Shuttering cameras clapped like thunder in Mel Myler’s ears, jolting him from his state of shock.
He looked up at the viewing area where he’d stood moments earlier with his 10-year-old son, Jason, where they had felt the ground tremble from the ignition of the Challenger space shuttle. The bleachers had emptied.
Myler looked around then and saw only his son, a TV reporter and Concord Superintendent Mark Beauvais. They were swiftly evacuated from the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center like everyone else had been.
NASA employees hustled Myler and the other remnant few onto buses bound for the parking lot. He arrived at the airport an hour later, and lacking any information beyond what he’d seen that morning — the Challenger engulfed in a ball of flames, two trails of smoke spiraling across the Florida sky — Myler called his wife back in Contoocook, N.H.
Diane Myler had been following the launch religiously. Their whole family had.
The day the Mylers read that Christa McAuliffe, a Concord teacher, had entered into a nationwide competition to become the first ordinary citizen in space, they cut out the newspaper clipping and held onto it.
Jason Myler, then in the fourth grade, had dedicated a school project to McAuliffe. He made a quilted wall hanging decorated with symbols cut from wool felt that he associated with her: the logo of the Girl Scouts, a bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, a NASA patch, the Holy Bible. The film in his pocket camera would capture the launch in frames, from the shuttle’s fiery skirt sweeping the launch pad at lift-off to the sudden explosion that ended the Challenger’s flight.
At a pay phone, Myler listened to his wife’s disbelief crackle through the receiver.
When he thinks about it now, 40 years later, he’s almost certain she repeated herself three times.
“They’re gone. They’re gone. They’re gone.”
‘The day dawned a pearly white.’
The icicles clinging to the Challenger were harbingers of trouble.
Inclement weather had delayed the Challenger launch by almost a week. On the evening of Jan. 27, 1986, NASA engineers left water trickling through the launch pad’s sprinkler system overnight to prevent burst lines.
Days before the launch, Ralph Jimenez and fellow Monitor reporter Bob Hohler had stepped off their flight and prepared for a tour of the Kennedy Space Center. They visited the Vehicle Assembly Building, an enormous puzzle room where solid rocket boosters and other parts were mounted to the space shuttle, and they learned the function of each building.
The landscape at Cape Canaveral looked to Jimenez like the set of a Hollywood Western: The rocket towers seemed contrived against the flat, marshy expanse that stretched across the horizon, like they were “not supposed to be there.”
Jimenez had been brought on to the Monitor’s staff as a religion writer, but editors Mike Pride and Bill McArthur interpreted his first byline, a story about people who made bathtub shrines in their yards, as a sign he wasn’t cut out for the gig. By April of 1985, when Christa McAuliffe was chosen as one of two New Hampshire representatives in the Teacher in Space competition, Jimenez had started writing a weekly science column for the paper.
Assigned to cover the Challenger, he studied everything he could about rocketry and shuttle launches. He entertained readers’ insatiable curiosity about weightlessness, discussing how astronauts attended to their human needs in zero-gravity. If he encountered technical minutiae he didn’t understand, he called up an expert. He memorized the launch sequence.
On Jan. 28, 1986, Jimenez was looking out on the launch pad from the media dome three miles away. The hulking icicles he saw scintillating in the morning light shook his confidence.
The day of the launch had “dawned a pearly white,” Hohler wrote in the next day’s Monitor.
Myler left his motel with his son to find a sheet of frost coating his windshield. He took a credit card out of his wallet and scraped it off.
A sequence of premonitions
Weather-related delays during the last six weeks before the shuttle launch had heightened restlessness and anticipation. As McAuliffe neared the end of her training, Tammy Hickey sat in class with her long-term substitute, who would relay information between McAuliffe and her students during nightly phone calls.
When Hickey and her classmates inquired about how delays made McAuliffe feel, her substitute returned the next day with a thought experiment for a response:
“She had said, ‘You know what it feels like sitting in there all day waiting to take off? It feels like you’re laying on your back against the wall with your feet straight up against the wall for eight hours,’” Hickey recalled.
The delays worried Jimenez, too.
In December 1985, the launch was postponed to accommodate training and the postponement of another shuttle flight. Issues with the Columbia shuttle and inclement weather at an emergency landing site in North Africa prompted another delay in late January. Thunderstorms provoked yet another rescheduling, and on Jan. 27, high winds and a frozen bolt on the hatch of the Challenger pushed the flight to the next day.
The bolt had been stripped of its threading, and Jimenez watched as NASA mechanics scrambled to find a cordless drill to remove it without sparking an explosion. Their search took about an hour, but when the cordless drill finally appeared, the battery was dead.
