TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/86/86capts.1

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                XYZìÅôö                                            W««"They slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God"

February 10, 1986

In 73 seconds, a new era in space travel explodes into a searing
nightmare

"Where in the hell is the bird?  Where is the bird?" shouted a space
engineer at Cape Canaveral.  "Oh, my God!" cried a teacher from the
viewing stands nearby.  "Don't let happen what I think just
happened."  Nancy Reagan, watching television in the White House
family quarters, gasped similar words, "Oh, my God, no!"  So too did
William Graham, the acting administrator of NASA, who was watching in
the office of a Congressman.  "Oh, my God," he said.  "Oh, my God."

Across the nation, people groped for words.  "It exploded," murmured
Brian French, a senior at Concord High School in New Hampshire, as
the noisy auditorium fell quiet.  A classmate, Kathy Gilbert, turned
to him and asked, "Is that really where she was?"  At the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., scientists turned away
from their remarkable new photographs of the distant planet Uranus
and stared, stunned, at the telecast from Florida.  "We all knew it
could happen one day," said one, "but, God, who would have believed
it?"

It had happened.  In one fiery instant, the nation's complacent
attitude toward manned space flight had evaporated at the incredible
sight in the skies over Cape Canaveral.

Americans had soared into space 55 times over 25 years, and their
safe return came to be taken for granted.  An age when most anyone,
given a few months' training, could go along for a safe ride seemed
imminent.  Christa McAuliffe was the pioneer and the vibrant symbol
of this amazing new era of space for Everyman.  An ebullient high
school social-studies teacher from Concord, N.H., she was to be the
first ordinary citizen to be shot into space, charged with showing
millions of watchful schoolchildren how wonderful it could be.  She
was bringing every American who had ever been taught by a Mrs.
McAuliffe into this new era with her.  It was an era that lasted only
73 seconds.

Disbelief turned to horror as the reality became all too clear:
McAuliffe and six astronauts had disappeared in an orange-and-white
fireball nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean.  So too had the space
shuttle Challenger, the trusted $1.2 billion workhorse on which they
had been riding.  Transfixed by the terrible sight of the explosion,
Americans watched as it was replayed again and again.  And yet again.
Communal witnesses to tragedy, they were bound, mostly in silence, by
a nightmarish image destined to linger in the nation's shared
consciousness.

Then the national mood shifted.  America wept.  From the White House
to farmhouses, Americans joined in mourning their common loss.  Flags
were lowered to half-staff.  Makeshift signs appeared in countless
cities:  WE SALUTE OUR HEROES.  GOD BLESS THEM ALL.  President
Reagan, in a moving broadcast to the nation that afternoon,
paraphrased a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a young
American airman killed in World War II:  "We will never forget them
nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their
journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth to
touch the face of God.'"

The preparation for Challenger's tenth journey into space had been
painstakingly careful, and for its crew, agonizingly slow.  It was an
aptly all-American group:  two women, a black, a Hawaiian of Japanese
descent and three white men.  The mission had originally been
scheduled to lift off Jan. 20 from NASA's Pad 39-B, which had been
refurbished after standing idle since an AMerican crew aboard Apollo
18 left it to dock with a Soviet spacecraft ten years ago.  The date
slipped to Saturday, Jan. 25, after one of the other three space
shuttles, Columbia, ran into delays with a mission that got
relatively little notice because such flights had seemed so routine.

When Saturday dawned, Challenger's crew learned that a dust storm had
developed across the Atlantic at an emergency landing facility near
Dakar, the capital of Senegal.  Under NASA's tight safety rules, a
shuttle cannot go up unless it has a place to land if something goes
wrong before it reaches orbit.  Such facilities have never been
needed, but every risk had to be minimized.  Challenger's crew would
have to wait another 24 hours.

On Sunday morning, McAuliffe, who had earlier reassured her parents
by telephone that she was "rarin' to go," was set once again.  Her
parents, along with 18 third-graders from Concord, had flown to the
cape to watch the lift-off.  Christa's son Scott, 9, was in the
class.  Her daughter Caroline, 6, was also there but had never quite
understood what her mother was doing.  While McAuliffe had been in
training, Caroline had asked several times by phone, "Mom, are you in
space yet?"

