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The Challenger
On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the vehicle, its crew, and the U.S. space program.
On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the vehicle, its crew, and the U.S. space program.
I watched that launch. I was 22. I was a space enthusiast now turned space professional. The space program has always and will continue to inpsire me. To remember that day I am featuring a gallery of 228 pictures on SpaceRef. From crew training to the memorial, it's all there. The pictures say it all.
I can't. I haven't seen a launch in 15 years; in fact, that Challenger launch was the only one I've ever watched. I guess I wish I had the courage to watch another launch...
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
NASA wanted to hollywoodize the program and it did. We need to be more like the Russians. Send up a crew, it blows up... send up another. That is progress.
- kk
AIGGH! There's a classic for you. Got to the point of typing the name and went "Franklin? No, not Franklin. What the heck is it..." and I was so stuck on "Franklin", I finally went to get the book. And, with the book propped up on the keyboard, no less, I typed the wrong name anyway. Twice.
Shoulda' stayed in bed.
It's possible. Just look at Microsoft.
sup
Well you can organize them in alphabetical order but that's not how they arrived.
Enterprise was first, it was the "prototype," used in test flights in 1977.
And yes it was named in honor of the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek.
Then Columbia (first mission: 1981), the first to actually fly in space.
Then Challenger (first mission: 1983),
then Discovery (first mission: 1984),
then Atlantis (first mission: 1985),
then the lastest shuttle Endeavor (first mission: 1992).
IIRC It was sometimes called Phoenix, before its completion.
Here is the page where I got the shuttle chronology:
http://www.spaceline.org/shuttlechron.html
We should all honor the memory of the crew of Challenger.
The special mini-magazine in the newspaper on Sundays, Parade, had a nice article on the Challenger Learning Centers, here is a link:
http://www.challenger.org/clc/clc_netw_set.htm.
The families of the crew started this science learning center in honor of them.
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LinuxKnight
The Nov 11 at 11 AM is actually to remember the end of WWI, Armistice day (you know the war to end all wars) so before you give trite history lessons, try to get the facts kind of correct
Ahem! Married, with two kids. Sorry! You loose! Go back to tossing off in the corner to 976 numbers and pr0n you looser!
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
a moment of silence is not created out of past respect for something long forgotten...but out of something so horrible or beautiful as to never be forgotten. don't tarnish the memory of the challenger by something so trite and politically correct as a moment of silence.
my moment of silence for the challenger was on that cold january day. Today, my gift to her crew is a place in my heart, and the knowledge that they will never be forgotten.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Wouldn't you agree that a faulty O-ring is a much easier and "fixable" problem than global poverty?
TLA's are nice, but some people are confused. I knew some, and had to look the rest of them up. =)
LEO = Low Earth Orbit
APU = Auxiliary Power Unit
SRB = Solid Rocket Booster
OMS = Orbital Maneuvering System
RCS = Reaction Control System
KSC = Kennedy Space Center
SSME = Space Shuttle Main Engine
Hope this helps. (source)
Right is wrong when left is right.
>I disagree.
>
>If you are pregnant...and you realise that you
>will not make a good parent, if your heart is not
>COMPLETELY in it. If you are not willing to make
>the sacrifices that are needed - then having an
>aboirtion IS a responsibility.
I disagree. If you are pregnant...and you realize that you will not make a good parent, if your heart is not COMPLETELY in it. If you are not willing to make the sacrifices that are needed - then having an abortion is still wrong. There are thousands of couples that cannot have children of their own that would jump at the chance to adopt a child.
First of all, as for doing whatever you want to your own bodies, the law already says what you can and can't do. You CAN'T take drugs on your body. You CAN'T prostitute your body, etc. In most states, if you commit suicide, it is illegal. (I don't know HOW they can prosecute, but oh well.) And as for "making your partner suffer for a mutually bad decision" that is a lie. You don't want to take responsibility for the baby once it comes out. Abortion as a means of birth control is lazy, and trying to get out of paying for what you've caused. You play with fire, and you get burned, don't get out of it by making an unborn pay for it. That's the mark of immaturity. And as for people who claim "what if it threatens the parents or is the result of a rape?" Well, those kinds or situations only account for less than 1% of all abortions. 99% are for convienence. But make of it what you will.
JoeLinux
I'm an old fart who remembers exactly where I was when I heard that Kennedy had been shot and when I heard that the Challenger shuttle had exploded. I was deeply saddened by both.
It seemed immediately obvious that the Challenger cabin would fall to the ocean surface intact and it would be at that point that the crew would die, in full knowledge of the fact that they were going to die.
That awareness contributed to my feeling of deep sadness and I was actually surprised when this obvious fact was subsequently announced as news. I guess that knowledge is not particularly conducive to happiness.
The Challenger disaster is a sad monument to the general fact that management decisions are a widespread cause of sadness and disaster. It's a shame that there's no way to stamp out management decisions.
It also a shame that too many shallow individuals find it appropriate to make light or contemptuous remarks about an event that comemmorates the death of some good people.
Wow, what a self absorbed jerk you must be. When I and my friends stand in silence on Nov 11 11:00 am for a moment of silence to remember those (including both my grandfathers) who fought (on opposing sides) during WWII it is neither trite nor politically correct and I'm offended at your casual dismissal of what is a very important tradition of respect for my entire family including the my one remaining grandfather.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
You, loosenut, should do a little more research. And also realize that engineers (I'm proud to be one, although in an unrelated field), don't usually have the luxury of choosing the projects that they work on. Ideally, assuming that you're a cluefull individual (doubtful, in this case), you'd bother and try and find out a few facts. Engineers responsible DID try and warn the management (INSERT BLAME HERE), that cold temps WOULD cause problems. Management pushed the issue, the engineers said it was bad idea. Managers killed good people and a lot of dreams that day, that's the real tragedy. Next, would I trust Jello Biafra with my wallet? NO! Thank God his 15 minutes of fame is almost over.
Exploded, didn't explode, whatever. Either way, it was a badda big boom. Fire, smoke, bits of orbiter strewn about. Close enough for me.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Man, that brought back some memories ... I, too, like many other people my age, were huddled into their cafeteria in their formative elementary school years (third grade, in my case) to watch this. Then we see a blast, and suddenly Principal Taylor gets up and jabs at the POWER button on the TV, and we are escorted back to our classrooms. Definitely one of the more disturbing incidents in my relatively happy childhood.
Re point 1) - I agree. Re point 2) - There's still that pesky 25% of the debate, which is non-religious. From the scientific stand-point, I have to wonder, is it possible to clearly define, at what point a fetus becomes sentient, because that's the point, beyond which I'd object to abortion. Yeah, I know it's right off the point of disasters, but it *is* a worthwhile question, is it not?
"Brevity is the soul of lingerie." - Dorothy Parker
The things future people will remember most will be the things that involve a similar percentage of the human race as the older revolutions. Things that effect everybody, like the internet, biotech/genomic R&D, the rise of India and China, will stick in most people's minds.
Part of this reaction is apathy - who cares? that explosion happened so long ago. we're a culture of fast-paced flash and there have been plenty of explosions (OK, NY twin towers), a couple of wars (Gulf, Somalia, Yugoslaia), plenty of school shootings, and 14 Superbowls since that explosion. Who cares to remember one explosion?
part of it comes from a lack of a sense of history, and the way that history has built the world we currently live in. I've mentioned to a few people my pilgrimages to Trinity Site, NM (site of the first manmade atomic explosion) and how it's historically one of the most influential events to current history, only to receive confused looks. Same look i get when i tell people a day is special b/c it is the anniversary of D-Day, or Napoleon's defeat, or Genghis destroying Nineveh. We've little perspective.
Why have we such little perspective? it's nothing new, and in fact we probably have more perspective than most people have had throughout history since we have access to information from all around. And that's probably why we've still such little perspective - though we hae access to knowledge about so many Important Events, we don't really have the tools to sort through them.
in the past (a few thousand years ago), the Challenger explosion would have evolved into a Legend, a Myth, perhaps similar to Icarus's flight, and it's memory and message would have influenced our decision making for centuries to come. But now, what stories would stand out against the plethora of others? what Event that we know of is greater than all others? Pearl Harbor? The Kennedy Assassination? The Challenger Explosion?
Why should the Challenger explosion stand out so much more than all the others? Or, if it cannot, how do we give each event the respect that it deserves when there are so many to remember?
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
I second this excellent recommendation. The way in which launch authorization was obtained and the subsequent efforts to cover it up certainly gave me pause. The rest of the book is also worth reading. Feynman was a brilliant man and an entertaining writer. There's also "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". His experiences on the Manhattan Project (and his breaking the combinations of the safes of his co-workers) make for fascinating reading.
It's all well and good remembering the Challenger explosion, but they were not the only ones to die for the space program. Yes it was the most widely watched disaster in NASA's history...but it was not the only one and it will not be the last one...
if any one ever has the time to take a tour of Kennedy Space Center they should visit Pad 34. It was the launch pad Apollo 1 burnt up on, I went there about 2 years ago, and at that site is a plaque. That reads " AD ASTRA PER ASPERA" ( a rough road leads to the stars). You get a strange eerie feeling walking around that pad I tell yeah...
Every time i see the explosion I feel sick, and i was only 3 when it happened.
I know....
But as I said, they're bound to go above their bosses if their bosses ignore the problem. At least here in Ontario.
But then, that's now. Events like that could have changed the regulations regarding Engineering Ethics as well.
Dark Nexus
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
IIRC, It was 7 years before the next manned launch. OK, it didn't destroy it, but it did slow us down a bit.
(Note: I could be wrong. I was only in 3rd grade)
Fish
Actually, it looks like someone moderated it back down to 1 (as overrated) after it was moderated to 2.
This may be a job for meta moderation!
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is that someone _intentionally_ caused the massive DATA LOSS of Challenger, because someone didn't want civilians in the space program. Because then, we might find out what things are REALLY out there....
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
According to campus lore, Resnik paid for her college tuition by flying narcotics from South America via the Avatiation Club's Cessna.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
All the nerds at my school (me included) were gathered at the school library to watch it take off, and then it blew up and everybody freaked out. Then later on i was sort of desensitised to the whole thing since they played the footage on the news on every station every hour for a week or so. Talk about shameless exploitation of mayhem...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
That's what bugs me the most about Challenger... the engineers KNEW about the fault that caused the explosion, they'd come close to having similar explosions during testing and knew the problem hadn't been fixed.
.. There was a very informative program on about the Challenger distaster. 'Challenger: Final Mission' or something like that. Anyone else see that program too?
No, it was the managers (at Morton Thiokol - mfrs of the rocket boosters) that OVERRULED the decision of their engineers who had a agreed that a launch in the cold January temperatures would be disasterous.
Do you get the Discovery Channel?
It's always the managers that screw these things up. Either by rushing the engineers/programmers/experts or assuming they know best when they clearly don't know shit.
--
Delphis
I remember thinking, as it lifted off,"Odd, that seems a little slow". It seemed just a touch less snappy compared to other launches.
But it got off the pad okay and I dismissed the thought.
Then a little bit later they showed a close up through thge telescope of the side of the ship, and I saw what I thought were unusual plumes from the sides of the boosters. Again, it was odd, but again I dismissed it. Somehow, through all this, I was not my usual cheery self. Something was bugging me.
Then it happened. boom. and I argued with the people around me about what I saw in the replays over the next day or two, until the analysts on the TV spotted the plumes.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The engineers decided to present their data by wrapping it in distracting rocket icons. The rockets were organized, left to right, by date, but the real variable they needed emphasize was the relation of temperature to O-ring failure, not of date to O-ring failure. (The forecast temperature that morning was 25-30 degrees F, far below any previous launch temperature.) Tufte includes a chart he would've used, which forgoes date (and those cute rockets) in favor of a clear relationship between temperature and O-ring failure -- a chart that very possibly could've convinced management to cancel the launch.
This is what good information design is about. It's not about using fancy pictures to obscure data -- it's about using visual elements to highlight and emphasize the relationships between data. It's an important skill, and unfortunately it seems to be in very short supply.
Do domain names matter?
Can anyone imagine being locked in a dark room up to your neck in water, waiting to die?
I think an interesting point is how it has enhanced our understanding of group decision processes and how they can fail. If you work in business you see this kind of fault all the time -- the piece of information that is suppressed, the nightmare scenario that is dismissed because it is so unthinkable that it must be equally unlikely.
Positive thinking is a crucial aspect of doing business. The problem is how to win victories against your competitors, and yet find a way to integrate thinking about the greater dimensions of the problem, and your responsibilities to the people who will live with the consequences of your actions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Right. Only a total retard would mistake purple for pink.
Go eat a dick.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
From these posts it is obvious that the average /. reader is much younger than me. I worked at Kennedy Space Center before, during, and after the Challenger accident. My office was right above the area you see in the video of the crew smiling and waving as they board the bus for the launchpad. My wife worked there too right across the street from the Launch Control Center, about 3 miles from the pad. I was there that day having lunch with my wife in her office when it happened. It was indeed an unforgetable day. The smoke from the explosion stayed there in the air for many hours afterward, the radio/TV/papers ran the story nonstop, and everyone could talk of nothing else. The only way to get away from it was to go home, close the curtains, turn off the lights and try to forget that horrible sight. I don't think I ever felt the same about participating in the space program after that. It permanently changed me and many of my coworkers.
I stayed there for several years afterward and for quite awhile things really were different. People listened to the engineers, safety mattered, and money was not the king. Slowly though, that began to change. As time passed people forgot the lesson learned that day. Politics began to be more important than doing things right again. Nobody wanted to hear it when the engineers said the schedule was unrealistic or the design was poor. The best and the brightest began to leave. They could see what was happening and didn't want to be there when the next "accident" occurred. Many of them (including me) left to join software firms.
I hope that things have changed in the years since I left, but I doubt it.
"Shredded cabbage and mayo go good together." Cole's Law
I think Anonymous Coward suits you rather nicely.
Damn right! I sacrificed perfectly good karma for my joke. The least I could ask is some backup from some other wise-ass slashdotters... but no, all I get is Anonymous Cowards. fuck karma, you can't trade it up at Thinkgeek... sacrifice some!
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
I don't care that this is just a me too post...
I'm 43. I honestly don't remember where I was when JFK was assassinated.
I was layed over in DFW airport when the Challenger went down. I noticed *everyone* crowded around the TV's in the bars and stopped to see what they were looking at. We were all speechless. I just wanted to go hide somewhere and cry...
Of course. Meta-moderation has been around for quite some time now.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Still, the thing was launched outside of its rated temperature range. The launch director should have been shot for that one.
I understand your pride at rapidly determining "the cause" of the breakup, but really all you identified was the endgame sequence --
Good point. We certainly didn't know the reason for the O-ring failure, or for that matter, didn't know that the SRB's *had* O-rings. We didn't know the specifics of the SRB construction at that point, all that came later with the discussions.
Thanks.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
I think you missed the point. Unlike most senseless violence, the Challenger explosion wasn't just a billion dollars down the tube and 7 dead astronauts. There is something more grisly horrible about a plane wreck, but seeing the Challenger blow up spoke to people on an entirely different level. We saw a symbol of a vital part of ourselves crash into the ocean that day.
A bit dramatic, but true. I was in high school in Concord NH when the challenger blew up. Christa McAuliffe had been one of my teachers. I have to admit she was not one of my favorites, but she was the kind of teacher you could swap jokes with outside of class. Generally a nice person.
Another stupid admission is that I was actually protesting the whole thing when it happened. See, even though I was a fan of the space program, the teacher in space program came right on the heels of massive cuts to federal education programs. As a student in a high school that desperately needed funds for arts and sciences, I felt like this was Reagan (remember him) throwing smoke in our eyes. In retrospect, it would probably have been better for science in general if we had gotten people excited about space.
We had gotten kicked out of the cafeteria where everyone was watching the launch. There were press there, and the administration didn't want anyone spoiling their perfect picture.
So I was on my way to the library to sulk when I heard an announcement over the pa. It was the principal asking everyone to stay calm in the face of this tragedy. I was really confused. It certainly never entered my mind that something could have happened to the shuttle. I thought maybe the launch didn't go off.
When I got to the library, they had a tv set up to watch the launch. It was showing the explosion complete with crying witnesses and panicking reporters. I don't think I can describe the feeling. It felt for a moment like nothing really worked the way it was supposed to. I've never gotten over some feelings of guilt that I was trying to protest it.
The next few days were some of the most instructive of my teenage years. I saw people who hated her, lionize her. I saw reporters trying to sneak in to the school to get reaction shots. I heard people blaming everyone they could think of, including ethnic groups.
On the other hand, I saw our community really pour out support for her family. I saw people who genuinely felt pain at her loss, try to keep people calm.
I guess tragedy often brings out the worst and the best in people. After all, extremes beget extremes.
The last time I went back to visit my school (a long time ago, I hated the place), there was a huge shrine to Ms. McAuliffe. It had a really cheesy oil painting of her in the center. It looked like it came from of one of those places you can buy paintings of Elvis on the side of the road.
Nevertheless, my throat caught a little when I saw it. She was sacrificed in the pursuit of science. It seems simultaneously noble and stupid, as ways to die go. I'd like to say that I thought her life and death had a positive effect on the world, but I'd be lying if I said I'd bet on it.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I Remember the the morning of the 29th of Jan 1986. Being in Australia I couldn't actually watch the launch, I was only in primary school, 9 years old, eating breakfast when I heard on the radio news that the Space Shuttle Challanger had exploded, I ran into the lounge and turned on the TV to see that horrific image. We even had a minute of silence at 11:00am at our school (signifigant for Australians on the 11th of november). Most of the kids thought it was tragic, but funny. "Those Bloody Americans can't even get their shuttle right" But I held firm, I KNEW that NASA would find out what went wrong and fix it, and the next launch would be safer...
Well, I have to say that the challanger was really the last launch of the US Space program. Every launch thereafter was for satillites and the like. It was bad PR for the government, so they took the easy way out and gave up.
Look at the russian space program, even though the country was decimated by the shift to democracy They still kept their space program running. Even though they were using the same systems that they used in the sixties.
The point that I am trying to make is that the primary difference between the russian space program and the US space program is determination and resorcefulness. I am not saying the the US don't have these elements, but the russians do in abundance. NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that could function in zero gravity. Which is a fantastic idea, really and a triumph of human knowledge, however the russians use a pencil. Mir has been in orbit for how many years, and Skylab is where...
In 1988 (two whole years after challanger) the Russians launched their first reusable Space Shuttle, the "Buran". Even in the midst of talk that the space shuttle was unsafe (and the Russian shuttle was designed of the original american plans) the still pushed ahead.
The problem is that the americian public forgot what the space program was for. as exciting as the first moon walk was and as unbelievable the first space shuttle seemed these events where not designed for the public's entertaintment, they where designed to further human knowledge, experience and our reach.
Lets be honest, the ISS should have been built 10 years ago, it's not as if it couldn't have been, it just wasn't.
The challanger disaster highlighted the real challanges of space exploration, the US Space program fell of it's bike and scraped it's knee. But it didn't get back on, it ran home to mummy.
Leg Godt!
I may have the dubious honor of making the first shuttle 'joke': I was in 12th grade, we were watching the launch in english class. About 10 seconds after it blew up, I said "I wonder how long till the jokes start", which busted up the whole class and sent the teacher into a kiniption (sp?) fit who made me go to the principals office. The principal didn't do much, he even smiled a bit. I thought it was funnuy as hell at the time, but now have mixed thoughts looking back.
BTW, christianity is based on Plato and Aristotle up to a certain degree. I'm not religious, but I'm not sure I'm an atheist. I believe there is something, man cannot and will never understand. But as soon as you get special with this, you are lying. So let's keep it that fuzzy.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
You've got to be kidding me. The abortion issue has nothing to do with women having the right to control their own bodies. If a women wants to kill herself, by all means, control your own body. However, stepping across the line and killing someone else, merely because they depend on you for life is murder. Why not kill people in nursing homes that couldn't survive without the care of others. You and the women of the world have every right to control your body, but let the babies your killing have the same right.
Ryan "the Moped" Runge
why do people bother replying with this kind of neurotic crap. it was a big thing, sure i heard about it, and went, oh, ohkay, that sucks, and went on my way, but then again i didn't watch the launch, nor was i exposed to the space program and all the enthusiasm that goes along with it. but still people have a right to talk about things like this without fools coming along and saying stuff like this. Kind of reminds me of some idiot 14y/olds i knew on irc a bit back, makes me a bit sick. but anyway, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anying at all nimrod
--
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
whom have lost their life in trying to make our country a great place for everyone. may their souls rest in peace, and may the hearts of their loved ones heal.
And a big middle finger to those who think it's funny making fun of a tragedy on this scale.
