July 16, 2025 • 42 mins
The Congressional Space Medal of Honor is awarded to those who go above and beyond– at the farthest edges of our frontier. Judy Resnick was one of our country’s first women astronauts, but what makes her a hero is something else: her willingness to face death in the name of serving a greater good.
Special thanks to the NASA History Office, Performance Initiative Podcast, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Episode bibliography:
Higginbotham, Adam. “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space.” Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, May 14, 2024. https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Story-Heroism-Disaster-Space/dp/198217661X.
Mullane, Mike. “Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut.” Scribner, February 6, 2007. https://www.amazon.com/Riding-Rockets-Outrageous-Shuttle-Astronaut/dp/0743276833.
SWE Magazine. “Judith Resnik’s Living Legacy” All Together, January 26, 2021. https://alltogether.swe.org/2021/01/judith-resniks-living-legacy/.
Galloway, Barbara. “Astronaut and Akron native Judith Resnik remembered as brilliant, strong-willed.” Beacon Journal, January 27, 2020. https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/local/2020/01/27/jan-29-1986-judith-resnik/1820447007/.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident: Chapter II - Events Leading Up to the Challenger Mission. https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v1ch2.htm.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It was Tuesday, June twenty sixth, nineteen eighty four, on
a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Space shuttle
Discovery was preparing to take its first voyage into orbit.
There were six astronauts on board, harnessed into their seats,
lying on their backs, facing up towards the Cosmos. The
(00:35):
hatch to the crew compartment closed. The astronauts felt a
pop in their ears as the cabin pressurized, and then
they waited, nervous, their chit chat and jokes fading into silence.
Soon the only sound was the whoosh of the cabin fan.
(00:58):
At T two two minutes, the astronauts closed the visors
on their helmets.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Good luck, everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Their mission commander said, this is it.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Do it like.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
We've trained eyes on the instruments. At T minus thirty
one seconds, Discoveries computers assumed control of the countdown.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
We have a very found one starts.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
The astronauts' hearts were racing. They focused their whole beings
on what was about to happen, on everything they had
trained for years to do.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
We have a main engine start.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
At T minus ten seconds, six high pressure turbo pumps
began to work, sending thousands of pounds of propellant to
the shuttle's three main engines. At T minus six seconds,
the cockpit started to shake and rattle by the first
(02:02):
engine headlet.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This was it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Liftoff was about to begin, and then suddenly the vibration stopped.
The cockpit was as silent and eerie as a tomb.
The crew knew instantly that something was very, very wrong.
(02:27):
They were only seconds away from lighting the solid rocket boosters,
two giant canisters of fuel that would propel the Shuttle
into orbit. If they ignited now while the shuttle was
still on the launch pad, they would generate more than
six million pounds of thrust. It would rip the shuttle apart.
(02:50):
Everyone on board would be dead instantly. The astronauts weren't
sure exactly what was happening, but they knew they were
sitting on a bomb that might be about to go off.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm JR.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
In this episode, you'll meet the recipient of a different
kind of medal, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. It
was authorized by Congress in nineteen sixty nine and since
then has only been awarded to thirty astronauts. It is
(03:34):
given to those men and women who distinguished themselves through
quote exceptionally meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
The nation and mankind.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And just like the Medal of Honor, it has to
be approved by the President of the United States. The
Space Medal of Honor doesn't award heroism in battle. It
rewards the heroism you need if you're going to push
to the farthest edges of our frontier. That heroism tells
(04:07):
us every bit as much about the nature of courage
and sacrifice as the classic Medal of Honor does. This
story is about Judith Resnik, one of the astronauts aboard
the Space Shuttle Discovery on that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Summer morning in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Judy was a brilliant engineer who joined NASA along with
five other women in the late seventies and went through
years of grueling training to qualify to be on that shuttle.
She was the second American woman in space after Sally Ryde,
and she understood deep in her bones how risky her
(04:49):
assignment was, but she did it anyway.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
She persisted through.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
That danger, not because she wanted to be a woman
in space, some kind of token or ceiling breaker. She
did it because she had a job to do, a
job she was doing for her country, for all of us.
She would do that job until the morning she died
(05:17):
at the age of thirty six, free falling through the
clear blue winter sky. By the time Judy Resnik decided
(05:40):
to become an astronaut, she had been the only woman
in the room literally dozens of times. That's what you
got from being a female math genius an engineer in
the late nineteen sixties and seventies. She was born in Akron, Ohio,
in nineteen forty nine. Her parents were first generation Jewish Americas.
(06:01):
Judy was exceptional from the start. She trained to be
a concert pianist, and she was amazing at it. She
spoke French. She was the only girl in the math
club in high school. She graduated first in her class,
and she was accepted early to the famous Juilliard School
of Music. But then Judy scored an eight hundred on
(06:25):
the math portion of her college SATs, the only female
high school student in the country that year to achieve
a perfect score. So she switched gears and enrolled at
Carnegie Mellon University to study electrical engineering. There were barely
any other women in the department that she was getting
(06:45):
used to that. Judy graduated first in her class and
promptly started adding to her expertise designing radar control and
rocketree circuits at RCA, working in biomedical engineering at the
National Institutes of Health, getting her PhD in electrical engineering
with honors. But while success came easily, finding something to
(07:11):
spark her interest was harder. That all changed in nineteen
seventy seven when NASA finally opened its applications to women.
Judy was twenty seven. NASA's decision was a long time coming.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
It was American men who first walked in space and
then set the first human footprints on a planet other
than Earth, and subsequent flights have remained a sort of
free floating bachelor party.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
This is from a documentary made in nineteen eighty three.
I can't tell if it's meant to be funny or what.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
From nineteen sixty until nineteen seventy seven, for reasons that
will forever remain unclear, NASA was unable to find a
single qualified woman candidate.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Or, as one woman put it, they trained a Tim
pan Z to go to space before they trained a
single female astronaut. Anyways, in the late nineteen seventies, NASA
had developed this space shuttle. Unlike the old spacecraft, it
would be reusable, able to take several trips a year,
(08:27):
which meant NASA would need more astronauts, and so finally
women were allowed in the door. Judy wasn't really that
interested in space until she happened to see the NASA
recruitment noticed on some bulletin board.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
This is Judy.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
I decided to apply to be an astronaut when I
was a graduate student finishing up my research work. It
was not something that I had planned to do for
my whole life. It was a case of being in
the right place at the right time. NASA was advertising
for astronauts at the time that I was looking for
a job.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
If she made it sound easy, it wasn't. More than
eight thousand people applied to become astronauts that year. Of those,
a little over a thousand were women. Judy worked hard
to stand out from the crowd, reaching out to astronaut
John Glenn and Apollo eleven pilot Michael Collins to learn
(09:26):
more about the space program. She got a pilot's license,
and while she waited to hear from NASA, she moved
to California and took a job with Xerox. Soon enough,
she was one of two hundred finalists invited to the
Johnson Space Center in Houston. Of those two hundred, only
twenty one were women. Judy submitted to a week of interviews,
(09:52):
to physical tests and mental ones. NASA recruiters needed to
know if these potential astronauts would respet bond badly to stress.
