The Challenger 488
On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the vehicle, its crew, and the U.S. space program.
On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the vehicle, its crew, and the U.S. space program.
Re:A moment of silence. . . (Score:2)
my moment of silence for the challenger was on that cold january day. Today, my gift to her crew is a place in my heart, and the knowledge that they will never be forgotten.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
Re:Feynman's perspective (Score:5)
Part of this reaction is apathy - who cares? that explosion happened so long ago. we're a culture of fast-paced flash and there have been plenty of explosions (OK, NY twin towers), a couple of wars (Gulf, Somalia, Yugoslaia), plenty of school shootings, and 14 Superbowls since that explosion. Who cares to remember one explosion?
part of it comes from a lack of a sense of history, and the way that history has built the world we currently live in. I've mentioned to a few people my pilgrimages to Trinity Site, NM (site of the first manmade atomic explosion) and how it's historically one of the most influential events to current history, only to receive confused looks. Same look i get when i tell people a day is special b/c it is the anniversary of D-Day, or Napoleon's defeat, or Genghis destroying Nineveh. We've little perspective.
Why have we such little perspective? it's nothing new, and in fact we probably have more perspective than most people have had throughout history since we have access to information from all around. And that's probably why we've still such little perspective - though we hae access to knowledge about so many Important Events, we don't really have the tools to sort through them.
in the past (a few thousand years ago), the Challenger explosion would have evolved into a Legend, a Myth, perhaps similar to Icarus's flight, and it's memory and message would have influenced our decision making for centuries to come. But now, what stories would stand out against the plethora of others? what Event that we know of is greater than all others? Pearl Harbor? The Kennedy Assassination? The Challenger Explosion?
Why should the Challenger explosion stand out so much more than all the others? Or, if it cannot, how do we give each event the respect that it deserves when there are so many to remember?
-f
Re:school library... (Score:2)
Re:Risk (Score:4)
No, it was the managers (at Morton Thiokol - mfrs of the rocket boosters) that OVERRULED the decision of their engineers who had a agreed that a launch in the cold January temperatures would be disasterous.
Do you get the Discovery Channel?
It's always the managers that screw these things up. Either by rushing the engineers/programmers/experts or assuming they know best when they clearly don't know shit.
--
Re:Local TV (Score:3)
I remember thinking, as it lifted off,"Odd, that seems a little slow". It seemed just a touch less snappy compared to other launches.
But it got off the pad okay and I dismissed the thought.
Then a little bit later they showed a close up through thge telescope of the side of the ship, and I saw what I thought were unusual plumes from the sides of the boosters. Again, it was odd, but again I dismissed it. Somehow, through all this, I was not my usual cheery self. Something was bugging me.
Then it happened. boom. and I argued with the people around me about what I saw in the replays over the next day or two, until the analysts on the TV spotted the plumes.
The importance of clear design (Score:5)
The engineers decided to present their data by wrapping it in distracting rocket icons. The rockets were organized, left to right, by date, but the real variable they needed emphasize was the relation of temperature to O-ring failure, not of date to O-ring failure. (The forecast temperature that morning was 25-30 degrees F, far below any previous launch temperature.) Tufte includes a chart he would've used, which forgoes date (and those cute rockets) in favor of a clear relationship between temperature and O-ring failure -- a chart that very possibly could've convinced management to cancel the launch.
This is what good information design is about. It's not about using fancy pictures to obscure data -- it's about using visual elements to highlight and emphasize the relationships between data. It's an important skill, and unfortunately it seems to be in very short supply.
Re:Give me a break... (Score:3)
Positive thinking is a crucial aspect of doing business. The problem is how to win victories against your competitors, and yet find a way to integrate thinking about the greater dimensions of the problem, and your responsibilities to the people who will live with the consequences of your actions.
Re:My favorite Challenger joke --I agree (Score:2)
Damn right! I sacrificed perfectly good karma for my joke. The least I could ask is some backup from some other wise-ass slashdotters... but no, all I get is Anonymous Cowards. fuck karma, you can't trade it up at Thinkgeek... sacrifice some!
"Me Ted"
Expected (Score:2)
Still, the thing was launched outside of its rated temperature range. The launch director should have been shot for that one.
Re:I remember (Score:2)
Good point. We certainly didn't know the reason for the O-ring failure, or for that matter, didn't know that the SRB's *had* O-rings. We didn't know the specifics of the SRB construction at that point, all that came later with the discussions.
Thanks.
Re:Challenger (Score:3)
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
I Remember the the morning of the 29th of Jan 1986. Being in Australia I couldn't actually watch the launch, I was only in primary school, 9 years old, eating breakfast when I heard on the radio news that the Space Shuttle Challanger had exploded, I ran into the lounge and turned on the TV to see that horrific image. We even had a minute of silence at 11:00am at our school (signifigant for Australians on the 11th of november). Most of the kids thought it was tragic, but funny. "Those Bloody Americans can't even get their shuttle right" But I held firm, I KNEW that NASA would find out what went wrong and fix it, and the next launch would be safer...
Well, I have to say that the challanger was really the last launch of the US Space program. Every launch thereafter was for satillites and the like. It was bad PR for the government, so they took the easy way out and gave up.
Look at the russian space program, even though the country was decimated by the shift to democracy They still kept their space program running. Even though they were using the same systems that they used in the sixties.
The point that I am trying to make is that the primary difference between the russian space program and the US space program is determination and resorcefulness. I am not saying the the US don't have these elements, but the russians do in abundance. NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that could function in zero gravity. Which is a fantastic idea, really and a triumph of human knowledge, however the russians use a pencil. Mir has been in orbit for how many years, and Skylab is where...
In 1988 (two whole years after challanger) the Russians launched their first reusable Space Shuttle, the "Buran". Even in the midst of talk that the space shuttle was unsafe (and the Russian shuttle was designed of the original american plans) the still pushed ahead.
The problem is that the americian public forgot what the space program was for. as exciting as the first moon walk was and as unbelievable the first space shuttle seemed these events where not designed for the public's entertaintment, they where designed to further human knowledge, experience and our reach.
Lets be honest, the ISS should have been built 10 years ago, it's not as if it couldn't have been, it just wasn't.
The challanger disaster highlighted the real challanges of space exploration, the US Space program fell of it's bike and scraped it's knee. But it didn't get back on, it ran home to mummy.
I got sent to the principals office within seconds (Score:2)
Re:School Children saw it. (Score:2)
The claim that these images "disturb a generation" is someone just trying to be too much of a shield from LIFE! I'd rather let my kids watch that type of reporting, rather than see all of the fake violence on today's TV shows. There is reality, of accidents, mistakes, war - then there is staged, scripted smut and violence all over today's TV that I am amazed from.
Shuttle Disaster Scenarios (Score:5)
In order to prepare for the next Shuttle disaster, we need to examine the various scenarios that may occur, their likelihood, consequences and what work should be done, in advance to prepare ourselves, our space program and our citizenry.
SCENARIO: Stranded in LEO due to APU failure
For example, consider what would happen if an orbiter were stranded in LEO due to total APU failure. The logic of the situation would unfold in this scenario:
Hundreds of millions of people on Earth would watch every detail of the dramatic situation unfold over several days (assuming they have that much life support). During the first few days, there will be many attempts to repair the problem with ground crews working round the clock on a simulated orbiter in a similar failure mode. They will come up with any of a number of futile attempts to fix the problem which the astronauts will, at first, dutifully carry out. This work will proceed even though there is little or no possibility of an actual fix. The public, the astronauts and NASA personnel will feel hope and dispair in cycles at each attempt, until, eventually, the charade will wear thin. At that point, the astronauts, the ones who are facing certain death, will be under enormous psychological pressure to end the charade.
Such a break-point will carry with it the likelihood of one or more astronauts venting frustration and hostility -- possibly built up over many years of disillusionment as part of the crippled US space effort.
