313/11:38:46 CDR Sure. We’ve decided to name our spacecraft after famous exploration sailing ships of the past, uh, in line with what Natalie’s just said. And I’m particularly pleased with the name we’ve given to our Mission Module — that is, the place we’re living in during the voyage — because it was from the Mission Module that we conducted our study of Venus, as we flew past that planet. And we’ve decided to name it after the sailing ship which Captain James Cook commanded to Tahiti in 1769, to watch a transit of Venus across the sun: Endeavor. Ralph…

313/11:39:17 MMP Yeah. Then there’s our Apollo, which we’ll use to return to Earth. We’ve chosen the name Discovery. That’s actually for two ships: the one Henry Hudson captained in 1610, in his search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and another of the ships Cook captained, when he visited Hawaii, and Alaska, and western Canada. Back to Natalie.

313/11:40:00 MSP And now the MEM, the Excursion Module which will be the first ship to land humans on the surface of Mars. We’re going to call it after a famous U.S. Navy ship, which made a prolonged and very successful exploration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the 1870s.

313/11:40:19 CDR Yes.

313/11:40:21 MSP We’re naming our MEM Challenger.

Source: Extracted from NASA, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, “Ares Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, “January 1986, pp. 1367f. Ares Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

The conference room was almost full, but a chair had been reserved for Udet in the front row. He took his seat and crossed his legs with precise motions.

Gregory Dana was at the lectern, fumbling with his thick spectacles, preparing to speak. Udet had not been surprised when Dana had been selected to chair the investigating panel.

On a large screen behind Dana, an image was projected; it showed the Saturn VB stack a few minutes before launch from Pad 39B at Kennedy. The fat MS-IC first stage gleamed white in the sunlight, with its wide tail fins and the four slim Solid Rocket Boosters clustered around it. It looked like a broken-off piece of some elaborate Moorish temple. The second stage was a squat cylinder atop the MS-IC, bone white, with the silver-gray gumdrop shape of an unmanned boilerplate Apollo capsule at the top.

Umbilicals snaked into the stack from the big, complex launch tower, feeding liquid oxygen and propellant into both the liquid stages: hydrogen for the second stage, and RP-1 — kerosene — for the big first stage. Vapor wreathed the upper levels of the booster, dispersing slowly, and Udet could see the sparkle of ice against metal and insulation.

The sky behind the stack was a gray-blue, and heat haze shimmered about the tower.

Udet felt his heart move at the sight. He had never lost his boyish wonder at the sight of such magnificent devices — these heroic machines — wrought by human hands from the raw materials of the Earth, to be hurled toward the planets.

And, of course, that sense of awe was piqued on this occasion by his foreknowledge of the fate of Booster AS-5B04, just a few seconds later.

Udet glanced around. Joe Muldoon, up on the stage with Dana, was moderating the meeting, and much of NASA’s senior management appeared to be in attendance; there were staff from Marshall and Houston and NASA Headquarters, including aides of Tim Josephson, and a heavy representation from the contractors responsible for the system components under scrutiny today.

The presentation was to be a summary of NASA’s preliminary internal report into the problems encountered during the launch of Saturn VB stack AS-5B04, three months earlier. Depending on the reaction of this audience, and on the NASA hierarchy as a whole to the content of the report, a draft would be finalized and published within the week.

There was an air of tension, anxiety, weariness.

Coming so soon after the Apollo-N tragedy, nobody in the Agency wanted to face up to another disaster, the first loss of a Saturn. Udet had heard the muttering. Who the hell can we blame for this one?

Dana was speaking, in his thin, frail voice. Udet drew a little more upright in his chair.

“At 6.6 seconds before launch, the Saturn’s kerosene-fueled F-1A main engines were ignited in sequence and run up to full thrust, while the entire structure was still bolted to the launchpad. The thrust of the main engines pushed the Saturn assembly upward, against the restraint exerted by the pin-down bolts anchoring it to the pad. When the Solid Rocket Boosters’ restraining bolts were explosively released the stack’s ‘stretch’ was suddenly relieved…”

On the screen behind Dana, clouds of smoke and steam billowed up around the base of the Saturn stack. Then the four Solid Rocket Boosters ignited, and yellow-white fire plumed from their engine bells. The camera shuddered, as testimony to the acoustic energy spewed out by the stack — but the film was without sound, and the brilliant launch sequence worked through in eerie silence.

The image froze. Billows of smoke stopped their evolutions, and became mounds of gray and white, solid-looking, like dirty ice cream.

Around Udet, rows of lined faces were illuminated by frozen rocket light.

An arrow pointed to a blurred patch of white near the base of the MS-IC; it was just below the “A” of the red-stenciled “USA” on the wide hull of the booster.

Dana said, “At 0.687 seconds into the flight, photographic data shows a strong puff of vapor spurting from the lower casing of the MS-IC, just above the engine fairing.” Dana glanced over his shoulder, wrinkling his nose. “As you can see here. The two pad cameras that would have recorded the precise location of the puff were inoperative. Computer graphic analysis of film from other cameras indicated the initial vapor came from that level of the MS-IC where the feed from the oxidizer tank exits the propellant tank.”

The MS-IC contained two huge cryogenic tanks. The oxygen tank was uppermost, and the fuel lower. Fat suction lines carried liquid oxygen through the kerosene tank for combustion in the five huge F-1A engines at the base of the stack. Dana was implying that there had been some kind of problem with that feed.

The film started again, in extreme slow motion; the smoke evolved around the Saturn with glacial slowness. White arrows continued to prod at the offending vapor patches at the base of the MS-IC.

“Six more distinctive puffs of vapor were recorded between 0.836 and 2.501 seconds. The multiple puffs in this sequence occurred at about four times per second, approximating the frequency of the structural load dynamics and resultant stack flexing…”

The wretched “stretch”!

“You can also see shock diamonds in the F-1A exhaust, another symptom of the stack resonance. At 3.375 seconds the last vapor was visible below the Solid Rocket Boosters and became indiscernible as it mixed with rocket plumes and the surrounding atmosphere. Other vapors in this area were determined to be melting ice from the bottom of the MS-IC or steam from the rocket exhaust in the pad’s sound-suppression water trays…”

The film began to run at normal speed.

The Saturn tipped away from the launch tower, and rolled, as programmed, onto its back. Udet could see, between the four brilliant stars of the Solid Rocket Booster bells, the pale, almost invisible, smokeless fire of the kerosene-oxygen main engines.

Dana went on, “At this point the first indications were received, via telemetry, of a significant reduction in propellant flow to the MS-IC main engines.”

The image froze again. The audience stirred; the sudden cessation of the launch sequence’s hypnotic flow was jarring. An arrow pointed to the five main engine bells.