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7 Myths About The Challenger Disaster
Lester67 writes "James Oberg at MSNBC has put together an excellent recap of the 7 myths surrounding the Challenger shuttle disaster. I remember that day clearly, but as the author points out, I didn't see it live, nor did a large chunk of the people said they did (Myth #1). Although there are no surprises on the list, regression may have caused you to forget a few of them (#3)."
I remember clearly watching the events unfold in my second grade classroom (must have been the satelite feed mentioned). I think it was the most traumatic event up to that point in my life.
did anyone here see it live on TV at school?
seeing that would be kind of horrible.
This is a case for the mythbusters, obviously. I think Kari would do nicely for this one, or well, any myth for that matter..)
-- # man women
As to whether it was "live" when I watched it - I have never claimed this - but I was a young schoolkid at the time, so I wouldn't have really been aware if it was or not. I also don't know of people going around claiming they saw it live as some sort of badge of honour. As for "exploded" - that's fairly semantic. For example, you have "exploded" views in technical illustration - that doesn't mean that the object was actually detonated to make the drawing. "Explosion" often refers to any rapid break-up, whether a "traditional explosion" or not.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The article says that people who claim to remember seeing it live didn't actually see it live, because most networks just showed a tape replay after cutting away. So technically it's not live, but still, most of these people saw the events just after they happened. It also says that the shuttle didn't explode, but then describes what happened as a huge fireball. I can see how people might describe it as an explosion. So the crew may not have died instantly, but they were probably unconscious until the cabin fell back to the Earth, so it doesn't make too much of a difference to them or to anyone. I gave up reading at this point, but there don't seem to be any major revelations. It was a tragedy, and the important lessons learned from the loss of lives are what I hope live on.
The librarian had rolled out one of the ubiquitous "TV + giant VCR" stands and parked it in the middle of the reading area. For a librarian that typically insisted on a completely quiet room, this was unusual. I suppose the novelty of the teacher going into space prompted her decision.
Anyway, that unusual situation was enough for me to watch the launch, motivated by the taboo feeling of watching TV in the otherwise serenely quiet library and being a bit of a space nut. Despite that and to corroborate the claim in the article, I was probably one of only a few people actually paying attention to it, as most other students were taking the situation as a license to talk to eachother.
I clearly remember watching it desintergate, fanning out into a cloud -- and my mind not being able to fully comprehend what was happening. I might have even vocalized, but I can only remember the visuals. It seemed to take forever for other people to catch on to what had happened.
I admit I wasn't watching (I was off at school), but my mom was watching the Today show (Pacific Timezone) when it happened, and that's not consistent with how she told it. She said that it was a reasonably routine "let's cut away to Florida, where the first teacher in space is about to launch". She saw the "explosion" (or whatever actually happened), totally sans commentary. Then things went black, and eventually, some stunned newscasters came on.
Now, it may be that other timezones weren't running news shows, and so they didn't break coverage, but at least on the PST feed of Today, they showed it live.
"NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer."
The "few people" statement seems like an awfully off-the-cuff remark with no facts to back it up. As he says, "CNN was indeed carrying the launch when the shuttle was destroyed...." CNN wasn't some local Wayne's World cable access channel. It started in 1980 and by 1985 was a major player in the news world. Most schools had it and were probably watching it due to the "first teacher in space" angle.
Today, more people will choke on a marshmellow and die than got killed in the Shuttle
Yes, people died and they should have lived. So do all the other that die today. Are they not as worthy to remember? At least the astronauts did something to further mankind.
Being gratitously reminded of it is not appreciated.
It's not gratuitous. It's the 20th aniversary, and it is important to make sure that history is as accurate as possible.
...So they DIDN'T find her Head 'n Shoulders on the beach
http://www.commaecho.com
Just to contribute here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_bulb_memories (wikipedia) /html moron
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
>>Yeah, I could have done without seeing this story.
>>
>>The fate of the crew was just awful.
>>
>>Being gratitously reminded of it is not appreciated.
The Genocide was Awful. So many Jews died
The rape of Nanjing was Awful. So many Chinese were killed.
The Bombing of Hiroshima was awful.
Please don't mention them or print stories about them. We don't need to be reminded of them, or learn from them, to prevent repeating of our earlier mistakes.
Not any worse (and in fact, probably much "better") than many airline disasters, including TWA800, Alaska 261, and a litany of others.
The Challenger disaster was quite shocking, even more so when I realised that the crew were probably alive (if not conscious) all the way until their capsule hit the ground. It's incredible that something could survive that disintegration but very sad that there was no way to get the capsule safely back to earth.
Richard Feynman's report is a fantastically clear and lucid account of his opinions. The man was one of the greatest communicators of science, and after reading this, you will see why. The most astonishing bit is that he discusses some less than simple things in such a way as to make them easily understood. It's a model of clarity, and I recommend it.
bang goes my karma... again...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
What kind of strange definition of explosion does this guy have?
the shuttle's fuel tank tore apart, spilling liquid oxygen and hydrogen which formed a huge fireball at an altitude of 46,000 ft.
That kind of sounds like an explosion to me. Maybe to a demolitions expert it doesn't meet some specialized technical definition of "explosion", but I don't see how that's really relavent. Talking about how the actual orbiter didn't explode is really starting to split hairs here.
AccountKiller
>> NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence.
That's the bit that annoyed me most.
The very idea that non-technical management can override or disregard technical advice provided by professionals in their specialist technical area is a complete travesty.
And imposing a flawed managerial direction by applying social pressures (bullying/bamboozling) to brush dissenters under the carpet just made it worse. All highly unprofessional.
I know that it's the way that business works these days, with the management thinking that it is somehow "above" the technical people who deal with the technology on which the enterprise is founded, but it's an insane model in a world that is becoming ever more technical every day.
As non-technical management becomes ever more clueless about technical issues with each passing day of technical progress, businesses who don't accept overriding technical direction at management level are treading the path towards having their own "Challanger disasters". It's a misguided approach.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It should be noted that this past Thursday was NASA's Day of Remembrance. This is in honor of the astronauts who died in all three of America's space accidents -- Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia -- which all occurred around the last week of January (January 27 - February 1). There's a commemorative page on NASA's site.
That said, I look forward to the day when a spacecraft accident is no more notable than an automobile or airplane accident. The best way to honor our lost astronauts is to make space travel more routine, allowing it to get safer and more accessible through experience.
Out of curiosity did you actually read the article?
Quoth the article:
"Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable. NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence. The skeptics' argument that launching with record cold temperatures is valid, but it probably was not argued as persuasively as it might have been, in hindsight. If launched on a warmer day, with gentler high-altitude winds, there's every reason to suppose the flight would have been successful and the troublesome seal design (which already had the attention of designers) would have been modified at a pace that turned out to have been far too leisurely."
'Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts.'
"Wow, I'm amazed, strapping two sticks of dynamite between a tank of increadibly flammable gasses might end up in disaster?"
fact 2: The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
"These astronauts were accepting a risk and the whole thing was a bummer"
myth
fact 4: The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly
fact 7: Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
RTFA article next time you post an "insightful" comment.
However, in this era, we cannot fathom things not being perfect. For some reason, someone is always to blame. We cannot accept the fact that space travel has lost a large amount of funding and even though ~40 years has passed since humans first landed on the moon, the technology hasn't advanced that much. As a people, we have to understand that space travel is still young and not perfected and losses will come.
Instead of trying to find blame and cutting funding for the space program. Let us continue to press on, innovate and find new methods, and most importantly, honour the people who are willing to take these risks to pave the road so that one day, we can all enjoy space travel just like how cruises across the ocean usually quite safe, and like how flight is quite safe as well.
It's happened again! Look at the Wikipedia article on the subject.
For example, in the second paragraph we find the ENTIRE first myth copied verbatim into the news article with no credit or references given whatsoever!
The rest seems to be original wording though, but I encourage you to dig more into this.
I have difficulty reading the text on Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0b
Text partly disappears under features like the author's photograph and the commercial banners.
Is it a mistake in the page's HTML or a bug in Seamonkey that I should report?
What do others see?
Going "LALALALALALALALA I can't hear you!" doesn't fix it. Were you on the flight? Do you know anybody on the flight? No? Shut up then.
Do you not want to be reminded of the numerous wars? You might want to try shoving your head up your ass a little further and keeping away from slashdot since you're obviously a trolling retard.
I've read this twice today since it was on Fark about 8 hours ago and I have a problem with Mister Oberg's story.
/ docs/rogers-commission/Chapter-3.txt
From Encyclopedia Astronautica - http://www.astronautix.com/flights/sts51l.htm
"At this point in its trajectory, while traveling at a Mach number of 1.92 at an altitude of 46,000 feet, the Challenger was totally enveloped in the explosive burn. The Challenger's reaction control system ruptured and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred as it exited the oxygen-hydrogen flames. The reddish brown colors of the hypergolic fuel burn are visible on the edge of the main fireball. The Orbiter, under severe aerodynamic loads, broke into several large sections which emerged from the fireball. Separate sections that can be identified on film include the main engine/tail section with the engines still burning, one wing of the Orbiter, and the forward fuselage trailing a mass of umbilical lines pulled loose from the payload bay.
The Explosion 73 seconds after liftoff claimed crew and vehicle. Cause of explosion was determined to be an O-ring failure in right SRB. Cold weather was a contributing factor. Launch Weight: 268,829 lbs. "
From the Commission's Report
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l
"At 73.124 seconds,. a circumferential white vapor pattern was observed blooming from the side of the External Tank bottom dome. This was the beginning of the structural failure of hydrogen tank that culminated in the entire aft dome dropping away. This released massive amounts of liquid hydrogen from the tank and created a sudden forward thrust of about 2.8 million pounds, pushing the hydrogen tank upward into the intertank structure. At about the same time, the rotating right Solid Rocket Booster impacted the intertank structure and the lower part of the liquid oxygen tank. These structures failed at 73.137 seconds as evidenced by the white vapors appearing in the intertank region.
Within milliseconds there was massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank.
At this point in its trajectory, while traveling at a Mach number of 1.92 at an altitude of 46,000 feet, the Challenger was totally enveloped in the explosive burn. The Challenger's reaction control system ruptured and a hypergolic burn of its propellants occurred as it exited the oxygen-hydrogen flames. The reddish brown colors of the hypergolic fuel burn are visible on the edge of the main fireball. The Orbiter, under severe aerodynamic loads, broke into several large sections which emerged from the fireball. Separate sections that can be identified on film include the main engine/tail section with the engines still burning, one wing of the Orbiter, and the forward fuselage trailing a mass of umbilical lines pulled loose from the payload bay."
From Mister Oberg's story
"The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word. There was no shock wave, no detonation, no "bang" -- viewers on the ground just heard the roar of the engines stop as the shuttle's fuel tank tore apart, spilling liquid oxygen and hydrogen which formed a huge fireball at an altitude of 46,000 ft. (Some television documentaries later added the sound of an explosion to these images.) But both solid-fuel strap-on boosters climbed up out of the cloud, still firing and unharmed by any explosion. Challenger itself was torn apart as it was flung free of the other rocket components and turned broadside into the Mach 2 airstream. Individual propellant tanks were seen exploding -- but by then, the spacecraft was already in pieces."
The Shuttle at that time was made up of the Orbiter, a Fuel Tank and two Solid Rocket Boosters, there was an explosion, so I think Mister Oberg is wrong for saying it did not "explode in the common definition of that word". It blew up.
Hey - you should check out www.google.cn
They do a pretty good job in making sure nothing too traumatic gets through...
Oh, well sometimes...
