The Surly Bonds of Earth: Challenger and Discovery
Humans in space. Most can name the first astronaut or the first man on the moon. How many of us remember the name of the ships that carried them to space? We remember Friendship-7 and “The Eagle has landed” on the moon. For me, eight other names were burned into my memory because of one of my photographs. The ship was Challenger and the names were Michael J. Smith, Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, and Christa McAuliffe.
I haven’t forgotten my 10-year-old self witnessing Neil Armstrong climbing down the ladder of the lunar lander designated Eagle and the most quoted statement ever made by an astronaut, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” By the time of the final moon mission in 1972. most of us were paying little or no attention to man’s efforts in space.
The end of the manned missions didn’t resonate in my 13-year-old brain. But Star Trek became a passion throughout my teen years. During my junior year in high school, NASA unveiled its first Space Shuttle, Enterprise, to the public on Sept. 17, 1976, igniting a new generation to see space flight as a goal in each of our lifetimes. I expected to fly in space “soon.”
STS-1 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981, the first orbital launch of the Space Shuttle program. It wasn’t the Enterprise, but the Columbia. Enterprise was just a shell, used to test earthbound, but never to enter space. During its 22 years of operation, Columbia was flown on 28 missions in the Space Shuttle program, spending over 300 days in space and completing over 4,000 orbits around Earth. At the end of its final flight in February 2003, Columbia disintegrated upon reentry, killing the seven-member crew of STS-107.
In the mid 80s, I was offered a photography position at the Tampa Tribune, just over a hundred miles from Kennedy Space Center. By the time I moved there at the end of 1985, four fully operational orbiters – Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis.
January 1986 was a pivotal month. Two shuttle launches were planned, the first on January 12 as Columbia returned to space for mission 61-C, delayed from December 1985, landing on January 18.
The second launch of the month was the one we were all waiting for — the first launch of a school teacher into space. This was the launch that meant we as civilians were finally getting our chance to see our world from beyond its bounds. Christa McAuliffe, a middle school teacher from New Hampshire, was designated a payload specialist, joining STS-51L crew as the first non-astronaut to fly.
Credentials were in demand for the launch and I did not receive one. Florida is flat and narrow, so I did what any enterprising photographer should do. I found a slight rise along US50, a straight east-west line from Tampa to Kennedy, where cars pulled off the road to watch the launches just over a hundred miles away. It’s exactly like they say, on a clear day, you can see forever, and on January 28, 1986, you could.
As I looked east, more cars pulled over to watch. This was the 80s, we were all standing by cars with windows down and radios blaring, listening as the voices of mission control and astronauts responded to routine questions and the countdown began.
The sound of the rocket engines came from our car radios as a white line rose from the tree line, climbing straight up in the sky against a bright blue horizon. Suddenly, a ball of smoke topped the straight line, and then two smoke trails shot out at angles from the top of the ball.
Then the most ominous words sounded from my radio, “There has been a major malfunction.”
A woman standing next to her car below me began to scream, “It blew up! It blew up!”
My knees shook as I realized what I had just photographed. I knew that what I had was unique. I wasn’t at the space center, so my images were from far away, but I also realized how many people in the state had just witnessed one of the worst tragedies of my life with that same view. And somehow, I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment to capture an image that would outlive me.
Quoting aviator and poet John Gillespie Magee, President Ronald Reagan said, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
The disaster stopped the shuttle program for over two years, and by the time they began once more, I was ready to leave Florida.
On my way out of the state, I was hired by United Press International (UPI) to photograph the March 13, 1989, launch of Discovery, her second flight since the return to service.
I was stunned at its size as I watched a beautiful sunset behind the orbiter on pad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center. It was one of those nights where you knew that the line “red sky at night sailors delight” stood true and the space shuttle would be launching the next morning.
On that morning, I had one of the best photography locations at the Cape, a fire tower, just 5 miles from the launchpad. Sitting on its pad, it nearly filled the frame of my 600 mm lens on a Nikon body. I was there with only one other person, a NASA security guard and it was his first time manning the position. He only had second hand information on what we would experience.
Standing on a wooden platform high above the scrubs and trees, we waited. As the countdown waned, nature was still in command, with birds everywhere. As the engines fired, the sound hit us what seemed an eternity from when I saw the first tendrils of fire appear below. The fire became a pillar as the 14th story tall structure of the shuttle attached to to its external fuel tank jumped into the sky.
And the ground shook. And it shook. I battled to track the shuttle as it climbed faster and faster. In the first few seconds, it clears the tower at 100 mph. In 45 seconds, it is transonic, in 2 minutes it has reached 3,000 mph, the boosters fall away, and it is gone from sight. Just like that.