I believe this is something that shouldn't be joked about. It's honestly a very dark day in our history. The deaths of ANY person is something that should be mourned, and I pray for the families of the mission. May the hears of the loved ones of who died become strong, and they remember what good came from them. Setting a presidence for others to follow. These people are heroes, red, white, and blue. Joking about this not only hurts the loved ones of those whom died. I'm offended by you. I believe that if you can joke about this, then you don't understand what the mission stood for. I'm ashamed of you, and quite appalled by your ignorance.
People don't joke about heroes.
That's like saying that all the guys in world war II for the freedom of the world were all morons.
And that george washington was just some fag who wore a stupid wig.
I'm extremely offended, and can't believe that you'd joke about something as serious as that.
-- John Dee
I was 5 when we landed on the moon, I remember watching it. I sent to nasa for books about space when I was about 7. I have watched the space program go from our most important national project to an afterthought. I watched the first shuttle launch. I watched Challenger explode. Space is the future of humanity, but we have been led astray by marketing and instant gratification. Sorrow is the only word that will describe the moment of realization that we have wasted our future.
I was one of those school children, in 5th grade at the time. The things I remember from the live reporting was not talk of dispair, but rather talk of the scrambling around to find possible survivors. The discussion in my class of Religion, accidents, etc. was intense because of this. People learn from this, and become stronger individuals. No one can truly grow without someone / something challenging what you thought to be a truth.
The claim that these images "disturb a generation" is someone just trying to be too much of a shield from LIFE! I'd rather let my kids watch that type of reporting, rather than see all of the fake violence on today's TV shows. There is reality, of accidents, mistakes, war - then there is staged, scripted smut and violence all over today's TV that I am amazed from.
I remember this vividly... I was in third grade, we were in the library to watch the shuttle launch and I was sitting on the the cool linoleum floor with the rest of my class mates. I was psyched because at the time it was my dream to become an astronaut. (Till I found out the extrordinarily high requirements to be one) I'll never forget that day, sitting watching that old TV with the gargantuan sized VCR sitting on the shelf below it and the moment when the shuttle exploded. I didn't believe it at first, and truely thought that it couldn't be real. How could NASA let something like that happen.. Well needless to say it was real, and that is something I will never forget. BUT, the moment they announce that one can take a space flight for a fee, I *will* have my name on that list, money waiting to be spent. :)
I would have said long live space exploration.. But we havn't really gotten much past sending out probes.. But that's another issue entirely.
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
I was in the shower when the Challenger blew. It was the year I got married. I stepped out to the sound of Tom Brokaw bemoaning the tragedy and speculating about what happened. I sat down on the couch and cried. I think a lot of us who really understood the miracle did.
Then we got into that whole O ring thing and the press acted like it was all their idea. Of course, the press also were the first to act like the shuttle program was routine and glossed over the hard reality that the Space Shuttle is essentially a flying bomb. People who understood, knew about the miracle involved were pretty offended.
So then the media crucified NASA; when days before the accident they were asking what was wrong with the Shuttle Program and why NASA couldn't get the thing off the ground. They had made it commonplace, no big deal, and made the masses think that it wasn't a big deal.
Of course, that didn't stop it all from being a miracle. It still is a miracle, when you consider Hubble, the Space Station, and the fact that we walked on the moon. When Apollo orbitted the moon and the crew read from Genesis, it made men stop and stare in awe. The astronauts won an Emmy for their oration. But because of the media, cheapening the experience, by the time of the Apollo 13, people were numbed to the miracle--when Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon the year before.
It wasn't just another moon shot. It wasn't just another shuttle launch. It wasn't just another space station. All of them were miracles, in just that the vehicles ever got off the ground in the first place.
The evil of the media is that it delights in robbing us of our heros and taking away our miracles. And I really wish we could make everyone understand that.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
I was born in 1982 and don't remember the Challeneger explosion. This does bring up the interesting question of what my generations defining moment is. We (thankfully) don't really a tragedy like this to relate to.
I'm not sure what this says about society, but I think the OJ car chase might very well be the defining moment of my generation.
-Jeff
-Jeff
I like to play with Shiny Objects and Yarn.
In order to prepare for the next Shuttle disaster, we need to examine the various scenarios that may occur, their likelihood, consequences and what work should be done, in advance to prepare ourselves, our space program and our citizenry.
SCENARIO: Stranded in LEO due to APU failure
For example, consider what would happen if an orbiter were stranded in LEO due to total APU failure. The logic of the situation would unfold in this scenario:
Hundreds of millions of people on Earth would watch every detail of the dramatic situation unfold over several days (assuming they have that much life support). During the first few days, there will be many attempts to repair the problem with ground crews working round the clock on a simulated orbiter in a similar failure mode. They will come up with any of a number of futile attempts to fix the problem which the astronauts will, at first, dutifully carry out. This work will proceed even though there is little or no possibility of an actual fix. The public, the astronauts and NASA personnel will feel hope and dispair in cycles at each attempt, until, eventually, the charade will wear thin. At that point, the astronauts, the ones who are facing certain death, will be under enormous psychological pressure to end the charade.
Such a break-point will carry with it the likelihood of one or more astronauts venting frustration and hostility -- possibly built up over many years of disillusionment as part of the crippled US space effort.
NASA will attempt to blank-out all communications with the astronauts at or before this point. Some or all astronauts will not want to cooperate with this black-out and will refuse to allow the their communications to be encrypted. Ham radio operators and others around the world will band together to pick up the transmissions of the doomed astronauts and make them available to the public.
After breaking from the bureaucracy's authority, the astronauts may become extremely critical of specific individuals in NASA and its contractors. They will have nothing to lose and will finally have a chance to right what they perceive as the wrongs in the space program.
A few weeks after the dying words of the astronauts are heard, the shuttle will reenter the atmosphere at 5 or 6 miles per second. It will break up. A few large fragments will scatter widely and unpredictaby, hitting the ground before total disintigration due to the ablative coating. The public, ignorant of probability theory, will be in terror at the thought of the shuttle crashing into their communities causing mass destruction. The fireball could easily be visible from large population centers and will most likely be viewed on television broadcasts around the world.
SCENARIO: Secret Shuttle Launch Disaster
The DoD reopens the Vandenburg Shuttle launch facility. A payload with a plutonium radioactive thermal generator needs to be placed in an LEO polar orbit. About 2 minutes after SRB separation, a main engine pump turbine blade fails causing the turbine to fly apart at supersonic speed. The containment works pretty well but a few blades get out. One of them nicks the pressurization system for the fuel oxydizer tanks in one of the OMS pods. The astronauts sense a loud THUD and the loss of one of the main engines. They opt to abort once around using the remaining two main engines. Everything goes according to the contingency plan. All fuel is consumed from the main tank. The tank separates. The OMS engines start up. Only one of them lights. Since this produces an off center thrust, the RCS consumes excessive amounts of fuel to keep stability. The OMS system, only capable of using half its fuel, fails to put the Shuttle into a once around trajectory. It reenters short, somewhere near the Persian Gulf. In the early phase of reentry, when the aerodynamic control surfaces are insufficient to orient the spacecraft, the already overtaxed RCS runs out of fuel. The Shuttle begins tumbling somewhere over the Caucasus Mountains. By the time the control surfaces could be used, the Shuttle is in a fatal spin. It breaks up. When it breaks up, the RTG canister, designed to withstand reentry, is struck by one of the structural members of the Shuttle. Not being designed to withstand this, it shatters. 22 kilograms of Pu238-dioxide are distributed in the atmosphere over Moscow, Kalinin and Lenningrad.
The Soviet ballistic missile warning radars, primarily facing north, are briefly treated to the spectacle of hundreds of reentering objects coming down around Moscow and Lenningrad. The two largest, most economically important and strategically significant cities in the Soviet Union.
Pu238 is 284 times more radioactive than the fissionable isotope Pu239 due to its relatively short half-life of 86 years. It decays by alpha emmission of 5.5Mev. While this is somewhat higher than the decay energy of Pu239, it is far higher than the decay energy of U235 and not similar to the decay energy of any other common nuclide. Thus to the relatively unsophisticated instruments initially used to evaluate the sudden release of radioactive material, it will appear as though 5.5 metric tons of weapons-grade Pu239 has suddenly reentered over Moscow.
5.5 metric tons of Pu239 is enough to support on the order of 500 warheads. Areasonable surmize would be that a US secret launch out of Vandenburg was to illegally emplace a facility containing 500 or so nuclear warheads into an orbit where it would pass over the Soviet Union 4 times per day from the south whre their early warning radars could not detect it until it was far too late.
Vandenburg is a highly secured facility. Due to the local geography, neither the launch pad nor the assembly building can be viewed from sites not on the base. The Soviets will have very limited intelligence about launch preparations and the launch itself. Our belated protestations that it was merely a routine Shuttle launch will be met with a great deal of skepticism.
The Soviets, sensitized by the Chernobyl disaster to nuclear catastrophe, will be react unpredictably.
SCENARIO: Brilliant Soviet Rescue of Astronauts Stranded in LEO
As in the "Stranded in LEO Due to APU Failure" scenario, all 3 APU's fail, leaving the astronauts helplessly adrift.
The Soviets, hearing Tom Neff's idea of a rescue effort, come up with a brilliant plan. They launch an unmanned Soyuz from Space City with the stated intent of making a rendevous with the drifting Shuttle and rescuing some of the astronauts (the Soyuz wouldn't have capacity for all of them). Space City, being at a much higher latitude than KSC, gives the Soyuz craft a much higher inclination orbit than the Shuttle. The Soyuz, being incapable of correcting its inclination by the required amount, intersects with the Shuttle's orbit at a few miles second or so.
Thus the Soyuz saves our brave astronauts from the senseless torture of a slow death.
Why would the Soviets would go along with such an imbicilic rescue attempt when it requires the sacrifice of a launched Soyuz (worth $15 to $20 million)? The Soviets draw attention and blame for the disaster away from NASA. This allows NASA to contain the political damage and maintain its appearance of conducting a space program, leaving the Soviets free to develop space without competition.
SCENARIO: Possible consequence of terminal approach APU failure
During reentry 2 of the APUs fail and the third has some problems (as has occured before). But unlike the previous instances, the Shuttle comes into the terminal area energy management manuver a little bit high and a little bit fast. It encounters a little clear air turbulence while in a tight turn to bleed off this excess energy. As the pilot is lining up on the runway, the third and last APU gives out due to the buffetting. Unfortunately, the APU failed before he completed the final turn. The control surfaces go dead. The Space Shuttle, now out of control, impacts at supersonic speed into the waiting crowd which never hears it coming. Thousands perish.
Shuttle Disaster Premises
Here are the premises of the Shuttle disaster scenarios (my apologies to those who find all this painfully obvious, but the noise level around here has made it necessary that I belabor these points):
1 The SSME turbine pump blades have been found to be a weakness in the SSME design that has yet to be dealt with adequately.
2 The failure of these blades would result in a failure mode that has not been adequately tested, thus the turbine blade containment ring may not succeed in fully containing the debris.
3 The 3 APU's have been found to be a weakness in the Shuttle system design as 2 of the 3 have failed in a single mission with the 3rd found to be near failure after landing.
4 According to James Fletcher, the NASA Administrator appointed by President Reagan to reform NASA's Shuttle program after the Challenger disaster, the Space Transportation System is on the verge of becoming "economical". (While I may not agree with this opinion, it is certainly reasonable to assume the statements of such a person to be "plausible" in these scenarios.)
5 An "economical" launch system is what the military needs to launch its crushing backlog of spy satellites and Vandenburg is the only launch site which can make polar orbit without going over populated areas.
6 The trajectory of a Shuttle launched to the south into a polar orbit (which is the typical orbit of spy satellites) from Vandeburg reenters over the major western Soviet cities in the event that an abort to once around option is attempted and falls short due to inadequate thrust (such as OMS engine failure secondary to SSME failure).
7 RTG's are a far less vulnerable power source for spy satellites than solar cells and the military is increasingly concerned about solar panel vulnerability.
8 Unavoidable clear air turbulence is common over the Shuttle landing site at Edwards AFB.
9 The OMS fuel and pressurization lines are in reasonable proximity to the SSME turbine blades.
10 The Pu239 oxide cannisters have not been adequately tested since when they were subjected to an explosive test, they did fail and NASA proceeded to proclaim them flight ready because the explosive test was "invalid".
11 We have no way of rescuing Shuttle astronauts stranded in orbit.
Some other facts, pointed out to me privately, that could be used for future Shuttle disaster scenarios:
12 Orbital debris is a significant threat to the Shuttle as we have already experienced damage during one flight.
13 The SSME bell is not being adequately inspected for hairline cracks which could fail catastrophically during launch.
There are many classes of plausible disaster scenarios based on these premises. I've chosen to write on just a few exemplary cases which are particularly horrific. They are worth contemplating because they are so horrific.
Seastead this.
Growing up I had heard that just about everyone older than I remebered exactly here they were when president Kennedy was assasinated. Since I, and my friends, weren't born then, this was just evidence of a generational gulf between us.
We finally understood what they were talking about when we lost Challenger. All of my gen-x friends still today can clearly recall where they were and what they were doing when they learned the news. (I was in the Student Union in Ann Arbor, MI getting something to eat and trying to impress some girl at the time. I ran back into my dorm to tell the other guys what had happened.)
For us, this was our equvalent of the "Kennedy assasination" a defining moment for our generation where one of the core rules of the universe as we know it suffers a hard fault. The generaton that comes after us will not/can not really relate to something they've only heard about as 'history'. In time, I'm sure their generation will have an event that has a simiar effect on them. I can only hope that it will be notable for it's improbability, and not it's disasterous effects (like the first use of a nuclear weapon by terorists).
On a completely different thread: I was at the Kennedy Space Center about 2 weeks ago, just before the launch of the Shuttle Atlantis was scrubbed. I stood on a launch platform there, eactly 224 feet below the spot where 3 men lost their lives in the Apollo 1 command module. It was somber moment, disturbed only by the crying babies and infants that seemed to be issued to every second family that walked through the gates.
Even with such noisy distractions, I encourage every person here to visit the Space Center if they have the opprotunity. Seeing the place in photos does not do it justice.
A moment of silence. . .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you don't see how they were serving all of society, I feel very sorry for you.
Ranessin
j00 5uX0r!!!!!!! H4 h4 h4 h4 h4 h4 h4 h4 h4!!!!!!
I will not condone a course of action that will raise my karma.
Please explain how those who were concerned about the Cassini lauch were profiteers. Some may have been ignorant, but "liars" is unduely harsh, and "profiteers" makes no sense.
It's amazing how you think you know my opinion on the matter when all I did was mention the claims of some commentators. If I say "Some commentators believe that George W. Bush is an intelligent human being," that makes the proposition "George W. Bush is an intelligent human being" neither fact nor my opinion. To my mind, both the degree of risk that was involved in the Cassini launch, and the ethics of exposing unwilling people to such risks, are both open questions. (Unlike the question of Dubbya's intelligence, where the truth is clear: the man is dumb as a stump.)
BTW, I got an "A" in "Statistics 400: Applied Probability and Statistics I", thank you very much. It was a required class for CS majors at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The "1 in 100,000 / 300 years between accidents" figures I mentioned come from Richard Feynman's account of the Challenger investigation in What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Feynman found a factor of more than 300 between the failure probabilities being quoted by management and the figures the engineers were giving out.
The risk in any spacecraft launch is nonzero. (If nothing else, it could fall on your house - that's why they put destruct charges on it, but there's still a possibility that these could fail.) NASA, much as I love 'em, has bullshitted in the past about risk. There needs to be more public discussion, debate, and understanding about the risks involved in scientific investigations, more than just an unquestioned environmental impact statement.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
ROTFL. It sounds exactly like Fish's bicycle.
__
L.
What do you think that the space race was about then? Actually in a way you are right that it was pretty irrelevant. The race was more important that the race I guess.
"what you're trying to get at when you ask who paid for what."
The majority of the population paid for it. The purpose of the space race, of the politics of hate, of "reds under the bed" thing, is to ensure that the minority of the population remain where they are. Extremely rich and generally in charge.
"I hope you're not suggesting that Lenin and Kruschev are still alive"
Good heavens no. Putin is ex KGB. This is a theme that is repeated throughout the old soviet bloc. And of course in the US you have pretty much the same faces. Bush's new office is staffed almost entirely by millionaire oil people.
"Gimme some facts, not some vague conspiratorial innuendo. "
Perhaps I am not being clear. What I saying is that the power structures that existed in the past, exist now. The space race was heavily subject to that. After the soviet bloc collapsed, ask yourself how long was it before the US found someone else to bomb? As well as Iraq, and Serbia, the US has invaded all sorts of countries since then. And now its "rogue states" that are the worry. The current political process demands enemies, demands people to hate, and demands people to compete and beat.
"Sorry about GW, incidentally."
Don't apologise. Its not your fault, and there is little that you could do to change the situation there.
Phil
No, it was the managers (at Morton Thiokol - mfrs of the rocket boosters) that OVERRULED the decision of their engineers who had a agreed that a launch in the cold January temperatures would be disasterous. (sic)
a) "their engineers" said nothing of the kind. What they said was "We've never done it and we don't know for sure what will happen."
b) The first failure of the O-rings was noted by a NASA engineer named Mr Ray in 1979 as cited in the Rodgers Commission report.
c) The first in-flight failure of the O-rings occurred very early and in very warm temperatures. Cold weather in Jan 1986 merely added to the original problem of poor engineering.
d) The fundamental problem of "the O-rings" is that they shouldn't be there in the first place. The O-ring manufacturers repeatedly stated that they were being used in an improper application. The reason they exist is that Morton Thiokol was the lowest bidder on the boosters. Congress (the budget people) scrapped liquid boosters as being too costly. Thiokol was already building solid rocket motors for ICBMs and voila. Because they're built in Utah, they can't be constructed in one solid piece so they're built in segments, joined at the launch site. This joint is weaker than the solid part of the case and exhibits "joint rotation" which briefly expands the joint enough to allow exhaust gasses to escape. The O-rings were a cheap engineering answer to the problem of a weak case.
e) NASA flies a stronger case now - but not because of Challenger. Because they're lighter. The uprated cases were on the drawing board in 1984. The joints are still fundamentally weaker than the case. The problem is still not fixed despite the addition of another tang and yet another O-ring.
f) The public at large could care less about the space programme. If you ask someone the names of "the Challenger Seven" you might get one or two. They died "doing their job" but the public have a hard time understanding what that job is.
Remember: Scobee, Smith, Resnik, Onizuka, McNair, Jarvis, McAuliffe.
I don't see how its completely illogical.
Of course I understand the difference bewtween disinfecting my toilet and performing an aborrtion. An abortion requires ALOT more skill - and care - as using the wrong tools/chemicals/techniques could kill the person being operated on (it would be excedingly hard fo rme to destroy my toilet bowl by cleaning it)
However, I see no MORAL difference bwteen the two.
"Thou shalt not kill" is a law made up by our society as a needed protection - a kind of glue to ease our fears and make society work. It does not apply to those who are not members of the society - or are not capable of being members.
It applies no more to a fetus than it does to a cow, or a deer, or any other animal that we regularly kill for our own ends.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I was a college student at the University of Central Florida at the time, and had worked at the space center the previous summer. I was up early for a class when I saw on the TV that it was about to launch, so I went outside to the open space between the dorms. This was about 25-30 miles away. Saw Challenger's exhaust trail draw a line upward from behind the university buildings, and then suddenly and unexpectedly split in two. One of the other students standing out there said, "Is it supposed to do that?" And I said, "No, it isn't..."
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Selling videos,books, and etc., paid appearances on radio/TV shows... profiteers. When these kooks start doing their Chicken Little performances without making half of it a sales pitch, their legitimacy may increase a notch or two in my book.
As for failing statistics, okay lets say you passed... in that case, how does a launch failure on the 50-somthingish launch disprove a failure estimate of 1 in 100,000? Or an average of 300 years between accidents? It does neither. Certainly the figures were bogus if they didn't take into account the temperature/faliure relationship of the solid boosters, but statistically, the Challenger accident neither proves nor disproves the figures as such.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Which really has nothing to do with the issue.
Just because someone else may the child, doesn't give you any responsibility to follow through with the pregnancy.
What makes abortion wrong exactly? Really what?
I don't think its wrong. I do not believe that it is killing a human life. I don't see it as any different than using disinfectant soap to clean my toilet.
Abortion iwrong IF AND ONLY IF you believe that the fetus is a living thing, that deserves protection. I am sorry, but I just don't see it. Its just a clump of cells.
It has no more of a right to life than the bacteria and vinegar yeastes that are naturally in the honey I use to make mead - and I have no qualms about killing them before pitching the yeast that I want in there.
Until a human being is capable of learning language and forming relationships and being a member of society, then I don't recognize any right to life (which is really, a fabircation needed for our society to function).
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Waco? The Berlin Wall? The Soviet Coup? Oklohoma city? Columbine?
When the Challenger exploded, I was in second grade, and like everywhere else, the launch had drawn much attention. In fact, a 5th grade teacher at one of my town's elementary schools was among the finalists to be the "Teacher in Space."
