Shuttle tragedy Confusion, despair grief hits relatives

Press, 30 January 1986, Page 4

Shuttle tragedy

Confusion, despair grief hits relatives

NZPA-NYT Cape Canaveral Bundled against the cold Florida morning, Ed and Grace Corrigan watched with pride and nervous excitement as the space shuttle Challenger, carrying their daughter, Christa McAuliffe, and six other astronauts, thundered off the launching pad yesterday. Then, 74 seconds into the flight, their excitement turned to disbelief, then horror. There was a puff of smoke and a muffled clap, audible in a grandstand where the Corrigans and relatives of the other astronauts were sitting.

There was a moment when nobody was sure what had happened. People around them were still cheering, raising their thumbs in a signal of victory. Then Lisa Corrigan, Mrs McAuliffe’s sister, shouted and grabbed her father’s hand. Mrs Corrigan leaned her head on the shoulder of her husband, whose sweater bore a large button with his daughter’s picture.

“The craft has exploded,” an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told Mrs Corrigan. She turned and repeated the message to her ashen-faced husband, as more screams

and crying broke the stunned silence around them.

In a nearby building, Mrs McAuliffe’s husband, Steven, their nine-year-old son, Scott, and six-year-old daughter, Caroline, were also watching as the spacecraft exploded; showering debris into the ocean.

The families of the astronauts were among some 2500 guests invited by N.A.S.A. to watch the touching from an open-air grandstand about 6 km from the pad. After it became clear that the mission had ended in disaster, some relatives spoke about it.

In Beaufort, North Carolina, Patrick Smith, the younger brother of Michael Smith, the shuttle pilot, said: “I’ll tell you exactly how I feel. I don’t have any regrets about Mike doing this. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. There aren’t too many people who’ve done exactly what they wanted to do with their careers. But he’s done that.”

In Ilion, New York, John Ladd, the stepfather of Gregory Jarvis, the payload specialist, said: "It’s got everybody wondering just what the hell happened. We’re shocked.

terribly shocked. It’s a : disaster, a national disas- ' ter for everybody.” Mr Ladd, aged 65, said < he and Mr Jarvis’s •: mother, Mrs Lucille Jarvis Ladd, known as Tele, had ’■ returned home from Cape ’ Canaveral on Sunday be- ; cause she was suffering from a heart problem. “My wife was in front • of the T.V. watching when it blew,” he said. “There was no one here with her. She called my office, a “* woman who lives nearby - came over. My wife is in very, very bad shape.”

Mr Ladd told the “Albany KnickerbockerNews” that Mr Jarvis’s natural father, Mr Bruce Jarvis of Orlando, Florida, had suffered a heart attack while watching the shuttle explode at Cape Canaveral and had been taken to a nearby medical centre.

At the launching site was Dr Charles Resnik, who teaches at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. His sister, Dr Judith Resnik, a Challenger crew member, was to have taken a signet ring and heart locket into space for her five-year-old nephew, Randy, and two-year-old niece, Becky, said Ms Deltona O’Brien, a principal at Randy’s kindergarten.