Painful Legacies of a Lost Mission

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NASA experts now believe that the Challenger crew members were aware for at least a moment of what was happening. "They went fast, thank God, but they knew they were in trouble," one astronaut told TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin. From interviews with NASA officials and members of the presidential commission investigating the disaster, Hannifin was able tentatively to reconstruct the astronauts' final moments. His report:

A shuttle takeoff is never a smooth ascent; heavy buffeting and shaking rattle the craft, and the crew is deafened by a clanking, metallic roar. Because of turbulence caused by sudden wind shifts, Challenger's crew had an especially rocky launch right from lift-off. Just 72 seconds into the flight--a second and a half before the explosion--the orbiter yawed suddenly to the right. As the righthand rocket booster broke loose, spewing superhot gases from a faulty joint, the shuttle's engines tried to compensate for the loss of pressure, and the crew must have felt swift side-to-side lurches.

An instant later the tip of the booster pivoted into the external fuel tank. The ensuing explosion rocked but did not obliterate the shuttle. "The orbiter itself seemed to float, very briefly, above the fireball of exploding hydrogen and oxygen," said one member of the shuttle inquiry panel. He was reminded of the way a bubble survives a cascade over Niagara Falls, "so fragile, yet with all that wild energy around it." Says a National Transportation Safety Board investigator: "The crew compartment was pressurized and sealed tight and welded into a kind of cocoon or bubble that may have suffered relatively little damage, briefly riding the top of that fire ball." Nonetheless, a pathology expert sent to examine the astronauts' remains at Cape Canaveral said, "it is likely that the crew was knocked unconscious immediately and felt nothing during the [three-to-four-minute] fall to the ocean. I want to guess that they were unconscious all the way down, if any of them really survived the fireball and breakup in flight." Some experts believed that the tremendous force of hitting the ocean after a 55,000-ft. fall did as much damage to the crew compartment as the explosion.

NASA officials acknowledged last week that the impact of the crash on the U.S. space effort has been to ground the shuttle program for at least a year, and perhaps as long as 18 months. A study by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that redesigning the flawed rocket booster and replacing the shuttle's cargo, a tracking satellite, will cost some $440 million. If a new orbiter is built to replace Challenger, it would cost at least $2.3 billion and take three or four years to complete. When NASA does resume shuttle operations, its overambitious aim of launching 24 flights a year by 1988 will be scaled down to no more than nine the first year, 14 the next, 18 the following year. Even that schedule may be unrealistic: NASA has never managed to launch more than nine shuttle flights in a twelve month period.