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.).
I do not recall the story about the EPA and the O-rings, however I DO know the story on the ET foam adhesive.
In the early 1990s, the EPA told NASA they had to switch adhesives used to stick the insulating foam on the External Tank. It seems the old adhesive relied on fluorocarbons, which everyone KNEW were destroying the ozone layer.
The new adhesive was not so good. The foam gets loaded with ice on the launch pad and then peels off hitting the Shuttle tiles when the bird hits supersonic speeds.
It was one such piece of foam that hit the wing leading edge on Columbia and broke a hole in the RCC (Reinforced Carbon-Carbon). That led to losing the second Shuttle.
I was in the meeting at JSC when we briefed them on the weakened RCC on Columbia. I still have my meeting notes in my file cabinet. I am not sure if they replaced it before the accident.
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No.
In all likelihood, the "black goo" was thiosulfide rubber -- the actual fuel in the solid propellant -- to which Thiokol added ammonium perchlorate as an oxidizer.
Then, they filled the rocket casings with the goo and vulcanized it in place in giant autoclaves...
The vulcanized rubber+oxidizer solid propellant looked like black, rubber shoe heel material. Thiokol engineers would demonstrate the precision of their fuel/oxidizer mix by lighting a small cube of it atop a white, glazed ceramic tile -- and showing that there was zero residue (not even discoloration) left...
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You were walking on un-vulcanized (probably raw, without oxidizer) solid rocket fuel, itself.