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I wrote most, if not all, of the Apollo launches under my own name, the fire that killed three astronauts on the ground and the Challenger disaster under the byline of Al Rossiter, a fine writer himself. The thumbsucker about explorers was written after the loss of Challenger.

apollo

    CAPE KENNEDY (UPI) -- Apollo 8, bursting the bonds of earth in history's greatest adventure, carried three astronauts into interplanetary space today on man's first voyage around the moon.

    "We look good here," reported laconic command pilot Frank Borman as he and his crewmen, James Lovell and William Anders, hurtled through space faster and deeper than men had ever gone before.

    The flawless five-minute blast from the third stage of the mighty Saturn rocket hurled Apollo 8 a thousand miles into space in less than 10 minutes from a 118-mile high aiming orbit around earth....

challenger

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (UPI) -- The shuttle Challenger exploded in a boiling ball of flame 72 seconds after blastoff Tuesday, killing teacher Christa McAuliffe and her six crewmates in the worst space tragedy since man began reaching for the stars 25 years ago.

    Ships, planes and helicopters rushed to a vast area 50 miles off the Florida coast where flaming debris rained down for half an hour after the mighty explosion, but all they found were parts of Challenger's booster rockets.

    "I regret that I have to report that based on very preliminary searches of the ocean where Challenger impacted this morning, these seaches have not revealed any evidence that the crew of the Challenger survived," said Jesse Moore, chief of the shuttle program, five hours after the explosion.

    The shuttle, loaded at launch with nearly a half million gallons of explosive hydrogen and oxygen, carried no emergency escape system.

    It was 10 miles high when it erupted into flames. The earth shaking roar of blastoff had subsided and the majestic contrail following Challenger into space turned silently into a serpent of smoke and fire writhing across the sky.

    On board the Challenger were Commander Francis "Dick" Scobee, 46; co-pilot Michael Smith, 40; Judith Resnik, 36; Ellison Onizuka, 39; Ronald McNair, 35; satellite engineer Gregory Jarvis, 41, and McAuliffe, the 37-year-old Concord, N.H. social studies teacher piced from 11,000 candidates to be the first private citizen in space. They were the first Americans to die on a mission into space.

    "It's been nearly a quarter of a century that we thought this might happen sometime," said Sen. John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to orbit the earth. "We hoped that day would never come. Unfortunately, it has."

    Cries of horror went up at viewing sites along the coast when the shuttle exploded at 11:39 a.m. EST, spewing burning pieces like a massive fireworks display. A shocked nation watched the replays moments later on television....

*************************************************

   EDITOR'S NOTE: UPI National Editor Jack Warner has been covering the space program since the days of the Mercury flights. In the following dispatch he draws parallels between the astronauts of Challenger and other explorers who dared the unknown and never returned.

    (UPI)  -    Fifty five times American men and women rode thundering rivers of flame and smoke into the vastness of space and returned to smile and wave.

    So routine did success become that when luck finally ran out and seven of them died, the nation had to be reminded that they were explorers, not tourists.

    Death rides always at the right hand of the explorer; it must be so. Where there is no danger there is no need for explorers. Placid waters can be charted by Sunday Sailors without calling in the pioneers.

    "We hoped we could push this day back forever," said John Glenn, a pioneer already enshrined in the pantheon of American heroism.

    "Pioneers have had tragedy before, and tragedy will occur again," said Rep. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who rode the last shuttle to return.

    The five men and two women who vanished in the hideous ball of flame that destroyed Challenger joined untold hundreds of explorers, some of them great, some of them merely noted, and most of them utterly anonymous, who ventured into the unknown and never returned.

    Modern communications gives all the world a part in the adventure now. We no longer have to wait for the sails to appear on the horizon to learn what our explorers found; nor do we have to wonder what happened when the ships never return.

    Perhaps no other spots on the face of the Earth come closer to the pitiless hostility of outer space than the polar regions; they have attracted singular feats of endurance and courage and exacted a grim toll of lives.

    It was in 1597 -- just 70 years after Ferdinand Magellan was skewered by enraged natives in the Philippines -- that the Dutchman Willem Barents died in the Arctic, sadly, after leading his ice-bound party through the first winter men are known to have survived there.

    One of the great mysteries of the last century began in May 1845 when 129 men under Sir John Franklin sailed from England aboard the ships Erebus and Terror in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient.

    They vanished in the frozen Artic. To discover the fate of the Franklin expedition became the goal of every adventurer.

    An expedition led by Dr. John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company departed Repulse Bay in 1853 and, a year later, got word of the missing explorers from an Eskimo. Rae crossed the Ross Strait to King William Island and there, along the southwestern coast, he found the bodies of some of Franklin's men. They lay in a long, staggered line, where they had fallen in a hopeless attempt to walk south to civilization.

    But there was no evidence of what had become of Sir John. His widow, Lady Jane, could not rest. She financed several expeditions, the last one led in 1857 by Capt. Francis McClintock, the greatest Arctic sledger.

    Again acting on information from Eskimos, McClintock made his way to Victory Point and there found the remains of Terror and Erebus and their captain, frozen fast in the ice, with the record written down and left by Franklin's men when they began their doomed trek south.

    In the early part of this century they eyes of explorers turned south to Antarctica, and in 1911 the news of Peary's successful drive to the North Pole spurred a race to the South Pole -- perhaps not unlike the way the launch of the Soviet Sputniks galvanized America 30 years later.

    The great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his party won the race, reaching the pole Dec. 14. They planted the Norwegian flag, lingered a couple of days and departed for safety.

    On their heels was the British Naval Capt. Robert Falcon Scott, who set off from McMurdo Sound on Nov. 1 with four companions on Siberian ponies. The horses proved useless, and the expedition would up manhandling its supplies on sledges through temperatures that fell as low as 58 below zero.

    On Jan. 18, 1912, after the longest sledge journey men have ever made -- an incredible 1,842 miles -- Scott and his men arrived at the South Pole to find Amundsen's tent and a note he cheerfully had left for Scott.

    Broken-hearted and exhausted, they started back in the teeth of the howling Antarctic gales. Two of the men died not long after they left. Scott and two others reached a point only 11 miles from the One Ton Camp and safety.  But a blizzard pinned them down, and in two days they were dead of starvation and exposure.

    It was in 1928 that an expedition led by the Italian Umberto Nobile came to grief in the Arctic, and Amundsen and five companions set out from Norway in airplane to find them. The great explorer and his friends vanished; no trace of them has ever been found

    Exploration and adventure on the face of the Earth didn't stop with the conquering of the poles; it goes on, and men still died of it.

    The taciturn New England sea Captain Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, set out from New Bedford in his beloved sloop Spray in 1909 and vanished without a trace; Col. Percy Fawcett, the British explorer of the rain forests of South America, led an expedition into the Amazon jungles and never returned; the pioneer aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator disappeared in the Pacific in a 1937 attempt to flly around the world; and in 1961, Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on an expedition to study a newly-discovered tribe in New Guinea.

    None died the public deaths of those aboard the Challenger, riveting the world in horror. But those who died in that expensive flash of fir4e and the uncounted hundreds who died a lone in strange and hostile lands all sought the same goal -- to push back the walls, to see whatever it is that is just out of sight.

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