In January of nineteen seventy eight, Judy got the news
she would be one of six women accepted into the program.
(10:13):
At the press conference, she stepped onto the stage and
smoothed her skirt. She had straightened her dark, curly hair
and wore a nervous smile on her face.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Judith Resnik Mission Specialist. Her residence is Redondo Beach, California.
Her present position is engineering staff Product development with the
Xerox Corporation el Segundab.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Judy moved to Houston with the rest of the thirty
five newly minted astronauts. She would train as a mission specialist.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The mission specialist does things associated with the experiments on
board or deploying the satellites while the pilots do most
of the flying of the orbiter.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
While she might not be flying the shuttle, the training
was still brutal and it would last for years. More
than any other of the six women, Judy was determined
to be seen as one of the boys, as she
once told her father quote that I don't want to
be a Jewish astronaut. I don't want to be a
(11:23):
Jewish woman astronaut. I just want to be an astronaut period.
I just want to go in space and do my job.
A few years into her training, Tom Broker asked her
what it was like to break into that old boys club.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
Once you got into the program.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
Wasn't there a little bit.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Of resentment or a little bit of male chauvinism that
was demonstrated to there's a very male kind of fighter
pilot world as you were in Rick.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
Not at all.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
As a matter of fact, I think everybody leaned over
backwards to make sure that we were treated as equal
right from the This, of.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Course, was not entirely true. Mike Mulane was also a
mission specialist in Judy's class of astronauts, and he remembers
the men ogling her, teasing her with dirty jokes. It
sounds like training with a bunch of teenagers. One time
the guys put a live grass snake in her back.
(12:22):
They waited in the other room to hear her open
her purse and scream, which she did. I would have,
but they respected her brilliance and reliability. Mulane has served
as an Air Force colonel before he joined NASA. He
was pretty tough. He had flown one hundred and thirty
four combat missions in Vietnam, and he remembers Judy this
(12:45):
way quote. I'd watched her fly formation from the backseat
of T thirty eight's and lead instrument approaches in bad
weather and do it as well as me. I'd washed
a repel off the side of the orbiter mock up
in our emergency training, parasl into the water in our
survival training, worked twenty feet underwater in a three hundred
(13:08):
pounds spacesuit in simulation. After simulation, she had instantly and
correctly reacted to countless emergencies. The other astronauts felt that
they could trust Judy with their lives. Plus she was
a really good time. Here's Rhea Sudden, who was one
(13:29):
of the first female astronauts.
Speaker 9 (13:32):
She was really, really bright, obviously very beautiful person, flirtatious, funny,
you know, she was just a live wire.
Speaker 10 (13:41):
You know.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
We would do the Happy Hours or we'd go on
these NASA trips, and Judy was just a star attraction.
She was just having a great time and was obviously
friends with everybody.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
NASA kept sending her out to do press, which Judy hated.
Journalists would ask her personal question questions they would never
ask a male astronaut like this Jim from Tom.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
Brookow are there discussions on Houston about what happens when
men and women go into space for the first time together?
Speaker 5 (14:13):
After all, if you're up there in some kind of
a prolonged.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Space mission and there may be even relationships that will
develop between men and women.
Speaker 8 (14:19):
Well, I think from our point of view, since we're
so used to working together professionally, that we look at
each other as professional colleagues on the ground, in orbit
and whatever, and we view it that way.
Speaker 11 (14:30):
Period.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
You think the time will come when there will be
a romance in the outer space.
Speaker 8 (14:33):
Then oh gee, I really couldn't tell.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You that, Tom, what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Understandably, Judy started to avoid the press. She sometimes would
hide from reporters, using her fellow astronauts as human shields.
And then at the start of nineteen eighty two, it
became clear that NASA was going to assign a woman.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
To Shadow crew.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Whoever it was would become the first American woman in space.
The female astronauts were more than ready. Judy had a
bright pink bumper sticker made that read a Woman's place.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Is in the cockpit.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
It looked like it was going to come down to
either her or Sally Ride. Ride was a brilliant physicist
and PhD who had married a fellow astronaut. Sally was
comfortable with the press, calm and well spoken on TV.
And then there was Judy, equally brilliant but single, who
(15:42):
cursed like a sailor, went out dancing in nightclubs, and
rolled her eyes whenever her gender became part of the conversation.
The decision, unfortunately, was probably pretty clear. In April of
nineteen eighty two, NASA announced that Sally Ride would be
the first American woman astronaut in space. It would be
(16:07):
two long years before Judy would have her first brush
with space. That day, when Discovery's engines shut down on
the launch pad and Judy realized she might be about
to die. In nineteen eighty four, Judy Resnek was finally
(16:42):
scheduled for admission to space. It would be Discovery's maiden voyage, although,
as Judy joked with the other five astronauts, who were
all men, quote, there are no maidens on this voyage. Judy,
as an expert engineer, specialized and the operation of the
mechanical arm, which was controlled from within the cockpit but
(17:05):
locate it outside the orbiter. It was used to lift
solar panels and position satellites. Here's Judy describing what the
team would be doing with the arm during a TV interview.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
The remote manipulator arm will be used to take large satellites,
for example, out of the cargo bay and put them
into orbit. The orbiter will act much like a bus,
and the satellite will be getting off at it's bus stop,
so to speak. We get to the right place and
the right time, and we'll pick it up with the
arm and we'll put it where we want to let
go and then back the orbiter away and leave it there.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Operating the arm took incredible skill. Here's Tom Brokaw again
talking about Judy on a news broadcast.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
Despite her protestations that she couldn't do things better than
some of the men, all and men told me that
when she operated that big arm at the back of
the payload, she had a great touch, that she had
real dexterity.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Discovery was set to launch in June. A few days
before liftoff, Judy and a friend discussed who would inherit
her things if the mission went wrong and she didn't return.
Her friend asked if she was ready for the risk,
and Judy replied, quote, oh yeah, I know what's involved,
(18:22):
but it was about to become very real for her.
The astronauts boarded the shuttle in the early morning of
June twenty fifth, but there was a problem with the
backup flight system computer. The lift off was scrubbed and
rescheduled for the following day, that was June twenty sixth.
(18:43):
Same drew an early morning wake up entried through the hatch,
the astronaut's ears popping as the cabin was depressurized. Judy's father, brother,
and mother were watching from the Lodge Control Center, located
three miles from the launch site, at a safe distance
from any potential explosion. Then came countdown fifteen, the propellant
(19:10):
flowed to the solid rocket boosters, that pair of giant
rockets connected to either side of the orbiter, which provided
eighty five percent of the Space Shuttle's thrust at liftoff,
and for the first two minutes of a cent we
have main engines start and then the terrifying silence. Everyone
(19:35):
on board the shuttle was worried that the solid rocket
boosters would ignite when they were still on the ground,
tearing the shuttle apart. And then they heard crackling over
the intercom. There's a small fire on the launch pad.
Here's Mike Mullane, who was on that flight with Judy.
Speaker 11 (19:57):
And I'll never forget thinking there's no such thing as
a small fire when you're sitting on four million pounds
of repellent. That was a uh real terror.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Hear the word fire.