McAuliffe and her six fellow crewmates were indeed ready, but the
weather was not.  A cold front was moving down the Florida peninsula,
pushing showers ahead of it.  While rain does not hamper takeoffs by
airplanes, its impact on a space shuttle at the speeds it reaches
shortly after lift-off could damage the heat-resistant tiles that
protect the craft's thin skin.  Challenger would not blast off even
into a drizzle.

Monday looked much better.  For the second time, the crew members
settled into their couches on the orbiter's two decks, just ahead of
Challenger's cargo bay.  Commander Dick Scobee and Pilot Michael
Smith were strapped into the flight deck; behind them were Judith
Resnik, an electrical engineer, and Ronald McNair, a physicist.  On
the middeck below were Ellison Onizuka, an aerospace engineer;
Gregory Jarvis, an electrical engineer; and McAuliffe.  Lying on
their backs, they could see a bright blue sky ahead of them.  The
countdown reached T (for takeoff) minus nine minutes--and stayed
there for four hours.

This delay proved to be embarrassing.  A sticky bolt prevented the
removal of an exterior-hatch handle.  Lockheed technicians called for
a special drill, which took 20 minutes to arrive.  When it did, the
battery was dead.  There were no replacements on hand.  After 90
minutes of fiddling, an ordinary hacksaw was used to free the bolt.

But now gusts up to 35 m.p.h. began sweeping across the Kennedy Space
Center.  Any malfunction immediately after life-off would call for an
"RTLS," return to launch site.  Either Scobee or Smith could fire
bolts that would release the orbiter from its external fuel tank and
two booster rockets.  Challenger could then loop swiftly back to
Kennedy's landing strip.  Nonetheless, the crosswinds were too strong
for a sure landing.  No such emergency had ever been encountered, but
once again NASA took the prudent course:  yet another delay.

Waiting out this frustrating postponement at the cape, Ed Corrigan,
Christa's father, said wryly, "I would have gotten the hacksaw
sooner."  Commented his wife Grace: "I would have gotten my nail
file."  One veteran consultant to NASA was less charitable, asking,
"Can you imagine a pad leader permitting an s.o.b. to show up for
work with a drill with a dead battery?"

That night, temperatures fell to an unseasonable 27 degrees, but the
wind dwindled to 9 m.p.h.  On Tuesday, Jan. 28, the clear morning sky
formed what glider pilots fondly call "a blue bowl."  Even before
Challenger's crew, wearing gloves against the chill, crossed the
access arm to take their assigned places, NASA's "ice team" had
inspected the shuttle and its towering gantry.  They decided that
there was no danger of any icicles breaking away on lift-off and
harming the heat-shield tiles.  Just 20 minutes before the scheduled
liftoff, they made another check.  A Rockwell engineer in California,
watching by closed-circuit TV, telephoned the cape to urge a delay
because of the ice.  But Kennedy Space Center Director Richard Smith,
having been advised that there was little risk, permitted the
countdown to continue.

"We're at nine minutes and counting," intoned NASA Commentator Hugh
Harris over the cape's public address system.  His words were also
broadcast widely by radio.

Shivering reporters, photographers, schoolchildren and other
spectators cheered.  The countdown was past the point where it had
stopped the day before.  The mission designed to show that space
belonged to everyone finally seemed ready to launch both its
schoolteacher and the dreams of the children participating
vicariously from their schools.  On Challenger's flight deck, roughly
the size of a Boeing 747's, Scobee and Smith continued to run through
their elaborate checklists.  The orbiter's main computer, supported
by four backups, continuously scanned all the date from some 2,000
sensors and data points.  They would shut down the entire system in
milliseconds if anything was wrong.  Nothing was.

"T minus eight minutes and counting."

Thousands of motorists in the cape area, listening to their radios,
pulled off highways and faced the ocean.  On Challenger's middeck,
Onizuka, Jarvis and McAuliffe had nothing to do except wait.  At
dozens of points around the globe, radar tracking stations had now
synchronized their antenna systems with the countdown sequence in
Florida.

"T minus seven minutes, 30 seconds and counting."

