Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 10

All MAIL The Arizona Republic Wednesday, January 29, 1986 missed Teachers had prepared for takeoffa'the fire below' i I testament to exploration of the cosmos. rBy MARK CHUCK HAWLEY -and DEE RAU.es AriioM RapuMc Staff I The words didn't come easy to Robin Kline, a 66-year-old Scottsdale teacher who was among 114 teachers nationwide ered for a ride into space aboard the space shuttle Challenger. I Just an hour earlier Tuesday morning, Kline and her first-grade class at Tonalea Elementary School had watched in horror as the space shuttle Challenger exploded i over the Atlantic. I Among the seven dead was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire teacher 'II i met AP '4 rockets and space shuttles sit on cabinet tops. Posters urge children to tum their eyes to the stars.

Books with such as Space Flight and Star Travel line the shelves. Hanging on a file cabinet is a full-size model of a spacesuit Kline would have used had she been selected. On this day, as she had for the past several, Kline was wearing a white blouse with a large "Challenger" button, and a red, white and blue sweater. "I can't help but realize the enormity of this," she said. "It's like the story I tell from' our preparations for the flight You dress in cobalt blue with the helmet on.

And you are only conscious of the fire below as you take off. I can't help but wonder what went through their minds." Kline paused. "The fire below," she repeated softly. As the 27 subdued first-graders filed out the door for their next class, Kline implored them to "walk in nice lines." Earlier, she said, one pupil had hugged her and said, "I'm so glad it wasn't you, Mrs. Kline." Kline, a mother of four and grandmother of seven, is married to a retired airline pilot Otis Kline said he always backed his' wife's wishes to be the first teacher in space but added, "I'm sure glad she wasn't on that flight despite how badly she wanted to Kline was one of five Arizona teachers selected as candidates for the mission.

She and Robert Carpenter of Tucson were selected as the state's two top candidates, and three others were alternates. None of the Arizona teachers made the national list of 10 finalists, but each of the original 114 prepared as though they were the ones making the journey. Kline returned to the Valley on Sunday night after a week of activities at Cape Canaveral, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She said she also traveled to Washington in June for another week of preparation. "We all held hands before we left Washington and said it didn't matter which one of us was taken, that we would all be on Challenger in spirit," Kline said.

Carpenter returned late Monday from Cape Canaveral and was not watching the launch on television Tuesday. Instead, he was in a classroom explaining science procedures to eighth-grade pupils at Secrist Middle School in the Tucson Unified School District When a woman from the school office came into the classroom and told him what had happened, he said he felt "numb." "It was just a feeling of total disbelief," Carpenter said. "I told the kids, and you could have heard a pin drop in the room and it's not often that you can hear a pin drop in a junior high classroom." Carpenter, 36, said he will now try to put the accident "into perspective for the kids." "I'll explain to them that there are risks involved in the space program, but Christa (McAuliffe) was so anxious to motivate kids through space that she sacrificed her life," he said. Carpenter said he feels that the "mission of the teacher-in-space program has been accomplished. It's been great getting kids excited about school through the space program." One of his pupils, Trica Moody, 13, said she immediately thought of Carpenter when she heard about the explosion.

"My first reaction was, 'What if Mr. Carpenter had been on that and my heart sunk at the thought of it. It's funny that all the kids wanted Mr. Carpenter to' win so badly, but now that this has happened, they are all glad that he lost." IRobert Carpenter of Tucson reacts to the news that he is a teacher-astronaut candidate in a May photo. When told of Tuesday's tragedy, Carpenter said he felt numb.

Journalists who want ride on shuttle flight this year philosophical about safety Challenger selected for the honor. "I'm devastated," Kline said. "Anyone but a mother with two small children. All of us sat here and watched. I kept shaking my headW" Kline motioned at a near-empty box of Kleenex on her desk.

"That shows the whole thing," she said. "That started out full this morning." Room 23 at the school at 6801 E. Oak is a Whitney, "The chances of my driving in my Volkswagen and getting killed are greater. We tend to think that human beings have control all the time and this underscores the fact that we don't "It's still just a tremendous opportunity to do something that no one else has a chance to do," said Whitney, 43. The application deadline for journalists' wanting to fly aboard the shuttle fas Jan.