Speaker 11 (20:08):
That's the scaredest I think I've probably ever been in
my life, sitting out there wondering what the heck's going
on with that fire on the launch bed.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
In the grandstands, spectators had seen a bright flash as
the engines ignited. Some were convinced that they had seen
an explosion. Judy's mother bent her head and rested it
in her hands. It looked like she was praying. Water
began to spray against the shuttle windows. The crew unstrapped
(20:38):
from their seats and debated opening the hatch to make
an emergency escape. They didn't know that the fire outside
the shuttle was hydrogen, and hydrogen fires are invisible. They
might have unknowingly exited the hatch directly into the flames.
Fortunately they decided to wait. It was more than forty
(21:03):
minutes before the astronauts finally got out, but they survived.
At the press conference afterwards, they did what they had
been trained to do.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
They lied, and.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
They said that they hadn't been afraid at all. Judy
said quote, I was disappointed, but I was relieved that
the safety systems do work. It was unfortunate that we
had to check them out, but it built confidence in
the whole system. In truth, the astronauts hadn't just been
terrified of the rockets blowing them apart or of the fire.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Lift off itself.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Was dangerous, and the shuttle wasn't designed with any way
for the crew to escape once it was airborne. Here's
Mike Mulane talking about the shuttle on a Performance Initiative podcast,
he makes it so clear why the Shuttle launch was
terrifying for everyone on board.
Speaker 10 (22:00):
We didn't have any way of bailing out of a shuttle.
Speaker 11 (22:03):
Of course, you're not gonna be able to bail out
of it.
Speaker 10 (22:04):
Into space or anything, but in the atmosphere, if you
had an escape system, you know, some type of injection
seats or pods or something, you might be able to survive.
But Shuttle didn't have any of that. So fear is
very very high on Shuttle launch.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
No way to escape. Just let that sink in.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Maybe Judy had intellectually known the risk of what she
was doing, but now I'm sure she really felt it.
And yet on August thirtieth, nineteen eighty four, when NASA
made his fourth attempt to launch Discovery, she was there.
And this time lift off went exactly as planned.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Three two one, Yeah, that's our reignition, and we had
lift off, lift off and lifting one d the first
flight and labit of Discovery, and the cut on her
clear the power.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Judy Resnek became the second American woman in space. She
released satellites into orbit and conducted experiments on a giant
folding solar panel.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
This is the largest structure ever deployed in space. All
in all, it was a good flight test for large
space structures with potential future use in either space based
construction or in space station operations.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Zero gravity turned Judy's curly hair into a cloud. She
had on gold rimmed aviator sunglasses and those short shorts
everyone wore in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
She looked well glamorous.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Back on Earth, people weren't happy about that, but Judy
was just being herself as usual. While Discovery was circling
our planet at five miles per second, the crew filmed
themselves eating and sleeping, even on a treadmill.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Exercise was part of our daily routine on orbit, just
like it is back here on Earth. Getting set up
on the treadmill takes a little bit longer on orbit,
but it feels just as good to quit.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But there was one episode that did it make the
highlight real. The crew had been sent up with an
Imax camera. While it was filming, the camera caught a
lock of Judy's hair and sucked it into the mechanics.
Judy was upset, but not because the other astronauts had
to cut off a chunk of her hair to set
(24:34):
her free.
Speaker 11 (24:35):
Let me tell you, the press had the women under
a microscope and we're looking for the slightest indication that
a woman was different than a man. And as a result,
the women were paranoid about displaying anything, anything that would
remotely be construed as, oh, you're different than a man.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Mike Mulane remembers that, and when Judy's hair jammed up
the camera, the commander, Hank Hartsfield said he would call
down to mission control and tell them they were going
to have problems filming for the day.
Speaker 11 (25:11):
And Judy, you know, looked at him and I don't
remember her exact words, but basically it was, you know,
I'm going to cut your heart out if you so
much as say a word over the air about my
hair getting caught in this thing. To us, it was baffling,
like why it's the big deal, But it quickly became
apparent to us what her concern was is that if
that was labbed to the whole world, it would be
(25:32):
the thing. It wouldn't matter how well Judy did on
the mission, all the things she did, she would be
remembered as the woman who had her hair that jeopardized
the IMAXI and that you know, women are different than
me and their hair as long, you know, that type
of thing. That's what the press would pick up on.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
She knew it.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
They fixed the camera and after six days they returned home.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Judy was thrilled.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Surely now she would be seen as an astronaut woman astronaut,
but very soon the whole world would know her name for.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
A different reason.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
In nineteen eighty five, Judy got the news that she
had been hoping for. She was scheduled for a second
mission to space. It wasn't just because she had shown
again and again how brilliant and professional she was. It
was also because, to boost's public excitement, NASA had decided
to invite a civilian to join the mission. Her name
(26:49):
was Krista mcculoff, a teacher from New Hampshire, and they
wanted a seasoned female astronaut to be on the flight
with her. They would be on the space show called Challenger. Judy,
like most of the astronauts in the Shuttle program, was
initially skeptical about sending a civilian into orbit, but she
(27:12):
soon realized how.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Alone and overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Mcculloff felt, so she set up a series of coffee
dates and taught mccauliff about celestial mechanics and how the
combustion of the shuttle's engines worked. She told her quote,
it's not as hard as they make it sound. Judy
was the only astronaut picked for the Challenger mission who
had experienced that brush with death on Discovery, and yet
(27:40):
she had total confidence in the shuttle and in the program.
Here's a clip of her from an interview around that time.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Are you a bit scared?
Speaker 9 (27:50):
No, I'm not scared.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Why not.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
We trained so heavily for all the contingencies, and we're
so familiar with the procedures that we can almost do
them in our sleep.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
But there were things that NASA and the engineers at
Morton Diacol, the company that made the solid rocket boosters,
didn't tell the astronauts. Think of the rockets kind of
like a giant stack of metal cans filled with highly
explosive propellant. Morton Diacol had designed thirteen foot rubber gaskets
(28:27):
called O rings to seal the joints of those cans
and keep the gas inside from leaking. If the O
rings didn't work, hot gas would escape through the casing.
Of the rocket, causing an explosion, burning through everything and
everyone inside the shuttle. After Judy's first flight on Discovery,
(28:52):
the engineers who inspected the rockets were alarmed to see
that the O rings had traces of such between them.
That meant that for a few moments at least, the
O rings had failed to seal, and as Shuttle missions
kept flying, it was clear that the issue with the
rocket booster joints was getting worse. There was one particular
(29:16):
cause for concern, cold weather, which could make the O
rings more brittle. A brittle O ring would be too
inflexible to create that all important seal that kept the
gas from leaking out. But of course, the shuttle launched
from southern Florida. Freezing temperatures weren't supposed to be part
(29:39):
of the deal at all. The engineers and Morton thiacol
knew that in order to really address the issue, they
would have to take the shuttles offline, but this felt impossible.