The walkway was pulled away from Challenger.  It could be
repositioned within 15 seconds, but in an emergency that could be a
fatal interval.  The seven occupants were now wedded to their three
combustible companions.  One was the rust-colored external tank, 154
ft. high, which carried 143,351 gal. of liquid oxygen and 385,265 gal
of liquid hydrogen.  Two lines connected the fuels to the orbiter,
where they would be mixed at controlled levels to power the
spacecraft's engines.  The other two companions were the gleaming
white boosters, each 149 ft. tall and packed with more than 1.1
million lbs. of solid fuel.  Once ignited at lift-off, they would
burn uncontrollably until their fuel was spent.

"T minus six minutes and counting."

Pilot Smith was given the order to prestart the auxiliary power units
that would operate Challenger's control surfaces and swivel its
engine nozzles.  The last pints of oxygen were pumped into the
external tank.

"T minus four minutes and counting."

Mission Control reminded the flight crew to close the airtight visors
on their helmets.

"T minus three minutes and 30 seconds."

Now the shuttle was operating totally on its own internal electrical
power system.

"T minus two minutes and 20 seconds," Harris announced.  "No
unexpected errors reported."

The Harris announcements were coming more frequently.  Everything
look good.

"Ninety seconds and county.  The 51-L mission ready to go."

The best news yet:  the many delays for Challenger's crew seemed at
an end.

"T minus 45 seconds and counting."

The launch platform was about to be flooded by powerful streams of
water gushing from six pipes fully 7 ft. in diameter.  The purpose:
to damp the lift-off sound levels from Challenger's three engines.
Otherwise, the acoustic energy alone could damage the craft's
underside.  The main-engine firing sequence was turned over to
computers.

"T minus ten...nine...eight...seven...six...We have main-engine
start."

Even then the onboard computer, sensing the slightest glitch, could
still abort a launch.  As it happened, Resnik had been aboard the
shuttle Discovery in June 1984 when, four seconds before the
spacecraft's three main engines were to ignite for liftoff, the
computer noted that the thrust from one of them was not a the proper
level.  The fuse was immediately pinched.

"Four...three...two...one...And lift-off.  Lift-off of the 25th space
shuttle mission.  And it has cleared the tower."

Like runners passing a baton, Harris handed off the public narration
to Steve Nesbitt, the communicator at the Johnson Space Center in
Houston.  At the cape, his voice was lost amid the cheers of some
1,000 spectators watching on bleachers some four miles from Pad 39-B.
Even at that distance, they could feel the power of the blast-off,
which elicits an almost instinctive elation.  A graceful sculpture
arising from an awesome explosion:  it was just as it was supposed to
look.  Among the relieved viewers were relatives of most of
Challenger's crew, including Christa's parents and her husband
Steven.  At Concord High School, students who had repeatedly gathered
in the auditorium finally had a chance to blow their party horns and
cheer their teacher's loftiest achievement.

Controllers both at the Cape and in Houston intently monitored
Challenger's roaring ascent for a different reason.  It is the most
critical and most dangerous phase of a space mission.  "When you have
that much power, you have to respect it," said Flight Director Jay
Greene in Houston.  "If you get complacent about the launch phase,
you don't understand what's going on."  In the shuttle, the crew was
about to be jammed back into their couches by three times the force
of gravity.  Their immediate fate was out of their hands.

"Houston, we have roll program," declared Commander Scobee.  The
flight was only 16 seconds old.

"Roger, roll Challenger," acknowledged Mission Control's Richard
Covey in the professional tones of all air controllers.  Like a fly
clinging to a caterpillar, the shuttle turned gracefully on its back
as the tank and the boosters assumed the proper downrange course for
entering orbit.

At 35 seconds, Challenger's engines were throttled back to 65% of
full power to pass through the zone of high turbulence.  Nesbitt
announced that the situation was "nominal," as NASA called it:
"Three engines running normally.  Three good fuel cells.  Three good
APUs [auxiliary power units].  Velocity 2,257 ft. per second [1,538
m.p.h.].  Altitude 4.3 nautical miles.  Downrange distance three
nautical miles."

"Challenger, go with throttle up," said Covey after 52 seconds of
flight.  That was not an order; it meant that the engines had
automatically reached full power and systems were go.  Based on the
performance of earlier engines, Challenger actually reached 104% of
the older standard.  The power-up meant that the shuttle had begun to
endure the greatest stress of physical forces in its ascent.

