Robert Cenker, an East Windsor resident and former Columbia astronaut, discusses the shuttle tragedy and space flight.
By: David Pescatore
EAST WINDSOR Robert Cenker, like many other area residents, was devastated by the loss of the space shuttle Columbia on Saturday. He has a deeper understanding than most, however, because he has flown on the craft.
The shuttle broke apart when it tried to re-enter the atmosphere around 9 a.m. Saturday. Debris from the spacecraft rained down over Texas and other states. The crew of seven perished.
"An associate called me and asked if I had turned on the TV. The first thought that crossed my mind was that we had gone to war, but he said ‘no,’ it was Columbia… I was a mess."
Mr. Cenker, 54, an East Windsor resident who flew on Columbia Jan. 12-18, 1986, said that he "was always afraid this would happen. I was always more afraid of re-entry (than launch). On the ride up you have more options. You can abort. You can go to South Africa. You can come back to the Cape if the problem happens early enough."
He said the space flight was like taking a vacation.
"You are excited before the trip, but when you are coming home, you just want the ride to go smoothly," he said. "You don’t want any problems. You just want to get home again.
"When I was growing up, the re-entry was always one of the most frightening parts of watching the Gemini and Mercury missions because of the heat of re-entry and the blackout, when you couldn’t communicate. That was something I talked over with my father and we agreed, we were going to be more nervous during re-entry than launch."
Mr. Cenker’s space flight was the last before the Challenger exploded Jan. 28, 1986. The news of Columbia brought the memories of that crew rushing back to him.
"I had an apartment in the same development as Christa McAuliffe. When I got back, she was all excited and kept asking me what it was like. I told her, ‘We’ll talk when you get back,’ but that never happened. We never even traded pictures. We wanted to wait until we were both veterans."
Ms. McAuliffe, one of the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion, would have been the first civilian and first teacher to make a space voyage.
Mr. Cenker, who moved to Hickory Corner Road in East Windsor from Uniontown, Pa., served as a payload specialist during his six-day, 2.1 million-mile flight. He used an infrared imaging camera and observed the deployment of the RCA Satcom Ku-1 satellite.
Despite being an employee of RCA, he had to condition his body as any NASA astronaut would.
"Training was fun, but those are carnival rides. Your mind knows that it will end," he said.
Mr. Cenker said that training included being spun in a machine to simulate G-forces felt during takeoff, but that he knew that he was just spinning, so it was not the same as flight.
He said he "had a ball" during weightlessness training, when he flew in a KC-135 airplane that would ascend and descend rapidly, allowing riders to achieve a feeling of weightlessness for 25 seconds, during the descent, followed by 25 seconds of feeling twice the normal pull of gravity during ascent. The effects of this have led the plane to be nicknamed The Vomit Comet.
The actual space flight was entirely different.
"One of the most memorable moments was when I took off my harness in space and I sat back down in my seat like I was in the KC-135. Then I realized that this is not 25 seconds, this is the next five days."
Mr. Cenker marveled at the body’s ability to accept change. He said that weightlessness made him feel like he had been "hanging upside-down for about three hours" for the first day, but soon he adapted.
"On flight-day two or three, Pinky (astronaut George Nelson) said, ‘Why don’t you try living on the ceiling for a day?’ So I did," Mr. Cenker said. "It is incredible how egocentric we are because at first, yes, I was upside-down. But, after about two hours, I wasn’t upside-down anymore. I was on a lighted floor, and everyone else was upside-down. The only thing that screwed it up was that the writing on all of the lockers was upside-down."
"Mr. Cenker said that the heat shield tiles used on Columbia and other shuttles were not perfect, but the best solution available today.
"When you re-enter the atmosphere, you’re shedding all that energy that you pumped into (the shuttle) to get it into orbit," Mr. Cenker explained. That is why so much heat is produced upon re-entry.
He said that the tiles did a good job of insulating the ship and radiating heat, but that "they are stiff. They don’t flex with the aluminum skin of the shuttle, so there are spaces between them so that they can move with the skin."
