Original subtitles

In 1969, a group of astronauts change the world.

They ride the biggest rocket ever built to the moon.

It's the culmination

of more than 10 years of space pioneering

and a foundation for more than four decades

of exploring worlds beyond our own.

This is the story of our greatest adventure.

The very first time

I saw the shuttle sitting on the back of that 747,

I thought, "We have screwed up bad.

This is never going to work."

NASA prepares to test a radical new kind of spaceship.

The first with wings.

Rockets will launch it into orbit,

but it lands like a plane.

First, they have to find out if it can fly.

We did something we called

an approach-and-landing test.

We modified a 747

so that it could carry the shuttle on top of it.

Gemini and Apollo veteran John Young

follows the new orbiter,

studying its every move.

I was a test pilot out there,

and I was flying the formation on the 747.

I'm the chase pilot.

Go ahead.

Okay, 30 seconds to the SRT minus-one call.

Go.

- Network. - Go.

- Echo. - Go.

- FAO. - Go.

Arm.

Houston is go for SEP. Have a great flight.

Stand by.

Sideways lurch, just like they said.

They actually jettisoned the orbiter from it.

Okay, she's flying good.

250. Starting to flare.

It's an awesome sight.

Okay, 11-alpha pushing over.

The world's biggest spaceship glides through the sky

over the California desert.

Engines cause problems, more complexity,

right on down the line.

Why don't we design it from the very beginning

to be an unpowered glider?

The shuttle falls through the atmosphere

at 1,000 feet every 6 seconds.

- ...195 and 20,000. - You got it, Gordo.

It has only one chance to land.

Straight.

It has no go-around capability.

Standing by the gear.

It's been related to flying like a brick

because it comes down so fast and the wings don't generate

all that much lift.

200 feet...

The shuttle lands

only 50 miles per hour faster than a 747.

Touch down here.

Down. Gear is down.

Speed brakes are tracking.

Touchdown at Edwards Air Force Base

launches a new era in America's exploration of space.

NASA is reinventing itself.

A new spaceship is designed for more practical missions --

launching satellites, repairs, deliveries,

and it has to fly over and over again.

The space shuttle is a unique vehicle.

It was designed to be reusable.

We need a space plane that can take off from a space board

and come and land on any runway.

Great idea.

So let's build this space plane.

The mission of a shuttle was we had to retrieve items,

we had to bring packages in that we could accomplish repair on.

It was basically a multipurpose spacecraft,

suited to a large number of tasks,

that we would fly repeatedly.

It was designed to make space flight routine.

Safe, reliable, on time.

And wow.

But the shuttle will have to stand up

to the hostile environment of space,

especially extremes of hot and cold.

You don't know if you're gonna burn up

when you come back through the atmosphere.

Like all spacecraft,

it will have to withstand temperatures

of more than 3,000 degrees during reentry.

The engineers came up with a system of tiles, thermal tiles,

that blanket the whole entire orbiter.

The tiles are what our thermal-protection system

primarily consists of on board the shuttle,

are about the consistency of Styrofoam, and they're glued on.

So you'll have this massive surface area.

The tiles not only got to reject all the heat,

but they also got to be very light.

They're very fragile.

It's easy to ding one.

And, depending on the size of the ding and where it is,

it could be critical to the survival of the spaceship.

You're on the glide scope. We see you on the glide scope.

250 knots.

31,000 tiles cover the orbiter's aluminum shell.

They're glued to a blanket of fireproofing,

allowing them to flex with the shuttle's frame.

Early tests don't go well.

Many tiles just fall off.

They told me you could hit the edge

with a baseball bat and it won't hurt it.

They weren't exactly telling me the truth.

Two solid rocket boosters

with a combined 44 million horsepower

will blast the shuttle into space.

During the first stage of powered flight,

when you're on the solid rockets, there's no escape.

There was no way to shut them down, no way to throttle them,

so if you had a problem with those,

you rode it out until you could separate from the solids.

A lot of people thought one solid rocket would ignite

and they'd cartwheel out this way.

For the shuttle's three main engines,

NASA must develop rockets that are compact, efficient,

and capable of lifting enormous payloads into orbit.

Every time we'd turn around and discuss the engines,

one of the engines would blow up and catch fire.

