Go at throttle up.

"Go at throttle up…" Listen for it, it’s the ship’s death sentence. It came after they made it through the most turbulent and risky part of the atmosphere. Every rocket has to slow down through a certain point in lift off– when accumulated speed is begging to go faster and faster, but the air is still too thick to handle it. Once safely beyond that point, command will give the order to open up the engines all the way, and really let ’em burn; but the act of "throttling up," for Challenger, was just a bit too much for the lurking hole in the O-ring to handle…

If you were around in ’86, you might recall the day that we all watched the Challenger space shuttle blow up– over, and over, and over again– on the news. I remember it quite vividly…sitting on my grandmother’s carpeted gray living room floor, watching the cycle repeat itself. Originally I was irritated that Fragle Rock was so rudely interrupted…but the recurring explosion had something of a hypnotic quality to it. I think that’s what I remember most; the strangeness of something being played over and over and over again like that, on all the channels. It had never happened before (and wouldn’t happen again until 9/11) Deep down, I knew it was a big deal…and that it was important, but aside from the fact that something obviously went wrong, I was a bit too young to comprehend what was going on. In fact, it’s only been within the last few weeks that I finally wrapped my head entirely around what was so terrible about that image– and I’ve seen plenty of documentaries on it since, some of them twice. Until recently though, I was never really able to feel what it was like for the crew of that shuttle. Now I think I have some idea.

The fact that the crew survived the explosion to experience a three minute free fall before being crushed by the force of hitting the ocean, I already knew. That one of the passengers was a female school teacher, and not an astronaut, I also knew. What I couldn’t comprehend was the obvious; the fact that these people, and anyone else who has taken a ride into space, didn’t just "fly there" in a rocket– even though that’s exactly what they did. More accurately, they perched themselves atop an enormous device, filled with enough explosives to rival the Hiroshima bomb should it combust; a device whose soul function was to harness this explosion in a controlled fashion, and use it torpedo the tiny crew through the atmosphere, and into the black airless void of space– a bit like a fire cracker launching a bottle cap, only in slow, controlled motion. Did you know that by the time those rockets reach their maximum velocity, towards the end of their journey into orbit, that they’re traveling at about 6 miles per second?

Maybe I’m just a bit slow upstairs, but I never really realized what it would feel like to know that you were sitting on top of such an enormous force– how uneasy, and unsettling it must be, just before launch. The way it must shudder and lurch as the engines kick on– and then fifteen minutes of solid praying as you continually accelerate, faster and faster, higher and higher– far far away from everything that you know and love. Please don’t blow up. Please just don’t blow up. I know you’re little more than a giant funneled bomb, but please, scientists, know what you’re doing and not blow up. Please– KABOOMMM!! And now everything is black and jostled and hissing and beeping and slowing down– rolling, falling….falling….

(that "shudder" at engine start, around the 8-seconds-to-lift-off point, creeps me out like nothing else)