Хьюстон хотын Клеар Лэйк ахлах сургуулийн сурагчдын гарын үсэг бүхий хөлбөмбөгийн бөмбөг 1986 онд Чалленжер хөлөгтэй хамт сансарт хөөрөхөөр төлөвлөгдөж байсан ч эмгэнэлт ослын улмаас тасалдсан юм. Астронавт Эллисон Онизукагийн охин Жанеллегийн багийнхны бэлэглэсэн уг бөмбөгийг осол гарсан газарт хайгуул хийх явцад олж, гэр бүлд нь буцаан олгожээ.
Олон жилийн турш сургуулийн архив болон шүүгээнүүдэд мартагдсан байсан уг бөмбөгийг 2016 онд астронавт Шэйн Кимброу сансрын станц руу авч явахаар шийдвэрлэснээр түүхэн аялал нь биеллээ олсон байна. Кимброу дэлхийг 2,768 удаа тойрохдоо уг бөмбөгийг ашиглан сансрын уудамд гайхалтай зураг авсан нь Эллисон Онизукагийн биелээгүй үлдсэн хүсэл, түүний гэр бүл болон олон нийтийн хүндэтгэлийг илэрхийлсэн үйл явдал болжээ.
Дэлхийн аварга шалгаруулах тэмцээний үеэр уг бөмбөгийг Хьюстоны сансрын төвд олон нийтэд дэлгэн үзүүлж байна. Энэхүү түүхэн үзмэр нь хөлбөмбөгийн спортыг сансар судлалтай холбож, астронавтуудын нийгэмлэгийн нэгдмэл байдал болон хүний сэтгэлийн тэнхээг харуулсан чухал дурсгал болон хадгалагдаж байна.
Дэлгэрэнгүй эх сурвалжийг харах
Эх сурвалжийг нээх ↓
It is January 1986, and Janelle Onizuka is at soccer training.
Her team, from Clear Lake High School in Houston, is preparing for a state championship game. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots a figure approaching.l
The figure is both familiar and unfamiliar: familiar because it’s her father, Ellison. Unfamiliar because he is supposed to be in quarantine as he prepares for his trip into space aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle.
“I’m thinking, no, no, no, that’s not him; he’s in quarantine,” Janelle says.
“This one particular portion of this field had a small creek, and we would always put a wooden board to jump over, because we didn’t want to step in the mud. I see my dad coming, and he takes that one leap.”
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Ellison has snuck out of his pre-flight isolation, designed to reduce the chances of getting ill in space, so he can collect a special item he is planning to take with him. It’s a soccer ball — specifically, a soccer ball that had been signed by Janelle’s whole team. Which is another surprise for her: when she signed the ball, she didn’t realise its purpose, something Ellison and her coach conspired on. Someone has written ‘Good luck, shuttle crew!’ on one of the panels.
“The coach brings out the ball, and she handed it to me, and I handed it to my dad,” says Janelle. “That was literally my last, fondest memory of my father, handing him the ball, and him having to rush back to crew quarters, and taking that leap again across that creek.
“When I drive by that field, I shed a tear every now and then, because… that’s all I have left.”
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Thirty years later, in 2016, Shane Kimbrough is talking to Dr Karen Engle, the principal of Clear Lake High.
The school is less than 10 minutes’ drive from Johnson Space Center, so it’s not unusual for the children of astronauts and other people in the space programme to go there, as Kimbrough’s daughters do, and as Ellison Onizuka’s children did.
Kimbrough is preparing for a four-month stint on the International Space Station (ISS), and like Ellison, he is looking for something to take with him to space. So he asks Dr Engle.
“She suggested a few things initially,” says Kimbrough now, “and then came back a few days later and said, ‘Hey, we found this soccer ball’.”
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after taking off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The cause was eventually found to be the failure of some O-rings, which were supposed to seal and contain the hot, high-pressure gases required to launch the shuttle into space.
The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes in 1986 (Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Frederick Gregory (foreground) and Richard O Covey, spacecraft communicators at Mission Control in Houston, watch helplessly (Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
All seven crew members aboard, including Ellison and Christa McAuliffe — a teacher who was supposed to be the first American civilian in space — were killed. The explosion was broadcast live on TV.
(Front to back) Schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, mission specialist Ellison Onizuka and payload specialist Gregory Jarvis make their way to the launch of the Challenger (Janet Knott/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
On board the shuttle was Janelle’s soccer ball, stashed in a metal locker along with a few other items Ellison had picked, including a football from his alma mater, the University of Colorado, and a flag from his native Hawaii. Other astronauts had taken items as varied as a baby’s shoe, a Girl Scout pin, assorted pieces of jewellery, a copy of the U.S. Constitution and a stuffed animal.
