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Science

NASA Was Prepared to Silence Stranded Moon Astronauts 325

Posted by Roblimo from the yet-another-dirty-government-secret dept.
LarsWestergren writes "The BBC has an interesting article about some NASA documents which have been secret for 30 years, which reveal that if the astronauts of the first moon landing had been stranded because of some technical problem, communications would have been cut and they would have been left to die in silence. Richard Nixon even had a patriotic speech prepared for the possibility. The astronauts, however, did not know about this. "
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NASA Was Prepared to Silence Stranded Moon Astronauts More

NASA Was Prepared to Silence Stranded Moon Astronauts

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  • One of the stories I heard has it that the re-entry capsule skipped off the atmosphere because the angle of entry was miscalculated (a very real danger, I'm told). Russian Space Command had contact with them for two days while they fell towards the sun, until they ran out of oxygen. The plan in that case was for them to crack their suits and the pod and go out quick, but they didn't.
  • First of all, NASA had a plan for everything. They tested every possible failure they could think of. If you look over all the Apollo flights, you'll see that they recovered quite nicely from all sorts of problems - some, like Apollo 13, quite major. Not once did they accept failure or abandon anyone. Even during/after the Apollo 1 fire, rescue workers continued to do everything possible to pull the men from the command module - even though they knew the odds of their surviving the fire were practically zero.

    Had NASA planned to just "switch off" the signal from a failed mission, why work around-the-clock to rescue Apollo 13? At the time, many - if not most - of the engineers working on saving the flight believed the three men aboard were as good as dead.

    As for the quote about NASA not knowing if the LM's ascent module would be able to return from the surface, it was extensively tested - as were all the other parts of the Apollo spacecraft - before being used for it's intended purpose. If you get right down to it, sure, they didn't know for sure if it would work. However, they (the engineers) had a pretty damn good idea or they (the astronauts - most also engineers) weren't about to try it.

    There were no "suicide pills" or other precautions for total failure. Total failure simply wasn't an option.

    I can go on and on, but for those who really want the truth and an excellent "behind-the-scenes" look at NASA during Apollo should read Andrew Chaikin's book "A Man On the Moon" (which, by the way, is what Tom Hank's based the HBO special "From the Earth to the Moon" on - also excellent).

    I'm surprised by how many Slashdot readers are quick to jump on the cover-up bandwagon and post replies when they clearly don't have a clue what they're talking about. Come on folks, Slashdot is supposed to be for _smart_ people!

    Scott
  • While it is true that Nasa would be unable to launch a rescue party in time to save their lives, I seriously doubt that nasa would have just cut communications and left them to die out there.

    I am certain that in the event of a failure, nasa would have stayed online til the bitter end helping the astronauts try to fix the problems. Leaving them stranded goes against every philosophy that Nasa and the United States stand for. Certainly there were risks, and the astronauts were well aware of those risks, but they were also aware that if a problem developed, and it was unlikely there would be no problems at all, that Nasa would spend every last moment of those astronaut's lives trying to come up with a solution.

    Certainly, Nasa would take a big hit if such a catastophic problem occurred, but I think that the citizens of the united states would be much more willing to support Nasa in the future if they saw a group of thousands that went days without sleeping in an attempt, however futile, to save those astronauts lives. It would not be possible to avoid news leaks with that many people involved who were completely aware of the issue.

    I'm not saying that nobody ever considered this plan. Anytime there's a crisis, or even a potential crisis, people get paid to present potential solutions, no matter how off the wall, or how politically damaging those solutions may be. Someone might very well have presented the idea that if something went wrong, we cut communications and leave them to die. But just because that plan was presented, along with thousands of much better ones, doesn't mean that it was ever seriously considered a valid option.

    And even if they DID decide to cut communications, Michael Collins (I think that's his name) was still in orbit around the moon and would have been unaffected by this problem, so he'd still have to return to Earth. He would be VERY aware of what was happening, and Nasa certainly wouldn't leave HIM to die out there, considering he was still able to return.

    I'm also not positive that the two men dying on the moon would have caused the end of the space program. 3 astronauts had died already before that, and it didn't kill the space program. Perhaps all the ciitizens of the US witnessing their death would have brought endless critism, but those men would have been martyrs, and people having witnessed these men dying to advance the space program, and therefore the country they loved, would in retrospect have probably brought more support for the program.

    -Restil

  • Is there any reason to believe that Houston could remotely deactivate the transmitter on the lunar lander? It sounds kind of strange. These transmissions, IIRC were not encrypted, nor was there anything particularly special about them. An avid HAM radio operator should have been able to pick up all the signals.

    It makes me rather wonder that if there is a grain of truth, it is that the astronauts were trained to turn their radio off and accept the failure of their mission; rather than screaming quite futily for their lives. The astronauts knew that a rescue mission was quite impossible, and they knew that the space program was reliant on public image. Why would these trained and diciplined specialists be screaming into the radio that they were dying?

    It's just a thought.

  • >Three astronauts died in a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule, during an unfueled test on the launch pad. Their deaths were not a secret, and was much publicised at the time.

    >Seven more astronauts died during launch of the SST Challenger, and that was also highly publicised.

    If you go to the tours at KSC in Florida, you are told that either 15 or 16 astronauts - I can't remember which - "gave their lives" to the US Space program.... Who are the remaining 5 or 6 unaccounted for astronauts?

    Anyone know if the European Space (Association?) has ever sent up a manned mission?

  • But what about the third guy? (Score:3)

    by eriko ( 35554 ) on Saturday July 10, 1999 @09:53AM (#1809837) Homepage
    There were two guys on the moon-but there was a third-Michael Collins, orbiting above the moon in the CSM. Am I seriously supposed to believe that NASA could cut off communications to the LEM without the help of Collins?

    Remember, according to the BBC, the astronauts had no knowledge of this plan. So, we are supposed to take the one confirmed fact-that Nixon had a speech ready in case the LEM didn't make the ascent, and blow in up into a conspiracy. This is worse than the shuttle. For all of this be true, we have to assume that.

    1) The LEM was equipped with a remote kill on the transmitter. Note that the crew had a full set of schematics on board. If it was in the schematics, they'd find it. If it wasn't, they wonder what the hell that thing in the transmitter was.

    2) That Collins was either in on it, or could be browbeaten into submission. He'd worked with Armstrong and Aldrin for years. I seriously doubt that he'd abandon them to silence if something happened. Of course, the conspiracy buffs will say "Collins would die too..."- but that assumes that we're willing to accept that the LEM and the CSM, currently seperated by about 50-100 miles, would fail at the same time.

