Bill Nelson on Challenger Disaster: 'Why Were We Spared?'

WASHINGTON -- Many have called Jan. 28, 1986, a "fateful day." Bill Nelson is one of the few who saw in the breakup of the space shuttle Challenger a fate that might have been his own.

Nelson had returned to Earth just 10 days earlier with the crew of the Columbia, the oldest shuttle in the fleet and one that years later would come to its own fiery end. The Democratic congressman from Florida, whose district encompassed the Kennedy Space Center, was back on Capitol Hill after moonlighting as a NASA payload specialist during Columbia's six-day mission orbiting Earth.

The flight of STS-61C was one of the most delayed in the history of the U.S. space program. Scheduled to launch nearly a month before it finally lifted off on Jan. 12, the mission was scrubbed four times because of mechanical and weather issues as its seven-member crew sat on the launchpad.

"What we know now is had we launched on any one of those scrubs, it would not have been a good day," recalled Nelson, now a U.S. senator.

A quarter-century after the terrible day that Challenger disintegrated in the sky, Nelson recounted the moment to AOL News in an interview. He spoke in the "space room" of his Senate office in the Hart Building, surrounded by paintings, photos and models of space shuttles and NASA rockets.

Nelson had gathered his staff around him 25 years ago so he could explain what was happening during the countdown.

"When it slowly became apparent from that far-distant television view that something had gone wrong, I suddenly looked around and everybody had disappeared and I was alone in the office," he said. "I went into the bathroom and got down on my knees and I said, 'Why were we spared?' "

Nelson knew the entire crew of the Challenger and considered them friends. He and the other Columbia astronauts were in quarantine waiting to go up when the seven Challenger crew members arrived at Kennedy Space Center to conduct a practice countdown. It was the first time shuttles had sat side by side on the launchpads and their crews shared quarters and conducted last-minute training together.

A training photo shows Nelson holding hands with teacher Christa McAuliffe as they floated weightlessly on a NASA zero-gravity flight. They shared a bond as two of just four civilians until that time who had been chosen to fly aboard the space shuttle.

McAuliffe's selection as the first teacher in space drew special attention to the Challenger mission as millions of schoolchildren tuned in to watch the launch. What they saw to their horror was "the symbol of America's technological power suddenly blow up in front of our own eyes, and it was repeated over and over and over on TV screens," Nelson said. "It was an assault on the psyche of America."

Later investigations would reveal human mistakes -- top managers hadn't listened to engineers on the line who warned about the potentially catastrophic effect of cold weather on the rubberized gaskets known as O-rings in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters.

"Sadly," Nelson said, different technical problems but "the same human failures" would lead to the loss of his shuttle, Columbia, in 2003.

It is somehow fitting that the 25th anniversary of the Challenger accident comes as the nation prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's birth on Feb. 6.

His brief words hours after the tragedy -- "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God' " -- are considered among the most eloquent ever uttered by an American president.

"In times of great tragedy, the president becomes comforter in chief, and Ronald Reagan really seized the moment," Nelson said. "He captured the grief and yet the vision of America. He set the tone that we as explorers are going to have mishaps, we're going to have losses. ... [but] that this is not a time to turn back."