Thirty years ago today, an event occurred that is seared into the memory of one Bartlesville resident.


Gary Nealis remembers witnessing one of the worst accidents in the history of the American space program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in a ball of fire shortly after it left the launching pad on Jan. 28, 1986.

The disaster claimed the lives of all seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire who had been selected to join the mission and teach lessons from space to school children around the country.

Nealis was working as a communications engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he and other NASA employees flew in a thick fog to Cape Canaveral, Fla., ahead of the tragic event.

"Normally I worked missions as a shift leader on the communications and tracking team in Houston. We provided engineering support to mission control. At launch we looked at the data, listened to the audio loops and glanced up occasionally at the TV monitors," said Nealis, 66. "Now I was going to watch a launch in real-time in person at the cape."

He recalled battling bitter cold temperatures while setting up his equipment — a 5-inch telescope balanced on a tripod with 35-millimeter camera on auto-winder and a TV camera mounted on top of the telescope — hours before the official shuttle take off.

"I felt so cold I thought I would snap in two. I kept ducking back into the car to thaw out while listening to NASA select on my airband radio," said Nealis.

Finally, when temperatures rose above freezing and the 12-inch icicles melted from the Challenger’s support structure, the shuttle was ready to launch. However, due to safety concerns over cold launch time temperatures, Nealis said the mission management team made the "wrong decision" to proceed.

He then recounted the moments before the Challenger disintegrated, traveling at nearly 2,000 mph at a height of 10 miles when it exploded just 73 seconds after launch from the Kennedy Space Center.

"My TV was going, my 35-millimeter was clicking and my camera head was tilting and turning," said Nealis. "Then my camera strap snagged on a tripod knob. I broke my concentration, freed the strap and searched for the rapidly moving Shuttle. It had already moved out of frame.

Peering skyward, Nealis scoured the Florida sky for the spacecraft, but saw only smoke and debris. The shuttle exploded into two smoke streams in the air, and he realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

"It was just a lot of debris falling or arching and then falling from an orange cloud surrounded by white steam," Nealis said. "We were all talking quietly in subdued almost hollow voices. In the distance I heard someone softly sobbing. It was starting to hit me."

Stunned and somber, Nealis played back the video footage with coworkers later that day when they heard a "soft whomp."

"We did some quick calculations of sound travel times. The whomp was the bang of the explosion picked up faintly on my recorder," he said.

Returning to work in Houston, Nealis eventually analyzed and helped make a transcript of the Challenger’s OPS2 tape recorder system, which recorded voice communication among the crew and between the crew and ground control. The unit was recovered from the ocean floor 43 days after the Challenger accident.

"It was a deteriorated tape but we didn’t hear anything abnormal. The crew was enjoying the flight, making calls to the ground, joking … then the tape stopped," he said.

Nealis, who is retired and volunteers at Woolaroc and the Frank Phillips Home, added that those who played a part in working on the mission will "always be haunted by those few minutes …"

"But, we recovered. We flew again. We still are. We need to keep flying."