“This isn’t in the script,” Jimenez remembered thinking to himself. “I mean, I have dead batteries in cordless drills, but NASA?”
73 seconds
At 11:38 a.m. the next day, while Jimenez stood shoulder to shoulder with journalists from around the country in the enormous steel grandstand at Cape Canaveral, Hickey was at lunch in Concord.
Journalists had already commandeered the school cafeteria, tripping over their cables and tripods during the week leading up to the launch. The room was crowded. Teenagers strapped on party hats and blew into noisemakers. Each time McAuliffe appeared on the boxed television screen, there was applause.
Hickey watched as the Challenger pushed off the launch pad. Little more than a minute had passed when she caught sight of the fiery plume. Everywhere, students cheered with confused elation, many believing the solid rocket boosters had separated from the shuttle.
The Challenger’s flight, projected to last six days as it circled the Earth, had ended in 73 seconds.
Mission Control’s flat commentary called it “a major malfunction.”
A teacher’s voice calling out from the back of the auditorium chilled the crowd where Kris Coronis Jacques had been watching. “He was trying to get us all to quiet down. He finally screamed: ‘It exploded.’”
In her chemistry class, Holly Merrow, who thought she recognized the explosion from a previous launch she watched on a family trip to Orlando, told a fellow student, “I think that’s supposed to happen.” She turned to her teacher and saw her collapse into tears.
The intercom carried Principal Charles Foley’s commanding voice throughout the school.
His announcement scared Merrow, but in years to come, it would be lauded as the reflex of a born educator impelled to protect his charges: All students should return to class and all press should leave the building.
Aftershocks in Cape Canaveral
By instinct, Clint Cogswell knew to act with urgency, too. Around him sprawled a class of confused third-graders, shivering in their gloves and crying into the arms of equally stunned adult chaperones.
The explosion had been too much for anyone to comprehend, but Cogswell, the principal at the Kimball School in Concord, knew he needed to “protect the kids.”
Euphoria had characterized the start of their trip. The 20 children in Cindy LaPrad’s third-grade class at the Kimball School had their flights sponsored through the Young Astronauts Council, their little bodies outfitted by well-known clothing brands, like Puma, and a visit to Disney World built into their itinerary. When the Challenger launch experienced delays, they endured the wait by throwing on their red-white-and-blue swimsuits and playing in the hotel pool. On January 28, they sat in the VIP viewing section a mile away from the launch pad, cheering on the mother of their classmate, Scott McAuliffe.
The students, chaperoned by Rob Fried and nine other parents, had toured the Kennedy Space Center before the launch and noted the “supreme confidence exuded by NASA” regarding the shuttle launch.
A veil of innocence fell from their eyes as they watched the disaster unfold.
“I think in retrospect, it gave my son and probably a lot of the other kids a first real understanding that the grown-ups don’t have it all together, that there are things that can happen that grown-ups can’t control, that even the best among the grown-ups can’t predict or guarantee,” Fried said.
Cogswell, Fried and the other adults feared the tragedy would be compounded by the media seeking a sound bite from their vulnerable children. Following a shrewd suggestion by their Greyhound bus driver, they took the class to a McDonald’s with a playground and adjusted their flight to leave that evening.
In Boston, law enforcement escorted the children’s bus from the tarmac; Massachusetts State Troopers led the way and trailed behind. But before the ride home to Concord could begin in earnest, the caravan halted at the mouth of the only highway on-ramp that carried traffic flowing from Logan Airport at the time.
A driver had barricaded the ramp with the body of their vehicle. When officers approached, a swarm of reporters converged on the bus. In Cogswell’s recollection of events, the reporters yelled at the children to lower their windows.
“It was set up. There was nothing accidental about it,” he said.
At Cape Canaveral, reporters wrestled with what they had just seen. Jimenez rushed to claim a phone he could use to reach the Monitor and attended a series of news conferences that ran late into the afternoon, belaboring what little information was known about the flight’s failure.
A member of the flight preparation crew gave him an interview.
“He said, ‘They were in the boots they wanted to fill. They were with the Lord in a twinkling.’ And that didn’t make it alright, but it really did put perspective on it,” Jimenez recalled. “Except, they didn’t know what was in those boots. There was a scorpion in the boots.”
In the two-bedroom hotel room they shared with a photographer, Jimenez and Hohler wrote into the early morning of the next day.
“NASA stopped the mission clock this morning,” Jimenez wrote, “leaving Christa McAuliffe and the rest of the Challenger’s crew to live in yesterday forever.”