The Coast Guard, led by Air Force Colonel Edward O’Connor, was dispatched to search the sea off the Florida coast. They spent seven months scouring the ocean, the primary purpose being to retrieve sections of the shuttle to help determine the cause of the disaster. But among the pieces of fuselage, booster rockets and the two satellites the shuttle had been scheduled to take into space, they also found Ellison’s locker.
Once it was established who the ball — still in astonishingly good shape, considering — and the other items belonged to, they were returned to the Onizuka family: to Janelle, her sister Darien and their mother Lorna.
“I was speechless,” says Janelle. “And I was emotional because I still had that vision of when I handed him that ball, seeing his face, his smile, hearing the last words of, ‘I love you, and I’ll see you when I get back’.
“It was hard. But at the same time I was also excited, because they found something of mine from him.”
Janelle thought about what she wanted to do with the ball. She thought about keeping it at home, but eventually decided to return it to where its journey began, back at Clear Lake High School. At the end of every year, the soccer team had a banquet, and that’s when the Onizukas presented it to their old coach and the principal of the school.
The ball was put into the trophy display cabinet, the sort that most schools have. But there was no plaque, nothing to really mark it out, nothing to make clear what an extraordinary artefact this was. It was still in that cabinet when Darien Onizuka graduated in 1993, but over the following years, it became forgotten. There were renovations; the cabinet was replaced, the ball was taken out and people essentially lost track of it.
Jered Shriver’s father Loren was an astronaut who accompanied Ellison on his first space flight in 1985, a year before the Challenger disaster. Both Jered and his sister Camilla went to Clear Lake, and Camilla was one of Janelle’s team-mates who signed the ball. The families were, and still are, very close.
In 1997, Jered Shriver started coaching the boys’ soccer team, and a couple of years later got a full-time job there as a teacher. The offices at Clear Lake were a bit of a warren, interconnecting rooms and corridors with filing cabinets stacked wherever there was room. As he navigated this warren, something would frequently catch his eye, an object resting on top of some of those filing cabinets that looked oddly out of place.
After a while, he picked it up. Turned it over in his hands. “I saw Camilla’s name on it, and I thought, ‘Why the hell is my sister’s name on this ball?’” Shriver says. “Then I saw the message, ‘Good Luck Shuttle Crew’, and that’s when I realised what I was holding.
“I didn’t really know what to do with it, because even though I showed people, nobody really showed any urgency to do anything with it.”
Loren Shriver, right, in space with Ellison Onizuka (Jered Shriver)
The school was going through a period of leadership flux. A few principals came and went. Shriver didn’t want to entrust it to someone he didn’t know and who didn’t really understand its significance. He nearly gave it to his own father because of his deep history and connection with the Onizukas. But it stayed in his office for a while.
Eventually, it was returned to the display cabinet, but again, it was never really marked out for what it was. It took another parent to email Dr Engle, after she had become principal a few years later, for people to fully realise its significance. This was shortly after Kimbrough had spoken to Dr Engle about what he could take with him. She suggested the ball.
“I was like, wait, tell me the story,” says Kimbrough. “I was blown away. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to find room for that’. Once I heard that story, I wanted to get it to its intended destination.”
Only a select group of people, including Shriver, Dr Engle and Kimbrough, knew he was taking it with him. There was a concern that it could be thought of as some sort of bad-luck charm. Shriver was charged with carefully deflating the ball so it could be taken into space without a risk of it bursting. “We went into this empty room in the back of the office so that nobody could see what we were doing,” he says. “Karen videoed me doing it just for posterity’s sake.”
On October 19, 2016, Kimbrough and the ball travelled to the ISS. It was Kimbrough’s second time in space, and he would go once more in 2020. The ball’s journey, which started in 1986, was complete.
Kimbrough was aboard the ISS for four months. He and the ball orbited Earth 2,768 times. During his time there, he re-inflated it and captured what is probably the most remarkable photograph ever taken of a soccer ball, floating weightless in the Cupola, the station’s observation module, the blue of Earth in the background.
“I think the family really just appreciated seeing it in orbit, like it was supposed to be,” says Kimbrough.
They did. “For Mr Kimbrough to do what he did, that is… that’s beyond something I can even describe, what he did for my father and for us,” says Janelle.
Things were still kept under wraps, initially. The photo theoretically had to be approved by NASA before anyone could know, and certainly before it was published. But Kimbrough was able to send a copy of it to Dr Engle from the ISS.