N/A
I was handling calls on the tylenol scare. Guy tells me, have you heard? Have I heard what? The Challenger blew up! No, I haven't heard. He goes on to tell me it was shot down by the Russians, and that the russians had poisoned his tylenol capsules. Turns out he was right. Both times.
he's probably got the same definition as something like dictionary.com, namely, that there wasn't any violent bursting as a result of internal pressure. It wasn't burning until the tank had already broken open, which can be a big distinction for people who think that engineers don't know how to keep hydrogen and oxygen apart until the right time. A fireball is just that, a ball of fire--although it expands, sure, it doesn't really create a blast wave, blow anything apart or do much other than heat damage. It sounds like nitpicking, but mostly it's just explaining the difference for people who've seen too many movies, and think that a pool of gasoline would have the same effect as a bomb.
I was at the Cleveland MEPS center waiting to take my oath of enlistment in the Army watching CNN Live in the waiting room.
When the shuttle exploded, or disintegrated, whichever, I definitely had second thoughts.
As it turns out, a patriotic wave swept over me and I enlisted anyway. Just over 3 years later I was on the East/West German border when they decided to open the gates without warning. No, the wall being disassembled in Berlin was not the opening of the East. The actual border was opened several days prior to Berlin.
The Myth Busters!
w00t
That the 7 myths are particularly prevalent.
Maybe it's just that I got most of my information about Challenger from Tufte.
Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
Surely everyone who was watching the launch on TV saw the tragedy unfold. The number of people who did observe this, numbers in the high hundreds of thousands at least; that hardly qualifies as few, regardless of the unsubstantiated assertion the all major broadcast stations had cut away
The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
I don't know what the author thinks the common definition of explode is, but a quick look on Wiktionary shows it to have as one common meaning to destroy violently or abruptly which is certainly what happened to the shuttle. Furthermore, it is semantics to argue about the 'challenger' exploding versus the shuttle with booster and fuel tank.
The flight, and the astronauts' lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch.
Again we have semantics being put forth as fact. Most people would find little discrepancy between a person being subjected to violent trauma, going unconscious or into extreme shock, and dying within a minute and dying instantly. Nothing happens instantly anyway.
The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.
This statement is complete poppy-cock. Any rational person would recognise the inherent danger in strapping themselves to the side of an enormous tank of liquid oxygen and lighting it.
Replacement of the original asbestos-bearing putty in the booster seals was unrelated to the failure.
unrelated? surely this is the wrong word to use for a part that has been proven by more than one panel of highly respected scientists to be inherently flawed.
There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
This is simply delusional, and requires no further comment
Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
It is difficult to know where to start with this statement. Aside from a criticism of management alongside a discussion of the inherent dangers of exploration, there are too many other mixed issues in this argument to make a sensible attack upon it, other than it is ill constructed.
heh. I love how this is moderated "flamebait". Like the post is designed for people who like those disgusting square pizzas is going to be like, "HEY! ASSHOLE, DON'T YOU FUCKING TALK ABOUT MY PIZZA LIKE THAT." People really should read moderator guidelines.
I was only 3 and a half years old.. I remember watching the TV with my mum and it came on as breaking news in Australia. I didn't understand exactly what was happening, but I knew it wasn't good.
Agreed, in this day and age of revisionist historians employed by our governments around the globe, who's sole job it is to re-write history in the favour of the encumbant politicions, it is VERY important that what actually happened during a pivotal event is recorded and re-told correctly. If we brush over the facts, how will we know how to stop it happening again ?
One of the positive things about the Internet, is it's ability to give everyone a voice. I still have enough faith in the world, that those who what to do the right thing easily outnumber those that dont. Concepts like Wikipedia help to preserve the real facts of events because so many people have a vested interest in keeping the articles they contribute to error-free. Information is power, and the governments of the world don't understand that they no longer control the information flow.
When something tragic happens the independent blogporters outnumber the employed reporters 10 to 1, agreggating those blogports will yield a more accurate and complete dissection of the event than any commercial newsfeeds can or want to provide.
Reading through the Myths in the article I was astounded under Myth #2 to discover that TV companies dubbed in an explosion sound! We can no longer trust what the news shows us.
Paranoid, me? Never.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Everyone involved in engineering work that matters should study this disaster and burn the lessons into their souls.
Edward Tufte wrote an excellent analysis on how crucial information about possible problems was buried in incompetently presented data.
sig? Oh, that sig...
"More people die getting hit by cars a day..." is a particularly pointless comparison: hundreds of millions travel by car every day, whereas only a handful of astronauts fly per year.
The Space Shuttle is not safe by any stretch of imagination: so far, the track record is an average of one total loss for every 50 flights. (Would anyone ever drive if there was one fatal car accident for every 50 car journeys, or would anyone ever fly if an airliner went down on average once per 50 flights?)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
So your point is, that spaceflight is 100% safe dispite the Challenger (or any other) accident?
Umm, I don't get it.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I don't want to come off as being against your post, because I totally agree, but I wonder if the O-rings thing wasn't just another in a long list of things the engineers were complaining about (of varying importance)... Engineers are certainly the kind to make known all their qualms about anything, and presented with a roomful of engineers I am sure a lot of managers would be quick to gloss over most of their complaints. Add to that the fact that this would only fail under certain circumstances and you can see how it falls down the list. I see it happen all the time in the software world. And then of course as soon as you agree to "let it slide for now", that certain circumstance is guaranteed to occur. That's gotta be some kind of Murphy's Law of engineering...
Yes, space flight is dangerous.
Yes, astronauts accept these inherent dangers when they fly.
That doesn't make the fact that Challenger blew up because of a KNOWN, RESOLVABLE DESIGN PROBLEM any less damning.
Sure, you can be sarcastic and explain it away as just being "one of the many dangers of space flight", but that's outright defiance of fact, and the exact sort of thinking that got seven people needlessly killed 20 years ago.
The O-rings on the SRBs didn't seal properly in weather as cold as the day Challenger was launched, and some of the people at NASA at the time knew this. They could have halted missions to find a new material that would work in the cold, or they could have just scrubbed the launch until it was a bit warmer.
Of course we all know that they did neither of these things. They assumed everything would work like it's "supposed to", and that they would once again narrowly avoid disaster. But, just as the design engineers feared they might, the O-rings failed to seal, and the shuttle exploded in the air. Any warnings that tried to make their way up the managerial hierarchy were ultimately ignored, much to the detriment of everyone.
The reason it was/is "such a big deal" is that the disaster could have been easily prevented. No amount of political backpedaling, finger-pointing, or media spin will change that.
that that is is that that is not is not
I was in the habit of watching the NASA channel, which my local cable company was carrying by that time. Usually, it was dead air or meetings, but when there was a mission in progress, it usually showed views of the earth from the shuttle.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I remember the British Coverage.
The British coverage clearly showed the relatives and friends of the shuttle crew, clapping and cheering as the whole thing turned into a fireball. I remember this because it has been censored from every broadcast since then.
I don't know if you can say that NASA management was non-technical. They weren't experts on the solid rocket boosters, but typical NASA management is staffed by engineers who have worked their way up. They were technical people at one time. There are only so many ways for engineers at NASA to move up the payscale. You typically move up into management positions and manage other engineers. I'm not excusing their bad decisions, and maybe I'm misconstruing your statement. I'm just saying that a lot of managers at NASA have a technical background. This doesn't make them experts on certain details of programs, but it might have contributed in their own way to the poor decisions. A manager with a non-technical background might have been more inclined to listen to lower echelons, and formed a decision based on expert opinion. It is possible to construe this as upper management, with their own engineering (read: technical) background, disregarded the experts for precisely that reason. They may have felt that because the knew the issues, that their judgement was sound. Bad call, yes. They should have listened to the Thoikol engineers, yes. Damn shame all around.
I should remind you, that America in the 1980's had lots of social conflict lying just below the surface.
It did? Gosh, I don't remember that. And I'm old enough to have voted for Reagan. Twice.
What I really noticed about this article was the claim that some TV-companies added an explosion sound to the footage. Doctoring footage and images: I've seen so many examples of newspaper images that were so similar, I've often wondered if news agencies don't pull up photoshop to make the image a little more illustrative.
There always seems to be a russian woman walking past a huge poster of Putin, an iraqi woman walking past a huge poster of Saddam, a venezuelan woman walking past a huge picture of Chavez. And a picture of a white dove with a palestinian demonstration in the background. They are both in focus... how did the photographer get them to stand still? And I don't think you can trust that demonstrators really held up the posters they did. Far too often, it seems that the most prominent poster is held by someone who is not in the image. Remember the affair when a parody image of "Evil Ernie" appeared in an image of bin Laden? It was claimed that the demonstrator had done an image search on the net and accidentaly downloaded the parody image, but if he made that sign, wouldn't he have noticed that bizarre puppet in the backgound?! I think it more likely that someone at reuters or AP decided that the image wasn't illustrative enough, and did the negligent image search
So now I see a major news outlet claiming that such "illustrative" manipulation occurs, perhaps I'm not paranoid, after all.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
This comment is a great example of what is wrong with Slashdot's moderation system. As I write this the parent comment has a +5 insightful score - a comment that is clearly written by somebody who has not read the article and has no knowledge of the subject.
Had the poster had a knowledge of the Challenger disaster they should know that the problem was caused by an O-ring failure due to the temperature at launch being significantly below the designed operating temperature of said O-ring. The "two sticks of dynamite between a tank of incredibly flammable gasses" comment is childish at best, but really just demonstrates a lack of understanding. That kind of launch configuration has been used successfully before and since.
It is completely irrelevant to comment that more people die by getting hit by cars than rockets, and making such a comparison shows a clear lack of insight.
It was a big deal because it was a big screw-up - not so much as a distraction from "social conflict", although it will inevitably had some distracting effect and been exploited for that by the media and politicians as all such events are. The real issue and lesson is that NASA had systematic problems that meant that the engineers who knew there was a massive risk of mission failure were ignored. This was all exposed in the Challenger investigation - most clearly by the investigations of Richard Feynman.
This +5 comment is exactly why I want to be able to browse at +10.
This article omits some very important facts related to how events
o nlineethics.org/moral/boisjoly/RB-intro.html+&hl=e n&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
o nlineethics.org/essays/shuttle/telecon.html+&hl=en &gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
occurred. Specifically within the contractor that produced them.
Anyone who has taken an engineering ethics course should have seen this material already:
google's cache of onlineethics.org
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:QhdMxzQaNpoJ:
Slightly more damning is that the engineers from the contractor attempted to have the launch delayed and were overturned by the management.
another google cache.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:1AGp_WgV7w8J:
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
James Oberg is a regular participant in several space related newsgroups and news sites that I read. (I note sci.space.station)
Accordingly, I have watched his coverage of several newsworthy space events and know, from my watching of coverage and analysis, that James Obserg is credible and often "ahead of the game" in calling what really happened.
I congratulate James Oberg on this account, and analysis, and ask readers to take his work as 'credible'.
Unfortunately, I have seen numerous analysis pieces that add evidence and weight to Myth #3: The crew died instantly. It seems they died on impact with the water, minutres afterward, as evidence from the video suggests that the capsule remained substantially intact. I recall the analysis that the investigators could not construct a scenario that showed 'the crew died instantly and did not know they were going to die'.
Myth #4: Dangerous booster flaws result of meddling is also flawed! It seems that the rockets were fired (the Shuttle launched) outside the demonstrated 'safe' parameters of the launch vehicle. For example, if your car is driven across a slickly wet road then full steering lock is applied in an instant then most cars will just be in a skid, as the design parameters have just been exceeded. Get it?
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
There more insightful detail on his view and the problems are described. The author accepts that space flight is inherent dangerous -- he works or worked at NASA and seems to know what he's writing about. Therefore this engineering area calls for special attention to safety. And the managers routinely scoffed off engineers who brought up avoidable risks: "The engineers were challenged to prove it was NOT safe to launch, and they had no data to do so." (page 3 of the article above.) The same was said for the Columbia disaster.