NASA will attempt to blank-out all communications with the astronauts at or before this point. Some or all astronauts will not want to cooperate with this black-out and will refuse to allow the their communications to be encrypted. Ham radio operators and others around the world will band together to pick up the transmissions of the doomed astronauts and make them available to the public.
After breaking from the bureaucracy's authority, the astronauts may become extremely critical of specific individuals in NASA and its contractors. They will have nothing to lose and will finally have a chance to right what they perceive as the wrongs in the space program.
A few weeks after the dying words of the astronauts are heard, the shuttle will reenter the atmosphere at 5 or 6 miles per second. It will break up. A few large fragments will scatter widely and unpredictaby, hitting the ground before total disintigration due to the ablative coating. The public, ignorant of probability theory, will be in terror at the thought of the shuttle crashing into their communities causing mass destruction. The fireball could easily be visible from large population centers and will most likely be viewed on television broadcasts around the world.
SCENARIO: Secret Shuttle Launch Disaster
The DoD reopens the Vandenburg Shuttle launch facility. A payload with a plutonium radioactive thermal generator needs to be placed in an LEO polar orbit. About 2 minutes after SRB separation, a main engine pump turbine blade fails causing the turbine to fly apart at supersonic speed. The containment works pretty well but a few blades get out. One of them nicks the pressurization system for the fuel oxydizer tanks in one of the OMS pods. The astronauts sense a loud THUD and the loss of one of the main engines. They opt to abort once around using the remaining two main engines. Everything goes according to the contingency plan. All fuel is consumed from the main tank. The tank separates. The OMS engines start up. Only one of them lights. Since this produces an off center thrust, the RCS consumes excessive amounts of fuel to keep stability. The OMS system, only capable of using half its fuel, fails to put the Shuttle into a once around trajectory. It reenters short, somewhere near the Persian Gulf. In the early phase of reentry, when the aerodynamic control surfaces are insufficient to orient the spacecraft, the already overtaxed RCS runs out of fuel. The Shuttle begins tumbling somewhere over the Caucasus Mountains. By the time the control surfaces could be used, the Shuttle is in a fatal spin. It breaks up. When it breaks up, the RTG canister, designed to withstand reentry, is struck by one of the structural members of the Shuttle. Not being designed to withstand this, it shatters. 22 kilograms of Pu238-dioxide are distributed in the atmosphere over Moscow, Kalinin and Lenningrad.
The Soviet ballistic missile warning radars, primarily facing north, are briefly treated to the spectacle of hundreds of reentering objects coming down around Moscow and Lenningrad. The two largest, most economically important and strategically significant cities in the Soviet Union.
Pu238 is 284 times more radioactive than the fissionable isotope Pu239 due to its relatively short half-life of 86 years. It decays by alpha emmission of 5.5Mev. While this is somewhat higher than the decay energy of Pu239, it is far higher than the decay energy of U235 and not similar to the decay energy of any other common nuclide. Thus to the relatively unsophisticated instruments initially used to evaluate the sudden release of radioactive material, it will appear as though 5.5 metric tons of weapons-grade Pu239 has suddenly reentered over Moscow.
5.5 metric tons of Pu239 is enough to support on the order of 500 warheads. Areasonable surmize would be that a US secret launch out of Vandenburg was to illegally emplace a facility containing 500 or so nuclear warheads into an orbit where it would pass over the Soviet Union 4 times per day from the south whre their early warning radars could not detect it until it was far too late.
Vandenburg is a highly secured facility. Due to the local geography, neither the launch pad nor the assembly building can be viewed from sites not on the base. The Soviets will have very limited intelligence about launch preparations and the launch itself. Our belated protestations that it was merely a routine Shuttle launch will be met with a great deal of skepticism.
The Soviets, sensitized by the Chernobyl disaster to nuclear catastrophe, will be react unpredictably.
SCENARIO: Brilliant Soviet Rescue of Astronauts Stranded in LEO
As in the "Stranded in LEO Due to APU Failure" scenario, all 3 APU's fail, leaving the astronauts helplessly adrift.
The Soviets, hearing Tom Neff's idea of a rescue effort, come up with a brilliant plan. They launch an unmanned Soyuz from Space City with the stated intent of making a rendevous with the drifting Shuttle and rescuing some of the astronauts (the Soyuz wouldn't have capacity for all of them). Space City, being at a much higher latitude than KSC, gives the Soyuz craft a much higher inclination orbit than the Shuttle. The Soyuz, being incapable of correcting its inclination by the required amount, intersects with the Shuttle's orbit at a few miles second or so.
Thus the Soyuz saves our brave astronauts from the senseless torture of a slow death.
Why would the Soviets would go along with such an imbicilic rescue attempt when it requires the sacrifice of a launched Soyuz (worth $15 to $20 million)? The Soviets draw attention and blame for the disaster away from NASA. This allows NASA to contain the political damage and maintain its appearance of conducting a space program, leaving the Soviets free to develop space without competition.
SCENARIO: Possible consequence of terminal approach APU failure
During reentry 2 of the APUs fail and the third has some problems (as has occured before). But unlike the previous instances, the Shuttle comes into the terminal area energy management manuver a little bit high and a little bit fast. It encounters a little clear air turbulence while in a tight turn to bleed off this excess energy. As the pilot is lining up on the runway, the third and last APU gives out due to the buffetting. Unfortunately, the APU failed before he completed the final turn. The control surfaces go dead. The Space Shuttle, now out of control, impacts at supersonic speed into the waiting crowd which never hears it coming. Thousands perish.
Shuttle Disaster Premises
Here are the premises of the Shuttle disaster scenarios (my apologies to those who find all this painfully obvious, but the noise level around here has made it necessary that I belabor these points):
1 The SSME turbine pump blades have been found to be a weakness in the SSME design that has yet to be dealt with adequately.
2 The failure of these blades would result in a failure mode that has not been adequately tested, thus the turbine blade containment ring may not succeed in fully containing the debris.
3 The 3 APU's have been found to be a weakness in the Shuttle system design as 2 of the 3 have failed in a single mission with the 3rd found to be near failure after landing.
4 According to James Fletcher, the NASA Administrator appointed by President Reagan to reform NASA's Shuttle program after the Challenger disaster, the Space Transportation System is on the verge of becoming "economical". (While I may not agree with this opinion, it is certainly reasonable to assume the statements of such a person to be "plausible" in these scenarios.)
5 An "economical" launch system is what the military needs to launch its crushing backlog of spy satellites and Vandenburg is the only launch site which can make polar orbit without going over populated areas.
6 The trajectory of a Shuttle launched to the south into a polar orbit (which is the typical orbit of spy satellites) from Vandeburg reenters over the major western Soviet cities in the event that an abort to once around option is attempted and falls short due to inadequate thrust (such as OMS engine failure secondary to SSME failure).
7 RTG's are a far less vulnerable power source for spy satellites than solar cells and the military is increasingly concerned about solar panel vulnerability.
8 Unavoidable clear air turbulence is common over the Shuttle landing site at Edwards AFB.
9 The OMS fuel and pressurization lines are in reasonable proximity to the SSME turbine blades.
10 The Pu239 oxide cannisters have not been adequately tested since when they were subjected to an explosive test, they did fail and NASA proceeded to proclaim them flight ready because the explosive test was "invalid".
11 We have no way of rescuing Shuttle astronauts stranded in orbit.
Some other facts, pointed out to me privately, that could be used for future Shuttle disaster scenarios:
12 Orbital debris is a significant threat to the Shuttle as we have already experienced damage during one flight.
13 The SSME bell is not being adequately inspected for hairline cracks which could fail catastrophically during launch.
There are many classes of plausible disaster scenarios based on these premises. I've chosen to write on just a few exemplary cases which are particularly horrific. They are worth contemplating because they are so horrific.
