining room of the crew quarters. In matching white polo shirts, they posed for prelaunch pictures around a table decorated with a centerpiece of red and white roses and a pair of small American flags, and a cake frosted with the mission patch. Then, in a conference room down the hall, the crew received a final meteorology briefing from Mission Control in Houston: The cold weather was pushing the permissible limits for shuttle flights, so they could expect to wait for a while on the pad, but — for now, at least — the launch was still on. With a new time officially set for 10:38 a.m., they would likely lift off around noon. Back in their rooms, they changed into their flight overalls, packed up anything not destined for orbit into attaché cases and suit bags, and left it behind for NASA staff to take to Houston later in the day.

A little before 8 a.m., the astronauts rode the elevator downstairs and walked out toward the waiting Astrovan. Led by Scobee, they looked cheerful and excited, their faces washed by the orange light of the low morning sun.

In the meantime, Charlie Stevenson and his team had returned to the pad and begun smashing up the frozen water in the sound suppression troughs with long-handled nets and sweeping ice into the flame trench. As they took temperature readings around the shuttle with a handheld infrared thermometer, the instrument produced odd results: the surface of the left-hand solid rocket booster registered at around 25 degrees Fahrenheit, close to the air temperature at sunrise. But at the bottom of the right-hand booster, near the aft field joint, sealed with its pair of synthetic rubber O-rings, the reading was just 8 degrees — an astonishing 24 degrees below freezing; that just couldn’t be right. Stevenson and his engineers assumed the thermometer was malfunctioning, and took note of the numbers, but kept the data to themselves.

Inside the Launch Control Center, the ice encrusting the launch tower remained the major concern: Rockwell technicians at the Cape and in California continued to discuss the threat it posed to the shuttle over the internal communications net. Ahead of a final NASA mission management meeting, they had to use their own computer models to decide whether to give their go-ahead for launch — but it seemed impossible to predict what would happen if thousands of fragments of ice were sent ricocheting from the gantry when the shuttle engines lit. “It’s still a bit of Russian roulette,” the chief engineer at the California plant said. “You’ll probably make it. Five out of six times you do, playing Russian roulette.”

Led by a white NASA security car topped with blue warning lights, the Astrovan sped straight up the deserted causeway toward the ocean and made a sharp turn two miles from the pad, flashing through the deep shadows cast by the subtropical scrub. Then the driver turned into a long right-hand bend, and the seven astronauts saw their spacecraft revealed slowly before them, framed in the front windshield against a turquoise sky. Raised on a massive concrete ramp and anchored to the great, gray superstructure of the launch platform, Challenger lay dead ahead at the end of the road: fully fueled and ready to depart.

As the high-speed elevator carried them almost 20 stories up the launch tower, Scobee and his crew could hear their ship coming to life: The external tank heaved and groaned as its thin aluminum skin contracted in the cold, exhaling a stream of boiling liquid oxygen from beneath the conical “beanie cap” resting at its tip. When the doors slid open at their destination, a platform 195 feet up, Scobee took a deep breath and smiled up at the sky; behind him, the Atlantic rollers glinted silently in the sunshine.

“This is a beautiful day to fly,” he said.

“It’s a little cold, though, Dick,” said Johnny Corlew, leading the “closeout crew” assisting the astronauts on the pad.

“Nah, that’s good, that’s great,” Scobee said, shaking his head.

Even so, as they crossed the swing arm toward the White Room, the box-shaped structure in which the astronauts would don their helmets and flight equipment, the closeout technicians warned the crew about the treacherous slick of ice on the walkway. Mission specialist Judy Resnik, the second American woman in space, shivered in her thin flight suit, and, as he waited his turn to enter the orbiter, pilot Mike Smith pulled out a folded white handkerchief from his top pocket to wipe his nose.

Scobee knelt to crawl into the orbiter, followed by Smith and mission specialist Ellison Onizuka. Resnik would take the flight engineer’s position in the cockpit, behind the commander’s and pilot’s seats, and was the last of the upper-deck crew through the hatch. Before she crouched to cross the threshold, she turned to Christa McAuliffe, the high school social studies teacher turned astronaut. “The next time I see you, we’ll be in space,” she said.

