I knew there were six other people with me,
although I could not see everyone.
I was excited to be finally going somewhere,
after all the extensive preparations.
The images in this article can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Mid-deck seating positions
The picture on the left shows the mid-deck seating positions under the flight deck.
The mid-deck matches corresponds to my position in the dream.
Crew seated here would not have had a view of the outside.
The circular airlock behind the seats normally connects to the cargo bay,
but would have led to the outside after the accident.
On the right a ladder to the flight deck can be seen.
Breakup of the
Challenger Spaceshuttle STS-51-L
One of the persons in my field of view was a woman.
Suddenly something unexpected happened.
There was panic and shouting.
I felt preternaturally calm.
However, I feared we would loose our air
and therefore tried to activate the emergency air supply.
Close up of the crew cabin of the exploded
Challenger Spaceshuttle STS-51-L.
The space shuttle stabilized quickly after the explosion
and fell for two and a half minutes towards the ocean.
Its speed hitting the ocean surface was approx. 200mph.
At the impact I briefly lost consciouness and then tried in a daze
to move to the air lock (mid deck airlock?) and tried to open it, to get out,
but it was stuck somehow.
I thought it didn't open because of pressure from the outside.
The airlock was constructed to open to neutral atmospheric pressure,
or a vacuum, but not against water pressing from the outside.
Shuttle Mission Simulator scene of astronauts Michael J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, and Francis R. (Dick) Scobee in their launch and entry positions on the flight deck. The photo was taken by Bill Bowers. (Dec. 12, 1985).
Water came seeping in.
I tried again to activate the emergency air supply.
My greatest concern was that the emergency air supply could somehow
keep me and the other crew member next to me, which was a woman, from drowning.
It was in my mind that under circumstances, when there was a hull breach due to an meteorite impact, it would work.
That was my last hope.
I tried to crawl into myself (an air bubble balloon, the PEAP?) to draw a last breath of air.
My last thought was my regret that the air lock did not open.
End of dream.
I must say that I can't recall most my dreams and it is seldom that anything
remarkable happens in them, up to that date.
Not so in this dream, which was also a lucid dream,
because I tried to affect the outcome while it happened.
The crew of Spaceshuttle mission STS-51-L:
Back row (L-R): Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik. Front row (L-R): Michael J. Smith, Francis "Dick" Scobee, Ronald McNair.
Two weeks later then, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger had the fatal accident, in which the whole crew of seven died, five men and two women.
The Rogers Commission determined that the cause of the destruction was due to the failure of an O-ring seal on the starboard Solid Rocket Booster (SRB).
When the accident happened, everyone thought that the crew had surely died instantaneously with the explosion of the booster rockets.
In the following accident investigation it was determined that the Challenger made it through the spectacular eruption of its external fuel tank with its cabin more or less intact.
The crippled vessel kept sailing upward for another three miles before its momentum gave out, then plunged 12 miles to the ocean.
The crew was, in all likelihood, conscious for the full two and a half minutes
until it hit the water.
It is generally agreed that the crew died then, at the moment of impact with the water surface.
NASA recovered all bodies of the astronauts.
Reporter Denis E. Powell of the Miami Herald Tropic magazine wrote two years after the explosion:
"When the shuttle broke apart, the crew compartment did not lose pressure, at least not at once. There was an uncomfortable jolt—
“A pretty good kick in the pants” is the way one investigator describes it—but it was not so severe as to cause injury.
This probably accounted for the “uh oh” that was the last word heard on the flight deck tape recorder that would be recovered from the ocean floor two months later.
As they were feeling the jolt, the four astronauts on the flight deck saw a bright flash and a cloud of steam.
The lights went out. The intercom went dead.
After a few breaths, the seven astronauts stopped getting oxygen into their helmets.
Crew seating arrangement of STS-51-L.
From this diagram I must have witnessed
the events from position 5 or 6.
Someone leaned forward and turned on the personal emergency air pack of shuttle pilot Michael Smith (S2).
The PEAP of Commander Francis Scobee (S1) was in a place where it was difficult to reach. It was not activated.
Even so, if the crew compartment did not rapidly lose air pressure,
Scobee would only have had to lift his mask to be able to breathe.
Two other PEAPs were turned on. The three others were never found.
Though the shuttle had broken to pieces,
the crew compartment was intact.
It stabilized in a nose-down attitude within 10 to 20 seconds,
say the investigators.
Even if the compartment was gradually losing pressure,
those on the flight deck would certainly have remained conscious long enough to catch a glimpse of the green-brown Atlantic rushing toward them.
If it lost its pressurization very slowly or remained intact until it hit the water,
they were conscious and cognizant all the way down.
In fact, no clear evidence was ever found that the crew cabin depressurized at all.
There was certainly no sudden,
catastrophic loss of air of the type that would have knocked the astronauts out within seconds.
"Such an event would have caused the mid-deck floor to buckle upward; that simply didn’t happen."
The Personal Emergency Air Packs (PEAP)
Conclusion
January 28th, 1986 at 11:39am EDT
Thirty years after this disaster I have decided to write down my experiences and make them public.
One may ask, what is the point in dragging this terrible event and grief back into the present day?
And to make everyone feel bad about it, because it appears that at least
one if not two astronauts survived the impact of the crew cabin on the ocean surface, only to drown without a way of escape?
Because I remember it and suffered through it,
two weeks before it happened.
I do apologize to the families, should I be causing additional grief, but this is how I recorded it.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger are heroes.
Crew seating S7. In memory of Christa McAuliffe, and all others, that were failed to be saved in my dream.