My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment (Score:5)
We finally understood what they were talking about when we lost Challenger. All of my gen-x friends still today can clearly recall where they were and what they were doing when they learned the news. (I was in the Student Union in Ann Arbor, MI getting something to eat and trying to impress some girl at the time. I ran back into my dorm to tell the other guys what had happened.)
For us, this was our equvalent of the "Kennedy assasination" a defining moment for our generation where one of the core rules of the universe as we know it suffers a hard fault. The generaton that comes after us will not/can not really relate to something they've only heard about as 'history'. In time, I'm sure their generation will have an event that has a simiar effect on them. I can only hope that it will be notable for it's improbability, and not it's disasterous effects (like the first use of a nuclear weapon by terorists).
On a completely different thread: I was at the Kennedy Space Center about 2 weeks ago, just before the launch of the Shuttle Atlantis was scrubbed. I stood on a launch platform there, eactly 224 feet below the spot where 3 men lost their lives in the Apollo 1 command module. It was somber moment, disturbed only by the crying babies and infants that seemed to be issued to every second family that walked through the gates.
Even with such noisy distractions, I encourage every person here to visit the Space Center if they have the opprotunity. Seeing the place in photos does not do it justice.
A moment of silence. . . (Score:4)
Re:Other historical tragedies. (Score:2)
Of course I understand the difference bewtween disinfecting my toilet and performing an aborrtion. An abortion requires ALOT more skill - and care - as using the wrong tools/chemicals/techniques could kill the person being operated on (it would be excedingly hard fo rme to destroy my toilet bowl by cleaning it)
However, I see no MORAL difference bwteen the two.
"Thou shalt not kill" is a law made up by our society as a needed protection - a kind of glue to ease our fears and make society work. It does not apply to those who are not members of the society - or are not capable of being members.
It applies no more to a fetus than it does to a cow, or a deer, or any other animal that we regularly kill for our own ends.
-Steve
Re:Other historical tragedies. (Score:2)
Just because someone else may the child, doesn't give you any responsibility to follow through with the pregnancy.
What makes abortion wrong exactly? Really what?
I don't think its wrong. I do not believe that it is killing a human life. I don't see it as any different than using disinfectant soap to clean my toilet.
Abortion iwrong IF AND ONLY IF you believe that the fetus is a living thing, that deserves protection. I am sorry, but I just don't see it. Its just a clump of cells.
It has no more of a right to life than the bacteria and vinegar yeastes that are naturally in the honey I use to make mead - and I have no qualms about killing them before pitching the yeast that I want in there.
Until a human being is capable of learning language and forming relationships and being a member of society, then I don't recognize any right to life (which is really, a fabircation needed for our society to function).
-Steve
Re:Other historical tragedies. (Score:2)
Glad it was you who raised the issue of what the rest of us are to do while a certain other group is praying on school time.
When I was in High School years back, Christmas trees were in the school office, decorations on classroom doors, etc..
but then, this was the same school that had a Vice-Principal who counted my Yom Kippur absence as un-excused.
I believe his comment to the absence review board was, "if he's going to claim a religious holiday, at least let it be a real religion."
But I got him back. I dated his daughter.
As for Challenger, I was in the only class in the elementary school that didn't watch the launch on television. I remember riding home on the bus that day being upset that we hadn't seen the launch, and having the other kids ask me, "did you see it, did you see it, I can't believe it!" and not knowing what happened (they wouldn't tell me) until I got home and saw the television.
I sequestered myself in the basement among my Odyssey magazines and posters and watched the footage of the disaster repeatedly for the next 12 hours. I still know every frame from memory. I also have the local newspapers from that fateful day.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Uhg.. (Score:2)
May they rest in peace.
--------------------------------------
I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
Re:The Psychology of Trauma... (Score:3)
I was on Cape Canaveral for the Challenger explosion. They have tours that you can take, and if a launch is schedualled, they take you out onto a peninsula across from the launch site and you can wait and watch. Well, I was on spring break from school (6th Grade) and he had taken me down to see the launch because he knew how much it ment to me. We were out in the cold every day, and then on the last day before I had to head back to New York to school, it took off.
I remember that they held us out there for at least 4 hours or so after the explosion and that the bus driver knew there was something wrong before the rest of us (he had seen lots of lift offs before).
I remember listening to the radio communication between the Challenger and ground control over some P.A. speakers they had set up out there.
I remember them anouncing that the orbiter had exploded and trying to figure out if they ment the actual space shuttle or something else.
Now, some 15 years later I remember how utterly exhausted I was at the end of it, and how much I watched the news and followed the story. I followed the inqueries and felt very happy when one of my heros (Richard Feynman) not only was apointed to the committee investigating the disaster, but actually solved the problem and wouldn't let them white-wash it (as I learned much later when I read more about it when I got older).
Its odd. After witnessing one of the major 'disasters' in U.S. Space history a lot of people seem to think I would be turned against space, or be afraid of it. The truth is, I would happily go into space if given the chance with barely a second thought, even knowing something could go wrong. I HAVE been afraid to go watch another shuttle launch live, but that has more to do with free time then the superstitious fear I had about it for a while when I was younger (as if my being there really had something to do with it
It took us far too long to get a permanent space station in orbit (and the shuttle delligated to the role it was envisioned for, a 'shuttle' to/from that sapce station). I hope space flight progresses enough that the average person can get into space within my lifetime. At 28 I figure I stand a decent chance if the space program follows the same sort of a pattern as the one aeroplanes followed (although it may still be close).
If not me, then my children should be able to go, if not "to the stars," then at least, "to the planets"
Re:51-L's Legacy (Score:2)
--
Re:I remember this.... (Score:3)
The above lesson that even single, simple engineers can have a profound responsibility to the safety of the public, and engineers should not let their instincts or ideas be persuaded by businessmen.
These lessons are taught to EVERY sophomore engineering student (mechanical, electrical, systems, chemical, biomed, etc....) at my school in an engineering ethics class that uses the Challenger and many other well known and documented engineering misjudgments as examples.
----------------------------------------
Rogers Commission Report (Score:2)
I'm of two minds on this.
Technically, you're correct. The vehicle did not explode. The SRB plume burned through the strut connecting it to the External Tank, the SRB swung on the remaining strut, and the vehicle was then being pushed in different directions at once at supersonic speeds. The tank was ripped open, and the fuel inside ejected in yet a third direction, causing thrust against the orbiter that it was never designed to withstand. The vehicle broke up at that point.
I don't think Peter Jennings has been lying to us, either. Explosion is a simple way to put what happened, and those with a desire for more knowledge can easily find it. There is no conspiracy to conceal this fact.
----
Re:The importance of clear design (Score:3)
The Thiokol guys knew their audience: NASA PHB's like shiny, pretty pictures. If you've looked at NASA documentation [just check out NASA Watch [nasawatch.com]], you'll see that they like this to be the way they get information. Hell, on the ISS Flight Plans, they have a NASA-distributed traffic light icon that is red, yellow, or green for the overall flight based on the overall flight criteria.
Tufte's conclusions are correct in many ways, but NASA's bureaucratic whims are as much to blame. For one thing, the entire STS system wasn't designed to launch below 40F. Yet they did anyway. The O-Rings were just one of many things that could have failed...in fact, the primary O-ring on one SRB failed on the fifteenth shuttle flight--at a launch temp of 53F--and that sparked the study and discussion of what happened with Challenger.
--
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
The lessons I'm talking about are :-
1. Technical failures don't endanger lives etc, it's the failure of people to adequately assess and prepare for risks that is dangerous.
2. Ideally, it should take more than a single technical faillure to cause a system failure. Where this level of preparation is too expensive or time-consuming, stakeholders should explicitly take the cost versus safety decision. And review it.
3. It's quite possible to produce systems whose complexity and reliability are impressive, but you can't do it just with brilliant individuals. You have to have a process; review and criticism is vital. Having brilliant individuals certaily helps. If all you have is dumb individuals, don't bother starting.
missed one (Score:2)
The Psychology of Trauma... (Score:5)
Kids (and adults) WILL generally fill in the blanks in their knowledge with the scariest possibilities. Often far scarier than reality could possibly produce.