On this day, Discovery’s mission STS-29 roared into space, carrying five names that are now a part of my history.
Commander Michael Coats was on his second flight, having served as pilot aboard the maiden flight of Discovery in 1984. His original second flight was cancelled after the Challenger disaster. He would command STS-39, featuring a seven-man crew aboard Discovery giving him a total of 463 hours in space. After retiring, he would become the head of Johnson Space Center.
Pilot John E. Blaha would go on to fly a total of five shuttle missions and have the state of Texas change their law to allow voting from space when he missed the 1996 Presidential election while serving on the MIR space station.
Mission Specialist Robert C. Springer was on his first mission and would fly one more time aboard Atlantis in 1990 before retiring.
Mission Specialist James Buchli was on his third mission, having flown aboard Discovery, on its first dedicated Department of Defense mission, and Challenger, both in 1985. His fourth and final mission put him back aboard Discovery for 1991’s STS-48 before retiring.
Mission Specialist James P. Bagian was on his first flight and still holds the distinction as the only person of Armenian descent to have been in space. He also is the first person to perform a magic trick in space. Before launch, he secured permission from the STS-40 Flight Director and Director of Flight Operations and link it real-time via television to Mission Control.
He enlisted Mission Control Capsule Communicator (CAPCOM), Marsha Ivins to purchase a standard deck of playing cards and keep them unopened on her desk. Bagian brought a second, identical deck with him aboard the shuttle. He chose one card from his onboard deck of cards and placed it facing the opposite direction before liftoff. During the mission, Mission Control Communicator Marsha Ivins, on live TV, opened the sealed deck, shuffled it, and randomly selected a card.
Bagian then revealed his deck, where one card was reversed. Pilot Sidney Gutierrez pulled out the reversed card—revealing it to be the exact same card Marsha had selected on Earth.
In 2025, I decided to pay my respects to these two events of my life by visiting the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, the final resting place of the Discovery, and on that same windy Friday in Washington, DC, a solemn sojourn to the Challenger Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac from our capital.
Discovery is the centerpiece within the confines of the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the museum at Dulles Airport. It seems smaller sitting like a plane rather than standing vertical. The remnants of its final flight still show on the streaked heat tiles, where fire left its marks on its way back into the atmosphere. Her 39th and final trip into space took place in 2011, on the 133rd Space Shuttle mission.
Discovery was NASA’s workhorse, spending more than a year in space over the course of its 39 missions since 1984, more than any other vehicle to launch and return from Earth orbit. It took to the air one last time atop NASA’s Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a modified Boeing 747, leaving the Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after dawn on April 17, 2012, for Washington, D.C.
Thousands of spectators witnessed a low flyover of some of the city’s landmarks before Discovery and its aircraft carrier landed in Virginia to become the first among NASA’s shuttle fleet to embark on its new mission as a museum exhibit.
“Discovery is still in working condition, because we don’t interfere with or disable such equipment, [though] we don’t have the means to power it up, turn on its systems, run its software, etc. It is idle and inert, but all the avionics and computers and environmental control, and other systems are on board and untouched,” said Valerie Neal, Discovery’s curator at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
“NASA did remove hazardous components before delivery and kept the [three] main engines for possible reuse, so the propulsion systems are basically gone, but otherwise Discovery is intact as last flown and will remain that way,” she explained.
Discovery on Pad 39 on March 12, 1989, STS-29 was the 28th Space Shuttle flight and the 8th by Discovery. After her 39th and final return from space, she became the centerpiece of the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. ©Mark D Phillips
After seeing Discovery, I was overwhelmed looking at the small memorial at Arlington for the Challenger astronauts. It was not easy to find, and the security guard I asked had no idea where it was. With the help of Maps, I found it atop the hill not far from the Robert E. Lee House. The simple, oversized headstone lists each of the seven astronauts on an attached brass plaque. I expected it to be larger, and I expected more content on it. I wanted more.
These seven astronauts were true heroes, willing to risk it all for an opportunity to go to space.
Now I want to make a trip back to the Kennedy Space Center for FOREVER REMEMBERED, a tribute to the Crews of Challenger and Columbia memorializing the 14 brave astronauts who perished during the loss of the orbiters. The seven astronauts aboard Columbia were Commander Rick Husband, Pilot William C. McCool; Mission Specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Michael Anderson. Mission Specialist and Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was the seventh member of the crew. We need to remember them all including the Apollo 1 crew of Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee who’s deaths almost ended our space program at its start. I wish I had found their memorial at Arlington.