    I can belive that NASA did have a plan for a failed LEM ascent, and it most likely was "Bring Collins home, mourn Armstrong and Aldrin"-there wasn't much choice if the LEM didn't work-it would be months before another Saturn V/Apollo CSM/LEM would be ready to launch. And I can believe Nixon had a speech prepared for the event. He probably had one read for a failure at launch, a failure at recovery, ect. ect. ect.

    Furthermore, a failed ascent would have involved one of four scenarios.

    1) The engine didn't fire. NASA wouldn't cut off communcations-they'd pull late nighters to fix the damn thing. Witness Apollo 13. They might have failed, and died-but we'd have heard it live. If they did die, you could bet that Apollo 12's sole mission, if it flew, would be to bring Armstrong's and Aldrin's bodies back home. Medals of Honor, Arlington Cemetary, the whole shebang.

    2) The engine fires, but without enough power to put the LEM into an orbit. Armstrong and Aldrin get a few minutes to say goodbye, then suffer an "Uncontrolled Flight into Lunar Terrain". Apollo 12 get to do the science jobs that 11 missed, and lays a wreath. If there was enough left over, see 1) above.

    3) The engine blows up. Two smears on the landscape. Communications do get cut off, and Nixon makes his speach, but for obvious reasons. Wreath time again-maybe a return of remains, but not likely to be very much to return.

    4) The engine fires enough to put the LEM into an orbit, but not the correct one. Here, it depends on food/air/fuel states aboard the LEM and CSM. Co mputers churn, and either they dock and rescue, or they fail and Collins comes home. Apollo 12 goes and get the remains later.

    Occam's razor, gentleman.

  • I don't believe the CSM/SM was in direct contact with the LM while the LM was on the lunar surface. Instead, communications had to be relayed from the moon to the earth and back.

    (For the vast majority of time in orbit, the CSM/SM would be beneath the LM's horizon.)

  • "President Nixon's disaster speech has remained secret for 30 years since the two astronauts first set foot on the moon on 20 July 1969. " -- BBC article.


    Actually, the speech itself was not a secret. If memory serves correctly, Bill Safire wrote about the speech many years ago. Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon during the first moon landing, and actually drafted the given speech. In his column, he discussed the speech and mentioned the most moving line - that men who had come to explore in peace were now to rest in peace. That line stuck in my head, and when I saw the text of the speech given on the BBC site, I immediately recognized it.

    At least, this is how I remember it -- can anyone confirm this?
  • If I'm not mistaken the USA has a monument which lists about 50.000 names of US soldiers who died in Vietnam. I wouldn't call that a "few," even if I'm not an American.
  • Radio communication was ongoing for several seconds after the explosion and NASA has refused to release the tapes.

    This is simply false. When the orbiter failed structurally, there were no reactant tanks to feed the fuel cells that power the orbiter. No power, and there's no way that Challenger could have sent back anything. (As it was, the final frames of telemetry were not send back via radio, but instead extracted directly from the magnetic core memories used by the computers.)

  • Yes, of course it would have been a public relations nightmare. So what? I am deeply offended that our government would have cut the only link to home of stranded and dying heroes of that very same government and its people. This is a shameful revelation of our government in particular and bureaucratic behavior and "pragmatic" politics in general.

    It is fitting with the lack of character displayed here that it took the BBC to bring it to our attention. (Thanks, BBC. It's a dirty job but at least someone, somewhere still has the guts to do it.)

    What can you call the risk-averse bureaucrats and slimy polititions who conspired to hide a possible disaster while setting themselves up to bask in the glory of the possible success of these brave men?

    These people are cowards. I am ashamed to have had them represent me.
  • Perhaps that's true, but a space shuttle reentering the atmosphere has a downward motion of 3 _kilometres_ per second....not to mention the forward motion of 40,000 kilometres per hour (11.111 kilometres per second). I suspect that that speed - mach 25 - is plenty enough to make a decent sonic boom.
  • I think you got that reversed. It would be zero G's while in free fall and ~1 G as they reached terminal velocity. But I can't quibble with your main point. The big peak of G's would indeed be impact.
  • Am I the only one who finds this darkly humorous?
  • The impact speed was closer to 200 MPH, not 600. That's still far faster than a free-falling human, and fast enough to instantly dismember everyone upon impact.

    Also, the reputable sources I've read said that the crew would have lost consciousness immediately due to high accelerations as the shuttle broke up, then remained unconscious due to the lack of oxygen. (They were not wearing full spacesuits, and their oxygen supply was (allegedly) cut off by the explosion). They *might* have regained consciousness as the flight deck reached lower altitudes, but humans aren't light bulbs and it would take them a moment to remember where they were. By this point they would have also reached terminal velocity, so it would feel like they were sitting on the ground at a very odd angle, adding to their initial confusion.

    I don't think it's impossible that some of the crew might have been conscious *and* aware of their situation at the time of impact, but this is a situation where I don't think anyone could have done anything about it, even if the tools were available. The ultimate responsibility lies with the bureaucrats who ordered the launch despite clear danger, and to a lesser extent with the bureaucrats and engineers who didn't add air brakes (streamers, parachutes) to the flight deck module.
  • I hate to be blunt, but BullS**T.


    The operations recorders are powered by the shuttle's main power system, connect to, IIRC, bus MNA. You can read about the power system here. [nasa.gov]


    Note that all the power comes from the fuel cells under the payload bay. Note that the cabin was seperated from the orbiter at the moment of the expolsion. Note no batteries on the shuttle. The AC inverters were located forward-but AC would have dried up the moment DC died. So...


    The power was disconnect at the moment of explosion.


    The operations recorders require power to operate, therefore:


    There was no voice recording following the explosion. QED


    The last recorded clear voice record from the Challenger was "Rodger, go at throttle up" - this is when the shuttle is through the densest part of the atmosphere, and can push the engines back to full throttle. There is another word/sound shortlu, which in buried in static, but all you can hear are the vowels. They do sound alot like "UhOh", but with the static, there's no sure way to tell.

  • than a technical difficulty? Dissention in the ranks? Moon insanity? An established Russian presence? Life?

    (first time i've gotten first post! tee hee!)

  • The problem with these stories is that, while making great television, the're bogus. Everyone who's gone through cosmonaut training has been accounted for, as has all rocket launches from the USSR in that time frame. There's simply nothing that could have lofted the cosmonauts into space, and no cosmonaut that could have been lofted.

    Check out "Phatoms of Space" (Scroll down a bit) in the Encyclopedia Astronautica [utk.edu]

  • so perhaps then, there should never have been any shuttle launches, if what he says is true, that there are valid technical reasons against each and every launch which are overridden by managerial pressure. It would be interesting to see the content of other technical objections to shuttle launches and see if they have similar merit to the Boisjoly presentations.
  • This would have been too bad but it's something that would have had to happen. Long, sad transcripts of the dying days of two heroes would have filled the newspapers everyday and it probably would have been the death of the space program.
  • http: //www.nando.net/healthscience/story/0,1080,68944-1 09064-773844-0,00.html [nando.net]

    The story refers to a previous one [latimes.com] in the Los Angeles Times.