For one thing, there was pressure within NASA to prove
that the Shuttle really could operate almost like an airplane,
(30:02):
flying regular missions into space. The launch scheduled was already
plagued with delays and cost overruns. Add to that the
public excitement over the Teacher in Space program, which put
even more pressure on NASA to get the shuttle aloft. Judy,
(30:23):
like all the astronauts, knew that NASA would do whatever
it took to make Challenger launch on time. She even
joked with Tom Brokaw about it.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
I had an enthusiastic letter from her saying that she
was hoping I could come down and watch this one
because she was sure was going to go off on schedule.
We used to have a running dialogue about whether NASA
could keep to his schedule or not.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
But Judy was wrong.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Liftoff was initially scheduled for January twenty second, nineteen eighty six.
That was postponed again, and then again. Finally, on January
twenty seventh, it looked like Challenger would launch. The crew
(31:08):
made it inside the shuttle strapped in, and then they
were delayed by an issue with the handle on the hatch.
By the time it was fixed, the winds had kicked
up and the launch was scrubbed for the day, which
brings us to Tuesday, January twenty eighth. The Challenger was
scheduled to launch at nine thirty eight am, but.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
The forecast looked bad.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
A record breaking coal snap by the night before, it
was clear to the engineers at Morton Thiocol that the
Shuttle should not fly. They presented their concerns to their
bosses and to NASA management.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
But NASA didn't.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Want another delay, not just because of the growing embarrassment,
but because it would put the rest of the year's
mission schedule off track, and the executives at Mortondiakhol were
just about to enter into negotiations to keep their lucrative
contract with NASA. The engineers insisted it wasn't safe. The
(32:16):
two sides argued deep into the night, and then the
engineers gave in. The launch would go ahead as planned.
None of the astronauts or the millions of people who
would be tuning in to watch the first teacher go
to space knew anything about any of it. A few
(32:39):
hours before liftoff, the temperatures bottomed out at twenty degrees fahrenheit.
Technicians use brooms to remove icicles, some of them two
feet long, from the shuttle and the launch pad. At
the crew quarters, the astronauts woke up before dawn. They
walked through press and cheering fans to the van that
(33:01):
would take them to the launch pad. Judy was smiling
in her blue jumpsuit, her hair blowing in the cold breeze,
and hand out wave into someone in the crowd.
Speaker 12 (33:13):
I'm here comes to fight through now and then their
gifts go and followed by specialists Ron McNair and the
pilot Mike Smith, followed by Christom mcslop feature in space,
Aunt Ellison on Azuka and Palo specialists Greg Jardist big
smiles today, considently getting into the van.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Once they reached challenger, Judy took her seat at the
flight engineer's position behind the commanders and pilot's seats. Before
she got strapped in, she turned to mccaulluffe and said, quote,
the next time I see you, we'll be in space.
At the grand stand, the crowd shivered in the icy air.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Judy's father was there.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
So were the families of all the astronauts. Krista mcculloff's
husband and kids, plus all of her son's third grade
classmates were there, cameras locked in on their hopeful faces.
The launch was delayed one hour, then another, and another
(34:23):
as they waited for the ice on the shuttle to
melt inside the crew cabin. The astronauts were convinced that
it would be canceled. Judy said, quote, I hope we
don't have to drive this down to the better end again.
But then at eleven twenty nine am, the countdown began.
Speaker 12 (34:46):
See minus fifteen seconds.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
The engines were ready to fire. The instrument panel and
the cockpit showed the final seconds of the countdown.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
The crew was ready eighty seven six.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
We have main engines start.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Millions of kids in classrooms across the country tuned in.
So did the engineers and Morton Thiokol, sitting in a
conference room, sharing the same sick feeling, holding hands.
Speaker 12 (35:21):
And lift off.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
Lift off of the twenty fifth Face Shuttle mission, and
it as cleared the tower.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
As the shuttle launched, sheets of ice more than three
feet wide fell off part of the launch pad. Even now,
the O rings were failing. Hot gas at more than
five thousand degrees fahrenheit leaked out of the side of
a solid rocket booster.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
A joint ruptured.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
The astronauts wouldn't have known any of this, not yet.
The shuttle shook and rattled as it went into the atmosphere.
It was hard for the astronauts to read their instruments.
As they approached the speed of sound, Judy shouted in excitement,
shit hot. At fifty eight seconds into the flight, a
(36:16):
bright orange flame flared at the bottom of the right
booster and then it grew. It crept around the fuel tank,
acting like a blow torch, cutting into.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
The tank and igniting it.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
But the instruments in the cockpit and at Michigan Control
still didn't show that anything was wrong.
Speaker 11 (36:38):
Downder go and throw ale up.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
At seventy two seconds, the fuel tank burst apart into
a giant fireball. You can probably picture it right, the
huge white cloud and then two streamers of smoke curling
away from one another, out and down a big y
(37:04):
and the clear blue sky. To the people in the
grandstand and watch it on TV, it wasn't clear what
they were seeing. Was this the thing that always happened?
Their cheers faltered and faded for a moment. Michigan Control
(37:25):
was silent, and then my.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
Obviously a major malfunction.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
But inside Michigan Control they knew how bad it was.
There was no more data from the flight communication with
the astronauts.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
The down link was gone.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
We have no down link.
Speaker 5 (37:56):
This is Mission Control, Houston.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
We have no additional word.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
At this time, the crew compartment had shot out of
the blaze of rocket fuel. Tumbling slowly, It was in
a free fall towards the Atlantic Ocean. It took two
minutes and forty five seconds for it to hit the water.
It is believed that the seven members of the crew
(38:22):
were alive the whole way down. Their oxygen would have
been disconnected when the shuttle blew apart. It's likely that
they were suffocating in their seats. After all, there was
no escape system, no ejection seats, no pods, nothing to
(38:46):
do but watch out the shuttles windows as the unforgivenly
hard surface of the ocean got closer and closer. When
we talk about heroism, particularly on this podcast, it's often
(39:10):
in terms of saving lives of remarkable one man stands
against terrible odds. But I think we can also agree
that there is this kind of heroism that has less
to do with saving others and more to do with
putting yourself at risk in the name of a greater good.
(39:34):
The astronauts of the Shuttle program and the ones who
came before and after were serious scientists, determined to learn
more about the cosmos. They were explorers at the outer
edge of what we know about our world. They weren't
going to space for fun, they were going there to
(39:55):
work for us. Judy Resnik was as clear eyed and
analytical as they come.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
She knew exactly what kind.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Of risks she was taking, but she felt the rewards
outweighed the peril.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
They all did.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Ronald Reagan put it this way at the Challenger Memorial Service.
Speaker 7 (40:21):
This America was built on heroism and noble sacrifice. It
was built by men and women like our seven Star voyagers,
who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than
was expected or required, and who gave it little thought
of worldly reward.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
They named a public elementary school after Judy in her hometown,
and every year the students sing a.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Song in her honor.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Call me a softy, but it really hits me in
the heart. I think that's heroism in a nutshell, knowing
(41:33):
the risk and pushing ahead anyways because you're serving something
greater than yourself. Full throttle up, all systems go.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Medal of Honor.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced
by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane. Our editor is Ben
Nadaph Hoffrey. Sound design and additional music by Jay Gorsky.