(That's why conspiracy cults and doomsday cults are as popular as they are. They claim to be able to fill those blanks in.)
"Understanding" is a fundamental human need that we ALL have. Young and old, male and female, of all races, cultures and creeds. Indeed, most cultures, stereotypes, religions, etc, sole function is to meet that need for understanding.
I'd rather kids have PTSD - which can be "remedied" and even turned into an asset by adequate councelling and a loving, safe family - than have those same kids turn into paranoid sociopaths (a common consequence of the mind adding it's own unique terrors) who are too suspicious to ever be helped.
That's not to say that kids should not have their information filtered. Age-inappropriate situations are those in which the brain has not yet developed a mechanism for handling the input. At which point, those situations will result in the brain developing all sorts of strange neural connections and chemical responses, in an effort to keep things managable.
(Children don't "mend" easily, as previous generations were taught. Such faulty brain chemistry or wiring will likely result in conditions which are permanent and require treatment - if any exists - for the remainder of the child's life.)
Which category is the Challanger disaster under? The first. Kids know "loss" and "bereavement" by the age of 2 or 3. The changes a kid will have gone through by then, through gaining ever-greater independence, involves losing so much of what they (as a baby) took for granted that the issue of loss is pretty much resolved.
(In fact, most people who have trouble with loss are people who never went through those losses as a child and therefore never developed a mechanism to cope.)
To deprive a child of an essential part of growing up (that of developing that understanding of loss) is often extremely harmful. In order to grow, you HAVE to be able to let go.
Virtually all "recovery groups" out there really just show people how to let go, grieve, and then convert what's left into something those people can build from.
The biggest reason ANYONE ever fails to recover in such a group is their refusal to take that first step and let go.
And the biggest reason anyone ever has anything to recover from is that society as a whole favours clinging on to ever letting go.
To summarise: If you're on the Titanic, you can recover from getting a bit cold. You can't recover from getting a bit dead.
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
The space program was for one reason. To get up there before the Russians could. There was a rightful fear of what could happen if the Russians established a base in orbit or on the moon and made a nuclear weapons platform up there.
Everything else was just icing.
Besides, if you can launch a spaceship into orbit, then you can launch an ICBM. This is the problem with the technology leaking into China as a result of the laxness of the Clinton administration. Fortunately, so far it looks like right now they'd rather get up into space than threaten everybody with ICBMs.
Lets be honest, the ISS should have been built 10 years ago, it's not as if it couldn't have been, it just wasn't.
Really, we should never have abandoned Skylab after a pitiful three missions. From what I remember seeing of it, it was as spacious as Mir was cramped.
Re: (Score:2)
mirror/memorial (Score:2)
This memorial consisted of a mirror, that tracks the sun while it is in the sky.
The motor has broken on the sun mirror, and NASA has announced they plan to *not* fix it due to the cost of it, and how much that money is needed elsewhere.
Just thought ya'll might like to know that.. and maybe some people would want to do something about it. I have no links, and I wouldnt know the first person to contribute to to get this working again, but I personally think it is a sad state of affairs when 7 people who die for the attempted betterment of mankind are basically blown off 15 years later.
Maeryk
Re:What Really Happened (Score:2)
And no, I'm not saying that the popular press is lying to us, just that their understanding of science is at its usual abysmal level.
--Jim
Re:I remember this.... (Score:3)
--
Get Over it (Score:2)
Re:Give me a break... (Score:3)
I think it will be a long time before NASA makes another decision like that, but like all great tragities of history, it is up to us to learn from these mistakes. Like holocaust surivivor elie wiesel has said, you only honour the dead if you help assure it will never happen again.
Life is not Star Trek (Score:2)
I take it that this topic is a result of MSNBC's program on the Challenger failure. IMO, it was a fairly well done piece, and it brought tears back to my eyes.
On that tragic morning, our whole school was shocked by the principal's un-scheduled, rushed, and awkwardly worded announcement that "The Space Shuttle blew up." We were particularly affected because my H.S. Calculus teacher [go.com] was one of the semi-finalist for the Teachers-in-space program. If the failure had not happened, she probably would have gone up in a later shuttle flight.
Edward Tufte (in his excellecnt book, Visual Explanations [amazon.com]) has an interesting section on the Challenger Disaster -- Basically, NASA didn't understand the urgency of the objections from Thiokol engineers because they (NASA) didn't clearly understand the o-ring failure probability. Thiokol engineers gave NASA the tabular data of o-ring failure rates (the data collected from post-flight analyses of past spent SRB's). Had they graphed the data, Tufte claims, NASA would have clearly understood that the SRB's were in an unusable temperature range.
Some people believe that science and technology has advanced to StarTrek-like perfection: a car should tell you that there's a problem with its right front tire, a chemical plant's safety system is multiply redundant and will never fail, a computer will instantly solve your problems if you ask the right questions, and common devices are instantly and infinitely reconfigurable to work in any environment. These are worthy ideal goals to have; but, of course, reality falls far short of these StarTrek dreams. Time and money, limits of practicality, and social and political dynamics combine to form trade-offs that sometimes don't work out.
It might be in somewhat poor taste, but I own a stock-certificate of the Thiokol Corporation [yahoo.com] as a reminder of the lesson that I learned from the disaster. My fellow engineers will occasionally hear me say "Go with Throttle up" when I feel that a (software) project has been rushed, inadequately designed, and poorly tested. Of these 'doomed projects', 3/5-th of those project 'launches' without significant problems, the next 1/5th has significant problems after launch, and the last 1/5th end up with critical failures which we then have to scramble to contain. Of course, failures are best understood in hindsight [tcnj.edu]. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes.
What Really Happened (Score:5)
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l
where you will find the text of the Rogers Commision report on what happened to the Challenger. Many of you have probably read Feynman's famous Appendix to the report, but you should also read Chapter III, "The Accident" and read it closely.
Nowhere in there will you find words like "the vehicle exploded" or "the external tank exploded". The closest you'll come is an "almost explosive" burning of fuel after the external tank comes apart. That's right, kids, the Challenger wasn't destroyed by an explosion like Peter Jennings has been telling you all these years. It and the external tank were torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the tank.
--Jim
Re:I saw it in person... (Score:2)
...phil
Re:Feynman's perspective (Score:2)
In other words, no, it is not a sign of the state of Slashdot. It's an artifact of the fact that it takes time to compose a well-thought-out discussion post, but no time to say "BO-ring!".
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Do YOU remeber where you was when you heard ... (Score:2)
Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this (Score:2)
Apollo 1 (Score:5)
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
IIRC, the military had quite a lot to say in the space shuttle program. And I think that a few of the communication satellites were spy satellites.
I still don't get why satellite launches via shuttle were considered better (or even cheaper) than rocket launches. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that a satellite launch with a Russian `Proton' rocket was both cheaper and safer than a shuttle launch in the late 80's.
The Galileo probe (to Jupiter) was delayed for almost eight years because first they couldn't get a launch slot on a shuttle, then the Challenger catastrophe happened and there were no slots for years. Meanwhile, the planets had moved and Galileo had to take that wacky Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth tour to pick up enough speed to eventually reach Jupiter. Of course, they had to modify the craft because it wasn't built for the inner solar system. Wouldn't have happened if they had just launched the probe with a rocket in '82.
Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment (Score:2)
While I'm certain that everyone discussed the situation, being so close to the investigation made it dominate the news. I remember hearing about it constantly as they were looking into the cause of the failure.
Like most launches, it was constantly delayed because of weather, etc. Well, they decided to launch the sucker rather than keep waitting, and wow, what a disaster.
