Remembering the Challenger and Apollo 1 Crews

On this date in 1986, all seven crewmembers of the Challenger space shuttle were killed.

The dates this week all seem strangely connected to the worst episodes in the history of space exploration. With my last post, discussing the loss of the Ranger 3 probe, I wanted to talk about the imperfection of human endeavors, but in that case, I could afford to speak lightly of the probe missing the moon. It was, after all, an unmanned probe, and all that was lost was time, effort, and money. Some have had to give much more to the cause of exploring space.

Yesterday was the 41st anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster. Three astronauts died when a fire started and rapidly spread through the spacecraft as it sat on the launchpad. Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were later found to have died of smoke inhalation, but were very heavily burned.

Today marks another sad date in NASA history, and one that, unlike the Apollo 1 fire, I was around to witness. 22 years ago today, the Challenger shuttle exploded seven seconds after takeoff from Cape Canaveral. I remember watching, back in the days when every school child in America watched every launch. It was still an occasion, and a great place to start a lesson, especially in a science class. This launch was even more heavily watched by American classrooms, because a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, was aboard, about to become the first teacher ever to leave the atmosphere of Earth.

McAuliffe's name is still, and will always be inexorably connected to the Challenger explosion. She was the public face of the mission, the poster child for NASA, and when the mission turned so horribly and suddenly tragic, she was still the name in the headlines. I asked a few friends today what they remembered of the explosion, and the only name that any of them could remember was Christa McAuliffe. Six professional astronauts also lost their lives that day, in the performance of their duties and in service of not only our country, but our species. Their names are Greg Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, Francis Scobee, and Michael Smith. They all deserve to be remembered.

Sometimes We Miss

On this date in 1962, the Ranger 3 space probe was launched.

In my opinion, one of the most impressive feats of science and technology, not to mention luck, in recent decades has been the success of the Mars rovers. The small (and relatively cheap) "little data collectors that could" have survived on the surface of Mars for years now, collecting hundreds of times the data originally planned for the mission. In the end, it is estimated that the mission will end because of dust that has settled on the rovers' solar panels. We never even considered they could last long enough for dust to be a problem.

Looking at this sort of success, it's easy to forget just how many times we as humans have tried to reach for the stars and failed. Aside from Apollo 13, which was lucky enough to get its own movie, most failed missions are happily forgotten.

One such mission that we often overlook in the history of space exploration is the Ranger 3. Launched from Cape Canaveral on January 26, 1962, it was meant to fly over the moon taking data on radar reflectivity and surface features, then land and continue to collect more data on the surface itself. It was, in many ways, the direct ancestor of the Mars rovers. Only it missed ... by a lot.

The Ranger 3 was launched by an Atlas-Agena B rocket. The idea was to clear the Earth's atmosphere, make a single course correction, and then ride the forces of gravity for the rest of the trip. It's the sort of calculation that anyone outside of NASA would call then, and many of us would still call today, impossible. But this is the reason you and I don't work for NASA. Their calculations were, in all likelihood, perfectly correct, but a faulty transistor on the rocket threw off its guidance system, and Ranger 3 missed the moon by an impressive 37,000 km on January 28. It then joined the thousands of other small objects orbiting our sun, and it remains out there today, spinning around the same star as us. Maybe someday we'll pick it up, and put it in a museum to remind ourselves that, as smart as we are, we and our technology are not perfect.