As it happened, I was at lunch when the launch occured, and was dissapointed in having missed it. However, just a few minutes later, opon re-entering our classroom, we were informed by our teacher, Miss Sara Cox (who ended up being a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions champion about 8 years ago,btw) that the Shuttle had exploded - something I'm sure many of the children didn't or refused to understand the reality of. As for myself, I can tell you exactly where I was sitting - second row from the right, second seat back. Its something I don't think I'll ever forget.
We spent much of the rest of that day in the library watching news coverage, it was a truly sad day.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I stand corrected. Like I said: Third Grade. thanx.
Fish
todah l'cha l' comment shelcha.
Glad it was you who raised the issue of what the rest of us are to do while a certain other group is praying on school time.
When I was in High School years back, Christmas trees were in the school office, decorations on classroom doors, etc..
but then, this was the same school that had a Vice-Principal who counted my Yom Kippur absence as un-excused.
I believe his comment to the absence review board was, "if he's going to claim a religious holiday, at least let it be a real religion."
But I got him back. I dated his daughter.
As for Challenger, I was in the only class in the elementary school that didn't watch the launch on television. I remember riding home on the bus that day being upset that we hadn't seen the launch, and having the other kids ask me, "did you see it, did you see it, I can't believe it!" and not knowing what happened (they wouldn't tell me) until I got home and saw the television.
I sequestered myself in the basement among my Odyssey magazines and posters and watched the footage of the disaster repeatedly for the next 12 hours. I still know every frame from memory. I also have the local newspapers from that fateful day.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
The reason they seperated church and state is because of all the warring factions within 1 religion (christianity). Now take this argument to it's logical extreme (because humans take everything they can to the perverted extremes if allowed to) you end up with murder, rape and drug use in our schools all in the name of religion. For me it stands to reason that people, given enough rope, will hang everyone but themselves.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
>I know he also has done a few good things, but I can't think of them off hand.
:-(
:-)
A "few good things"? You mean like giving the country it's first three-year budget surplus since the Truman Administration (surplus 1947-1949)? Like making amazing strides to pay down the national debt? It's hard to think that if we followed his budget plan, we'd be debt free as a country for the first time since Jackson was president by 2010. Honestly, 2015-2020 is more reasonable, but if we issue out trillion dollar tax cuts, it probably won't happen.
Reagonomics or Clintonomics? I make well under one-million dollars a year.... I have to go with Clinton on this one.
I'd continue, but it's 2:30, I'm lacking caffeine, and I have an exam at 8 today....
I won't dispute the fact that he's immoral. Too bad really. He could have one even more good....
I'm going to close my completely off subject rant by saying that, personally, I want to support Bush, but I know he's going to be against many things I believe in (I'm a bleedin' heart liberal). Neither one (Bush/Gore) was anything to get excited about. I'm just going to do what I was going to do even if Gore had been elected: Realize that, regardless of who the "press" says is President, Martin Sheen is the leader of the free world. Go West Wing.
"I think, therefore I am? What if I think I'm not?" - The_Shadows
While you change the names of your machines should it's vehicle have a Challenger-style disaster? Inevitably, there will be another failure.
Dude, Bite your toungue for saying that. We should all hope that the rest of the existing shuttle fleet all suffer the fate of getting to be grounded and placed on display at museums when they get too old, worn out and unpractical to remain spaceworthy. My servers will keep their names as long as they remain in service. Belive it or not, I also have a machine named "Mir" and this machine will keep its name as long as it remains in service, since this is a different situation and the Mir space station is being intentionally end-of-lifed... a quite "honorable" and meaningful death IMHO.
Underpants troll is the top secret (up until now, anyway) /. identity of....
...Bill Gates' 137th clone!!!!!!
I will not condone a course of action that will raise my karma.
I'm not flaming, I'm being serious, you all need to have more respect. This story wasn't posted as a fact, or some story, it was posted in memory and sympathy, all you all can do is flame eac hother and the poster. This was obviously intended to allow us to remember what happened as these people lost their lives.
May they rest in peace.
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I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
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58.0% slashdot corrupt
It's the religious dogma of the Catholic Church, among others, which is based on Greek philosophical concepts such as an immortal soul. No evidence of these belief is found in the old or new testaments.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Well, I think it is something you can recover from , depending on ones point of view.
:).
I was on Cape Canaveral for the Challenger explosion. They have tours that you can take, and if a launch is schedualled, they take you out onto a peninsula across from the launch site and you can wait and watch. Well, I was on spring break from school (6th Grade) and he had taken me down to see the launch because he knew how much it ment to me. We were out in the cold every day, and then on the last day before I had to head back to New York to school, it took off.
I remember that they held us out there for at least 4 hours or so after the explosion and that the bus driver knew there was something wrong before the rest of us (he had seen lots of lift offs before).
I remember listening to the radio communication between the Challenger and ground control over some P.A. speakers they had set up out there.
I remember them anouncing that the orbiter had exploded and trying to figure out if they ment the actual space shuttle or something else.
Now, some 15 years later I remember how utterly exhausted I was at the end of it, and how much I watched the news and followed the story. I followed the inqueries and felt very happy when one of my heros (Richard Feynman) not only was apointed to the committee investigating the disaster, but actually solved the problem and wouldn't let them white-wash it (as I learned much later when I read more about it when I got older).
Its odd. After witnessing one of the major 'disasters' in U.S. Space history a lot of people seem to think I would be turned against space, or be afraid of it. The truth is, I would happily go into space if given the chance with barely a second thought, even knowing something could go wrong. I HAVE been afraid to go watch another shuttle launch live, but that has more to do with free time then the superstitious fear I had about it for a while when I was younger (as if my being there really had something to do with it
It took us far too long to get a permanent space station in orbit (and the shuttle delligated to the role it was envisioned for, a 'shuttle' to/from that sapce station). I hope space flight progresses enough that the average person can get into space within my lifetime. At 28 I figure I stand a decent chance if the space program follows the same sort of a pattern as the one aeroplanes followed (although it may still be close).
If not me, then my children should be able to go, if not "to the stars," then at least, "to the planets"
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Dont even think of comparing Kurt Cobain to JFK -- its not even close. I, for one, have absolutely zero respect for someone that kills themselves, especially when they have a baby to take care of. Treating your family and friends like that is the most selfish thing that anyone can possibly do.
I'm surprised no one had mentioned him in all of these threads
He may have been a very good songwriter, but voice of a generation? He had a few years. Voices of generations are John Lennon/Beatles, Bob Dylan, it takes longevity.
Why do we think of sex as something just for fun ?Sex is a tool for procreation. And from it we have children.So why does everybody act so suprised on finding out that there is a child on the way? You are not ready to have children? No Problem! Couple hints: Use aprotiate protection? or ? Don`t have sex? SEX IS FOR ADULTS! If u`re old enough to have sex be old enough to take FULL responsability for your own act. having abortion is just a convinient way to avoid responsability...I can understand if u don`t have enough food to feed yourself or the child .. then u can complain about not beeing able to support the child .. otherwise .. THERE ARE OPTIONS.
(Adoption for one)
I don`t know if abortion is murder or not but that`s not the point!
It has a shattering psychological/physical effect
on a woman and should be allowed only in extreme cases..
"child is a nature`s way of saying that the world should go on"
skullb@redneckmail.com
Because there may be one of us (or our children) on a space mission some day.
I know that sounds rather trite, but consider our lack of memory of past space disasters. If history is a cruel teacher, then the lack of our history can be even more brutal.
I hope this article reappars in 5 years. The anniversaries of the Challenger will forever remind us not to take our technology for granted.
I remember Challenger for the crew who died on it. I also remember because of the others who died in a valiant attempt to push our species to the limits of our abilities.
If you forget Challenger, then you have also forgotten Apollo 1 and 13 (fortunately, no one died on mission 13). You have also forgotten the brave souls who died on missions from the former Soviet Union.
As a species, we learn from our collective mistakes. But only if we remember them.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Columbia was the first. And Endeavour would come before Enterprise, alphabetically.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
On the contrary. I think that if the public does not make light of these things, then it will affect them much more. Reference the emotional outpouring when Diana Spencer died in a Paris underpass. If a good hardy set of jokes had made the rounds then, there wouldn't have been so much wailing and silliness. People would have got on with their lives instead.
~Cederic
Ps: Where do schoolteachers go on holiday? All over Florida
5) Unborn children losing the right to live.
Umm.. although I can tell by your "beliefs" that you'd probably hate me and disregard my opinion as ignorant (as some people of my "beliefs" would to you), by definition, unborn children are not alive. Note: I'm not saying that children in womb are not alive. That's just the definition. In fact, I don't really have a full-formed opinion on abortion; partial-birth abortion is plain sick, and the thought of "killing a baby" is, too. But are they alive? Bacteria growing on you and other symbiotic life could be considered you; nobody has (and nobody should) have a problem with eliminating life such as this. A baby in the womb really is, again, by definition, a parasite. Who says that they are any different? Who says that they are alive? They cannot think, they cannot move, they cannot do anything - they could be considered no less than bacteria or any other parasite. Therefore you'd have the right to 'kill' 'it'. Then again, I also fully understand the view that a baby is a baby is a baby, and that killing it is definitely murder. But what about women who were raped? Would you force her to bear the child? What if a woman was to die during birth? Would you force her to carry on, then? Sure, these are extenuating circumstances, but they WILL and DO happen.
Also: just because Bush says he is moral does not make him moral. just because Bush is a Republican does not make him moral. likewise, just because Clinton was a Democrat and just because all the Republicans say he's immoral does not make him immoral, and it does not make his 8 years in office as "years of wretchedness." You do not know what happened. The Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a silly war over bragging rights. Don't listen to 94.7% of the shit they say.
Are you an engineer? Are you an engineer in aerospace? Look, in the '80s, the era of unlimited budgets was gone. Even the lowest bidder does very good work. Cost and schedule are two very, very big drivers in aerospace. You just have to deal with that fact and go on with it...
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-- Geof F. Morris
Explosive means uncontrolled/uncontrollable, where almost explosive would mean, um, almost controlled/controllable?
An explosive chemical reaction is one where there is a chain reaction. Combustion is where it is merely self sustaining. I think.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Gnu may be free, but it will cost you your free thought
What do you mean by that?
The Challenger accident serves as a lesson to all engineers. The exact cause of the explosion was the failure an O-ring on one of the SRBs. It failed because of the low temperature of the launch site that day. Morton Thiokol, the maker of the o-ring, did not know and could not accurately predict how the o-ring would perform that day since no one had thought to test it at low temperatures. Because of the bloated probability figures and the fact that the whole nation was watching, engineers at Thiokol were persuaded to NOT postpone the launch, which they had the power to do, if they thought there was sufficient danger. The Morton engineers are one of many hundreds of engineers who are consulted every time there is a shuttle launch.
The above lesson that even single, simple engineers can have a profound responsibility to the safety of the public, and engineers should not let their instincts or ideas be persuaded by businessmen.
These lessons are taught to EVERY sophomore engineering student (mechanical, electrical, systems, chemical, biomed, etc....) at my school in an engineering ethics class that uses the Challenger and many other well known and documented engineering misjudgments as examples.
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Yeah 220, 221. Whatever it takes! - Mr. Mom
For myself and many others, I'm sure, the Challenger disaster was more than just a national tragedy. It was moment of dreams being devastated, and snuffed out in the wink of an eye. And the crushing blow of the event was more than just watching the shuttle loss, it occurred over next many days as NASA notified the world that they were suspending their space program, possibly for years, and that even when they did resume the program, it would be at a far slower pace. Halting everything indefinitely until the problem was solved... and as the days wore on, my life and my dreams were torn apart.
All of my life I had dreamed of being able to go into space, visit the moon, or more, not as an astronaut (I'm not airforce pilot grade material, and I don't kid myself otherwise). Not only was it a dream, it was an event that was almost guaranteed to come about at the rate of advancement our space program was taking. Yes, everyone bitches about NASA taking the shuttle flights for granted, that they had become commonplace, but this is exactly what was needed before we could make the next jump to commercial/private travel. Christa McAuliffe represented the idea that an average person off the street could travel into space now because it was just so commonplace a trip.
I was born in 1968, and I have lived my whole life with the reality of space travel before me. When the Challenger exploded our space program ground to a halt. Although I'm glad to see that fifteen years later we're getting back to regular, commonplace shuttle flights, I don't get those fifteen years of my life back. The drive of our space program has slowed in this direction of common travel for the common man. It is back to being the world of lofty researchers, and air-force types. It's budget has been cut tremendously, and the dreams of many in my generation have been lost. While my kids may one day have to opportunity to travel to space, I have to realistically acknowledge that I will probably be to old by then to go myself.
Sorry, for the rant, but this has really bothered me a lot, and be warned, if you're going to belittle my feelings by telling me how this is all my own problem for getting my hopes up, you can go fuck yourself.
The URL you posted had a space in it. Here's a live link: Rogers Commission Report
I'm of two minds on this.
Technically, you're correct. The vehicle did not explode. The SRB plume burned through the strut connecting it to the External Tank, the SRB swung on the remaining strut, and the vehicle was then being pushed in different directions at once at supersonic speeds. The tank was ripped open, and the fuel inside ejected in yet a third direction, causing thrust against the orbiter that it was never designed to withstand. The vehicle broke up at that point.
I don't think Peter Jennings has been lying to us, either. Explosion is a simple way to put what happened, and those with a desire for more knowledge can easily find it. There is no conspiracy to conceal this fact.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I, like many children, had (and have) an aspiration to become an astronaut. The opportunity to be an explorer, a pioneer, a scientist and an engineer inspired me to read and learn about the space program. Thus I was one of the few children in the class who knew any specifics about the NASA and the space shuttle.
I remember this day clearly because it was really my first realization of our mortality, that even in an organization such as NASA, people could make mistakes, make bad decisions; and even without this things could go wrong. I mourned for the astronauts, scientists and teacher who were lost on that day, but as the weeks went by I also mourned the space program. I was afraid that this disaster would cause the downfall of the space program.
This made me realize that in any scientific endeavor there is always risk. But it is important to learn from everything, whether it is a huge achievement, or a terrible disaster. It is an insult to the memories of the people involved, in either case, to ignore the lessons derived from the experience.
In the case of the Challenger, the lesson is that it is better to double and triple check everything in an undertaking so huge, than to rush to meet a launch window. However, the lesson taking by much of the public and certain members of the government was that the space program is too dangerous and not worth the risk.
I think that in order to honour the crew members of the Challenger, today the space program should be decades ahead of where it is now, not stagnating due to lack of interest in everything but tax breaks and a few dozen votes, and buffing up the world's most useless and wasteful military, kept in place to satisfy the macho superiority complex of a relative few.
We must support more funding for the space program - lest we forget the story of the Challenger - and let one of the greatest achievements of one of the most powerful countries in the world fester, underfunded and unappreciated, in the back of the national mind.
I grew up in Melbourne Beach, FL, which is 30 miles south of Kennedy Space Center. When the shuttle is launched, it can clearly be seen (and heard) from my backyard. It was typical school tradition to go outside for the launches (hell, the school was named Gemini Elementary). I remember standing outside on that cold february day and watching (and hearing) the shuttle explode. I remember the teachers standing there, not knowing what to say... I remember the principal announcing over the intercom (after we were back inside) that a 'terrible tragidy' had just occurred.
I remember the jokes that were made for weeks afterward about people finding parts of the shuttle washed up on the ocean. I feel that this event had a dramatic cost on the lives of americans, especially those in my community. Most of my parents' friends worked for Harris, or Martin-Marrietta, or Northerp-Grummon, or NASA.
I imagine in some alternate deminsion where this hadn't happened, things would be much different.
-Andy
Personally I find it if nothing else a reminder of just how much time has passed since then - how little i've thought of this event since then.. how it really doesn't seem to be all that formative of a moment, honestly. Although I was certainyl expecting /. to come at it with some better discussion than this. Was hoping maybe to see some things from a new perspective. ..
Honestly, for most of us, the answer is the same.. "Where were you when the Challeneger was lost?" "3rd grade", "4th grade"
Is it any better or worse that this space shuttle was sent up with a full crew of astronauts, or with a crew of astronauts and one civilian? I don't really consider someone's profession a matter of how to rate a tragedy. Police officers, astronauts, sea captains, heads of state, presidents.. all the same. They are all -people- and their tragedies should not be weighted in different places because of their "status" in society. BLAH!
The fact that our country, government, space program, whatever branch you might want to blame, sent 7 people up in a rocket that summarily exploded is just plain bad. But, flight is dangerous. Space travel is more dangerous. Considering what happened within our atmosphere, I'd really hate to think about what might've happened had this rocket actually made it into outer space. *shudder*
I never really had the goal in life to be an astronaut - by this time I was already a Geek. But I do recall thinking at the time "OK.. so what effect does this really have on me? Yes, there are these people that are hurting out there, the families and so on... but this really doesn't have any effect on me."
Maybe I'm calloused from life. Maybe I'm insensitive. I don't know - but although there's a lot to be learned and discussed, the event itself didn't do a whole hell of a lot for me. I'd like to see a lot more interesting discussion on this topic than what -is- here, though
Btw, to the person who posted this story.. come on.. get a little more into the story!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
this is also the 15th anniversary of me turning in a late library book in 4th grade. I was having to face the music on a book that was overdue when I witnessed this fateful explosion. Had it not been for the bitch in the library and the pricipal, I would have missed this sorrowful occasion. thanks assholes in elementary school.
Not all children were as lucky as you, is all I can say. Not being in a private school were religion classes existed made the experience very diffrent from what you describe. We did not talk about the accident after the fact - it became taboo. If you became upset or wanted to talk about it, you were sent to the couselor's office to talk about it. In a large public school system this was a Bad Thing - the other kids noticed and would treat you diffrently because of it. Going to the counselor was seen as a bizare combo of mild punishment, being a snitch, being a wuss, and just being 'odd' - it usually caused more damage via the treatment you would get from other students then it was worth. Thus, without the benefit of discussion after the fact, without guiding hands saying 'these things happen, it is sad buch such is life, nothing is without risk' - we were left to rot in confusion. Many of us, myself included, didn't go home to our parents. Our parents worked and went to school and we were left with baby sitters who didn't want to discus it because it bothered them, or they didn't want to get in trouble with thier parents, etc... Maybe myself and my class just weren't as mature as your 5th grade class - but from what you describe it was a growing experience for you - for us it Was disturbing.
And your claim that we wanted to be shielded or think its right to be shielded is false. Had you sat in my shoes you would of had a very diffrent experience, and all who experienced it they way I did were bothered by it - not even the school clowns would dare make jokes the like of which are being posted on slashdot as we speak.
man is machine
I was in math class when this was announced.
:)
Later during lunch friends of mine would speculate that a student was just having fun with the intercom. It happend occasionally. Someone would announce a fictional holliday, or a birthday of someone who didn't exist.. or some fictional news event.
The space shuttle blew up..
NASA was getting boring... rockets blew up.. people watched waiting for annother disaster... when it didn't happen people stopped watching.
Ronald Regan was prepaired to do some budget cuts. Nasa was on the block... politics was involved and they needed some PR...
Send up a school teacher.. big PR stunt...
I'm guessing if they'd have known the shuttle might explode they'd rethink the situation...
But then if the public knew the shuttle might explode they'd stay intrested...
That was pritty scary...
I rember as a kid hopping this ment soon we'd have public shuttle flights...
I'd lay down 5 grand to enter orbid and back...
I was looking forward to setting up a BBS on a moon base
I don't actually exist.
The world is not nice, friendly, or safe. You are welcome to avoid facts, but please do not ask for my assistance. I find knowledge an infinitely better shield than ignorance.
The lessons I'm talking about are :-
1. Technical failures don't endanger lives etc, it's the failure of people to adequately assess and prepare for risks that is dangerous.
2. Ideally, it should take more than a single technical faillure to cause a system failure. Where this level of preparation is too expensive or time-consuming, stakeholders should explicitly take the cost versus safety decision. And review it.
3. It's quite possible to produce systems whose complexity and reliability are impressive, but you can't do it just with brilliant individuals. You have to have a process; review and criticism is vital. Having brilliant individuals certaily helps. If all you have is dumb individuals, don't bother starting.
Add Apollo I to the list, Grissom, Chaffee, and White.
In 1988 I saw a video which was a summary of the congressional report describing the events that lead to the demise of the Challenger.
An interresting conclusion of the findings was that the Challenger did not actually explode, but was torn apart by aerodynamic forces. The large ball of fire was the uncombusted contents of the large external tank, which were illuminated as the SRBs flew through them.
The other thing I found interresting was that they believed that at least two astronaughts were still alive at least for a short time after the incident, because a couple of emergency oxygen valves had been turned on. Something which would only have been done while going through emergency procedures. And possibly could have been alive until the crew cabin hit the water.
