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At the time, Lewis Research Center efforts focused on propulsion and power generation as well as the Atlas-Centaur, Atlas-Agena and Thor-Agena rockets.<\/p>\nThe voice of Hugh Harris provided countdown commentary for the brave new era of the Space Shuttle Program during his illustrious NASA career. Mr. Harris confirmed liftoff to audiences worldwide for the victorious debut launch of Columbia, the tragic loss of Challenger and the fightback of Discovery\u2019s first Return To Flight mission.<\/p>\n
\nStarting at NASA:<\/p>\n
Hugh Harris\u2019 NASA career lasted 34 years longer than he expected.<\/p>\n
Harris began working in NASA public affairs in February 1963 at the agency\u2019s Lewis Research Center, later renamed Glenn Research Center. Previously, as a reporter, Harris covered Reaction Motors, a New Jersey company that manufactured the engine for the X-15 spaceplane. When he received simultaneous job offers from the U.S. Federal Reserve and NASA, Harris opted for space.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I went to work at NASA, I was thinking along the lines of maybe working there for a year and then, having become an expert in everything, go back to the media and do stories for whoever I was working for,\u201d Harris said. \u201cWithin a relatively short period after I started working, I realized that what NASA was doing was probably one of the most important things being done in the country and for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019 NASA duties included handling press relations as well as preparing news releases and writing articles.<\/p>\n
At the time, Lewis Research Center efforts focused on propulsion and power generation as well as the Atlas-Centaur, Atlas-Agena and Thor-Agena rockets.<\/p>\n
The emphasis that Lewis placed on those particular rockets led to Harris\u2019 first work in launch commentaries, which occurred in California at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB).<\/p>\n
SpaceX launch tickets (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t very clear in those days as to who was responsible for what as far as public affairs was concerned,\u201d he noted. \u201cSince we were responsible for a number of rockets that launch both at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and at Vandenberg, and the KSC people didn\u2019t go out to Vandenberg, I just started doing the commentary. So, I did dozens of rocket launches out there.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1975, Harris applied to be director of public affairs at KSC. He was edged out by Chuck Hollinshead, who in turn offered him the position of chief of public information at KSC.<\/p>\n Harris took the job.<\/p>\n As the chief of public information, Harris oversaw KSC\u2019s press site, an area next to the center\u2019s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where news media set up equipment and report launch progress.<\/p>\n As part of Harris\u2019 new job, he eventually would conduct launch commentary for a new era of American space missions: the Space Shuttle Program.<\/p>\n Early Shuttles:<\/p>\n April 1981 saw the first launch of the space shuttle.<\/p>\n Columbia, the inaugural space-worthy shuttle orbiter, would rocket from KSC with a crew of two on an unprecedented test flight. For this first launch, Harris was the logical choice for launch commentary.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a too mysterious process,\u201d he said. \u201cSince I had been doing unmanned launches and was in the position of the people who normally had done commentary on human space flight before that, it just sort of fell into my lap as something that naturally I would be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, that was the best way to learn what was going to happen during the countdown.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Harris and others in public affairs worked to better understand the workings of the space shuttle, also known as the Space Transportation System (STS).<\/p>\n \u201cWe wrote dozens of fact sheets about all the major systems on the shuttle. In order to do that, we had to know something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n When Columbia lifted off, Harris\u2019 words heralded the first moments of a 30-year program that took hundreds of humans into space.<\/p>\n STS-1 landed successfully and safely in California.<\/p>\n As the Shuttle program progressed with further missions, Harris thought it essential that more people became trained as launch commentators.<\/p>\n \u201cI immediately suggested to both people at KSC and at NASA headquarters that it was really dumb to have one person who was doing all of the human space flight,\u201d Harris said. \u201cHaving one person who could lose their voice or get sick or run over or whatever would happen didn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I finally got permission to have three people trained, including myself, to do commentary at any one time.\u201d<\/p>\n Fueling, also called tanking, \u201cwas a fairly benign period, and also it wasn\u2019t being broadcast to the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, the trainees would graduate to conducting full commentaries. Scripts were essential to a commentator\u2019s success.<\/p>\n \u201cI really insisted on having a script that elaborated on what happened pretty much minute by minute,\u201d Harris added. \u201cYou\u2019re listening to so many channels of information and you want to react to those, so it\u2019s very easy to lose your way if you don\u2019t have a roadmap.<\/p>\n Harris and other commentators used a combination of video and audio feeds to assist their commentaries. The video feeds included both engineering camera views as well as public affairs camera shots of the shuttles. The public affairs views were made available for television broadcasts.