COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER : Challenger’s Last Flight : 6. CHALLENGER : ‘You Folks Build Some Good Rockets’

Challenger would be their ship. Named for a naval vessel that explored vast expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific a century ago, the orbiter had become a 3-year-old workhorse of the four-orbiter fleet. Nine times it had soared into orbit. Nine times it had glowed the bright glow of re-entry. Nine times it had touched down safely on Earth.

At 9:44 a.m. on Nov. 6, 1985, after 7 days and 44 minutes in space, Challenger dropped from the blue sky over Edwards Air Force Base, landed on the dry lake bed and rolled the length of 30 football fields before braking to a gentle stop. It would be its last homecoming.

Routine, the aerospace experts said.

The landing “looked just the same as when it took off, except that instead of being vertical it was horizontal,” said a NASA technician who would follow Challenger from Edwards to the next launch.

The spaceship was met by a fleet of trucks and crew, working quickly to cool it and purge it of potentially hazardous gases. Within an hour, the eight astronauts were out of the cockpit. Technicians removed the brakes, packed them in boxes and sent them to the manufacturer for inspection.

Four days later, Challenger was lifted in a giant sling, a modified Boeing 747 airliner was towed underneath and the two were bolted together. The 210,000-pound spacecraft rode piggyback as the jet hopped across the country back to Cape Canaveral, stopping for fuel three times along the way.

Awaiting Challenger at the Kennedy Space Center were the solid-fuel rocket boosters, the sleek white twins, and the large liquid-fuel tank.

Challenger, in a way, was the precocious child of the orbiting fleet. Only Columbia was older. But Columbia had originally been built for test flights. Challenger was born out of confidence, an “operational” orbiter is how the experts put it. Ejection seats, installed on Columbia’s early flights, were never installed on Challenger.

It was built at a Rockwell International plant in the Antelope Valley, 50 miles northeast across the mountains from Los Angeles. Once completed, it was ferried to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards and eventually on to Florida.

At first, all went smoothly. But days before the scheduled first launch, NASA inspectors discovered hydrogen leaking from an engine. A small crack seemed to be the problem. But when the engine was replaced, the new engine also leaked. The leaks turned out to be the result of a basic design defect. All three main engines were overhauled.

Challenger finally lifted off on April 4, 1983, two months late. Its occupants made up for its disappointing delay by performing a dramatic, four-hour space walk. Over the next three years, it chalked up a series of firsts: first woman in space, first night launch and landing, first untethered space walk.

While it was the most-used orbiter, Challenger also became something of a hard-luck ship. After the fuel-line leaks that delayed the first mission, the third mission, in August, 1983, came close to disaster when the lining of the exhaust nozzle on one of its two solid rocket boosters almost burned through. Then a malfunctioning coolant valve delayed its eighth mission, and after the launch two weeks later, one engine shut down and Challenger made it into orbit on its two remaining engines.

In the space shuttle program, the orbiter has always been the star. Its coat of 30,000 heat-resistant tiles was painstakingly checked after each flight. Engineers tested and retested its computers and instruments. After all, it carried the experiments, the satellites and the human beings.

The controlled fury of the rocket boosters and the explosive power lurking in that massive fuel tank underneath were givens. That supporting cast had been punching holes in the sky for spacecraft long before they carried men and women.

The rockets’ purity of purpose, the necessity of doing the job in a few minutes, made them easy to forget. Before the crowds at Cape Canaveral had left the parking lot, the two boosters were cold, empty shells bobbing in the blue Atlantic, and the great fuel tank had been burned to fragments by its fall through the atmosphere.

While those supporting characters were all but forgotten by sky watchers, they were foremost in the minds of the astronauts who had ridden their bucking force into orbit.

Astronaut Don Lind, a Challenger veteran, addressed himself to a sea of faces at a company “family day” in northern Utah one afternoon last summer. “You folks make it all happen. Without you we don’t go anyplace,” he said.

It happens there, at Morton Thiokol’s Wasatch Division on about 2,000 acres of ruggedly beautiful, arid land in northern Utah. The shuttle’s solid rocket boosters are created inside small, square buildings arranged in clusters and painted bright shades of blue, red and yellow.

The world’s largest solid rocket motor facility is isolated, even by Utah standards. To the west is desert, to the south the Great Salt Lake. Spectacular chocolate-colored mountains, dipped in white winter frosting, rise from the east. Signs on the road warn of crossing deer.

Brigham City, the closest town of any size, is 22 miles away, in the foothills of those mountains. It is a community of 16,000 whose fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again with its rocket-building neighbor. Rare are the vacant storefronts, liquidation sales and front-yard “for sale” signs so predominant throughout the energy-dependent mountain West. Instead, new stores are opening and Main Street seems healthy.