Our executive producer is Constanza Gayarto. Fact checking by Arthur Gomberts,
original music by Eric Phillips. Production support by Suzanne gabber
(42:13):
Special thanks to the NASA History Office Performance Initiative Podcast
and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library And don't forget.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
We want to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone
else's bravery. Just email us at Medal of Honor at
Pushkin dot fm. You might hear your stories on future
episodes of Metal of Honor, or see them on our
social channels at Pushkin Pods. I'm your host, JR. Martinez
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It was Tuesday, June twenty sixth, nineteen eighty four, on
a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Space shuttle
Discovery was preparing to take its first voyage into orbit.
There were six astronauts on board, harnessed into their seats,
lying on their backs, facing up towards the Cosmos. The
(00:35):
hatch to the crew compartment closed. The astronauts felt a
pop in their ears as the cabin pressurized, and then
they waited, nervous, their chit chat and jokes fading into silence.
Soon the only sound was the whoosh of the cabin fan.
(00:58):
At T two two minutes, the astronauts closed the visors
on their helmets.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Good luck, everybody.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Their mission commander said, this is it.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Do it like.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
We've trained eyes on the instruments. At T minus thirty
one seconds, Discoveries computers assumed control of the countdown.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
We have a very found one starts.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
The astronauts' hearts were racing. They focused their whole beings
on what was about to happen, on everything they had
trained for years to do.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
We have a main engine start.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
At T minus ten seconds, six high pressure turbo pumps
began to work, sending thousands of pounds of propellant to
the shuttle's three main engines. At T minus six seconds,
the cockpit started to shake and rattle by the first
(02:02):
engine headlet.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This was it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Liftoff was about to begin, and then suddenly the vibration stopped.
The cockpit was as silent and eerie as a tomb.
The crew knew instantly that something was very, very wrong.
(02:27):
They were only seconds away from lighting the solid rocket boosters,
two giant canisters of fuel that would propel the Shuttle
into orbit. If they ignited now while the shuttle was
still on the launch pad, they would generate more than
six million pounds of thrust. It would rip the shuttle apart.
(02:50):
Everyone on board would be dead instantly. The astronauts weren't
sure exactly what was happening, but they knew they were
sitting on a bomb that might be about to go off.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm JR.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
In this episode, you'll meet the recipient of a different
kind of medal, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. It
was authorized by Congress in nineteen sixty nine and since
then has only been awarded to thirty astronauts. It is
(03:34):
given to those men and women who distinguished themselves through
quote exceptionally meritorious efforts and contributions to the welfare of.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
The nation and mankind.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And just like the Medal of Honor, it has to
be approved by the President of the United States. The
Space Medal of Honor doesn't award heroism in battle. It
rewards the heroism you need if you're going to push
to the farthest edges of our frontier. That heroism tells
(04:07):
us every bit as much about the nature of courage
and sacrifice as the classic Medal of Honor does. This
story is about Judith Resnik, one of the astronauts aboard
the Space Shuttle Discovery on that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Summer morning in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Judy was a brilliant engineer who joined NASA along with
five other women in the late seventies and went through
years of grueling training to qualify to be on that shuttle.
She was the second American woman in space after Sally Ryde,
and she understood deep in her bones how risky her
(04:49):
assignment was, but she did it anyway.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
She persisted through.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
That danger, not because she wanted to be a woman
in space, some kind of token or ceiling breaker. She
did it because she had a job to do, a
job she was doing for her country, for all of us.
She would do that job until the morning she died
(05:17):
at the age of thirty six, free falling through the
clear blue winter sky. By the time Judy Resnik decided
(05:40):
to become an astronaut, she had been the only woman
in the room literally dozens of times. That's what you
got from being a female math genius an engineer in
the late nineteen sixties and seventies. She was born in Akron, Ohio,
in nineteen forty nine. Her parents were first generation Jewish Americas.
(06:01):
Judy was exceptional from the start. She trained to be
a concert pianist, and she was amazing at it. She
spoke French. She was the only girl in the math
club in high school. She graduated first in her class,
and she was accepted early to the famous Juilliard School
of Music. But then Judy scored an eight hundred on
(06:25):
the math portion of her college SATs, the only female
high school student in the country that year to achieve
a perfect score. So she switched gears and enrolled at
Carnegie Mellon University to study electrical engineering. There were barely
any other women in the department that she was getting
(06:45):
used to that. Judy graduated first in her class and
promptly started adding to her expertise designing radar control and
rocketree circuits at RCA, working in biomedical engineering at the
National Institutes of Health, getting her PhD in electrical engineering
with honors. But while success came easily, finding something to
(07:11):
spark her interest was harder. That all changed in nineteen
seventy seven when NASA finally opened its applications to women.
Judy was twenty seven. NASA's decision was a long time coming.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
It was American men who first walked in space and
then set the first human footprints on a planet other
than Earth, and subsequent flights have remained a sort of
free floating bachelor party.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
This is from a documentary made in nineteen eighty three.
I can't tell if it's meant to be funny or what.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
From nineteen sixty until nineteen seventy seven, for reasons that
will forever remain unclear, NASA was unable to find a
single qualified woman candidate.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Or, as one woman put it, they trained a Tim
pan Z to go to space before they trained a
single female astronaut. Anyways, in the late nineteen seventies, NASA
had developed this space shuttle. Unlike the old spacecraft, it
would be reusable, able to take several trips a year,
(08:27):
which meant NASA would need more astronauts, and so finally
women were allowed in the door. Judy wasn't really that
interested in space until she happened to see the NASA
recruitment noticed on some bulletin board.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
This is Judy.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
I decided to apply to be an astronaut when I
was a graduate student finishing up my research work. It
was not something that I had planned to do for
my whole life. It was a case of being in
the right place at the right time. NASA was advertising
for astronauts at the time that I was looking for
a job.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
If she made it sound easy, it wasn't. More than
eight thousand people applied to become astronauts that year. Of those,
a little over a thousand were women. Judy worked hard
to stand out from the crowd, reaching out to astronaut
John Glenn and Apollo eleven pilot Michael Collins to learn
(09:26):
more about the space program. She got a pilot's license,
and while she waited to hear from NASA, she moved
to California and took a job with Xerox. Soon enough,
she was one of two hundred finalists invited to the
Johnson Space Center in Houston. Of those two hundred, only
twenty one were women. Judy submitted to a week of interviews,
(09:52):
to physical tests and mental ones. NASA recruiters needed to
know if these potential astronauts would respet bond badly to stress.
In January of nineteen seventy eight, Judy got the news
she would be one of six women accepted into the program.
(10:13):
At the press conference, she stepped onto the stage and
smoothed her skirt. She had straightened her dark, curly hair
and wore a nervous smile on her face.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Judith Resnik Mission Specialist. Her residence is Redondo Beach, California.
