Previously-Unseen Photos of Challenger Disaster Appear Online 207
Nerval's Lobster writes "Twenty-six photos of the space shuttle Challenger disaster have appeared online. According to io9, "Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster of 1986. To his knowledge, these photos have never been publicly released." Hindes told the Website that the photographer was "a friend of his grandfather, who worked for NASA as an electrician on the Agency's hulking, spacecraft-schlepping crawler transporters." Someone at Reddit (which also has a lengthy thread devoted to the images) also threw together a GIF of the liftoff and subsequent explosion."
PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Insightful)
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
Then, on Columbia's last mission, the managers ignored the engineers' concerns over the ice impact that had occurred on launch.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, with Columbia's mission I watched the launch and they immediately questioned the impact. Then a few days into the mission NASA was talking about how they wanted to inspect the damage after they landed. I was thinking the whole time "That looked pretty bad!"
Then it blew up and NASA pretended it was all news to them. I didn't really get it.
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If I remember correctly, the computer model predicted nothing much bad was going to happen, so they did nothing when they might have had a small chance of saving the crew. Then, later, someone pointed out that the computer model was based on much smaller impacts, and they had no data from such a powerful impact on the wing. By then it was too late to do anything.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Interesting)
The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles. Columba was a wreck the moment the foam caused the damage. She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.
The only possible way to get Columbia's crew safely to earth would be to ramp up refitting Atlantis for launch use a crew of four astronauts, and figure out a way of successfully transferring crew from Columbia to Atlantis since they had no equipment to perform an orbiter to orbiter docking. That operation alone would introduce significant risk to both orbiters during the operation due to station keeping further complicated by the fact that air quality in Columbia would have to be significantly reduced so the CO2 scrubbers would last long enough. So hopefully all that station keeping and maneuvering could be solely handled by Atlantis while the cross space transfer of crew is performed.
Performing the rescue itself would have involved doing things in time frames that were never intended and could introduce risk for Atlantis and her crew. It's tragic but I don't think there was any other outcome. The only way it could have ended without death would have been if the foam impact had been observed during launch while it was still possible to abort. It wasn't noticed until after Columbia was in orbit.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.
Every mission except STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission. Since the orbit of the ISS has a large inclination relative to the Hubble they planned an in-space rescue mission [wikipedia.org] if TPS damage made it necessary.
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She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.
They could have done an angled reentry to distribute more heat load to the side of the vehicle that wasn't damaged. Columbia might have still failed, but that's a better strategy than merely hoping the damage wasn't bad enough.
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The CAIB ran simulations of that afterward; there was no angle that would have worked. All of the ideas for an improvised patch would have failed as well. The only remotely realistic thing that could have saved the crew would have been a rescue mission with Atlantis. But Atlantis wasn't ready because nobody bothered to budget or plan for a rescue mission.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Funny)
That operation alone would introduce significant risk to both orbiters during the operation
They could just jump out the airlock with the fire extinguisher, fly across space to the other station, and then kill off George Clooney for no reason at all.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Interesting)
The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles. Columba was a wreck the moment the foam caused the damage. She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.
This claim was solidly refuted in the official accident investigation report [nasa.gov], which explores parallel scenarios--one for rescue, and another for improvised repair while on orbit.
The report is a fascinating read, by the way, and highly recommended. It manages to be satisfyingly technical without going over the head of a typical engineer or even lay person.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Informative)
February 15th was the date beyond which the survival of the Columbia crew was unlikely due to suffocation.
A Soyuz has a three person capacity. I don't think Russia had enough lying around waiting to be launched. You're looking at 3, 4, or 7 launches to rescue the entire Columbia crew with Soyuz and they would need to occur in short order. Atmosphere loss from cycling the airlocks would be too great and cause the February 15th survival date to no longer be tenable.
As for the Atlantis rescue. Me thinks you believe it to be far simpler than it truly was.
http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030523rescue/ [spaceflightnow.com]
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:4, Insightful)
A Soyuz has a three person capacity.