"Roger, go with throttle up," Scobee confirmed.  The message came at
70 seconds into Challenger's flight.

NASA's long-range television cameras had been following Challenger's
shiny white rocket plume, recording the graceful roll that had awed
the spectators.  But then the cameras caught an ominously unfamiliar
sight, imperceptible to those below.  However different those
photographs later looked to viewers of the endless taped replays,
NASA analysts said that an orange glow had first flickered just past
the center of the orbiter, between the shuttle's belly and the
adjacent external tank.  This was near the point where the tank is
attached to Challenger.  Milliseconds later, the fire had flared out
and danced upward.  Suddenly, there was only a fireball.  Piercing
shades of orange and yellow and red burst out of a billowing white
cloud, engulfing the disintegrating spacecraft.

Snaking wildly out of control, the two boosters emerged from the
conflagration, both clearly intact.  They veered widely apart,
leaving yellow-orange exhaust glows and gleaming white trails behind
them.  The configuration resembled a giant monster in the sky, its
two claws reaching frantically forward.

In Houston, Commentator Nesbitt had kept his eyes on the programmed
flight data displayed in front of him, not yet aware of the images of
disaster appearing on the TV monitor to his left.  He reported what
normally would have been the readings from Challenger.  "One minute,
14 seconds.  Velocity 2,900 feet per second [1,977 m.p.h.].  Altitude
nine nautical miles.  Downrange distance seven nautical miles."  To
millions watching their own screens, Nesbitt's narration was surreal.
They had seen the fireball.

There was a 40-second pause and silence on the screen as viewers
stared in baffled horror.  Then, his voice still calm, Nesbitt
announced, "Flight controllers are looking very carefully at the
situation."  He added quickly, "Obviously, a major malfunction."  His
unemotional tone did not change.  Communications with the craft had
been severed, he continued.  "We have no downlink."

On the consoles in front of Nesbitt and the rows of technicians on
duty in Houston, a series of S's froze on the monitoring screens.
They signaled "static."  No data were coming from Challenger.  The
range safety officer at the cape pressed a button to destroy the two
boosters by radio.  Although it was first reported that one had been
skittering toward coastal population centers, NASA later conceded
that both had remained well out to sea.  But NASA's range safety
officials had to react in seconds.  With the destruction of the
boosters went the possibility that if retrieved from the water, they
might have provided valuable evidence of what had gone wrong.  After
another pause of 40 seconds, Nesbitt pronounced the fateful verdict:
"We have a report from the flight-dynamics officer that the vehicle
has exploded.  The flight director confirms that."

"RTLS!  RTLS!" yelled former NASA Engineer Jim Mizell, watching from
the press stands at the cape.  He looked up in vain, and in horror,
expecting Challenger to arc away from the unnatural cloudburst and
return safely to the landing strip.  In the VIP bleachers, only a few
experienced viewers immediately sensed the disaster.  To the naked
eye, the flames were diluted by the distance.  Many thought the
explosion involved a normal separation of the boosters from the main
tank and orbiter.  That maneuver was to have occurred at two minutes,
seven seconds into the flight.

McAuliffe's mother and father had watched anxiously at the long-
awaited lift-off.  They appeared more somber than many of the
cheering spectators.  Ed Corrigan seemed to sense the tragedy first.
He reached out to put an arm around his wife.  Grace Corrigan's look
of puzzlement turned to tears.  She cradled her head against her
husband's shoulder.  Most of the schoolchildren were mystified.  But
some began sobbing as they saw the reaction of the adults.  To those
in the stands came a brusque order:  "Everybody back on the buses."

The lift-off celebration at McAuliffe's high school faded slowly.  To
Sophomore Marsha Bailey, the TV pyrotechnics looked like "part of the
staging" in any space shot.  Students began quizzing each other.
Then a deep voice in the balcony shouted, "Shut up, everybody,
listen!"  In the silence, the televised narration of the disaster
finally made the outcome all too clear.  Three teachers put their
arms around each other at the rear of the auditorium as one wept.
Classes were canceled and the students dismissed.  Principal Charles
Foley explained his students' early reaction:  "Someone they admired
and loved has been taken away.  It makes them mad.  They have learned
that nothing in this life is certain."  He ordered the school closed
for the following day and set counseling services for any teachers
and students who desired it.

