Replies

17 - Well, i grew up on Merritt Island, the home of the shuttle, and live there off and on, most all of my life.

The challenger was launched after enduring 7 days of off and on freezing in 1986.

Where did all the thousands and thousands of acres of frozen orange groves come from, in the 80's? Oranges have just about disappeared from Orange County. (note this requires sustained temps of 28 degrees).

One other thing, we are dealing with cryogenic fuels, hundreds of degrees below zero, and when you have the whole shuttle system, prefrozen/precooled near freezing, it doesn't take much more.

Remember those excellent pictures of the saturn launches, from the launch gantry, with all those pieces falling off, as it slowly rose in launch. That was ice.

Some years there is no freeqing. Some years there are numbers of freezes.

Yes, there are freezes - clearly. The mid-80's saw a bunch of them. But just as clearly, launching in January doesn't have to be a death sentence. Recall, for example, that Bill Nelson was on Columbia just before the Challenger launch -- in January 1986.

Yeah -- I saw the groves killed off in the citrus belt, too (I lived among'em!). You're right - it takes about 4+ hours at 28 to damage them. But for starters, it's typically 3-5 degrees warmer at the coast. And USUALLY, low temps are short-lived. But there was indeed a period of 4-5 years that just blasted the groves in the late 80's. It has hardly been that cold since.

The ice you refer to is due to the cryo gasses, which happened in the middle of July, too.

Here's the rub: NASA was stupid to have launched Challenger: this was an abberation that can't be repeated due to new post-Challenger flight rules. Again, I don't think January '05 is their problem. It's a general culture that has repeatedly believed "we engineered this stuff to the max - it couldn't possibly be a problem." They're good -- real good -- but hardly perfect.