I didn't realize it was gonna be so hard to get there

from where we're at, but it was a pretty tough road.

I learned when John was worried about something,

I ought to be worried about it as well.

NASA upgrades the rockets

and develops a new superglue to keep the tiles from falling off.

Four years after the first glide test,

the shuttle is finally ready to fly into space.

The orbiter is designed for a crew of seven.

For the first high-risk mission, NASA is sending only two.

I was with the then-director

of flight-crew operations.

Turns to me and says,

"Cripp, how would you like to fly the first one?"

Send the gear.

Gear down.

It will be Bob Crippen's

first flight into space.

Okay. That does it.

I was doing handsprings at that point.

When Commander John Young

first learns NASA will build a shuttle,

it's years earlier, and he's a long way from home.

I was on the moon.

Yeah. Yeah, I was on the moon.

John Young was the chief of the Astronaut Office,

walked on the moon on Apollo 16.

He was the obvious choice to be commander of the first flight.

John was the right guy to fly this first shuttle mission.

The shuttle is bolted to the solid rocket boosters

and external fuel tank and ready to fly.

When it comes out on the mobile launch platform,

when the crawler takes it out to the pad, it's an awesome sight.

It's beautiful, but not in a streamline sort of way.

The same crawler

that carried the giant Saturn V rockets

for the moon missions

takes the shuttle to the same launch complex.

It looks to me like it's just all kinds of muscle

'cause it's got all these engines and solid rockets.

Every other NASA project

has flown unmanned test flights first.

Not this time.

This was everything up on the first mission.

Never been done before.

And these two idiots go out on top of it.

We didn't have any idea about probability,

risk assessment, when the shuttle was first launched.

Anybody thinks they can statistically predict

when something with 2 million moving parts is gonna fail

is sort of smoking something they shouldn't be, probably.

Yeah.

For the first time in six years,

NASA starts a countdown to launch astronauts into space.

Wake up in the morning, have a nice breakfast.

They wire you up so they can monitor your heartbeat.

Walk you out to this little bus that we have,

and there's usually a little press out there.

You get to wave at them.

Then you climb on the little bus,

and they take you out to the launchpad.

From my standpoint,

this was really a mission in which I prayed a lot.

I really had some concerns

because there were so many unknowns.

We had never flown a spacecraft manned

for the first time before.

40, Cap Com.

Columbia, Houston, you're go at 40.

Half a million people come to the Cape

to watch John Young and Bob Crippen

fly the first shuttle into space.

If you see anything you don't understand

when we're going down here, we got seven hold points.

You remember where they are.

Seven minutes, we got one at five minutes,

we got one at four, and two more...

It was a very complicated vehicle.

And I really thought that we'd do lots of countdowns

before we actually lifted off.

15-10 lift-off.

Pick up in about a minute and a half here.

- DPS. - We're go, flight.

- Guidance? - Go.

- FIDO? - Go.

And it was only when the count got inside of a minute

that I turned to John and I said," I think we might do it."

That's when my heart rate went up to about 130.

John's was a nice, calm 90.

I didn't ever ask him if he was nervous.

I never thought of that.

Should I have thought of that?

T-minus 10... 9... 8... 7...

6... 5... 4...

We've gone for main engine start.

Once the solid rocket boosters ignite,

they can't be cut off.

The shuttle is committed to flight.

The main engines start, you know it's alive.

And the solids really tell you that.

You know you're headed somewhere,

because it's a nice kick in the pants.

I can see the tower going by.

By the time you've cleared above the tower,

you're going, already, over 100 miles an hour.

Columbia, Houston, we have 40 seconds to LOS.

Configure LOS. You're looking good burning over the hill.

We'll see you at Madrid.

Mark "A" off.

And "B" off.

I've likened it to driving my old truck

down a washboard country road.

It's kind of like this.

I don't think comfort is what you're looking for

when you're going uphill.

You're looking to get there.

The sound went away.

I really thought that all the engines had quit.

Steps one and two of the...

I figured that once we made it

to where there wasn't anything blowing up and catching fire,

we were home safe.

Checklists start floating.

Trash starts floating.

We get debris coming out of here.

So it's obviously we're weightless.

Go ahead, then.