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of those feeds were available so that we could see what was happening and talk about it intelligently.\u201d<\/p>\n As Harris and other commentators covered the early era of shuttle launches, they were advised not to disrupt the developing coordination of the launch control team.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a result, I had to develop a list of people who were familiar with each of the systems who were not in the control center and work with them prior to the launch so they knew there was a possibility I was going to call them.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, that relaxed a whole lot as the people in the firing room became more familiar with us and with launching. The first launch is always the trickiest one.\u201d<\/p>\n These missions, reaching orbits not safely flyable from KSC, would have included Harris as a launch commentator, he confirmed.<\/p>\n \u201cI would have been at least one of the people doing the commentary.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster resulted in a permanent deviation from NASA\u2019s shuttle plans. As a consequence, the Vandenberg shuttle missions never flew.<\/p>\n Challenger:<\/p>\n The Shuttle\u2019s 25th flight was highly unlikely to launch on the morning it occurred.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I went to the launch on that day, I was pretty convinced in my head that we were never going to launch,\u201d Harris noted.<\/p>\n Some people, including contractors at Rockwell, the builders of the shuttle orbiters, said the ice could fall from the pad during launch and gouge the orbiter\u2019s thermal protection system, leaving her helpless against the extreme temperatures of atmospheric reentry.<\/p>\n \u201cRockwell raised that as a red flag and said they were concerned with that,\u201d Harris remembered. \u201cThen, they and people at Johnson Space Center (JSC) did a number of computer modeling exercises where they determined falling ice would not be a problem as far as the thermal protection system was concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n While the risk of falling ice was dismissed, another issue, this time with the shuttle solid rocket boosters (SRBs), also was analyzed.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody at Kennedy had heard about the concern that the Thiokol engineers had and the conferences that they had with the people at Marshall Space Flight Center,\u201d Harris recalled.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody ended up saying to the launch director \u2018we\u2019re ready to go,\u2019 and the launch director, not knowing there was this back story there, felt that he really didn\u2019t have an option.\u201d<\/p>\n Challenger\u2019s right-hand SRB, crippled by the cold, would doom the mission.<\/p>\n \u201cLiftoff! Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower,\u201d with Harris\u2019 words now etched into history.<\/p>\n With Challenger\u2019s mission underway, control, as well as commentary for the mission shifted to JSC in Houston.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, KSC\u2019s launch control team watched the shuttle soar and prepared for post-launch activities. The vehicle arced skyward, billowing an ashen streak in her path. Challenger\u2019s main engines throttled up to 104 percent of rated performance.<\/p>\n A flame appeared on the right-hand SRB and grew to encompass the vehicle. The shuttle\u2019s external tank, struck by the flame, ruptured and hemorrhaged fuel as the right SRB began to break free, throwing the shuttle into unsustainable aerodynamic stresses.<\/p>\n Harris, along with the others in launch control, could only watch.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce it launched and got up to the point where we had the vehicle consumed in flames, that came as a real shock to the people that I observed in the firing room where I was sitting. It was one of those things that you just really can\u2019t quite comprehend,\u201d Harris said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf everything was okay to launch, then how did this happen? There was a real shock through the entire room. It was very quiet. People pulled out their contingency plans and had to start on the process of safing the pad, notifying the other proper agencies and doing what they actually had trained to do.<\/p>\n While his primary concern was informing the public and maintaining transparency, Harris found that NASA\u2019s immediate response to Challenger\u2019s breakup was marred by disjointed priorities.<\/p>\n While public affairs\u2019 contingency plans mandated speedily making high-ranking NASA managers available to the media, those managers\u2019 own plans prioritized other activities, such as reviewing flight imagery.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen everybody pulled out their plans and started looking at them, they were looking at what they had planned as opposed to what other people had planned on their behalf. So, it was a little bit ragged there.\u201d<\/p>\n In particular, news media sometimes wrote about recovery crews finding Challenger\u2019s wrecked crew cabin in the waters of the Atlantic before the cabin actually had been found.<\/p>\n \u201cIn some cases, I can remember a news person crying and saying they were likely to get fired because they didn\u2019t have a story and I wasn\u2019t giving it to them,\u201d Harris said. \u201cI was saying, \u2018I\u2019m giving you the right information.’\u201d<\/p>\n Return to Flight:<\/p>\n Rising from Challenger, NASA pressed onward to return to flight with the September 1988 launch of STS-26.<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s public affairs efforts improved in anticipation of the shuttle\u2019s return.