You could use a Soyuz as a resupply vehicle, and a particularly large one at that if you get rid of all the reentry gear that you'll never use.
Apollo XIII showed that under pressure, equipment can be made to perform tasks very different than those it was designed to do. The only way to know if they could have been rescued was for NASA, Roscosmos, ESA and the Pentagon to each try their best to get supplies to them and find a way to bring them back. Maybe they would have failed, maybe they would have succeeded. Certainly with Apollo XIII no one knew if they would make it until they heard the signal from the capsule upon splashdown and the entire Com broke into applause.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
Read Wayne Hale's take on it [wordpress.com]; he was there:
The excerpt that sticks with me:
Jon Harpold was the Director of Mission Operations, my supreme boss as a Flight Director. He had spent his early career in shuttle entry analysis. He knew more about shuttle entry than anybody; the guidance, the navigation, the flight control, the thermal environments and how to control them. After one of the MMTs when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he gave me his opinion: "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?" I was hard pressed to disagree. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don’t let them in your organization.
Re: PHB's strike again (Score:2)
Not ice - the warning was that the O rings sealing the joints between sections of the solid rocket boosters would be too stiff in the cold to seal properly and hot combustion gases could leak. That's what happened .
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Although you're basically right, I think the ability of the SRB's leak to penetrate the shuttle's external hydrogen tank was due to high pressure and the tank's weak skin - so it might be better to say "high pressure exhaust" or something like that instead of "hot combustion gases". Honestly shu
Re: PHB's strike again (Score:4, Interesting)
The point, I think, is that the engineers warned the administrators of a very specific danger based on hard numbers. And despite that they launched anyways. Which resulted in the specified part failing exactly as warned resulting in loss of life.
Those O-rings, like every other part of the shuttle, were designed and produced to very exact specifications. For a rubber gaskett ambient temperature is one of those critical factors. I learned all that as a teenager when I got to hear a presentation from one of the guys that lead they investigation into the whole disaster.
Re: PHB's strike again (Score:5, Interesting)
We actually wanted to build it without O-rings, we wanted to cast the propellant into a mold and wrap the slug afterwards with carbon fiber, which would have been a fraction of the weight and far stronger than the segmented steel casings NASA insisted on.
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No, it wasn't habit. It was political pork. There was a Florida company read and willing to build the SRBs as a single unit. Simpler and vastly safer.
But that didn't spread the pork far enough. Thus Thiokol got the contract and a Utah congressman got to brag about how he brought home the bacon. The result: the SRBs needed to be segmented and seven people got to die.
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I think it was a bit more nuanced than bosses vs. engineers. We've had 2 disasters shortly after "run NASA like a business" campaigns. That kind of culture leads to compromises that can work out well for disposable goods, consumer software, etc., but when you're talking about the razor's edge of technology, pushing a launch because delays are bad for PR is going to get people killed.
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We've had 2 disasters shortly after "run NASA like a business" campaigns.
Weren't there some disasters before that as well?
Space travel is inherently dangerous and many feel that NASA has actually become too risk adverse.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it was a bit more nuanced than bosses vs. engineers. We've had 2 disasters shortly after "run NASA like a business" campaigns. That kind of culture leads to compromises that can work out well for disposable goods, consumer software, etc., but when you're talking about the razor's edge of technology, pushing a launch because delays are bad for PR is going to get people killed.
*Very Nuanced*
I worked for Rocketdyne, the SSME main contractor, through the 80's in the quality organization... the "way things worked" then was NASA gave delivery / target launch dates. If the corporate contractor delivered early or the launch went ahead of schedule, the contractor got a bonus.
When NASA down-sized all of its Engineering talent after the Apollo program, it became dependent upon the corporate contractor's for 'assistance' in making the engineering decisions . The ultimate decisions were made by the Bosses of the Engineers because the bosses saw dollar signs rather than safety and science... and NASA went along.