Her present position is engineering staff Product development with the
Xerox Corporation el Segundab.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Judy moved to Houston with the rest of the thirty
five newly minted astronauts. She would train as a mission specialist.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The mission specialist does things associated with the experiments on
board or deploying the satellites while the pilots do most
of the flying of the orbiter.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
While she might not be flying the shuttle, the training
was still brutal and it would last for years. More
than any other of the six women, Judy was determined
to be seen as one of the boys, as she
once told her father quote that I don't want to
be a Jewish astronaut. I don't want to be a
(11:23):
Jewish woman astronaut. I just want to be an astronaut period.
I just want to go in space and do my job.
A few years into her training, Tom Broker asked her
what it was like to break into that old boys club.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
Once you got into the program.
Speaker 5 (11:45):
Wasn't there a little bit.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
Of resentment or a little bit of male chauvinism that
was demonstrated to there's a very male kind of fighter
pilot world as you were in Rick.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
Not at all.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
As a matter of fact, I think everybody leaned over
backwards to make sure that we were treated as equal
right from the This, of.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Course, was not entirely true. Mike Mulane was also a
mission specialist in Judy's class of astronauts, and he remembers
the men ogling her, teasing her with dirty jokes. It
sounds like training with a bunch of teenagers. One time
the guys put a live grass snake in her back.
(12:22):
They waited in the other room to hear her open
her purse and scream, which she did. I would have,
but they respected her brilliance and reliability. Mulane has served
as an Air Force colonel before he joined NASA. He
was pretty tough. He had flown one hundred and thirty
four combat missions in Vietnam, and he remembers Judy this
(12:45):
way quote. I'd watched her fly formation from the backseat
of T thirty eight's and lead instrument approaches in bad
weather and do it as well as me. I'd washed
a repel off the side of the orbiter mock up
in our emergency training, parasl into the water in our
survival training, worked twenty feet underwater in a three hundred
(13:08):
pounds spacesuit in simulation. After simulation, she had instantly and
correctly reacted to countless emergencies. The other astronauts felt that
they could trust Judy with their lives. Plus she was
a really good time. Here's Rhea Sudden, who was one
(13:29):
of the first female astronauts.
Speaker 9 (13:32):
She was really, really bright, obviously very beautiful person, flirtatious, funny,
you know, she was just a live wire.
Speaker 10 (13:41):
You know.
Speaker 9 (13:41):
We would do the Happy Hours or we'd go on
these NASA trips, and Judy was just a star attraction.
She was just having a great time and was obviously
friends with everybody.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
NASA kept sending her out to do press, which Judy hated.
Journalists would ask her personal question questions they would never
ask a male astronaut like this Jim from Tom.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
Brookow are there discussions on Houston about what happens when
men and women go into space for the first time together?
Speaker 5 (14:13):
After all, if you're up there in some kind of
a prolonged.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Space mission and there may be even relationships that will
develop between men and women.
Speaker 8 (14:19):
Well, I think from our point of view, since we're
so used to working together professionally, that we look at
each other as professional colleagues on the ground, in orbit
and whatever, and we view it that way.
Speaker 11 (14:30):
Period.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
You think the time will come when there will be
a romance in the outer space.
Speaker 8 (14:33):
Then oh gee, I really couldn't tell.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You that, Tom, what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Understandably, Judy started to avoid the press. She sometimes would
hide from reporters, using her fellow astronauts as human shields.
And then at the start of nineteen eighty two, it
became clear that NASA was going to assign a woman.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
To Shadow crew.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Whoever it was would become the first American woman in space.
The female astronauts were more than ready. Judy had a
bright pink bumper sticker made that read a Woman's place.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Is in the cockpit.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
It looked like it was going to come down to
either her or Sally Ride. Ride was a brilliant physicist
and PhD who had married a fellow astronaut. Sally was
comfortable with the press, calm and well spoken on TV.
And then there was Judy, equally brilliant but single, who
(15:42):
cursed like a sailor, went out dancing in nightclubs, and
rolled her eyes whenever her gender became part of the conversation.
The decision, unfortunately, was probably pretty clear. In April of
nineteen eighty two, NASA announced that Sally Ride would be
the first American woman astronaut in space. It would be
(16:07):
two long years before Judy would have her first brush
with space. That day, when Discovery's engines shut down on
the launch pad and Judy realized she might be about
to die. In nineteen eighty four, Judy Resnek was finally
(16:42):
scheduled for admission to space. It would be Discovery's maiden voyage, although,
as Judy joked with the other five astronauts, who were
all men, quote, there are no maidens on this voyage. Judy,
as an expert engineer, specialized and the operation of the
mechanical arm, which was controlled from within the cockpit but
(17:05):
locate it outside the orbiter. It was used to lift
solar panels and position satellites. Here's Judy describing what the
team would be doing with the arm during a TV interview.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
The remote manipulator arm will be used to take large satellites,
for example, out of the cargo bay and put them
into orbit. The orbiter will act much like a bus,
and the satellite will be getting off at it's bus stop,
so to speak. We get to the right place and
the right time, and we'll pick it up with the
arm and we'll put it where we want to let
go and then back the orbiter away and leave it there.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Operating the arm took incredible skill. Here's Tom Brokaw again
talking about Judy on a news broadcast.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
Despite her protestations that she couldn't do things better than
some of the men, all and men told me that
when she operated that big arm at the back of
the payload, she had a great touch, that she had
real dexterity.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Discovery was set to launch in June. A few days
before liftoff, Judy and a friend discussed who would inherit
her things if the mission went wrong and she didn't return.
Her friend asked if she was ready for the risk,
and Judy replied, quote, oh yeah, I know what's involved,
(18:22):
but it was about to become very real for her.
The astronauts boarded the shuttle in the early morning of
June twenty fifth, but there was a problem with the
backup flight system computer. The lift off was scrubbed and
rescheduled for the following day, that was June twenty sixth.
(18:43):
Same drew an early morning wake up entried through the hatch,
the astronaut's ears popping as the cabin was depressurized. Judy's father, brother,
and mother were watching from the Lodge Control Center, located
three miles from the launch site, at a safe distance
from any potential explosion. Then came countdown fifteen, the propellant
(19:10):
flowed to the solid rocket boosters, that pair of giant
rockets connected to either side of the orbiter, which provided
eighty five percent of the Space Shuttle's thrust at liftoff,
and for the first two minutes of a cent we
have main engines start and then the terrifying silence. Everyone
(19:35):
on board the shuttle was worried that the solid rocket
boosters would ignite when they were still on the ground,
tearing the shuttle apart. And then they heard crackling over
the intercom. There's a small fire on the launch pad.
Here's Mike Mullane, who was on that flight with Judy.
Speaker 11 (19:57):
And I'll never forget thinking there's no such thing as
a small fire when you're sitting on four million pounds
of repellent. That was a uh real terror.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Hear the word fire.
Speaker 11 (20:08):
That's the scaredest I think I've probably ever been in
my life, sitting out there wondering what the heck's going
on with that fire on the launch bed.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
In the grandstands, spectators had seen a bright flash as
the engines ignited. Some were convinced that they had seen
an explosion. Judy's mother bent her head and rested it
in her hands. It looked like she was praying. Water
began to spray against the shuttle windows. The crew unstrapped
(20:38):
from their seats and debated opening the hatch to make
an emergency escape. They didn't know that the fire outside
the shuttle was hydrogen, and hydrogen fires are invisible. They
might have unknowingly exited the hatch directly into the flames.
