COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER : Challenger’s Last Flight : 5. THE CREW : ‘Regular People . . . the Macho Wasn’t There’

Politics and personality made them different from the start.

In the official parlance of Houston’s Johnson Space Center they were Mission 51L. But to NASA’s Jerry Swain, a lead instructor who had trained seven other shuttle teams, this Challenger crew was a favorite. Perhaps it was because they were all so different, their seven divergent backgrounds and outlooks merging into a distinctive collective personality.

Swain had been scheduled to join another mission in January. But because he enjoyed the Challenger assignment so much, he asked to stay on until the mission was completed. One of the things he liked best was watching the homey way the seven went about making themselves a team: They had summer barbecues, went to local happy hours and watched football games together.

“None of them were like that ‘Right Stuff’ syndrome,” Swain said. “Of course, there were civilians on the flight, but even the others were more like regular people and didn’t look at themselves as prima donnas. This crew was different from the ones in the days when astronauts were all test pilots. The macho wasn’t there.

“They weren’t there to ride a rocket into orbit to see if it would fly; they were launching satellites, studying Halley’s comet. They were more like scientists and engineers who realized the importance of the other people involved in the mission . . . not seat-of-the-pants guys like in the movies.”

But different as the Challenger seven may have been, they constituted a sort of living history of America’s manned space effort. Two of them--mission commander Dick Scobee, 46, and pilot Michael Smith, 40--did bring to mind the original Mercury astronauts. Both were pilots first and last, men who had built their lives around the wonder and adventure of flight itself.

Three of the crew--mission specialists Judith Resnik, 36, Ronald McNair, 35, and Ellison Onizuka, 39--represented the second phase in NASA’s development. That was a period in which daredevil jet jockeys made room for scientists and engineers, and a crew-cut, white, all-male astronaut corps expanded to include women and ethnic minorities.

The other two--payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, 41, and social studies teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, 37--were emblems of new realities: the space program’s need to produce profits and advance science while building wider public support.

Scobee, McNair, Onizuka and Resnik were members of the so-called “Class of 1978,” a group whose selection changed the face of manned space flight.

Former astronaut Alan Bean, the fourth man to set foot on the moon, was then director of operations and training at the Johnson Space Center, and he worried about that class. Mainly, his anxiety focused on the six women and three blacks who were among the 35 new astronauts chosen from among 8,079 applicants. He wanted to make sure they received no special treatment--real or imagined--that might engender resentment among their colleagues.

Then there was the question of their training: 20 of the 35 were not even test pilots, as all American astronauts up to then had been. Instead, they were scientists and engineers, people with lists of degrees so long they made many of the veteran astronauts look like high school dropouts.

Whether they were pilots or not, Bean’s job was to prepare the 35 for the space shuttle missions set to begin in three years. He soon found, however, that he had little to worry about. The Class of ’78 was not just good; it was the best ever.

“They were very cocky because they knew they were needed,” said Bean, who now makes his living as an artist, painting pictures of space exploration. “There wasn’t the kind of competition that we had in the previous programs like Apollo, where there were just so many flights available. They all felt they would fly soon. They felt they would fly as much as they wanted to. And, they were real good.”

Mack Herring, a spokesman for NASA’s Space Technology Laboratories in Bay St. Louis, Miss., remembers being awed by his first encounter with the Class of ’78. “They were different, the first of the super-smart new generation.”

Intelligence was not the only thing that set the new astronauts apart, for their number included Sally Ride, a research assistant at Stanford University who would become the first American woman in space; and Guion Bluford, an Air Force major who became the first black astronaut. Among their classmates were three men and a woman who would go to their deaths aboard the Challenger.

One was Dick Scobee, a railroad engineer’s son who enlisted in the Air Force as a mechanic, then went to night school until he won his bachelor’s degree and a commission. Scobee became a test pilot, and by the time he joined the space program he had logged more than 6,500 hours in 45 different types of aircraft.