  • <sarcasm>

    What, you mean John Glenn wasn't the first human in space, as several major news organizations misreported during his recent shuttle flight?!

    </sarcasm>

    BTW, do you recall why the USSR sent up *two* women before Sally Ride's mission? Could the stories about Valentia's mission be true after all?...

  • It does make sence, though (Score:5)

    by Whelkman ( 58482 ) on Friday July 09, 1999 @09:40PM (#1809867)
    They were pioneers of a new land and new, untested technology. Physicists and aeronautical engineers can only do so much with the information given, and it's up to testing and fate to decide the outcome. The chance of failure on the mission was astronomical, and it is only natural that the government was prepared for the worst.

    The men had to know, deep down, that, in the event of technological failure and complete radio silence, there would be absolutely no way NASA could scrape together the resources required to save them before their all too short air supply ran out.

    Either in failure or victory, the men would have been heroes, daring to explore new worlds with shaky means of exploring it. They knew in their hearts that the rest of their lives would not amount to that experience, and I believe they would have done it again, even if they knew they could have been stranded.
  • This reminds me of an Armstrong quote, which I'll paraphrase because I don't recall his exact words.

    A reporter asked him what he'd be doing if the LM Ascent Engine failed to ignite and he had a half hour of oxygen remaining. He replied that he'd be spending the time trying to fix the engine.

    Anyway, I notice the BBC article cut the speech, so I thought I'd post the full version from the LA times here.


    Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
    These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldr in, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
    These two men are laying down their lives in m ankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
    They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
    In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
    In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
    Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
    For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
  • I believe the article was talking about Neil and Buzz because Collins would have been able to return to Earth. Although you're right, he would have suffered the same fate if he was also stranded.
  • Boy, that would've made Apollo 13 (the movie) very short..

    Houston: "Well guys, we're ceasing all communications. Houston out."
    Apollo 13: "BUT HOUSTON! IT'S JUST AN EXPLOSION!!"

    The End

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?

  • what's the big deal? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If they'd been conspiring to make the mission fail, that'd've been 'creepy', but contingency planning is not 'creepy' at all, in fact it's quite responsible and proper. The fact is that if the astronauts had been stranded and yet been allowed to continue communicating with the world, the space program would've been killed.

    (Instead, the space program is _de facto_ dead, killed by budget constraints. Put that in your conspiracy pipe and smoke it.)
  • Look closer, that word goes away as technology advances, and it becomes 'science' instead of 'science fiction'. A lot of the things we take for granted now were 'science fiction' at one point in time.
    Shoot lasers at a metal and plastic disk to make music? Nah. Robots the size of ants? Nah. Growing hands/ears on lab rats? Nah. It's all science fiction until it happens. Haven't you been paying attention?
  • Yes, but unfortunitally, those 7 died not only after nasa had faded from the spotlight, but in a way that didnt inspire. It was a mistake that nasa made.. a screw up in the system, rather than a noble way to die. i'm not saying they were any less than the other astronauts, but it wasnt an event that inspired the public.
    Dreamweaver
  • Contrary to numerous cheesy Hollywood movies, people do not explode in a vacuum.

    I saw an interview with Chris Hadwell (sp?), a Canadian astronaut, where they asked him what does happen when an astronaut is exposed to a vacuum. (This was in the context of a space suit leaking on a space walk) He described that all of those wonderful dissolved gases we have in our blood would come out of solution like opening a bottle of soda and you would foam to death.

    ICK!!!!
  • Which is more sickening: that people know some of the horror that could result from a ahuttle accident? Or that this be sanitized and "heroified" to protect NASA?

    Does no one besides me have problems with the mindless pushing of a government-run space program that seems based more on propaganda than any rational justification? Like government-run and -funded education, pervasive welfarism both corporate and personal and increasing restrictions of privacy, the idea that we ought to send folks out of Earth's atmosphere on a monthly basis is one that since the 60s has gone from lunacy to obvious.

    The Space Shuttle is a royal bauble of the US govt, circus center ring. No doubt there is a lot of neat collateral technology, but all in the pursuit of ... what, exactly? Why must many miilions of confiscated money support the meanderings of the space program?

    I'm all for space exporation, actually. But if there are economic benefits to be had from going into space, why do we need to pay truckloads of tax money to fund R&D? Wouldn't it make more sense for Morton-Thiokol, or any other company which thinks they can make space profitable, to pay their own start-up costs?

    Dying screams are not pleasant, but they illustrate that the pursuit of space is an endeavor with possible grave consequences, and that is a valuable thing to know. Astronauts are much sexier than unmanned explorers, maybe, but that's not how I want my money to be played with. Obscuring the consequences of failure is unfair to those who might want to be astronauts, and to the people who fund the fireworks.

    timothy
  • Well it is. Liquid hydrogen and Oxygen are explosives. So is the Ammonia Perchlorate in the SRBs. There are destruct packages on the SRB, but there's no need for the Main Engines. Remeber-it's a glider-a piss poor one, but a glider. In the event of an off course launch that would impact land, they would drop the SRBs and ET, destruct the SRBs if needed, and the orbiter would either A) Go back to the Cape-which is a big reason for most of the weather restrictions. B) Go across the Atlantic and land in Spain or Africa, depending C) Everyone jumps out with the parachutes they now have-and didn't then. This is called a contingency abort, and means that the orbiter is toast. NASA assumes that the chances surviving a ditch into the ocean are near nil, so the orbiter is abandoned.



    Acutally, if the engines are working, but they aren't going into the right orbit, they would AOA-Abort Once Around. Go in to orbit, drop the ET and SRB, and deboost and come home.



    Check out this for a comprehensive covereage of the mission profile-and the oops lists-AOA, ATO, ATL, ATLS and Contingency Aborts. [nasa.gov]

  • Those same paper pushers ...

    According to Samuel Florman in The Civilized Engineer, all of the managers at MT who told NASA what they wanted to hear the night before the launch had a technical background of some sort. I thnk at least one was an engineer. They were told directly to take off their engineer hats and put on their management hats and make the decision.

    I find it utterly disgusting when an engineer cuts the legs out from under what should be a technical decision in the name of management.
  • Yeah and it was set to music...

    4, 3, 2, 1... Earth below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless, calling, calling home...
  • In one particular mission, a cosmonaut was unable to reenter the Earth's atrmosphere. His wife was brought to Mission Control where they talked until he ran out of oxygen.

  • Re:Clueless managers at Morton Thiokol (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I say sic 10,000 trekkies and star whores freaks on them. Let them be pelted with non-functioning scale-model phasers and bludgeoned with non-functioning lightbeam sabre toys.
  • I read a year or two ago in a magazine, that the shuttle is packed with explosives and should it be going dangerously off-course then NASA can make it go boom. Can anybody confirm this?

