Rockets Red Glare

August 06, 2008

One fine October day in 1899, a 17-year-old boy climbed into a cherry tree at a friend's home in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was supposed to be pruning the dead branches, but ended up gazing at the sky and day-dreaming about launching a rocket into space, perhaps even traveling to Mars.  Robert H. Goddard went on to invent the first liquid fuel rocket in 1926, paving the way for future generations of space exploration. "It looked almost magical as it rose," he wrote in his diary on that fateful day. "Without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, 'I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere else, if you don't mind.'"

Everyone loves a good rocket launch, even today, when such events are a relatively common occurrence. The sheer power and roar of the rockets as they ignite, the vast plumes of smoke, and the sight of this massive spacecraft soaring upwards towards space never fail to invoke a sense of awe of what space science has wrought.

And sometimes it even inspires artists, like Lia Halloran, whose work reflects her natural love of physics, and the interaction of unseen forces with physical objects all around us. (You can see more examples of Halloran's work and other science-inspired art here.) Based in Los Angeles, she created a series of paintings inspired by the Space Shuttle Challenger in 2006/2007, like this piece, simply entitled "Night Launch":

Not that Halloran is averse to color; another painting in the series features swirling orange hues as Challenger lifts off into the sky:

Our quest to conquer space has not been free of peril; occasionally the dream becomes a nightmare, such as when Apollo 1 was destroyed by fire during a training exercise in 1967, killing all three members of the crew. On January 28, 1986, Challenger met an equally horrible fate, disintegrating in mid-air 73 seconds after launch, as millions viewing the launch live watched in horror. All seven crew members died, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, the very first member of the Teacher in Space Project.

A subsequent investigation revealed the cause: an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster failed at liftoff, causing a breach and a series of related failures, until aerodynamic forces tore apart the orbiter in mid-air. Why did the O-ring fail? Physicist Richard Feynman memorably demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures -- like the low temperatures that prevailed the morning of that fateful launch.

"I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water," he testified during a televised hearing. "And I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for awhile and then undo it, it does not stretch back. It stays in the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees." A few seconds was all it took to doom Challenger.

In February 2003, the nightmare happened again, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its re-entry over Texas -- again killing all seven crew members on board. This time the culprit was damage to a piece of foam insulation that broke off an external tank during launch. (Those aerodynamic forces are brutal.)

Is it worth it? Some might rightfully wonder. In the days immediately following the Challenger disaster, then-president Ronald Reagan struck just the right note during a memorial service at Johnson Space Center: "Sometimes when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain." Certainly the astronauts who lost their lives would not wish to have died for naught. I like to think of them echoing the sentiments of Goddard's first rudimentary rocket as they shot off into the atmosphere to meet their fate: We've been here long enough. We'll just be going somewhere else, if you don't mind....

Photos: (top) "Night Launch" (2007). (center) "Challenger Lift Off Occurring in Orange Sky" (2006). (bottom) "Challenger Explosion in the Nighttime" (2006). All courtesy of Lia Halloran. Used with permission.