"The demonstration I’ve seen people give," Mr. Cenker said, holding a 6-by-4-by-3-inch black tile from a previous Columbia mission, "is hold a tile (from one end), light a blowtorch and heat the other side until it was glowing red. It’s such a good insulator that one end is glowing red, but the other doesn’t get hot."
"It would be nice if we had a metal that just survived (the heat generated during re-entry), but we are not there in metallurgy."
He said it was not uncommon for the tiles to fall off.
"We thought that losing one would mean the loss of the orbiter. We came back and found that we lost six or seven tiles. We found out that we don’t know everything."
Mr. Cenker said there was nothing the crew of Columbia could have done to save themselves during re-entry.
"You’re flying at Mach-18, 18 times the speed of sound, and you have to dump this energy. The only mechanism we have for dumping the energy is the heat. If the heat is what is destroying you, there are no options. If you get into that position, all you can do is pray."
Reports indicate that the protective tiles on the underside of Columbia’s left wing may have been damaged during takeoff. But even if the damage could have been detected after launch, Mr. Cenker said nothing could have been done.
He explained that a robotic arm likely could not have repaired the damage and that there are about 25,000 different heat tiles, so carrying spares is not practical. In order for an astronaut to go out and fix the damage, he would have needed a man-maneuvering unit, an individual propulsion device. Mr. Cenker said that since they did not have an MMU, they would have needed hand-holds to reach the area, but Columbia was not equipped with them since there would be nothing anyone could do to that area of the ship.
Despite the tragedy, Mr. Cenker said that the space program should go on.
"It bothers me when people say we shouldn’t be doing this. We pay money to watch someone jump a motorcycle over school buses for our entertainment, but this is too dangerous?"
He said everyone knows the risk involved in space flight. "These people are not in the dark about the risk, but to me, the risk is worth it. I think of the firefighters and police that died on September 11th. People don’t say we shouldn’t do that anymore.
"Christa McAuliffe, she had a lot of questions, and the answer to a lot of those questions was ‘Well, if this happens, it’s a loss of crew. You’re going to die.’ You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what that means.
"I believe that mankind is always moving. We can either move forward or backward. If we end space exploration then I think it would be a step backward.
"You watch a little kid climb a tree and why does he want to climb a tree? Because he wants to go up. Why does he climb a fence? Because he wants to find out what is out there. It’s part of our nature. If we tell our kids that we shouldn’t be exploring, I don’t know where that leaves us."
He said unmanned probes were not enough.
"There isn’t a computer that is a gleam in someone’s eye, that can match the human mind."
Mr. Cenker, who currently works as an independent consultant in the area of spacecraft design, does not blame lack of government funding for the Columbia disaster, saying "space travel can never be safe." He does feel, however, that improvements could be made with a bigger budget.
"You make the best thing you’ve ever seen. Then, give me money and six months. I’ll make it better. I’m an engineer. That’s what I do. Bring another engineer in here with more money and more time and it will get better. So I think that at the end of this, there will be some soul searching, and they will make it better.
"Will it be safe? No. It will never be safe. Just like driving your car down Route 130 will never be safe. We have to draw a line in the sand with how much risk we are willing to take. Considering our forefathers came over here on boats, I find it a little bothersome that we are hung up on safety.
"NASA’s budget is currently less than 1 percent of the national budget. If it went away, you probably wouldn’t even notice it in your taxes," Mr. Cenker explained. "During the Apollo missions, NASA was 7 percent of the budget. I’m not saying that we need that, but if you doubled the current budget it would still only be around 1.5 percent."
Mr. Cenker’s belief about the future of our civilization drives his faith in NASA.
"I don’t believe that mankind is bound to the face of this planet. I don’t know if that will happen in my lifetime, my children’s lifetime or their children’s lifetime, but I believe that eventually, we will leave this planet. We are on the threshold."