Looking out the window -- shuttle's got great windows --

there's the Earth.

Roger, Houston.

And we're passing lots of clouds.

Crippen and Young fly the shuttle through space

for more than two days.

They orbit the Earth 36 times.

Houston is with you at Maua.

Reentry will test the thermal tiles

when the shuttle hits the atmosphere

at 14,000 miles an hour.

We were in the dark at the time.

One of the dramatic things that I did notice

was, all of a sudden, the outside,

which was supposed to be dark, started glowing this soft pink.

And it was obvious that those little molecules out there

were getting very warm.

Velocity Mach 2.

Sink rate, still losing altitude

at the rate of about 200 feet per second.

This was one of the first times

everybody started getting a sense of speed.

As we came in lower, you could really get a sense of,

"Hey, we're going pretty fast."

Cripp said he looked out the window and said,

"What a way to come to California."

We knew we were coming across the West Coast

over Santa Barbara,

and you could see where you turn in to Runway 23.

Gear down.

Landing went perfect, and John greased it home.

About the softest landing you could ever imagine,

and when we finally got wheel stop, John and I shook hands.

Flight control, report steady braking.

And John was as excited as I've ever seen that man get.

They said it was a pretty good mission.

I don't know if it was dangerous or not.

We weren't smart enough to know whether it was dangerous or not.

We did it.

Crippen and Young are the first astronauts

to return from space in a reusable vehicle.

It was about as perfect a mission

as we could have ever executed.

The shuttle era begins.

The orbiter is scheduled to fly up to 24 times a year.

For the first time,

you could carry something up to space,

drop it off and leave it there for six months or so,

let it be exposed to the space environment,

the radiation, all of the different things

that we see in space -- the vacuum --

and then fly another space shuttle up,

pick it back up, and bring it back down.

To give astronauts more freedom

to work outside the spacecraft,

NASA designs a new machine

with the chance to fulfill the dream that man can fly in space.

One of the most exciting things we did

on my very first space flight

was something that had never been done before.

And that was to fly the Buck Rogers jet backpack.

NASA calls it the manned maneuvering unit.

Controlled by 24 thrusters firing bursts off nitrogen gas,

the jetpack provides life support, communications,

and the power to steer through space.

We were approved to build the maneuvering unit

for the shuttle program,

and I was picked to be the first to fly it.

Bruce McCandless is a NASA veteran.

He worked the moon landings in Mission Control

but has never been to space.

The preparation for the space walk

takes a good hour and a half, two hours.

Put on the liquid-cool garment in the air lock

and then closed it up.

No astronaut has ever walked in space

without being firmly tethered to the ship.

People have asked me if I was apprehensive or nervous.

But basically, it was a feeling of relief

that we had finally gotten to this point.

Okay, Bruce, we see your port.

Upon opening the hatch,

I was just seeing nothing down below but Earth.

It was unsettling.

We'll check on it for you.

So I'm sitting there with a camera in my hand,

and never forget,

when Bruce McCandless got about 15 away,

I look through the viewfinder the first time

and looked at this image out there

of him floating away from us.

And I thought to myself, "What a spectacular image this is.

If I don't mess this picture up,

I'm gonna get some magazine covers with this."

How are you reading?

Roger, Bruce. Loud and clear.

In the shadow of the Earth,

the temperature is more than 250 degrees below freezing.

I got so cold

that I was shivering and my teeth were chattering.

McCandless spends more than four hours

flying the jetpack through space.

It was a tremendously exciting moment

to look out the window and watch Bruce McCandless floating away

and drifting out to 300 feet away from the space shuttle,

the length of a football field away from us.

Just passed over Florida and Cuba.

Well, I guess to break it,

Robert is gonna have to go 10% faster.

Looks like Florida.

It is Florida! It's the Cape.

Yeah, you're on a stateside pass, Bruce.

I think I got enough...

Space flight is back on the front page.

I mages from shuttle missions rival science fiction.

The shuttle was probably the finest flying machine

that NASA has ever built.

There's the final turn into the HAC.

I believe it's really the pinnacle

of American aerospace technology.

It revolutionized our knowledge of aerodynamics.

...end of the runway.

Airspeed 256 knots.

