Casper Star-Tribune from Casper, Wyoming • 6

star Special Report AR-Star-Tribune, Casper. Wyo. Wednesday, Jan. 29, 1 986 I 1 1 I said it had too terrible to happen, to believe yr fcA) rsi Recently there had been launch delays. The weather.

A faulty part. More weather. And various readings that told computers: Shut Down Now! were a half million gallons of fuel in the tanks. The worst fears always were for liftoff and landing. A blowup on the pad.

A crash by coming back too hot, too fast. This time, though, the ship was on its way; everything seemed as NASA likes to say "nominal." The giant fireball destroyed all that. Even after seeing it and knowing what it was, there was the hope that somehow the Challenger would be seen in the distance, climbing higher. Recently there had been launch delays. The weather.

A faulty part. More weather. Various readings that commanded computers: Shut Down Now! You had to be close to the launch site, or the engineering offices, or the NASA executive suites to know what that entailed. Pressures that build up to lift a 100-ton spacecraft and its fuel so fast, so high had to be relieved. Kennedy Space Center I 8.05 miles -fx- The horror AP Christa McAuliffe's parents, Grace and Ed Corrigan, and sister, Lisa, react in horror as the space shuttle Challenger explodes Tuesday.

All seven astronauts aboard including McAuliffe were presumed to have died. Everybody but it was By The Associated Press Everybody said it had to happen sometime, but when it did, it was too terrible to believe. Fifty-five times, spacecraft had carried American astronauts away from Earth's hug into the boundless, airless space beyond. It got to be routine. We were used to the images, even bored by them.

The guided tours of the spacecraft: How many times would they show us an astronaut flipping food overhead and catching it with his mouth? Even the spectacular views from space, the blue cloud-mottled Earth hanging strangely above the spacecraft, became routine. Another astronaut, bundled in white a human satellite zipping along at 17,400 miles an hour a human being seeing whole continents with his naked eye. Routine. Fifty-five times men and women went aloft in ships designed for space. One at a time in Mercury.

Two at a time in Gemini. Three at a time in Apollo and Skylab. And then two, four, five, six, seven and even eight at a time in the space shuttle. One hundred and twenty-nine individuals. Three rookies were added to that number on Mission 5 1-L.

It was the one thing that always worked, at a time when so little was working. During the Vietnam protests of the '60s, we were sen-1 ding ships to circle Earth. At the height of the war, in 1969, we sent the first men to walk on the moon. During Watergate, we had men doing research in Skylab. It went so well, it seemed so routine.

It was easy to forget that this was a very dangerous business. In the case of the shuttle, there Disbelieving scientists see shuttle explode PASADENA, Calif. (AP) Scientists and NASA officials who watched closed-circuit monitors in disbelief as the space shuttle Challenger exploded after launch canceled Tuesday's briefings on the Voyager 2's exploration of Uranus. "I was stunned. I didn't believe it," National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Jim Kukowski said as tears welled up in his eyes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates America's unmanned space program.

"I've known (Challenger commander) Dick Scobee for years," Kukowski said. "I just can't believe what happened." Hundreds of scientists, engineers, journalists and NASA officials watched TV monitors throughout JPL buildings with horror as the shuttle exploded. 1 "It's a rather emotionally wrenching experience, because we've just come off an intellectual high into what is a terrible tragedy," said Norman Ness, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "Everyone was absolutely stunned," said Frank Bristow, JPL's chief spokesman. "Members of the Voyager team are in a state of shock." Deputy Voyager project scientist Ellis Miner said the mood among scientists was "about as gloomy as you can expect.

We've been dealing in the unmanned space program for a long time, and we're alwayi upset by anything that goes wrong. But something of this nature is a major disaster, and it hard to express how you feel. It takes the space shuttle only 10 minutes to dart into space, to go from the eastern Florida coast to over the Indian Ocean. Space starts at 400,000 feet 75 miles up. The United States regarded the space shuttle as its principal ship in this decade and much of the next.

It built four and planned to keep them all busy for a rate of 24 flights a year. There were to have been 15 this year. The Air Force agreed to two flights a year. Planners for President Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system scheduled experiments. Companies like McDonnell Douglas and 3M were pioneering commercial products to be made on shuttle flights.