Fortunately they decided to wait. It was more than forty
(21:03):
minutes before the astronauts finally got out, but they survived.
At the press conference afterwards, they did what they had
been trained to do.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
They lied, and.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
They said that they hadn't been afraid at all. Judy
said quote, I was disappointed, but I was relieved that
the safety systems do work. It was unfortunate that we
had to check them out, but it built confidence in
the whole system. In truth, the astronauts hadn't just been
terrified of the rockets blowing them apart or of the fire.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Lift off itself.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Was dangerous, and the shuttle wasn't designed with any way
for the crew to escape once it was airborne. Here's
Mike Mulane talking about the shuttle on a Performance Initiative podcast,
he makes it so clear why the Shuttle launch was
terrifying for everyone on board.
Speaker 10 (22:00):
We didn't have any way of bailing out of a shuttle.
Speaker 11 (22:03):
Of course, you're not gonna be able to bail out
of it.
Speaker 10 (22:04):
Into space or anything, but in the atmosphere, if you
had an escape system, you know, some type of injection
seats or pods or something, you might be able to survive.
But Shuttle didn't have any of that. So fear is
very very high on Shuttle launch.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
No way to escape. Just let that sink in.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Maybe Judy had intellectually known the risk of what she
was doing, but now I'm sure she really felt it.
And yet on August thirtieth, nineteen eighty four, when NASA
made his fourth attempt to launch Discovery, she was there.
And this time lift off went exactly as planned.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Three two one, Yeah, that's our reignition, and we had
lift off, lift off and lifting one d the first
flight and labit of Discovery, and the cut on her
clear the power.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Judy Resnek became the second American woman in space. She
released satellites into orbit and conducted experiments on a giant
folding solar panel.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
This is the largest structure ever deployed in space. All
in all, it was a good flight test for large
space structures with potential future use in either space based
construction or in space station operations.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Zero gravity turned Judy's curly hair into a cloud. She
had on gold rimmed aviator sunglasses and those short shorts
everyone wore in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
She looked well glamorous.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Back on Earth, people weren't happy about that, but Judy
was just being herself as usual. While Discovery was circling
our planet at five miles per second, the crew filmed
themselves eating and sleeping, even on a treadmill.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Exercise was part of our daily routine on orbit, just
like it is back here on Earth. Getting set up
on the treadmill takes a little bit longer on orbit,
but it feels just as good to quit.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
But there was one episode that did it make the
highlight real. The crew had been sent up with an
Imax camera. While it was filming, the camera caught a
lock of Judy's hair and sucked it into the mechanics.
Judy was upset, but not because the other astronauts had
to cut off a chunk of her hair to set
(24:34):
her free.
Speaker 11 (24:35):
Let me tell you, the press had the women under
a microscope and we're looking for the slightest indication that
a woman was different than a man. And as a result,
the women were paranoid about displaying anything, anything that would
remotely be construed as, oh, you're different than a man.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Mike Mulane remembers that, and when Judy's hair jammed up
the camera, the commander, Hank Hartsfield said he would call
down to mission control and tell them they were going
to have problems filming for the day.
Speaker 11 (25:11):
And Judy, you know, looked at him and I don't
remember her exact words, but basically it was, you know,
I'm going to cut your heart out if you so
much as say a word over the air about my
hair getting caught in this thing. To us, it was baffling,
like why it's the big deal, But it quickly became
apparent to us what her concern was is that if
that was labbed to the whole world, it would be
(25:32):
the thing. It wouldn't matter how well Judy did on
the mission, all the things she did, she would be
remembered as the woman who had her hair that jeopardized
the IMAXI and that you know, women are different than
me and their hair as long, you know, that type
of thing. That's what the press would pick up on.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
She knew it.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
They fixed the camera and after six days they returned home.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Judy was thrilled.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Surely now she would be seen as an astronaut woman astronaut,
but very soon the whole world would know her name for.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
A different reason.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
In nineteen eighty five, Judy got the news that she
had been hoping for. She was scheduled for a second
mission to space. It wasn't just because she had shown
again and again how brilliant and professional she was. It
was also because, to boost's public excitement, NASA had decided
to invite a civilian to join the mission. Her name
(26:49):
was Krista mcculoff, a teacher from New Hampshire, and they
wanted a seasoned female astronaut to be on the flight
with her. They would be on the space show called Challenger. Judy,
like most of the astronauts in the Shuttle program, was
initially skeptical about sending a civilian into orbit, but she
(27:12):
soon realized how.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Alone and overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Mcculloff felt, so she set up a series of coffee
dates and taught mccauliff about celestial mechanics and how the
combustion of the shuttle's engines worked. She told her quote,
it's not as hard as they make it sound. Judy
was the only astronaut picked for the Challenger mission who
had experienced that brush with death on Discovery, and yet
(27:40):
she had total confidence in the shuttle and in the program.
Here's a clip of her from an interview around that time.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Are you a bit scared?
Speaker 9 (27:50):
No, I'm not scared.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Why not.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
We trained so heavily for all the contingencies, and we're
so familiar with the procedures that we can almost do
them in our sleep.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
But there were things that NASA and the engineers at
Morton Diacol, the company that made the solid rocket boosters,
didn't tell the astronauts. Think of the rockets kind of
like a giant stack of metal cans filled with highly
explosive propellant. Morton Diacol had designed thirteen foot rubber gaskets
(28:27):
called O rings to seal the joints of those cans
and keep the gas inside from leaking. If the O
rings didn't work, hot gas would escape through the casing.
Of the rocket, causing an explosion, burning through everything and
everyone inside the shuttle. After Judy's first flight on Discovery,
(28:52):
the engineers who inspected the rockets were alarmed to see
that the O rings had traces of such between them.
That meant that for a few moments at least, the
O rings had failed to seal, and as Shuttle missions
kept flying, it was clear that the issue with the
rocket booster joints was getting worse. There was one particular
(29:16):
cause for concern, cold weather, which could make the O
rings more brittle. A brittle O ring would be too
inflexible to create that all important seal that kept the
gas from leaking out. But of course, the shuttle launched
from southern Florida. Freezing temperatures weren't supposed to be part
(29:39):
of the deal at all. The engineers and Morton thiacol
knew that in order to really address the issue, they
would have to take the shuttles offline, but this felt impossible.
For one thing, there was pressure within NASA to prove
that the Shuttle really could operate almost like an airplane,
(30:02):
flying regular missions into space. The launch scheduled was already
plagued with delays and cost overruns. Add to that the
public excitement over the Teacher in Space program, which put
even more pressure on NASA to get the shuttle aloft. Judy,
(30:23):
like all the astronauts, knew that NASA would do whatever
it took to make Challenger launch on time. She even
joked with Tom Brokaw about it.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
I had an enthusiastic letter from her saying that she
was hoping I could come down and watch this one
because she was sure was going to go off on schedule.
We used to have a running dialogue about whether NASA
could keep to his schedule or not.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
But Judy was wrong.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Liftoff was initially scheduled for January twenty second, nineteen eighty six.