But the shuttle

becomes a victim of its own success.

Gear down.

It flies so often, it's taken for granted.

The public loses interest.

As they continued to fly, it got more routine.

People got more confident.

All of a sudden,

they had an airliner that people could ride on safely.

They expected it to work.

They expected no problem with it.

NASA was arrogant.

Thought they couldn't do anything wrong.

NASA needs to capture the public's imagination again.

Their answer -- a teacher in space

and lessons beamed down from the shuttle in orbit.

10,000 teachers apply.

Christa McAuliffe was selected,

and they could not have selected a better person.

I've made nine wonderful friends over the last two weeks.

When that shuttle goes, there might be one body...

but there's gonna be 10 souls that I'm taking with me.

- Thank you. - That's great.

Barbara Morgan is Christa's backup.

Well, you're always a little disappointed,

and I tried to bump Christa off with poison cookies,

but she would never eat them.

I was just surprised and very pleased

to be able to have the opportunity

to train alongside.

A social studies teacher and mother of two

from Concord, New Hampshire,

Christa will fly on the Challenger,

known as the workhorse of the shuttle fleet.

Three months before her flight,

Christa and Barbara watch their first shuttle launch.

Main engine start.

3... 2... 1... 0.

We have solid rocket booster ignition and lift-off.

There's joy.

There's also a sense of surprise.

They are off.

I think the biggest surprise was how bright it was

and how loud it was.

And then, when you feel the sound

just coming up through your body

and pounding in your chest and everything.

Oh, my God! Look at it!

It was wonderful to be there together

and to know that Christa's turn was next.

Preparing to throttle down.

75 % on main engines.

30 seconds from launch.

The night before, I'm getting from my sources

that it's too cold tomorrow to fly.

Temperatures drop below freezing.

The shuttle has never launched in such extreme conditions.

The temperatures were a concern.

But it was not the kind of thing that would say,

"No, we've got a very solid reason for a no-go that day."

It got down to 27 degrees.

And I called my desk and I want to do a report on The Today Show

that they shouldn't be taking off today.

After all, they have the teacher on board.

Very excited about exploration and about space

and about sharing it with everyone.

The smiles on their faces and the extreme joy --

They were really happy to be doing what they were doing.

And we're at T-minus 9 minutes and counting.

People thought

that because a teacher would be on board

that it might rejuvenate attention.

But it did not.

T-minus 7 minutes and counting.

There weren't that many members here of the press.

Pilot Mike Smith has given...

The mission has already been postponed

several times due to mechanical problems

and bad weather.

Throughout the morning,

engineers express concern about the unusually low temperatures.

At 11:38 a.m., Challenger is cleared for launch.

Ground launch sequencer program has been initiated.

Turn on your AP and voice recorders.

Will do.

I remember I looked in their eyes

and I wished them well on the journey.

T-minus 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Someone stuck their head into the big conference room

and said, "Hey, guys,

Challenger is about two minutes from lift-off.

You want to take a break and watch the launch?"

T-minus 1 minute and counting.

Christa's parents are at the Cape for the launch.

Sound suppression system now armed.

I've done a lot of launches

on the top of the launch-control roof out here,

and I've seen families.

They're worried.

They're scared. They're in tears.

That's not nice.

T-minus 10... 9...

8... 7... 6...

We have main engine start.

4... 3... 2... 1.

And lift-off.

We heard "ignition". We heard "lift-off".

I heard the call "throttle down."

Everything was looking normal. I was watching the main engines.

Roger roll, Challenger.

You're sitting there quietly rooting for them.

You're sitting there quietly saying,

"Go, Challenger. Go, Challenger."

Challenger now heading downrange.

Preparing to rethrottle the engines back up to 100%.

It seemed to be just kind of crawling in space.

This is one for The Guinness Book of Records

with the size flight crew aboard.

Challenger, go with throttle up.

3, 305.

Flight, FIDO.

- Flight, FIDO - Go ahead.

RSO reports vehicle exploded.

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.

Seconds later,

I happened to see sort of a flicker over on the TV.

Flight GC, we've had negative contact.

Okay, all operators watch your data carefully.

And I looked over,

and I saw this picture of this expanding fireball

with pieces moving in all directions.

The crippled rocket boosters careen out of control.

