9. On a Thursday
NINE
ON A THURSDAY
? SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA, UNITED STATES?
Helen Beckman died on a Thursday.
Which was just like her, to pick a day in the middle of the week that everyone usually looks over in anticipation of the day to come, not realizing how important Thursdays were to keep the whole world going.
? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES?
The years between Frank's death and Helen's diagnosis were, by most measures, the best years of Charlie Wickett's life.
Helen's original tests had come back normal. Charlie had checked in with her every day, just as she'd promised, until Helen finally told her all was well.
"I told you it was nothing to worry about, dear.
You worry too much for someone so young!
" Charlie covered the mouthpiece while holding the phone to her ear and looked at Katie.
She was sitting cross-legged on the apartment couch with a textbook in her lap, but her eyes were on Charlie, searching for answers.
Charlie gave her a thumbs-up, and Katie closed her eyes and exhaled.
Life kept moving.
Katie blazed through her undergrad at UCLA with the focus of a woman who had found her calling and refused to waste a single day of it.
She graduated early, a full semester ahead of schedule, and was accepted into the graduate anthropology program without hesitation.
She was even chosen by her program professor as the recipient of a full scholarship for her advanced degree work, once again ensuring that her education came to her without issue.
All her professors described her as extraordinary, which Charlie could have told them when Katie was ten years old.
But there were still moments in those years that Charlie remembered for the rest of her life, and not always for reasons she wanted to remember.
Three months after Katie started at UCLA, Charlie and a group of her graduate cohort gathered in the Beckman Auditorium lounge at Caltech. It was a Tuesday morning in January of 1986, and they were planning to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
The room was electric. Graduate students and faculty packed the space, some standing along the walls, others sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Someone had brought coffee and donuts. A professor had wheeled in the department's largest television.
This was the Caltech event, the launch of the twenty-fifth shuttle mission, carrying the first civilian into space.
Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from New Hampshire, was going to teach a lesson from orbit, and the whole country was watching.
Charlie sat near the front with her knees pulled up, her eyes fixed on the screen.
She could feel Frank's pin in her pocket.
She thought about him and what he would have given to see this.
A man who had spent his life maintaining the machines that carried people into the sky, watching a schoolteacher ride one into space. He would have been beside himself.
The group around her started to settle and the room got quiet.
The sounds of mission control transmitted over the television, each station marking "go" when they were called out.
The news anchors and commentators went silent as the directors in Houston instructed the rocket in Cape Canaveral. Finally, the mark came on the TV.
'We are go for launch. T-minus, ten, nine...' The room went silent, not a sound escaping from anyone. Hands stilled with donuts still enclosed in fingers, cups of coffee stayed straight as everyone's gaze focused in on the screen.
'Seven, six... We have main engine start...' Charlie could feel her heartbeat speeding up as the countdown ran down.
'Four, three...' Charlie was clutching her knees, afraid to blink, almost afraid to breathe.
The countdown reached zero.
'And we have liftoff! Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower!' On the screen, the cameras panned as the spectators cheered and applauded. The camera returned to the launch, and the group watched as the solid rocket boosters ignited, the shuttle climbing into space.
'Start your roll, Challenger. Good roll program confirmed … Challenger now heading downrange.'
People around Charlie started to applaud, some hugging and clapping others on the back.
Charlie knew some of the people in here were probably directly related to the success of the Challenger's launch.
Caltech was consistently involved in the development of the NASA space program, and she was glad to be in a room of people celebrating this achievement.
'Engines beginning throttling down now at 94%. Velocity, 2250 feet per second. Altitude, 4.3 nautical miles, downrange distance three nautical miles.Challenger, go with throttle up. Roger… go with throttle up.'
Then a sound echoed through the television. One that silenced the room around her once again. But this time, it was in fear.
Charlie watched as the camera on screen zoomed in on the plume trail behind the Challenger. And that's when she saw the plume split in two.
Charlie saw it while she heard Houston through the television, noting a major malfunction, trying to make sense of what just occurred. But Charlie knew. She knew it before the commentators said it, before the room around her even understood what they were seeing.
Charlie knew what it was before anyone spoke.
She saw the exhaust trail fork into two diverging paths and she recalled the way Frank had taught her to know what it meant when an engine sound changed pitch or a vibration shifted frequency, that something on the Challenger hadn't just malfunctioned, but had failed catastrophically.
You just needed to understand thrust, and what it looked like when thrust went wrong.
The room stayed silent. Someone behind her said "Oh my God." Someone else covered their mouth. On the screen, the commentators were still trying to process what the cameras were showing them. But Charlie knew those seven brave people were gone. The teacher from New Hampshire was gone.
Charlie's dream that Frank Beckman had given her of human beings riding engines beyond the sky had just shown her its cost.
She didn't leave the lounge for a long time.
She sat there after the others filtered out, after the television began replaying clips and commentary as no new information came in.
She sat with her hand in her pocket, holding Frank's pin, and she thought about O-rings and temperature and the engineering that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of event from happening.
In the weeks that followed, as the investigation unfolded, Charlie read every report she could find.
She followed the Rogers Commission and studied the technical analysis of the solid rocket booster failure.
It was the O-ring that had lost its elasticity in the cold, which meant the joint couldn't seal.
Seventy-three seconds between ignition and catastrophe.
Charlie understood the physics of what had failed. What she couldn't understand was why it had to happen.
For months, she carried the Challenger quietly, in pieces, turning each one over in her mind the way she'd turn a component she couldn't yet place.
She thought about what it meant to build something that people climbed inside of and trusted with their lives.
She thought about Frank, who hadn't just maintained engines, but maintained them so pilots stayed safe, so they could stop thinking about whether the machine would hold and start thinking about where it could take them. Trust as engineering; safety as craft.
Charlie thought about the seven people who had climbed inside that shuttle and trusted the people who built it. She thought about the engineer somewhere who had looked at that O-ring data and told the managers, who likely ignored it, and she wondered what it felt like to carry that.
Charlie spent her time thinking about the Challenger disaster in a slow assembly, pieces clicking into place over weeks and months until a shape became undeniable. Charlie realized she didn't want to just build engines anymore. She wanted to build engines that didn't fail.
She wanted to be the person who caught errors everyone else may have missed, the one who looked at a system and heard the wrongness before the instruments did.
But more than anything, she wanted to make sure that the people who rode machines into the sky did so in ones she'd built, and built safely.
Frank had given her the dream. But the Challenger had given her the mission.
In the summer of 1988, Charlie and Katie drove to Shelbyville.
It was Helen's idea. She'd been alone in the house for nearly three years, and the girls had been calling every week, sometimes twice, sometimes three times, and Helen had finally said, "If you two call me one more time this week, I'm going to start charging you for the conversation. " So they drove to Indiana instead.
They stayed for ten days, sleeping in their old spots with Charlie on the sofa and Katie in the guest room.
They cooked for Helen, badly, and Helen supervised from her chair at the yellow table with a bemused expression and a running commentary that made Katie laugh so hard she burned the pasta intended for Charlie's chicken piccata. Charlie never forgave her.
Two days before they were set to leave and return to California, they convinced Helen to come back with them. Helen resisted at first.
"I'm too old to be gallivanting across the country," Helen said from her seat at the table. Charlie was across from her, and Katie at the kitchen sink, finishing up with the dishes after Helen cooked for them (in which they were all grateful).
"You, old?" Katie said with a smirk. Helen threw her apron at her.