Last Flight Of Challenger's Crew

By Ed Magnuson

They had blasted off from Cape Canaveral last January to the thunderous roar of Challenger's five rocket engines. They returned last week to a respectfully silent ceremony on the Cape's runway where their shuttle mission, if successful, would have landed. The quiet was broken only by two disparate sounds: the somber cadence of tramping boots as an Air Force honor guard gently placed the seven flag-draped coffins aboard a Lockheed C-141 transport plane, and the cheery song of a nearby flock of mockingbirds.

Each casket, bearing the remains of one of Challenger's crew, was accompanied by an astronaut. Top officials of NASA, the space agency whose reputation has been badly tarnished by the disaster, also boarded the giant C- 141 en route to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. It was Dover that received the bodies of the 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines, killed in Beirut in 1983 and the 248 U.S. Army Airborne victims of last year's plane crash in Gander, Newfoundland.

A second military guard attended the transfer of the Challenger coffins to the base mortuary, but no relatives of the crew were present. Most had been in Houston on Jan. 31 for the memorial service addressed by President Reagan. Each family now made its own arrangements to receive a crew member's casket.

In Concord, N.H., Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher whose presence on Challenger was intended to herald a now postponed era of routine space flight, was buried on a hilltop some two miles from the high school where she taught. At Arlington National Cemetery, Navy Commander Mike Smith, Challenger's pilot, was buried with military honors on Saturday. Mission Commander Dick Scobee, a former Air Force officer, will also be interred there. The wife of Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis asked that his remains be cremated so his ashes could be scattered into the Pacific near his home in Hermosa Beach, Calif. A military service will be held at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii for Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka. Mission Specialist Ronald McNair will be interred in his hometown of Lake City, S.C.. The family of Mission Specialist Judith Resnik has not announced its plans. The final ceremony for Challenger's crew will be at Arlington, where the body parts that could not be identified will be placed in a common grave dedicated to all the astronauts.

The fact that the remains of all seven crew members had been recovered from Challenger's heavily damaged crew compartment on the ocean floor was a tribute to the largest underwater search operation in history. Costing some $20 million, the search also retrieved enough of the shuttle's parts to substantiate the findings of NASA investigators and a presidential commission looking into the disaster. The probers have concluded that a joint between two segments of the shuttle's right booster failed, letting superhot gases escape and rapidly ignite liquid fuel from the external tank, causing an explosion 73 seconds into the flight.

The Challenger disaster understandably haunted space officials at the Cape last week as they prepared for their first launch since the accident. They checked and rechecked a 116-foot Delta rocket that was to carry a $57.5 million weather satellite into an equatorial orbit to detect developing hurricanes. When a tiny fuel leak was detected on Thursday, the launch was prudently postponed until Saturday as technicians pored over the problem.

The launch team had another concern: the last two attempts to send Titan rockets into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had failed, one last August, the other on April 18. Both Titans reportedly had been trying to put secret military photographic satellites in position to keep watch on the Soviet Union and the Middle East. With the shuttle program on hold and the once trusty Titan turning unreliable, America's ability to get satellites into orbit had been seriously impaired. But NASA looked with confidence to the workhorse Delta. It had flown successfully 43 consecutive times, including its last mission, on Nov. 13, 1984. "We need this satellite," said NASA Acting Administrator William Graham, "and we need to remind ourselves that we have had success in the space program."

The sleek three-stage Delta roared off its pad at 6:18 p.m. Saturday after a trouble-free countdown. Its main liquid-fuel engine and solid-fuel boosters all fired as planned. Delta soared into the clear Florida sky. Then, 71 seconds into its flight, monitoring technicians experienced a chilling case of deja vu. Their instruments showed that the main engine had shut down before it was programmed to do so, causing Delta to lose its flight stability. Veering out of control, the rocket began to break up. At 91 seconds, range safety officials destroyed it by remote control.

Once again a fireball flashed over Cape Canaveral. Again there would be an intensive investigation to find out what had gone wrong. Inexplicably, America's space program seemed to have shifted into reverse. Even as the Challenger astronauts were buried, more gloom overtook a once proud space agency.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral