REMEMBERING CHALLENGER\How deaths altered lives of 5 workers.

Byline: Seth Borenstein Orlando Sentinel 

Icicles everywhere. An apple for the teacher. A wave goodbye. Sudden silence. A crew compartment squashed like a shattered eggshell.

Those are some of the memories of the people closest to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger. A decade ago today, Challenger exploded just 73 seconds into its flight. Dick Scobee, Greg Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Mike Smith and teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe perished.

Hours before launch, temperatures dropped to 27 degrees that Jan. 28 morning. Engineers knew that the cold crippled the ability of O-ring seals to contain hot gases in the shuttle's solid-rocket boosters.

Launch or delay? The arguments went back and forth. Finally, the fateful decision was reached to fly.

As the shuttle soared 46,000 feet off the ground, hot gas burned through the right booster and ignited the liquid hydrogen in the external fuel tank.

"Uh-oh," pilot Smith said, just moments before the shuttle became a fireball.

It was a defining moment of tragedy. A decade later, people still remember where they were when "it" happened. America saw the shuttle explode on television - not once, not twice, but over and over. Schoolchildren watched but didn't understand. People wept for seven total strangers.

For the people who knew the Challenger Seven, the tragedy hit harder. For those who last saw them, talked with them, life went on - but it was never the same again.

"A lot of people looked at themselves and said, 'Did I do something wrong?' " said Bill McGuire, who runs the employee assistance program at Kennedy Space Center. "I still think it's very much on people's minds here. It was 10 years ago, but sometimes it doesn't seem that long."

This is how Challenger changed five lives:

"Sometimes I dream of it still, just about it blowing up and what I could have done to prevent it," said Johnny Corlew, who was the safety official on the team that sealed the astronauts into Challenger. "Everybody tells me there was nothing I could have done about it."

But that doesn't stop the dreams.

Corlew brought an apple for teacher McAuliffe when he and other workers put the astronauts in the shuttle. But attempts to launch Challenger kept getting delayed. So the apple kept returning home.

Corlew and his crew still kick themselves for what happened Jan. 27.

That day, the device that closes off the crew hatch - called a milk stool - wouldn't come off. A nut broke. So workers sent down for a drill and when it arrived, the batteries were dead. By the time everything was fixed, the winds were too high to launch. Challenger was delayed to Jan. 28, when temperatures dropped further.

"I believe in my heart if we had went on the day we should have, and didn't have a problem with that milk stool, they'd be alive," said Corlew, who has retired to Tennessee.

On the 28th, Corlew once again gave McAuliffe her apple.

"She said, 'Save it. Keep it for me when I get back.' "

Later, Corlew told the shuttle commander, "Scobee, it's awful cold to be flying this morning. He said, 'No, this is great weather for flying. Cold weather is good flying weather.' "

It wasn't. After the explosion, a shaken Corlew jumped in his motor home, drove away and went fishing for two weeks.

"I tried to get rid of it," he said. "There's nothing, I don't think, you could ever do to really get rid of it."

Many people blame Larry Mulloy for the accident. He doesn't blame himself.

"I never felt guilty. I felt regret. Gee, I wish I could go back and make this not happen," he said. "I never felt I did something wrong. I made the same decision I made correctly 24 times."

Mulloy, manager of solid-rocket boosters at NASA's Marshall Space Center, pushed to launch Challenger despite the objections of engineers who worried that the O rings would fail in the cold weather.

In a meeting 14 hours before launch, engineers for rocket-booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol tried to convince Mulloy that it was too cold for launch.

"My God, Thiokol," Mulloy said at the time. "When do you want me to launch, next April?"

The Thiokol engineers regrouped and backed the launch decision.

For days, Mulloy had nightmares and cried "out of regret," he said. But when the cause of the accident was initially determined, he said, he felt better. "I'm the one who made the call based on the advice of a whole lot of people," Mulloy said, adding he was not alone in backing the launch.