A few years later I was doing a "research paper" (I think 6th grade, so it was closer to a book report with 2 books
Alex
Re:Amendment One protects sick fuck's speech? (Score:2)
Attention span.... (Score:4)
I think the most significant part of the posted sentence was the part about destroying the space program. Challenger *did* set the US space program back incredibly. So what? Given the large number of posts on
So who cares? If you don't, you probably should. The vast majority of
The whole point of this post was to elicit discussion, unfortunately the discussion so far has been just depressing. Think about where we are 15 years after the Challenger incident vs. where we might be if it had never happened at least. I personally wasn't old enough to remember the Challenger incident, but it still saddens me. Not only were lives lost when they shouldn't have been, but progress was held back by foolishness yet again. So today, please try and pull yourself from the four hour pregame shows for just a few minutes to really think about the impact Challenger has had and will have on all of us, and spare a thought for those lost, the world will be that much better.
Apologies for the longwindedness.
-wd
--
chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
old story (Score:3)
better luck next time michael
whats this about? (Score:2)
Challenger (Score:5)
Here's why...
Take a look at some of the other responses. People are posting tasteless jokes, making comments such as "Kaboom!" and other insensitive remarks. After reading some of them I began to feel sick to my stomach. I realize there are a good number of younger readers out there who don't recognize the significance of the event, but there's no excuse for that kind of behavior.
I was very young when the Challenger exploded. I was only 8 years old. I was in Atlanta, and Jan. 28th was a very cold day - it was snowing in fact, a rare scene in Atlanta. So rare, that the schools were all closed, so we were at home watching tv that day. I was at my best friend's house, playing with Lego's and Transformers when we his mother told us the shuttle "blew up". I remember the shock, and disbelief. I thought she was wrong, or making a really bad joke. Then we saw the pictures on the tv replay.
The press kept showing the various images. There were people at the Cape, completely horrified at what they had just seen. There were reporters who couldn't speak, some of them broke down on camera, hit with the horrific scene they had just witnessed. There were cameras focused on the water, scanning for bits of wreckage. Everyone thought that a rescue team might be able to find the survivors in the water. Nobody even realized the fact that there were no survivors until several hours later.
Yes, I remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing. I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, and watching that was devastating. I think a part of every American died that day. All we could do was sit there and watch as one of our most important national sybols burst into flames.
In the years that followed, NASA went through a sort of "rebirth". They rebuilt the entire program, making thousands of changes to the shuttle fleet. Plans were made for a new shuttle to replace the Challenger. NASA asked the children of the nation's schools to submit ideas for the new vehicle's name. Ideas like "Challenger II" and "Phoenix" were commonly mentioned. Today we all know it as "Endeavor".
More than two and a half years after Challenger, NASA was ready to give it another shot. This would be the safest shuttle mission the world had ever seen. Anything less, and the program would be a total failure. Many of us remember the next launch just as well as the Challenger. Everyone watched as the clock was counting down. We all held our breath as the engines fired up. Time sort of stood still as we watched Discovery leave the pad. Everyone was watching for that little spark to appear on the booster rocket - hoping that it didn't happen again. A little over a minute into the launch we heard the operator's call - "Go with throttle up". That was the last call they made to Challenger. We held our breath again. Nothing happened. Discovery just kept on climbing. The SRB's were seperated. Discovery kept going. Ten minutes later Discovery was flying high above the Earth, and along with it were the spirits of every American. One launch took us from the worst feeling in the world, to a kind of euphoric joy. I used to watch the launch over and over again, thinking how cool it would be to someday be an astronaut.
The Challenger accident was a huge lesson for America's space program. It's unfortunate that an incident of this nature is sometimes necessary for us to get the message. Fortunately we did get the message. Atlantis is being delayed this week so that engineers can make a few additional safety checks. The chance of a problem are extremely remote, but the program is focused on safety more than ever today.
It still amazes me when I see some of the comments posted on this board. How anyone can look at the Challenger and make light of its importance escapes me. Someone mentioned that it might have been "beta testing an early version of Windows". Another says that NASA stands for "Need Another Seven Astronauts". Then there are the ones who simply ask "and..?" If you don't understand the significance, read some of the other posts from people who really care. This is a piece of our history, and it should not be made into a joke.
If you're still confused about it, go to CNN. Read some articles about the Challenger, watch some videos. There's a show on the Discovery Channel that documents the entire event, and explains the failure in great detail. If you can find it, watch it. If you still can't say anything decent abuot it, then please, do us all a favor, and keep your comments to yourself.
Now if you will all excuse me, I'm going to take my moment of silence.
Went home early that day.. (Score:2)
I got home and watched the replays for hours. I remember being pissed off when they finally returned to regular programming. See, I was totally fascinated with the shuttle program when I was a kid. Columbia first went up when I was 10. I was the geeky kid who grabbed the National Geographics to read up on the shuttle program instead of looking for the naked ladies in the jungle. In fact, I swiped the Columia issue from my stepfather's collection just last year. I couldn't believe what I was watching that day, as most of us here.
In December of last year, I spent Christmas vacation in Orlando, and spent 6 hours touring Kennedy Space Center with my family. What an amazing place. We sat in third row center of the shuttle IMAX movie, featuring the Challenger, and some crew members who lost their lives in the explosion. And then MSNBC ran the Challenger special for a couple weeks earlier this month. It was all too soon for me, right after the Florida vacation.
I still get very upset when I see the explosion. I often have to close my eyes or turn away. And being a ham radio operator, knowing hams who have spoken directly to astronauts and cosmonauts using 14-foot steerable antennas on the roofs of their homes.. it all just strikes me very hard.
Being a sysadmin now, I now regularly use a phrase that I learned directly from the loss of the challenger.. "catastrophic failure".
--
Re:What Really Happened (Score:2)
Does anyone have any independent verification of this?
--
Re:Aw, come on... (Score:2)
Re:Challenger (Score:2)
I remember everyone was like "cool" when it happened. It was remote, not part of our lives, something that happens. Aircraft crash, ships sink, spacecraft blow up. Need Another Seven Astronauts, and forty other jokes that went around immediately afterwards.
I don't see it as being any great deal. Who remembers the TWA jet crashing off Florida, with 20 or 30 times as many deaths? Who recalls the two off-duty policemen, dragged from their car and ripped apart by an angry mob, live on tv, in Northern Ireland. Who remembers the stunning footage of an American GI getting shot through the throat in Lebanon.
Sure, it was a screw-up supreme when Challenger popped. But it's no big deal - shit happens every day, and making light of it is how we deal with it.
~Cederic
(What do NASA engineers drink? 7 up)
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
Everyone with pride cashed in their social security cards and moved to Canda. In the process, they took a large amount of cigarettes and booze with them, but that didn't inhibit their ability to actually learn and sing the national anthem.
Don't believe me? Go to any sporting event in Canada. People actually sing along, remove their caps and show respect. Even Subway restaurants are different. They don't serve American cheese in Canadaian subways, they serve chedder. In the states it's American.
So there you go.
I remember this.... (Score:2)
At least some good things came from that disaster. The safety measures on shuttle launches have taken leaps and bounds forward because of that. Also, they (NASA) realized that shuttle launches shouldn't be treated as "routine" as they were then, no matter how many safety features there are.
It was just a tragedy that a disaster like that had to happen for all of those good things to happen.
Dark Nexus
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
It's one thing to knowingly take a risk. It's another to be lied to about the magnitude of that risk, or to be exposed involuntarily to risk (of shuttle parts falling on your house, or toxic payloads being strewn into the atmosphere) based on bad assumptions.