    That is not true. The shuttle has a range safety system composed of radio receivers, command decoders and explosive charges on the SRBs. There used to be explosive charges on the ET but they are no longer installed. There have never been any explosive charges on the orbiter. The explosive charges are designed to terminate thrust, not "blow up" the shuttle. The purpose of the system is to make sure that, if something goes wrong, the debris lands in a safe area. There is a Range Safety Officer that is responsible for sending a destruct command if there is a danger of debris landing in a populated area due to uncontrolled flight. This is standard procedure for all US launches. Most expendable launch vehicles will self-destruct if they detect a serious problem such as structural failure. The explosive charges are usually linear shaped charges that cut open the rocket motors and fuel tanks. The "explosion" that you see on TV is actually the rapid burning of the fuel and oxidizer from the ruptured fuel tanks, not the explosive charges.

  • Yes, I can confirm it. I've scanned your memory banks have found the memory you referred to.

    Guh.

    -----------------------------
    Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
  • Okay, but were it so cheap and good for PR, why did they not install it on the very first shuttle to fly?

    I had heard (more unsubstantiated rumors again, danger Will Robinson!) that it was because the thinking pre-Challenger was that if anything went wrong, there would be no crew left to escape. The Challenger incident demonstrated conclusively that such an assumption was incorrect.

  • >re-entry heat is pretty high, right?

    Yes but they never left the atmosphere did they, they were no higher then a commercial airliner when the accident happened.

    >into 207 MPH wind is pretty unpleasant.

    Very true, but i`d would have liked to have a choice between that and certain death if I was one of them.

  • Sure, and I'm sure all the space-geek HAMs just weren't paying attention to their radios during the launch. Radio is a broadcast, anyone with a reciever on the right frequencies (which are published by NASA) can listen in! NASA does NOT encrypt their transmissions, for obvious reasons.
  • "falling towards the sun" means that, on re-entry to the earth's atmosphere, they skipped, sending them off into space and away from the earth at re-entry speeds that are too fast to turn around and try again. The gravity of the sun got hold of them, and their orbit, no matter what angle to the sun they skipped from, decayed relatively instantaneously, compared to the rate at which the earth's orbit is decaying (something like several millimeters a year).

  • This discussion about BBC's story has been one of the greatest I ever seen on Slashdot. We have been talking a lot. However things seem to turn to "I believe, I don't believe".

    Is BBC's story true? Well I have some scheptics on this simplistic "solution" they write about. It is not NASA's nature. At least then. However some of it is true.

    There is one fact discussed many times by several people, and experts included: the lift-off. NASA was not absolutely sure that the charges of the lander would work on the Moon. There was some notes that they had failed sometimes during testing. At least there was some rumour, that they retested the damn thing as far as they could, but still the chance remained that they could not fire up on the Moon. Fortunately they did.

    There was also several other problems on Apollo 11's mission not less creepy. Unfortunately it passed some good years since I heards about them. It seems that the hatch either on the Moon or when they were on orbit gave some serious problems. There was also another problem that they could not be sure about the landing site. And that Armstrong had the seconds of his life on trying to do a successful landing. Any small doubt during these seconds and either the lander would crash or fly away from the Moon's surface. And then Collins would not have the bitter chance to get them back.

    Yes, the fact about "silencing" the crew sounds rather extraordinary. At least I know that Mission Control would go into the Hell to get them back. But I would not be surprised that some kind of "contingency plan" of this sort would be put in place by any of those media-paranoids that started to roam the agency by then.

    The fact that this plan sounds quite dumb ("Truth is *always* out there"), but I also wouldn't be very admired that someone would try to put it into action. Well the fact is that NASA, by then, had some level of IQ bigger than now. So probably such plan would be shot down together with its creator. But who knows? The fact is that historically NASA has become a big and HUGE liar.

    The Space Shuttle program was/is a whole pack of lies, damn lies, statistics and NASA. Since the beginning a lot of people warned about the "suicide ship". And even after Challenger's accident it seems that NASA kept lying about Shuttle's real world.

    The Shuttle is probably much more reliable now. But not long ago there was a near miss that almost repeated Challenger. What seemed to save the situation is that the boosters had already separated. A few seconds before and a few more astronauts would be making one more historical dive into the Ocean.
  • I later got to thinking about this and talked about it with some friends.

    We decided that the liftoff from the moon was fairly uncertain for a couple reasons. First, the fuel they had to use to escape the moon's gravity and get into orbit again was the same fuel they'd used in trying to land. As I recall, they were running fairly low on fuel durin landing, which is why it was almost aborted, since they almost wouldn't have enough to get back. Second, the rocket engines had been completely turned off for several hours. Getting them re-ignited was probably a little tricky piece of engineering, since most rocket engines are made to turn on, burn and turn off, without consideration for re-ignition. I seem to recall once seeing a TV documentary about the moon landing where Buzz or Neil was saying how relieved he was when the engines started again. So apparantly they had a twinge of doubt as well.

    Hummm... I wonder if they dusted off this speach in case Nixon had to go on TV during the Apollo 13 incident.
  • As you say, those astronauts were air force test pilots and the like. You know, brave. Not trusting them not to say something embarrassing in the face of imminent death is a terrible thing. It's a pretty poor way to repay people who have just given you their lives in service. Of course they weren't told about these plans, they would have been insulted.
    Of course, it's a little uncertain what would have _really_ happened if the lunar lander had not been able to relaunch. As others have pointed out, a lot of ham radio operaters were listening in on the communications. Perhaps NASA had some way of shutting off the astronauts radios from Houston, but I doubt it. It's not as if they had very advanced computers to handle that sort of thing automatically. Maybe they could have scrambled the signal somehow. But, anyway, I have to hope that if it had really happened that there would have been people who would have taken a stand and said "I'm not going to do this."
  • The difficult decision to turn off the radio really only comes if there's somebody alive to talk to on the radio. You really don't need a contingency plan if a malfunction causes a catstrophic crash that kills everybody instantly. And if the accident doesn't kill everybody instantly, but wipes out the oxygen system so that they're going to die in a few minutes, you don't have enough time to worry about the decision.

    But if you have a crew who has several hours of oxygen and no way to get back, that's a different matter. And it really doesn't matter if the crew is stranded because of a bad landing or because of a system malfunction.

    I suppose the contingeny plan for a re-entry/splashdown accident would be to try to rescue survivors because, well, they'd be on this planet, so that would be an option. They rescued Grissom before his capsule sank. And if there were no survivors -- but wait, Challenger seems to demonstrate this contingency plan.