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we tried to do was to make sure that the same mistakes weren\u2019t made again if there was another accident,\u201d Harris added.<\/p>\n With Challenger, remote-controlled news media cameras from around the launch pad were impounded by NASA immediately after the mishap in the hopes that the film inside the cameras would yield clues as to exactly what went wrong. As a result, media were cut off from their own accident footage.<\/p>\n For subsequent missions, NASA agreed to return cameras to news media as soon as safely possible, with the understanding that news media would share copies of their imagery with NASA.<\/p>\n \u201cNever again would you have an impounding of the press cameras and film and that sort of thing because a fear on the part of the technical people that information would be lost that would be vital to the investigation,\u201d Harris said.<\/p>\n NASA also increased its educational outreach following the accident.<\/p>\n \u201cI had great faith in all of the things that had been done. I had known how hard everyone had worked on trying to ensure that there was never another Challenger, knowing still that when you have that many systems and how complex they are, there\u2019s always a chance something can go wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though you\u2019ve tested something a lot of times, one of the problems is that if you test it too much, it\u2019s probably gonna break. There has to be a balance between testing it just enough and not wearing out whatever system you\u2019re testing.\u201d<\/p>\n The run-up to STS-26 saw Harris\u2019 promotion from chief of public information to deputy director of public affairs at KSC.<\/p>\n \u201cTheoretically, whoever was the chief of public information at that time and the other people who had been trained to be commentators would normally do that,\u201d Harris noted. \u201cHowever, the Director Chuck Hollinshead and the assistant administrator for public affairs at Headquarters said, \u2018no, you are the one who\u2019s going to do that.\u2019 And, of course, I was happy to do it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very comfortable doing commentary and I really wanted to be part of that launch, so I was very pleased. But, I would not have done it had I not been told that I should.\u201d<\/p>\n The success of STS-26 would determine the Shuttle program\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we had a second disaster at that point, I think the whole program would have been canceled,\u201d he noted. \u201cWe never would have built the International Space Station, serviced the Hubble Telescope and all the other things we did.\u201d<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s efforts succeeded.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a tremendous sigh of relief when the solid motors separated and it continued to climb into orbit,\u201d Harris recalled.<\/p>\n \u201cThere certainly were some muted cheers and everybody really relaxing a little bit more than they had before. Of course, once it gets off the pad, the people in the launch control center don\u2019t have much they can do to change things.\u201d<\/p>\n Director of Public Affairs and Onward:<\/p>\n By the 1990s, Harris had fully transferred commentary duties to his successors. In 1992, Chuck Hollinshead retired, and Harris took over as KSC\u2019s director of public affairs.<\/p>\n During his tenure, Harris oversaw radical improvements to KSC\u2019s visitor facilities.<\/p>\n One such improvement was the multi-million dollar construction of KSC\u2019s Saturn V Center, a building housing one of the three remaining Saturn V rockets along with other Apollo-era artifacts.<\/p>\n The Saturn V placed in the center had for years been exposed to the elements and needed restoration work to be readied for display.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Saturn V Center was something that involved a tremendous amount of time in the design and in very small details that I actually never would have expected to get involved in.<\/p>\n \u201cLooking at the educational activities in conjunction with what you talked about to the press and then what you talked about to the public through the visitor activities, it was very satisfying to be able to help have a cohesive message.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition, Harris created a volunteer program at KSC that allowed retirees to return to the center and continue to shape its direction.<\/p>\n Harris retired in 1998 after 35 years with NASA. He continues to work in the same KSC volunteer program that he established.<\/p>\n In addition to his volunteer duties, Harris continues to write about NASA.<\/p>\n In 2014, he released \u201cChallenger: An American Tragedy,\u201d an e-book covering the Challenger disaster while focusing on the people involved in the accident and its aftermath.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt that, at the time I was writing it, that this was long after it had been exhaustively investigated and covered by the media, and there were a number of books already on the subject,\u201d Harris added. \u201cI felt that the main contribution I could make was trying to have it be as much about people as possible. Because, in the long run, that\u2019s what the space program is about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The voice of Hugh Harris provided countdown commentary for the brave new era of the Space Shuttle Program during his illustrious NASA career. Mr. Harris confirmed liftoff to audiences worldwide for the victorious debut launch of Columbia, the tragic loss of Challenger and the fightback of Discovery\u2019s first Return To Flight mission. Starting at NASA: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7779,3757,9031,3439],"class_list":["post-39204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-shuttle","tag-sts-1","tag-sts-26","tag-sts-51l"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}See Also<\/h4>\n