Morton-Thiokol was the main contractor for the SRBs modules which stacked together and held together with "O" rings and interface pins. The ring materials becomes brittle in "low temperatures" [below freezing as it was that morning]. Their engineers did not want to launch in the cold since it was far colder that the SRB had been designed for. Management at Morton-Thiokol knowing a bonus depended on the launch told NASA "go" and so they launched. I still cannot look at those pictures without getting upset. I could not event look at the full set of these.
Just so its clear-- the problem is with NASA isn't that its run by the government. The problem is that it is run by a bunch of ex-aerospace revolving-door [public-private] rubber-stamp management administrators and not run by true engineers... if NASA had then had a real engineering staff for the Shuttle program rather than playing for money and politics, things would have been different...
The people that made those decisions should have been "hung out to dry" for both of those shuttle "accidents". They should have been criminally charged for the deaths... with the corporations financially liable to the victims and to the government for the losses. But as the recent financial crisis has demonstrated yet again-- the corporations squeal, the politicians make "oratory", and then the government [you and me] pay for those corporate mistakes. Then after a while everyone forgets how they were robbed... of lives, money, and honor by greedy types that only see term profits as good....
The Shuttle program was about science -- or at least it was supposed to be... but what it became was "Aerospace Corporate Welfare"... [just as the various subsidies paid to various industries by the Government are corporate welfare...]
You should not play politics with science... or at least be aware you do it at your peril -- go ahead play politics with the laws of gravity [or "O" rings] and see how far it gets you. You can do science or you can do greed but not both. In this case seven people were killed because someone wanted a bonus.
Re: PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
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Would we have heard of the warnings if the launch had been successful? How many of the other launches had engineers warning? I bet they had to override warnings for pretty much every flight.
One of the many problems with the space shuttle program was that people got accustomed to it being routine. Before a commercial plane gets certified and allowed to fly routine flights, it goes through all sorts of testing on how it behaves outside its normal operating envelope. Probably more hours than the entire shuttle
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people got fired
this was the first launch with a civilian on board, a teacher. i think they had to delay it a few times and the bosses wanted it to launch of the PR
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Interesting)
As well they should have. Stuff happens, and I bet NASA did try to make it safe, but they failed horribly in this case.
Richard Feynman ripped NASA a new butthole too. After listening to him it became readily apparent that there was a huge disconnect between the administrators and the engineers. In some cases the administrators decided to go with estimates that were several orders of magnitude different.
I can give NASA a pass when it's really difficult to engineer and design a controlled explosion to get you into space, *and* then how to work, survive, and come back.
However, everyone of those people that got fired deserved that and more for their "acceptable flight risk" mentality that was in hindsight unreasonably reckless.
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
There was a great television movie last year about Feynman's involvement in the Rogers Commission. William Hurt plays the part of Feynman and does a magnificent job.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/ [imdb.com]
Re:PHB's strike again (Score:5, Informative)
The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:
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And by "bosses" you mean Ronald Reagan. His State of the Union address was schedule that night, and the multiple delays didn't look good.
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That joke was funny when I was in fourth grade. I don't think it's funny anymore.
Re:An oldie from back ni the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
That joke was never funny.
Re:An oldie from back ni the day... (Score:5, Funny)
Why does NASA only have Sprite?
Because they couldn't get 7 up.
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Where do NASA Astronauts take vacation? All over Florida...
NASA actually stands for Need Another Seven Astronauts...
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You know what NASA stands for, don't ya?
Not Another Stupid Asshole?
Link to GIF (Score:5, Informative)
The gif [imgur.com] is pretty amazing, credit [reddit.com].
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Gotta say -- looking at the pics brought back the emotional response I felt at the time. Much more subdued (so may years later), but nonetheless, I felt the shock and dismay and I was back in my parents home watching this unfold on a 19" tube TV.
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Yeah, dunno why but I still can't watch it. Turn my head every time it comes on. Just thinking there are pieces of people up there. :(
I think telemetry indicated the crew were intact and alive until they hit the water, weren't they? As I recall at least one member was conscious enough to switch on a colleague's oxygen on the way down.