Kids (and adults) WILL generally fill in the blanks in their knowledge with the scariest possibilities. Often far scarier than reality could possibly produce.
(That's why conspiracy cults and doomsday cults are as popular as they are. They claim to be able to fill those blanks in.)
"Understanding" is a fundamental human need that we ALL have. Young and old, male and female, of all races, cultures and creeds. Indeed, most cultures, stereotypes, religions, etc, sole function is to meet that need for understanding.
I'd rather kids have PTSD - which can be "remedied" and even turned into an asset by adequate councelling and a loving, safe family - than have those same kids turn into paranoid sociopaths (a common consequence of the mind adding it's own unique terrors) who are too suspicious to ever be helped.
That's not to say that kids should not have their information filtered. Age-inappropriate situations are those in which the brain has not yet developed a mechanism for handling the input. At which point, those situations will result in the brain developing all sorts of strange neural connections and chemical responses, in an effort to keep things managable.
(Children don't "mend" easily, as previous generations were taught. Such faulty brain chemistry or wiring will likely result in conditions which are permanent and require treatment - if any exists - for the remainder of the child's life.)
Which category is the Challanger disaster under? The first. Kids know "loss" and "bereavement" by the age of 2 or 3. The changes a kid will have gone through by then, through gaining ever-greater independence, involves losing so much of what they (as a baby) took for granted that the issue of loss is pretty much resolved.
(In fact, most people who have trouble with loss are people who never went through those losses as a child and therefore never developed a mechanism to cope.)
To deprive a child of an essential part of growing up (that of developing that understanding of loss) is often extremely harmful. In order to grow, you HAVE to be able to let go.
Virtually all "recovery groups" out there really just show people how to let go, grieve, and then convert what's left into something those people can build from.
The biggest reason ANYONE ever fails to recover in such a group is their refusal to take that first step and let go.
And the biggest reason anyone ever has anything to recover from is that society as a whole favours clinging on to ever letting go.
To summarise: If you're on the Titanic, you can recover from getting a bit cold. You can't recover from getting a bit dead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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anyway...
when you waste billions on nothing more than a PR stunt to make yourself more tax dollars, you'd better be prepared to pay the price when it backfires in your face.
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Good point. The sentence didn't say anything about an anniversary.
sup
It is a little known fact that Kennedy approched the Russians in an attempt to work together to reach the moon. But his advisors (and the Secret Service) decided that this was not good idea and the government vetoed it straight off, it was better for the Americian public to believe that those dirty Commo bastards wanted to put a nuke up there (Anyone seen Space Cowboys...) because "god damn it, we have to protect the rest of the civilised world"
Kennedy was a true believe in what the space program meant, and to a degree so was Regan, is it any wonder that these two presidents were also some of Americia's most, shall we say fair and just, presidents.
Fortunately, so far it looks like right now they'd rather get up into space than threaten everybody with ICBMs.
As it should be really. Space is the next frontier, no point destroying each other before we get there.
Really, we should never have abandoned Skylab after a pitiful three missions. From what I remember seeing of it, it was as spacious as Mir was cramped.
I Agree, it was a poor decision indeed, so much more could have been done with it.
Trav
Leg Godt!
I don't think the astronauts themselves would've considered it a waste the way the media did. They were astronauts and test pilots, after all, they knew that essentially they were strapped to a controlled bomb and being hurled at unbelievable speeds. They knew the risks, they knew what they payoff would be if they suceeded, and what would happen if they failed.
The Soviets had numerous accidents - most hushed up - but their programs went forward. Nobody really knows how many people have given their lives to the fledgling Chinese space program. Yet with the US, we have 10 lost lives (7 challenger, 3 apollo) and a proprotionally high sucess rating, and yet NASA is seen as a failure. We send probes past the planets and into deep space, land robots on mars, and a few probes gone amiss on their way to mars...MARS!...make the whole program "beleagured."
I don't get it. The sucess rate is astronomical compared to a lot of other US-funded endeavors, but because of the public spectacle that is the space program (and the jadedness of the public towards it), failure can kill the whole project.
Don't get me wrong - the Challenger disaster was a tragedy, a tragedy caused by some stupid management at Morton Thiokol, but I think the astronauts themselves would've hoped that their legacy would've been a near-complete shutdown of the programs they'd given their lives to.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Not only was it during the summer, but Armstrong & Aldrin's lunar walk was in the evening. I vividly remember sitting in my parent's living room watching (got to stay up late & everything).
See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1969-059A.html for a chronology.
The space program was for one reason. To get up there before the Russians could. There was a rightful fear of what could happen if the Russians established a base in orbit or on the moon and made a nuclear weapons platform up there.
Everything else was just icing.
Besides, if you can launch a spaceship into orbit, then you can launch an ICBM. This is the problem with the technology leaking into China as a result of the laxness of the Clinton administration. Fortunately, so far it looks like right now they'd rather get up into space than threaten everybody with ICBMs.
Lets be honest, the ISS should have been built 10 years ago, it's not as if it couldn't have been, it just wasn't.
Really, we should never have abandoned Skylab after a pitiful three missions. From what I remember seeing of it, it was as spacious as Mir was cramped.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I hope it comes down in price as well, or else I may only get up their by way of having my creamated body shot in to space. :)
But I'll be hopefully and save my spare change and money in the hopes of paying my way in to space in the future. (Not too distant future hopefully)
"We're so tough we're made of nerf!" --D&D Character Tagline
Boy I gotta keep up on stuff I post... wow.. good stuff :)
Ok let me start.. I'm a goddess lovin pagan a libertarian and I voted Nader.. I'm sorry Bush got in office becouse I think he'd win bigger if he quit while Al Gore was pushing for endless recounts and run again 4 years later...
4) My mother was worryed becouse I carryed a Bible to school.. A teacher once asked me to stop what I was doing when I was meditating (my technique some times looks like praying)...
5) Thick debate... will not touch...
6) Religion defines everything a person is.. The more spiritual they are the more imposable it is to cease being spiritual...
This is exactly what your asking when you ask someone to not pray.. quote the bible etc.
For example I am allways meditating or using a mental focusing technique or some other spiritual thing... It do it without thinking. It just happends.
So it would be vertually imposable for me to NOT meditate in an elivator.. I'm sure I violated fedral law in this reguards many times during jury duty... I refuse to remake myself to satisfy some moronic idea that you can dump spirituality in a glove compartment...
I don't actually exist.
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I dont know how many people know or care about this, but a memorial was erected to the people killed in the accident down at NASA.
This memorial consisted of a mirror, that tracks the sun while it is in the sky.
The motor has broken on the sun mirror, and NASA has announced they plan to *not* fix it due to the cost of it, and how much that money is needed elsewhere.
Just thought ya'll might like to know that.. and maybe some people would want to do something about it. I have no links, and I wouldnt know the first person to contribute to to get this working again, but I personally think it is a sad state of affairs when 7 people who die for the attempted betterment of mankind are basically blown off 15 years later.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
For me, it renewed a burning hatred of bureaucracy. It brought out a lot of emotions from an event which rocked our school and our state like nothing I'd ever seen. New Hampshire was particularly sensitive due to the involvement of Christa McAuliffe, and PR motives aside, it was a nasty, preventable tragedy.
Y'all should catch a rerun the Discovery Gulf War spot that aired over the weekend. That was equally fascinating and frightening. I never really gave two bits about the gulf war, mostly because I was in middle school when it happened, but it really opened my eyes.
I remember working on our "Oregon Trail" role play thing, and writing down something about supplies, and looking up to see the challenger exploding. I also remember my (4th grade) teachers being very sad. By that time, I was cognizant enough to know something very serious was happening.
___________________________
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
Nice article on CNN, but was it really nescessarry to include that photo of her mother? It's plain bad taste, and it doesn't seem to go with the "spirit" of the article. Seems like tabloid stuff to me.
I was four when the shuttle exploded, I was at a babysitter's (daycare, whatever) whose husband was somewhat involved in the space program. In fact, IF i've been told the story correctly since then, he had been interested in trying to be one of the astronauts on that launch.
In any event, being the responsible sitter that marilyn was, she wanted us to experience the historical moment of a shuttle being launched even at such a young age. I must say I don't remember actually seeing the launch- i think i had chicken pox or something, i was probably scratching sores or coloring a picture-
what i remember was seeing one of the adults whom I most trusted and thought was invincible break down in tears and run out of the room. That really makes an impression on a little kid, I didn't really know what had happened, but i knew it was something big.
I'm glad that i was where i was that day, i'm sure alot of people my age were taking naps or playing legos and simply have to say they aren't old enough to really remember it while I learned alot-not about the space program, exactly-but about history and people and that there are always things around us to learn about and that every day could become a historical moment that you may remember for the rest of your life, if only you're paying attention.
I'm sure there is a burn rate that defines explosive combustion, but I'm more concerned with what's implied when one says that the external tank exploded: it implies that the intact ET was destroyed by explosive burning of its contents. In fact, the events occurred in the other order: the ET was already destroyed, or being destroyed, but not by burning fuel. The burning occurred as the fuel, no longer contained by the ET, dispersed in the atmosphere.
And no, I'm not saying that the popular press is lying to us, just that their understanding of science is at its usual abysmal level.
--Jim
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while it was most definatly political and ecomonical, I think the real reason that it happened was that NASA had begun to feel invincible. There was a risk involved, and they knew it, but had they actually thought that it could happen to them, then they would not have done it. They would have know that disaster would set them back 10 years, but like all of us in our youth, we did not think it would happen. As with the first Apollo deaths, this was a time of great maturity for NASA, as they coped with the poor decision that they made.
I think it will be a long time before NASA makes another decision like that, but like all great tragities of history, it is up to us to learn from these mistakes. Like holocaust surivivor elie wiesel has said, you only honour the dead if you help assure it will never happen again.
Well said...
I was in 3rd grade at the time as well. I remember it just as vividly as everyone else has stated. It was then that I learned the true meaning of a 'moment of silence.'
--Chemguru
I take it that this topic is a result of MSNBC's program on the Challenger failure. IMO, it was a fairly well done piece, and it brought tears back to my eyes.
On that tragic morning, our whole school was shocked by the principal's un-scheduled, rushed, and awkwardly worded announcement that "The Space Shuttle blew up." We were particularly affected because my H.S. Calculus teacher was one of the semi-finalist for the Teachers-in-space program. If the failure had not happened, she probably would have gone up in a later shuttle flight.
Edward Tufte (in his excellecnt book, Visual Explanations ) has an interesting section on the Challenger Disaster -- Basically, NASA didn't understand the urgency of the objections from Thiokol engineers because they (NASA) didn't clearly understand the o-ring failure probability. Thiokol engineers gave NASA the tabular data of o-ring failure rates (the data collected from post-flight analyses of past spent SRB's). Had they graphed the data, Tufte claims, NASA would have clearly understood that the SRB's were in an unusable temperature range.
Some people believe that science and technology has advanced to StarTrek-like perfection: a car should tell you that there's a problem with its right front tire, a chemical plant's safety system is multiply redundant and will never fail, a computer will instantly solve your problems if you ask the right questions, and common devices are instantly and infinitely reconfigurable to work in any environment. These are worthy ideal goals to have; but, of course, reality falls far short of these StarTrek dreams. Time and money, limits of practicality, and social and political dynamics combine to form trade-offs that sometimes don't work out.
It might be in somewhat poor taste, but I own a stock-certificate of the Thiokol Corporation as a reminder of the lesson that I learned from the disaster. My fellow engineers will occasionally hear me say "Go with Throttle up" when I feel that a (software) project has been rushed, inadequately designed, and poorly tested. Of these 'doomed projects', 3/5-th of those project 'launches' without significant problems, the next 1/5th has significant problems after launch, and the last 1/5th end up with critical failures which we then have to scramble to contain. Of course, failures are best understood in hindsight. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes.
Where there had been only cold blue sky pierced by a bright flame atop a climbing white smoke trail, there appeared a hellish fireball. Instantly it bulged into a massive flaming monster. Metal tore jaggedly, shattered into debris that that would continue to climb, tumbling and cartwheeling through curving arcs, until gravity commanded their downward fall. Two corkscrew spears of white smoke spun twisting paths higher into the clear blue sky, the rocket boosters flaming uncontrolled, burning as if in mockery to the disaster from which they fled.
...I just celebrated my fifteenth year with my parent company in my first Real Job.
/. a living entity at the time?
I remember the day vividly. I was still living out of a hotel room when the news came around the office halls like wildfire. When I went back to the hotel for lunch I saw the first of what must have been 100 re-runs of the footage.
Was
Oh, that's right. We didn't even have much of an internet back then. Still, I remember the proliferation of stupid NASA jokes over the airwaves/email. But that had to be a few years later...
I hope we all learned something from this disaster, like how beauracracies can be blind to realities.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Us middle-aged folks are to blame, ya know, if we don't do something about it during this decade. This is our time to make it happen, and if we don't, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
It's time to remember what it was like to have principles.
--
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
...is that although this "tragedy" shouldn't have happened, I seriously doubt we are much worse off because of it. Yes, people died, and I'm sure some were fired as well. How often has that happened in the history of the world? I'd bet every single day. So the question remains, what was the point of the post? Was it just to encourage some discussion? Was it to remember? I'm thinking it was to confuse. On a day when most Americans are gearing up for the Superbowl, few will probably even think about this "tragic" topic. They might see a footnote on the news, but that's all it has become to them, a footnote. They don't realize the pain and trauma that one must undergo when an entire online community discusses such a topic. With all of the flaming and rhetoric and emotion and moderation, it's kind of overwhelming at times.
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
We all know space travel is dangerous, and accidents are inevitable. How long do you think it will be before another American is lost in space?
"I drank WHAT?" -- Socrates
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Sorry, but where I come from, the world is as nice and friendly as you make it and as you allow others to make it for you. If you let them tell you that your world is not nice or friendly, then have it your way - it won't be. If you're strong enough to enjoy life for what it is and shrug off the disasters as simply natural occurences that are bound to happen regardless of information, then life can very easily be nice and friendly.
As it is for me.
"The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded". Well, not really. Yeah, I know that most of you have probably been hearing that for most of your lives, and it's the popular "Time Magazine" version of what happened. But as true geeks you're supposed to be interested in the "hard science" version of what happened. So go to this site:
/ docs/rogers-commission/table-of-contents.html
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l
where you will find the text of the Rogers Commision report on what happened to the Challenger. Many of you have probably read Feynman's famous Appendix to the report, but you should also read Chapter III, "The Accident" and read it closely.
Nowhere in there will you find words like "the vehicle exploded" or "the external tank exploded". The closest you'll come is an "almost explosive" burning of fuel after the external tank comes apart. That's right, kids, the Challenger wasn't destroyed by an explosion like Peter Jennings has been telling you all these years. It and the external tank were torn apart by dynamic forces due to massive structural failure of the tank.
--Jim
I went to a public school. I was in 6th grade when the shuttle exploded, in music class. I don't remember any class clowns making jokes that day, but there were definitely a lot of jokes after a few days.
If the Bravens win, that's just plain WRONG, after Baltimore stole our Browns and we got the worst team in the NFL.
;)
If Baltimore wins, Modell better watch his back...
Remember, a lot of those guys were *not* watching live video, but reporting what the telemetry was telling them.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I remember this clearly as a second-grade elementary student. My teacher was in the middle of teaching when the principal came on the PA system, and announced that the Challenger exploded. For the remainder of the day, all the students in the school and their teachers had their eyeballs glued to the TV set, watching the news coverage.
> 5) Women losing the right to control their own bodies.
And men, too. Prostitution is illegal for both buyer and seller, and this doesn't even involve the nonconsentual death of anyone.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Keep in mind that that doesn't mean 10% of the Slashdot readership is apathetic about the explosion. 10% of the people who composed their responses to the article in five minutes might be apathetic, but they'd have just said "first post" anyway, so who cares what (if?) they think?
In other words, no, it is not a sign of the state of Slashdot. It's an artifact of the fact that it takes time to compose a well-thought-out discussion post, but no time to say "BO-ring!".
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Given the countless quadrillions of molecules floating around, that life started without help from a god (or a technologically advanced society) is arguably inevitable.
"God" mucks things up by being synonomous with "magic", i.e. "we don't know how it started, therefore it was magic."
And, of course, "Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic to the natives." A. C. Clarke.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Small correction. The techs, particularly the Morton Thiokol engineers, were against launching. It was the Pointy-Haired-Boss types who insisted on going ahead. Politics triumphant over science yet again and seven good folks dead as a result.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All/most Airbus are made similarly. Different parts made in different countries. Can't remember which bits are made where, but I think the fuselage is made in Toulouse (FR) and wings in the UK.
Hell, even Boeing aircraft (admittedly to a lesser extent) are not made all in one place (e.g P&W or RR or Snecma engines).
I was in the US Navy at the time, we were doing exercises off the coast south of San Diego. I remember waking up from the dream about an hour before I had to get up. I was pretty shaken, but it was just a dream and I fell back to sleep quickly to catch a few more winks before I had to go on duty.
Later that day, we heard about what happened, and the ship was steered closer to the coast to pick up the TV signals of the newscasts about the disaster. No one believed me about the dream then, and I don't expect anyone to believe me now. But it was a really strange feeling to watch the explosion on TV, which burned the dream of the previous night into memory along with the TV images.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I'll take credit for it. hehehe.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I wonder why my personal true experience is listed as being a troll when every person here who was a kid whines about how they were upset seeing it at school when they were ten, gets a +5 insightful? I was older and the only reason I saw it was that particular situation, I would never have watched it on my own (back in those days I usually wasn't up before noon anyway). I said I thought it was tragic so I wasn't making light of it.
Too many moderators, too few with a sense of irony........
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Why would we need to include, in a moment of silence day, a musical number by Mel Brooks in 'History of the World'????
Why is this moderated to Funny? Twisted sense of humor? Come on, this is insightful...
Oh, go cry a river along with Drew Carey; I'm rooting for the Ravens.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
During RADCOM school @ MCAS Miramar, I heard a story from an instructor that used to work on the flightline when the base belonged to the Navy. Not 10 hours after the Challenger disaster, Astronaut Hoot Gibson ( a 'hero' of modern aviation, in my book) flew into Miramar in a T-38 (Not Uncommon). A joke or two was told by him having to pertain about the color of Christa McAuliff's eyes (I won't repeat the punchline). When I first heard about it, I laughed my butt off. But then I realized that even though it's a moderately funny joke, you're making fun about the way someone died. I believe that jokes like this are made to compensate for our own losses. Pilots don't grieve; we just fly on. We will all gather and make jokes about near-misses (near-hits???) and bad landings to take our minds off the fact that what we do can be fatal. There's a tradition in Boeing, that before any major flighttest, the engineers go out and get drunk while watching videos of airplane crashes. It's the same thing.
F-18's --- Gear Up, Flaps Up, Nozzle OUT baby!
If you read back, you'll see I didn't make any judgement about the conquest of the Western frontier. I was just making an analogy and trying to make the point that exploration will always be a risk for the explorers.
For the record, I'm not American myself and I agree with what you are saying. The conquest of the West came dangerously close to genocide on the part of the settlers. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make in this context.
Just my opinion, but right around the Challenger accident, things were picking up, we were proud to be Americans, people were starting to look past earth's orbit, and even past the moon.
When the Challenger exploded, it just seemed to take the wind out of our sails when it came to space and big projects and all.
I don't have all the fancy numbers and all, but after NASA went into a slump after the moon (even if you do count SkyLab), the space shuttle, especially the Challenger and her crew, got a lot of people thinking about the moon/mars again. A lot of things seemed possible. A lot of us had been jaded up until the Challenger since the shuttle had become commonplace and all. The Challenger generated a lot of interest that has been sorely lacking.
I just feel that the accident set NASA back/made them paranoid enough, that Mars was pushed to the back burner.
Just my opinion.
you are right. that other guy is a moron.
Zzzzz....
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
politics.
Let's not forget 01-27-1967 when we lost three on the pad...
Besides, I would argue what destroyed the US space program has deeper roots than Dan Goldin, Deeper than Challenger, Deeper than the Decision not to build the F1 flyback option, Deeper than the decision to scrap the X-20, All the way back to the decision to seperate the civilian program from the military programs and have NASA place spam in a can in orbit instead of the progression from X-1 to X-15 to X-20 to a truely reusable space vehicle. Instead we wasted our money on Spam in a Can and made a partially reusable white elephant. We can thank Kennedy (oh and he's dead to).
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I'm not cold, mostly cynical with a sideorder of disbelief of the American habit of making conversational pieces out of grief.
//Wegge
I beg to differ. The space program at one time was a thing of national pride. It was scary when the three died on the pad due to the fire.. but that didn't stop the space program at all. With Christa and the STS-51L .. and the terrifying explosion.. not much has moved forward in the space program. The international space station is slowing down.. there may not be enough funding to go to it in the future. The extraplanetary missions are two or three generations down the road instead of one. The shuttle still doesn't have a safe egress vehicle while it's taking off.. and it's only confined to circumnavigating the earth. Right now, the shuttle missions are mostly funded by outside organizations for scientific/commercial purposes.