Johnny Corlew had grown up in Indiana, and as a boy had picked apples for his teachers from the tree in his yard; this morning, he had brought his own gift to the pad for McAuliffe: a red Rome apple he’d had his wife pick up at the supermarket for the occasion. The Teacher in Space raised the fruit to her face with a smile but then immediately returned it. “Save it for me,” she said. “And I’ll eat it when I get back.”

Greg Jarvis, a satellite engineer from the Hughes Aircraft Co. who had already been bumped at the last minute from two previous shuttle missions, was next. In a buoyant mood, he grinned and chatted with the technicians before they helped him into his tight-fitting clamshell helmet.

“Well, we’re really going to go today,” Corlew said.

“Yeah,” Jarvis replied. “I sure hope so.”

Finally, mission specialist Ron McNair shrugged into his equipment. He shook hands with the White Room team, stooped onto all fours and crawled over the step to take his seat on the middeck.

Inside, the astronaut assisting the closeout team, Sonny Carter, moved from one member of the crew to another, tightening their harnesses, completing headset communication checks, and adjusting cables and hoses. As he hunched over McAuliffe to inspect her helmet one last time, he looked down into her face and saw that her Girl Scout pluck had deserted her at last. In her eyes he saw neither excitement nor anticipation but recognized only one emotion: terror.

A few moments later, Carter crawled from the orbiter and Corlew swung the hatch shut behind him. It closed with a bang, and the latches fell into place.

Back in the Launch Control Center, the ground controllers broke into a round of applause.

It was 9:07 a.m.

The decision to launch now lay in the hands of the two most senior members of the Mission Management Team, seated on the top tier of Firing Room 3: the chief of the shuttle program in Houston, Arnie Aldrich, and his boss, Associate Administrator for Space Flight Jesse Moore. Aldrich, 49 years old, was a NASA veteran who had started with the agency as a flight controller for the Mercury program at the end of the 1950s and had worked on the shuttle since the beginning; he was confident he knew as much as almost anyone at the agency about the foibles of the spacecraft.

Soon after 9 a.m., Aldrich convened a meeting in a conference room at the Launch Control Center, attended by more than 20 senior managers and experts who had assessed the hazards of the freezing gantry. First, Aldrich heard the analysis from a team of NASA engineers: Based on their calculations of wind speed, fragmentation and debris trajectory, they felt good about the ice; it was unlikely to cause significant damage. They gave their go-ahead to launch as soon as the air temperature rose above 31 degrees. But when he turned to the Rockwell team, they delivered a different message: The ice made the situation unpredictable, and unlike anything they’d seen before. “Rockwell cannot assure that it is safe to fly,” said one.

And yet Aldrich had made up his mind: His own engineers were unanimous; a single dissenting voice — even from the contractors who had built the orbiter — was not enough to stop the launch. Around 10 a.m., he returned to the Firing Room, where he was immediately intercepted by George Abbey, the director of flight operations.

“What did you decide?” Abbey asked.

“We’re still a go,” Aldrich replied. He reminded Abbey that they were all on a tight schedule to get Challenger off the ground — and keep the rest of the year’s missions on track.

“Did Rockwell say they were a go?” Abbey asked. But the countdown had already resumed.

Standing on the aluminum bleachers more than three miles from the launchpad, the crowd shivered in the cold, wrapped in winter coats, hats and sweatshirts, and sipped hot coffee or cocoa to ward off the chill. Christa McAuliffe’s parents, Grace and Ed Corrigan, along with her sister Lisa and her brother Christopher, were seated in the stands with other VIP guests, wearing buttons depicting Christa in her astronaut flight suit.

Back in New Hampshire, seniors at McAuliffe’s high school in Concord had packed the main auditorium, holding banners, balloons and noisemakers, joining thousands of other students in schools across the country to witness the launch live on the feed from NASA. “All of America is watching and waiting,” CNN correspondent Tom Mintier reported in a morning news update.

In Washington, President Ronald Reagan was at the outset of a busy day in the White House: At 1 p.m., he was scheduled to meet a dozen national TV correspondents to give them a preview of the televised State of the Union address he would be delivering at 9 that night. The speech had been the subject of intense last-minute wrangling among White House staff, tussling over how much tangible policy it should include, but NASA communications chiefs had suggested that Reagan mention the space program; “the Teacher Flight,” as the public had begun calling it, seemed a perfect crowd-pleasing cue for the occasion. While the president met members of Congress in the Cabinet Room, first lady Nancy Reagan was upstairs in the Executive Residence, planning to watch the Challenger launch on television as it happened.