15. If the program continues, the pool will be cut to 100 regional semifinalists, five selected by each of the 20 journalism schools participating in the selection process around the nation. ElDean Bennett, director of Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication, is scheduled to head the panel that will select the regional semifinalists in 11 Western states. The selection process is administered by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. Bennett said he has been notified by association officials to proceed with the screening process unless he is notified otherwise.

One journalist, as well as an alternate, is to be selected April 17. Both will undergo 114 hours of training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Directors of the Joumalist-In-Space program have said it is too early to tell what effect the accident will have on plans to send civilians or non-scientists into orbit However, Bennett said he fears Tuesday's accident will prompt strong congressional opposition to civilians in space. "I'd be kind of sorry about that," he said. "I thought it was a good idea.

After all, the journalist is trained in observation." Added Tom Journey, 35, Republic wire editor and another program candidate, "I think, obviously, no one's going to be going up in the shuttle for some time. "But I'm confident that they'll take' every precaution that they can. It's one of those things. If it happens, then your number's up." Sean BradyRepublic In her Scottsdale first-grade classroom, Robin Kline discusses the shuttle disaster. On a bulletin board behind Kline are photos of her pupils in spacesuit cutouts.

would not deter her from reapplying for the space program. "I've already volunteered to be the second teacher," she said. "I won't be selected, but I've volunteered." Louis Self, a 43-year-old seventh-grade science teacher at Sunrise Middle School in northeast Phoenix who also was an Arizona alternate, said he would not hesitate to reapply. "I'd go," said Self, who learned of the explosion when a school official came to his classroom. "I don't think I'll have the chance, but I'd go." He added, "They were pushing frontiers, and pushing frontiers is a risk, just as living day to day is a risk." The tragedy cast a pall on the 35th birthday of the youngest of Arizona's five candidates, Arthur DeFilippo.

DeFilippo, the only Arizona applicant from a one-room school, now is teaching sociology at the University of Arizona while working on certification to become a school principal. Until this year, he taught kindergarten through high school at the Zimmerman Accommodation School atop Mount Lenv mon near Tucson. It is a school for the children of people who run the Mount Lemmon ski resort 1 By JACQUEE G. PETCHEL 'Arizona Republic Staff Arizona journalists who hope to be the nation's first in space still appear eager to make the historic journey despite the explosion Tuesday of the space shuttle Challenger. But it is not known yet whether any of the more than 1,700 journalists from across the nation who applied for NASA's Jour- nalist-in-Space program will ever get their chance to orbit.

Officials said the program will be "at least delayed" because of the shuttle explosion that killed six astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. There is way to determine immediately what effect the tragedy will have on efforts to send the next private citizen, a journalist, into space, they said. The first reporter had been scheduled to 1 blast into space this fall aboard a shuttle mission after a lengthy selection process that started this month. Thirty -seven Arizonans are among those vying for the chance to take the journey. One of them, Chandler Arizonan editor and reporter Patricia Zapor, said she has no plans to withdraw her application, nor are 1 her hopes of putting to words "the realities I of space flight" dimmed by Tuesday's accident "I'm still just as interested," the 27- year-old journalist said.

"If there's a plane accident somewhere you don't cash in your ticket and take the train. "My job is reporting on complicated j. things and making it something everybody I out here can understand." Her thoughts were echoed by others, including several applicants from The Arizona Republic "I think it's like flying a plane. If there bad been a crash the day before, it wouldn't i stop you from flying," said Republic reporter Neat Savage, 36. "I like challenges.

1 That's about the biggest there is around." However, Savage said a veto by his wife who "might be upset by all this" could keep him from participating in the program, Added Republic feature writer Herb 2 who taught By GENE VARN Southarn Arizona Buraau TUCSON Hours after his death-Tuesday in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Francis R. was remembered fondly by two of his former teachers at the University of Arizona. Scobee attended the UofA for two years as an Air Force enlisted man, graduating in 1965 with a bachelor-of-science degree in aerospace engineering. Edwin K. Parks, 68, a professor of aerospace and mechanical recalled Scobee as a bright student on his waytosuccess.