He liked to describe himself simply as “a flier.” Aviation was both his profession and his hobby, a passionate love affair born of a boyhood spent within earshot of the huge Washington state airfield where the Boeing Corp. tests its aircraft. “You know,” Scobee once said, “it’s a real crime to be paid for a job I have so much fun doing.”

But beneath the flyboy banter was a private intensity. Scobee once told friends he regretted sharing with others the memories of his first, and only other, space flight. “I wish I had locked them up and kept them for myself,” he said, “because each time I talked about them, it took some of the fun out of it.”

Ronald McNair was one of the three blacks in the class. His fascination with space began when, as a 7-year-old boy, he rushed outside to scan the night sky in an unsuccessful search for Sputnik.

It was one of the few failures in a lifetime of accomplishments that began with a triumph over his hometown’s bigotry. Rural Lake City, S.C.--where the future astronaut earned pocket money by picking cotton and tobacco--was so rigidly segregated that the precocious 9-year-old McNair was once denied the right to check a calculus book out of the public library because of his race.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology would later award him a doctorate in physics for his work in laser science. Along the way he found time to become an accomplished jazz saxophonist and a fifth-degree black belt in karate.

In 1984, shortly after his first trip into space, McNair sent a letter to the fifth-grade class at his old elementary school in Lake City. “It doesn’t matter where you come from, who your relatives are, how much money you have, or who you are,” he wrote, “whether or not you reach your goals in life depends entirely upon how well you prepare for them and how badly you want them.” The handwritten letter was signed, “Your friend, Ronald E. McNair, NASA Astronaut ‘Homeboy.’ ”

Ellison Onizuka, the first Japanese-American astronaut, also belonged to the Class of ’78. The grandson of immigrants, he grew up in the village of Kealakekua on Hawaii and once worked in the coffee fields on the Kona coast. He spoke fluent Japanese and retained something of that culture’s reticence and modesty. Matsue Onizuka, his mother, recalls that “Ellison always had it in his mind to become an astronaut, but was too embarrassed to tell anyone. When he was growing up, there were no Asian astronauts, no black astronauts, just white ones.”

At the University of Colorado, Onizuka studied aeronautical engineering and, like Scobee, eventually became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. His first spaceflight was aboard a shuttle leased to the Defense Department for a secret military mission he never was able to discuss. It was hard work, but Onizuka maintained an islander’s fondness for a good time. He was Challenger’s unofficial social director, chief kidder and cheerleader.

When Christa McAuliffe’s life insurance company canceled her policy after she was selected for the Challenger mission, Onizuka told her to forget it and pocket the premiums she would save. “We’re going to have a great flight,” he said.

Finally, there was Judith Resnik, a brilliant young electrical engineer who took a pay cut when she left her job as a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corp. in El Segundo to join the space program. She was a classical pianist and a gourmet cook who seldom answered questions about herself. She did, however, ask plenty of them about the spacecraft--so many, in fact, that the instructors assigned to her mission would roll their eyes as the training sessions dragged on.

Resnik once described herself as a person with “a short attention span” who liked the shuttle program because it gave her a chance “to work on something for a year or two, make a contribution, then go on to something else.”

Such self-deprecation may have been a private person’s mask for a restless drive toward perfection that began as a mathematics student so precise that Donald Nutter, her teacher at Akron’s Firestone High School, recalls that when her answers to test problems differed from his, he rechecked his own calculations. In the late 1970s, friends recall, she began to chafe against what she felt were restraints on her progress as a scientist and a woman. One of that period’s casualties was her eight-year marriage to college sweetheart Michael Oldak.

Once in Houston, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the shuttle program. Her father, Marvin Resnik, said: “If I wanted to get her, I’d call her at Johnson Space Center.”

The exhausting road that Scobee, McNair, Onizuka and Resnik took to their first shuttle assignments began with a year of rugged physical testing, including survival training, flying in T-38 trainer jets and making parachute jumps--”all of which,” said astronaut trainer Frank Hughes, “is foreign to most Ph.Ds.”