Specially declassified footage

shows them being remotely destroyed.

We have a report from the flight dynamics officer

that the vehicle has exploded.

- Flight director confirms that. - Okay.

We are looking at checking with the recovery forces

to see what can be done at this point.

I knew instantly that none of them could possibly survive

because we didn't have parachutes,

we didn't have pressure suits,

and at the altitude that they broke up at,

there was no way they were gonna maintain consciousness.

It was immediately obvious to me

that we had lost the entire crew.

It didn't look normal.

And I knew that from the amount of training that we had had

and from the launch that we had seen previous,

that Christa and I had witnessed.

We are now looking at all the...

Very, very sad time.

I felt horrible.

It was a huge loss, and it always will be.

I believe every person in Mission Control

came to grips with his demons that day.

And I think several of us said a few prayers for the crew.

And we also prayed for the team in Mission Control,

the team in launch control,

and those people who would have to live

with the aftermath of this accident.

Don't reconfigure your console.

Make hard copies of all your displays.

Make sure you protect any data source you have.

I was Vice President of the United States

way back then.

I went down there when Challenger blew up.

It was a terrible tragedy, of course.

So Reagan asked me to go down to comfort the families.

It was a very moving thing for me

to see these families in grief.

I think the thing that really moved me

was President Reagan's comments after that.

We will never forget them,

nor the last time we saw them, this morning,

as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye

and slipped the surly bonds of Earth

to touch the face of God.

Thank you.

It was so beautiful. I could never have done that.

I would have choked up too badly.

For the first time,

NASA loses astronauts during a mission.

They shut down the shuttle program

and launch a complete investigation,

reconstructing the 73-second mission

in split-second intervals.

The report is scathing.

Turns very rapidly from grief to anger

because you discovered

there was gross negligence to launch on that day --

just plain negligence.

We had all the data.

We knew how bad everything was.

We knew the relationships of "O" rings and temperature.

You know, it turns to sheer anger.

The investigation concludes

that cold weather caused the failure of an "O" ring,

a rubber gasket in the right rocket booster.

It leaked flames that ignited the external fuel tank.

The report also chronicles

the final moments in the astronauts' lives.

We know that the crew of Challenger

survived the breakup.

We know that three of the crew members

turned on their air packs after the vehicle broke up.

Now, Challenger was at 49,000 feet

going uphill at a tremendous rate when it broke up.

And it coasted uphill to 67,000 feet.

Very, very high altitude.

There's no way in the world

that the crew was going to maintain consciousness

in that kind of an environment.

So we believe they were alive.

But we also believe

they were unconscious when they hit the water.

Contingency procedures are in effect.

They were alive until they hit the water.

No shuttle flies for 21/2 years.

A lot of second-guessing in the Congress

about the whole program

and whether we were taking proper care

of these people going out into space

and whether the program was worth it.

But NASA determined to go forward

with the support of the Congress and of the American people,

and forward it went.

After the loss of Challenger,

it took us almost three years to redesign and rebuild

and get ready to feel confident about going to space again.

After the Challenger accident,

the press took a whole different outlook towards NASA.

The outlook towards NASA was, "We're not sure we believe you

when you say you're gonna do this."

Shuttle flights resume in September 1988.

After five missions,

the fleet of three orbiters is flying a regular schedule again.

We have to continue to move forward.

To stop in space is to surrender.

The orbiter Discovery rolls out

for the most ambitious mission of the shuttle era.

It promises to unlock age-old mysteries

about the origins of the universe,

to look deep into space for clues to the distant past.

The promise of Hubble to the public was the power.

It was gonna show them their universe

in a way they'd never seen it before.

We said Hubble would probably answer the question

"What is the age of the universe?"

Hubble was going to see galaxies and stars being born.

Here was a new telescope,

which was going to be launched by the shuttle,

and, you know, somehow it was gonna make

these incredible things possible.

Hubble is a pioneering scientific mission,

launching the most powerful telescope ever built.

At 24,000 pounds, it's the size of a city bus.

This is shuttle launch control

at T-minus 3 hours and holding.

- OTC, LVCC. - Go ahead.

The telescope has to be

high above the Earth's radiant light,

which could distort its view into deep space.

