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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.
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
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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. . .
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.
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
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)
--
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.
"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
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.
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
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chip norkus(rl); white_dragon('net'); wd@routing.org
mercenary albino programmer for hire
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
better luck next time michael
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.
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.
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Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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.
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-- 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.
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.
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
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
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?
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?
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.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
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
To see a QuickTime movie of the explosion click here
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
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.
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."
NASA's official transcript and a collection of non-official information.
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
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
When *I* was in elementary school in 1969 I remember we all got out of class and gathered in the auditorium to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Now *that* was a rush. Looking up in the sky, seeing the moon, and knowing some human was up there walking around on it.
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...)
Our priorities are just pathetic. An entire generation of people now are alive that have never seen a live moon walk. Nice progress.....
Our space program died long before 1986 I'm afraid. The shuttles were neat, but the drive to expand our frontier was already dead. Space Shuttles were moving into deployment and repair of communications sattelites for the most part.
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!}