Things had become so routine, looked so safe, that NASA wanted to expand space flight beyond astronauts and scientists. Mission 5 1-L was to be the first for an ordinary citizen. With much hoopla, NASA selected teacher Christa McAuliffe to represent her craft, to intrigue millions of school children who would be watching. McAuliffe was on board, ready to give lesson plans on "the ultimate field trip." Gregory Jarvis, a Hughes Aircraft payload specialist also was on board. He had been waiting years for a mission.

Michael Smith, an astronaut since 1980, was on board. It was his first mission. Francis R. Scobee, who had logged more than 6,500 hours in 45 types of aircraft, was on board. Ellison Onizuka, who had been the first Japanese-American in space, was aboard.

Star-TribuneGreg Kearney slides on launch pads for the crews, and the shuttles have hatches through which the crew could escape in the event of 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 Tuesday's crew because the blast came without warning. Mercury and Apollo space capsules had an escape rocket that would blast the crew's capsule to safety in an emergency. Gemini astronauts had ejection seats, White said.

"With small craft that was practical. But the shuttle was too big. You had people on two decks and crews of up to eight. How would you arrange something like that?" White said. Congressmen will start asking some down-to-earth questions downrange WASHINGTON Committees in the Senate and the House said Tuesday they will hold extensive hearings into the space-shuttle disaster, but probably will wait until after an internal investigation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"We as a people and as a nation have benefitted greatly from space exploration, but we must have answers, we must understand exactly what has happened before further launches can be made," said Sen. Lawton Chiles the home of the Kennedy Space Center. "Exhaustive investigations and inquiries lie ahead." Lawmakers from both parties raised sharp questions about the handling of the space-shuttle program and said that Tuesday's loss of the spacecraft Challenger and its seven crew members could seriously set back a program that Once Challenger launched, there was no way to escape was already beset by budget pressures and foreign competition. Several legislators suggested that the disaster could undermine plans to put additional civilians into space, even though President Reagan reiterated his determination Tuesday night to continue those plans. Others said that foreign competitors in the space business, particularly France, would get a boost from the tragedy, and that the Air Force would probably accelerate its efforts to increase the use of unmanned vehicles to place satellites into orbit.

Despite these initial criticisms, other congressional leaders insisted that the tragedy was part of the price of a successful space program. "I guess we always knew there would be a day like this," said Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, who was the first American to or but said it seemed there was no chance the crew could have survived. The Soviet Union, the. only other nation that has sent manned vehicles into space, has reported the deaths of four Soviet cosmonauts.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported the accident in a three-paragraph dispatch from Washington, saying: "It appeared there is no way that the seven people on board could survive." In Paris, the European Space Agency (ESA) expressed its "deep sympathy with NASA." bit the Earth. "This is a day we hoped to push back forever." Lawmakers in both chambers unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "profound sorrow" at the explosion and took the floor to express their continued support for the space program. A typical comment came from Rep. Edward Boland, who said: "We can't let this terrible tragedy stop us from going ahead." Rep. Bill Nelson, who flew on the last shuttle mission just a few weeks ago, said, "This is part of venturing into the unknown." But this sense of determination did not deflect an underlying current of concern and criticism.

One of the first questions that will be raised in those inquiries will be about the value of sending civil-ians into space. America's grief The accident was "a disaster for NASA and for space in general, and as ESA is in space, a disaster for us," said spokesman Jean-Paul Paille. ESA builds the Ariane satellite launcher as a commercial rival to the shuttle, but it cooperates closely with NASA in other pro-jects and built the Spacelab carried on previous Shuttle flights. French astronaut Patrick Baudry, who flew on an earlier U.S. space shuttle flight, praised NASA's training program and the shuttle.

Spacefaring nations share in SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) The astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger had no way to escape the vehicle once it left the launch pad, a NASA spokesman said Tuesday. Astronauts aboard Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions could be ejected from their spacecraft, and astronauts aboard the first four space 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 any escape mechanism would have helped the Challenger crew in Tuesday's explosion, White said. "After launch, there is no egress except for an intact landing," White said.

"It's basically like a commercial aircraft. How do you rescue 300 people?" The shuttles and other NASA space vehicles have emergency By The Associated Press Foreign reaction to the fiery explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the loss of its seven crew members Tuesday began with terse reports of the event and then turned to messages of condolence. The Soviet news agency Tass briefly reported on the explosion 30 minutes after it occurred. The initial report, datelined New York, was a single sentence saying, "U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff today." Tass later reported that seven astronauts were aboard the shuttle,.