The desire was to get it as high as we possibly could.

Normally, the shuttle would fly

between 150, 170 nautical miles.

And for Hubble, we wanted to do almost twice that.

And that really pushed us

to the limit of what the shuttle could achieve.

Discovery will launch Hubble higher

than any spacecraft has flown since men went to the moon.

NASA selects a veteran crew

to deliver the world's most expensive telescope,

with a price tag topping $ 1.5 billion.

SDS 31 was a high-profile mission.

Because we had all flown before,

we had a bit of a leg up on training.

We didn't have to start at zero.

Pilot Charlie Bolden, Bruce McCandless.

Kathy Sullivan

is the first American woman to walk in space.

This is her second shuttle mission.

There's thousands and thousands of things

that have to be right on the money

and checked hundreds of times a second

to be sure everything's ready to go.

And it has to all mesh, you know,

with an astonishing kind of precision

in the last minute or so of a countdown.

The odds ought to be that you never get off the planet.

Let's go do this.

Roger roll, Discovery.

Discovery, go with throttle up.

It wasn't that long since Challenger.

Hubble was the biggest and largest thing

we had ever tried to deploy.

I don't think any of us wanted Hubble

to have any sort of a major problem after Challenger.

Discovery's velocity now 2, 300 feet per second

and is downrange eight nautical miles.

On schedule,

Discovery jettisons the solid rocket boosters.

Discovery burns through 2,000 tons of fuel

to reach 370 miles above the Earth,

more than twice as high as the shuttle's normal orbit.

I was able to look out pretty much right away

after main engine cutoff.

And I distinctly remember the feeling,

"Wow. This is a lot higher than I was last time."

We were all struck by how fabulously different

the doubling of the altitude made the Earth look.

That was and is the highest

that any of us had been and that the shuttle has ever been,

even to date.

The higher they are,

the more fuel they'll need to get home.

If disaster strikes and it runs out,

they'll be stuck in space,

unable to return before their oxygen is gone.

You looked up at the key onboard-shuttle fuel gauges.

You know, the moment you got there, they were reading 49%.

Hmm. You wonder, "Well, is that really gonna be enough

to get us back down?"

You've still got five or six days to go,

and you're already through half your propellent.

Any indication of a leak, any indication of a leak,

I'm getting out of there fast,

or we don't get to come home and talk with you about it.

The crew plans to launch Hubble the next day.

Discovery, Houston.

Morning, Story.

Got to go for HST deploy arms.

Bill Reeves directs the flight from Mission Control.

It was time-critical

that you get on orbit as fast as you can,

get everything checked out as fast as you can,

and get this telescope deployed.

Discovery's robotic arm

lifts Hubble from the cargo bay.

Timing is now critical.

Discovery, Houston.

Hubble's ultrasensitive instruments

need a continuous source of energy.

Its two solar panels must be fully extended

before the telescope can be deployed,

or the extreme temperatures in space

could cause catastrophic damage.

Hubble's on a battery, so you only last so long on batteries.

You've got to get the solar panels out, you know,

to get your electricity.

I'd like you to go three drift.

So before the solar arrays come out,

the telescope is using battery power,

which is fine so long as the arrays come out.

Discovery, go plus SDM deploy.

They commanded the first set of solar arrays to deploy,

and that all worked properly.

So we're feeling pretty good about things.

And then they go to do the second set.

Discovery, we'd like three drift

from minus SDM deploy.

Okay, we copy. Three drift.

You could see a little bit of the stored energy

in the canister as the latches were released,

and the array would come out a little bit

and then it would stop.

And we thought, "Well, that's not what it's supposed to do."

Houston -- Discovery. Looks like motion stopped.

My payload officer told me the array had stopped.

I mmediately, we knew we had a problem.

One good solar panel is keeping Hubble alive,

but just barely.

The telescope is useless until it's under full power.

So the payload team were trying to figure out

why it wouldn't deploy.

So there was a sense of urgency to get things going.

Mission Control scrambles for a solution.

The crew in space prepares for an EVA.

They may have to crank the solar panel open by hand.

Let's have the EVA crew press on with EVA prep.

Yeah, we had Bruce McCandless

and Kathy Sullivan get suited up.

Just as insurance.

