Du Quoin Woman Worked in NASA Budget Office During 'Challenger' Disaster

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[For Elizabeth Morris, now 53, the haunting memories of the January 28, 1986 Challenger disaster on an otherwise gorgeous morning in South Florida pale by her fear that the United States has lost its imagination.

Its desire to explore. Its desire to be the FIRST.

"The space shuttle program is done," said the Du Quoin native from her Titusville home Wednesday night. Elizabeth is the daughter of Phyllis (Morris) Blanchard and the late Gene Morris.

"The space shuttle program is done," said the Du Quoin native from her Titusville home Wednesday night. Elizabeth is the daughter of Phyllis (Morris) Blanchard and the late Gene Morris.

She left Du Quoin to ultimately become one of the budget managers for NASA's shuttle program. She is one of the few NASA administrative employees whose careers traversed both the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003. "Much of the staff was older and had already retired," she said.

Health issues resulted in Elizabeth's own retirement with full medical disability benefits in 2005. She continues to make Titusville--a short drive from Cape Canaveral--her home.

"When Columbia blew I knew how to get NASA's books straight," she said, having put the pieces back together after Challenger. "I was one of the few people who knew how to do that," she remembers. "It felt like de-ja vu," she said.

"The lost shuttle meant lost lives," she said. Like many, Elizabeth had stepped outside on that chilly January 28 morning to watch the shuttle launch. Disaster unfolded before her eyes. She didn't see the Columbia disaster in 2003, which rained debris over a 150-mile path in Texas.

"It's different when you see it live," she said. "All of our engineers at NASA were traumatized," she said. "They close the administration building for the weekend and on Monday coming back was 'by invitation only from the FBI'," she said.

"It was a guarded office for six months."

They (the engineers) all knew how dangerous this was.

"With rockets you have a big bomb. It is a controlled explosion," she said. As one engineer put it, "It's the largest hydrogen container on earth, then somebody lights it from underneath."

"I started getting weird procurement requests," she said. NASA and Congress were writing blank checks to find out what happened. "We hired boats and salvage ships. We cleaned up paper for six or seven months after it happened," she said. "We didn't have the money to pay for what we were doing. No one ever questioned what we spent. It was all necessary," she said.

At the time there were four space shuttles and it took 30 months before Elizabeth--and the world--would see another launch.

"It was a long two years," she said. "I never thought we would ever have a space station, let alone people in it," she adds.

"My real feeling now is utter disappointment," she said. "We are down to two flights and can't even do it without the help of other countries," she said. "We have no followup to put people back into space," she said. "They can't do it without a different kind of launch vehicle," she said. "Bush cancelled the program, then started the Constellation program. That was killed two years ago. We are launching some commercial rockets and satellites. That's about it."

"But, the shuttle program is dead and will not be revived. It will be China or Japan or somebody else that does the exploring now," she said. "We are not going to take chances anymore."

There are risks and casualties to exploration of any kind, but she fears no one has the courage to take them nor to go "where no man has gone before."

We have lost Kennedy's vision to put men on the moon and to go beyond.

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, United States at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC).

Disintegration of the shuttle stack began 73 seconds into its flight after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff.

The seal failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it filled, allowing a flare to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent attachment hardware and external fuel tank. The SRB breach flare led to the separation of the right-hand SRB and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter. The shuttle was destroyed and all seven crew members were killed. The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. The partial remains of two astronauts were returned to two family members. Other indistinguishable remains are buried in a common grave at Arlington.