Thiokol employs more people than any other private company in Utah. In Brigham City, two out of every three people either work at Thiokol or are related to someone who does. About 7,000 people, from trash men to Ph.D. chemists, from apartment dwellers to owners of sprawling mountainside ranch homes, snap on Thiokol laminated ID tags every morning. More than a third of them work on the 70,000-piece boosters.

“I always figured we’d go up there, into space, someday,” said Kurt Nebeker, 28, who pours soupy propellant into the 12-foot-wide metal cylinders. “What I do helps. There’s a lot of pride here. You’ve got to have pride.”

It can be dangerous, working with thousands of pounds of propellant. Nebeker narrowly escaped injury two years ago when propellant caught fire and gutted the building where he had been working.

Some Thiokol workers have been drawn to the company by romantic notions about zooming rockets and sleek space machines. Like many of the executives, Gil Moore, the director of external relations, has an abiding, lifelong affection for space exploration.

Many in the space program know Moore as the trim man of about 60 with a black patch over his left eye who has delivered a loud yell as shuttles have climbed above the launch pad. He has been on hand for 21 shuttle launches.

“I get thrilled when those things go up. I admit it,” he said.

Moore and his wife make a hobby of spending several thousand dollars to purchase NASA “Getaway Specials,” which allow citizens to buy space aboard shuttle missions for their own experiments. Then the Moores give the opportunity to students they select from across the country.

To people living in northern Utah, whether they work at Thiokol or not, the space shuttle is something that is launched into space by their friends and neighbors.

Last May, 2,000 people turned out to watch Thiokol test a rocket motor made of lightweight graphite, which the company hopes will replace the metal now used. In those stationary tests, the rocket is placed horizontally, with its tip against a concrete slab, and the propellant is ignited. People who live in the region are accustomed to the results: a long, booming explosion. The ground shakes for miles around and chandeliers in Ogden, 40 miles away, have been seen to swing.

The company had no worry inviting the public to those tests. No shuttle rocket booster had ever failed, either on the launch pad in Florida or in stationary tests in Utah.

“There had been so many successful shots that it had become humdrum for us,” said Bruce Keyes, managing editor of the Box Elder News & Journal in Brigham City.

Confidence was echoed at the plant. Tom Rose, a 45-year-old systems analyst and father of 12, has seen every step of the rocket booster production process.

“I love my children, I love my sweetheart, and if (NASA) asked me to ride the shuttle tomorrow I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m ready.’ That’s how confident I am. I’d stake my life on any of the pieces we make here,” he said.

Visiting astronauts have been received like royalty at the plant, where workers never tire of hearing about those first two minutes of flight atop Thiokol’s powerful motors. “You folks build some good rockets here,” said John Young after he and Robert L. Crippen returned from that first shuttle mission.

“When those solid rocket motors go off, you know you’re going where they want to go and you hope you’re pointed in the right direction,” said Air Force Col. Karol Bobko, commander of two shuttle missions.

“It all happens very quickly. There’s a lot of power released, and I’m certainly glad that people like you take all the care and effort that you do in making sure that even though it’s a short ride, it’s an exciting one and of course that it’s a safe one as well.”

Thiokol has a NASA contract worth several hundred million dollars a year to produce boosters for 37 shuttle missions. Its work force grows and grows. Already, it is the company’s largest Utah payroll in 30 years. And it has the space shuttle to thank.

The boosters can be reused 20 times. After launches, they are retrieved from the sea and pulled back to shore. Then they are broken into pieces and put on rail cars bound for Utah. The casings are refurbished at a Thiokol plant near Clearfield, Utah, and are sent up the road to the main plant.

The production process at Thiokol begins with the arrival of the new or used metal casing, in four pieces of about equal length. The propellant is mixed, poured into shells around a center core and allowed to set. When it hardens, the core is removed and the propellant lines the inside of the casing. Then an igniter is installed.

After an inspection, the four sections are taken by truck, on a road specially reinforced to handle the weight, to a railroad track 19 miles away in Corinne, Utah.

A few hundred yards from the local farmers’ co-op elevator, the booster rocket pieces--weighing a total of more than 1 million pounds--are loaded onto flatbed railroad cars and the long trip east to Florida begins.

A thousand miles from Utah’s mountains and desert, the shuttle’s 154-foot-tall external fuel tank is assembled in a square building rising high above reclaimed swampland just east of New Orleans. The tank holds, in separate compartments, the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that feed the main engines on the shuttle orbiter.

The $20-million tank is made by Martin Marietta at NASA’s Michoud Flight Center. Most of the 4,700 employees at the center work on the tanks, which take about a year to build.

Last winter, external Tank No. 26 was loaded on a yellow wheeled platform, pulled by tractor to the waterfront and rolled onto a waiting barge. Towed 1,000 miles by tugs, the tank arrived at Cape Canaveral on March 5, where it sat in storage for 10 months until its turn arrived.

It was to be the tank for Challenger’s 10th launch.