Philadelphia Daily News from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 4

Facte 4 PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS Wednesday, Jan. 29, 1986 TRAGEDY IN THE SKY "The courage of space travel is not climbing or descending to earth in a fiery furnace. persevering and dealing with the crossroads into the smoking hardware of the rocket The true courage of space flight is in of decisions." Astronaut Ronald McNair alabamaceorgia 3. After the explosion. sQS mm tne two so rocket I VXX cape jtP' 1 boosters detached and I Gun of Canaveral Vv A I "ew out of control.

I Uexlco fx-t Space Shuttle Challenger's Fata! Path Cape Canaveral FLORIDA Launch Pad 39-B Atlantic Ocean 4. The disintegrating 9 nn. I shuttle fell over a Vf (II Ci 2. One minute and shuttle fell over a i 28.64 -C Latitude wide area in the ocean. Burning debris fell for nearly 45 minutes prohibiting rescue teams from entering promptly.

One solid fuel booster was seen floating down on its parachute. 14 seconds after lift-off Challenger explodes about 10 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. It was heading due east and was accelerating to orbit at a speed of 1,977 miles per hour. 1 Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off from Cape Canaveral with six astronauts and school teacher Christa McAuliffe. The launch had been delayed earlier because of weather related problems.

80.28" Longitude DAN CLIFFORD Knight Ridder Graphics Network No Exit for the Astronauts SHUTTLE Continued from Preceding Page astronauts for 21 months, and yesterday's explosion is expected to halt space shuttle flights for many months. Jesse Moore, director of NASA's shuttle program, said a shuttle will not fly snril ihe cause of the accident is pinpointed and corrections made. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had planned a record 15 shuttle flights this year, and Challenger was on the second. The ship, making its 10th flight, had beci the workhorse of a four-ship fleet. Killed along with McAuliffe were commander Francis R.

Scobee. 46; pilot Michael J. Smith, 40; Judith A. Resnik. 36: Ronald McNair, 35; Ellison Omzuka, 39, and Gregory B.

Jarvis, 41. Scobee; Resnik, America's second woman in space: McNair. the naTion's second black astronaut, and Onizuka. a Japanese-America, were making their second shuttle flights. Jarvis, an employee of Hughes Aircraft, was on the trip to conduct fluid dynamics tests developed by his company.

"We mourn seven a somber Resident Reagan told the nation. Moore called it "a national tragedy." Reagan delayed till 9 pm. next Tuesday his State of the Union speech, which had been scheduled for last night, and ordered American flags to be flown at half staff through Monday on public buildings and military installations. At the president's request. Vice President George Bush flew to Cape Canaveral to offer condolences to the familes of the astronauts, who watched in horror as Challenger was transformed into a raging fireball.

Mission Control reported there had been no indication of any problem with the shuttle's three main, liquid-powered engines, its twin solid-fuel rocket boosters or any other system. Officials said the shuttle just suddenly blew apart and that radio data ceased at 74 seconds. Moore named an interim investigation team headed by Kennedy Space Center director Richard Smith, and said NASA acting administrator William R. Graham would soon name a formal review board. The explosion occurred as Scobee was throttling the main engines back to maximum thrust after dropping them to 65 percent to reduce forces of gravity on the ship.

It took place just after the spaceship drove through an area where wind and other atmospheric forces exert maximum pressure on its outside. "Roger, go at throttle up," reported Smith as the thrust increased. Those were the last words from the Dally News Wire Services SPACE CENTER, Houston The astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger had no way to escape the vehicle once it left the launch pad, a NASA spokesman said yesterday. Astronauts aboard Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions could be ejected from their spacecraft, and astronauts aboard the first four shuttle missions had ejection seats as well, spokesman Terry White said. But the ejection provision was removed once the program advanced from the testing phase and the size of crews grew.

White said. It is doubtful anyway that an escape mechanism would have helped the Challenger crew in yesterday's explosion. White said. The shuttles and other NASA space vehicles have emergency slides on launch pads for the crews, and the shuttles have hatches through which the crew could escape in an emergency landing or a belly-crash into the ocean. The shuttle carried life rafts and survival kits but no parachutes, White said.