    Were there contingency plans for other stranding scenerios? Probably. The thrusters on the command/service module could malfunction leaving the astronauts orbiting the moon. But this really isn't any different from being stranded on the surface of the moon, is it? You're going to run out of oxygen and die and nobody can do anything to change that if you can't fix the problem yourself.

    Is there something inherent to the design of the lander that raised some uncertainty about its abiliy to lift off from the moon? It would be the first time human beings would actually depend on the lunar module to return them from the surface of the moon. This was the real alpha test. If there was something wrong, despite all of the previous testing, this was the mission that would find out. Preceding Apollo missions had already tested the rest of the system. And I seem to recall that the lunar module was a particularly delicate piece of engineering with thin margins (which is why Armstrong came within a minute of aborting the landing or stranding the lander).

  • Two points:
    • I've heard a totally unsubtantiated assertion that it took Challenger's flight deck upwards of nine minutes to reach the surface after the breakup of the orbiter.
    • As to whether the crew were alive, or conscious, or whether NASA knows either fact--consider this and draw your own conclusions: The crew escape system, which is specifically designed to allow the crew to exit the orbiter without hitting any flight-control surfaces and parachute to safety, was first installed on the flight after Challenger.
    A-coding we will go, hi ho the derry-o.
  • The ESA has no manned rockets. The rockets in use are all different types of Ariane and unmanned. There were plans for an European space shuttle ("Hermes", IIRC) but it got discontinued.

    This does not mean that the ESA has no manned space program at all, they just send their astronauts up in cooperation with Russia (to MIR) and with NASA (e.g. the Spacelab module was an European project and twice in space with the Space Shuttle). They also contribute one module to the ISS.
  • The Sovjets did most of their early space missions (or, better, attempts) in secret and never told the public about failures and deaths. But they had it a lot easier in hiding rocket starts / explosions with their vast uninhabited lands. Censoring took care of the rest. For them dying in an attempt to reach space was obviously not a heroic thing.
  • The other way round: the speed of sound in thin air is slower. It nature it is fastest at sea level and a hell of a lot faster in solid objects. Think of it this way: in low density the molecules have to travel a long way to hit the next molecules in order to transfer sound.
  • It's winter down there. Dark, bad weather, is the risk to the aircraft crew and to the woman justified? vs. waiting until flying conditions are safer? There is a difference between a serious situation and an emergency situation.
  • Not true. NASA had one man accidentally exposed to near vacuum on earth during a space suit test (he is fine). They also have a web page on medical implications of vacuum exposure (sorry, don't have the URL handy right now).

    Actually, for foaming to occur this would require extreme loss of pressure *inside* your body. This would require that your body increases its volume quite much. We know our bodies aren't inflatable balloons, they would explode and we know they don't explode.
  • Not because governments are too nice to do that kind of thing. It's a matter of how they're going to keep a lid on it. Everyone at Mission Control would know immediately that there was a problem. There would be a number of radio exchanges before it was determined that the problem was insoluble. The Soviets, at least, and probably most of the industrial nations of the would would have been monitoring voice and telemetry to the best of their ability. Ditto for amateur radio operators, and probably some observatories.

    Pulling this stunt and not keeping a lid on it would have been a PR disaster beyond imagining, and I can't imagine that they would be able to keep a lid on it.

    But then again maybe Tricky Dick habitually overestimated his skill at coverups...
  • > (Armstrong was dangerously low on fuel when he landed; Another minute more, and he would have had to abort the landing)

    They actually landed 20 seconds before they had to abort.
  • This sounds a bit stupid to me (or maybe it is just misreported). But how the hell can someone fall towards the sun just by skipping off the atmosphere? It takes one hell of energy to get to escape velocity, that sure doesn't happen to you by accident.
  • As a side note, we're not talking about the shuttle, we're talking about much smaller capsules.

    A shuttle doesn't reach "our part" of the atmosphere until it's going much slower than mach 25. And when it is going mach 25, the waves don't reach the ground with significant energy.

    -Imperator

  • I can't help but think of this as something that would happen on The Simpsons; complete with a whole comical gov't coverup, Kent Brockman doing some stupid coverage, and Homer stranded on the moon (hey, he almost got stranded in space once.)
  • Yeah. However Russians had the first robot systems roaming in a foreign planet. Also don't forget that they made a lot more in Space than Americans. Besides until recently they were the only nation having a space station.

    On Moon race what was creepy is that both Americans and Russians were running over the weels. Each one tried to overcome the other. In this race Americans had three astronauts cooked inside of the capsule. Also Russians had almost 100 guys vaporized by the blast of a rocket.

    That's what's creepy. Telling about who's best on space technology is quite hard. Both nations have a lot of things that overcome each other. But making races in behalf of "I'm better than you" is what lead to most of the mistakes and tragedies.

    On Apollo 1 tragedy many talk aboutthe speeding up of the work. On the Russian moon rocket's blast many talk about exactly the same thing.

    Please remind that Moon race was a political game. That's why Russians didn't go to the Moon. That's why the Congress cut the program after a few missions. And that's why all the Space race is turned to a swamp. Do you want to get to Mars? Forget it! Until some dirty politicians don't start fighting on "I'm better than you, you bastard!" we will have to contempt ourselves with a few automatic stations, some popcorn, Coca-Cola and StarWars...
  • and while on the island they find a small bottle with Barbra Eden in it; they let her out and call her 'Genie' and she calls them 'Master' - "But Major Heely..."

    Nice movie plot, with maybe an American Prez who will sacrifice anyone or anything to maintain a + public relations image ...

    But, as mentioned, Apollo 13 was a 'successful failure' - don't think a mission can realistically return from lunar orbit w/o ground control assistance.

    Also, there was in the news recently a blurb about a downed commercial aircraft w/ black box recordings of the last minutes/seconds of the cockpit crew that was not going to be released to the public out of respect for the crew, it was just too personal.

    Chuck

    This is tranquility base last transmission, over and out, earth.
  • Well, they do now....
    When I was watching the John Glen launch, they showed the guys waring them, and said they always did now, after chalenger. They didn't wear them in '85
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • I wasn't aware (or at least don't remember) any Russian cosmonauts dying in space. There were at least one instance of cosmonauts being killed during their return. Remember that the Russians didn't have access to any large bodies of water -- at least none that weren't filled with nasty ice floes -- and landed on land. Now that's an engineering feat I'm not sure I'd like to experience.

    ``...launch of the SST Challenger, and that...''

    BTW, that's STS Challenger, not SST. The STS carries astronauts into space; the SST carries rich people between New York and Paris.

    ``having every launch visible from several nearby cities (like Orlando, only 50 miles away) makes it hard to have a launch no one knows about''

    From all the accounts I've read, a Saturn rocket launch sounded something like a volcanic eruption what with the noise and the ground shaking. I doubt any clandestine launches would be possible.