So the default at NASA is to err on the dangerous side, and not on the safe side. The default is to override engineer's concerns, to "put off the engineering hat and put on the management hat". That's what the story is about, and that's what should be of relevance for the /. audience.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I dont know why but any time there is a major disaster a bunch crackpots come out of the woodwork and start talking about how if we had the magical asbestos everything would have been alright.
Same thing happened on 9/11. They started talking about how supposedly the towers used to have asbestos insulation, but the evil environmentalists took it away, and if only the towers still had the asbestos insulation the steel columns would not have melted and the buildings would not have colapsed.
Of course in reality the towers still had the same asbestos insulation (the evil environmentalists had only sealed it so it does not leak in the air) at the time of the attacks, and that did not help. But on the other hand new yorkers (including me) got to breathe the asbestos laden smoke which is guaranteed to give many of us cancer.
So the moral of the story is -- do not believe anyone who tries to sell you on how helpful and useful asbestos is or could have been.
Yeah ---- why not write an article on the 20th aniversity to try to whitewash NASA incompetence. The whole flight was a propaganda game, and they lost their gamble. They had the odds in their favor, but lost they did.
The astronauts probably died horribly. The rest of the article is BS too.
BTW, I saw it live on the NASA channel. Just thinking about almost brings tears. To have that insensitive clod minimize reality like he did is truely offensive.
> And a picture of a white dove with a palestinian demonstration in the background. They are
> both in focus... how did the photographer get them to stand still?
Why would the photographer need them to stand still? Do you know how fast the shutters of a camera are? I've taken photos out of the back of a moving tuk tuk in Thailand at a shutter speed of 1/2000 of a second and got perfect pictures, and that's with a £250 camera - I think professional photographers are using slightly better equipment.
> Remember the affair when a parody image of "Evil Ernie" appeared in an image of bin Laden? It
> was claimed that the demonstrator had done an image search on the net and accidentaly
> downloaded the parody image, but if he made that sign, wouldn't he have noticed that bizarre
> puppet in the backgound? I think it more likely that someone at reuters or AP decided that the
> image wasn't illustrative enough, and did the negligent image search
Wasn't illustrative enough of what? What's a "negligent image search"? Are you suggesting that Reuters and AP added them to all the frames of it that they covered? Why?
I thought it was funny that on the CNN map the town above which the crash happenned (Palestine, TX) was taken very quickly off. Maybe with the Israeli astronaut on board they thought it was a bit too much food for conspiracy theorists?
Columbia's crew died because small pieces of foam falling off tanks got to be routine, and eventually after 100 missions a big one fell off...
You know, I've always wondered what part composite aging might have played. Materials scientists tend to know little about how composite materials like the RCC panels age, especially in the harsh environment they had to endure -- radiation, violent temperature swings, et cetera -- and especially over the 20 years or so between Columbia's fabrication and the accident. Plus, unlike metals, composites are a bit notorious for showing no outward signs at all that they are about to fail, for looking perfectly sound even when they are so rotten that they'll suddenly and catastrophically fail under stresses they easily stood before.
Here for example is a story about some of the problems the USAF is running into now with the F-15 wing, which is composite and approaching 20 years old in many aircraft, e.g. the linked article notes an F-15 coming apart midflight in 2003 because of a sudden failure of the wing, and yet routine inspections every 200 hours had shown no signs of incipient failure.
If Columbia's accident was the result of this kind of failure, it's a lot harder to blame the designers, engineers, and even management for failing to prevent it -- because it involved the emergence without any warning of a completely unforeseeable materials failure mode. Essentially, the impact of the foam was a trivial hazard, easily withstood by the airframe for almost all of the 20 years Columbia flew. And then, by incredibly bad luck, the aging of the RCC material made the stuff just suddenly become ridiculously fragile, to the point where an oversize bird turd could crack it. And it did so with no outward signs of weakness at all.
That would make Columbia's accident pretty much a pure act of God, beyond the ability of mortal men to foresee and prevent. Indeed, I think one of the lessons of Columbia should probably be that these things still happen, that materials and systems can fail in totally unforeseen ways, even with the best engineering talent and the best management will in the world.
While the non-technical managers overriding the decisions of the technical staff here would never lead to loss of life it still occurs and is still very frustrating.
Many of us can spend more time refuting a non-tech than actually performing the work. It can take more time refuting even most uninformed opinion than the entire projects takes from planning to completion. I have had projects stopped just before release because of some "wild hair" objection by someone higher up only to later unexplicably finding it released.
Its jealously for the most part. Not direct but that is what it still is. They need to feel superior somehow so they mask ignorance with authority. By pulling "rank" they have effectively shown the technical staff whose boss as if it makes right.
Fortunately there are times where their idiocy gets noticed by someone higher up who realizes the issue raised is nothing more than strutting and they get boxed up for a while. But eventually they pop their heads up again when the coast is clear and it is back to step one.
Sometimes I think the motto of most companies is, "We make money inspite of ourselves"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I wish journos would stop doing this. Please find something else to write about on a slow news day.
I saw this when I got home from School - I am (and was) a massive space nut: when I got home from school, ran into the kitchen and asked my mum if she had hears about the space shuttle (I hadn't heard - I was just asking if the news had reported the launch". when she answered "It's terrible, isn't it", my stomach lurched three feet to the side.
I'm absolutley haunted by the image of that fireball expanding, absolutely despertately willing the orbiter to come clear of it, unharmed... despite knowing full well that this wasn't live, and that it was all over before I even started watching.
I can remember watching the news re-runs, hoping that the explosion of the fuel tank had been enough to kill the crew there and then, rather than having to endure a 2 minute plunge to their death.
I remember some sick tabloid printing a transcript of a crew voice recorder (faked, I hope). and churning it all up again.
To be honest - I was more emotionally hurt by the challenger incident than by the death of some family members... and I wouldr eally rather consign that to the past rather than see these guys keep digging it up to make a cheap buck.
I.
ps> my copy of Jarre's Rendevouz doesn't have "ron's piece" on it. it's just too darn tearful to listen to.
Will someone please mod down the parent?
TFA is clearly contradicting him. I call flamebait.
The existence of the entire shuttle program was the result of political interference: an overpriced, showy way of getting people into space that served little practical purpose. A rational, cost-effective space program would not have relied on such technology in the first place and would have used manned spaceflight very sparingly and mostly for medical tests that required humans.
You know what it is, too? They might have been "bullied or bamboozled into acquiescing", but that means the engineers did, in fact, acquiesce! That means clearly none of them had a mathematical proof of certain disaster, or they would have said, "NO, I know this is certain disaster, and you can fire me if you want but I won't let it happen." In fact, it means more than that: it means none of them thought, on the whole, that there was certain enough risk that they should stand up for what they knew. As a manager, I would say if any engineer had reasonable proof of a 10% chance of failure (for example, 10% of simulations with the O-ring faults show catastrophe), then this person would not let the mission proceed even at risk of termination. It is fair to say that there was good communication surrounding that 1% or whatever: the engineers objected vehemently, the managers saw that the risk as 7 deaths per 1000. The correct comparison is war: what general would call off a major battle because some engineer says he thinks it will cost seven in a thousand of his soldiers! A manager thinks: At seven in a thousand, I can do ten of 'em and still lose only 70 men in 1000. Holy cow!
Also, you gotta' remember: no one survived the middle ages. No one will survive the "space age". Life moves on, everybody dies. Is it worth doing something dangerous before we do? Answer: sometimes.
The transcript of the crew's last transmitted words.
From Nasa.gov: This is a transcript of the Challenger operational recorder voice tape. It reveals the comments of Commander Francis R.Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialist 1 Ellison S. Onizuka, and Mission Specialist 2 Judith A. Resnik for the period of T-2:05 prior to launch through approximately T+73 seconds when loss of all data occurred.
I take exception to this one
There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
BS. I worked at NASA at the time, and I knew that there were politcal pressures on the flight schedule before the launch. One thing that he conveniently doesn't mention is that the State of the Union address was that night. It is a fact that Reagan wanted to salute the first teacher in space. That was common knowledge. Only an idiot would think that the NASA higher-ups would not feel pressure to launch in those circumstances. (I never heard of any plans to link the flight crew to the speach, which I cannot recall being done for any SOTU with anyone; this sounds like a straw man to me).
What I will give him is that I personally doubt that this pressure took the form of the White House calling up Houston. (There is certainly no evidence of that.) But they didn't have to.
"...obviously a major malfunction."
"My fellow Americans, these are not the droids the nation is looking for."
These astronauts were accepting a risk and the whole thing was a bummer, but more people die getting hit by cars a day than being strapped on dangerous rockets.
Far more people ride on cars each day than ride into space.
The reason it was such a big deal was the media and politicians using it to full propaganda value. Nothing like a little shared greaf to bring the nation together. I should remind you, that America in the 1980's had lots of social conflict lying just below the surface.
You need to read myths 6 and 7. Politics had nothing to do with when the launch happened, and the accident did not have to happen. Dismissing this as just "something that goes with progress" suggests that we need not learn from our mistakes, since it's okay if we mess up every now and then. It's always important to learn from mistakes in engineering, especially when they end up tragically like in this case, so that they don't repeat themselves.
If you're friends or family died in a car crash, I don't think you'd find this idea very consoling: "hey, running around at 60 mph in a ton of metal with explosions going off in front of you is dangerous, so what? My friends knew about the risk and they accepted it."
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
I look forward to the day when a spacecraft accident is no more notable than an automobile or airplane accident.
Not I. Tragic accidents like this mean we're living on the cutting edge of our technology, pushing the envelope of what we can do, standing on tip-toe and reaching as high as we can. As long as those who risk their lives do so with eyes wide open, let it rip. I want to live in interesting times, and in a culture that has balls of brass.
If we insist on exploration being safe, we've just pussified ourselves, turned away from the frontier 'cause it's scary and dangerous, and it'll only be a matter of time before some new kid on the block culture comes along and shoves us unceremoniously out of their way, into the ashcan of history, like the barbarians did to the Romans and we did to the British Empire.
I watched this disaster live on TV. I am from New Hampshire, so the sight of a Concord schoolteacher going into space was a major event. Our entire school was gathered in the auditorium, and we watched Challenger explode. I think it is safe to say that they wouldn't have shown us a recording of a teacher exploding.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
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ROT13ed:
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And while I'm at it just let me say that I do not, in any way, shape, or form appreciate the lameness filter attempting to interfere with the capitalization of my troll
I worked as a contractor to NASA from STS-6 (well before Challenger) through the disaster and for several years afterward. I was an engineering manager on the payload side rather than the oribiter itself but I was heavily involved in all phases of prepration and launch. That qualifies me to say: this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
There was enormous pressure to launch on time. Did the President call the Launch Director and tell him to launch? No, of course not. But NASA's budget depended on getting those launches off and beleive me that is a big motivator.
Did stupid managers ignore the advice of engineers? Not really. Remember that you're dealing with the "fog of war". Nobody knows anything 100% for sure and nobody communicates 100% perfectly. Incomplete data, poorly constructed PowerPoint slides, fear of rocking the boat, preconceived ideas, all contribute to this. Would someone intentionally put the astronauts lives at risk? Of course not, but in the absence of clear information most people just go with what the group wants to do.
Did the astronauts accept the risk? I knew many astronauts (OK actually it was 5 or 6) and they were some of the smartest people I have ever met. They TOTALLY accepted the risk of what they were doing. Just as much as a Marine going into battle accepts the risks. In this case though they were even more educated and aware of the odds. The astronauts I knew usually had multiple degrees, dozens of certifications, and 1000s of hours of training. They knew exactly what they were doing.