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correct, in fact 4 PEAC had been turned on, and the pilot had been turning on switches.
The switch require one to put out and twist. Design not to be thrown accidentally.
Probably trying to get power on.
I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? I always pinned it at the time when Gene Cernan made a little speech on the Moon and then we, as a species, packed up our shit and left, never to return. (There's no money in it, you see.)
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Really? I always pinned it at the time when Gene Cernan made a little speech on the Moon and then we, as a species, packed up our shit and left, never to return. (There's no money in it, you see.)
Yes, that was my impression, also. The shuttle's justification was so tied into military missions, and there was so little connection to anything deep space, that it seemed to me the "space age" largely ended with the Moon missions. The Viking landers were pretty darn cool, though.
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes and no. A bunch of us in and around the space biz already knew the Shuttle would never live up to its promises, but the general public was (as usual) blissfully unaware until then.
Some of us re-convened the CACNSP [wikipedia.org] and concluded that the Shuttle program be kept alive but without expectation of any significant advancement (as a "No Output Division" for aging bureaucrats), that the hypersonic NASP was a dead end, and we started pushing toward what eventually became DC-X. Our belief in the space-age lasted a few years longer.
Alas, eventually the bureaucrats at NASA eventually took over DC-X and broke it, then diverted attention with X-33, a technology development program (DC-X was intended to re-use existing technology wherever possible) with silliness like Y-shaped LiAl tanks and linear aerospike engines, and the worst possible mixed mode launch and landing (VTHL) with no survivable abort mode in the first minutes of launch.
SpaceX and a few others finally seem to be swinging the thing around. Someone should institute a D. D. Harriman [wikipedia.org] prize just so it can be awarded to Elon Musk.
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I want to say you're right;
But there were thousands of bad decisions (mostly made by politicians), in the decade prior to this accident, which led to the poor design, that led to this accident. These decisions were based on the attitude of hundreds of politicians and the people who voted them into office. This attitude is what killed "the future".
And this was following the decade of America's triumph at "conquering" the moon, which included a huge propaganda effort (on the part of Werner Von Braun, and Wa
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:5, Insightful)
when I was a child. The odd thing, is that my memory is mostly about my father's reaction, and the look on his face. A look of shock and disbelief. The failure of infallible American tech.
It was the failure of 'infallible' American money.
Money and technology are such strange bedfellows. On the one hand the connection between them is obvious and inextricable, but on the other lies the question of progress. Money is required to develop and ultimately build a technology, and yet by virtue of the money invested that technology is expected to create money - usually more than was invested in the first place. So, in an way, from money's perspective all that technology is designed to do is to create money - anything else that technology does is a mere byproduct of the process of developing it to make more money.
In other words, according to money, any technology which does nothing but make more money is a perfect technology.
This might explain why things like FOSS and any "Open" technology movement is perceived as so vile and abominable a thing by money. How can a technology not take nor make money? I think it causes money to be a little nervous that technology can exist without it. After all, since money is anything accepted as payment for goods or services, doesn't that mean that money can actually be nothing?
And by the way I asked money if it cared that I anthropomorphize it and it said it couldn't care less.
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:4, Informative)
The freakiest thing was when someone said the crew compartment survived the explosion. It's one thing to die from an explosion--quite another to watch it coming at you in a fall from 48,000 feet.
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It wasn't the first time and won't be the last time that aviators have known they were going to die in a crash. A horrific way to go, I guess, but one that has actually been pretty well studied. Many pilots end up going unconscious from G-forces or suffer from heart attacks prior to impact.
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It is freaky that the crew survived the explosion and floated down in the crew compartment knowing they were going to die....that's what was freaky.
Except none of them knew it, because they were unconscious within a few seconds.
Re:I remember watching the disaster on television (Score:5, Informative)
Analysis of the wreckage showed that at least a few of them survived long enough to activate emergency oxygen systems and flip some switches in an attempt to regain control.
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Analysis of the wreckage showed that at least a few of them survived long enough to activate emergency oxygen systems and flip some switches in an attempt to regain control.