Mulloy said the real fault rests with NASA management, which knew of the risks and history of the O rings.

"It was an accident waiting to happen," said Mulloy, who has since retired from NASA. "It was thoroughly recognized as a hazardous condition. It was treated as a hazardous condition. It got a lot of attention. Out of all that, a group-think came in. . . . We continued to accept the risk."

"The thing that I recollect the most was how unreal the situation was," Dick Covey recalls. "It was not something that anybody who was in the (Mission) Control center was willing to accept as having happened."

One moment he was talking with Challenger's crew. The next moment his console at the Johnson Space Center in Houston showed the shuttle breaking apart.

Covey, the capsule communicator, was Challenger's link to Earth after the launch. Just before the explosion he radioed to the crew, "Challenger, go at throttle up."

Scobee responded.

"Roger, go at throttle up."

Seconds later, a flash erupted between Challenger and its liquid hydrogen tank. Then the fireball.

Back in Houston, Covey said he had this recurring feeling: "This is really not happening."

Since then, the words - his words - "Go at throttle up" stick with Covey every time another shuttle launches.

"I always think back: 'That's the point where the Challenger was lost,' " said Covey, who piloted the first shuttle after Challenger.

That flight in 1988 helped Covey recover, but not forget.

"You never forget," said Covey, now retired and working for a space contractor in Houston. "You can't say it's behind us now. It isn't yet. The legacy of Challenger is that spaceflight is not routine."

Roberta Wyrick remembers the silence most.

Silence coming back from Challenger. Silence in the launch control room.

All morning before launch, Wyrick, an orbiter test conductor for Lockheed, had been the radio contact with the crew. After launch, her job was to get the launch pad ready to be cleaned.

She was looking at her console when Challenger exploded.

"I didn't see it, and I still don't want to see it," she said.

"When it happened, one of the guys that was one of my backups said 'Look' and I turned around and I just saw the trails (of smoke), but I didn't see anything else," she said. "I turned right back around."

Then for four hours, everyone was locked in the control room, gathering records and making sure everything else was safe. It was an eerie time. That was the second silence that she remembers: the silence in the launch room.

"It was a very, very subdued environment," she said. "Usually there's a lot of talking and everybody's happy, the clapping and the speeches. That was the very strangest day I've spent out here."

Since that day, Wyrick has tried to avoid dwelling on the tragedy.

"It's almost like I close it away in a small part of my mind," she said.

For days, weeks, months and even a year, video and photographs of Challenger exploding were everywhere. But Wyrick did everything she could to not see the full picture of what she saw out of the corner of her eye.

"They still have things on the news occasionally where they show something," Wyrick said. "And I just turn it off. I can't watch it."

For two years, Wyrick buried herself in her job. One of her duties was to review the paperwork documenting work done to Challenger at Kennedy Space Center. Then she helped plan an emergency escape hatch for other shuttles.

And when shuttles started launching again and she had to talk with other crews before liftoff, Wyrick had to put aside her Challenger memories. But not her feelings.

"I still get those feelings every time we launch," she said. "I don't expect anything bad to happen, but I still get nervous. . . . And I still get the chills every time they say 'Go at throttle up.' "

Greg Katnik remembers chills - from the physical cold that morning. Challenger's launch pad looked like a scene from "Dr. Zhivago."

"It was like being in a winter wonderland," recalled Katnik. He was an engineer and photographer on NASA's ice team, which inspected the shuttle for a final time. "Icicles hanging from the railing, the pipes, the stairwells. There was glazed ice on the decks. It was really amazing to see, considering we were living in Florida. But we did not perceive a threat to the vehicle at that time."

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo (1) The space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Pad 39B at Cape Canaveral in Florida at 8:38 a.m. PST carrying a crew of seven. Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service (2) Seconds after liftoff the shuttle exploded killing all seven aboard and sending a nation into mourning. Associated Press (3) An investigation later attributed the accident to faulty O-ring seals. Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service