At 10:30 a.m., Launch Director Gene Thomas watched on the remote cameras as Charlie Stevenson and his team drove back out to Pad 39B in their white government van. The countdown clocks inside the Launch Control Center were holding at T-minus 20 minutes. High up in the cockpit of the orbiter, the Challenger crew bantered with one another over the intercom headsets, unheard by the public.

Harnessed on their backs in the unyielding aluminum seats, the crew had little to do but wait for news from launch control. On the flight deck, Resnik, Onizuka, Smith and Scobee were washed in sunlight and had a view to their left of the launch gantry and, above them, a cloudless cobalt sky. They attended to a handful of instrument checks and pressure readings and joked back and forth — about the cold, their breakfast and the discomfort of yet more hours of supine inertia. But below on the middeck, McNair, Jarvis and McAuliffe saw only what sunshine struggled in through the porthole in the entry hatch and down the narrow flight deck gangway. Confined by their helmets and communications lines, the three astronauts had no tasks to perform during ascent and would be scarcely more than cargo until they reached orbit. They would have almost nothing to look at beyond the wall of battered equipment lockers directly in front of them, and no source of information about their flight except their headset audio and the shuddering din from the solid rockets’ burn, as 6 million pounds of thrust rattled through every nut, bolt and fixture inside the spacecraft. As the hours of waiting wound on, Jarvis interjected in the cross talk from the cockpit. But both McNair and McAuliffe sat silently beneath the wan fluorescent light, alone with their thoughts.

One hundred feet below them on the deck of the launch platform, Stevenson and his men were using their nets to fish more ice from the green waters of the sound suppression troughs and still sweeping frozen debris away from the shuttle. The Ice Team leader noted that on the sunny side of the gantry melting icicles were coming loose and tumbling to the steel deck below. But in the shadows, right where the wind came in off the ocean and supercooled air drifted up from the base of the external tank, Stevenson could see that the lower part of Challenger’s right-hand booster rocket was still freezing, glazed with a coating of ice an eighth of an inch thick that extended for 30 feet toward the strut holding it to the big orange fuel tank. Still, the air temperature had now risen above 34 degrees: just within the formal limits NASA set for launch.

Inside Firing Room 3, the director of engineering was already making his final round of checks with the controllers at their rows of consoles.

“Any problems?”

“No problems.”

“We’re in good shape.”

“Y’all are go.”

“All our systems are go.”

But he was still awaiting word from the Ice Team; at last, Charlie Stevenson came in over Channel 245.

“The vehicle looks good,” he said.

In the cockpit, Dick Scobee heard the voice of launch control in his ear. The countdown was about to resume.

“All right!” the commander replied. “That’s great.”

In the windowless vault of Building 30 in Houston, Flight Director Jay Greene was making everything ready to assume control of Challenger on its path to orbit. Seated in the center of the hushed Flight Control Room, Greene was flanked by the 11 other managers and technicians who would monitor the launch, including the flight dynamics officer — the FIDO — responsible for the spacecraft’s trajectory, and the day’s capsule communicator — the CapCom — astronaut and former Air Force pilot Dick Covey.

Responsibility for Challenger would pass to them as soon as the shuttle cleared the tower at the Cape. Now Greene polled each member of his team in the ritual chant of affirmation that proceeded a confirmed launch:

“FIDO?”

“Go!”

“GNC?”

“Go!”

“INCO?”

“Go!”

“Surgeon?”

“Go!”

“CapCom?”

“Go!”

In the top tier of seats in the Firing Room, Jesse Moore conferred with Arnie Aldrich and Gene Thomas: The final decision about whether to launch would be his. The three men talked quietly for a few moments, and Moore looked over some paperwork. Then he nodded.

Terminal count.

Nine minutes.

It was 11:29 a.m.

From speakers on the roof of the Launch Control Center and on the grandstands below, the voice of Kennedy Space Center public affairs officer Hugh Harris picked up the count:

“The Ground Launch Sequencer has been initiated. T-minus eight minutes, 30 seconds and counting. The flight instrument recorders are turned on.” Running thousands of diagnostic tests and checks each second, the Ground Launch Sequencer began the process of severing Challenger’s last connections to Earth. At the computers’ command, the crew access arm slowly retracted, swinging the White Room away from the orbiter hatchway with a robotic lurch. The solid rocket boosters were armed.