*shrugs*
Sounds like a kill to me.
Magnwa
Do you mean to suggest that back in their offices, they came up with a calculation of risk that was much higher, but they then fudged it to make it sound better?
So who was it that did this?
I have to agree with the first guy. It's a damn shame that the Challenger failure paused the space program for so long, and soured our national quest for space exploration. There was no good reason for crippling the space program the way we did.
To put the Challenger failure in perspective, remember that thousands of people die every day in automobile accidents. Hundreds of people perish at a time in our many airline disasters every year. It is not at all unheard of for twice as many people to die in a single vehicle highway accident as died when Challenger failed.
People die routinely. It's a fact of life. We all have to go one way or another. You either get over it, or you're in for a losing battle.
So why was the space program put on hold for so long? Were the astronauts refusing to fly? Not a chance. Were the technicians unable to solve the O-ring problems? Of course they were. So what was it?
It was the politicians' lust for fingerpointing and blame.
The only defining moments I can think of for my gen-z (is that what we're called?) generation are either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the invasion of Iraq/start of thr Gulf War. When the wall fell and they opened the gates, I was coming home from school and watched it all night, and when the first missles came into Iraq, I was doing math and my parents called me in to watch CNN, Chritianne Annanpour, and the Scud Stud from NBC cover the whole thing...luckily the war happened during Rodgers Cable's free CNN week, and they gave it to us free for the whole war.
Or, if you're cynical, it could have been the run-OJ-run marathon car chase - I was writing an english paper and my parents called me in to see it. But what does that say for My Generation if our big event is a washed-out footballer on a car chase?
Dan.
Cue The Sun...
ASM wrote:
It was 7 years before the next manned launch.
Seven years? Hardly.
The Challenger accident occurred on Jan. 28, 1986. The Return to Flight, STS-26B, launched Sep. 29, 1988 -- two years and eight months later.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Thank you! I can't actually take credit for that - what makes geekizoid so cool is the same thing that USED to be cool about this place - it's a weblog by the people, for the people.
That, and the SysAdmin/Author crew isn't rude and full of themselves.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
I was home sick that day also. I remember turning on the TV and hearing Dan Rather talking about debris still falling, and seeing the smoke trails. You have to remember that we who saw this on TV as kids were part of the generation that also saw the TV movie 'The Day After' and lived during the end of the Cold War. For about 15 minutes, I actually thought that what Rather was describing was the beginnings of nuclear war. It wasn't until they showed a full replay, that I understood what was actually happening.
And on January 27, 1967, the first Apollo capsule caught fire during a test, killing Gus Grissom (who most likely would have been the first man to walk on the Moon), Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
I agree, it is a sad event and lives were lost. It's not the time to crack jokes about the people. I bet they're the type of people to laugh at a funeral. >:(
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Perhaps they were hoping to have Challenger jettison itself from the flying bomb, and then glide to the runway. However, I think that then and there, they should've gone for the escape hatch/pod (I know that the standard STS [except for the Enterprise, of course] has one).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
One thing they didnt change was a way for astronaugts to get away from the falling craft they were in before it hit the sea and they were killed.
And I think you give the US government too much credit for the outcome of the Cold War. For starters, the space race was the arms race--can everyone say "I-C-B-M?" I think the push on both sides was more to gain a technological advantage than to bankrupt the other, and it was the Soviet's poor choice to try to play the game on US terms that did them in--by no means a foregone conclusion in the early sixties. For another, the Soviet Union had access to landmass and resources far out-stripping what the US could lay hands on. Although technology is certainly not a panacea, it seems to have been at least part of the reason that the implicit resource advantage was turned on its ear. Maybe that was your point. But along with that should come some recognition that those traits you listed are not somehow universally evil.
As for the politics, I have to agree with you there. But I don't think it's really gone anywhere, just slowed down a bit. Perhaps you haven't yet been inflicted with George W. Bush's statements signaling his intent to go ahead with development of a missile defense system, but it looks like it's happening and several other players aren't too happy about it (not that they should be--it probably won't work). I don't think we've seen the last of international power politics by any means.
No relation to Happy Monkey
I remember seeing the explosion in my primary school in Britain, and the reaction was curiously muted. I admire the other /. posters with their expressions of grief, I truly I wish I had the same intensity of feeling that the posters have, but really, so what? Space flight is an inherently risky business.
Yes, I'm upset that seven fine people died that day, but many hundreds die as part of relatively normal but tragic accidents every day, and where's their mourning? The crew knew the risks. If you had said "You have a 1 in 5 chance of blowing up", you still would have a queue of people halfway down Florida trying to get in.
This national grief strongly reminds me of how many British people reacted the day Diana "Princess of Hearts" died - national shock and mass hysteria. Traumatised school children? Death of a nation's space program? Like "where were you when Kennedy died?" for our generation?
Puhlease. Give it a rest.
Major Francis Scobee, Mission Commander
r bi ters/challenger.html
- l/ mission-51-l.html http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/ 51-l-crew.gif
Captain Michael Smith, Pilot
Dr. Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Lt. Colonel Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Dr. Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Captain Greg Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, School Teacher
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/o
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51
"The media, not knowing that schoolchildren were watching, didn't pull any punches, and repeatedly stated that the astronaughts and crew were most likely dead."
Death is also part of life. You can't hide it for god's sake!
I remember that during the Tamagotchi craze the product for the US had to be modified because children there were disturbed knowing that their digipets were , well, how can I put it... dead.Instead they went to dreamland or something ludicrous like that.
Curious that it is the same land where boys in their teens can go and hunt classmates with assault guns. Perhaps they don't know what death is because adults will go to such pains to hide it from them?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
here and here
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
So who cares:
To add to your post I would like to point out that a lot of medical research has been done in space. Many of the experiments performed have benefitted humanity and will continue to benefit us in the future.
To respond to an earlier post about perspective, how many lives could have been saved due to experiments performed in space that where put off for 2 years or more?
While loosing a large amount of people in an earthquake is no less important, it isn't as preventable as this. I hate to say it, but it also isn't relevant to SlashDot.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
IIRC, the military had quite a lot to say in the space shuttle program. And I think that a few of the communication satellites were spy satellites.
I still don't get why satellite launches via shuttle were considered better (or even cheaper) than rocket launches. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that a satellite launch with a Russian `Proton' rocket was both cheaper and safer than a shuttle launch in the late 80's.
The Galileo probe (to Jupiter) was delayed for almost eight years because first they couldn't get a launch slot on a shuttle, then the Challenger catastrophe happened and there were no slots for years. Meanwhile, the planets had moved and Galileo had to take that wacky Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth tour to pick up enough speed to eventually reach Jupiter. Of course, they had to modify the craft because it wasn't built for the inner solar system. Wouldn't have happened if they had just launched the probe with a rocket in '82.
Everyone who doesn't understand why we're still obsessing about this: Who are your heros? Do you even have any? I understand that people die everyday, many doing very important things for humanity, many with very little recognition. Does that mean that when I witness someone die while doing something very dear to my heart, I should blow them off? If the space program isn't a big deal with you, if you're not American, then I can see why it's not a big deal for you. But I happen to have a thing for the explorers. I have a thing for the people who risk their lives to figure stuff out. I have a thing for the people who give that knowledge to others. I happen to think that the quest for answers is worth the money and the lives that it costs.
"Fine," you say. "Memorials are a good thing. But why after 15 years for only seven people?" I suppose part of it is that I was very young when this happened. At an age when heros mean more to people. I think of the dreams I had growing up, and the dreams I have now, and it reminds me of the people who died in the process of making some of those dreams a reality. That was the day I learned that dreams can cost you your life. That was also the day I decided that dreams are worth the risk.
In the end, someone's choice of a hero is a very personal thing. I'm not about to rip on people's adoration for Princess Diana, even if I don't see what the big deal is.
I particularly don't like the comments that try to compare this to the Kennedy assassination. I don't like being told that I don't have sufficient reason to dwell on something. I've never seen Kennedy. I learned about him from history books after he was dead. I can understand why this was a big deal to my PARENTS, but don't expect me to be emotional about something that was over and done with before I was born.
Ok, my rant is starting to lose cohesion, so I'd better stop.
I just can't wade through all the messages. Don't think anyone will read this. But. This was tragic, because civilians were on it. A teacher and a muscician. Remember? They found his foot. If you want a moment to rend your soul, then go to napster or, if you are coo, dig up your old vinyl copy of Jean Michelle Jarre's recording of Ron's Piece, which was *going* to be the first piece of music played live in space (or at least orbit). Haunting. Eloquent. Shame.
Shame you weren't alive then. The world is such a better place now.
I thought it was interesting that when William Rogers died this year, none of the obits I read mentioned that he chaired the Challenger commission. In light of what Feynman was clearly trying hard not to say about this guy, I wonder if this was an example of "speak no ill of the dead"...
Uhm, you can pray in school whenever see fit. Any student in a public school can pray to any deity they want to, whenever they see fit. You can read the Christian Bible. You can even mention your God.
You can also not pray, not read the bible, and not mention God, of you so choose. That's the whole point of keeping religious influences away from school, to let each person believe what they will. Not to promote one system of beliefs over another, not to belittle and insult anyone who doesn't share your beliefs, not to force others into taking part in your rituals.
Admittedly, there are some people who try to make any mention of religion in school a punishable offense. These people are just as small-minded and intolerant as those who would turn schools into churches. Fortunately, they have yet had little success, so I fail to see where people's right to pray in school has been removed.
> I prayed at my public high school
Doesn't this statement alone cast some doubt on the validity of 4)?
I didn't pray at my public high school. Some of my friends did. Nobody told any of us that what we were doing was wrong (not the school staff, anyway). For that I thank everyone who has given their time, effort, money, or life to protect our right to individual belief.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
You're correct. This is history, not news. Is there anything new here?
Any of you guys hear about the ISS? It is going to be the largest space station in history! With many of the nations of the world contributing to it's sucess. If the Challenger explosion hadn't happened, maybe we would be closer to getting to colonizing Mars or the Moon. The ISS is starting up our space pioneering again. Maybe not in my lifetime, but sometime in the future, and not to far, we will be living on other planets. I am willing to bet before I die we will have at least landed on Mars and maybe have a small colony on the Moon.
I watched it and the repeated replays.
My TA in philosophy chided me for being late to class that day. "The Space Shuttle f*ckin' blew up, Jackass!". I stilled the class and got an A.
It was the largest setback NASA ever had. The press effectively banned manned spaceflight as a result.
One of the few days I cried.
NASA was warned about the problem. They were warned long before Ebeling and Boisjoly. NASA saved money by using the Morton-Thiokol SRBs instead of the safer, more expensive ones proposed by United Technologies. The decisions that led to this disaster were made in the early 70's, well before the incident. NASA knew very well that this outcome was a good possibility.
forth ?love if honk then
And December 7th is not?
Forget the past and you are doomed to repeat it as the old saying goes.
Earthquake? Last week an entire star system was swallowed by the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Yeah, it's not worth thinking about unless it's absolutely the biggest tragedy in the whole world.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Where does what condemn speech? I was simply stating that one can believe in free speech, but not necessarily agree with what another has to say. I.e. the "sick fuck" - the guy obviously holds some dissenting feeling towards the person who posted the "first explosion" thing. I personally think the Troll had every right to do so, but I don't aggree with what he said at all.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
After browsing the comments here, I think one of the things this post has done is strongly magnify the (lack of) attention span of the average /.er. Given that the average /. reader tends to be at the more enlightened (or at least aware) end of the spectra of average people, this is very disturbing. People are asking "so what?" and "who cares?" without thinking about what this means, or why they should care.
/. about space, space exploration, terraforming, the ISS, Mir, etc that question should answer itself. Where would we be today had Challenger not exploded in front of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people live on TV? Perhaps the ISS would be done. Perhaps investors would be more interested in commercial space travel. The possibilities are limitless here. Think about all of that for a few moments.
/. readers will live to see a greater exploration of space, and I'd dare say a lot of us may even get the chance to go into space some time in the future. If this sounds like crazy talk, remember that it took only about 75 years from the invention of the airplane to commercially viable, relatively inexpensive air travel for the masses. After 100 years, air travel has become even more affordable (if not more comfortable). Now, for simplicity we will say space travel began in 1960. It seems reasonable to say that space travel for the masses may be viable as early as 2030 or so. Even if it was not viable until 2060, given the upward trend of life expectancy, you or I have a decent chance of being around to see that. Therefore, understanding the mentality of those who are running the programs putting people in space _NOW_ is very important, because they will undoubtedly influence the future. History is the only tool we have with which to model the future.
I think the most significant part of the posted sentence was the part about destroying the space program. Challenger *did* set the US space program back incredibly. So what? Given the large number of posts on
So who cares? If you don't, you probably should. The vast majority of
The whole point of this post was to elicit discussion, unfortunately the discussion so far has been just depressing. Think about where we are 15 years after the Challenger incident vs. where we might be if it had never happened at least. I personally wasn't old enough to remember the Challenger incident, but it still saddens me. Not only were lives lost when they shouldn't have been, but progress was held back by foolishness yet again. So today, please try and pull yourself from the four hour pregame shows for just a few minutes to really think about the impact Challenger has had and will have on all of us, and spare a thought for those lost, the world will be that much better.
Apologies for the longwindedness.
-wd
--
chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
Written by Feynman himself, and is an extremely good summary of how the engineers knew the safety was shit, but the managers didn't believe them. A great read.
You can all thank me later.
"Making linux GPL was the best thing I ever did" - Torvalds. I'd hate to see the worst thing...
I was six at the time...kinda set the mood for the whole year.
I read the headline, and my heart leaped. Talk about stunned, as my first thought was OH SHIT, not again!?!?! I'm really glad it's not April, lest I be the fool.
Condolances to all invoved in the Challenger incident.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
better luck next time michael
If you meant to attribute it, please don't take this as a flame.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
this is not exactly news, is it?
I'm glad to see that this story was posted today. I hope to see it again five years from now. There's a good reason for this being posted, even though it isn't "news" today.
Here's why...
Take a look at some of the other responses. People are posting tasteless jokes, making comments such as "Kaboom!" and other insensitive remarks. After reading some of them I began to feel sick to my stomach. I realize there are a good number of younger readers out there who don't recognize the significance of the event, but there's no excuse for that kind of behavior.
I was very young when the Challenger exploded. I was only 8 years old. I was in Atlanta, and Jan. 28th was a very cold day - it was snowing in fact, a rare scene in Atlanta. So rare, that the schools were all closed, so we were at home watching tv that day. I was at my best friend's house, playing with Lego's and Transformers when we his mother told us the shuttle "blew up". I remember the shock, and disbelief. I thought she was wrong, or making a really bad joke. Then we saw the pictures on the tv replay.
The press kept showing the various images. There were people at the Cape, completely horrified at what they had just seen. There were reporters who couldn't speak, some of them broke down on camera, hit with the horrific scene they had just witnessed. There were cameras focused on the water, scanning for bits of wreckage. Everyone thought that a rescue team might be able to find the survivors in the water. Nobody even realized the fact that there were no survivors until several hours later.
Yes, I remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing. I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, and watching that was devastating. I think a part of every American died that day. All we could do was sit there and watch as one of our most important national sybols burst into flames.
In the years that followed, NASA went through a sort of "rebirth". They rebuilt the entire program, making thousands of changes to the shuttle fleet. Plans were made for a new shuttle to replace the Challenger. NASA asked the children of the nation's schools to submit ideas for the new vehicle's name. Ideas like "Challenger II" and "Phoenix" were commonly mentioned. Today we all know it as "Endeavor".
More than two and a half years after Challenger, NASA was ready to give it another shot. This would be the safest shuttle mission the world had ever seen. Anything less, and the program would be a total failure. Many of us remember the next launch just as well as the Challenger. Everyone watched as the clock was counting down. We all held our breath as the engines fired up. Time sort of stood still as we watched Discovery leave the pad. Everyone was watching for that little spark to appear on the booster rocket - hoping that it didn't happen again. A little over a minute into the launch we heard the operator's call - "Go with throttle up". That was the last call they made to Challenger. We held our breath again. Nothing happened. Discovery just kept on climbing. The SRB's were seperated. Discovery kept going. Ten minutes later Discovery was flying high above the Earth, and along with it were the spirits of every American. One launch took us from the worst feeling in the world, to a kind of euphoric joy. I used to watch the launch over and over again, thinking how cool it would be to someday be an astronaut.
The Challenger accident was a huge lesson for America's space program. It's unfortunate that an incident of this nature is sometimes necessary for us to get the message. Fortunately we did get the message. Atlantis is being delayed this week so that engineers can make a few additional safety checks. The chance of a problem are extremely remote, but the program is focused on safety more than ever today.
It still amazes me when I see some of the comments posted on this board. How anyone can look at the Challenger and make light of its importance escapes me. Someone mentioned that it might have been "beta testing an early version of Windows". Another says that NASA stands for "Need Another Seven Astronauts". Then there are the ones who simply ask "and..?" If you don't understand the significance, read some of the other posts from people who really care. This is a piece of our history, and it should not be made into a joke.
If you're still confused about it, go to CNN. Read some articles about the Challenger, watch some videos. There's a show on the Discovery Channel that documents the entire event, and explains the failure in great detail. If you can find it, watch it. If you still can't say anything decent abuot it, then please, do us all a favor, and keep your comments to yourself.
Now if you will all excuse me, I'm going to take my moment of silence.
I was 16, in 11th grade. I usually got out of school at around 1 that year. They made an announcement over the PA system and urged us to watch when we got home.
I got home and watched the replays for hours. I remember being pissed off when they finally returned to regular programming. See, I was totally fascinated with the shuttle program when I was a kid. Columbia first went up when I was 10. I was the geeky kid who grabbed the National Geographics to read up on the shuttle program instead of looking for the naked ladies in the jungle. In fact, I swiped the Columia issue from my stepfather's collection just last year. I couldn't believe what I was watching that day, as most of us here.
In December of last year, I spent Christmas vacation in Orlando, and spent 6 hours touring Kennedy Space Center with my family. What an amazing place. We sat in third row center of the shuttle IMAX movie, featuring the Challenger, and some crew members who lost their lives in the explosion. And then MSNBC ran the Challenger special for a couple weeks earlier this month. It was all too soon for me, right after the Florida vacation.
I still get very upset when I see the explosion. I often have to close my eyes or turn away. And being a ham radio operator, knowing hams who have spoken directly to astronauts and cosmonauts using 14-foot steerable antennas on the roofs of their homes.. it all just strikes me very hard.
Being a sysadmin now, I now regularly use a phrase that I learned directly from the loss of the challenger.. "catastrophic failure".
--
Intelligent Life on Earth
Oh god.
What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?
You feed the dog, I'll feed the fish.
What color were her eyes?
Blue. One Blew this way, one blew that way.
How do you fit 12 astronauts in a VW?
2 in the front, 3 in the back, 7 in the ash tray.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
What is the difference between these 7 people who died for the USA and people who died, for example, in the Soviet space program?
/.-ers (and people in general) will gloat over a catastrophie happening abroad comparing to the one in their country.
Much more
I don't think such people are dying to make a country great, they just live to the best of their abilities for the progress of the whole humankind.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Many of you are too young to remember this, and I don't think you understand why this is such a big deal. You have to understand the way the world was back in 1986. While only 15 years ago, it was a very different place. No world wide web. Computers were rare. A giant wall symbolic wall was still standing seperating ourselves and the Russians.
I was in the fifth grade. Old enough to know that the threat of nuclear war was still very, very real. In school and at home we discovered any method such as duck and cover would be useless. If the Russians came, we were doomed. It was that simple.
All around us we were discovering that America was not a great country. Vietnam was still fresh in many of our parents minds, and rumors of foul play began to surface in regards to our activities in the Middle East and South America.
And despite all of that, we had the space program. Here was something, as children, we all could get behind. It was, at times, the only good thing. It represented a bright contrast to the hopelessness of the cold war.
And in a way, it did so much more. We lived with the knowledge that by the year 2000 we would all be taking flights into space just as often as we fly from city to city. The idea of bold, heroic space exploration captured the imagination of myself and my classmates so profoundly.
And it all went away that day 15 years ago. All the students were called off the playground during recess and brought into one large classroom with a TV set. A teacher addressed us all, with sadness, telling us that the Space Shuttle had exploded and all of the astronauts died.
I remember how I felt that day. That complete disbelief, that complete shock. For myself, this was an impossibility. For the first time in our lives we learned all at once the very real reality that something good and perfect can be lost. A hard lesson to learn for millions of youngsters my age all at once.
The nation changed that day. The space program changed. I changed. In time the news storys stoped and things started to go on as usual, but something was missing: Hope.