Heading home from the cape, some of Concord's third-graders stopped
for hamburgers in Orlando.  One asked, "Well, if there was an
accident, when will they come back?"  Concord, nestled by New
Hampshire's Merrimack River, is one of the nation's smallest state
capitals (pop. 30,400).  Linked like the rest of the world by the
searing television images, the whole city seemed to stiffen in
sorrow.  Said Pharmacy Clerk Timothy Shurtleff:  "People froze in
their tracks."  A local radio station began playing mourning music.
"It's like part of the family has been killed," said Barbara
Underwood, who had been watching at the library.  The townspeople
were not alone.  The vivacious McAuliffe had come to embody each
schoolteacher that any American has ever admired.

In Washington, Ronald Reagan was getting ready to brief network-TV
correspondents about his State of the Union address, scheduled for
that evening.  He was startled when several officials involved in the
preparations burst into the Oval Office.  "There's been a serious
incident with the space shuttle," said Vice President George Bush.
National Security Adviser John Poindexter echoed what he had just
heard on TV:  "A major malfunction."  Communications Director Pat
Buchanan got to the point:  "Sir, the shuttle has exploded."  Reagan
stood up.   "How tragic," he said.  Then he asked, "Is that the one
the schoolteacher was on?"  While NASA had proposed sending a private
citizen into space, it was the President who had decided that a
teacher should be first.

When asked about the State of the Union speech, Reagan replied,
"There could be no speech without mentioning this.  But you can't
stop governing the nation because of a tragedy of this kind.  So,
yes, one will continue."  Leaders on Capitol Hill, however,
immediately sensed the incongruity of an upbeat national address at
such a time.  House Republican Leader Robert Michel telephoned Chief
of Staff Donald Regan to urge a delay.  Regan phoned House Speaker
Tip O'Neill and Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole.  Both strongly
advised a postponement, and the White House agreed.  Spokesman Larry
Speakes announced that the address would wait a week, until this
Tuesday.

Instead, Reagan delivered a poignant and graceful televised tribute
to "the Challenger Seven" late Tuesday afternoon.  "They had a hunger
to explore the universe and discover its truths," he said.  "They
wished to serve, and they did--they served all of us."  Addressing
himself directly to the nation's schoolchildren who had been
watching, Reagan added, "I know it's hard to understand that
sometimes painful things like this happen.  It's all part of the
process of exploration and discovery, it's all part of taking a
chance and expanding man's horizons."

On Capitol Hill, Speaker O'Neill recessed the House and, shaking his
head, could only mutter, "Terrible thing.  Terrible thing."  He
issued a statement expressing his awe of the space pioneers:  "We
salute those who died performing exploits that people my age grew up
reading about in comic books."

Utah Republican Jake Garn, a former Navy pilot and the first civilian
official to go into space (aboard the shuttle Discovery last April),
could barely speak.  "These were my friends," he said.  "Mike Smith
was my mother hen."  Smith had been specifically assigned to help
ready Garn for his flight.  Garn explained that all the astronauts
were fully aware of the risks.  "We never talked about it.  We always
assumed that if it happened, it would happen to somebody else."
Recalled Ohio Democrat John Glenn, the first American to orbit the
earth:  "We used to speculate, the first group of seven, how many of
us would be alive after the program."  (One of them, Gus Grissom,
died in a 1967 fire on a launch pad.)  His voice thick, he added, "We
always knew there would be a day like this.  We're dealing with
speeds and powers and complexities we've never dealt with before.
This was a day we wish we cold kick back forever."

Glenn was among those space experts who had argued that the shuttle
program should be devoted solely to research and that only experts
who could contribute to that purpose should occupy the limited spots
available on the hugely expensive flights.  But after a highly
successful series of missions in 1983, James Beggs, the NASA
administrator, decided that the time was ripe to select a "citizen
observer-participant."  One clear aim:  to build broader public
support for the funding of the shuttles.