Yes, but none of them were conscious. The emergency oxygen couldn't keep them conscious at altitude, and the oxygen use rates were consistent with them being unconscious.
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Maybe not. Emergency Oxygen had been turned on by Judy Resnik, and nothing after that point was outside the bounds of human survivabilty, except the impact, of course.
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Maybe not. Emergency Oxygen had been turned on by Judy Resnik, and nothing after that point was outside the bounds of human survivabilty, except the impact, of course.
Except, again, the emergency oxygen packs weren't capable of keeping them conscious at that altitude. That's why they started wearing SR71 pressure suits on later missions.
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AGAIN, there was no breach in the Cabin, so it was at pressure.
Got a source on that? Wikipedia says nobody knows if there was a breach or not:
Whether the astronauts remained conscious long after the breakup is unknown, and largely depends on whether the detached crew cabin maintained pressure integrity. If it did not, the time of useful consciousness at that altitude is just a few seconds; the PEAPs supplied only unpressurized air, and hence would not have helped the crew to retain consciousness. If, on the other hand, the cabin was not depressurized or only slowly depressurizing, the astronauts may have been conscious and cognizant for the entire fall until impact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_disaster#Cause_and_time_of_death [wikipedia.org]
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It is freaky that the crew survived the explosion and floated down in the crew compartment
"Floated" down? I think the word you are looking for is "plummeted." I'd also allow "plunged."
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It is freaky that the crew survived the explosion and floated down in the crew compartment
"Floated" down? I think the word you are looking for is "plummeted." I'd also allow "plunged."
Ditto! When I read "floated down" my first reaction was WTF?!
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Possibly, if your dad was born before 1963 or so, or he would have remembered the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 near disaster.
FTFY.
The fallen.... (Score:5, Informative)
Francis R. Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Greg Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist
God speed to all of them....
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Rocketdyne days (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a young engineer working for Rockedyne on the SSME at the time and we were the last to know. The announcement over the intercom was that there was a "system failure" on flight 51 and incoming calls were blocked (pre internet day youngsters). I guess they didn't want anyone to panic and go back and edit the turbopump or engine build books that would impede any investigation. We didn't know about the catastrophic failure until people went out for lunch that day.
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You will recall that the first thing they did on the Columbia crash was lock the doors to prevent information from leaving the rooms. It's in the manual..... Everything is is in the manual.
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You will recall that the first thing they did on the Columbia crash was lock the doors to prevent information from leaving the rooms. It's in the manual..... Everything is is in the manual.
--
Oh no. Not again.
A rather morbidly apt sig.
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If you think about it, it works for most of the issues around here.
Where's the video? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Post Challenger Days (Score:2, Interesting)
My grandfather, John W. Townsend, jr., was called in to become Goddard Space Flight Center's 6th Director in response to the Challenger accident. I miss him and all of his stories about NASA and its beginnings. His NASA Medal of Honor is my most prized keepsake of him.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2011/11-072.html
The amazing thing was not Challenger disaster. (Score:5, Insightful)
That it all worked so well was really amazing. It is tragic we lost two shuttles and their crew, but while we mourn the loss, and learn from the mistakes, let us not lose sight of the fact, the more amazing success of the remaining flights. We should define ourselves by the successes.
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Indeed.
How many people died trying just to cross the Pacific? Or to reach the South Pole? Percentage-wise, I'd bet it was a lot worse than any of the NASA programs. Even the Soviet programs probably did better. Exploration, by its very nature, involves risk. We do what we can to keep the risks in check, but the only way to eliminate risk is to explore and colonize space until going from Canaveral to Tranquility is as common as flying from New York to LA.
Could they do better? Probably, and they should never
Where were you when you got the news? (Score:2)
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I was in college, at the business office, working with the secretary who took care of VA benefits (I had a problem with my GI bill benefits). She was on the phone with the office in St. Louis. Suddenly her eyes flew open and she looked at me and said, "She says sombody in her office just said that the Challenger blew up". I said, "Then I need to go."