“The idea here is that you learn the space business,” he said. “They have to understand how we do business around here and what NASA is like.”

And NASA, for the astronauts, is constant repetition: going through a training regimen over and over until it is done perfectly. Don Peterson, a retired astronaut in the shuttle program, remembers the long hours of drills designed to teach the crew what each of the 1,300 switches on board does; they must also be taught to understand all of the orbiter’s 256 computers. There are endless sessions in the shuttle simulator, which costs $5,000 an hour to run.

Danger, Peterson said, was never discussed. “They didn’t sit around quantifying the risk,” he said. “They identified as many failure modes that they could think of. They identified those that can be handled. They also realized there were some failures which they can do nothing about.”

While working in the Johnson Space Center’s drab concrete-and-glass buildings with their government-issue furniture, the astronauts also help to plan modifications and changes in the shuttle. Peterson, who was a mission specialist on Challenger’s maiden voyage, said that 600 vehicle changes were made in the 17 months before that flight in April of 1983.

“It’s not like buying a Buick and putting it in the garage,” he said. “It was constantly changing.”

The four from the Class of ’78 were doing that kind of work when Mike Smith arrived in 1980. He was one of 19 new astronauts chosen from a field of 2,937 applicants. Like Scobee and Onizuka, he was a pilot; like McNair, a product of the rural Deep South. Smith was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who flew 225 combat missions in Vietnam, where he earned a chest full of decorations, including the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, 13 Strike Flight Air Medals and the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry with Silver Star.

Smith was very much the fighter pilot, a man who did the job and seldom talked about it. Navy Cmdr. Ken Carlton, who had known him since 1969, said Smith never even hinted that he might be interested in applying for the astronaut program. There was always that slight edge of competition and the unwritten code that openly pursuing a goal implied he was better than his fellow pilots.

Later, Smith would joke about the veteran astronauts’ clubbiness. “I can’t wait to see what lies these guys have been telling me all these years,” he said shortly before Challenger’s final launch. “I’m looking forward to getting the secret handshake once we get into orbit.”

On Jan. 29, 1985, NASA announced that Smith would join the four veterans from the Class of ’78 to fly the Challenger on Mission 51L.

As always, the five astronauts moved into a single office. Their 12-hour workdays became more specific and intense. Developing teamwork was not the only reason for the enforced togetherness: There was only one set of lengthy documents showing the changes being made for this mission. Each one had to be learned until it was second nature.

“The real problem is you have to learn this stuff and then relearn it,” said Peterson, the retired astronaut. “You have to drill so that if something goes wrong you don’t revert back to the previous procedure.”

With the addition of two other crew members, Mission 51L began to take shape. One was Gregory Jarvis, an even-tempered civilian engineer from Hermosa Beach who designed satellites for Hughes Aircraft Co. Jarvis, whose personal passions were squash, classical guitar and long cycling trips with his wife, Marcia, had been bumped from the two previous missions to make way for Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and then Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.).

He was, according to one NASA official, “on this flight for no specific reason. He’s flying because we have a commitment to Hughes.”

Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the high school teacher from Concord, N.H., was on Challenger for a reason. In August of 1984, President Reagan--in hot pursuit of the powerful education lobby’s support--had made a promise as part of his reelection campaign “to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program--one of America’s finest--a teacher.”

McAuliffe was chosen from among 11,400 applicants. She described herself as a “Kennedy-liberal, pro-union and a feminist.”

“My sympathies have always been for working-class people,” she said.

She was a woman who had used her personal and professional energy to suffuse a rather ordinary life with an extraordinary sense of adventure. “I touch the future,” she told an audience last August. “I teach.”

That sense of the significance buried within the routine of everyday life also colored her approach to her field: “I’ve always been concerned that ordinary people have not been given their place in history. I need to have that linkup with the students, because if the students don’t see themselves as part of history, they really don’t get involved.”

More recently, she sent a 14-year-old neighbor girl an autographed photo with this inscription: “To Jeanne, May your future be limited only by your dreams, Love Christa.”

