The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle, carrying a crew of seven, including the first teacher in space, was destroyed, all aboard were killed.
Posted on 01/28/2017 3:32:14 AM PST by Bull Snipe
Space shuttle Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven crewmen perished.
I remember thinking “boy that sure don’t look right. Where’s the ship?”
Occasionally I would make lunch time run home from work to make a sandwich and pick up something
I forgot that morning.....just happened to turn the TV on as it lifted off....
I remember watching this ...
My 6 yo came home about an hour later and told me they sent all the children home after telling them they would always be sad etc...they had to wait while wailing idiots went from classroom to classroom informing the children how they should “feel”...if the children weren’t upset and frightened before the “talk” they sure were later...
(and some wonder where all those snowflakes came from...yeah from being told junk like this...)
She told me that all the crying adults were wrong, and from her child’s mouth she said some words of wisdom....that the astronauts went to Heaven if they were saved...
(It pays to tell the children about God and the Hope of Glory through Salvation that is in the LORD Jesus Christ while they are young...I told my children while they were in my womb...)
One of NASAs biggest management screw-ups. Engineers begged them to not launch due to cold temperatures. NASA management overruled. A 4 billion dollar spacecraft blown to bits and 7 dead astronauts.
Anybody got a link to the tribute song by the sf fan group “Technical Difficulties”?
“Seven men to represent the whole damned human race,
Seven who died reaching for space.
Others will fly
In that tempting void beyond the sky,
We’ll control the lightning once again.”
Hell bent on putting that teacher in space.
Nothing else mattered.
I always felt if she wasn’t on board it would have been canceled
The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle, carrying a crew of seven, including the first teacher in space, was destroyed, all aboard were killed.
I had just walked into the campus bookstore and looked up at a tv they had going, just at the instant of the explosion. A strange feeling of being transported into the cabin came over me. Very unsettling. Could never entirely shake it. In fact, it’s back now as I write this.
There was one woman on board...a teacher.. that’s why all the kids were watching at school...
I was in Orlando at the time. I could see the shuttle off in the distance, then the smoke from the explosion.
Physicist, Richard Feynmann, was on the commission that investigated the disaster. He wrote a book, ‘What do you care what other people think?’, where he described parts of the investigation. According to Feynmann, NASA administrators were more focused on pleasing politicians than on heeding the advice of their engineers.
I have posted this story before.
I spent most of my aerospace career as a Shuttle engineer.
Like everyone else, I thought the official O-ring story made sense. There’s even a new book out by a Morton Thiokol guy on the O-ring disaster.
However, in 1999 I was talking to an old engineer who had worked for United Technologies at KSC. This is what he told me:
“Solid Rocket Boosters are made in segments. After the SRBs burn out, they land in the Atlantic with parachutes, are recovered, and refurbished at Morton Thiokol. Then, they are re-assembled at KSC for another launch.
However, on one landing, the SRB hit hard and was bent. No one realized this until they tried to assemble the section into an SRB at KSC.
The bolts are approx. 1” diameter on 4” centers at the joints. On this section, the SRB segment had been bent out of round and the bolt holes did not line up.
So, an engineer suggested plugging the problem holes and drilling NEW holes for the bolts between the old ones.
So, with their NASA Manager’s approval, they took out about 30% of the steel by drilling new holes. NO structural analysis was performed. The NASA guy got a bonus for “saving” the SRB segment.
Upon pressurization, the area with extra holes ripped open like a perforated sheet of paper. You can see the puff of smoke in the launch video. The flame hit attach point hardware weakening it. When they hit a wind shear at about 30,000 feet, the SRB broke off and hit the External Tank.”
This UT engineer assumed that the Accident Commission would find all this out. When they had a press conference, he was shocked they were blaming O-rings.
So, he went to the head of the Commission and told his story. The top guy responded, “We already had a press conference. If we change our findings now, NASA will lose credibility. All of these imminent scientists and engineers will be embarrassed. We will NOT change our findings.”
So, the innocent were punished. The guilty NASA Manager kept his bonus. Everybody kept their mouths shut.
They quietly put the word out to never drill extra holes in an SRB.
I doubt the Shuttle Program Manager, NASA Administrator, or almost anyone else in the world knows this.
I record this story in the hope that someday a historian or journalist will set the record straight.
Ad astra.
I was in the computer “room” of my university, using my alloted time on our VAX supercomputer, banging away at some Fortran 77. Basically, you sat at one of the dozen or so little fiberglass encased crt/keyboard units that ringed around the big machine.
You were alloted time, hours each week, and you didn’t waste it for, if you didn’t get your crap done, you flunked the class.
A student acted as moderator and sat in a little room with lots of windows. There was a tv in there. On this day it was a girl.
We didn’t have but a handful of women in engineering back then and the ones we did have were understandably excited about this first lady in space business so she was watching the launch.
Anyhoo, I remember her jumping up and running out of the room, absolutely hysterical. “It just blew up! The shuttle blew up! They’re all dead!”
I remember looking up, making eye contact, maybe looking over her shoulder at the plume and smoke trails in the TV, then immediately dropping back down to my keyboard.
You didn’t waste your time on the VAX 11-782.
Were you yourself a Shuttle engineer, or are you quoting someone else? In any case, it's an incredible story which makes perfect sense, at least to me.
Thank you.
Ironic that the background for that portrait sort of resembles fire and smoke.
That other one was like the Mary Ann of the mission. Prayers of remembrance for them and their families.
That was back in the day when the office secretary of our small environmental company would bring her TV in with the rabbit ears and we would gather around to watch every launch.
It was such a shock and so hard to believe. Around that same time was the truck bombing at the World Trade Center IIRC. Hmm - now that I think about it, she may have had that TV in her office all the time.
Not too long after the Challenger disaster I was doing some work at a haz waste site. Walking over hard black goo in spots that had oozed up through the sand. The site had been used by Morton Thiokol as a disposal site. I always wondered if this black crap was what they had made the gaskets out of?
IIRC there was some sort of environmental component to the failure? Like the original gaskets were made of something “bad” - so they switched to something more environmentally “safe”.
While being in the environmental business, the boss and I were (and still are) very conservative.
“So how the hell does the EPA tell us .001 ppm mercury is too much, but we can only measure to .01!!!???” Or something like that! (Back in the day that was the truth! I suppose nowadays they have better instruments.).
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