My job at that time was as a radio announcer. When I got to my Jeep I turned on the radio and all the stations were talking about the Challenger. I rushed
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Well, he did mention a mention a newspaper - sort of like a blog, but with horrible latency.
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What's the matter with you? He said "newspaper". He found out about it in the following morning's newspaper. You certainly missed something.
Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:2)
I was watching the launch on TV when it happened. I still can't watch the videos or look at the pictures.
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I remember it well (Score:2)
I remember that morning. I was watching the launch on TV as I was getting ready to go to work, and had to head out during a launch hold. Later that morning one of our part-time folks came in and asked if we had heard about Challenger? I felt myself go grey and took the rest of the day off.
Every generation has events where everybody remembers exactly where they were. I wasn't born when Sputnik 1 was launched, and I was a bit young to remember Kennedy. But I do remember Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Chall
"That's BS, they're exaggerating" (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone came into the room quickly and said "Challenger just blew up!" I first said that's not true, it's just media complaining about another launch delay. But a minute later, I realized it was real. It seemed everyone stopped what they were doing and productivity went to zero for rest of day. A calibration lab and also that repairs VCRs taped the launch footage and were playing it back and forth in slow-mo, kind of their own analysis trying to pinpoint the cause. Kind of interesting because just a few short years before only major investigative teams had these kinds of tools. I'm sure many households were doing the same. Though it took a few days when they released footage showing the flame coming out side of SRB, that seem to completely change the discussion of the cause. Me along with many others had no clue what that flame meant but it was very unusual. We had to wait until Feynmann spoke.
Contrasting to Columbia disaster in 2003, the country didn't seem to stop and mourn like after Challenger because the country was gearing up to invade Iraq.
Kerbal (Score:2)
Harrowing (Score:2)
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I witnessed this even. It was quite jarring at the time.
Even now, these pictures are still disturbing.
It was the "Kennedy Moment" of my generation.
We know where we were, what we saw, how we felt. Everything is burned into our memories. I can still hear the rattle of the ventilator.
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like everyone else who saw it that day, I completely remember every bit of what I was doing, and who was around. I am always confused though, as so many other people were in school watching it, and I was at a friends house playing basketball. Were all the people still in school on the west coast and the explosion happen in an afternoon?
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Given that there was a civilian teacher going up for the publicity, a lot of schoolrooms were watching it live.
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Given that there was a civilian teacher going up for the publicity, a lot of schoolrooms were watching it live.
Correct. By this time spaceflight was considered "routine", and not much fanfare with a launch. This one was special for one for schools because a teacher was going up. I can remember a lot of hype surrounding it in the preceding months. I was in 3rd grade, the 4-6 grade school was watching live, while we were not. I can remember people talking about it, but I personally did not see it until the evening news when I was home from school.
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We were out of school (middle GA) because the temperatures had gone low enough for the diesel in school buses to gel up. I remember watching it on my couch with a stupid sort of "hey, I don't think it usually does that?" when it blew up.
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thank you. this would be the answer. I was in Georgia also.
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Needless to say, my report took on a rather more morbid tone following this, but at least I never los
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I was sitting in the library in Junior High when my friend came up to me and said "Hey, did you hear the Challenger exploded and everyone was killed." I thought he was joking, but he gave me that dead serious look. It was a pretty sad day, particularly as I remember watching the news the night before where they were interviewing Christa McAuliffe, and she looked as excited as any civilian would be at getting a chance to go into space.
It's a funny thing that the Columbia disaster didn't seem to cause the sam
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My housemate and I were out in the yard splitting wood when his girlfriend drove up, jumped out of her car and yelled "The Space Shuttle just blew up" over her shoulder as she ran into the house. She already had turned the TV on by the time we got inside, I remember her muddy footprints across the floor and the cats trying to figure out what the excitement was about. We watched the coverage for about half an hour, then I got really, really stoned and split Douglas fir until my muscles ached and I couldn't
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That's odd, so did I.