That day, the space age ended, and the communications age began to emerge. The wonder of space exploration was put on the back burner. We learned that the economics of space travel was just something we could'nt afford any more.
The space program of today just is not the same. Rockets no longer objects to propel man into the heavens, they are expensive delivery trucks for big business. The international space station is more about politics and balence sheets then discovery. And when Mir is allowed to come crashing down from orbit, we begrudingly understand the economic factors behind it.
I've yet to see anything else that inspires and delights as much as the hope that was generated by Space Exploration in my youth.
I deeply miss it.
The Internet is generally stupid
Some people don't get humor. Whence my :))?
Maybe this is true, although I think that the world has got into a big hurry since the last explorations. I'm not sure the time scales in terms of years is terribly meaningful.
"As ambivalent as you seem towards technological growth, you show all the signs of being spoiled by the same"
Spoilt my it? Maybe so. I work in a technological field. I have seen technology overturn all the ground rules in the time that I have been in it. Indeed its overturned so many thats its been re-invented. Its been exciting and enthralling to what it happen, and to a small part of it.
"I think the push on both sides was more to gain a technological advantage than to bankrupt the other, and it was the Soviet's poor choice to try to play the game on US terms that did them in".
Then I think that you misunderstand the politics. Who paid for the arms race, and the space race? Who paid when the soviet bloc finally died? Not the leaders who were in charge all that time. Most of them still are now. Technological advances like the space race are amazing but they benefitted the minority of the population in both the US and the USSR. And around the world millions paid for this folly as they were caught in the cross fire.
"you haven't yet been inflicted with George W. Bush's statements signaling his intent"
Oh yeah we have. One of the more moronic of our leaders has suggested that its a great idea. Star wars II, the ultimate triumph. It is a big advance over the space race, because no one expects it to work in the first place, so how can it fail. Compared to this the space race was a big gamble. After all it was far from guarenteed that the US would get to the moon first.
Phil
And those are the people who don't know what the big deal is. I wasn't one of those kids. That's why this still matters to me.
I'm not suprised that you apparently agree with the anti-Cassini liars and profiteers, since you obviously failed statistics class.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride? We just don't care about doing something like that anymore. All we care is whining about taxes, buying bigger SUVs, and building expensive missle defense systems (when the nuke that takes out NYC will be a back-pack nuke sailed in the bottom of a cargo ship into the Hudson probably. No SDI will protect us from that...)
Everyone with pride cashed in their social security cards and moved to Canda. In the process, they took a large amount of cigarettes and booze with them, but that didn't inhibit their ability to actually learn and sing the national anthem.
Don't believe me? Go to any sporting event in Canada. People actually sing along, remove their caps and show respect. Even Subway restaurants are different. They don't serve American cheese in Canadaian subways, they serve chedder. In the states it's American.
So there you go.
No sig is worth reading.
Well not exactly, but the reason America was so involved with the space program is because we were competeing with the Russians. The only way to get the government to do anything is to make our country look bad compared to others. Maybe if we had another super power someday that could compete with us in a space program, then our space program would start up again.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
IT is called side scanning sonar. New york police use it to look for drugs packed into pvc pipes straped to the bottom of ships. It works pretty well. lizard boy
What irony that months later, the report showed that our second scenario was exactly correct. As just a bunch of low paid wanna-be techies sitting around looking at the event frame by frame, we had gotten the gist of what had happened within an hour after the explosion.
I understand your pride at rapidly determining "the cause" of the breakup, but really all you identified was the endgame sequence -- it's like witnessing a car crash and saying "the damage was caused by the two cars steering towards each other and colliding".
What took NASA months to determine was the root cause of the explosion. The cold weather that day was out of the specified operational range of the huge O-rings used to seal the gaps in the booster segments, and thus some gases were able to escape out through the gaps. Over time (say, 60 seconds) those gaps got burned out enough to allow visible flames to escape and trigger the endgame sequence you observed.
The cognizant Morton Thiokol engineer had protested the launch that day and had been overridden by management higher up. Everyone had "Go Fever" and safety was ignored.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I immediately changed my plans for the future when that happened. Sure, I was only 6 at the time, but hey :)
At least some good things came from that disaster. The safety measures on shuttle launches have taken leaps and bounds forward because of that. Also, they (NASA) realized that shuttle launches shouldn't be treated as "routine" as they were then, no matter how many safety features there are.
It was just a tragedy that a disaster like that had to happen for all of those good things to happen.
Dark Nexus
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
I was serious, moderator. Jan 28 is my birthday. It was quite disturbing. So step off.
Hell, I take that back. Bring it on. I've been at max karma since I was dropped 40 points to bring me down to the new max.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I remember watching that on tv when i was in elementary school. its one of those things that you never forget. im glad that people still take the time to honor their memory.
I had just started lunch in the High school cafeteria. Some school official came on the loud speaker and said something that was too low volume-wise to compete with the always deafening roar of the students running their mouths. What we could make out were the words Challenger and teacher. My friend Eric said "It's prolly just some PR spiel about have the first teacher in space". With a big smile and quite the kidding tone I said, "Hey, Maybe the shuttle just blew up!" We laughed, and went back to plowing through our sheppard's pie and running our mouths.
My mother was in grade school when kennedy was killed (she was 11), and had been naughty that day. She was exiled to the corridor to "sit and think about what you've done" (<-- doesn't this happen to every kid at least once?). While she was out there, she heard the ladies working in the cafeteria talking about the asassination (they'd presumably heard it on the radio). Mom became quite disturbed and ran back into the classroom and shooted "Kennedy's dead! He's been shot!". The teacher didn't believe her and she got in even more trouble for telling "such hurtful lies." (Note that of course the teacher didn't apologize when she was found to be in the wrong, I think it's in their contracts that they can never do that... :-/)
Fast forward ~23 years. I'm in 2nd grade (I was about 8, we started regular schooling @ 6 in my district). All the kids had been getting worked up about the shuttle launch for weeks, making posters, reading things about it, etc. The teacher told us (I don't recall how she found out), and I got in a lot of trouble for not believing her (shouting "That's not true! You're a liar!" probably didn't help)).
Well, at least good things have come from those tragedies. Now we take a little better care of our Presidents (i.e. no more riding around in convertibles). And from what other posters have said (corroborated by a friend who spent 6 months as an enginneering intern at NASA), they are a lot more fastidious now about launching safely.
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
What were the last words heard from the Challenger?
"No! Give me a BUD Light!"
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Apparently basic facts now count as Slashdot articles.
Future Slashdot Postings:
Water is a cool, refreshing drink.
A wrench is a fine tool.
Eating paste is not a good idea.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
When the Challenger was lost, they brought TVs out into the hallways .. I was in 4th grade .. they had the whole school watching it. It's going to be the defining moment of our generation. People will ask, "Where were you when the Challenger was lost?" just as they ask our parents, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"
.anacron
20,000 people are feared dead. 100,000 people are homeless. And people are getting all melodramatic and tearful because of a few people who died (sad though it is, I agree).
I know american lives are more valuable than others but perhaps a little perspective?
no sig.
Besides NASA cleaning up their act, did the catastrophe mean much beyond beeing just another reference point in the social game of "Where was you when ... ?"
//Wegge
My grandfather was chief test engineer on some of the previous missle systems that this country built and lives in Cocoa. I believe it was Polaris and Poseidan that he worked on. Anyway he got out just before we began putting men on top of those rockets because he didn't wish to be responsible for their lives - it was retirement time for him.
Nonetheless he kept in touch with some of the engineers at the Cape and had a great deal of knowledge regarding rockets - in particular solid fuel designs. The day of that launch he steped out on to his porch and noted the crisp weather. He then turned on the tube and was shocked to hear the launch proceeding "as planned". You see, as he explained it to me, when solid boosters get cooled too quickly they can have fractures created in the fuel. When the burn hits those fractures the flame front races upwards into the crack and burns the fuel unevenly creating tremendous pressures above the main burn. The result is usually a breach or explosion in the wall of the booster. Sounding familiar?
The day of that launch he felt it was too cold and that the launch should be halted. He said he nearly drove up or attempted to call but he'd been out of the business for years and figured they'd write him off as an old nutcase.
After the accident I called him to make sure there was no damage to his home and to get his reaction to the launch - he was in tears and crushed. He said he knew they shouldn't have launched and regretted not having "done" anything.
As the investigation progressed he kept tabs on it through internal contacts that he knew. In the end when they decided it was a "seal" that blew he laughed - how could any seal have resisted the pressures he was sure would've built up as the flame raced upwards through those fizzures? He concluded that NASA simply didn't want to admit that they'd rushed things when they should've known better. He claims that things run in cycles up there, that when "old hands" leave the incoming younger ones in charge have to make a few mistakes to learn their lessons. He says he's afraid that this time it cost lives.
I hope that they've learned well enough not to repeat that loss again. Rushing one launch to save face and winding up killing people costs them much more PR than simply pushing the damn thing back....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
What about partial birth abortions? Is that still just a clump of cells? And what about me, a 16 year old? Aren't I "technically" just a clump of cells too? If you don't see the difference between having an abortion and using disinfectant cleaner on your toilet than you are either a) a complete moron (not because of your beliefs, but because of your lacking the ability to see the difference. If your toilet bowl spawns a human life, you'd be famous) or b) being beligerent and using a completley illogical comment to down play the tragedy of abortion. Either way..sucks for you. One last thing...anyone who believes in abortion should thank their parents that they didn't, just some food for thought.
Ryan "the Moped" Runge
So are plane crashes. Yet you don't see the 3rd anniversary of every little plane that goes down killing 3 people do you?!
[Is Greek the Professional Language of Lawn Mowers?]
It would have been nice if you'd had the guts to respond using a /. ID, so that I could properly respond to your post. I almost didn't even notice it (I read at +1).
If you are interested in continuing this discussion off-line, I will gladly back up my claims with examples form Bush's public statements, from the bills he's sponsored, from the people he's helped, etc.
I have followed his public record since he's taken office. Whatever else you say about me, I am not ignorant of the man's activities.
You committed several logical fallacies in your response, including the ignorant jab. I do not lie, and people ^do^ follow puppets- history is filled with them. If you choose to reply, we can discuss the examples an understanding of history provides us with.
~wmaheriv
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
Don't laugh...
Some sick bastard actually came out with a "Challenger" firework that same year. Looked like the Space Shuttle. You lit it, it took off, and then exploded.
Sick.
Sick sick sick.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I agree. But the point 5 is a blurry subject, the abortion may have short, middle or long term consequences to the mother, but for the fetus it's permanent. Is easy to us to talk about the convenience or not of abortion, since we didn't get aborted. Of course, the "religious idiotic viewpoint on sexuality" doesn't help.
What's wrong with contraception? If they don't want kids to be aborted, then they should encourage the use of contraceptives to begin with, no unwanted pregnancy == no abortions. People listen, give power to religious leaders, they should use that power with responsibility, not with self-complacency. If they want maturity, then they must provide an array of options, so their followers can make a mature decision, instead of driving them of their intelligence. It's about what they can do to improve the situation, not about what it should be.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
They're making a millenium clock and library complex to give us all a sense of history. Very interesting and insightful project.
I think this is so memorable because of the fact that pretty much everybody in the country saw it happen. The sick thing is, after the fact, they didn't relent in showing it. You saw it every day, every time you turned on the Television. It alsmost makes me sick to think about it.
Stupid is as stupid dies.
First, I work in aerospace. We heard about the booster cable problem in late November or early December through the routine grapevine. Noise about the next launch died down significantly, and the push to get U.S. Lab done on time let up *just* a bit. [I work with one of the guys who gets sent down to Kennedy some of the time to work inside ISS modules.]
After the last launch, it was found that one of the SRB's didn't separate from the primary firing mechanism, but the secondary. Because of issues with separation--heck, look what happened when the restraints failed on STS 51-L, because that was perhaps the most catastrophic of the failures right there--NASA quietly put all the fleet on standby.
The cables that caused the rollback to happen were only found as part of an investigation prompted by the above. It's good to see the thing rolled back, but having unresolved SRB separation issues is a bad thing.
In some ways, the system is working, but we were all frustrated that they ever rolled STS out there in the first place. Plus hell, we all hate late January launches [the last FDRD baselined launch date was 01/18]. 51-L, Apollo I...we prefer to just wait a while. Superstitious? You bet your ass.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
For those who want the 25-cent ludicrously short summary of the answer, and on the web so they don't even have to pay 25 cents, can find it near the bottom of a speech I gave to the National Defense Industry Association conference last year, posted here .
It's actually mostly about the Titanic -- I added in the material on the Challenger when I read Prof. Franklin's book and realized the deep similarities in the engineering and management cultures. It starts around slide 44.
The above URL has one link for the speech text, then links to all the slides. If you print the text (or use two browser windows) and then follow the slides on-screen, you can duplicate the whole presentation.
It happened on my birthday today...
A shuttle crew crash into the water and it gets into the newsmedia 15 years later. 20,000 people die in India due to an earthquake, and nobody seems to notice. It's not that I have a problem remembering Challenger, it's just that there seems to be a view that some lives are more important than others.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I agree with you... Linux is better. I have Redhat and Slackware installed, along with QNX, Win2k, win98, and Inferno. haven't loaded any BSDs or BeOS yet, though I plan on it. (I love 60GB HDs...) Anyway, yah. I like Linux better, but I use my comp for mainly 3 things... writing papers, browsing the web, and playing Counterstrike. I know I can do the first 2 in Linux, but I have yet to see anything but a server for Cstrike that runs under Linux. Also, I just upgraded my system and am using an ATA100 raid setup, and haven't installed the Linux patch yet.
Anyway, you notice I said I run windows MORE than Linux. I didn't say I run it exclusively. =). Personally, I can't wait till all the good apps are available on Linux, so I can get the M$ trash of my 'puter. =).
Why does this country (U.S.) need nationalist pride? It seems to me that American pride has always led to the obliteration of another culture.
"I am a student. Please do not fold, spindle, or mutilate me." -Slogan of the Free Speech Movement, 1964.
I was eight when the Challenger exploded, and I honestly barely remember it. What I do remember is not really caring about space shuttle launches before it; sure, the first time I saw one on TV it was neat, but that was it. I was born in 1977, well after Neil Armstrong et al walked on the moon. By the time I was in Kindergarten, the coolest thing about astronaughts was the freeze dried ice cream they allegedly ate.
Public awe of space exploration had been quite low going into the Challenger launch; the US v USSR Space Race was becoming a footnote in the Cold War; NASA's importance as part of American culture was waining. Putting Christa McAuliffe in a space shuttle (w/a real crew, of course) seemed to be a publicity stunt.
I do not intend to imply that having a Jane Doe (pardon the unintentional reference to unidentified bodies) in a space flight leads to disaster, but the lesson here is not one of lowest contracts. Rather, we should remember that this tragedy should have never happened -- the shuttle launch should have never even been scheduled.
This happened 15 years ago, and it just gets posted to slashdot now??!!@@$@
I wonder how many people submitted this in that time before it finally got posted on here. I mean, this is rather significant compared to the recent failed space probes, which appeared on here almost immediately after they were reported.
What happened is that the launch went ahead in spite of warnings from knowledgable engineers that things could very probably go wrong if they went ahead with the launch at that time. Speculation abounded that there was pressure to launch on time so that Regan's speech (scheduled that evening) could go ahead, as planned.
As I remember it, the astronauts, themselves were absolutely furious at the callous regard for the lives of the crew during that launch, and insisted on some of the safety measures that caused delays in future launches.
It's one thing to risk your life. It's another thing to risk your life needlesly to prevent an idiot president from having to change his speech.
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Of course it's difficult! Because of compressible flow, there is a nice shock cone all around the craft. It's not all that easy to make mass cross the cone, and there's not enough room to kick it out any other way. Trust me--if there was a way to get the astronauts out of the orbiter on the way up and do it safely, NASA would have implemented the change long before now.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
What a completely unnecessary, inflammatory statement. The Challenger accident did not destroy the U.S. Space Program. There have been approaching 100 shuttle missions since then. What it did was present the reality of space flight to a public that had become complacent and soft, believing in the delusion that going to space was like getting on an airplane.
The U.S. space program continues to be the most advanced and vigorous of any nation in the world, a product of the superb economic system that drives it. I'd challenge anyone to show me a program that did not have accidents and one that provided as many benefits for its nation as ours does. As a matter of fact, I'd say our program is healthier than ever, considering that a billion dollars in hardware and 7 of the most gifted people on the planet went down just 15 short years ago in the glare of the most prolific and suffocating media machine the world has ever seen.
Frank W. Miller
How the hell did this get "Score:5 - Funny"?
The last sentence should read "instead of depriving them of their intelligence. It's about what they can do to improve the situation, not about what it should be."
Sorry
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
I'm really glad my 9th-grade teachers kept the TV on so we could hear the news coverage. Of course it was difficult to watch - but we all knew that this was something important, and besides, we felt for the teacher who was killed. I don't think anyone was "scarred" by the experience - on the contrary, we all learned from it.
sulli
RTFJ.
assuming that you're a cluefull individual (doubtful, in this case)
No need to get defensive and resort to personal attacks, my friend. I happen to be an engineer as well. My point wasn't that engineers fuck up, it was that people do. Whether it was the management's fault, or the engineers is irrrelevant. We have given a few select individuals access to tools that can effectively destroy the human race.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
how about
4) The waste of taxpayers money spending time in public schools doing religious things that have absolutely nothing to do with education. If you want to have lead prayers and stuff in schools, nothing is stoping you from going to a private religious school, or even just doing it at home or church, where it belongs.
5) Women losing the right to control their own bodies. And the redefinition of life from birth to conception, so the religious right can further their idiotic viewpoint on sexuality.
6) The religious right starting to win their crusade to turn this country into a theocracy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...It exploded on my birthday!
*sigh*
readme.1st
Too co-inky-dinky. One only wonders what would have happened if the shuttle launch was not "speed up" from its original time.
Of course, this tidbit of information DISAPPEARED in less than 4 hours from the explosion. But hey, I've come to expect less from an administration that promoted the sale of drugs by the CIA as a way of funding an illegal war in South America.
The problem is not one of apathy. The problem is one of apathy induced by the people we put into office. They LIKE it when you don't pay attention to the shady shit that they're doing. Hey, it's even sweeter when they use YOUR tax dollars to do it1
Why do most Americans believe in a God? What evidence is there to back this up? Why make your view of the universe unnecessarily complicated?
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
Not really.
I was probably as shocked as the rest of you, but that doesn't make it news (anymore), right?
Obligatory Where Were You Moment: I was home sick from high school and watched the launch, such as it was, in real-time, and then watched the footage repeatedly all day, devouring the news coverage. In the fifteen years since the explosion, I've come to realize that the most significant result (for me) was a change in how I viewed the press.
The astronauts weren't heroes. We'd like to pretend that they were ennobled souls who gave their lives in pursuit of a dream, but they weren't. They were a couple of pilots whose "plane" was designed to go exoatmospheric, some scientists whose laboratories happened to be on that exo-"plane", and a joyrider whose presence was thought to be a PR coup. I'm sure that they were all dedicated, respectable individuals -- but their deaths no more made them heroes than the safe return of all the other shuttle crews made _them_ heroes.
The engineers had a bad day in that they couldn't make the managers understand the gravity of the situation. The management structure of NASA and its contractors was ill-suited for the activities they were conducting. Tight schedules, tight budgets, and tight-assed bureaucrats led into a dangerous situation where they accepted a risk higher than they should have and it jumped up and bit them hard. But that was not the end of the world. You grieve for the dead, you identify the breakdown in the system, you redesign where needed, either in a booster or an org chart, and you move forward with lessons learned.
But the press...ah, the press. The press (save CNN) couldn't be bothered to broadcast the launch. There was no "public interest" to be served there. Come the explosion, however, and they could hardly decide whether they needed to serve the public by showing the explosion, or the burned Apollo I capsule in the obligatory Solemn Look Backward, or the various self-aggrandizing political "leaders" arguing either that They Shall Not Give Their Lives In Vain or We Have Suffered Too Greatly, depending on whether the space program did or did not result in large sums of federal dollars being transferred into the said self-aggrandizing politician's district/state. They were positively relishing in just how awful it was; a national tragedy like that could really draw people to their TVs. That was the first time that I _really_ understood that the role of the news media is to draw eyes for the advertisers and that their proud defense of the public interest is just so much self-serving bullshit. "Oh, God, it was horrible! The flames, and the smoke, and the death! Let's see that again, Bernie!" I've been disgusted by the media since.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
What I meant by praying in school was mostly public praying (like out-loud stuff during school hours, like at the start of classes, etc.) Also, there are many schools where people are told they cannot have a Bible out in class. It is not necessarily legal to tell students they can't have Bibles in class, but many schools couldn't care less what is and isn't legal when dealing with students. Students no longer have rights.
