The Horror Dawned Slowly

At 8:35 a.m., Christa McAuliffe crawled through the Challenger hatch, her foot disappearing last.

The other woman on board, Judith A. Resnik, 36, was one of the four astronauts on the flight crew who had already taken shuttle flights. She was an electrical and biomedical engineer. The other veterans included Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, 46, the spacecraft commander who had logged more than 6,500 hours in 45 types of aircraft; Air Force Lt. Col. Ellison S. Onizuka, 39, and Ronald E. McNair, 35, a physicist.

Rookie astronaut Michael J. Smith, 40, a Navy Commander, was the pilot. Engineer Gregory B. Jarvis, 41, of Hughes Aircraft Co., was a satellite specialist.

Jarvis had twice been bumped from shuttle missions.

Several hundred of Onizuka's relatives reportedly traveled from Hawaii to see the launch.

At 9:30 a.m. Mission Control expressed concern about "one- to two-foot-long" icicles, which could be seen hanging like long beards from the service structure around the spacecraft.

The astronauts were sealed in and the launchpad cleared of ground crew at about 11:10 a.m.

Four hours after the 11:38 launch, NASA officials gathered the news media in the same grandstand from which they had watched the tragedy and, red-eyed, made an official announcement that the seven crew members had been killed. NASA space flight director Jesse W. Moore, who made the final decision to "go," today expressed his sorrow.

As dusk fell, Vice President Bush, who last July announced McAuliffe's selection to fly on the shuttle, arrived at the space center to pay his respects to her family. He was accompanied by Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the first American to orbit the Earth, and Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), a veteran of a successful shuttle flight last year who knew the seven aboard.

"We hoped this day would never come," Glenn said. "But unfortunately it has."

Christa McAuliffe's parents had told reporters in recent days that they were "a little scared" for their daughter. But they added that they accepted their daughter's pride and excitement and her strong desire to go.

In the press room, during the days of delay, there had been the usual gallows humor, jokes about having to write stories about how dangerous the flight was -- "gang plank" stories about McAuliffe. The attitude was that this was merely hype. After all, no American had been killed in a spacecraft after leaving the launch pad.

McAuliffe had seen herself as a pioneer. It was her study of the 18th century women who crossed America in Conestoga wagons that inspired her to apply for the space trip, she said last July. She had seen the shuttle as her own frontier vehicle.

Explorers such as the astronauts have always been followed by other people, she said. "I look on myself as one of the first of the 'other people.' "