Four minutes.

Christa McAuliffe snapped down the visor of her helmet. She was breathing pure oxygen.

It was 11:35 a.m.

In the CNN studios in Atlanta, the producers switched over to broadcast live footage from the launch site.

“T-minus two minutes and counting.”

The shuttle began running on internal power. The vent hood lifted from the top of the external tank.

On the flight deck, the banter continued. “Okay, there goes the LOX arm,” Smith said. “Doesn’t it go the other way?” Onizuka said, and laughed. “God, I hope not, Ellison.” Ninety seconds.

In the cockpit, Scobee and Smith watched as the automatic sequencer worked through the final moments before launch: The propellant systems came up to pressure; all three engines were ready to fire.

“Thirty seconds down there,” Scobee said.

“We are go for auto-sequence start.” The crew heard the distant whirring as the onboard computers verified the responses of the shuttle hydraulics. “Fifteen,” the commander said. Amber numbers blinked the final seconds of the countdown on the instrument panel.

Over the Kennedy Space Center loudspeaker system, the voice of Hugh Harris echoed the incantation for everyone to hear. The children in the grandstands joined in.

“T-minus 10.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

“Seven.”

“Six.”

Inside the shuttle, the whine of the turbopumps rose to a roar. One by one, the three engines lit.

“We have main engine start.”

“Four.”

“Three at a hundred,” Scobee said; the trio of main engines had reached 100 percent thrust. The shuttle leaned away from the tower, straining against the hold-down bolts anchoring it to the Earth.

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One — ”

The twin boosters lit: Igniters simultaneously fired tongues of flame 150 feet long down the full length of the rockets’ hollow cores, and more than 700 tons of ammonium perchlorate exploded into life. Within 600 milliseconds, the pressure inside their steel casings rose to nearly 1,000 pounds per square inch. Almost invisibly, expanding gases pushed the walls of the half-inch steel casings outward, each of the six field joints flexed open, and the O-rings encircling them began to move into the widening gaps between the rocket segments.

The hold-down bolts blew. Sheets of ice more than three feet across tumbled from the launch gantry.

“ — and liftoff, liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.”

In the grandstands, Ed and Grace Corrigan stood side by side and watched their daughter ascend toward orbit, their faces lit with anxious smiles. They turned and embraced, linking hands with their daughter Lisa. Standing on the roof of a small building nearby, Barbara Morgan, McAuliffe’s backup, hollered and clapped: “Whooo! C’mon, go!” she shouted, and gave a gleeful wave toward the departing spacecraft. “Bye, Christa! Bye, crew!” At Concord High School, the students let loose with whoops and cheers.

But in the bottom-most field joint of the right-hand booster rocket, the cold had done its work: The synthetic rubber of its two O-rings and the thick grease they were packed in had proved too inflexible to close the gap that opened in the case at ignition. Hot gas at more than 5,000 degrees had blasted past the first seal — and then broken through the backup seal, too, instantly vaporizing portions of the O-rings as it went. Unseen by the crowd or the officials in the Launch Control Center, burning grease, insulation and Viton rubber spurted from the ruptured joint in puffs of coal-black smoke.

Seven seconds into the flight, the shuttle’s computers began to turn the orbiter onto its back as it thundered out over the Atlantic. Scobee opened his radio link with Mission Control.

“Houston, Challenger: Roll program,” he said.

“Go, you mother!” said Smith. The shuttle rattled and shook like a runaway train as it accelerated toward the speed of sound, making it hard for the pilot to read the instruments.

From her seat behind them, monitoring the laminated ascent checklist open on her knee, Judy Resnik gave an exuberant yell: “Shit hot!”

“Ooohh-kay!” Scobee replied.

Now the same forces of combustion that had destroyed the booster seal momentarily conspired to heal it. Within 12 seconds of launch, molten aluminum oxides from the burning propellant built up in the fissure in the aft field joint of the rocket, sealing the breach around the ruptured O-rings and cutting off the leak.

