Free Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America

Her flight would mark the beginning of a new age of civilian space travel, in which space would be open to everyone. NASA planned to have McAuliffe teach two fifteen-minute classes from the space shuttle, which would be beamed by television to millions of students across America.
    It was unusually cold at Cape Canaveral that morning, but not cold enough to cancel the flight. The liftoff seemed to go smoothly, but seventy-three seconds later
Challenger
erupted into a fiery red ball. The space shuttle had exploded, killing everyone on board. For the nation’s schoolchildren, it was the end of a dream.
    Malcolm McConnell, born in 1939, was at Cape Canaveral to cover the
Challenger
launch for
Reader’s Digest
.
    B efore I witnessed my first shuttle launch, NASA officials escorted several other reporters and me down to the launchpad to see the shuttle up close. I felt like an ant walkingaround a stepladder. I felt awed and dwarfed by this huge machine. When you’re three miles away in the press grandstand and that huge assembly lights itself on fire and takes off, the feeling is overpowering. There is a bright flash from the solid rocket boosters, and then you see an almost volcanic burst of steam from the main engines. Immediately after the flash this huge vehicle begins to rise away, and it’s all silent. A second or two later you are literally assailed by the shock waves. The press grandstand has sort of a tin metal roof that begins to bounce up and down, and your chest is hit by this cacophonous pounding. The first time I saw it, I was virtually speechless. I felt proud that my country, my civilization, had put together this wonderful machine which was so powerful, so complex.
    By the mid-1980s NASA had pretty well convinced most of the world not only that it could run the space shuttle economically, but that the shuttle could actually pay for itself on a commercial basis. NASA wanted to prove that the shuttle was so safe that even an ordinary person could ride into space. So Christa McAuliffe, a high-school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, was to encourage an interest in space for millions of schoolchildren.
    The morning the
Challenger
was launched, very few of us who had covered the space shuttle program thought it was going to fly that day. It was bitterly cold. One reporter pointed up at one of the monitors and said, “Look at the ice.” The launch tower looked like a frozen waterfall. But we got our coffee and we sat around and waited. As it got light, the launch control people began saying, “Well, it’s looking better and better.” NASA had somehow pulled this thing off. And then the countdown reached five, four, three, two, one, and that glare lit up from the solid rocket boosters. I had a sense of great pleasure and satisfaction.
    As the shuttle cleared the tower and the first shock waves of sound began to pound the press grandstand, I had my first sense of foreboding. Because the air was so cold and dense, the pounding sound was much louder than I’d ever experienced. I thought, “That does not sound right.” But I quickly shrugged it off as the shuttle rose. All of us on the grandstand were screaming our heads off, yelling, “Go! Go!” Any sense of professional composure was lost; we were all caught up in the euphoria of the moment.
    The pillar of smoke with the little tiny shuttle had turned to the degree so we couldno longer see the shuttle itself. We could just see the rippling cloud of white and orange smoke coming back toward us. From our vantage point, it still looked like a normal flight. Then there was silence. For a long time. I would say ten seconds, which is a long time during a launch. And we began looking around at each other. And then the voice came over the loudspeakers. In a very dry, almost emotionless voice, “Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink….” And then there was a pause. “The flight dynamics