Francis Scobee 1939-1986

The commanding officer of Challenger was a late bloomer. Born in the rural Washington town of Cle Elum (an Indian name meaning swift water), the son of a railroad engineer, Francis R. (“Dick”) Scobee began his flying career unglamorously, as an 18-year-old enlisted Air Force mechanic. By attending night school and enrolling in service education programs, he eventually won a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona that helped him qualify to become an officer and a pilot.

Scobee’s fascination with aviation developed early. Ruth Fletcher, a classmate, remembers that he drew pictures of airplanes in spare moments throughout elementary school. At Auburn High School, south of Seattle, Scobee was a lineman on the football team, the Trojans, and a part-time grocery clerk at a Safeway store, but he excelled neither on the field nor off. “He was never a class officer, not the star athlete, just one of the bunch,” said his coach, Forrest Wohlhueter. “When he went into the Air Force as an enlisted man, that’s about where I figured he would head.”

Scobee found his true potential in the skies. After winning his Air Force wings in 1966, he logged more than 6,500 hours of flying time in 45 types of aircraft, ranging from the experimental X-24B to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet to the Caribou C-7 he flew on combat missions in Viet Nam. Scobee entered astronaut training in 1978 and helped fly the 747 that carried the shuttle spacecraft between ground stations. As pilot of Challenger in 1984, he guided the spacecraft so that fellow crew members could retrieve a broken Solar Max satellite, which was repaired on board and later placed back into orbit. At an in-flight press conference, Scobee and the mission’s four other astronauts showed up in T shirts that read ACE SATELLITE REPAIR CO.

Scobee carried his fascination with flying to his home in suburban Houston, where he lived with his wife June and their two children. He and Astronaut James van Hoften built a two-seat, open-cockpit Starduster plane and flew it cross-country. The craft, made of wood and fabric, had no radio. Reflecting on this convergence of his work and leisure pursuits, Scobee once observed, “You know, it’s a real crime to be paid for a job that I have so much fun doing.” For all his accomplishments in the skies, however, Scobee was scrupulously modest. “He just wasn’t one to sound off on his own,” said a friend, Bill Almon of Yakima, Wash. But once the conversation turned to space, Almon added, “you could see the gleam in his eye, and he would want to talk about it.”

After Scobee completed his first shuttle mission, in 1984, he told Almon he “would give absolutely anything to experience the exhilaration of lift-off once again.” On that mission, he carried a 2-ft. by 4-ft. banner made for him by students at Auburn High. It said, TROJANS FLY HIGH WITH SCOBEE. School officials announced last week that the banner would be put on display to remind other seemingly ordinary students that they too can fly high.