The shuttles do have levers astronauts can pull to separate the orbiter from its rocket boosters and fuel tank, said John Lawrence, a NASA spokesman, but he said it would not have helped yesterday's crew because the blast came without warning. Mercury and Apollo space capsules had an escape rocket that could have blasted astronauts to safety. Gemini astronauts had ejection seats, White said. Soviet officials have said ejection mechanisms saved three cosmonauts when their craft exploded on a launch pad in September 1983. A report yesterday by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, noted that Challenger was not equipped with such mechanisms.

The first four test flights of the shuttle Columbia, each carrying two-man crews, were equipped with ejection seats much like those on a jet fighter, where the pilot can "punch out," White said. But there never was any intent in the shuttle program to allow for in-flight ejection, and there were "no provisions for escape in a catastrophic failure like we had lyesterdayL" White said. The major blast came from the large external fuel tank, which lifted off with 526,000 gallons of volatile liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant. As the fireball spread ter-rifyingly across a clear sky, the two solid-fuel rockets broke loose and continued flying crazily, apparently under full thrust, before they crashed into the ocean. Reagan, in an Oval Office address after he postponed his State of the Union message, reaffirmed his commitment to the shuttle program and said, "The future doesnt belong to the fainthearted, it belongs to the brave.

"We will continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. "Nothing ends here." NASA delayed its announcement that there appeared to be no survivors for more than four hours until it had conducted search-and-rescue efforts. Even before Moore's statement, it seemed impossible anyone could survive such a cataclysmic explosion. Soviet leader Mikhail S.

Gorbachev told President Reagan in a telegram today that Soviets share America's grief at the death of seven astronauts in the space shuttle Challenger and offered condolences to relatives of the victims. In contrast to the secrecy usually surrounding the Soviet Union's own space mishaps, the Tuesday evening news program broadcast just two hours after the Challenger exploded showed film of the tragedy to about 180 million Soviet viewers. New Hampshire schoolchildren were drawn to this launch because of the presence of McAuliffe, 37, who had been a social studies teacher at Concord High School and who had won her seat on the shuttle in competition with 11,146 other teachers. The children, watching in school auditoriums, screamed and fought back tears. Until Yesterday, a Stellar Workhorse Daily News Wire Services Despite nagging problems with heat tiles and landing gear, flights of the U.S.

space shuttle program had come to be viewed as routine. Until yesterday. Before the launch disaster, which claimed the lives of seven Americans and destroyed a billion-dollar spacecraft, the shuttle had proved to be remarkably reliable. The four vessels Columbia, Discovery, Atlantis and Challenger had made 24 trips into space, carrying scores of people and many millions of dollars worth of cargo, in line with the concept of providing regular, routine and affordable space travel. However, those achievements did not come easily.

By the time Columbia blasted off April 12, 1981, the project was years behind schedule and had cost billions of dollars more than planned flight with a minimum of maintenance work. The solution involved covering most of the space plane with silicon tiles that, although extremely light, could withstand temperatures of thousands of degrees. While the approach ultimately worked, the first shuttle flight was delayed many months when Columbia lost several thousand tiles while being ferried across the country atop a jumbo jet. Other problems, notably with the powerful liquid-fuel main engines, delayed several missions. However, space agency officials always insisted they were just being ultraconserva-ti ve and the shuttle was not flawed.

Indeed, virtually every mechanical and electrical part of the shuttle has at least one completely redundant backup part. Many components, such as the all-important computers, have as many as four spares aboard. when conceived in the early 1970s. Five years later, the ambitious Space Transportation System, as the shuttle was formally called, was still experiencing technical problems and frustrating launch delays. However, over the course of two dozen missions by a total of four winged shuttles, technical problems were always overcome One of the most challenging problems scientists had to overcome was protecting the delta-winged orbiter from the enormous heat of friction when it returned to the Earth's atmosphere at 40 times the speed of sound.

Earlier U.S. space vehicles, including those which went to the moon, were covered with a special material that burned away as the tiny cone-shaped capsules hurtled through the atmosphere. Such a material was considered impractical for a spaceship as large as the shuttle, which also had to be made ready for another These Daily News staff writers contributed to coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion: Gloria Campisi, Michael Days, Scott Flander, Ron Goldwyn, Michael Freeman, Kevin Haney. Tyree Johnson, Vince Kasper, Kit Konolige, Julia Lawlor, Frank Lenny, Frederick H. Lowe, Michel Marriott, Marc Meltzer, John F.

Morrison, Debbie M. Price, Valeria Russ, Leslie Seism, Gene Seymour, Linn Washington and John C. White..