  • What the hell are you doing? Don't you know you can't have a spelling flame that doesn't have a spelling eror in it?

    --
  • My understanding of the situation is that it is not dangerous or risky, but flat out impossible to land an aircraft this time of year at the South Pole.

    I'm dead certain the USAF would fly a mission for this if it were remotely possible - but to send multi-million airchine and crew to certain doom? Please.
  • >I wonder if the HAM operators
    would have been able to talk to them.

    I remeber speaking to a HAM operator years ago and he claimed to have heard something like this that had happened to the russians. Stranded in orbit due to a malfuntion.

  • Just a small point, JFK wasn`t assasinated on live TV because they didn`t know he was going to be shot (Or did they };-).
    LHO was the first person killed on live TV.
  • Looks like someone at the BBC decided that there is enough secrecy (or just aging memories) shrouding the details of the lunar mission (contingency plans and such), then they watched Armageddon (which would've been much more tolerable without the sap angle), and decided to have some fun.

  • Some types of research are still simply to costly to be done for profit, even though it will give tremendous benefits in the long run.

    I think his point was who gets to reap the benefits? Answer: The company that is in a position to take the quickest advantage of the information that comes out of the space program. So, we taxpayers are funding major research that will be used by corporations to create stuff that we will have to pay for again. What did they put up? What did they risk? Nada. Where is the payback for us? What do we get out of our tax dollars?

  • But they wouldn't reach escape velocity by accident. Sure they skipped off but earth's gravity would pull them back eventually, letting them burn up in an uncontrolled fall into the atmosphere (in the worst case).
  • The flight recorder was retrieved and had recordings of them screaming after the explosion - pretty conclusive evidence they were alive I'd say.
  • This is all commmon knowledge. A book was released in the late eighties called "Challenger: A major malfunction". Even more interesting in the book is the fact that NASA had a safety meeting about the effect of the frost on the O rings, they knew that this might happen!
  • I read in Challenger:A major malfunction that some of the emergency oxygen cylinders were used which suggests that some were conscious.

    I guess the problem is that there was very little for them to do but wait for the inevitable. Even if they opened the hatch they didnt have a parachute so they could not escape.
  • Hmm.
    I'm not arguing that this is supersoinc, but realize that the speed of sound varies with air pressure.
    At 100,000 feet elevation, the air is so thin that if you were to jump out of your (whatever goes this high.. I dunno), and fall, (you'd need a pressure suit to keep from freezing...), your shirt wouldn't even flutter in the wind, and you would very quickly attain speeds of over 600MPH.
    The speed of sound in rarified air is very fast, afiak.
  • And the space program would be killed not because of mission failure and lost life, but because of NASA's cold-hearted attitude


    Either that, or, the goverment would argue with the masses that it was in the best interest of the astronauts, as they would be proud to have served their country with honor and died in valor for the cause of furthering the human race (which would have been the biggest piece of crap). I'll bet they'd have even invented some kind of fancy medal to give them too... while the rest of us were tortured by the horrors of the poor men, the government would have continued research, hoping to develop a working lunar module (which they would test with more helpless human subjects!)
  • It is very hard for me to believe so many people out there buy this crap as the truth. You got some very well educated people going on a space trip after years of training and then landing on the moon and you expect me to believe that they thought a passing craft could rescue me... Yeh give me a damn break. They knew right down to the last what could happen and if there was problem, it was all over. What do you sickies think would happen, that the deaths would be normal home viewing. Are you people beyond thinking?
  • Yeah, but if Huston turned off the astronauts' radio...
  • > I was under tremendous pressure and eventually I > did what I was told. I am ashamed.

    You are not ashamed enough. You should be thinking about this in a prison cell, between shifts at hard labor, staring at your supervisor
    in his cell.
  • Armstrong and Aldrin would in all liklihood still have been able to find some way to communicate with Collins, who was orbiting the moon in the capsule.

    For goodness' sake, it was a failure plan! When they have no more to say, close down communications.

    Some people see conspiracies everywhere...

    (Next thing people are going to start claiming Yuriy Alexeievich Gagarin wasn't the first man into space.)

  • Those capsules are coming in at 25,000 miles per hour, and I doubt the friction of skipping takes much off of that. 25K is much greater than escape velocity from the Earth.

    An interesting question for any physics geeks here: how fast would the capsule have to skip for escape velocity from the sun?

  • 'the astronauts were not aware'

    So what were they going to do if they got stranded? slowly freeze and/or suffocate while mission control simply turns off the radio?

    The movie Contact gave me the impression that astronauts had a secret suicide pill just in case. Of course, you can't believe the movies. Suicide sort of goes against 'the american way' though, so I'd imagine the government would
    A: tell an outright lie about a glorious, quick and violent death,
    or B: romanticize the sacrifice while glazing over the details

    And if in fact the stranded astronauts did NOT have suicide pills, what might they have done? Going for a moonwalk without a spacesuit comes to mind...
  • Why was this post (whic you probably can't see) moderated down? The poster has a valid point in regard to the thread at hand.

    Please moderate it back up to at least "0".

  • O.J. Simpson [imdb.com] starred as an astronaut. Its subject was a faked Mars mission, not a moon mission.
  • right. but only fluids exposed to the vacuum would do that. the most noticable symptoms would be a ear popping, a great deal of farting, belching, and shortness of (like, zero) breath.
  • The Avro Arrow was the number one military aircraft of the time - but our very own John Deifenbaker (responsible for the Deifenbunker and the Deifendollar in Canada) said "we don't need that! that's too expensive!" and all 10 Arrow's built were cut up for scrap and the instructions and documents on building it were destroyed. If you are looking for a conspiracy theory grab this and run with it.
  • >Hey, wait a second. Back then they were probably using ordinary, unscrambled radio to communicate. I wonder if the HAM operators would have been able to talk to them.

    This is in fact what I was wondering also. I remember some of the later missions, some people were monitoring transmissions direct from the moon. Almost certainly the Russians would have had some capability to monitor these transmissions as well, and would no doubt have been quite capable of releasing recordings of what really happened after "communications failure" happened, just to embarass the US space program.

    Makes me wonder if they had a way to transmit a command to the LEM to turn off transmissions remotely. Although I agree with most of the posts here that have said this was probably necessary and reasonable for whatever reasons, it still rings kinda sinister and creepy that they would do it this way.

  • "You can't handle the Truth!" (Score:5)

    by TopSpin ( 753 ) on Friday July 09, 1999 @10:14PM (#1810001) Journal
    Who is to say astronauts didn't get stranded on the moon? NASA could
    have made up the rest of several of the voyages in a studio. For all
    you know, NASA established a permanent base and left astronauts behind
    on purpose! :)

    All my life, the moon shots have been the subject of television
    commercials. I appreciate the enormity of these events, but when I
    see an astronaut bounding along to surface of the moon, luxury cars
    and life insurance spring to mind.