"Shredded cabbage and mayo go good together." Cole's Law
I saw the accident from my office building. The windows on the correct side were in the accounting department, so a bunch of us engineers invaded some poor accountant's office, displacing piles of beans (and accountants) already there.
The weather was clear, so we had a great view of the exhaust trail as it went up. When the accident occurred, the solid-rocket boosters went their separate ways, forming a "Y" in the exaust trail. The accountants said, "Oooh, isn't that neat looking!" The engineers said, "Uh-oh...that's not supposed to happen...."
I lived in BC at the time and our high school was equipped with some sort of live educational satellite network at the time so we were able to watch the NASA channel live. I did not realize that the networks were not broadcasting live. Interesting.
I ambled into the library to watch and, well, we all know what happened.
Rereading my post makes me think people might misunderstand. TFA is a MYTH, not the post I replied to. I agree with the posters sentiments. ---- TFA is an attempt to whitewash what occurred. TFA talks about what is not true rather than what IS true.
For example, how does it add to rememberence for me to say that it was a myth that NASA had antigravity suits that could have saved lives, but not enough for everyone, so they left them behind. Steers us away from the publicity overloaded, politicized, advertized, heavily promoted astronauts that tragically died from NASA incompetence.
Also, to imply there was no political pressure is to say that being pressured by non-engineer pointy-heads in NASA is not political pressure. BS, I say.
I'll bring a parachute.
the booster rockets did. Wow. Huge myth.
It's like saying my car didn't have a flat tire but the wheel did.
The article does have some legitimate myths, such as the booster rockets were an accident waiting to happen. Well, of course you're taking chances when you attempt a launch in weather the seals on the boosters weren't designed or tested for.
Oh yes indeedy
And i don't care if is off topic!
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Sure, if the car was going to take me to the moon.
Saw it live and via live broadcast from Kingsbay Naval base in St. Marys Georgia. I was watching it's assent and then the breakup from the ship I was on.
Photographers get fired and blacklisted for manipulating their pictures. Have a look here for an example.
As for focussing on both a poster and a person walking past it, you measure the distance from you to the poster. Then you measure the distance between you and where the nearest person you want to focus on will be. You focus between them and use the hyperfocal marks on the lens to choose the aperture you need to use. Then you meter to find the shutter speed you need. If it's too slow, then you have to focus on someone closer to the poster, or use a faster film. Then you stand and wait for someone to get in the right place. It's a trivial process.
So if you watched CNN you did not see the accident live but a recording. Granted the difference is only a few minutes but Live is Live and not a recording.
So the original story is right and you fail for being unable to read.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just begs the questions:
- Where the hell did the last 20yrs of my life go???
- What schools did you all go to, that so many of you were all watching it live? No real leasons to go to?
(For the benefit of the yanks, most UK schools got 1 or 2 TV sessions a week - at most - and it was usually some god awful Open University sociology tripe dictated by some hippy professor...)
"Dismissing this as just "something that goes with progress" suggests that we need not learn from our mistakes, since it's okay if we mess up every now and then."
Ey? Mistakes go with progress. They allow you to find a flaw and correct it. What you're basically saying is that it's possible to progress with nothing going wrong, which any engineer will tell you is a load of bollocks.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Is was Bert, not Ernie that appeared on the poster. A picture of said poster and Urban Legends take on it can be found here
Personally I liked the Lost excerpt of the Pam and Tommy Honeymoon video the best.
I was going to Elementary school in San Jose, CA, and our whole class watched it live on TV. I will never forget watching it 1) explode, and 2) the shock on my teacher's face. This guy is totally false on #1 and #2. I watched it on TV. Technically it may not have exploded, but have you seen the feed? It didn't exactly go into space. We all saw it straight through, sure they cut away but after it exploded, genius.
stuff |
You should read the reports, particularly Feynman's. The technical people and the management were on diverging paths of bamboozlement. The management, yes, overrode some technical people who said the risk was too high. They estimated the risk as tiny and represented it as tinier, as if the numbers were only meant to impress rather than indicating an actual mathematical quantity. But they did it because some of the technical people said the risk was not too high. They deluded themselves to believe that it was OK to accept a higher risk because previous trials had not caused failure. This is the same syndrome that leads a roulette player to go bust, just because he won a few times in a row. True, not all the techs fell prey to it, but enough did that management got the impression that conflicting opinions of the risk existed (everyone on the technical side knew that the overall risk was around 1-2 percent, they differed about whether it was acceptable). Engineers raised the "success criterion" for tests to match their data when their tests failed, because the failure in that trial was not catastrophic, without understanding the root cause of the poor performance and the real odds of a catastrophic failure. As a result, components passed their tests in a state that initially would have cause a mission scrub due to an aggregate risk that was too high, and went into service without an assessment of true risk. The foam thing was another example of "it hasn't killed anyone yet, ignore it". After a history of doing things this way, and a history of good luck, it became easier for management to ignore the warnings of higher risk and push forward. The message to take home is to treat every risk seriously, recognize that 1% chance of failure is not small - it means that you *will* fail one day if you keep trying.
Definition: A decrease in the size of a tumor or in the extent of cancer in the body.
Ok then!
Of course, if you meant "repression," there hasn't yet been a single verified documented case of the Freudian now-you-see-it-now-you-don't-but-now-you-see-it-ag ain concept we call "repression" actually taking place.
Ahh, the power of suggestion.
Those astronauts practically sat on a bomb. Knowing, and acknowledging, that something could go wrong was definitely part of their training.
People seem to forget this whenever they ride the plane, though. It's the Fight Club effect. All the safety folders, small warning stickers and superficial routines make mr. and mrs. Traveller forget that - sh*t - I'm sitting on an airplane!
In the case of the Challenger disaster, the political optimism that ruled the western world made it a tragic incident.
People tend to forget that they're in reality.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
The challenger disaster was just the result of constant budget cuts resulting in a space craft that did not have proper safety equipment being used in roles it had never been designed for and forced to operate in circumstances that were not safe.
It is not an accident, it was mis-management and Nasa learned nothing from it.
On the other hand, the NASA the US gets is the NASA it is prepared to pay for. Same with ESA really, luckily for the europeans we do not do passenger launches so when the europeans screw up it is "harmless".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"The disaster need never have happened if managers and workers had clung to known principles of safely operating on the edge of extreme hazards -- nothing was learned by the disaster that hadn't already been learned, and then forgotten."
I think this is flawed. And unfortunately it did happen again.
Desaster is part of technology. Currently my Linux is broken. Was it inevitable? I don't know. Was it my fault? I don't think so.
Keep technology simple. Fix bugs. Know the risk. But don't say "The disaster need never have happened if Linux developers had clung to known principles of safely operating on the edge of extreme hardware"
I remember when I was very young and at a school fair. While walking past the 'tombola' stand a photographer grabbed me and thrust a bottle of apple juice into my hands and took my photo. He took my name and put the bottle back on the stand and walked off. In the local paper that week was a picture of me 'winning on the tombola'. As a young boy it was my first lesson that the media will architect anything to create the news story they want (although trivial in this case). Hence I'm the cynic I am today, and can't stand the modern press either (but that's another story...)
from snopes.com "Mostafa Kamal, production manager of Azad Products, the Dha..."
:-)
FWUI this name is a joke name. Please tell me one would really name thier kid "must have a camel"
You've missed the point.
With a fast shutter speed (needed to catch the dove) you have minimal depth of field. Therefore 2 objects at different distances cannot both be in focus. Unless of course you took the 2 images in 2 separate photos and then photoshopped them together as the GP suggested
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Few people actually saw what happened live on television. The flight occurred during the early years of cable news, and although CNN was indeed carrying the launch when the shuttle was destroyed, all major broadcast stations had cut away -- only to quickly return with taped relays.
Notice the "although"? He's not claiming that CNN cut away - after all, CNN has NEVER been a broadcast station. He is only claiming that the networks cut away. And as I saw it live on CNN, which we had in my dorm common room, I can confirm that he is right about CNN staying on the story. So I think that maybe you'd better apologize to the fellow you said failed for being unable to read - you didn't read the story correctly, either.
So? What difference does a minute or three make?
2. The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
No, it *did* explode in the common definition, as in boom, major disassembly. It did not explode in one specific, technical way. There was no bag of TNT on board. There was the equivalent of many tons of TNT just a few feet away. Big diff? I don't think so.
3. The flight, and the astronauts' lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch.
Well, effectively, they did. There was nothing that could be done at that point to save them. Also IIRC the only clue that a few were concious was that two of the emergency airpacks were found turned on. Not exactly uncontrovertible evidence.
4. The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.
Totally wrong. There were several previous documented cases of the O-rings burning part way through. Feynman's report clarifies the severe nature of this problem. If you manage to walk across the freeway blindfolded 66 times, does that certify the action as safe? Nope. The political angle is not documentable either way. But one might guess if the president is scheduled to talk to the astronauts during the state of the union address, there's some pressure there to launch.
5. Replacement of the original asbestos-bearing putty in the booster seals was unrelated to the failure.
Well, true in the sense that the whole basic design was foobar. But "unrelated" is a value judgement, one unlikely to be categorically false.
6. There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
Yep, we went over that already. You expect to find a written memo on this?
7. Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
Wishful thinking, and doesnt correspond with history. There's no way any engineer could get the shuttle grounded and a major subsystem completely redesigned just on a hunch. In the real world flaws often go unresolved until somebody dies. See: Pinto gas tank, Ford ABS switch, Dodge ball joints, Vioxx, thalidomide, radium drinks, smoking, children's air bags, and probably many more.
There's a posting in this thread from someone who was working at NASA at the time debunking the claim that there was no political pressure on the launch schedule - saying that Oberg has made a straw man with his comments about there being no phone calls from the White House or plans to link up with the astronauts, that everyone at NASA knew that the president wanted to hail Christa MacAuliffe in his State of the Union (which was scheduled that same night) and so felt pressure to get the launch off that morning. Of course, that doesn't mean we should blame Reagan for the disaster, either.
What other 'Myths' are there going on right now that we are unaware of?
Are spreading 'Mythinformation' common practice among the news media and government?
Or just a coincidence or from not having all the facts at the time?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
There is generaly no need for a photo-shop conspiracy in the composition of most photographs. Photographers general take more pictures with people/doves ect.. because they are more intresting and appealing to the human eye. Then out of the man pictures the photographers take, the editors are more likely to use those with people/doves becaues they are likewise more intresting and better pictures. No conspiracy, just natural selection, only the fittest photgraphs survive.
I generally don't respond to AC's, but I'll make an exception in your case because you completely missed most of the subtleties of the situation. The calculation was not, "Wow, look, there is a 0.92375% chance of the shuttle going "Boom!"; it was more like an order of magnitude estimate based on guesswork and engineering experience, which is much harder to justify. Safety engineering, piloting, and other "veto for safety" situations based on operational experience rather than a fill-in-the-blanks-out-spits-probability situations, are inherently difficult ones. This is because the odds are, 99% of the time, things will be okay, and if you are the "bad guy" and hold things up, and they work out fine for your replacement (as they will, 99% of the time), in a manager's mind (unless he is really good), YOU are the problem, not the situation you said was unsafe. It's the 100th time that catches you. Or the 101st. Or the 1000th. That's the problem - safety is not a device or a simple calculation, and it is not proven to have existed because of a successful outcome - it is an attitude towards limits and the unexpected, and what is a reasonable risk vs. the return and what is not.
As for your comment regarding war and acceptable losses, that's fine. But the point was that the shuttle could have been MUCH safer (by three orders of magnitude) if the engineers' advice was sacrosanct, with little loss of productivity. Is getting a 30% increase in flights per year worth an increase of x1000 times risk of hull loss?
