Previously-Unseen Photos of Challenger Disaster Appear Online 207
Nerval's Lobster writes "Twenty-six photos of the space shuttle Challenger disaster have appeared online. According to io9, "Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster of 1986. To his knowledge, these photos have never been publicly released." Hindes told the Website that the photographer was "a friend of his grandfather, who worked for NASA as an electrician on the Agency's hulking, spacecraft-schlepping crawler transporters." Someone at Reddit (which also has a lengthy thread devoted to the images) also threw together a GIF of the liftoff and subsequent explosion."
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Insightful)
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
Then, on Columbia's last mission, the managers ignored the engineers' concerns over the ice impact that had occurred on launch.
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:5, Insightful)
when I was a child. The odd thing, is that my memory is mostly about my father's reaction, and the look on his face. A look of shock and disbelief. The failure of infallible American tech.
It was the failure of 'infallible' American money.
Money and technology are such strange bedfellows. On the one hand the connection between them is obvious and inextricable, but on the other lies the question of progress. Money is required to develop and ultimately build a technology, and yet by virtue of the money invested that technology is expected to create money - usually more than was invested in the first place. So, in an way, from money's perspective all that technology is designed to do is to create money - anything else that technology does is a mere byproduct of the process of developing it to make more money.
In other words, according to money, any technology which does nothing but make more money is a perfect technology.
This might explain why things like FOSS and any "Open" technology movement is perceived as so vile and abominable a thing by money. How can a technology not take nor make money? I think it causes money to be a little nervous that technology can exist without it. After all, since money is anything accepted as payment for goods or services, doesn't that mean that money can actually be nothing?
And by the way I asked money if it cared that I anthropomorphize it and it said it couldn't care less.
Re:An oldie from back ni the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
That joke was never funny.
The amazing thing was not Challenger disaster. (Score:5, Insightful)
That it all worked so well was really amazing. It is tragic we lost two shuttles and their crew, but while we mourn the loss, and learn from the mistakes, let us not lose sight of the fact, the more amazing success of the remaining flights. We should define ourselves by the successes.
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? I always pinned it at the time when Gene Cernan made a little speech on the Moon and then we, as a species, packed up our shit and left, never to return. (There's no money in it, you see.)
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Insightful)
A Soyuz has a three person capacity.
You could use a Soyuz as a resupply vehicle, and a particularly large one at that if you get rid of all the reentry gear that you'll never use.
Apollo XIII showed that under pressure, equipment can be made to perform tasks very different than those it was designed to do. The only way to know if they could have been rescued was for NASA, Roscosmos, ESA and the Pentagon to each try their best to get supplies to them and find a way to bring them back. Maybe they would have failed, maybe they would have succeeded. Certainly with Apollo XIII no one knew if they would make it until they heard the signal from the capsule upon splashdown and the entire Com broke into applause.