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Actually, my favorite was the Challenger License Plate [forbes.com] with the message "KABOOM"
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for a brief period after Challenger, NASA became Now After Seven Astronauts
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What's the new official drink at NASA?
Ocean Spray....
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People who can laugh at life's ineviable hardships and disasters - whether their own or someone else's - bounce back. People who are afraid to face life and death and laugh at him, cower.
Yeah, very poetic. Still the same old self-justifying misappropriation of "black humour as a coping strategy" being used to rationalise sick jokes by those who were neither involved in nor traumatised by the event being mocked. As I said last time [slashdot.org]:-
Most of the time I see that argument parrotted on Slashdot, it's being intentionally misused some borderline sociopathic asshole that's just made an insensitive joke about something that happened on the other side of the world and been called out on it.
Sure, we all know that you made that sick joke about that tragedy in the Philippines/China/wherever that'll never affect your home in Buttfuck, Illinois (which you'll have forgotten about by the time you move on to the next news item) as a "coping strategy". It's because you were scared by it.
Bullshit.
We all know that people closely affected by events (or feel themselves likely to be affected) often take solace in black humour- fair enough. We also know that many people are just dicks that like to make sick jokes about stuff that doesn't affect them personally. Anyone in the latter group trying to justify themselves and place themselves *above* their critics with a self-righteous appropriation of the "non-PC coping mechanism" argument is full of it.
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Just get over it dude. People are going to make jokes. Often times those jokes will be in questionable or bad taste.
Go back and read what I said. I wasn't responding to the original (lame) jokes, but calling out the OP's bullshit *response* of "black humour is a coping mechanism" being used by people who clearly *weren't* using it as such.
Specifically, these people *didn't* have the guts to say "yeah, I made a sick joke"- quite the opposite, they tried to put themselves in the same position as those actually affected by the event and grab the moral high ground.
You have no right to control what other people say
That'd be why I didn't tell people what or what not to say
It was a pretty horrible day at Thiokol. (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno. I was at Morton-Thiokol when it happened, and I've read the Rogers report and Congressional hack job, and I'm pretty convinced that NASA told our upper management to overrule our engineers, and then when Boisjoly et al tried their damndest to contact NASA directly (bypassing Morton Thiokol's upper management entirely) NASA called us and said "shut down your loose cannons". So while I would not say Morton Thiokol's management was blameless, their actual fault was that they gave in to threats and let NASA Marshall bully them. And it's not entirely unlikely that the bullying ultimately came directly from the White House, where Reagan's handlers were anxious to have him give his launch speech, and were upset that the mass media was ridiculing repeated launch delays. Stuff rolls downhill, but not back up.
This is slightly at odds with the Wikipedia version of events, but that version has Reagan "quoting" High Flight instead of using the more accurate word "plagiarizing" so I tend to trust my memory more.
When then-popular news figurehead Dan Rather suddenly decided he was a forensic rocket scientist (after weeks of publicly ridiculing NASA for being afraid to launch in bad weather, and no doubt contributing to the pressure to launch) and told America live on-air that faulty SRBs were the cause of the disaster, our phones started ringing... and ringing... and never stopped, all the rest of that day. You wouldn't bother to put the phone down, just press the switch hook and take the next call before it rang. "No, mom, it wasn't our fault. As far as I know. I gotta go. <switchhook> No, Aunt Louise, it wasn't our fault, as far as I know. <switchhook> Hi honey, Yeah, I don't know yet, I'm sure I'll be working late, don't hold dinner, tell the kids I love them, bye" etc. etc. etc.
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I dunno. I was at Morton-Thiokol when it happened,
Few years ago I met someone who worked at Morton-Thiokol and left shortly after it became ATK. He said it seemed ATK was doing all it could to rid the name and history of Morton-Thiokol.
and were upset that the mass media was ridiculing repeated launch delays.
I remember the day before they scrubbed the launch because closeout crew could not remove handles from the side hatch. Many media people were commenting, "why o why are there so many launch delays? Geez, back in the 1960s they were launching right and left with no delays." Yeah, I guess they all forgot of so many times when
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