I was working in Sunrise, FL. at the time. My office was on the second story and we had
a window facing north. It didn't take a rocket scientist to know something bad had
happened. And network tv was live covering it. We had a portable tv in the office area
providing the sound to our live view out the window.
I remember coming into work the day of the launch mad at myself for forgetting to bring
my binoculars from home.
I was vacationing in Florida at the time and saw it live and in person. It was the first and only shuttle launch I've ever seen. It's true that although it looked like an explosion, it didn't really sound like one. It's kind of hard to describe what it sounded like, kind of like the sound of rushing air, not the boom of an explosion. What I remember most about that day was the bitter cold. I was born and raised in Southern California, and so I wasn't used to cold like that. I didn't have any gloves and I remember getting frostbite on my fingers while trying to hold my camera. I also remember the voice of the mission control announcer sounded very stressed as he first told us that they had "lost contact with the orbiter", then "rescue units are moving into position". They locked down Kennedy Space Center for one hour and nobody was allowed to enter or exit. I also remember watching all the little bits and pieces falling to Earth afterwards. Stuff was falling out of the sky for what seemed like half an hour. It looked a little like the very last shot in the movie Independence Day. I don't think I will ever forget that day.
I watched a pretty good Horizon programme on the BBC about this, where they actually talked to the concerned engineers who knew the problems with Challenger and Coumbia. One engineer was relieved when Challenger took off because he thought it was going to blow up on the pad! Unfortunately, these people who were concerned for safety were consistently asked for proof that the flight was unsafe, which is an absolutely ludicrous thing to ask an engineer.
Screw the risks of manned space flight. Those risks were known about, the faults were identified and they were ignored. By some miracle, people weren't killed on Mir, but there seems to be a huge culture where people feel safe making judgements where astronauts could, and will, be killed with no repercussions. That's the problem.
evil but funny.
You didn't need a TV. It should be noted that almost all shuttle launches are visible for most of Florida, and the sonic boom during reentry shakes the entire State. If you lived in Florida, you could see the smoke for hours. And it was common practice at most business, schools, and homes to go out an watch the shuttle take off.
I was six at the time. It was clearly visible from Central Florida, even though that's not where it happened. It was a BIG explosion.
So "everyone saw it" may be wrong, but "millions of people saw it" is certainly correct, and probably "almost everyone in Florida" saw it" is not necessarily wrong.
And it was obvious what happened. The small flame thing in the sky (which is all we actually see during shuttle launches) turned into much larger cloud of something.
The refutation of myth #2 is a bit questionable. Pieces went everywhere. They were found all over the place. And the size of the thing in the sky was big enough to be visible all over the state. Sure, there was no "bang," but it did explode.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
This is erroneous. At the proper film speed, you can have both a fast shutter speed AND wide depth of field. If you have ISO800 or ISO1600 film in your camera, it's quite easy to get a 1/1000 second photo and have the aperture completely shut. Hell, given enough light, you could do that with 400 speed film, but that's cutting it close.
I remember it clearly. It was the night before the disaster. She said she had something to teach me. She said her name was Christa, and that she was leaving on a secret mission the next day. I went for it, and we had a night of passion that I will always remember. It was not a myth. It was real. Wasn't it?
-Heartbroken
I think we can compare the shuttle incident a little bit to the "Pentagon incident". How much maintenance has actually been performed on the shuttles ? If it has been performed in the same way as the Pentagon (meaning totally none up to a point where they simply didn't have a choice anymore) then I can't say to be very surprised in seeing two shuttles going down.
I mean really... What organisation would stoop to using *ducttape* to tighten certain components and then act all surprised when it falls off. Why won't they provide any coating for the big tank and simply leave it in its own rusty color ? I have to agree that the theories about it being rusty are sometimes far fetched, but then again; who will be able to actually spot the difference ?
But finally I just cannot believe that an organisation like NASA hasn't managed to come up with the slightest improvement on their original idea in the past 30 years. With those budgets why would they still cope with the riskfull heat tiles while we allready have much better materials available at the moment? Not only are tiles more expensive in maintenance, the risk they carry is also a lot higher. Back then it was a brilliant idea but now we really have much better (perhaps even cheaper) but most of all: *safer* alternatives. Don't believe me? Take a look at the other space programs, heck, just take a look at some of the Asian inventions.
IMHO NASA needs to get off their (IMNSHO lazy) ass and actually start getting into the innovation business again. At least try to catch up with modern technology.
Growing up in brevard county florida, I do remember watching this in person. I was in the 4th grade at fairglen elementy school, where every time a shuttle launch happened they would sound the fire alarms and bring us all out to the large field used for the Physical Ed, and recess classes. Was quite a site to see live and in person like that. I remember spending the rest of the day at our desks just drawing, doing crosswords, etc while our teacher was listening to the news on this little clock radio she had. At the time I didn't really think much about it, I guess I didn't really understand what had happened. But now looking back what a sad day.
I am an AE. I had to do a paper on the tragedy. What this article says is actually nothing. It talks about definitions of "Explode" and astronauts not knowing how to operate the shuttle ("was neither especially dangerous if operated properly"). The whole article is bullshit. Is MSNBC going to create their own program so they are saying it is safe just because?
I was a co-op at a company when I noticed a crowd of secretaries were watching a small TV - as soon as I realized what they were seeing, I ran to tell the other co-ops who stared blankly like they couldn't understand that I was telling them something important.
I remember the hopes that the crew died instantly, the fears that they didn't and the realization that they may have been conscious all the way down.
I remember the frustration caused by a nation that became apparently paralyzed by the accident - unwilling to accept that space flight was dangerous and screwing around for 2 years without taking any decisive action to either begin working on a replacement for the shuttle or resume space flight.
But most of all I remember the stolen promise of cheap, reliable transportation to orbit and the future that it would bring.
Clear, Dark Skies
I too was in second grade and watched it on television from my school in NJ. I didn't know what a succesful launch was supposed to look like so it didn't make sense immediately upon seeing it. Howevever, I remember how excited my teachers were to watch, and then how I saw several teachers crying immediately after the explosion. On a related note, my family later moved to Florida's Space Coast and attended Christa McAulliffe Elementary School. This part of Florida has several schools built since, that have been named after those 7.
I was a freshman at Virginia Tech and had just come back from an English class I think. Went back to my dorm room and the guys across the hall told me about it. Don't think I missed any classes over it. There were more important reasons to miss class back then.
It was raining outside so most of the kids jumped at the chance to go to watch tv instead of staying in the gym for indoor recess. My friends and I had seen a bunch of launches, and didn't really care to see another one, even though Christa was a local hometown hero for us, being in New England. The kids ran into the gym to tell us, but no one believed them. That was the first time I can remember seeing an adult cry when they made the whole school announcement. I've heard many of these rumors - It's nice that the anniversary is getting some play, every year it seems more forgotton. Sunday at 8 as well there's a Christa McCauliff documenary on CNN that some students made, that's apparently pretty good.
cleverly disguised as a responsible adult ||
Your post is entirely correct except for one detail - the article listed launch due to 'political pressure' as one of the seven myths. It was rather internal management pressure within NASA, largely due to a limited launch window for the probes the Shuttle was carrying.
I was a college senior majoring in Aerospace Engineering at the time of the accident. In fact, I was in the offices of the local chapter of AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) when I heard the news, and we all rushed to a TV to watch the replays. Being cables relative early years, that was the first time I can remember an entire day of television devoted to a single news story. The accident was a tragedy, but on a personal level Aerospace companies curtailied hiring the rest of the year, waiting to see what shook out of the accident investigation. Hence, I couldn't find a job in my chosen field - and enrolled in grad school. The rest, as they say, is history.
I was with the 82nd Airborne at the time of the accident. We were at a Army Reserve base in Michigan doing winter weather training. I had Charge of Quarters duty that day and stayed at the HQ building warm and toasty. Nothing much to do but watch TV and answer the phone occasionally. At least they had satellite TV to keep me occupied. I watched the launch and the aftermath. (Looked like an explosion to me, but then again, our eyes deceive us).
I just remember sitting there for the longest time not really being able to absorb what I had just seen. When the rest of the guys came back from the field I told them what happened. Most of them refused to believe it until they saw the replays fro themselves. A sad day to be sure.
The opinions expressed here are not mine, but those of these dang voices in my head.
I was in high school when the challenger disaster happened. I totally agree with your reply. I also like his comment on the "social conflict" of the 80s. Like there's not been any since. And to continue your needful criticisms, I'm no grammar nazi, but when someone can't spell basic words it makes me question their insight....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
20 years ago I was what most Slashdot readers are now -- a young nerd with too much time on his hands (in my case, at Georgia Tech getting an engineering degree). I was a dyed-in-the-wool space flight fan, with my shuttle reference manual, space activity journal subscription, and dorky astronomy posters (actually I think I left those on my wall at home, just too dweeby for college).
I remember that day that I had a class at noon, and the launch was happening shortly before then, so I was pacing on edge there in my dorm room, flicking past all 9 local broadcast stations (no cable in dorms) looking for coverage, hoping for just a few seconds at the moment of launch. I HAD found a radio station that was covering it, so I had the soundtrack, just no pictures. The countdown proceeded and launch occured. No TV.
The radio coverage stopped after 60 seconds and they returned to their usual talk radio drivel. I turned off the radio and TV and went to class.
A couple hours later I ran into my roommate (Roger Brown, you out there?) on campus and he told me that the shuttle had exploded on launch. I laughed and told him he was full of it because I had listened to the launch and it went fine. We bet a dime on it (obviously I'm not a betting man) and I continued back to the dorm. I later gave him the dime.
Funny, since then I've always been able to find the launch on TV.
One more thing to demonstrate my nerd chops: in high school, for an honors english class, I wrote a 2-3 page poem about a fictional accident involving the 101st shuttle mission exploding on the launch pad. Written in iambic pentameter. Got an A.
One simple rule for its versus it's
and look up the word "gratuitous"
I am trolling
They are both in focus... how did the photographer get them to stand still? With a high enough shutter speed, you can make a rocket flying out of its launcher stand still. That would be my guess, anyway. Never attribute to malice what is best explained through simple, good photojournalism.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
a russian woman walking past a huge poster of Putin, an iraqi woman walking past a huge poster of Saddam, a venezuelan woman walking past a huge picture of Chavez.
And god walking past a huge poster of Chuck Norris....
sorry....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I remember watching this on a television. Nobody ever claimed it to be live, we might have assumed it was since they interrupted school.
Blar.
They are both in focus... how did the photographer get them to stand still?
1/10000 shutter speed sill stop even a bullet. A fast wide angle lens coupled with fast film and a sunny day = huge depth of field and super fast shutter speeds = photo of action frixen in time in focus and clear.
Most photographers for news have good cameras and not the cheap junk that the common person has.
This doesn't excuse the management decision, but the presentation used by the engineers has actually been written up as a classic example of how NOT to present data to managers. Their presentation used a very complex set of slides to demonstrate than the O-rings experienced some degree of burn-through when they were very cold (failure of an O-Ring utlimately led to the break-up of the Challenger). If they had plotted a simple line-graph of burn-through against temperature - and extrapolated a point to show that day's temperature - their argument would have been much more compelling and harder to ignore. Draw your own conclusions here
I was in junior high school when it happened, in English class. the principal's voice came over the intercom, asking me to come to the office. why just me? because at the time there was no Internet access to be had, and the only way for us to access information quickly was a connection that I knew most about. In the agriculture department of our school we had a decent Apple IIe (or ][e for you purists), and with the attached Hayes modem we had access to AgriData, an online service that provided information about all things agriculture related. In addition to agriculture data, there were also a steady stream of AP news stories, fresh off the AP wire. For the rest of the day, I sat there at the computer, printing out AP articles on the old dot matrix printer and running them to the office for the principal to read to the school.