“Karen and I were walking down the hallway together,” says Shriver, “when she received an email from Shane from space, with the pictures he had taken. We both just sat down and cried in the hallway because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
When he returned to Earth, Kimbrough took the ball home. He presented it to the Onizuka family in a ceremony at half-time of a football game, attended by the whole team that originally signed the ball in 1986. “I got to say a few words and then give the ball back to Lorna,” says Kimbrough. “She was visibly very emotional, but her tears were happy tears, I think.”
The Onizukas then returned the ball, along with a signed photo of the Challenger crew, to Dr Engle and Clear Lake. This time they made sure it wouldn’t be forgotten, and both the ball and the signed photo were put in a special display case near the entrance of the school. That is where it stayed, until 2026.
Paul Spana is the director of collections and the curator at the Space Center Houston. He has worked there for 22 years. He knows pretty much all there is to know about the history of the American space programme. Get him talking about the minutiae of space travel and the things he has discovered in the course of his work, and you’ll lose track of time as quickly as he does.
But until the Space Center started planning what it would do to mark the World Cup arriving in Houston, even he didn’t know about Ellison Onizuka’s soccer ball.
For the duration of the World Cup, the ball is on loan to the Space Center. The choice was obvious: something that links soccer, Houston and the space programme, and has a remarkable backstory. It’s front and centre, essentially the first thing you see when you walk through the entrance, presented in a six-foot-high (183cm) display case with a copy of Kimbrough’s photo behind it.
“It’s a very special item,” says Spana. “We needed to do it right.”
The ball on display at the Space Center in Houston during the World Cup (Space Center Houston)
Janelle quietly went to see it a few weeks ago. Kimbrough didn’t know and was there for another reason as they were setting up the display. “I was like, ‘Hey, what’s that over there?’”
Because of its prominent position, it’s often the first thing families and tour groups look at before they disperse left or right to visit the Artemis exhibit or climb aboard a replica space shuttle. Kids, many of them wearing replica shirts of teams at the World Cup, stop and discover this extraordinary artefact of the game.
The ball will return to Clear Lake after the tournament is over, but Spana and the Space Center will send with it some tips on how to maintain its condition, which, considering everything, is still remarkably good.
At the Space Center, it sits in specialist glass to shield it from ultraviolet light. They’ve also taken steps to ensure as little moisture as possible affects it too: there are two boxes of silica gel — those little white packets you get in boxes of electrical items that you immediately throw away — underneath the plinth the ball sits on.
“It’s just a soccer ball,” says Spana. “But it’s an excellent example of the community here. It shows that astronauts are just like you and I.”
Not far from both Clear Lake High and the Space Center is a football stadium. It’s named the Challenger Columbia Stadium, after the shuttle that crashed with Ellison Onizuka on board, and the shuttle that disintegrated on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003.
That’s where students from Clear Lake have their graduation ceremony, students who have so far included two of Janelle’s three sons, Hunter and Mason (the third, Nicholas, went to another school to play baseball), plus Janelle’s nephew and in the future will also include her daughter Caitlin.
“It’s a bigger honour that they get to graduate in their grandfather’s stadium,” says Janelle.
Lorna Onizuka passed away a couple of years ago. Ellison lives on through his grandchildren, but it’s important to everyone involved that even when they have moved on, nobody at Clear Lake forgets him. Which is why the ball is so important, to the family and this community that is so entwined with the space programme. They don’t want a return to the situation where the ball was just on top of a filing cabinet that people walked past and ignored.
“Nobody said, ‘Hey, look, we have this ball, this is really amazing,’” says Shriver. “Nobody really knew the story, and nobody knew the people that were involved in the story.”
For Kimbrough, the importance of the ball is connected to the community around the Space Center, which Clear Lake is central to.
“We were part of the same community, right?’ Kimbrough says. “This crazy world where you’re sending your spouses on a rocket and you hope they come back. It’s very, very dangerous, high risk in the community that we’ve lived in.
“Our families never got used to it, but it was just how they grew up, how our kids grew up, how our spouses grew up. We put them under an immense amount of stress. It’s a huge responsibility we have, but we don’t take it lightly.
“That’s why it’s so important that we did something like this. I got to just give a little piece back, to complete Ellison’s mission.”
It’s 40 years since the Challenger disaster, since Janelle last saw her father, skipping over that creek with the ball in his hands. And it’s now 10 years since the ball completed its intended journey and went into space with Kimbrough.
“I was very thankful,” says Janelle. “I told Shane that I never thought my father’s mission would be complete, that this ball would go into space and then return home. I told him there are no words to thank him and the gratitude that I have.
“I did get teary-eyed with him, and I shared some of the sadness and emotions. To me, that’s the closest I’ll ever get to whatever I have left of my dad.”