In Houston, public affairs officer Steve Nesbitt had taken over the NASA commentary, and was watching the streams of black-and-white numbers appearing on his monitors, waiting to explain the next major event in the flight to the millions watching on TV. To his left, Flight Director Jay Greene swept his gaze over the engine performance data appearing on his console. Everything looked good.

The next part of the ascent program would reduce the thrust of Challenger’s three main engines to take the shuttle through Max Q, the phase of maximum dynamic pressure at which the aerodynamic forces acting on the spacecraft would reach their most extreme. To reduce stress on the airframe as the shuttle shot through the atmosphere at Mach 1, the engines would throttle back to 65 percent of their rated power for 15 seconds, before returning to full thrust on the other side of the pressure wave.

The flight dynamics officer made the call: “Throttle down . . . three at 65.” “Sixty-five, FIDO,” Greene replied.

On the broad projection screen at the front of the Flight Control Room, the red line marking the shuttle’s trajectory tracked tightly to its nominal path. A perfect ascent.

Fifty-seven seconds into the flight, the maneuver was complete. In the cockpit, Scobee watched the thrust readings start to rise as Challenger’s computers began once more to increase engine power.

“Throttling up,” he said.

But as Challenger shuddered through Max Q, it was also buffeted by the worst high-altitude wind shear yet encountered on a shuttle flight. The entire shuttle stack flexed and twisted in the turbulence, shattering the delicate glassy residues that had resealed the hemorrhaged rocket motor. At 58 seconds, an orange flame flared through the field joint at the bottom of the right booster.

Still clearly visible to the spectators on the ground, the shuttle was approaching an altitude of 35,000 feet, and a velocity of one and a half times the speed of sound, its engines firing at 104 percent of rated power.

“Feel that mother go!” said Smith. “Wooohooo!”

The flame grew in intensity, deflected down in the slipstream of the rising spacecraft until it made contact with the external fuel tank, close to one of the three steel struts securing the bottom of the booster to the spine of the shuttle stack. Yet neither the instruments on Challenger’s flight deck nor the readings on the consoles in Houston gave any indication that anything was wrong. The onboard computers, struggling to keep the orbiter flying true, swiveled the nozzle of the left-hand booster outward to compensate for the loss of pressure in its malfunctioning twin.

“Challenger, go at throttle up,” the CapCom radioed from Mission Control.

“Roger, go at throttle up,” said Scobee.

Burning at more than 6,000 degrees, in less than three seconds the errant flame escaping from the booster encircled the circumference of the giant external tank, incinerated its insulation, cut through its aluminum skin and ruptured the welds of the pressurized fuel tank membrane within. A plume of liquid hydrogen burst into the slipstream of the rocket engines, where it ignited.

In Atlanta, CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, watching the pictures of the spacecraft flying away into the empty sky, began to wrap up his live commentary. “So the 25th space shuttle mission is now on the way, after more delays than NASA cares to count. This morning, it looked as though they were not going to be able to get off — ”

He stopped abruptly.

At 72 seconds, the tank lost its structural integrity and tore apart, crumpling and disgorging the remaining liquid hydrogen — more than 300,000 gallons of it — which bloomed into a colossal fireball. Released from its aft anchors, the right-hand booster swiveled around its upper attachment point. Its nose smashed into Challenger’s right wing and the liquid oxygen tank, tearing it open.

The orbiter was engulfed in a swelling cloud of combustible propellant, and the nozzles of its three main engines swiveled wildly as the onboard computers struggled to regain control of the disintegrating spacecraft; for the few fractions of a second it took for the engines to consume the fuel remaining in the feed lines, their high-pressure turbopumps continued to spin, until the computers shut them down one at a time. Then the booster rockets tore free from their mounts, and Challenger, still hurtling toward space at almost 1,500 miles per hour, tumbled from its precisely prescribed supersonic trajectory. Its airframe stressed far beyond its design limits, the most complicated machine in history began to come apart in flight: Its stubby wings ripped away, the cargo bay bursting like a paper bag, the inrushing air pulling the fuselage asunder from the inside.

At 73 seconds, the transmission of telemetry from the shuttle suddenly ceased. On Jay Greene’s console in Houston, on all the screens in Mission Control, the rapidly flickering lines of streaming data froze, and one column after another filled with the letter S.

Static.