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![\"2015-11-04-190852\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-190852-350x247.jpg\")
To prepare for the launch, Harris attended dozens of practice countdowns conducted by the shuttle launch control team.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-190935\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-190935-350x269.jpg\")
\u201cWe\u2019ve gone for main engine start. We have main engine start. And we have liftoff. Liftoff of America\u2019s first space shuttle! And the shuttle has cleared the tower,\u201d Harris said to audiences worldwide as Columbia soared to space for the first time.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-191016\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-191016-350x243.jpg\")
To learn how to conduct commentaries, trainees first would simply sit and observe launch commentaries. Then, they would take over commentary for early launch stages such as the fueling of the shuttles, he recalled.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-191124\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-191124-350x265.jpg\")
\u201cI gave what I used to the people as they were trained, and they in turn gave that sort of thing to the people they were training eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-190704\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-190704-350x233.jpg\")
\u201cGeorge Page was the launch director for the first launches,\u201d Harris said. \u201cHis orders to me were, \u2018I don\u2019t want you talking to anybody here in the control center.\u2019 Also, he made us put up a Plexiglas shield so that the person at the next console to me hopefully would be shielded from my voice in his ear.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-191933\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-191933-350x254.jpg\")
In 1986, plans were in place to begin shuttle flights from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-192328\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-192328-350x205.jpg\")
Liftoff was scheduled for the morning of January 28, 1986. Ice adorned KSC Launch Pad 39B, where Challenger stood poised for liftoff.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-192747\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-192747-350x263.jpg\")
The cold could compromise the joints of the SRBs, allowing scorching gas to shoot from the boosters\u2019 sides and onto the shuttle, said engineers at Morton-Thiokol, the company that built the boosters. This, too, was quietly dismissed by mission managers.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-192505\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-192505-350x280.jpg\")
Harris, seated in the Launch Control Center, proceeded with his commentary as the launch countdown ticked to zero. Challenger rumbled to motion and shot off the pad.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-193227\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-193227-350x304.jpg\")
Within seconds, Challenger flew into pieces and cascaded into the ocean, taking seven lives with her.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-193344\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-193344-350x241.jpg\")
\u201cI think people get through that, certainly in my case, because you know there are a lot of things that you\u2019ve got to do and you don\u2019t have time to be emotionally involved in what you\u2019ve seen happen in front of your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-192958\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-192958-350x234.jpg\")
Throughout the recovery and investigation following Challenger\u2019s loss, Harris observed that some members of the media were in a frenzy to obtain the latest news, even if they risked publishing mere rumor, he said.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-193102\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-193102-350x346.jpg\")
One initiative was in direct response to a media complaint regarding film footage access in the Challenger aftermath.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-200430\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-200430-350x344.jpg\")
When STS-26 Discovery lifted off and inaugurated the Shuttle program\u2019s second chance, Harris felt cautiously confident that the mission would be successful.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-193735\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-193735-350x272.jpg\")
While this promotion technically put commentary out of Harris\u2019 job description, NASA managers stipulated that he proceed with commentary for STS-26 regardless.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-193658\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-193658-350x256.jpg\")
When STS-26 Discovery roared skyward, she and her crew made it safely to orbit. From launch control, Harris observed a reassured launch team.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-200545\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-200545-350x249.jpg\")
\u201cIt\u2019s always a lot of fun to actually be able to influence events more than you can when you\u2019re at a lower level.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-200625\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-200625-350x249.jpg\")
Harris sought to establish a sense of unity across all of KSC\u2019s public interactions.<\/p>\n![\"2015-11-04-200803\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-04-200803-350x264.jpg\")
KSC\u2019s written public affairs content increasingly is generated by contractors, but the center will continue sharing a steady output of new discoveries and activities with the public.<\/p>\n