After Reagan told a group of students and teachers in August 1984
that he wanted a teacher to be first, more than 11,000 applied.  NASA
officials felt that a key quality for the winner was the ability to
articulate the values of space exploration.  McAuliffe, who came
across as a public relations natural, survived all the screening at
Johnson Space Center.  At a White House ceremony with the ten
finalists last July 19, Bush announced that she was the winner.  She
would carry only "one body," into space, McAuliffe said happily, but
the "ten souls" of all the finalists would be riding with her.

After training for three months, the teacher and her more experienced
crewmates were ready for their multiple mission.  McAuliffe's task
was to conduct two 15-minute classes in space as millions of
schoolchildren watched via closed-circuit TV.  In one, called "The
ultimate field trip," she would conduct a tour of the spacecraft,
explaining the duties of each crew member and the facilities on
board.  The second, titled "Where we've been, where we're going,
why?," would stress the scientific, commercial and industrial
benefits that have been derived from space travel.

The other specialists on Challenger had less publicized but important
goals.  The mission carried a $100 million NASA satellite, the second
in a series designed to fill the communications gaps that now exist
between orbiting spacecraft and ground stations.  Among the
experiments the crew was scheduled to conduct was the deployment of
instruments that would measure the ultraviolet spectrum of Halley's
comet.  Another was to sample radiation within the spacecraft at
various orbit points.  There was even a student project in which the
effect of weightlessness on the development of twelve White Leghorn
chicken embryos would be studied.

All those laudable projects vanished, of course, with Challenger's
demise.  But it was the loss of the seven humans, the realization
that shuttle flights involve much more than a wondrous display of
mechanical and electronic wizardry, that set off spontaneous
expressions of grief across the U.S.

In Atlanta, Tuesday afternoon was sunny, but motorists switched on
their car headlights as a tribute.  In Los Angeles, the Olympic torch
atop the Memorial Coliseum was lighted anew in honor of the space
victims.  Governor James Thompson of Illinois, before leaving on a
trip to Japan, had asked citizens of his state to turn on their porch
lights at night during Challenger's mission to express support for
the teacher-in-space project.  After the tragedy, he telephoned a
request that they keep them on Wednesday night as memorials of the
fallen heroes.  Many other communities paid comparable tributes.  The
floodlights that normally bathe New York City's Empire State Building
in bright colors were darkened.  Residents of Harlem petitioned Mayor
Ed Koch to name a street after black Astronaut Ronald McNair, whose
father once operated an auto shop on East 96th Street.  All along the
Florida coast, from Jacksonville to Miami, some 20,000 people pointed
flashlights skyward on Friday night.

In the communities where the crew members were raised or lived,
friends and family members gathered to try to draw meaning from the
tragedy.  Seven black balloons were released at Framingham State
College in Massachusetts, where McAuliffe had earned her bachelor of
arts degree.  A memorial service in the college auditorium on
Thursday afternoon was attended by her parents, holding hands in the
front row, and more than 1,000 friends, faculty and students.
"Christa McAuliffe is infinite because she is in our hearts," said
Charles Sposato, a Framingham high school teacher.  At Temple Israel
in Akron, Governor Richard Celeste of Ohio told Judy Resnik's parents
and friends, "She knew she would be at home in space.  And she was.
And she is."  At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State
University in Greensboro, where Ron McNair studied physics, the choir
sang old spirituals, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a fellow alumnus,
told the congregation that McNair "belongs to the ages now."

On Saturday the sad sound of bugles blowing taps rolled across the
site from which the astronauts had climbed so joyfully, but so
briefly, into the air.  Employees of the Kennedy Space Center held a
memorial service near the stands where the schoolchildren had watched
the liftoff.  A helicopter then carried a wreath of white
chrysanthemums and seven red carnations two miles out to sea and
dropped them into the gray water.

Almost immediately, sympathetic Americans moved to create a wide
variety of memorial funds.  One group of Washington attorneys and
bankers set up a trust to provide for the children of the crew
members; among those who pledged donations were kindergarten classes
in Florida and Maine, two California songwriters and a bank in
Hawaii.  (The McAuliffe family is already the beneficiary of a $1
million life insurance policy, donated before the accident by a
Washington, insurance brokerage company.)  The National Education
Association began to collect for a program that will seek to honor
McAuliffe by financing "pioneering" projects by teachers as well as
scholarships to encourage gifted people to enter the profession.  And
school children around the country began sending nickels and dimes to
NASA to help replace the shuttle, which will cost an estimated $2
billion.  (NASA says it will decide later how to use the
contributions.)

