Posted on 01/28/2019 1:31:02 PM PST by SMGFan
Jan 28, 1985: I was one of the accident investigators. NASA knew there were serious problems but launched anyway. @NASA wanted publicity & the press was leaving after waiting a couple days. Well, they got their publicity. #Challenger #Challengeraccident
It looked like an explosion but actually wasnt. The center tank disentegrated. What looks like an explosion is the fuel escaping at that high velocity and altitude. The strain completely pulled the shuttle apart and thw crew cabin was blown clean away. The astronauts were likely alive all the way down.
I thought it used to be a single O-ring and then they went to 3 to over-engineer it.
No?
The O rings were so well known as an issue, when the USAF built a Shuttle launch facility at VAndyland, they had added jet engines to the tower infrastructure to heat the SRBs prior to launch.
Of course, with this loss, there was no longer any ‘spare’ shuttles for military launches from the Air Force Base
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-space-shuttle-s-military-launch-complex-in-californ-1710303170
Kind of a matter of definition. Later finite-element analysis indicated that the shuttle heat shield experienced (briefly) a force of five million pounds from the expanding gas cloud. That was way more than the shuttle had been designed to withstand; its weight was something like 110 thousand pounds (not counting payload bay contents), so 5 million pounds of thrust would have imparted an acceleration of like 45Gs.
It wasn't a brissant explosion, as you would have with nitroglycerine, but LH2 and LOX burn very fast when combined.
Doesnt matter some ass said its Ronald Reagans fault.
I'm convinced that part of the reason for the frantic and maniacal response of the MSM-Democrats to the Trump presidency is they didn't want a repeat of the patriotic glow that ensued after Reagan kicked loser Carter out of the White House, and proceeded to show Americans what it was like to be Americans for the first time in the lives of many baby boomers.
This had to be avoided in Trump's case, at all costs.
The fraction of Rocket Scientists at NASA has been on the decline for decades......
Feynman examined other shuttle subsystems, and found problems elsewhere as well. His conclusion was that management’s wishful thinking about the true reliability of shuttle systems meant that, if it hadn’t been a catastrophic failure of the O-rings, something else would have failed eventually.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
It was 86...
95 year old guy using twitter. No doubt Someone might have told him his error.
Promising to nominate a woman to SCOTUS, taking a Democrat deal on border security, caving to MADD to use Federal highway money to blackmail states, and pulling the Marines out of Lebanon (which encouraged the OBL types to do more terrorism); destroying the US Commercial Fishing Industry - particularity the tuna, bottom fish, cod, and salmon Industries.
The original was two o-rings, the redesign was three. There were other changes in the redesign, and I’d say the redesign was excellent and would probably be extremely unlikely to fail.
Browse through this PDF to see the redesign.
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/553082main_Shuttle_Lessons_Learned_Buzzard.pdf
Ah, O.K.
Remember that tragic day well.
I was attending COMSEC school, NS Mayport, FL
Duh
You don't quite recall correctly.
Not one single Morton Thiokol engineer would approve the launch.
Read that line again.
The company could not find an engineer, any engineer, to approve the launch.
A non-technical manager signed off on it.
I was assigned to both cancelled programs in the Los Angeles AFB
System Program Office SPOs. MOL and AF shuttle. Both jobs were planning SLC 6 construction.
I only heard of the two but I’m sure that’s probably correct.
[ A non-technical manager signed off on it. ]
That part I did know.
As an 11th grader at the time, I attended a special dinner maybe a month before the flight with Christine (teacher) and several of the other astronauts for that trip. I was one of 3 who had won a special school contest to design the patch they wore for their shuttle trip. Of course, it was super exciting meeting them and of course we all were thrilled to watch the day it went up. Just sitting there watching as the shuttle blew up after having met her and the others in person...well no words.
One of our I/T support people told me (erroneously) the shuttle had blown up on the pad.
At lunch, everyone was staring at the video at a downtown Macys store on the TVs.
I was a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Member at Grand Forks AFB. On that day I was driving out to C-0 (one of the alternate command posts , ACP) Launch Control Facility to complete my training to be on a ACP crew.
It was snowing and I entered the facility and got out of my vehicle the Facility Manager told me the Shuttle had blown up. I walked into the building topside and saw on the TV in the lounge the pieces of the Shuttle raining down into the ocean (real time, not replay).
I almost got jacked-up by the Flight Security Controller as I stood and stared at the TV rather than showing my ID and checking in.
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