I still tear up a little when thinking about it. One of those things, even 20 years gone, that makes the hair on the back of your neck stiffen and your whole body shudder a little. God bless them.
Mike O, KT2T
I did read the article. If you had thought a little instead of using a knee-jerk reaction, you would have realized, that I was pointing out, that the concept of spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Any system, no matter how well designed, that releases those kinds of energies is going to have failure of some sort.
It is VERY relevant, that people die of all sorts of things that are not even inherently dangerous, such as walking down the street. However, sitting on top of a large mass of soon-to-explode-stuff is. Those astronauts took their chances and died, too bad, but that was expected.
Were you born in the nineties? Because things were really wrong in the late 1980's in the States and Challenger, Grenada and Panama were all made into huge deals to keep people distracted.
Your comment is currently rated at +5 and is exactly the reason why some comments should be moderated to -5 Totally Uninformed.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
The very idea that non-technical management can override or disregard technical advice provided by professionals in their specialist technical area is a complete travesty.
you have never worked in a corperation have you.
This is the status Quo most places... and very typical in Government.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Too many run ins with that fat fuck to really care about what he has to say.
I would like to know if I was one of the few. I had just finished a class at Georgia State University. To go to my part time job, I had to walk through the student center to get to the outside of the building. The TV which was never on was on this morning with 15 - 20 people gathered around. I asked what was up. Someone said that they were going to launch in a couple of minutes.
Where I worked was a 5 minute walk so I had time. I decided to watch it and after it was out of viewing range would leave for work.
I remember it well because it was unusual. I don't know if the TV at Georgia State University had the feed or not, I would really like to know.
I do remember when the shuttle broke up every one turning to look at everyone else to to see if what we just saw was really happening.
Can someone let me know.
Thanks,
Nathan
Every car I've ever owned in the USA had the gas tank under the trunk/boot. Several feet BEHIND the passenfer. I find it very hard to believe that the gas tank manages to get repositioned UNDER the passenger compartment before rupturing and burning. Most colissions from the rear compress the auto but do not fold it up. Neither do side impacts general distort the chassis such that the user is OVER the tank.
I think you are talking out of your ass. You have a point about saftey, but don't lie to get your point accross.
Blar.
I have heard, from several indipendent sources that the crew cabin had it's own structural reinorcements that make it stronger than the surrounding shuttle body.
If I understand this correctly, it is this cabin that survived (and can be seen on film) falling, intact, to the water below.
On a side note, I have a gut feeling (worth nothing more than what it means to me) that there was some consciousnous of the crew after the explosion (the ball of fire was big enough for me to continue to call it that). I hope that perhaps rapid rotation of the crew cabin during free fall caused g-forces to keep them blacked out before impact.
At the time of the launch I lived in Sarasota, FL. Sarasota is on the west coast of Florida, just south of Tampa. Even though the Cape is on the East coast, nearly 200 miles away, you can clearly see the launches on a clear day. (Night launches are SPETACULAR, but that's another story) I was outside watching the launch. Even from 200 miles away, it was clear that the tank BURST first, the orbiter and solid rockets cut loose from the tank. The orbiter continued upward due to momentum. The SRB's actually accellerated since they were still running, but were now only supporting their own weight. The SRB's also went "squirrley" at that point since they were no longer guided. A bit later, probably less than a second, there were multiple explosions from the debris cloud that had previously been the tank. Remember, the SRB cut open the OXYGEN tank. That alone would not cause an explosion. It would cause nearly everything it touched to burn, but no explosion yet. Until it burned through the hydrogen tank and the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could mix. Then it goes off like, well, a rocket.... But if you do the math on it, I had nearly as good a view from 200 miles away and people at the Cape did....
From what I've seen, pretty much all of his list are things I've never even heard of, the first one may have some merrit, but the rest seem to be really scraping the barrel.
And most slashdoters can probably tell you the root cause of the problem, involving managers, rubber o-rings, and freezing tempratures.
They got a new teacher! :-)
Also:
Q - What's worse than finding broken glass in baby food?
A - Finding astronaut in your tuna
Q - What were Crista McAulliff's last words?
A - "I said Bud Light!"
Revell's producing a new model of the Challenger. No assembly required.
Typical Slashdot moderation. Post an anti-Republican, TROLL statement like yours and it gets modded as insightful just because it's anti-Republican.
If you think that the Clinton years were any less FUD, you must be the proud owner of a very strong pair of prescription, rose-colored glasses. EVERY Presidency is about FUD to one extent or the other regardless of whether or not that president happens to be of your political party or not. That's partly what politicking is all about.
No, sir, your extremist view ("I have decided for everyone that you're part of the problem because I don't like how you voted!") is the real problem, regardless of which political party is being demeaned or defended.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Mr T pities you, god, and Chuck Norris.
Heh. The classic "I understand it so they will" problem.
Tech types need to remember that even *if* their audience is as smart as them, their intelligence may well be targeted at a completely different area, leaving them completely unable to understand what you are saying, or only understand enough to be dangerous.
I grew up in south Florida, and saw it happen live. I was in 8th grade. It was at the start of our 4th period, which for me was band. I remember it being a freezing cold day, especially for Florida. We all went outside to watch, as was a fairly common thing to do at that point (remember, the shuttle program was only 5 years old at the time, and to middle-school kids was still really neat).
At the point at which the single contrail split into two (the explosion), we all just stared. There was no Aha! or Oh my God! moment. We all just stared, confused. After a few seconds, someone in the group asked the band teacher if something was wrong. I don't think he knew one way or the other, but he must have been wondering the same thing. He ushered us all back into the classroom, and went to his office.
About a minute later, he returned from his office and said that the shuttle blew up.
In the town I grew up in, Pratt and Whitney was the dominant employer. Following the accident, Pratt got the job or reengineering the now infamous O-rings, and a family friend of ours, who had retired a few years earlier, was asked to un-retire and lead the effort.
In tabulario donationem feci.
I actually fell into a chair when I saw the fireball, and I do remember seeing the spots of fire on the SRBs just before that happened.
And I distinctly remember thinking "No shit, Sherlock. It's gonna really suck for you too when you find out just how major" when the guy on the NASA comms circuit said something like "We appear to have a major malfunction."
I think it's called "exposure." There are many reasonable measures, by distance traveled, by time spent doing the activity, by year of life, by number of people participating in the activity, etc.
How many Challenger Astronauts can you fit in a Volkswagon Beetle?...
Eleven: two in the front, two in the back, and seven in the ashtray.
Anyone who takes this article or any other mainstream writing seriously to review the link at the bottom of the page to another article this cheeseball wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6872105/
This "NBC News Space Analyst" is merely amusing himself with alliterations rather than writing with any substance. As an armchair quarterback attempting to draw conclusions in an extremely complicated and ongoing area of science spanning decades, his writings do nothing more than cater to the overall knee-jerk hand-waving that has become the mainstay of mainstream "news".
I invite those of you who are more technical, more inquisitive, and deeper than the target audience of this "Space Analyst" to skip the gyst of the article. It's simply inflammatory garbage.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I was home sick from school that day, and watched it on network TV. I remember the commentators trying to figure out what happened and being totally at a loss for words.
The Evil Bert incident, however, would have been pretty hard to fake. One of the first editors to notice it had thought the photo was doctored, but had checked other photos of the same poster from different angles, and found they all showed Evil Bert. So he checked the negatives, and there was evil Bert. He then checked with pictures taken by different photographers for different new agencies, and sure enough, photographers that hadn't even noticed Evil Bert in the photos had still captured the same image on the poster.
I clearly remember watching it happen live on one of the broadcast stations in southern CA. I was in college at the time.
MSNBC can't even get something as simple as this right. What a bunch of whack jobs. Why should believe whatever other tripe comes out of their new rooms?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Dude -- the shuttle is super-safe. No car or widespread-use airliner comes close to its record in all-cause fatalities per mile travelled. Conservative, back-of-the-envelope calcs give it something like 1 death every 300 million miles. that's like saying one in evey 3500 cars will be involved in a fatality.
My history teacher was one of the finalists for the mission. During the "competition" process Christa McAuliffe became a friend of hers. We watched the launch live during history class. I was 10 years old. We all saw it, but I don't think anyone really understood. School was let out early and when I got home my mom and dad were watching President Regan speaking about the event. With the exception of my mom's death a year later, that was the only time I ever saw my dad cry. During the course of my life, I will forget lots of things but that is a day that I will *never* forget.
For some reason I have a facination with the incident so I have spent a lot of time studying the facts, the videos, the NASA reports. Myth #3 (that the astronauts died at 73 seconds) is the only one that I've found people think to be true. I have a feeling that people do believe it because it's more comfortable to assume they died instantly rather than think it was even possible that they survived the event and met a much more unfriendly end (slamming into the ocean at 200mph).
--Insert catchy
Hell, I took the day off from school to a) work on my car and b) watch the launch. I sat for a good sixty minutes watching the screen in total disbelief as did 5 of my friends. I'd like to know how this guy arrived at that statement. If he didn't do any major grunt work in tracking down who did and did not see it and is just "guessing" based on the coverage of CNN at the time then the guys a tard.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
One of the positive things about the Internet, is it's ability to give everyone a voice. I still have enough faith in the world, that those who what to do the right thing easily outnumber those that dont. Concepts like Wikipedia help to preserve the real facts of events because so many people have a vested interest in keeping the articles they contribute to error-free. Information is power, and the governments of the world don't understand that they no longer control the information flow.
Not really. Wikipedia still reflects the bias of those who are likely to contribute and edit. Just because a bunch of people say something is the 'truth' doesn't mean it is.
Teenagers do some crazy stuff -- and I am *not* recommending this in any way. But it's slightly relevant, so I'll mention it.
... A huge fireball would erupt and entirely envelope the, uhh, experimenter. Huge, but very brief. The effect was enough to somewhat scorch the hair, but that's about it, tho it did leave a whiff of paraffin about the person, as I recall. Whether you want to call that an explosion or not is semantic. But the point of the article is that the fireball that accompanied the breakup of the Challenger no more tore it apart than those paraffin fireballs blew us kids apart.
As a kid, a few times we'd soak a rag in paraffin and place it a convenient external corner, a concrete surface where two walls met at a right angle. Then we'd take a bicycle pump, suck up a load of *paraffin* (not petrol), aim it carefully at the blazing rag from a distance of a couple of feet, and then blat out the paraffin really hard. (I know, I know).
The result was impressive
This is the sixth article I've read so far this week with a title having to do with exposing a set number, less than 10, of "myths".
s _scoring=d&hl=en&edition=us&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+S earch&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nsrc=&as_nloc=&as_o cct=title&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=&as_mind=28&as_minm=1&a s_maxd=27&as_maxm=1
There are more: http://news.google.com/news?as_q=myths&svnum=10&a
Is this some sort of 100th-monkey thing? Has the Bullshit!/Mythbusters TV-propagated meme hit its polynomial stride?
I dislike this style of newsreporting, because it sets up the audience to believe they have expertise in the topic of discussion. Bullet-point simplification is acceptable for broad overviews, but in some of these cases very complex topics are being crudely distilled for fast-food consumption. The end result is usually just the opinion of the reporter, garnished with cherry-picked evidence supporting the gist of the claim.
Write news articles, not PowerPoint presentations. It's really no wonder that most people just regurgitate the news rather than bothering to attempt any sort of analysis or further processing. You can't properly analyze a book when all you have is the Cliff's Notes.
I agreed completely with every word (except #7, which I partially agree with).
I didn't see it live. The Challenger launch was the first one I missed.