On Capitol Hill, Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Arlen Specter
asked President Reagan to name one of the Education Department's
buildings after McAuliffe so that "her sacrifice will live forever in
the memory of this nation."  New York's Democratic Congressman Gary
Ackerman introduced legislation to designate Jan. 28 of each year as
a permanent National Teacher Recognition Day.  Florida's Democratic
Congressman Bill Nelson, who, like Garn, had flown on a shuttle,
proposed that seven of the newly discovered moons of the planet
Uranus each be named for one of Challenger's victims.  Colorado
Republican William Armstrong went a bit further, asking the Senate to
name ten moons, adding the three Apollo astronauts who died in 1967
launch-pad tragedy as well.  Democratic Representative Mickey Leland
of Texas urged that the "true heroes" all be posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom.  At the Smithsonian's National Air and
Space Museum in Washington, a photo of Challenger's crew, draped in
Black ribbon, was placed beside a 12-ft.-high model of the shuttle.
The museum kept running a film, narrated by Walter Cronkite, with
scenes of Judy Resnik and Dick Scobee on previous space missions.
The documentary is called The Dream Is Alive.

For Jay Schaeffer of Belmont High School in Los Angeles, personal
gestures caught the national mood.  Schaeffer had been one of the
teacher semifinalists in the competition to lift off on Challenger,
and despite the disaster, he still yearns for a flight.  "I would go
today, right now.  I wouldn't even go home to change," he said.  But
he appreciated the students who gently touched his shoulder on
Tuesday.  "It was an affirmation of life."  For students, he
explained, "a teacher in space becomes their teacher.  Do you know an
astronaut?  Everyone knows a teacher."

America's agony drew widespread sympathy around the world.  In
Moscow, a somber TV announcer spoke factually about the disaster as
videotapes f the aborted flight were broadcast throughout the Soviet
Union.  American music, including old Glenn Miller recordings, were
broadcast on radio.  Soviet Party Chief Mikhail Gorbachev quickly
joined the multitude of world leaders who sent condolences to
President Reagan.  "We partake of your grief at the tragic death of
the crew of the space shuttle Challenger," he said.

Surprisingly, the Soviet newspaper Socialist Industry reported that
Soviet officials had decided to name two craters on the planet Venus
in honor of McAuliffe and Resnik.  The Soviets had discovered the
craters via space probes.  Only the women among the American space
victims were selected because the Soviets respect the view in Roman
mythology that Venus is the goddess of beauty.  Several Soviet
cosmonauts sent a collective note of sympathy directly to NASA.
Soviet citizens seemed to share the sentiment.  "When something like
this happens," said a Moscow factory worker named Yelena, "we are
neither Russians nor Americans.  We all just feel sorry for those who
died and for their families."

Only later did the Soviet press begin to carp that capitalist
competitiveness had been responsible for undue haste in U.S. space
projects.  Komsomolskaya Pravda charged that the accident showed the
frailty of Reagan's antimissile Star Wars program and asked, "What if
lack of caution, a technical defect or sheer chance should bring the
world an unforeseen nuclear war?"

At the Vatican, Pope John Paul II asked an audience of thousands to
pray for the American astronauts.  He said that the tragedy had
"provoked deep sorrow in my soul."  In Buenos Aires, Cartoonist Dobal
used his space in the Clarin to write, "I can't give you a joke
because, dear reader, all my space is filled with infinite pain."
Japan's public TV extended its popular 45-minute evening news program
to an hour and devoted it all to the space accident.  The Jerusalem
Post noted editorially that "Americans take their risks in front of
grandstands and television cameras for all the world to see, while
the Soviets prefer to keep their launchings secret until they have
been successful."  Alan Castro, a former newspaper editor in Hong
Kong, expressed a common new awareness of space travel prompted by
the accident:  "For a while there, we lost sight of the man in our
fixation with the machine."  Toronto's Globe and Mail pointed to the
"harsh lesson that glory and adventure often go hand in hand with
danger and death."  On a visit to the north of Britain, Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher observed, "New knowledge sometimes demands
sacrifices of the bravest and the best.  I just felt we saw the
spirit of America and the spirit of the American people."

