Challenger 25 Years Later 236
25 years ago, I peered inside through the playground window of my school. I was never particularly interested in being outside, and there was a shuttle launch on the library TV! The images of what I saw that day will stick with me forever. I didn't know what it really was I saw; I just made jokes. It's still how I deal. But I think I'm a bit wiser today, having maybe learned that the bleeding edge is sometimes literal. The technology we take for granted descends directly from the people willing to do what we never could. Thanks to the crew of Challenger,
Columbia and Apollo 1.
Re:Too soon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single person in a mission control facility is trained to deal with disaster. And part of that training is... don't stop doing your job.
That telemetry data that he sits there and reads off "like an asshole" is actually quite invaluable data from a post-failure analysis point of view. He wouldn't be helping any if he were to stop reading the data and scream "Oh, the humanity!". He'd just be making noise and contributing to an already chaotic environment.
Stoicism Sometimes a Necessity (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, my memory if it is actually a funny one. I remember chuckling at the guy still reading the telemetry data as if nothing had gone wrong after it blew up. I remember thinking "Hey asshole, you might want to look at your monitor." And even when he did realize something had gone wrong, I remember him calling it something like a "major malfunction." Yeah, major malfunction, no shit.
In his defense, there's not a lot of room for emotion in that line of work. And said emotion often leads to inefficiencies. Imagine what sort of data might have been missed had he exploded in tears and rushed out of the room. While information is still coming in, remaining stoic is probably the optimal course of action for such a position.
No dieing to push the envelope. Plain old go fever (Score:2, Insightful)
This was a waste of perfectly good life. Not a race to push technology to new limits.
Like Columbia, this was an example of short-cutting and not listening to nay-sayer engineers who turned out to be correct. And simply not following the safety rules that NASA itself established.
Re:Hell of a Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too soon? (Score:4, Insightful)
The guy was struggling with what to say. I think the quote was something like "umm... obviously, a major malfunction".
What do you expect someone to say in that situation?
Re:No dieing to push the envelope. Plain old go fe (Score:5, Insightful)
From a maintainer's perspective . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
An earlier comment talked about remaining stoic at mission/launch control. It's the same for the knuckle-draggers on the ground as well. If anything, those directly involved with the launch have the hardest job. I personally don't think that I could have handled something like this the way that they did, so for that, I salute them and only hope that I can be half as awesome as they were on that day.
Re:Stoicism Sometimes a Necessity (Score:4, Insightful)
and clamping emotion down has sold probably thousands of gallons of Jack Daniels.
Re:Hell of a Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Only last year, during the Vancouver Olympics, I saw the most disturbing footage ever.
Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed in a luge run when his sled flew out of a corner and he crashed into a steel support girder. The reverberant *thwangggggggg* followed by no movement and otherwise complete silence is the stuff of nightmares.
And people freak out about a nipple.
Re:Too soon? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I've watched it in later years, though, I'm most struck by his professionalism and commitment to his job. This guy had to know his voice was being broadcast around the world, and that this was the most watched shuttle launch in years (possibly ever). He was probably himself just realizing from the data (I'm not sure he even had the video feed available to him at the time) that something horrible had just happened, and people he probably knew and worked with had likely just died. Through all that, he kept a measured tone and suppressed whatever emotion he might have been feeling. His calm monotone and understated assessment of the situation was the perfect backdrop to the utter shock everyone was feeling at that moment. Having that guy panic or lose his shit would have made the whole thing much much worse.
Mod parent up (Score:0, Insightful)
Mod parent up
Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
And not forgetting (Score:5, Insightful)
> Thanks to the crew of Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1.
And Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11 and all the astronauts and engineers of whom we seldom hear who are listed here [members.shaw.ca] but who all gave their lives for the cause.
Re:Root cause: politics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as usual, it's not nearly so simple as that.
The reality, that when the hardware decisions were being made - we had exactly zero flight experience with big monolithic solids and considerable flight experience with segmented solids. There's also the near impossibility of pouring the grain of a monolithic solid with sufficient consistency in performance, let alone matching two of them to required level of consistency. Then there's near impossibility of handling a million plus pounds worth of monolithic grain without flexing it and damaging the grain or the bond between the grain and the case.
So in reality, there was many reasons to prefer segmented boosters and no particular reason to prefer monolithic ones. (Which is why of the three bids submitted - only one was monolithic.)
You're also making the mistake of generalizing from the specific instance of the Shuttle to all segmented booster. The cause of the Challenger accident wasn't because the booster was segmented (we've flown many with zero problems), but because that particular joint design had a serious flaw in that it could not fully compensate for joint rotation.