Does that mean we shouldn't take risks? Hell no! But we need honest assessments.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The symmetry was just too much for me & mom (Score:3)
My mother was in grade school when kennedy was killed (she was 11), and had been naughty that day. She was exiled to the corridor to "sit and think about what you've done" (<-- doesn't this happen to every kid at least once?). While she was out there, she heard the ladies working in the cafeteria talking about the asassination (they'd presumably heard it on the radio). Mom became quite disturbed and ran back into the classroom and shooted "Kennedy's dead! He's been shot!". The teacher didn't believe her and she got in even more trouble for telling "such hurtful lies." (Note that of course the teacher didn't apologize when she was found to be in the wrong, I think it's in their contracts that they can never do that... :-/)
Fast forward ~23 years. I'm in 2nd grade (I was about 8, we started regular schooling @ 6 in my district). All the kids had been getting worked up about the shuttle launch for weeks, making posters, reading things about it, etc. The teacher told us (I don't recall how she found out), and I got in a lot of trouble for not believing her (shouting "That's not true! You're a liar!" probably didn't help)).
Well, at least good things have come from those tragedies. Now we take a little better care of our Presidents (i.e. no more riding around in convertibles). And from what other posters have said (corroborated by a friend who spent 6 months as an enginneering intern at NASA), they are a lot more fastidious now about launching safely.
--
Fuck Censorship.
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
Well, lookie here... it seems at least the Air Force thinks there could be problems if China joins the space race... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/29/165206 &mode=thread
[slashdot.org]
Re:Feynman's perspective (Score:2)
They're making a millenium clock and library complex to give us all a sense of history. Very interesting and insightful project.
Re:51-L's Legacy (Score:3)
First, I work in aerospace. We heard about the booster cable problem in late November or early December through the routine grapevine. Noise about the next launch died down significantly, and the push to get U.S. Lab done on time let up *just* a bit. [I work with one of the guys who gets sent down to Kennedy some of the time to work inside ISS modules.]
After the last launch, it was found that one of the SRB's didn't separate from the primary firing mechanism, but the secondary. Because of issues with separation--heck, look what happened when the restraints failed on STS 51-L, because that was perhaps the most catastrophic of the failures right there--NASA quietly put all the fleet on standby.
The cables that caused the rollback to happen were only found as part of an investigation prompted by the above. It's good to see the thing rolled back, but having unresolved SRB separation issues is a bad thing.
In some ways, the system is working, but we were all frustrated that they ever rolled STS out there in the first place. Plus hell, we all hate late January launches [the last FDRD baselined launch date was 01/18]. 51-L, Apollo I...we prefer to just wait a while. Superstitious? You bet your ass.
--
Some "Challenger" reading (Score:3)
For those who want the 25-cent ludicrously short summary of the answer, and on the web so they don't even have to pay 25 cents, can find it near the bottom of a speech I gave to the National Defense Industry Association conference last year, posted here [cuug.ab.ca].
It's actually mostly about the Titanic -- I added in the material on the Challenger when I read Prof. Franklin's book and realized the deep similarities in the engineering and management cultures. It starts around slide 44.
The above URL has one link for the speech text, then links to all the slides. If you print the text (or use two browser windows) and then follow the slides on-screen, you can duplicate the whole presentation.
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
Until Mars exploration becomes more of a reality, there is nothing for the US to focus their pride and nationalism towards. Something 'Independence Day'ish would probably also do it.
What WAS the program trying to do? (Score:2)
Public awe of space exploration had been quite low going into the Challenger launch; the US v USSR Space Race was becoming a footnote in the Cold War; NASA's importance as part of American culture was waining. Putting Christa McAuliffe in a space shuttle (w/a real crew, of course) seemed to be a publicity stunt.
I do not intend to imply that having a Jane Doe (pardon the unintentional reference to unidentified bodies) in a space flight leads to disaster, but the lesson here is not one of lowest contracts. Rather, we should remember that this tragedy should have never happened -- the shuttle launch should have never even been scheduled.
Re:Prerecording statements (Score:3)
What happened is that the launch went ahead in spite of warnings from knowledgable engineers that things could very probably go wrong if they went ahead with the launch at that time. Speculation abounded that there was pressure to launch on time so that Regan's speech (scheduled that evening) could go ahead, as planned.
As I remember it, the astronauts, themselves were absolutely furious at the callous regard for the lives of the crew during that launch, and insisted on some of the safety measures that caused delays in future launches.
It's one thing to risk your life. It's another thing to risk your life needlesly to prevent an idiot president from having to change his speech.
`ø,,ø!
Re:Those final moments (Score:2)
--
Pardon me, but WTF is this (Score:3)
What a completely unnecessary, inflammatory statement. The Challenger accident did not destroy the U.S. Space Program. There have been approaching 100 shuttle missions since then. What it did was present the reality of space flight to a public that had become complacent and soft, believing in the delusion that going to space was like getting on an airplane.
The U.S. space program continues to be the most advanced and vigorous of any nation in the world, a product of the superb economic system that drives it. I'd challenge anyone to show me a program that did not have accidents and one that provided as many benefits for its nation as ours does. As a matter of fact, I'd say our program is healthier than ever, considering that a billion dollars in hardware and 7 of the most gifted people on the planet went down just 15 short years ago in the glare of the most prolific and suffocating media machine the world has ever seen.
Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment (Score:2)
Yea, I was also born in 1982 and I will always remeber that event. It canceled the game I was watching and aloud me to view a 25mph bronco for a few hours.
turn the TV off? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
As the parent of an obsessed three-year-old who knows the names of more Apollo astronauts than virtually any adult, the sense of loss is brought home to me every time he says "Michael Collins" or "Jim Lovell" and the other adults in the room ask what the heck he's talking about.
The media were the message... (Score:3)
The astronauts weren't heroes. We'd like to pretend that they were ennobled souls who gave their lives in pursuit of a dream, but they weren't. They were a couple of pilots whose "plane" was designed to go exoatmospheric, some scientists whose laboratories happened to be on that exo-"plane", and a joyrider whose presence was thought to be a PR coup. I'm sure that they were all dedicated, respectable individuals -- but their deaths no more made them heroes than the safe return of all the other shuttle crews made _them_ heroes.
The engineers had a bad day in that they couldn't make the managers understand the gravity of the situation. The management structure of NASA and its contractors was ill-suited for the activities they were conducting. Tight schedules, tight budgets, and tight-assed bureaucrats led into a dangerous situation where they accepted a risk higher than they should have and it jumped up and bit them hard. But that was not the end of the world. You grieve for the dead, you identify the breakdown in the system, you redesign where needed, either in a booster or an org chart, and you move forward with lessons learned.
But the press...ah, the press. The press (save CNN) couldn't be bothered to broadcast the launch. There was no "public interest" to be served there. Come the explosion, however, and they could hardly decide whether they needed to serve the public by showing the explosion, or the burned Apollo I capsule in the obligatory Solemn Look Backward, or the various self-aggrandizing political "leaders" arguing either that They Shall Not Give Their Lives In Vain or We Have Suffered Too Greatly, depending on whether the space program did or did not result in large sums of federal dollars being transferred into the said self-aggrandizing politician's district/state. They were positively relishing in just how awful it was; a national tragedy like that could really draw people to their TVs. That was the first time that I _really_ understood that the role of the news media is to draw eyes for the advertisers and that their proud defense of the public interest is just so much self-serving bullshit. "Oh, God, it was horrible! The flames, and the smoke, and the death! Let's see that again, Bernie!" I've been disgusted by the media since.
Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this (Score:2)
A car that was that unreliable would be lethal.
Still, there may not be any fundamental reasons that rockets are so bad right now- it may well just be that mankind hasn't learnt how to do it reliably yet- nearly all the failures seem to be preventable.
Flying used to be very dangerous too, but now it is about as dangerous as driving (per journey; much safer per mile though.) Probably space flight will go the same way.
Feynman's Appendix F (Score:4)
I remember (Score:5)
A humanities class had just started in the three classrooms in three different cities linked by our microwave system. We control room operators asked the instructor if he and his class would like to watch the launch. He said yes and we threw the satellite signal to all the classrooms. About 60 students between all the sites. The signal was also thrown to a TV in the lobby of the local campus.
