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 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.
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.
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.
Right after it happened I remember a reporterette in a news conference accused Reagan of blowing it up.
Technically what she said was, “Did you know it was going to blow up”?
I was in a training meeting for a new job. Some racist piece of human debris who worked there came in and said “seven more white people dead.”
What a scum