Anyway, enough of that rant... =). When I said I prayed at my school, I meant after school, before school, and sometimes by myself. Although the school didn't necessarily like it, they couldn't stop some of it. (like before-school prayer around the flag pole). The US Supreme Court has, in the last several years, made a few decisions expressly allowing students the right to meet at schools for such purposes. For a while though, many schools did not allow any kind of religious meeting, no matter when or for what purpose.
I just realized that today was the 15th anniversary of the incident. I was thinking this whole time that it was some spontaneous posting that was made for no reason. My bad. :X
I remember being in second grade when this happened. It was a real let down for all the teachers, since many were excited that Christa McAuliffe was on board the mission.
I remember back then when the books foretold of a future where everyone would be living on space stations and the space shuttle would be a passenger station. The demise of Challenger deflated all those dreams...
oh yeh...it was exactly 15 years ago..I get it..
4) The removal of people's rights to pray in school if/when they see fit.
5) Unborn children losing the right to live.
6) The change in the percieved meaning of "seperation of church and state" from "the church shall not run the state and the state shall not run the church" to "the state shall have nothing religious in it, and no one should dare to do anything resembling religious activity in any state-run organization."(praying, reading the Bible, mentioning God, etc.)
PS Flame me if you want, but I am a Bible-Believing, God-fearing Christian, and proud of it. I'm also generally a Republican, I voted for Bush, I'm glad to have a reasonable, Godly, moral man in office again after 8 years of wretchedness, I prayed at my public high school, and yes, I even run Windows more often than Linux.
it takes a long time to process the slashdot story queue, doesn't it?
For anyone who hasn't read it Richard P. Fenyman's Appendix F to the Rogers Report on the Challenger accident is well worth reading. The Rogers report itself kind of sucks up to NASA, but as usuual Feynman was very open and thorough with his report. Read what the father of quantum computing had to say about Challenger...
void theoremProver(){
print "this product is correct"
}
On that sad day, I was working at a community college as a control room operator for our interactive television classroom system. We had a 15' C-band dish out back and were watching, and recording on 3/4" video tape, the launch. We were taking this directly from the NASA east satellite feeds - much better technical details than the news media and uninterrupted by news peoples chatter.
/. for honoring the people and this program with an article on the anniversary.
A humanities class had just started in the three classrooms in three different cities linked by our microwave system. We control room operators asked the instructor if he and his class would like to watch the launch. He said yes and we threw the satellite signal to all the classrooms. About 60 students between all the sites. The signal was also thrown to a TV in the lobby of the local campus.
We watched the launch through 'go at throttle up' and then the explosion/disintegration/whatever. All the rooms became very quiet. Everyone was shocked. There was a little confusion at first as we all didn't quite understand how bad this was. Sure it exploded, but was the orbiter intact and cabaple of some kind of controlled landing? Were any of the crew alive?
After a time it became clear that this was total destruction and it was unlikely that the crew survived. Twenty minutes after the event, the instructor said "I don't think I feel much like having class today, you're all free to go." Most students agreed and most left. Some stayed to watch the continuing coverage.
We stopped one of the two 3/4" decks that had been recording this event and reviewed the tape frame by frame. In that day, VHS had frame by frame but the resolution and tracking was poor, 3/4" was not quite the best for broadcast standard, but was very clear and would hold a still frame. As we watched carefully, the boss told us to hold at one frame and then went to the screen to point out the plume from the SRB. He said "This doesn't look right, is this supposed to be there?" We looked at the postion of the plume and began to discuss what might have happened.
We came up with two fundamental theories. The first was that the hot gasses from the plume had perforated the External Tank and ignited the LOX or Hydrogen. After looking at the tape several more times, there was a frame where the SRB looked a bit askew. This gave rise to the second theory -- that the lower SRB mount had burned through or broken and the SRB swiveled with the top of the SRB striking the top of the ET and causing the breakup. Damn that NASA video was good.
What irony that months later, the report showed that our second scenario was exactly correct. As just a bunch of low paid wanna-be techies sitting around looking at the event frame by frame, we had gotten the gist of what had happened within an hour after the explosion. I suppose that this exercise was our way of bebriefing and putting off the saddness and trauma until we were ready to handle it.
On the personal side, I have always been really involved in the space program, absorbing everything about it, from the fluff to the technical and I saw it as our future. I spent the next 3 or 4 months in clinical depression after this event. It caused problems with my marriage (we worked it out). I am still sad when I think about the loss of the lives of those brave people and the harm to the space program. I still had confidence that the program would continue though. I would have ridden a launch the very next day, even on the old SRB design.
I got to visit the Cape a few years later and take the tour. As another poster has mentioned, it was a very sobering experience. It was very powerful to be where this event and all the other successes of many years of the manned and unmanned space program had taken place. I was also lucky in that the Shuttle mockup built from the early prototype lifting body was present there in the parking lot on display. One could go up a series of stairs underneath the Shuttle into the cargo bay and they had landings at each of the decks in the crew comparments. The compartments were complete and the had plexiglass walls so you could see the entire area. I spent quite a bit of time studying the details.
The thing that struck me most was that all the panels, electronics, etc. were one-off. We are all so used to manufactured electronics where everything is stamped plastic and identical, and peoples lives don't depend on whether your boom box was well manufactured. I looked at those panels and realized that they were done by some individual. Each connection soldered individually, each panel custom built, each astronauts life dependent on whether the technican was feeling good or had a headache or had a fight with his wife that morning. I felt an intense connection with the seven brave and well trained people who had perished.
I still believe that space is our future. I would still fly if asked (not likely due to age and physical condition).
This is first time I have written about this event since it happened. Sorry if I have rambled, but I'm glad to get it off my chest. I hope that it has been valuable for someone else.
Thanks
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake, the media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.
Examples of Bad Press for Engineers:
Space Shuttle Challenger.
Hindenberg.
SPANet(tm)
Hubble space telescope.
Apollo 13.
Titanic.
Ford Pinto.
Corvair.
The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:
Risk -
Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people.
Reward -
A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are far too complicated to explain.
If that approach is not sufficient to halt a project, then the engineer will fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it will cost too much."
Here's a shot of Smirnoff 100 to the Crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. God Speed.
makes no sense. perhaps there was to bo an article posted or something along with this and Michael hit the 'submit' button without the preview first?
/. and bitch, i guess?
And where is the superbowl-related poll already?
Good day to surf
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
On Friday, January 26, 2001, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit the Gujarat state in western India.
More than 10,000 and as many as 30,000 people are presumed dead. 125,000 people are missing.
Rescue agencies are unable to provide the type of support needed to search for survivors, due to a lack of funding.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
... was a joke in other parts of the world then...
However, a small number of people die in the Challenger accident and it becomes a national "tragedy" that threatened the existence of the space program. I'm not saying we should be careless in our scientific research (of course all reasonable safety precautions should be adhered to), but if some people are willing to take on potentially dangerous jobs (and no-one ever said being an astronaught doesn't have any risks) to help everyone progress their knowledge; and an occasional accident happens and they die, that's only to be expected and not a good reason to can the space program. (Which, of course, was never completely canned in any case).
I had gone home at lunch that day, hoping to see the launch on TV. Nothing but soap opreas! Called a couple local TV stations to ask, 'are you showing the launch'? Answer = NO! A couple of hours later, the radio at work announced the
explosion. For the next two days TV didn't STOP
showing that!
hey, I'm partially right! It was the gaskets, I tell you!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The quote is from Steve Nesbitt, a NASA spokesman responsible for updates to the television link. Nesbitt was neither a Flight Controller, nor a CapCom -- almost always another astronaut. Call him the NASA TV anchor.
Nesbitt was based in Houston and did not have a monitor in front of him showing the plumes, just data monitors showing telemetry.
At that point they only knew something was awry with the launch and vehicle communications. There are limited abort capabilities at 73 seconds -- realistically, probably none. But until the Range Safety Officer reported they had destroyed the SRBs ahead of schedule, even after that, it was still possible that the orbiter vehicle was in some kind of abort mode.
Nesbitt's words were for the public, interpreting things that are said and seen, and as far as I know were not heard by the people at Mission Control.
I agree, it was a tremendously professional moment among many others that day. Hundreds of people, all of them unable to sit and stare, all of them required to be working their post and determining what happened and what options may be left, if any.
transcript/timeline
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the Morton Thiokol manager who overruled his own engineers earlier that morning.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Another good book on this subject is No Downlink. (sorry, i know, it's a link to amazon).
Provides yet another account of what was going on during and around the Challenger accident, from the perspective of a foreigner (from Denmark). Really a good read.
I used to think printing on on Unix sucked. Then I figured it out. Printing on Unix *does* suck. Like a Kirby.
Also worth mentioning here is that Feynman illustrated the O-ring failure during the public (televised?) hearings, with nothing more than 1) A glass of Icewater, 2)A sample of the O-ring material, and 3) A pair of Vise-grips.
"A Little Song, A Little Dance, A Little Seltzer Down your Pants" -Chuckles The Clown
whom have lost their life in trying to make our country a great place for everyone. may their souls rest in peace, and may the hearts of their loved ones heal.
And a big middle finger to those who think it's funny making fun of a tragedy on this scale.
I believe this is something that shouldn't be joked about. It's honestly a very dark day in our history. The deaths of ANY person is something that should be mourned, and I pray for the families of the mission. May the hears of the loved ones of who died become strong, and they remember what good came from them. Setting a presidence for others to follow. These people are heroes, red, white, and blue. Joking about this not only hurts the loved ones of those whom died. I'm offended by you. I believe that if you can joke about this, then you don't understand what the mission stood for. I'm ashamed of you, and quite appalled by your ignorance.
People don't joke about heroes.
That's like saying that all the guys in world war II for the freedom of the world were all morons.
And that george washington was just some fag who wore a stupid wig.
I'm extremely offended, and can't believe that you'd joke about something as serious as that.
-- John Dee
I'm not a US citizen.. but this has always been important as so few groups try and get into space
Every now and again I hear again the filk music made in Challenger's honour - having a filk tape collection containing some of these songs helps...
All of them are out of print now... (firebird music).. That's culture for you.
I can't and won't describe my feelings about this - but space, science, magic, and glory are all of which makes our lives full of magic. This was a true disaster.
Now there's not much that comes out of the US anymore except propoganda and arrogance. I'd like to see the dreams fly again.
remember the dream...
11.
2 in the front, 2 in the back, and 7 in the ashtray.
I don't dispute that they were warned. Going with Thiokol over United [who, yes, had a better design] was an engineering decision. True engineering decisions have time and cost as part of it. As far as knowing the outcome, sure they did! Various NASA documents have the "catastrophic failure rate" of STS at about 2% of all launches. We're at about 0.95% today. So, as a NASA subcontractor, I cringe like hell with every launch. This is my job on the line, dammit. =)
--
-- Geof F. Morris
There was only one civilian onboard the Challenger. The Challenger deaths were the first deaths in a NASA launch; the three who died on Apollo 1 were on the launch pad, doing testing.
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
I wanted to be an astronaut until Challenger blew up on my 10th birthday. Yeah, I didn't even want to go to space camp that summer. I still don't know what I want to do with my life. I've been in college for years and I've gone through more majors than beer. LOL, I should sue NASA, it seems the popular thing to do in America. Don't blame someone for your problems when you can sue them over them.
I was out on my balcony, getting ready for work and I was patiently watching the skies for the launch.
The time came and I saw the plume rise to the sky, when the explosion occured. I, like many people figured "Hmm, something doesn't look right" and ran inside to put on the news...
Sure enough, there had indeed been a "major malfunction." :(
While others at neighboring bases were sent to guard the beach and obvious wreckage, I luckily didn't get this grisly duty.
My heart is certainly out for the crew of Challenger, and it's good to know that 15 years later, they're still remembered, and the ideal of a "teaching mission" was not in vain.
Maybe it's Stuff that matters then ...
To see a QuickTime movie of the explosion click here
I think he was going for something reverant here. So maybe we could reflect on this tragic event.
You've been watching "Starship Troopers" too much..
second society
The day before the shuttle blew-up, a friend of mine gave me back my copy of the Space Shuttle Operator's Manual , after reading it.
I stopped thinking about it, and the next day, I went to a head-hunter for a job interview. When I got there, everyone had long faces. I sit in front of the head hunter, and he asks me "did you hear the news?".
-- What news?
-- Whe space shuttle just blew up.
I didn't believe him, and he brought me in the boardroom where everyone was watching the same famous tape looped back along with a lot of pointless comment from the newscasters.
I sat totally dumbfounded and angry, and I then remembered the book I had in my bag, and pulled it out, and about 6 engineers almost ripped-it out apart trying to figure out what happenned, while the head-hunter proceeded to tell me how he was involved in the Gemini program (he was laying-out wire harness diagrams).
In the end, I did not get any job out of the interview; the one I did was of my own fault...
* * *
Of course, I wanted to be an astro-nut when I grew up. But one of the hardest things I had to do was to realize how much astro-nuts are assholes. Of course, I knew that many an astro-nut wife killed herself or ran off with another man (the first canadian astro-nut managed to pull both stunts at once: she was found dead in a car along with her lover); this should have given me some hints.
Then I worked with that girl whose sister was an airline pilot who married a doctor. Later, the doctor got selected as an astro-nut. Then, he was so much overwhelmed with his training that when his wife got pregnant, he neglected to do the necessary follow-up during the pregnancy, including testing for genetic deficiencies.
The baby was trisomic.
And the fucker had the balls to blame her for it. Never mind he's a doctor. And, to add insult to injury, he cancelled the baby shower. That an astro-nut would be such a far-fetched asshole definitely cured any desire in me to go up there.
Then they had to move to Houston, and, of course, the baby needed special care, care that the insurance would of course not pay for in Houston. So, the fucker insisted that she stay behind, but she told me: it's your career or me.
He finally managed to scrape together the little balls it took to DEMAND from the space agency that they pay for the special care. Of course, the agency didn't want to. Fortunately, the other astro-nuts went on strike to back his demand, and the agency finally gave in.
But still, the guy is a perfect asshole for not ding the obvious by himself.
--
Slashdot is populated with many highly technical people, a lot of which must deal with the idiocy of management on a daily basis. The Challenger was destroyed by a technical problem that the engineers tried to get through the thick heads of management, but couldn't.
On the other side, there aren't that many geologists on Slashdot.
Challenger
This page and the ones after it describe in great detail what happened before, during, and after the crash.
When the Challenger exploded I was still in grade school (I think that's what it's called here in the US) - one thing that I remember is that at the time it was just as devastating for people in Europe as it was in the US - but one thing I do have a bit of a gripe about is that everyone in the US seems to have forgotten about it.
:)
Most people have this "Oh, it went boom.. so what" reaction to it these days, and that's sorta wrong.
7 people died, that's worth remembering. They died a shitty death, and that's worth remembering too.
Ofcourse I joked just as hard as everyone else about needing another 7 astronauts, and the muffled laughter about the wish it was our teacher in there, but those sorts of jokes are made just to protect your own sanity.
Hell, some of my friends (RNAF pilots) can crack a joke about a near miss with another plane or a flyby-gone-wrong - they do that to stay sane
I guess the point is that the Challenger tragedy is worth remembering, and worth thinking about for a while. And if you don't want to do that, just think about the 7 people who died trying to realise the dreams of this world - space flight.
There is no sig...
I was one of the children that saw it live. I remember the hype and heavy school promotion of it. I think that I was in 2nd grade, at the time.
It was exciting watching the shuttle take off. Then *BOOM*! "Is it supposed to look like that?" I faintly remember confusion, at first. At first, I wasn't sure if it was supposed to "look like that". The reaction from the adults assured my fears. It wasn't supposed to "look like that". Something went wrong.
Then I remember the, what seemed like, 100 replays of the accident. I have the shape of the smoke cloud caused by the explosion etched into my mind. I remember thinking that the small off-shoot streams of smoke were from escape pods. I figured that the adults had things figured out enough to cover problems like this. I couldn't grasp the fact that adults (of my time) could make mistakes of this magnitude.
It wasn't until a while later that my mom told me that no one survived, and that no one was sure why the accident happened.
It was one of those moments as a child, that you realize that your elders do NOT have all of the answers - that they too made mistakes... big mistakes!
Then I went into the phase of thinking that I would be the one to figure out why the shuttle exploded. Call me a wannabe Feynman, even though I didn't know who he was, at the time.
I believe I did hear something about this on all the news channels, news papers, news websites; along with continuous updates about the disaster. /. isn't your only source for news.
hopefully
-- Viva FreeBSD --
Isn't most of this post taken from "The Dilbert Principal"?
I wouldn't have noticed except I reread it yesterday.
Did it kill the space program? I don't believe so. There are still shuttle flights on a regular basis. Why?
The quest for the Frontier has always been an American trend. The first settlers crossed the ocean, then started heading west from the East Coast, constantly pushing the frontier west. Now the new frontier is space.
As always, when a frontier is challenged, there are casualties. Weather, adverse conditions, indigenous people, ingrown toe-nails, and in this case, the failure of technology. In the end, these are all sacrifices in the name of progress and discovery.
I remember when it happened, and I was stunned and speechless. But as in all explorations, there will be sacrifices. We can only thank them and remember.
Since the shuttle was carring the first teacher into space, many schools across america had been preparing for the launch and mission for weeks. We had made posters, I had perfected the art of drawing the shuttle for the other kids, and were all eagerly awaiting the launch. I was lucky, I didn't see it live, but it was still bad.
My (4th grade) class had lunch durring the time the launch was to happen, so we were buying food when it happened. The class next to us had decided to take a late lunch in order to watch it - they suddenly showed up and were rather upset - saying the shuttle had exploded. Lunch ended early. Classes crowded into rooms with TVs and watched news reports on what had happened. at least 20 times from various angles we saw the explosion. We were all elft speechless, some kids cried. The teachers were too stunned to realize they needed to turn the TV off and get us doing something else. No work got done all day - we went to the busses straight from watching the news coverage.
The media, not knowing that schoolchildren were watching, didn't pull any punches, and repeatedly stated that the astronaughts and crew were most likely dead. It was a bad day, and it hurt the space program as well as disturbing a generation. I'm getting my vodka now. I don't want to think about this.
man is machine
I remember being in my 2nd grade class In Maumee, OH. Miss Hipp had riled us all up in anticipation of this historic occasion. We had been studying random space factoids and things of that nature for weeks leading up to the explosion. I was the ever-present geek, always proffering up my opinions on space travel and planetary blather and the nascent info I knew of relativity. I can distinctly remember the cold in the air outside, and that it was a sunny day, and that we all watched eagerly on television. I can remember reading about Christa McAuluff in those random newsprint things they gave you when you were little, about how her kids begged her not to go, about what an amazing and historic thing this was going to be.
I can also remember watching the pre-liftoff show and getting goosebumps just as I am while I write this, and being horribly confused and dismayed and sad and lost when the cameras caught the shuttle exploding before my little 6-year-old eyes. I can remember feeling Miss Hipp's loss for words, her confusion as to what she was supposed to do next, her sadness, and her shock. She sat there staring at the TV for a few moments, walked over to it, and shut it off. I asked, knowing full well the answer, "What happened?"
"I don't know, kids. Take out your math books."
--
... the failure of an o-ring on Michael's can of Mountain Dew destroyed the rest of this story.
Why is it a moment of silence? What's this silence?
How 'bout a moment of screaming?! These people are dead! You know, 'AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhh!!!"
--George Carlin
"And like that
I was 16 at the time... and I had skipped out of school to see my girlfriend. In her basement we watched it happen live on tv, seven astronauts dead including a school teacher... it was unbelievable.
I stayed home from school that day and saw it on
TV... I thought it was a joke, and then they kept showing it over and over again; I couldn't believe it.
What a horrible tragedy to show over and over on television all day.
Have you ever heard of a statement? Geez.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
I know someone at my uni that got a project into space with the european space agency , and that is the coolest thing that you have for a project.
the moment they announce that one can take a space flight for a fee, I *will* have my name on that list, money waiting to be spent
:).
They are going to send Dennis Tito into space for a week for $20,000,000. This article mentions that the Russians will most likely sell more trips in the future. I am with you, I am starting to save my money now, hopefully it will come down a little in price, tho
Enigma
Enigma
But Stormin' Norman got some praise.
Bitter?
Who decided this aricle was worth posting? I believe the seven astronauts that died aboard STS-25 (51-L) deserve to be remembered on /. with better than a troll post.
To address the destruction of the US Space program..... The space program is doing more today than it was 30 years ago. The fact that it is not focused with pin-point accuracy on a single effort testifies to that.
The "space race" that occured 30+ years ago, was in your face headline news. It was a competition bigger than todays Superbowl that had the entire country (hell the entire free world) rallied behind it. Todays space program is commonplace. We send probes to comets, asteroids and even to the surface of other planets and people regard it with a whatever attitude..... This does not mean the space program is dead. It just means that it has become a part of our lives that we are used to.