That was postponed again, and then again. Finally, on January
twenty seventh, it looked like Challenger would launch. The crew
(31:08):
made it inside the shuttle strapped in, and then they
were delayed by an issue with the handle on the hatch.
By the time it was fixed, the winds had kicked
up and the launch was scrubbed for the day, which
brings us to Tuesday, January twenty eighth. The Challenger was
scheduled to launch at nine thirty eight am, but.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
The forecast looked bad.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
A record breaking coal snap by the night before, it
was clear to the engineers at Morton Thiocol that the
Shuttle should not fly. They presented their concerns to their
bosses and to NASA management.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
But NASA didn't.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Want another delay, not just because of the growing embarrassment,
but because it would put the rest of the year's
mission schedule off track, and the executives at Mortondiakhol were
just about to enter into negotiations to keep their lucrative
contract with NASA. The engineers insisted it wasn't safe. The
(32:16):
two sides argued deep into the night, and then the
engineers gave in. The launch would go ahead as planned.
None of the astronauts or the millions of people who
would be tuning in to watch the first teacher go
to space knew anything about any of it. A few
(32:39):
hours before liftoff, the temperatures bottomed out at twenty degrees fahrenheit.
Technicians use brooms to remove icicles, some of them two
feet long, from the shuttle and the launch pad. At
the crew quarters, the astronauts woke up before dawn. They
walked through press and cheering fans to the van that
(33:01):
would take them to the launch pad. Judy was smiling
in her blue jumpsuit, her hair blowing in the cold breeze,
and hand out wave into someone in the crowd.
Speaker 12 (33:13):
I'm here comes to fight through now and then their
gifts go and followed by specialists Ron McNair and the
pilot Mike Smith, followed by Christom mcslop feature in space,
Aunt Ellison on Azuka and Palo specialists Greg Jardist big
smiles today, considently getting into the van.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Once they reached challenger, Judy took her seat at the
flight engineer's position behind the commanders and pilot's seats. Before
she got strapped in, she turned to mccaulluffe and said, quote,
the next time I see you, we'll be in space.
At the grand stand, the crowd shivered in the icy air.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Judy's father was there.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
So were the families of all the astronauts. Krista mcculloff's
husband and kids, plus all of her son's third grade
classmates were there, cameras locked in on their hopeful faces.
The launch was delayed one hour, then another, and another
(34:23):
as they waited for the ice on the shuttle to
melt inside the crew cabin. The astronauts were convinced that
it would be canceled. Judy said, quote, I hope we
don't have to drive this down to the better end again.
But then at eleven twenty nine am, the countdown began.
Speaker 12 (34:46):
See minus fifteen seconds.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
The engines were ready to fire. The instrument panel and
the cockpit showed the final seconds of the countdown.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
The crew was ready eighty seven six.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
We have main engines start.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Millions of kids in classrooms across the country tuned in.
So did the engineers and Morton Thiokol, sitting in a
conference room, sharing the same sick feeling, holding hands.
Speaker 12 (35:21):
And lift off.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
Lift off of the twenty fifth Face Shuttle mission, and
it as cleared the tower.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
As the shuttle launched, sheets of ice more than three
feet wide fell off part of the launch pad. Even now,
the O rings were failing. Hot gas at more than
five thousand degrees fahrenheit leaked out of the side of
a solid rocket booster.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
A joint ruptured.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
The astronauts wouldn't have known any of this, not yet.
The shuttle shook and rattled as it went into the atmosphere.
It was hard for the astronauts to read their instruments.
As they approached the speed of sound, Judy shouted in excitement,
shit hot. At fifty eight seconds into the flight, a
(36:16):
bright orange flame flared at the bottom of the right
booster and then it grew. It crept around the fuel tank,
acting like a blow torch, cutting into.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
The tank and igniting it.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
But the instruments in the cockpit and at Michigan Control
still didn't show that anything was wrong.
Speaker 11 (36:38):
Downder go and throw ale up.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
At seventy two seconds, the fuel tank burst apart into
a giant fireball. You can probably picture it right, the
huge white cloud and then two streamers of smoke curling
away from one another, out and down a big y
(37:04):
and the clear blue sky. To the people in the
grandstand and watch it on TV, it wasn't clear what
they were seeing. Was this the thing that always happened?
Their cheers faltered and faded for a moment. Michigan Control
(37:25):
was silent, and then my.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
Controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
Obviously a major malfunction.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
But inside Michigan Control they knew how bad it was.
There was no more data from the flight communication with
the astronauts.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
The down link was gone.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
We have no down link.
Speaker 5 (37:56):
This is Mission Control, Houston.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
We have no additional word.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
At this time, the crew compartment had shot out of
the blaze of rocket fuel. Tumbling slowly, It was in
a free fall towards the Atlantic Ocean. It took two
minutes and forty five seconds for it to hit the water.
It is believed that the seven members of the crew
(38:22):
were alive the whole way down. Their oxygen would have
been disconnected when the shuttle blew apart. It's likely that
they were suffocating in their seats. After all, there was
no escape system, no ejection seats, no pods, nothing to
(38:46):
do but watch out the shuttles windows as the unforgivenly
hard surface of the ocean got closer and closer. When
we talk about heroism, particularly on this podcast, it's often
(39:10):
in terms of saving lives of remarkable one man stands
against terrible odds. But I think we can also agree
that there is this kind of heroism that has less
to do with saving others and more to do with
putting yourself at risk in the name of a greater good.
(39:34):
The astronauts of the Shuttle program and the ones who
came before and after were serious scientists, determined to learn
more about the cosmos. They were explorers at the outer
edge of what we know about our world. They weren't
going to space for fun, they were going there to
(39:55):
work for us. Judy Resnik was as clear eyed and
analytical as they come.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
She knew exactly what kind.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Of risks she was taking, but she felt the rewards
outweighed the peril.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
They all did.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Ronald Reagan put it this way at the Challenger Memorial Service.
Speaker 7 (40:21):
This America was built on heroism and noble sacrifice. It
was built by men and women like our seven Star voyagers,
who answered a call beyond duty, who gave more than
was expected or required, and who gave it little thought
of worldly reward.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
They named a public elementary school after Judy in her hometown,
and every year the students sing a.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Song in her honor.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Call me a softy, but it really hits me in
the heart. I think that's heroism in a nutshell, knowing
(41:33):
the risk and pushing ahead anyways because you're serving something
greater than yourself. Full throttle up, all systems go.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Medal of Honor.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced
by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane. Our editor is Ben
Nadaph Hoffrey. Sound design and additional music by Jay Gorsky.
Our executive producer is Constanza Gayarto. Fact checking by Arthur Gomberts,
original music by Eric Phillips. Production support by Suzanne gabber
(42:13):
Special thanks to the NASA History Office Performance Initiative Podcast
and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library And don't forget.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
We want to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone
else's bravery. Just email us at Medal of Honor at
Pushkin dot fm. You might hear your stories on future
episodes of Metal of Honor, or see them on our
social channels at Pushkin Pods. I'm your host, JR. Martinez
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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