We instantly jumped into that get-outside mode.

Dropped the cameras and started suiting up.

And Bill, at this point,

is having to listen to the telescope guys,

ask them, "Do they think they've got this fixed?"

- Flight payload. - Go ahead.

They haven't gotten it yet, and they're scratching their heads.

They're working a plan right now.

I'll get back to you

as soon as we get a good plan pulled together.

Another thing I need an answer to

is if I can go ahead and commit the EVA

with the thought of going out and cranking it out

if whatever they're about to do fails.

We really expect to have to go out the door

and actually crank it out by hand.

They want us to just press on to back them up.

We need to get on with it.

Something had to happen to get that array out,

or we'd lose the telescope.

Okay, Flight. I'll come back with the answer.

I need answers now.

By this time, Bruce and Kathy are in their space suits.

They're in the air lock.

- Flight FAO - Come in.

Yeah, I don't feel comfortable waiting until --

I don't either. That's why I want the answers now.

Time is very critical.

They certainly were measuring

how long it would take before the telescope would die.

The question I need is the status

of the state of charge of the batteries at release.

Are we gonna have adequate charge?

We can only get minus-X translation.

It's firm.

That was a very difficult day.

We really earned our pay that day.

If the second solar panel

isn't generating power soon...

NASA could face a difficult decision.

- Payloads. - Yes.

Leave Hubble in orbit

until another mission can return and attempt to repair it.

At Mission Control, engineers search for computer commands

that will deploy the second array.

Yes, what we need to do is command both of the motors.

- They ready to go right now? - Yes.

- That's what they want to do? - Yes, sir.

The guys on the ground figured out

an alternate command.

It had taken them those couple of hours

to find their way to that conclusion.

We gave the command, and, sure enough,

it started to open and it kept going.

The solar panels unfold and get right to work...

Okay, EECOM.

...soaking up sunlight

and converting it into electricity.

Hubble is ready for launch.

- Eagle? - Go.

- FAO? - Go.

- MAX? - Go.

- ARS? - Go, Flight.

Bruce and I didn't get to see.

I was about this far away from the wall of the air lock,

staring at a nice, bright, blank white wall

and listening to all that happening on the com loops.

Payloads, waiting on you.

Flight, payloads, we are go.

Cap Com, we have a go for release.

Discovery, go for Hubble release.

We were very satisfied with our mission.

We had gotten the telescope deployed.

We'd done what we had set out to do.

There was a feeling of pride

and also a feeling of a new beginning.

We're gonna be able to observe things and answer questions

that we thought were unanswerable before.

We're touched down.

The Hubble launch revives America's space program.

It's the high-profile mission NASA needs

to put the Challenger disaster behind them.

And 370 miles above the Earth,

the Hubble telescope prepares to peer back

through space and time

to capture images of the origins of all things.

About two or three weeks after launch,

we started to take the first images.

And a few of us gather around a screen

to see the images that would come back that night.

And the focus didn't seem to be right.

They didn't look nearly as sharp

as the experts in the room expected them to.

Sort of looked at each other

and said, "That's the way it's supposed to be, isn't it?"

And, of course, people knew that it wasn't.

Hubble's main mirror,

8 feet wide and weighing nearly a ton,

is the wrong shape -- ground to the wrong specifications.

Many images are blurred.

Hubble is nearsighted.

It was only off by about a millionth of an inch,

which is about 1/50 the diameter of a human hair.

It was absolutely shocking

when a couple of people who are optics experts

came forward and said, "You can't correct it.

There's nothing you can do about it."

There's a significant spherical aberration

appears to be present in the optics --

in the optical telescope.

You grieve for the fact that,

you know, the possibilities and they're gone.

But very soon, then, the grief turns to flat-out anger.

How could this have happened?

I mean, don't you guys know how to make telescopes?

Personally, I felt like it was the end of the world.

You spend 15 years of your career working on something,

and the world is watching, and it's a total disaster.

As far as you know,

it had to have happened on the ground before it went up?

We were a joke. A national joke.

The most expensive,

most powerful telescope in the world is a dud.

It's really hard now, in retrospect,

to create the sense of outrage and despair

that people were feeling.

This was a, you know, multibillion-dollar disaster.