NASA photo
She's been gone now for as long as she was alive. Thirty-six years ago this month, 36-year-old Judith Resnik perished along with her six crewmates in the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Most people alive today are too young to remember the events of January 28, 1986, and they've probably never heard her name. But too few people knew Judith's name even then, and that's a shame, because Judith Resnik was an amazing human being. She deserves to be remembered, and if you don't know anything about her, please read her Wikipedia bio sometime. Or just read on.
I have to color my story about Judith with a couple of personal anecdotes, because I developed quite a crush on her early in my adult life, and I never really got over it. In 1982 I was a young aerospace engineer working for McDonnell (Please Don't Call Me Boeing) Douglas in St. Louis. In the factory next to my office building all kinds of interesting stuff was being built, and when I got bored I'd wander out to the factory floor to see what was going on.
The most interesting project of all was taking place in a clean room in a corner of the factory - Final assembly of the Space Shuttle Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) units. The OMS were blister pods at the rear of the shuttle that, as the name implies, allowed the shuttle to maneuver while in orbit. For entertainment I'd stare through the giant windows of the clean room, watching jump suit-clad workers crawl around the OMS pods. Astronauts came to the factory all the time, for tours and to train on some simulators. One lucky day I spotted a small group near the clean room, and among them was a very attractive young woman wearing a visitor badge. At the time no American female had ever flown into space, and it was unusual to even see a woman visitor in the factory. Naturally I wanted to know who she was. It was Judith of course, and she looked pretty much the same as she does in this picture:
Undated photo of Judith taken from a Facebook fan page.
"Who is she?" I asked anyone nearby. No one knew. I found out later that she was an astronaut when an article about her appeared in the McDonnell Douglas newsletter. (I've scoured the internets for an archive of those newsletters, but so far I've come up empty. It was 1982, after all.)
Her name was Judith Resnik, the article said, and she was in St. Louis to visit the OMS facilities. She had a PhD in electrical engineering. She was an accomplished musician. She was taking flying lessons. In her professional life she had been involved in a number of technically-challenging projects. And it was possible that she would become the first American woman to fly into space.
Wow. I was smitten. I felt so inadequate when I compared myself to her, but I couldn't help but do it. I had a degree in electrical engineering, but it wasn't a PhD. I banged on the piano and sawed on the violin once in a while, but I was nowhere near being "accomplished." I was already a licensed pilot at least, so I had a leg up on her on that, but it was a small consolation. I wasn't an astronaut.
I became my own Judith Resnik fan club. I didn't do anything silly like write letters to her, but I wish now that I had. I just admired her from a distance, and I hunted for news about her wherever I could find it in those pre-internet days. I kept waiting to find out when she would fly.
Judith made it into space at the end of August in 1984 - The second American woman to do so. The year before in June of 1983 Sally Ride, with whom Judith had trained, finally broke the NASA gender barrier. By the time of Judith's flight, Sally Ride had become a household name.
The first launch attempt of the shuttle Discovery with Judith and her crewmates almost ended in disaster. A launch abort was forced at T-6 seconds when one of Discovery's three main engines failed to ignite. A hydrogen fire ensued, and the crew had to be evacuated. The fire was invisible, and had the crew chosen a different escape path than the one that they did choose, they would have run through the flames. After a month-long delay Discovery successfully launched, and Judith spent six days in space. During the mission she operated the shuttle's Canadarm. She was an expert on the arm, having developed its NASA software and inflight operating procedures. She and her Discovery crewmates orbited the earth 97 times.
A very cool pic of Judith on orbit during STS-41-D, September 1984. Look at all that hair. (NASA photo).
One of those crewmates was a guy named Charles Walker, who also worked for McDonnell Douglas. Charles flew on three shuttle missions as a payload specialist, managing a pharmaceutical experiment that McDonnell Douglas was helping to develop. Our offices were in the same building, but I never met the man. If I had, I would have told him how jealous I was of him - Not just because he was flying on the shuttle, but because he got to fly on it with Judith.
I began to worry a lot about the shuttle in those days. Maybe it was because of Judith, and her close call with Discovery. Maybe it was simply because I was trained as an engineer and a pilot - To know that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, like Murphy taught us. The shuttle was a marvelous machine but it just seemed too complicated, and the chances for disaster seemed too great. I don't believe in premonitions, but I began to have recurring nightmares about a catastrophe. In my dreams the shuttle lifted off and then slowly crashed down backwards onto the launch pad, where it exploded into a giant ball of fire.
On January 28th 1986 I was in Crystal City, a god-awful antiseptic suburb of Washington DC, for some meetings at a US Navy office about a project that I was working on. As we broke for lunch I overheard somebody ask, "What? What happened?" Somebody else just quietly answered, "The Space Shuttle."
I went weak in the knees. I knew that a launch had been scheduled for that morning, and I knew that Judith was on that flight. A group of us found a restaurant with a giant screen TV, and we watched as that horrible video that we've all seen was shown over, and over. And over.
In the days that followed all that anybody wanted to talk about was Christa McAuliffe. The whole teacher-in-space story provided a human-interest angle that the popular press loved, and Christa became posthumously world-famous. Nothing against Christa, who was a fine and accomplished human being, as were all of her crewmates, but I found it a shame that Judith's story became lost in the shadows, much as it had when she was "merely" the second American woman to fly into space. Judith's resume and accomplishments were as impressive as that of any astronaut, cosmonaut, or taikonaut who ever flew, and I feel certain that every one of them would say the same thing.
After the Challenger disaster the pharmaceutical project that Charles Walker was working on was cancelled, and he never flew again. Signs were posted all over the McDonnell Douglas factory where the OMS was still being built. "NASA - Safety First." "If You See Something, Say Something." All of those standard hindsight bromides that people say after they realize how badly they've screwed up.
Of course we screwed up again anyway, and we lost another fine crew in the Columbia disaster of 2003. Maybe the shuttle was too complicated. But maybe none of it had to happen. Maybe just because a few people who had no business making decisions made some very bad decisions, a lot of amazing people like Judith Resnik died.
I'll end these paragraphs with a short video that I found on YouTube. It shows an interview that a young Tom Brokaw conducted with Judith in April of 1981, shortly before the first-ever launch of the first space-rated shuttle, Columbia. I cringed when I watched it, because the interview is peppered with sexist comments and questions that should make all of us cringe. I think that Tom would be embarrassed if he were to see this now, given the perspective of time. But if you watch the video, you'll note how Judith handles it all with grace and determination. She was an amazing human being, she was way ahead of her time, and she left us way too soon. Let's please remember her. Let's please try to use her story to inspire other young, talented people to do amazing things. Here's lookin' at you, Judith. May your soul rest in peace.
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