Dreams were one thing, illusions another. McAuliffe was realistic about the civilian passengers’ role on the shuttle. “We’re not astronauts,” she said, “we’re space participants.”

From mid-summer until the launch, Scobee, McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Smith, Jarvis and McAuliffe were together almost every day.

Their schedules were rigorous, but the seven remained exuberant. Onizuka usually initiated the gatherings for drinks after work and often bet instructors a beer on the outcome of training exercises. He would impishly order an intentional malfunction in a simulated run-through, then watch as the crew scrambled to right the problem.

Scobee matched Onizuka’s high spirits with his own dry wit. He threatened to pan Onizuka’s work in a yearly review. And Onizuka would argue that he should take command of the ship every time Scobee flipped the wrong switch.

Despite the banter, Scobee was very much in command. A minor controversy erupted when he forbade McNair to bring along the saxophone he had carried into space on his first flight.

Scobee “was very much a leader, but he had enough confidence that he didn’t mind being challenged,” Swain said. “He would discuss any questions or disagreements a crew member had, but when it got counterproductive, that would be the end of it. It was very much his crew and his mission.”

Smith liked to exchange military history trivia with one of the instructors, and the calm restraint of his war years carried over into the shuttle training.

“I’ve never seen anyone who could handle pressure like him,” said Jim Arbet, a training instructor. “When most people begin to learn some of the most tricky duties, they get aggravated and impatient. But I never saw him the least bit disturbed. He had enormous self-control.”

During launch and landing, Resnik, who sat behind Scobee and Smith, was to function like the flight engineer on a commercial aircraft. She described her role as that of “a back-seat driver.”

Swain recalled that “Scobee, for example, would say: We’re supposed to flip the switch before we pull the circuit breaker. Then Resnik would say it was the other way around and that she had read it in her manual. Scobee would argue that he had read it in his manual. Then Mike (Smith) would kiddingly jump in and say his manual said something entirely different, and El (Onizuka) would joke that his manual was different from all of theirs. . . . Then everybody would crack up.”

The instructors recalled other things about the crew, how McNair had the mien and manner of the cool jazzman and how he played in a NASA group called the Contra Band. He did not join in much of the horseplay, but he had been the first man to play a saxophone in space.

Swain said that Jarvis “wanted to learn about all aspects of the mission and sat in on all aspects of the training, even if it did not involve his particular duties. He was extra eager and excited because he’d come so close to going up on other missions.”

And then there was McAuliffe, known as the “teachernaut” to the rest of the crew. She was awed at first--seldom asking questions--but began to open up as she became more comfortable in her role. She became a favorite of the instructors and the astronauts’ wives. She also became a favorite of Bob Mayfield, an aerospace education specialist who was assigned to help her with the two presentations she was to make in space.

In a broken voice, he talked of how they worked together to assemble the props for her two demonstrations, “Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going and Why” and “The Ultimate Field Trip,” a tour of the Challenger.

He said they had met once a week to discuss the projects, to get her ready for the biggest class of her life. He showed the model space station McAuliffe was to have used to explain the future and the Wright Brothers plane she would have used as an example from the past. A pulley was included in the props, to show the workings of a simple machine.

“She sat there many a time,” said Mayfield, pointing to the government-gray chair next to his cluttered desk.

The months of training proceeded, with long hours in the simulator made even longer by the delay of the shuttle Columbia’s mission. The seven repeated their drills over and over, but still there was the humor, the camaraderie of Mission 51L.

Through it all, the crew continued to improve, to react instinctively with the correct procedure in each problem presented them. In anticipation of a successful mission, Onizuka, ever the social chairman, reserved a Mexican restaurant for the return celebration with their families and friends.

Then came a final test. The crew was working on the simulator, practicing one of the trickiest maneuvers, a return to base after an emergency such as an engine malfunction. They had never completed the run flawlessly. On a day shortly after New Year’s, however, they did it perfectly.

A simulator instructor turned to Swain and said: “They’re ready to fly.”