Throughout the week, as mourning continued, Coast Guard and NASA
officials undertook the grim task of searching for the wreckage of
Challenger.  Starting some 30 miles off the cape and then spreading
out to cover some 6,000 sq. mi., 13 aircraft and more than a dozen
recovery vessels joined the search of the conveniently calm Atlantic
waters for any evidence that might give clues as to why the
spacecraft had exploded.

The debris raining from the sky had kept the searchers away from the
possible impact area for nearly an hour.  The sight of a slowly
drifting parachute had given viewers a fleeting hope of human
survival.  News reports first indicated that a frogman had chuted
into the ocean in a quick look for any survivors.  But officials soon
corrected both impressions:  the falling parachute was one of the two
that normally drop the boosters into the sea for salvaging and reuse
of its parts.  This one held a booster nose cap, which was retrieved
two days later.

Despite the obvious devastation of the explosion, searchers began
finding surprisingly large parts of the wreckage, the biggest being a
25-ft.-long section of the spacecraft's fuselage.  Parts of the
shuttle's wings, cabin and cargo-bay door were tentatively
identified.  Sonar detected a large metal object 140 ft. below the
surface, and deep-diving submersibles went down to inspect it.
There was speculation that the object might be Challenger' main
cabin, although a more likely possibility was that it was one of
Challenger's three main engines, which could have fallen in a
cluster.  But Coast Guard Spokesman Lieut. Commander James Simpson
warned that "it could be a shrimp boat from 20 years ago or a Spanish
galleon from 300 years ago."  By week's end the mystery had not been
solved.  Recovery workers also turned their attention to a 13 ft.-
diameter orange object sighted some 100 miles east of Savannah.  They
were hoping that it was the cone of the main fuel tank.

The final farewell for America's seven newest heroes came on Friday
at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, where they had lived and
trained.  Among those who gathered there, under gray skies on a
grassy quadrangle amid the squat modern buildings, were some 6,000
employees of NASA and its contractors, 90 Senators and Congressmen,
and about 200 relatives of Challenger's crew.  Awaiting the start of
the memorial service, while an Air Force band played funeral hymns,
some of the mourners stood quietly in clusters, dabbing their eyes,
while other stared sadly into space.  A few held aloft small American
flags as tears ran down their faces.

The President and Nancy Reagan met the families in a sparsely
furnished classroom.  Reagan picked up Mike Smith's daughter Erin, 8,
who was holding a brown teddy bear that wore a pink apron.  After
embracing most of the relatives, one by one, he said, "We'll all go
out together in a few minutes.  I wish there was something I could
say to make it easier, but there just aren't any words."  Yet when
the music stopped and he stepped onto the outdoor rostrum, Reagan
once again found the right words, and he delivered them eloquently.

"The sacrifice of your loved ones has stirred the soul of our nation,
and, through the pain, our hearts have been opened to a profound
truth," said the President.  "The future is not free; the story of
all human progress is one of a struggle against all odds.  We learned
again that this America was built on heroism and noble sacrifice.  It
was built by men and women like our seven star voyagers, who answered
a call beyond duty."  After paying individual tributes to each member
of the crew, the President declared, "Dick, Mike, Judy, El, Ron, Greg
and Christa--your families and your country mourn your passing.  We
bid you goodbye, but we will never forget you."

The dignified 30-minute ceremony ended with a display of an aerial
equivalent of the riderless horse procession, which was impressed
indelibly on a mourning nation at the funeral of John Kennedy 22
years ago.  Four T-38 jets--the trainers in which all astronauts
prepare for their dangerous duties--roared overhead.  It would have
been a perfect V formation except that fifth plane was missing, and
another symbolic void was created when one of the jets veered sharply
away from the others.  As the band played God Bless America, the
President and the First Lady went down the line of family members,
shaking their hands, offering final words of solace, and hugging
little Erin and the other children as they began to cry.

--By Ed Magnuson.
  Reported by Robert Ajemian/Concord, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral
  and David S. Jackson/Houston