We watched the launch through 'go at throttle up' and then the explosion/disintegration/whatever. All the rooms became very quiet. Everyone was shocked. There was a little confusion at first as we all didn't quite understand how bad this was. Sure it exploded, but was the orbiter intact and cabaple of some kind of controlled landing? Were any of the crew alive?
After a time it became clear that this was total destruction and it was unlikely that the crew survived. Twenty minutes after the event, the instructor said "I don't think I feel much like having class today, you're all free to go." Most students agreed and most left. Some stayed to watch the continuing coverage.
We stopped one of the two 3/4" decks that had been recording this event and reviewed the tape frame by frame. In that day, VHS had frame by frame but the resolution and tracking was poor, 3/4" was not quite the best for broadcast standard, but was very clear and would hold a still frame. As we watched carefully, the boss told us to hold at one frame and then went to the screen to point out the plume from the SRB. He said "This doesn't look right, is this supposed to be there?" We looked at the postion of the plume and began to discuss what might have happened.
We came up with two fundamental theories. The first was that the hot gasses from the plume had perforated the External Tank and ignited the LOX or Hydrogen. After looking at the tape several more times, there was a frame where the SRB looked a bit askew. This gave rise to the second theory -- that the lower SRB mount had burned through or broken and the SRB swiveled with the top of the SRB striking the top of the ET and causing the breakup. Damn that NASA video was good.
What irony that months later, the report showed that our second scenario was exactly correct. As just a bunch of low paid wanna-be techies sitting around looking at the event frame by frame, we had gotten the gist of what had happened within an hour after the explosion. I suppose that this exercise was our way of bebriefing and putting off the saddness and trauma until we were ready to handle it.
On the personal side, I have always been really involved in the space program, absorbing everything about it, from the fluff to the technical and I saw it as our future. I spent the next 3 or 4 months in clinical depression after this event. It caused problems with my marriage (we worked it out). I am still sad when I think about the loss of the lives of those brave people and the harm to the space program. I still had confidence that the program would continue though. I would have ridden a launch the very next day, even on the old SRB design.
I got to visit the Cape a few years later and take the tour. As another poster has mentioned, it was a very sobering experience. It was very powerful to be where this event and all the other successes of many years of the manned and unmanned space program had taken place. I was also lucky in that the Shuttle mockup built from the early prototype lifting body was present there in the parking lot on display. One could go up a series of stairs underneath the Shuttle into the cargo bay and they had landings at each of the decks in the crew comparments. The compartments were complete and the had plexiglass walls so you could see the entire area. I spent quite a bit of time studying the details.
The thing that struck me most was that all the panels, electronics, etc. were one-off. We are all so used to manufactured electronics where everything is stamped plastic and identical, and peoples lives don't depend on whether your boom box was well manufactured. I looked at those panels and realized that they were done by some individual. Each connection soldered individually, each panel custom built, each astronauts life dependent on whether the technican was feeling good or had a headache or had a fight with his wife that morning. I felt an intense connection with the seven brave and well trained people who had perished.
I still believe that space is our future. I would still fly if asked (not likely due to age and physical condition).
This is first time I have written about this event since it happened. Sorry if I have rambled, but I'm glad to get it off my chest. I hope that it has been valuable for someone else.
Thanks
Russ
Keep Perspective (Score:3)
More than 10,000 and as many as 30,000 people are presumed dead. 125,000 people are missing.
Rescue agencies are unable to provide the type of support needed to search for survivors, due to a lack of funding.
"Obviously, a major malfunction." (Score:3)
Nesbitt was based in Houston and did not have a monitor in front of him showing the plumes, just data monitors showing telemetry.
At that point they only knew something was awry with the launch and vehicle communications. There are limited abort capabilities at 73 seconds -- realistically, probably none. But until the Range Safety Officer reported they had destroyed the SRBs ahead of schedule, even after that, it was still possible that the orbiter vehicle was in some kind of abort mode.
Nesbitt's words were for the public, interpreting things that are said and seen, and as far as I know were not heard by the people at Mission Control.
I agree, it was a tremendously professional moment among many others that day. Hundreds of people, all of them unable to sit and stare, all of them required to be working their post and determining what happened and what options may be left, if any.
transcript/timeline [cbsnews.com]
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the Morton Thiokol manager who overruled his own engineers earlier that morning.
----
Re:Interesting Moderation (Score:2)
Also a "bug" in the way some browsers' keystrokes work. If I try to submit a form via the keyboard, instead of by mousing down and clicking the button, I usually manage to change the selection in the box before I do so. So maybe the one Funny person didn't even mean to set the moderation that way.
(I also end up with all the selection boxes disappearing. Time to scrap IE4, I guess.)
Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment (Score:2)
A Toast to Those... (Score:3)
And a big middle finger to those who think it's funny making fun of a tragedy on this scale.
I believe this is something that shouldn't be joked about. It's honestly a very dark day in our history. The deaths of ANY person is something that should be mourned, and I pray for the families of the mission. May the hears of the loved ones of who died become strong, and they remember what good came from them. Setting a presidence for others to follow. These people are heroes, red, white, and blue. Joking about this not only hurts the loved ones of those whom died. I'm offended by you. I believe that if you can joke about this, then you don't understand what the mission stood for. I'm ashamed of you, and quite appalled by your ignorance.
People don't joke about heroes.
That's like saying that all the guys in world war II for the freedom of the world were all morons.
And that george washington was just some fag who wore a stupid wig.
I'm extremely offended, and can't believe that you'd joke about something as serious as that.
-- John Dee
Re:51-L's Legacy (Score:2)
--
Re:I saw it in person... (Score:2)
I think the exact quote was "[long pause] Obviously a major malfunction.[long pause]" It was delivered in classic military/NASA radio code style, with no change in tone of emphasis, as if were only noting the throttle down or SRB separation. I've taken to using this expression when something catastrophic goes wrong at work, like a prototype goes up in smoke, but few bystanders appreciate the irony.
The other immortal quote comming out of the tragedy was the famous "Red Flag Memo": "[t]he result wouldbe a catastrophe of the highest order--loss of human life." for which Roger Boisjoly, Thiokol engineer, would be blackballed from the space program, following the accident.
QuickTime movie of the explosion (Score:3)
Re:Pardon me, but WTF is this (Score:2)
If the U.S. economyc "system" was really superb, people and corporations would be PROPERLY taxed a reasonable amount to insure that the space program would really be progressive, in the order of foresightly bring back untold riches for the benefit of everyone, instead of being the dreadful acc
--
a page with lots of info: (Score:2)
This page and the ones after it describe in great detail what happened before, during, and after the crash.
School Children saw it. (Score:5)
My (4th grade) class had lunch durring the time the launch was to happen, so we were buying food when it happened. The class next to us had decided to take a late lunch in order to watch it - they suddenly showed up and were rather upset - saying the shuttle had exploded. Lunch ended early. Classes crowded into rooms with TVs and watched news reports on what had happened. at least 20 times from various angles we saw the explosion. We were all elft speechless, some kids cried. The teachers were too stunned to realize they needed to turn the TV off and get us doing something else. No work got done all day - we went to the busses straight from watching the news coverage.
The media, not knowing that schoolchildren were watching, didn't pull any punches, and repeatedly stated that the astronaughts and crew were most likely dead. It was a bad day, and it hurt the space program as well as disturbing a generation. I'm getting my vodka now. I don't want to think about this.
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
And they keep feeling that way until the benefits smack them in the face. The gold and cotton of the Americas; silks and spices of the Orient; these things weren't obvious when the first explorers arrived, and weren't fully appreciated until the infrastructure was in place to transport them. But those things all happened in the fullness of time. Who is to say that the rest of the solar system will be any different (except that it looks like we won't have to displace any more indigenous populations before raping the other planets, but I digress...)?
