Doc Review- Challenger: The Final Flight

To have it told in pop-culture today, one could easily get the impression that my generation all watched the Challenger disaster together in real time in school and were all simultaneously traumatized. It’s easy to see how that narrative would get traction when trying to boil a historical event down to the least common denominator for a nation. But that’s not how I think about that day. 

Part of the bigness of that horrible tragedy was more in the mythology of the role that the space shuttle program was playing in bridging us to a new era. Some day the shuttle would literally be a space ferry to multiple space stations that would serve as staging grounds for missions to the moon, other planets, and then maybe places beyond our wildest imaginations. The relative frequency coupled with the seeming ease of putting the shuttle in space, bringing it back to Earth safely, and turning it around for another mission fed into this mythology and fueled my imagination about what kind of adventures might be within my reach during my lifetime. 

Other than that, Tuesday, January 28, 1986 began on a course to be another unmemorable early-week winter school day during that long slog in a school year when the magic of Christmas break had passed, the summer break felt like it was a decade away, and the weather sucked. I did not throw on the backpack, grab my lunch and run to the bus stop eagerly awaiting one of those special school days that would be like an indoor field trip where we would take a break from classes to all celebrate a teacher going into space together.  

Instead, sometime before noon, I recall Mr. Rebhun, my elementary school principal wheeling a tv cart into the unit where us 5th and 6th graders spent our days.  He told a couple of us that crossed his path while he setup that we were going to assemble and watch the news because the space shuttle exploded.  What do you mean exploded?  I took a few seconds to process that, and it wasn't long before the images on the tv basically showed exactly that.  I don't remember much detail about who said or did what after that other than I was instantly curious to learn more about how this happened and what became of the remains of the shuttle.  With events like this, you seldom learn anything like that anytime soon, but you do get saturated with everything you already learned in the first 30 seconds for the next few days.  The teachers and staff didn't seem upset....stoic maybe, and in the film of this scene that replays in my head, students seemed to take a cue from that and didn't display much emotion that I can recall other than maybe a sense of awe about something pretty important happening.  I don't recall any kind of important words of wisdom or soothing coming from any grown ups, and judging from what I do recall about the adults I was surrounded by, if we started to show any signs of allowing this to distract us, we would have been admonished to get our act together and focus.

It's not that we didn't know or care that a teacher was going up in space.  We'd been inundated with that information in all sorts of ways ever since President Reagan made the announcement that the first civilian in space would be a teacher.  We'd seen Christa McAuliffe's name appear in the Scholastic News issues that we were assigned to read.  One issue of Scholastic News had a "story starter" that my class was assigned to complete for homework.  The assignment was to imagine that it was our teacher who was going on the shuttle and when her broadcast from space began, she would announce that she had a message, and it was addressed to me.  Then I was supposed to write what that message was and complete the story.  What an awkward frickin' assignment that was......to turn in a paper to someone that contained what I thought they might say to me in front of the entire country on tv seemed like a really effed up thing to expect me to do.  I decided to pretend it was a fictional teacher and wrote the story in a humorous way that portrayed us both in the way teacher-student banter might occur on a sitcom.  Alas, the humorless woman was not amused and made sure I knew that.

So every time I see something that suggests that my experience on that January Tuesday in 1986 was in complete communion with classrooms all over the country at the same moment and we all were one with a group of students from Christa McAuliffe's class in a moment of collective grief is what I think of as another version of lazy narrative that dots our media landscape.  Of course it was sad, but we'd never entertained the possibility of something like this happening, so how were we supposed to know how to feel about it?

This is why I appreciate this documentary so much.  This is the first real attempt to aggregate information about the design of the shuttle, the culture of NASA at the time, and who the seven astronauts were that died so suddenly that day.  In its four parts, The Final Flight does more to educate me about all of the things I wanted to know that day than the regular media told me in weeks/months/years they spent passing on tragedy porn as news.  To give you an idea of what passed for excellent journalism in the day, I'll submit to you the interview that media demigod Tom Brokaw conducted with deceased astronaut Judith Resnik 5 years prior to her death on the Challenger:

So in the spirit of elementary school lessons, let's recap what what we've learned.  Any of the following answers are acceptable:

• Tom Brokaw is gross
• Judith Resnik hated every second of that interview and couldn't wait for it to end, yet never showed it
• Media people are constantly digging for something juicy
• Resnik never took the bait and was refreshingly down to earth about all of it

I wish there were more people like Judy and a lot less like Tom in the media.  I like her idea of what normal looks like a lot more than his and this interview highlights that culture wise, the two of them inhabit professional environments that aren’t on the same planet. 

In The Final Flight, you'll learn a lot more about her in less time than Tom used when he could have asked her anything, and instead entertained visions of hooking up with her in space.  And you'll find out that she was a really fascinating trailblazer that never seemed to think of herself that way.  You'll learn similar things about Christa McAuliffe.  You'll also learn similar things about Ellison Onizuka and Ronald McNair.  

In the early 1980s, whodda thunk it that society put together an outstandingly diverse cast of characters to participate in activity reserved for an extremely elite few in a program costing billions of dollars..... and they didn't spend any time banging drums about how special or unheard of that was?  Like as if it were the perfectly normal and practical thing to do. Huh.  57% of the crew that died on the Challenger in 1986 were not white males and the 43% that were conducted themselves in a way that indicates they thought that a team like this was completely normal, ordinary and healthy. What a concept.  They were way ahead of the wokeness of today. 

Take the time to watch the documentary and learn about them.  You'll also learn that after having landed on the moon, NASA became the White Star Line of space travel.  The mythology of the space shuttle was that it was a modern technological marvel embracing all technology that was state-of-the-art.  So was the Titanic.  The reality is that both of these modern marvels were nothing close to what the mythology had us believe about that. An actual unsinkable ship predates Titanic by 53 years and is called the Great Eastern. It had a double hull to Titanic’s double bottom/single hull, and 50 compartments that were truly watertight to Titanic’s 15 that were not at all watertight. Titanic was a scaled back cost cutting version of state-of-the-art. And just as the Titanic was not doomed to sink, in fact it is equally or even more likely that with a few different decisions, it could have gone on to have a full career and sailed into a peaceful and uneventful retirement, so it is with the shuttle.  State of the art for NASA is the Apollo project. We were told the shuttle was much more advanced, but the only real advantages it had were payload capacity, human capacity, and the ability to be reused. Apollo missions at almost any point after ignition had a contingency to safely abort the mission. The people were on top of all of the massive combustion. If something went wrong with the candle below, the astronaut capsule would separate and fall to a soft landing. The shuttle stack put the people right next to the fuel and the ignition source, giving them no means of escaping when something went wrong. Apollo had the ability to shut down ignition because it used rocket engines. The shuttle had rocket engines, but it was assisted in launch by rocket motors, which once ignited run at full power with no way of throttling back or shutting off until the fuel is exhausted. 

In layman’s terms, If Apollo was a car, it moved when you turned it on and pressed on the accelerator. The shuttle put the pedal to the metal from the moment you inserted the key until you ran out of gas. Sound like fun?  It also needed to be done on a budget while meeting an unrealistic schedule. All the ingredients for disaster are baked in. Now you just need the people who are willing to light the fuse and lack the imagination to think “what if”.....

There is so much that we have to learn, but this story is a catalyst for alignment on what we should learn about a group of 7 people who did everything the right way and how they were put on a collision course with people who refused to learn.