    Look, what the hell would you expect NASA to do in such a situation?
    Stranded astronauts begging for help which would never arrive while
    they run out of air is not how you, me or any of the thousands of
    people involved in those projects would want them to be remembered.

    Frankly, I am forever amazed by the fact that no one did die on the
    moon. Fretting over NASA's contingency plans for the very likely
    possibility of someone being stranded on the moon is the sort of naive
    ignorance that provides millions of lawyers with gainful employment.
    Perhaps it provides an incite into the reasons why, after thirty some
    odd years, we haven't made it any further.

    In short, those of you who feel a chill crawl up your spine when you
    consider these matters; grow up. Sometimes people in hopeless
    situations have to be left behind or put down. I am certain that if
    NASA's horrible plot was known to the astronauts before hand not one
    would have hesitated to go anyhow.

    TopSpin
  • And if in fact the stranded astronauts did NOT have suicide pills, what might they have done? Going for a moonwalk without a spacesuit comes to mind...

    Depressurizing the LEM would be a quick way to kill yourself. It would result in rapid loss of consciousness and death. Contrary to numerous cheesy Hollywood movies, people do not explode in a vacuum. A similar technique has been used to euthanize animals in animal shelters.

    I wouldn't expect NASA and the astronauts to give up too quickly. Most of the astronauts were test pilots, a profession with a high death rate. I've seen cockpit films of test pilots calmly reporting aircraft behavior as they were seconds away from death.

  • Truth and Morbid Sound Bites (Score:3)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Saturday July 10, 1999 @10:27PM (#1810013)
    Let's take a step back into history. The place is Clear Lake City, for the most part a satelite community of Houston, Texas... host for the NASA community of Johnson Space Center. Home of Mission Control and many of the NASA Astronauts.

    During the early 80's that community was a tight family. There was excitement and pride. The piggybacked shuttle would do a victory lap around Clear Lake on its treck back from Edwards AFB to Kenedy Space Center. All the local schools would have televisions in classrooms and common areas so that students from that NASA community could watch that month's launch. Everything was becoming routine.

    Students watched the Challenger launch from hallways and classrooms at Clear Lake Highschool. There was a sudden explosion. The entire school went deadly quiet. A few seconds passed. The shocked silence was broken by the wails of students who realized they had just watched their parents die on national television.

    The torment was just beginning.

    Clear Lake was beseiged by reporters. The local police force was mobilized to try and provide some privacy to horrified family members of the astronauts who had just died. But the reporters were tenacious; they were caught climbing into windows and even taking pictures into bathrooms. Clear Lake Highschool was forced to close for a week because of the disruptions caused by the press. And when it did re-open, the children of the slain astronauts fled there; the press didn't allow them the privacy to greive at home.

    The press learned that NASA had copies of supposed transmissions from the shuttle during the incident. NASA had found the wreckage of the crew compartment. There were also body parts found by the disaster recovery crew. But the recordings, the wreckage, and the associated carnage were closed off to the media. The media howled. They would have their sound bites and shocking pictures! But NASA insisted on the dignity of the deceased and weathered all complaints. The press were denied.

    How dare you call this a case of government coverup! This was a case of people trying to preserve the dignity of their friends, family, and the familys of those people who died.

    You want something to get upset about? There's plenty of real issues involved with the Challenger incident.

    Go after the media hounds who's appetite for sound bites drove them to invade grieving family members' privacy. Criticize inaccurate reporting as media organizations fumbled facts in an attempt to scoop competitors.

    Criticize the American public's shock when they realized space travel, at least with current technology, is anything but a safe, routine function.

    But mostly... go after the administration of NASA. Be critical of the leadership that very possibly squandered the entire future of a program that strove towards mankind's next great exploration endeavor.

    Dig into why warnings were ignored. How politics played a more important role than technical considerations. And look very hard at the internal "machine" that was generated to keep this status quo functional.

    Finally, and most importantly, ask... does that machine still exist today?

    The deceased don't have the answers to these questions. Raising their spector does not serve the interest of truth.

  • Jumping to conclusions (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 1999 @10:41PM (#1810024)
    I don't think it's justified to assume that the
    plan was to cut communications at the first hint
    of trouble.

    Most likely they would have been allowed to say
    their goodbyes to their families, in as much
    privacy as could be afforded with the comm loops
    they had at the time (probably the surgeon's
    channel). But only after all efforts at
    troubleshooting and repairing the problem had
    been exhausted. It's probable that these efforts
    would continue until the last possible window for
    rendezvous with the command module.

    At that point, of course, they would terminate
    communications and allow the crew to die in peace.
    What you wouldn't have would be a bunch of
    reporters trying to ask them inane questions
    about what it feels like to die a quarter-million
    miles from home.

    Personally, if I were stranded in the LM with only
    a couple hours of O2 left, I'd see how far I could
    hike on what was left in my suit...
  • I advise everybody to take information from the BBC with a grain of salt.
    While the BBC used to enjoy a good reputation when it came to news, it looks like it's now drifting the way of the British paper press, that is, to tabloid-like "information".

    For a precise example: the BBC had a story, linked here on Slashdot, saying that the French Government, disapproving of the use of the Greenwich meridian instead of the Paris one as reference, was organizing the plantation of olive groves and a mass picnic along the meridian. This was bogus. This nevertheless generated 200 comments here.

    So, until some serious press gives an independent report on this, I'd not believe in this too much.

  • Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster Hushed Up (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 1999 @11:43PM (#1810051)
    This has already been done with the Challenger disaster. Despite the impressive pictures of the explosion, most of the "smoke" was water vapor. The crew of the Challenger were not killed in the explosion. The shuttle remained largely intact and only broke apart on impact of falling into the ocean. The crew were conscious until they hit the water. Radio communication was ongoing for several seconds after the explosion and NASA has refused to release the tapes. The screams of terror they hold are said to be horrifying. And NASA has refused to show photographs of the remains that were recovered because they are too horrific. From the start, NASA tried to cover up. And remember it was NASA who demanded that the launch go ahead despite the advice by lower level MT engineers.
  • Well several years ago I knew some guy that worked for NASA on Appolo and several other projects. The guy was some bright mind picked up in the middle of the 50's in Portugal. In the 80's he returned to his homeland. He was disgusted with many things that happened in NASA and specially some crazyness that seemed to go by on Shuttle's project.

    He talked a lot about this on portuguese TV. One thing that he noted a lot was that Shuttle was dangerous. And in one program he noted that the design of the solid propellant rockets was _flawed_. I saw this thing myself. And the guy was tremendously convincing. He also noted that NASA was ignoring all these problems for several political, technical and economic reasons.