I had been living in Orlando since 1980 and saw every single launch before Challenger, not live on TV but live from the back yard. One or two launches we drove to the coast to see it close up.
My oldest daughter was six months old. She, my then-wife and I had moved back to Illinois and were living with my father.
He saw it, and yelled at me from the other room. I got to the TV in time to see the first "instant replay." My dad was pretty shook up, mostly because I had drawn pictures of exploding rockets as a kid, and apparently my imagination matched reality pretty well.
Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
Few would have - it was in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. Most folks were at work. (I was looking for work and was only home by coincidence.)
Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
That particular disaster wasn't inevitable, as it shouldn't have been launched in that cold weather, colder than that part of Flarida hardly ever gets. The O rings weren't designed for freezing outside temperatures.
However, accidents happen no matter how careful you are. When teh Empire State building went up, its owners were proud that fewer men died building it than expected. Up to then you expected ten deaths per floor built.
Men died building the big golf ball at Epcot in Disney. A six year old kid in Chicago died a few weeks ago when he and his family, in their car, were run over by a commercial jetliner that slid into the highway.
Over two thousand soldiers have died in the Iraq war alone.
In over four decades of American space flight, there have been only three fatal accidents. I think that's a pretty damned good safety record; how many died discovering America?
And, you have to die from something. I'd rather die being launched into space than from Alzheimer's.
(mrc="hitching")
However, I was certain that they would have still been alive. The underside of all shuttles are designed to withstand the heat of re-entry, which should have been as hot or hotter than the heat of the explosion (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=explosio n's definition of an explosion) which forced the shuttle away from the fuel tank and booster rockets.
But, I also believed that the cockpit should have survived the impact into the water, and the crew died whilst waiting (concious or not) for NASA to get over their shock and send a Search & Rescue crew out to them.
If one thing is to be learned from Challenger & Columbia, is that the crew quarters should be designed to separate in times of dire emergency, and be equipped to fall to Earth in the same manner as the crew quarters on a manned rocket mission
What I remember is:
Q: What's the difference between the Space Shuttle and a Monastery?
A: One teaches friars, and the other fries teachers
I actually read about the breakup, here, on Slashdot, first, before any news channel. This was the first time that I saw something (news significant) on the 'net before it came out on TV... Kind'a shocking it was. It was a real geek moment for me though.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
I remember the accident clearly. Somewhere In my house I even have a VHS tape with at least 4 continuous hours of coverage on it.
I've even got a weird story to tell about that day. I was home that day and was watching televsion when the news report had interrupted whatever it was I was watching. I watched stunned. As a kid I was interested in aircraft, rockets, etc. So to see this unfold in front of my eyes, live, was a shock. Watching the coverage, seeing how the accident was explained made me curious. During a commercial break, I ran into my bedroom to grab my model of the Columbia shuttle and look at it as a reference point. It was one of those full blown kits; shuttle, boosters, fuel tank, platform. I kept my shuttle proudly on top of a tall bookshelf next to my bed. When I came in and looked up, it wasn't there. It had fallen down to my bed, the left booster detached from the fuel tanks.
Sure, it wasn't the exact spot where the challenger experienced the failure. But it was an eerie coincidence nonetheless. That model was up on its shelf when I left my bedroom to watch tv and came down sometime before I saw the live news report.
Airplanes are 100x safer than a car. You are riding a container of explosive fuel and remember you are sitting on top of the explosives.
A few months ago, I ran across an interesting article describing how movie makers create those explosions that you always see in auto and plane crashes.
Their problem is that the fuels used in autos and airplanes just aren't explosive. It takes some rather complex and precisely-times equipment to create the tiny "explosions" that power an internal-combustion engine. Even then, engineers will object that those are just very rapidly-spreading fires inside a container, so that pressure builds up in the cylinder. But there's no explosion in any techical sense of the term. To get an explosion, you need to ignite all the fuel at once, and the fuel doesn't contain enough oxygen. In a crash, there's no way to mix the fuel with air thoroughly enough to get an explosion.
What they do in the movies is create the explosions through special effects, and usually add them to the scene after the fact. There are quite a lot of movies where this is done cheaply, so if you watch the scene closely, you'll see that the explosion often happens slightly before the crash. Often the flying pieces and fireball obviously come from behind the vehicle.
This is done for dramatic reasons, of course. A real crash just doesn't have anything spectacular about it. There's a crunch, things stop quickly, and everything is all dented. In a few cases, the fuel tank is ruptured, and if it touches something hot (usually the exhaust pipe), you get flames. But no explosion.
In the case of those spectacular photos of the World Trade Center with the huge fireball, you can see just by looking at them that it wasn't an explosion. If it were, you'd see signs of the blast. The fireball has obviously been there for several seconds, long enough for sound waves to reach the ground, but there's no visible blast effect on the nearby smoke, which is drifting in a slow breeze. There's nothing like flying glass or other debris that you'd expect in an explosion. There is debris visible, falling nearly straight downward. It's an impressive fireball, with falling pieces of building and plane, but sorry, there wasn't really an explosion. It was two impacts with falling debris, followed by the fires that destroyed the buildings.
In reading about the work needed to produce explosions in movie crashes, it occurs to me that al Qaeda missed something in this caper: They should have had the sense to have camera crews on site to record the whole thing, with lots of closeups from various angles. They could sell the footage to movie studios. This could have been a good source of funding for future efforts. I guess this shows that they just aren't very good business men.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
My father worked for Rockwell at the time; he was with the shuttle program from its inception. My mother had lived in Titusville, FL (where I was born) for several years, at least since the Moon program, so she'd grown up around the space program.
Even though I was so young, I can remember how proud my dad was to work on the shuttle and how proud I was of him.I remember we could watch the launches from our house. I don't remember the entire time, but I remember the explosion...
We had the TV on and were going back and forth between them. When it happened, I remember looking at it and not comprehending what was going on. The TV channel, I think, was following a booster; to me, since I didn't understatnd what was happening, I somehow still thought it was the shuttle. The sky was getting darker, and I kept asking "Daddy, is it in space yet?".My father was panicking, saying "No! It's shouldn't be doing that!". I don't remember my mother's reaction...
My mother did tell me that afterwards, the town was in shock. She said that the people looked dead... She said all she could think of was how she hoped my sister wouldn't be born that day; that she didn't want to happen to the child.And it didn't. My little sister was born two days later. About a year later, we left Titusville since my father lost his job in the aftermath.
Those are my memories."Needs another seven astronauts" At least that the was the joke that got one Florida dj fired that day.
More to the point, the engineers just weren't capable of expressing their concerns in a way that made sense to managers. The managers weren't stupid. They lacked domain knowledge and the engineers couldn't express what they knew in a way that made sense. When they tried charts, they made it worse.
/ tufte.shtml
See Tufte's graphs:
badly excepted here: http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
reviewed here http://www.statview.com/support/techsup/faq/Tufte
*whoosh*
What were the last words spoken on the shuttle?
"Okay, FINE! Let the bitch drive."
(Heard on a dial-up BBS 6 hours after the disaster. Dialed in with my C64.)
The 2003 Columbia flight recorders show it started shaking and the automated pilot trying to compensate for about 70 seconds before the hull was breached. The crew would have known what was happening at this time. And much of the flesh survived to the ground too.
Many mid-air plane accidents such the 1983(?) Korean airlines shootdown by the Russians can glide for tens of minutes before the crash. Lawyers are able to argue large pain & suffering compensation from insurance companies.
I was told that the astronauts themselves had the right to stop the mission, and that engineers that knew the risks could have called them and explained the danger. I was also told by an astronomer who knew one of those engineers that those engineers are haunted by that knowledge to this day.
How do we know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?
Found her head and shoulders on the beach.
What I really noticed about this article was the claim that some TV-companies added an explosion sound to the footage.
On the DVD Trinity and Beyond , one of the special features is raw footage of a nuclear test.
One thing noticable was a delay between the explosion and the sound, which makes sense. Given that the camera is usually a few miles away from ground zero, the sound would take several seconds to reach the microphone (approx. 5 seconds per mile).
Most films (both fiction and documentary) with explosions show the explosion and sound at the same time.
The only movie I can think of that had a sound-delay after an explosion was Red Dawn (the first gas station scene, when the protagonists gathering supplies). And maybe The Beast , which was directed by Kevin Reynolds, who wrote Red Dawn.
KSC is actually on Merritt Island and everyone I knew worked (either directly or indirectly) for KSC.
We were pretty positive there was political pressure. I'm not surprised that they couldn't find anything specific after the shuttle incident....but...
Or knew him. Whichever.
I remember the day well, I had just graduated from college and was working at Rocketdyne, the then maker of the Shuttle Main Engines (SSME). I worked in the section that built the turbopumps for the SSME.
Some time during the morning a message went over the intercom that there was a "system failure on flight 51". Heads popped up across the cubicle farm and people started talking but nobody surmised the extent of the problem. Most assumed that the the flight was scubbed.
The company or NASA shut down the phone lines coming into the building so that no one could report the incident to us. When some went out for lunch they were stunned to hear the news on TV's in the malls and on the radio. Some time in the afternoon all or the build books that documented the contruction of the turbopumps and the main engine itself were consficated and held behind armed guards. They were concerned that some engineer would go "oh oh maybe I let that torque go out of spec" and go back and alter the records. I spent the rest of the summer helping to prepare a report for Feynman.
"Oh, him? That's just God. He only thinks he's Chuck Norris."
Thanks for the info! Nice to hear from someone who knows. I had the vague impression that the honeycomb depended for its structural integrity on the composite skin, sort of like a monocoque design in car bodies, so that damage to the 'skin' can result in too much stress to the substructure, hence overall failure. Is this possible?
Management schools teach that you don't have to understand something to manage it. They believe that their techniques are everything. This disproves that, but it is a religious issue, not subject to facts.
...man, was I wrong. I screwed up that day. I was in college, and we were hanging around our ROTC lounge. The liftoff was being shown on TV (broadcast, not cable) and some cadets were watching. I said, "bah, another shuttle launch, big deal" and left the room and went outside. This is why I'm not buying the guy's point that nobody watched it live. It was definitely on live. I saw the preparations for launch and left during the countdown.
A short while later one of the other cadets was wandering off by himself in the courtyard. A professor came up to me and asked what was bothering the cadet. At this point I didn't know of the accident, so I flippantly replied, "The shuttle blew up." I guess I thought I was being funny. At least I didn't throw in a "Nelson" laugh.
Now that I think about it, a similar thing happened on 9/11. I drove to work (from near Baltimore to just before the DC beltway) at the time of the attacks. I either had the radio off or I was listening to a book on tape...probably the former because I was mad at my boss and wanted to talk to him first thing. I get to work, go into the building and straight into my boss' office. I start on whatever issue was eating at me and he says, "Not now." Just then one of my coworkers pops his head in and says to my boss, "The 2nd tower's down." At this point I'm totally confused so I go to my office and quickly learn what happened.
The morals of the stories? Don't make tragedy jokes because they may just come true, and always check the news at my computer first thing. There's probably a deeper lesson there that would make me a better person but I don't see it. I guess a better person would probably pick up on it...
I remember sitting in the library at my school since we did have a satellite I got to see it live. When it first went I thought cool explosion but when I looked around the room and saw the teachers were very upset I kinda freaked out a little. I just kept thinking it was so horrible all those people died and that I would never get to go into space. I don't know why I thouhgt I wouldn't get to be astronasut because of this accident but I was very young and I guess a little self centered(maybe alot but hey I was a kid). Still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up thinking about it.
WTF?