In the movies and on TV, we see Kirk and Picard travel to civilizations thousands of light years away in a matter of minutes with the touch of a button. So when we see some real live people on a real space station with about as much room in it as the family Winebago, we laugh at it as being a relic, when in actuality, it is the pinnacle of mankinds ability to overcome anything.
I agree with this one especially.. Just listening to Dubbya...
.... will have an important place in our plans and in our laws."
"Church and charity, synagogue and mosque
"Atheists should not be citizens..."
Not exact probably, this is from memory, but that is what he said...
You can read "Church, synagogue, and mosque" as "people who believe in my god, my god, and my god...."
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The greater the risks, the greater the falls.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
It would seem that everybody posting so far has lost their minds. It should be obvious that this is a reminder to people. The day the shuttle exploded was a sad day for all of us. It was a day that was to show that politics and budgets were more important than advances or peoples lives. It was a day that showed us that an accident can eliminate the enthusiasm of an entire nation and put a program that, IMHO, is one of the most critical to the development of human knowlege. Remember the people that died. Remember what the program was TRYING to do. Remember what happened. Those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
I'm not sure where you're getting this information from. NASA rolled out Atlantis fully intending to launch her. However, after that was done test results came back on some spare cables which were found to have decayed while in storage. NASA then decided to roll back Atlantis and take whatever steps were necessary to test the SRB comm cables in her, even though those cables were believed to be fine.
This is an example of the system working. NASA was all set to launch, but when they found out there was even a slight chance that the cables they were using might be frayed, simply because they found a completely different set of cables elsewhere that was, they made the decision to roll the shuttle back to the VAB, at a cost of millions of dollars and a delay of weeks. They did the tests, the cables did indeed check out A-OK, and now they can launch in clean conscience. There's nothing idiotic about any of this as I see it.
One can beleive in the Constitution and still condemn what some people say.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Two points:
1. I'm sure there are many good books on the Challenger disaster, but anyone interested in the workings of the actual investigation from an insider's perspective should pick up What do you care what other people think?, by Richard Feynman. The second half of the book is dedicated to his role in the investigation, and it says a lot of interesting things about government bureaucracy, etc.
2. I think it's a sign of the state of Slashdot that when an article is posted which obviously has no other purpose than to elicit discussion, the first thirty posts include only two or three that say something other than "dumb story."
An interesting overview of what happened before and after the disaster inside NASA, look for Richard Feynman's book "What do you care what othe people think?" (ISBN 0-553-34784-5). At least half of the book is devoted to Feynman's participation in the board of enquiry, and to read it from his irreverent "march-to-a-different-drummer" point of view is quite enlightening.
Hey, I have an idea. Why don't we color the memory of this sad event with political commentary?
Wait, never mind...
</sarcasm>
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Man talk about real old... how long has this been languishing in the inbox?
One of the safety concerns had always been the o-rings. If the booster rockets had been built to Aerojet's design instead of Morton Thiokol's this one safety concern would have been eliminated. If blame is to be placed put it on NASA and the upper management that went with a defective design in the first place. I was within 5 miles of the first shuttle launch, within 10 miles of the Aerojet booster test firings and 200 miles of Challengers illfated launch watching it live because the local tv stations had decided to return to regular programing as it was too routine for anything more than the liftoff itself.
Took my girls on their early morning paper route and decided to go back to bed. I never remember my dreams, but today I had this extremely vivid technocolor dream that they were going to launch a space shuttle from our college campus. I was supposed to do a live webcast of it and (as in most dreams) everything was going wrong for me. (I was carrying my little ZR10 recording everything, but forgot to set up the Broadcasting app.) People were lined up all over campus to watch the launch and when it went up it was AWESOME. But it appeared to be going north instead of UP and it disappeared into thick clouds. There was a huge sound of an explosion, but it appeared to come from the south. We hopped in a car to try to drive out of town to get a better view and were seeking some sort of news on the radio, but getting nothing. I was awakened at this point and felt extremely anxious.
It wasn't until about an hour ago that I was flipping through the Sunday paper and saw "Today in History". The first item was the Challenger disaster.
Now if you would have asked me what date the accident happened in, I couldn't have told you, let alone known (consciously) that today was the anniversary of the event. Now I log onto Slashdot for the first time today and see it has been a monster thread.
I saw the Challenger disaster live on CNN (I was 27 at the time) and it had a big impact on me. Like seeing any multi-fatality accident live would affect one. It indirectly lead to a reawakening of my interest in amatuer astronomy when I found the Feb. issue of Sky and Telescope thrown away atop a wastebasket at the post office. The cover picture featured Discovery lifting off the launch pad (and was hailing the (then) imminent launch of the Hubble Space Telescope -to be delayed for years.
Anyway, I think the connection is just too weird and more than a coincidence. It's not like I have every dreamed about the Space Shuttle before. It seems to be a powerful reminder of how much our subconscious is able to keep track of and release in the form of dreams.
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
Yeah, one blew this way and one blew that way.
I was in fifth grade in rural New York state, and they stopped class and rolled in one of the few television sets that they had.
Our teacher told us that a national tragedy had just taken place. We were ignorant to such things but I think that the fact that one of the passengers was a teacher made it ring truer to the administration than it did to us. Our teacher told us to remember where we were, just as he had remembered where he was when Kennedy was shot.
Looking back can we say that it had left the stigma that the Kennedy assassination had done? Not quite, but it has left an undeniable scar on the U.S. space program. 1986 was a height of science fiction in this country with both Star Trek and Star Wars being insanely popular. And this trip was to provide us with our first civilian space traveller and that would make a dream of many become an attainable reality. After the tragedy, NASA became too costly, it would be too dangerous to send a human to this place or that place. In short we lost our nerve. This is in sharp contrast to the legacy of the Kennedy assassination where we took his statement of going to the moon by the end of the decade as something that had to do in order to honor his memory. What honors the memory of those aboard challenger? A couple of low-budget craters on mars and rover that wouldn't last half a round on BattleBots. America needs to do more!
The hell it was. It was a darn fucking ACCOUNTING decision.
A reporter asked Alan Shepard what was he was thiking about while sitting on top of that Redstone rocket, waiting to be shot into space, thus making history as the first american in space.
-- The only thing I could think of was that every single part that rocket is made of, down to the last nuts and bolts, went to the LOWEST BIDDER.
--
(from nasa's web site)
T+1:13............PLT..... Uhoh.
: |
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
'So What'
/. ... I enjoyed taking part in discussions.
/your/ comment, I'll just not yell myself hoarse.
Nobody ever mods me up. Not that I care much on that topic, but I do beleive I've put forth some serious comments. I don't know why I don't get modded up. It's unfair, and I don't care.
Don't tell me life is unfair. I know that. Everybody knows that. The whole point of civilization is to help make life more fair. Why do you think 'handicap' laws even exist?
/. has caused me to think a lot more than any high school assignment or any college class. It's a shame I'm leaving
As for
What's this Submit thingy do?
NASA's official transcript and a collection of non-official information.
I was just listening to (coincidently) Jello Biafra's piece "Why I'm Glad The Space Shuttle Blew Up". It sounds like he wrote and recorded it shortly after the accident. After making it clear that he is saddened by the loss of life, he informs us that NASA had plans to shoot a 72 pound load of plutonium into space. Enough Plutonium to kill all life on the planet. So he was glad because he thought this accident would make NASA think twice about radioactive payloads.
Interestingly, NASA finally did decide to undergo this mission, which received lots of opposition, but turned out okay.
Still, it gives you something to think about. We're placing all of our lives in the hands of a few NASA engineers. Missions like this are not comparable to designing and building a bridge, where, if an error was made, only a few dozen lives will be lost. We've seen that the engineers can make mistakes, and when the stakes involve the entire human race, maybe we should question giving NASA that kind of power.
Yeah they were "real people". As a historical fact they are heros. But let's be serious...I have seen thousands of ships blow up in outer space. That is what space ships do! They fell into the trap of need, speed and greed. The money was going to go away if the ships were not launched fast enough.
"The earthquake would have happened no matter what (I believe that reliable earthquake prediction won't happen for about 100 years, and earthquake prevention technology will take at least a thousand years from that point). The Challenger incident was a totally preventable accident."
If the majority of the world's population wasn't living in shanty-town conditions, we wouldn't see 30,000-100,000 people dead from an earthquake.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
I don't think it's very appropriate to make a joke out of that.
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
it's by Diane Vaughan, not Diane Franklin.
So I guess the discussion is supposed to center around the effect the disaster had on the "U.S. space program", huh?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
No better way to totally fubar a kid's birthday than to explode a space shuttle carrying an elementary school teacher aboard. Of course, I was just as socially inept and cynical then, so I put a bright side on it by talking about the best fireworks ever for my birthday...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
STS 51-L has a legacy:
Still, with all of that, NASA rolled out Atlantis a few weeks ago, knowing that a concern about--you guessed it!--the SRB separation mechanism would likely delay the launch. The cost of rolling out and rolling back is expensive, yet in the name of good PR, NASA did it anyway. Idiots.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:
* How smart they are.
* How many cool devices they own.
The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal -- a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.
Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex--and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.
Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."
At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
We CAN'T be anything like we were back during Apollo and the early shuttle days. Even if there's a snowball's chance in you know where of something happening, if there's any chance of a critical failure resuliting in the loss of crew and craft, we should take it seriously. I applaud NASA for it's current efforts.
What CAN be done now, is we can finally get around to designing a craft that can take off in adverse conditions safely. Can it be done? I don't know. Maybe. Should it be done? If it's possible, we should do it. Then, maybe, we can resume a schedule similar to what we had back in the eighties of a launch a month.
Live on Challenger Crew. IN our hopes and dreams.
Gorkman
Comment removed based on user account deletion
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
The Challenger incident was a totally preventable accident. Without it, we'd have had an international space station with all it's benefits years ago, and would probably be about 10 years away from a manned mission to Mars. Seven individuals were lost, but MORE importantly, space exploration was set back an entire generation, at least.
I was in high school in Tampa, FL. We went outside to watch the launch. It was a beautiful day. We watched as it came up into view and climbed. Then, it turned into a ball of smoke. I looked a little bit like a dandelion. The SRBs we flying around it like flies. I remember saying "That's not right." We watched.. it was horrifically fascinating... like watching a car accident happen in slow motion. We went in and watched the debris rain from the sky.
I will never forget it.
I hope the 7 rest well. Dave
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Another historical catastrophe? Well, let's see...
for example, imagine that speaking English is forbidden in the United States of America. If you speak English on the street, you get fined. If you write or publish anything in English, or even if you speak publicly in English, you are imprisoned, no matter what you say. SF? Orwell? No, ladies and gentlemen. In 1938 the Catalan language, which happens to be my native language, was FORBIDDEN by the Fascist government that seized the control of Spain in 1936. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, a territory located northeast of Spain (capital city Barcelona; remember the '92 Games?), with its own language, culture and traditions, even our own measuring system until we adopted Metric. The Fascists had our language forbidden during 37 years, until 1975. Imagine this period of time: it lasted longer than most of the lifespans of us slashdotters (including mine, I'm 35). From this tragedy, one generation later, our culture and language is still recovering from these dark years.
Remember, Slashdotters: to destroy takes a very short time, to rebuild takes much longer!
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
Maybe it's because we don't want to change anything about the good events. When we see bad things happen, we try to think of a way to keep it from happening again. If we keep reminding ourselves about unfortunate events, we might remember to be more careful next time, to not let political arrogance take precedence over human life, or somthing like that.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
It really does sicken me. I really don't like being reminded of such "horrible" losses in this way. Has anyone ever thought that maybe those people were saved from this hellhole we're living on? I know they probably had so many more things to do with their lives, but at least they don't have to go on living with their sufferings. I'd imagine that a few of the crew of that shuttle wouldn't have survived till now had it made it's orbits of the planet and returned safely.
Maybe next time we can think of something a little less emotionally disturbing?
You got a point there. A big one.
On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, destroying the vehicle, its crew, and the U.S. space program.
I don't think the explosion destroyed the crew. It is very sad to even think of, but it is believed that the crew survived and were killed by the impact on the ocean.
All seven of the crew were recovered from the ocean.
The interesting thing here is that my father was in charge of the manufacturing division for the company that does the US Navy's deep water salvage (NASA as well). I mean deep, none of this 18000ft Titanic crap. I believe they still hold the record for the worlds deepest dives. The company is now Oceaneering, but was Easport.
Anyway, a day or so after the launch my father was on a ship in the Carribean (sp?) directing much of the salvage first hand. Not only did I get to see space shuttle parts close up, but I got to the un-edited videos from the ROV's. They found astronaut parts, ewwwww. My fathers wall is covered with awards and honors from the president, NASA, etc. Nice keepsakes.
Anyway, this kinda hit home for me. I'm not sure that it changed my life, but I did work at NASA for four years while in college. Thanks dad....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
...I've been submitting the story about Viking-I getting stranded on Mars since 1977 and haven't seen a friggin' thing about it YET!
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
This disaster could've been prevented by preheating the rubber gaskets on the solid rocket boosters. But nooo, the NASA techs wanted to get Challenger off the ground ASAP, so they rushed it onto the Crawler for pad 39A. Seventy-something seconds into the launch, the gaskets expanded due to heat, and all hell broke loose in the sky. Seven astronauts, all of which could have been alive today, were maimed on that fateful day. And all because of a slapdash attitude in the hangar.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I think those who venture into space could record a short statement, saying something like: "I knew this was a risky job, but just because I died doing it doesn't mean you should spend any time arguing whether or not we should be exploring space - instead support those of us who would give our lives in the pursuit for knowledge..."
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mrBlond
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
I just heard on NPR's hourly broadcast a tidbit about NASA's research into, among other things, escape systems for the shuttle. They also talked about it on Talk of the Nation five years ago. And while i'm doing the "karma-whore" thing, cnn.com has a piece about it.
In quasirelated news, that cargo ship docked with Mir, so we can now send it screaming to the ocean "between australia and south america." Greeeeat.
Anyway. Anyone got any info about these escape systems?
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
My birthday is on Pearl Harbour Day, my Mums on the Challenger disaster day, any takers for 1st, 2nd October or 10th September for the rest of my family.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
I was working in Austin TX, as a college dropout, for a company that built automated television station equipment (I built and programmed Z-80 based embedded systems). I watched the event happen live in the company's "presentation room" on a huge wall-sized Sony projection TV system. When Challenger exploded, I felt like a bug that had just been squashed on the floor. People tend to make hasty, brash decisions when under the shock of emotional trauma and mine was to decide that day to write up my resignation notice and prepare for going back to college to finish my degree in computer science. I guess I had grand delusions of perhaps trying to get a job at NASA after graduation, but of course that was only a crazy dream. I'd grown up as a kid in the late 60s - early 70's with my face glued to the television screen for all the Apollo moon missions and as a tribute to the space program, all my servers at my current job are named after the Apollo lunar landers, except there's none named "Challeger", of course (Apollo 17, the very last moon mission's lander), and some are named after the current fleet of shuttles.
I heard that Christa McAuliffe was a good teacher - apparently she only blew up in front of her class once...
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Watched it blow up live.
Bright and sunny day it was.
College classes were canceled.
A live launch is loud; the explosion didn't make much noise.
Some may disagree with me on this one but, I've been doing some informal polling over the last few years as to what generations remember. My parents (members of the greatest generation) only recall that challenger happened. ( my girlfriend's younger sisters and my younger coworkers don't remember it at all and when they are reminded they just ackowledge it and move on. Big deal they seem to think (no slight to our younger /.ers here) my generation (gen-X) seem to recall challenger with a clarity few others do. I think challenger was the first time we learned that the people on the tv can die. I think that helped to burn the image in our minds. the way the exhaust trail forked off has been in my head for as long as i can remember and i can remember little before that as being real. the fact that a teacher died that could easily have been one of our teachers also cemented the image and memory further. I remember challenger every year and i remember the consequences of it (the nasa state of affairs, my generations seeming disregard for life in many instances) i think that when historians look back on my generation they will see challenger as one of the pivotal moments in our lives. Its no vietnam or wwii or depression but it had a lasting impact made all the more powerful for its suddeness and quickness.
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I meant, to, actually -- my "Ego" post was intended as an "I-know-where-you-got-that-and-YOU-didn't-attribut e-it" follow up to the parent. (My post is basically Chapter 2 of the rant that the original parent starts)
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Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Really? The article never said anything about an anniversary.
sup
You've got important stuff to remember. My generation's "Kennedy was shot" was "OJ is innocent".
sup
I strongly feel about men and women that risk their lives in boldly exploring the unknown. So you can guess your comment doesn't rank very high with me. They died because they believed in something and pursued it to its fullest extent, reaching for their dreams and hanging on to their passion. Although people die everyday, each human life is as important as the next. And if you don't agree with that, you can at least admit that it's better than getting shot after you stole 40$ from a 7/11 and shooting the clerk before you leave..... no?
A lot of us techie types were profoundly affected by the Challenger disaster, and I for one am glad to see it commemorated. If you don't think that the crisis moment and the untidy revelations it prompted had some impact, you simply weren't paying attention.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I guess the event is not "nerdy" enough. But, since you mentioned india, in Dec 2, 1999 we had 15 years since the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal. I don't recall a /. story about that (at least, not in the front page). Anyone can confirm that? Michael? Rob? Taco? Katz? Tim?
I agree with those calling that an irresponsible statement. The Challenger accident was a horrible tragedy, but in challenge, intelligent people see opportunity.
The standdown allowed for a redesign to not only the solid-rocket boosters, but a reassessment of NASA's entire approach. Congress was right to correct their earlier error of putting all our space launch needs on one vehicle, so the Air Force revived the Titan, Atlas, and Pegasus booster programs. The removal of the shuttle as a requirement for commercial launches reduced costs for the satellite industry, and allowed NASA to concentrate its resources on a successful manned science program in low Earth orbit. The tragic realization that the safety process had become tainted by what NASA calls "Go Fever" led to a reorganization of the people running the program and a safety-at-any-cost mentality.
Since Challenger, the realization set in that the limitations of the Shuttle as a launch platform, which had been a source of debate since the early 1970s, required a blunt approach with self-honesty.
If anyone believes that if it had not been for Challenger, we would today have wheel space stations and moon shuttles as in Kubrick's 2001, you're fooling yourselves in the same way that NASA was fooling itself right up to 51-L. That future was never going to happen. The only justification for massive spending as on Apollo was the Cold War. (It's little known that the infrastructure shown in the film was chiefly to support space-based nuclear weapons platforms. Science and exploration were incidental benefits.)The debacle of Viet Nam taught us that the Cold War could not continue, and led to the scaling back of space ambitions just as surely as it led to Nixon's opening to China.
The failure of the shuttle program itself to live up to program promises of early days (100 launches a year, cost to orbit approaching an expensive plane ride) taught us many lessons about our own capabilities, though it took Challenger to drive those lessons home.
The reason we don't have moon bases or Mars missions today is not that we lost our nerve in 1986. It's because those things cost a hell of a lot of money. Until recently, we were saddled by massive budget deficits and even more massive national debt. Today, we're paying those down; in a decade we'll be able to afford a budget 20% larger than today's with the same tax receipts, because we won't be paying all that interest. In a decade, maybe we can see our way to modest spending increases on space exploration.
We honor the Challenger Seven today by continuing our space program but with mature knowledge of what we can and cannot do.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Although I'm glad to see that Slashdot remembers history, I've never really understood the fascination with the space shuttle Challenger explosion - thousands of people die every day, and rockets are big (usually) controlled bombs. The US is so wrapped up in its technological navel it's rather sad. It meant a lot to people who had bought into the space program as an integral part of the American identity, but to others I think it all seemed rather odd, a media moment removed from reality.
But, if you want to read a thorough book on the subject, try Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Launch Decision.
http://www.bluestraveler.net/lyrics/popper/aint
I don't know if the lyrics will transcend their text, but to hear him sing it is certainly moving.
i might've been born yesterday, but i stayed up all night
I'll never forget the day that the Challenger went down. I was four months short on a four year tour of duty with 1st Battalion, 6th Marines at Camp Lejeune, NC. That day I spent most of the morning at the dental section on base, having a root canal done. After my appointment was done, it was around lunchtime, so I went back to my room at the barracks and flipped on the tv. I had a blank cartridge in the VCR and hit record as I tuned in to the launch with only minutes to spare, thinking it would be neat to have the launch on tape because of teacher Christa McAuliffe's big flight. I caught the entire thing on tape--lift off, roll program, ka-bang, then two boosters fly out of the cloud left behind and we begin seeing the debris falling out of the sky. I then carried the tube and vcr the quarter-mile to the company/batallion headquarters building and set it up for folks to watch who hadn't seen what happened. All the while, me, a skinny yet muscular Marine, wept like a baby at one of the worst disasters in the hisory of the space flight program. I think a lot has changed for Nasa. They've tightened up procedures and policies in order to prevent catastrophies like this from happening again. At least something good came out of it. Rich