    The interview where he talked about the flwed boosters ocurred somewhere in 83-84 if I'm well remembered. When Challenger went boom I had the luck to see the special newsflash on portuguese TV right after the event. The guy was there. When e was asked to comment the event he just answered:
    "I told about this didn't I? I always told about this!" The guy looked tremendously furstrated. He spoke a little bit about the why's and when's of this tragedy. One thing can be resumed from his talk. IT HAD TO HAPPEN. Because NASA was running on the wild.
  • What I don't understand is what they would have done with Michael Collins. While they could have cut off communications between Armstrong and Aldrin to the Earth, Armstrong and Aldrin would in all liklihood still have been able to find some way to communicate with Collins, who was orbiting the moon in the capsule.

    I don't believe that NASA would then deliberately make him strand himself there just to maintain the silence - it's not like they would be able to stop him from returning anyways. So eventually, messages from the two men left on the moon would reach people back on Earth, in the form of messages passed on by Collins.

    People would look into it, Collins would eventually talk (probably before this document got released), and it would become general knowledge that communications had been deliberately cut off, and that would have been pretty bad for public relations.
  • It's consistent with the official statements about the Apollo 204 pad fire - it sounds much more heroic and clean to hear that Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom and Ed White were "killed instantly" rather than struggled for a minute to open the hatch before the hull ruptured.

    Or Challenger - it's more heroic to think that they went up with a flame than to know the truth - the damaged orbiter, passenger compartment virtually intact flew for a few more minutes in a ballistic trajectory until it crashed into the water. The astronauts died on impact.

    This patronizing attitude from governments officials who think they know better about what we should or shouldn't be allowed to know about what is being done with our money is certainly not as strong as it was 30 years ago, but it's still with us.

    In a way, I can understand them, tough. They were trying to protect their budgets which depended on public image. And these budgets did send my childhood heroes into orbit and to the moon...

    P.S. NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation, is almost at big as it was at the peak of the Apollo program.
  • With Challenger, it's also important to note that we honestly didn't -know- if anyone could have, or did, survive the initial explosion. The research needed to find out took a long time, and by that time, the only people who cared were the families, the researchers, and other die-hard space freaks.

    Remember, all radio communications ended at the time of the accident. Mission Control didn't even -know- there was an explosion for some time (they announced, to the crowds watching the fireball "There appears to be a major malfunction").

    At the time of the explosion, the few people who were saying that the cabin portion of the orbiter flew out of the fireball intact were drowned out in the media by everyone who was screaming "OH MY GHOD!!! DID YOU SEE THAT???? NO ONE COULD HAVE SURVIVED!!!"

    As it was, the orbiter DID survive the fireball -- the SRB which malfunctioned ended up attached to the shuttle, but rotated so it was pointing forward, causing the airframe to snap sideways into a several mach speed airstream, which tore it to pieces. You couldn't see any of this because the fireball hid everything.

    Finding out if anyone survived the explosion, and for how long, was complicated by the fact that if they -did- survive, they didn't survive impact with the water -- and all the evidence was either floating on, or deep beneath, the sea. But they were able to get some info.

    The NASA reports (which are available online, in case anyone really cares) say that they don't know if the cabin maintained pressure integrity after the airframe self-destructed. The damage from water impact was too great. If it didn't, then they would have had no air to breathe, and would have passed out in 15 secs, if they weren't already unconsious or dead from the accident.

    There are signs that at least two survived, and tried to do something before they fell unconsious or were killed.

    But the official NASA reports are usually pretty good. If they -knew- that Christa McAuliff spent her last minute alive and conscious, it would be in the report. The PR flacks probably wouldn't point it out, however.

  • One thing I found offensive about that article is the bit at the end where they refer to Michael Collins as "the crew member that did not take part in the lunar landing".

    Shee-it, that bugs me for some reason. If he didn't take part in it, how the heck did Neil and Buzz get back?

    In my view, Michael Collins deserves as much respect as Neil and Buzz, and its truly a shame that future generations will not be educated in the skill, professionalism, patience and understanding it took for him to be able to look down on the moon, oh so close, and do his job so that Neil and Buzz could do theirs too.

    This is a perfect opportunity for media to teach humility and respect for true professionalism, yet it's missed every time.

    Shee-it.
  • What was the alternative? A rescue mission? The technology wasn't up to it. But dwelling on it would have led to pressure to mount such a mission --- which wouldn't have been possible. It would have been a disaster, and not just a PR disaster.

    Yes, it sounds cold and callous. But read "The Cold Equations" to find out why it had to be that way. (Quick summary: the universe doesn't give a flying fart about human sensibilities, and cares even less about breast-beating over the unfairness of it all.)

    NB: that doesn't mean we should give up on human sensibilities. It *does* mean that sometimes we lose, and there isn't anything to be done about it.
  • Following on from the link given above,

    http://onlineethics.org/moral/ boisjoly/RB-intro.html [onlineethics.org]

    it would be good to know the names of the Morton Thiokol managers that repeatedly overrode Roger Boisjoly's detailed technical presentations on the flaws in the O-rings and decided to launch Challanger despite overwhelming reasons not to do so. In a sane world, those managers would be criminals.

    Those same paper pushers are now probably making equally clueless judgements in other major corporations. Should we not be told their names so that we can stay clear of their next disaster?
  • :)
    That's the media...
    Poor Collins is a "minor part" of the mission. He worked like Hell during the whole thing but that does not matter for these people. Not him nor Mission Control nor all the people that made it reality.

    They didn't leave their footprints on the Moon so they mean "nothing". It's the typical media stereotype. The Hero made it. And it seems this the reason why Neil Armstrong hates journalists. He just does not want them to turn him into another "media star". Apollo's team was not there filming Holywood footage.

  • Richard Feynman's report (Score:3)

    by SpinyNorman ( 33776 ) on Saturday July 10, 1999 @08:18AM (#1810134)
    When (nobel prize winning physicist, the discoverer of QCD amongst other things) Richard Feynman investigated the challenger explosion, he found that very specifically it was known inside NASA that the O-ring seals were not functional at too low a temperature.

    The engineers specified the lowest temperature the shuttle should fly at as being 53'F. On the day the challenger crew died, the temperature was 29'F. At his report to the commission, Feynman's rather low-tech demonstration of the O-ring material's behaviour was to put a piece of it into a glass of ice water, and show how it would not spring back to shape when deformed - as a seal should do.

    Anyone interested in a very detailed story of what NASA knew should read Feynman's book: "What Do You Care What Other Poeple Think?". Feynman was one of the most brilliant people to live this century, as well as being a very interesting individual :)
  • They are all covering up the fact that aliens built both our heart and brain. And you'll never hear the government admit this fact. Partly because it's not true, but primarily because they must cover it up or else something bad might happen...

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