The Horror Dawned Slowly

The beanstalk of cloud, ending in a large blossom, hung in the air for hours, breaking lazily into smaller puffs. The debris from the explosion, which occurred 18 miles downrange from the space center, continued to fall into the ocean for nearly an hour, the loudspeaker voice explained later, and thwarted the search teams on helicopters, planes and ships that were converging on the spot.

The closed-circuit television monitors scattered everywhere in the press area, which had recorded the bustle of launch activity, the suiting up of the astronauts, one by one, now showed an empty picture of Atlantic horizon.

Some of the crustier observers here compared their feelings to the aftershock of combat, others to the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.

Some people sobbed. Most had red eyes.

"I was just standing, looking up, watching for the shuttle to come out of the cloud," said Brian Ballard, 16, editor of a student newspaper.

Christa McAuliffe, 37, a social studies teacher from his school, Concord High in Concord, N.H., was in the middeck section of the spacecraft, part of the seven-member crew. She had been officially designated by the White House as the "first private citizen in space." Officials had hoped her participation would rekindle interest in the space program among schoolchildren.

"My stomach turned over," Ballard said quietly a little while after the explosion, recalling the moment of realization. "I felt sick right that minute."

McAuliffe's parents and other relatives were standing in the VIP grandstand area surrounded by a white picket fence, a parking lot between them and the press stands. They were with the visiting third-grade class of about 20 children that had traveled here with McAuliffe's son, Scott, 9, last week. Scott, McAuliffe's daughter, Caroline, 6, and the teacher's husband, Steven, were watching from the roof of the nearby Launch Control Center, at the foot of the giant Vehicle Assembly Building. The grandstands are 3 1/2 miles from the launching pad -- as close as it is safe to get, officials here said, to the rockets' potentially explosive 3.8 million pounds of fuel at liftoff.

Bob Hohler, a reporter for the Concord Monitor, had followed McAuliffe for seven months, from the time she became a finalist in the competition for yesterday's brief ride.

At liftoff, he was watching McAuliffe's parents, Edward and Grace Corrigan, through a telephoto camera lens.

"They already had tears in their eyes, from the liftoff," he said. "As the truth of what had happened dawned on them, they kept looking up, the tears of delight still on their faces, their mouths half-open. I guess they were in shock."

Then a man standing nearby put his hand on Edward Corrigan's arm and led him and his wife away. Someone else was calling "Back to the buses, please get on the buses," to the other visitors.