Scobee enlisted in the Air Force right after graduation from high school in 1957 in Auburn, Wash. In 1963, he was chosen to participate in an Air Force-sponsored program at the; Sister Judith Bisignano, a science teacher at Tucson's Kino Learning Center and an Arizona alternate, said the fatal launch was seen by all of the school's 150 pupils. "We had just gotten a satellite dish at the school, and we put it up yesterday," Bisignano said. "We were all looking at it live. The whole school was there." Bisignano, 43, said the disaster will become a learning experience for her pupils.

"The students are just in shock," she said. "Now, it's turned from space education to death education. We have 150 kids who will have to shift from joy, from life, to death. "I wrote a book on death, on how kids can deal with death," said Bisignano, who has taught for 22 years and faced death herself in two bouts with cancer. But the children in her class were not prepared for the rapid emotional turnaround they experienced.

"First, they just cheered when it left the pad," Bisignano said. "Then the explosion happened there was two minutes of dead silence. Nobody said anything, but it was obvious what had happened." Bisignano said the explosion and deaths back to its Florida 1984 after his first shuttle mission, he laughed when shown a grainy black-and-white movie of the model-plane episode, Parks and Vincent Said. On that return trip, Scobee brought with him a display of UofA tokens he had taken with him on his shuttle trip earlier that year, including an Arizona Wildcats bumper sticker. During that three-day trip to his alma mater, Scobee met with hundreds of university and high school students to discuss his trip aboard the Challenger, the same shuttle that exploded Tuesday.

"He was very relaxed, a people's person," recalled Richard Guthrie, president of the UofA College of Engineering Alumni Council, who was at Scobee's side during much of that trip to Tucson. Guthrie, Parks and Vincent appeared togeer Tuesday at a UofA press confer its mission in November. I 'n prww'34 The space shuttle was being taken The shuttle Challenger perches atop a NASA jet stopping for fuel at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson at the end of astronaut Scobee at Uof A remember him base after having landed in California. affectionately ence called to note the tragic death of the famous alumnus. One morning during that 1984 visit, Scobee went on a jog from his Uof A-area hotel to the cottage on North Mountain Avenue where he and his wife, June, lived during his student days, Guthrie said.

"Gosh, that looked small," Scobee commented to Guthrie on his return from the run. Guthrie was in Florida last weekend at Scobee's invitation to see the launch of the Challenger. Because the launch was delayed, Guthrie said, he had to return to Tucson without seeing the liftoff. Although Scobee was in quarantine with the rest of the shuttle crew, Guthrie said he met with June Scobee and one of the couple's two children. "She was very excited about the flight," Guthrie said.

"It was badly designed," Parks recalled. The predictable occurred. With one of the students handling the remote controls, the plane lurched down the runway and smacked into a rock, flipping over. Again Scobee and the other students tried, but this time a wind gust turned the 'plane over before it could get off the runway. Then the students launched the plane by hand, Parks remembered.

Up it went for about 60 seconds. Then it stalled and came crashing to the ground. Despite the model-plane failure, Scobee: was on the university honors list while at UofA because of his B-plus grade average, officials said. He also belonged to the engineering honorary society, Tau Beta Pi. When Scobee returned to the UofA in UofA that would lead to a commission as a second lieutenant upon graduation.

Parks and Thomas Vincent, 50, also a UofA professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, acknowledged Tuesday that the passing of two decades had dimmed their memory of Scobee as a student But both recalled a project Scobee was involved in that was a failure. Scobee, then 26, and about a dozen other aerospace students built a large remote-controlled model airplane as an extracurricular project, the professors said. On a hot Saturday in late May, Scobee and the other members of the student chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics took the model plane to an abandoned World War II landing strip northwest of Tucson in the Avra Valley..