I can't help but look at responses such as this as pathetically short-sighted. Maybe nothing will come of our fragile experiments beyond the envelope of the atmosphere, but we can't know if we don't try. To the objection that machines can do it better, I would say that this may be true of routine, well-planned tasks such as satellite launches, but it will never be true for less well-defined missions. Could a robot at this stage have repaired the Hubble? Assembled the ISS? And had men been sent instead of machines to Mars, don't you think they might have noticed that they were descending a little fast rather than just oblogingly smashing into the surface as directed?
Personally, I think the rest of the solar system will probably turn out to be a worthwhile resource for humanity--far out-weighing a cure for malaria or a couple of ugly bits of public sculpture (and there is a fallacious assumption implicit in that argument that somehow, monies spent on space exploration would otherwise necessarily go to something more immediately practical. Uh-huh. Obviously our elected officials would rather benefit humanity than indulge in a little more pork-barreling for their constituents). Even if not, I think that finding out is a chance that's worth taking.
Re:I remember this.... (Score:2)
I was in a class at Camelback High School in Phoenix, Arizona, titled "Science Seminar."
For one class period per day, we did essentially whatever we wanted to do, but we had to report on it once per week.
I submitted a paper to the SSIP (Student Space Involvement Program) on the design and construction of a magnetohydrodynamic generator for use in low Earth orbit. For that, I won a trip to Ames AFB, Palo Alto, CA.
Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in a classroom with six or seven other people, all of whom were also involved in the program.
We watched the Shuttle go up, and saw it explode. And with it, all of our hopes for our *own* projects went up in smoke.
When I was *little*, I wanted to be an astronaut. As I got older, I learned that being asthmatic, flat-footed, and having 20/800 vision are all red flags against me - so I did what I thought would be the "next best," and tried to have one of my own experiments sent up. Obviously, that's not going to happen now - the space that used to be set aside for student projects has been taken over by commercial ventures.
The Shuttle program still isn't anywhere near what it used to be.
I have hopes for the ISS, or Freedom, or whatever they're calling the space station this week, but it's not the same.
Re:Risk (Score:2)
In the case of the Challenger and the Titanic , engineers didn't fuck-up. It was clueless shareholders/administrators who went ahead despite advance warning of disaster.
In the case of the Ford Pinto and the Corvair , it was clueless accountants who either dismissed the need for a 49 part or calculated that settling eventual lawsuits would be cheaper than paying to have a safe fuel tank.
--
Give me a break... (Score:5)
Feynman's perspective (Score:5)
1. I'm sure there are many good books on the Challenger disaster, but anyone interested in the workings of the actual investigation from an insider's perspective should pick up What do you care what other people think?, by Richard Feynman. The second half of the book is dedicated to his role in the investigation, and it says a lot of interesting things about government bureaucracy, etc.
2. I think it's a sign of the state of Slashdot that when an article is posted which obviously has no other purpose than to elicit discussion, the first thirty posts include only two or three that say something other than "dumb story."
Re:A moment of silence. . . (Score:3)
But it would be nice if we did have a "moment of sillence" day for this...
To rember all the historical horrors where we learnned ohh so much...
Hitler, The Space Shuttle, the Inquision, The witch trials, Microsoft, AoL, Amazon... ok I added Microsoft AoL and Amazon out of spite not out of anything to learn
Hmm what historical disaster would you add to the list (and no pulling the Microsoft, AoL, Amazon stunt I did... unless you add some real disasters...)
Those final moments (Score:5)
Re:Those final moments (Score:5)
51-L's Legacy (Score:3)
STS 51-L has a legacy:
Still, with all of that, NASA rolled out Atlantis a few weeks ago, knowing that a concern about--you guessed it!--the SRB separation mechanism would likely delay the launch. The cost of rolling out and rolling back is expensive, yet in the name of good PR, NASA did it anyway. Idiots.
--
Re:Can I moderate down the whole story? (Score:3)
A lot of us techie types were profoundly affected by the Challenger disaster, and I for one am glad to see it commemorated. If you don't think that the crisis moment and the untidy revelations it prompted had some impact, you simply weren't paying attention.
Re:My Generation's "Kennedy was Shot" moment (Score:4)
I had this discussion with some guys from work [tbe.com] last night. They remarked that it indeed was one of those watershed American events, like the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 landing, Reagan getting shot, etc.
What disparate views we had; our quality engineer [who's 59] was driving out to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for a review of some payload when the radio bulletins first came out. [Being a NASA town, they came out damned quick.] His comment was, "Oh, shit, it's finally happened."
Me [I'm 22], I was in first grade and distinctly remember the horror of my teacher, who had gotten decently far in the Teacher in Space program. That moment is one of the reasons I'm close to an aerospace engineering degree today [although I realize now I'm more of a writer than an engineer, but hey].
The other guy [who's 41] was at work, and there were no TV's and few radios. Word spread by mouth--"Did you hear? Did you hear? Challenger just blew up?" Scott said the most surreal moment was seeing Ernst Stuhlinger, one of Wehrner von Braun's rocket team, walking around the building, asking people, "Tell me how this could happen? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?" Scott said that he never got an answer from anyone, and he never seemed to really see anyone as he asked them.
Yes, it's one of those days that will live in infamy.
--
Re:I remember this.... (Score:5)
When *I* was in elementary school in 1969 I remember we all got out of class and gathered in the auditorium to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Now *that* was a rush. Looking up in the sky, seeing the moon, and knowing some human was up there walking around on it.
What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride? We just don't care about doing something like that anymore. All we care is whining about taxes, buying bigger SUVs, and building expensive missle defense systems (when the nuke that takes out NYC will be a back-pack nuke sailed in the bottom of a cargo ship into the Hudson probably. No SDI will protect us from that...)
Our priorities are just pathetic. An entire generation of people now are alive that have never seen a live moon walk. Nice progress.....
Our space program died long before 1986 I'm afraid. The shuttles were neat, but the drive to expand our frontier was already dead. Space Shuttles were moving into deployment and repair of communications sattelites for the most part.
US Space Program was not destroyed. (Score:5)
The standdown allowed for a redesign to not only the solid-rocket boosters, but a reassessment of NASA's entire approach. Congress was right to correct their earlier error of putting all our space launch needs on one vehicle, so the Air Force revived the Titan, Atlas, and Pegasus booster programs. The removal of the shuttle as a requirement for commercial launches reduced costs for the satellite industry, and allowed NASA to concentrate its resources on a successful manned science program in low Earth orbit. The tragic realization that the safety process had become tainted by what NASA calls "Go Fever" led to a reorganization of the people running the program and a safety-at-any-cost mentality.
Since Challenger, the realization set in that the limitations of the Shuttle as a launch platform, which had been a source of debate since the early 1970s, required a blunt approach with self-honesty.
If anyone believes that if it had not been for Challenger, we would today have wheel space stations and moon shuttles as in Kubrick's 2001, you're fooling yourselves in the same way that NASA was fooling itself right up to 51-L. That future was never going to happen. The only justification for massive spending as on Apollo was the Cold War. (It's little known that the infrastructure shown in the film was chiefly to support space-based nuclear weapons platforms. Science and exploration were incidental benefits.)The debacle of Viet Nam taught us that the Cold War could not continue, and led to the scaling back of space ambitions just as surely as it led to Nixon's opening to China.
The failure of the shuttle program itself to live up to program promises of early days (100 launches a year, cost to orbit approaching an expensive plane ride) taught us many lessons about our own capabilities, though it took Challenger to drive those lessons home.
The reason we don't have moon bases or Mars missions today is not that we lost our nerve in 1986. It's because those things cost a hell of a lot of money. Until recently, we were saddled by massive budget deficits and even more massive national debt. Today, we're paying those down; in a decade we'll be able to afford a budget 20% larger than today's with the same tax receipts, because we won't be paying all that interest. In a decade, maybe we can see our way to modest spending increases on space exploration.
We honor the Challenger Seven today by continuing our space program but with mature knowledge of what we can and cannot do.
----