I was in the 8th grade when the Challenger exploded. I was sitting in Math class, and the principal, who looked very distant or distracted, walked into the room and announced that the Space Shuttle had exploded. She said that there was a television in the library, and if anyone wanted to watch, they could. She wasn't saying this to be ghoulish, but sort of matter-of-factly. The look on her face was unforgettable: pure shock and disbelief...no sadness...just shock. Needless to say, the math teacher essentially cancelled class, and I made my way to the library. There were about 20 or so chairs in a loose jumble around the TV, and most of these were full. I took a seat in front of the 6th grade English teacher, and turned to watch. I don't remember what channel it was...I suspect it was CNN, but it could have been network coverage. There was a man on talking very quietly and sadly, but looking down constantly at notes, not even looking at the camera. There was a graphic in the upper right that may have said "Challenger Explodes". After about 2-3 minutes of reading notes outloud, the man finally looked up and said they were going to show video of the event. The video showed a routine take-off and liftoff. As Challenger got further and further, the image got shakier and slightly grainy, as if they were switching to cameras with higher and higher zooms. Suddenly, Challenger exploded. No warning. Nothing. The most vivid memory was that the teacher sitting behind me actually jumped in her seat pretty hard. She'd been watching so intently that she was more surprized than I, if that was possible. I could do nothing other than stare blankly at the TV in disbelief. I couldn't even register a coherent thought at that point. My whole body and mind was simply numb. The rest of that day was a total fog...I think I sat in front of the TV for another 15-20 minutes. I don't remember speaking to anyone the rest of the school day, but no one else seemed to be in the mood to talk.
Even today, I was shuddering reading the recount of this tragic event that happened 20 years ago.
--- Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
During the filming of The Twilight Zone movie, Victor Morrow was decapitated in a helicoptor accident.
:-)
Hence the joke:
Q - How did they know Vic Morrow had dandruff?
A - They found his head and shoulders in the bushes.
NASA does not stand for "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
You obviously do not know the difference between "broadcast" and "cable."
So my original post is right and you fail for being not only a moron, but also an asshole.
20 years ago? Yikes!
I remember that morning. As a space nut I was watching the launch preparations (and delays) on TV as I got ready for work. They hadn't launched by the time I left.
Later that morning one of our part-time students came in and asked if everybody had heard that Challenger had blown up. I felt myself go grey, went home sick, and spent the afternoon glued to the TV.
So, no, I didn't see it live. Probably just as well.
Apollo 1 was a little before my time - I was only 5 in 1966. I distinctly remember a couple of years later, though, thinking how badly it would suck to be away from home for Christmas while watching coverage of Apollo 8.
...laura
I was at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, on the fateful day in 1986. At the time, I was between classes and was writing a couldn't-take-the-hint-letter to my ex-girlfriend when I wrote, 'I have to watch the launch now.' Granted, I never sent the letter.
4-8-15-16-23-42
Looks like you're aiming for a -1 Troll moderation now. Challenger *was* a huge deal. It was not *made* into a huge deal. When the Challenger was destroyed, the American Century started to be destroyed with it. Our sense of infalibility, superiority, and incredible technology was irreparably damaged by what happened.
The Shuttle was a source of pride for many Americans, regardless of one's political affiliation. The number of incident-free shuttle launches enforced that position every time the shuttle returned safely to the point that safe shuttle launches and landings were taken for granted. Even the media was proof of this. Whereas every news outlet carried the shuttle launches live in the beginning of the shuttle program, only CNN carried it live on that fateful day. It was assumed that all would be well by every news outlet, so why bother showing a live launch? We'll just report yet another successful launch on the 6 o'clock news. The Challenger disaster caught us completely off guard and was a major blow to the American psyche. Not only had we lost our astronauts, we lost a chunk of our pride with it.
No, you are the one who deserves a "-5 Totally Informed". At the very least a "-5 Trying To Still Politicize Something That Happened Two Decades Ago Because I Didn't Like The Reagan Administration" should apply. You have karma that you're trying to burn, I assume.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Somehow it always reassures me when one of these 'big myths' stories comes out, and I'm not wrong on any of them. Are these really widespread?
1. Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
Well I did. I was one of the school children in that program.
2. The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word.
Well duhh, read the details. I'm sure to most of us 'challenger' meant the whole package, and there was a rather large fireball involved, which in the common definition of the word would qualify as an explosion
3. The flight, and the astronauts' lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch.
The facts are just unclear.
4. The design of the booster, while possessing flaws subject to improvement, was neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.
Though the flaws subject to improvement would likely have been fixed if not for political interference (or beurocracy as you prefer).
5. Replacement of the original asbestos-bearing putty in the booster seals was unrelated to the failure.
Who thought this?
6. There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.
Except of course for the whole 'teacher in space' deal.
7. Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management -- the disaster should have been avoidable.
Which of course runs counter to his previous claim that political interference had no impact.
All in all, what a crap article.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"Each of the pair of solid-fuel boosters was made from four separate segments that bolted end-to-end-to-end together, and flame escaping from one of the interfaces was what destroyed the shuttle"
.. was later suggested` this is incorrect. The engineers repeatedly reported problems with the infamous O-rings. Their objections were repeatedly ignored by the management. Why Oberg would propagate this distortion at this time is curious to say the least. After all he is a reporter at the prestigious MSNBC.
t ml
.. 'Don't launch.' Roger Boisjoly,
t ml
"Although the obvious solution of making the boosters of one long segment (instead of four short ones) was later suggested, long solid fuel boosters have problems with safe propellant loading, with transport"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/
The decision to make the boosters in segments was a political one and not a technological one. The fact is that the booster rockets had to be made in the home state of the 'powerful Republican senator` in order to get approval for the budget. At the time there was a lot of complaint about the excessive spending on space flight. The managers at NASA were told to come up with a cost effective solution that would allow cheaper routine missions with a reusable vehicle. With hindsight it is easy to see that the technology could not deliver.
Regarding 'the obvious solution
The facts are that Roger Boisjoly, the engineer with Morton Thiokol protested against the launch. Here is an extract from a memo he wrote in July 1985 *seven* months before the disaster. Later on Roger was forced out of MTI. No one at NASA or Morton Thiokol has ever been heald accountable for the shuttle disaster and the loss of seven lives.
"This letter is written to insure that management is fully aware of the seriousness of the current O-ring erosion problem in the SRM joints from an engineering standpoint"
"It is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action to dedicate a team to solve the problem with the field joint having the number one priority, then we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch pad facilities"
http://onlineethics.org/moral/boisjoly/MTImemo1.h
'Don't launch.'
"I felt I really did all I could to stop the launch." Roger Boisjoly,
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.78.html
"Approximately one month after my testimony to the House Committee, I could no longer endure the hostile environment at MTI,"
http://onlineethics.org/essays/shuttle/post-dis.h
The objective of a parachute system would NOT have been to make for a soft landing in the water. It would need to be way too big to do that. On the other hand, why would it need to? The cabin had a servicable airlock and was airtight. So long as it struck the water slow enough so that deceleration was survivable, that's about all you'd need. Then it would just be a matter of escaping a submerged vehicle, which I believe NASA astronauts are specifically trained in doing.
The important thing is not that the escape system should be gentle, smooth and relaxing. It just needs to keep people alive, and even then only long enough for them to extract themselves, or be extracted, from the situation.
There may be other mechanisms, but the principle remains the same - NASA has always objected to an escape system on grounds of weight and space, but if you really go for the absolute minimal survival-only-never-mind-the-comfort escape system, it may well be within reasonable limits.
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)
I am a materials scientist and I'm really tired of getting blamed when you avionics and mechanical people don't do your %$&#* homework! I quote
n Menu/ASMFoundation/Materials_Camp/StudentsMaterial sCamp/CampOverview.htm but it's an uphill battle.
"Materials scientists tend to know little about how composite materials like the RCC panels age, especially in the harsh environment they had to endure"
Oh really, no kidding, well if you genius's had decided to fund that study we wouldn't be having this conversation, now would we?
I've got composite materials data out the wazoo. I'm sitting in a library filled with data on all types of polymer and composite materials, not to mention the original drafts of papers by guys like Lawrence Broutman. And because you aren't familar with catastrophic failure modes in composite pre-pregs and laminates, this is somehow my fault?
No one respects Materials Scientists, you don't listen, you don't understand basic fundamental principles and then you're surprised when things go wrong 20 years later?
And as for the foam problem, here's a hint, when a large object strikes another object at near supersonic speeds the impact, no matter the properties of the impacting object causes impact effects in the impacted material. If you wanted impact strength in that situation, you should have used titanium or a superalloy. It's not my fault NASA's managers slept through MS 200 when they got their undergraduate degrees. I spend days hitting composites with charpy and izod impact hammers, I should know.
Materials science education in this country is woefully under-utilized. We're trying to change that http://www.asminternational.org/Content/Navigatio
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
The only thing Reagan had going for him was his public persona... otherwise he was a quack.
I recently graduated college with a degree in Economics, and Reagan came up quite frequently during class discussions... as a way to destroy a perfectly good economy.
"Reaganomics: Help the poor by giving to the rich!" rather than helping the poor directly.
You can also credit Reagan with the "War on Drugs", which is about as futile as the current war in Iraq. Keep in mind that Jimmy Carter campaigned in the 1976 election on the premise that he would decriminalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana... and WON. Even presidents like Nixon focused more on rehabilitation rather than criminalization of drug users, and he was a staunch Republican as well.
So yeah, I guess it's safe to say that you are part of the problem because you voted for him... had Carter gotten another four years in office things could very well have been different... but most people like to think that Carter was somehow responsible for the oil crisis in the late 70's, which severely damaged him politically. One only needs to look at what he's done after being out of office just to see his character.
But, you keep your rose colored glasses on... wouldn't want you to see just how bad Reagan really was... talk about revisionist history. Sheesh!
For more, see: http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/shuttle/shuttle1.ht
I think the point is that we DO forget and should be reminded. Apollo 13 was almost unknown until it turned out to be a good plot for a movie (complete with a happy ending). The Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts (on January 27, 1967 --19 years and a day before the Challenger accident) including the father of one of my fellow kindergarteners. It wasn't as striking an image as Challenger or Columbia but it was at least as traumatic.
It's not even so much about honoring the individuals who died but rather about our collective responsibility.
I witnessed the Challenger accident first hand. I was working in Firing room 2 that day and was looking out of the giant window during the launch. My job was finished at that point so I was free to watch the launch. The thing I remember most was the fact that it was so cold that day. I usually would go outside and watch the launches. That day I was standing in FR2 and I could see my breath inside. I was wearing a B2 bomber jacket inside on top of that, just to give you the idea of how cold it was. There was ice all over the pad and they almost scrubbed it because of the danger the ice would pose to the vehicle. The temperature warmed enough to melt the ice, so the countdown continued. Which surprised me because it was so damn cold! I remember saying this out loud. Ignoring the cold for a second, the launch was beautiful and looked perfect! Then when the vehicle disintegrated, I instantly thought RTLS (Return To Launch Site). In the event of an emergence the shuttle would basically fly back to the runway at Kennedy. I kept looking for the Shuttle, but didn't see anything but debris. It took me a few minutes to realize the vehicle was completely destroyed. There was a small glimmer of hope when several minutes later we saw a parachute on some of the monitors. This turned out to be from the nose cone of one of the Solid Rocket Boosters(SRB). The firing rooms were as quite as I had ever seen them. I pin drop could have been heard. It was one of the most tragic days I have ever had! My own thoughts turned inward to think through my job...had I done everything correctly...what caused the accident...did the main engines blowup. I am sure the others were having similiar thoughts. The thing that the public may not realize is that the space program and all its workers are like one giant family! We all watch out for each other, and especially the Astronauts! The management decisions made that day were done with the safety of the Astronauts in mind. Nothing else matters! There was no conspiracy; no one was aware of the SRB issues until after the fact. The temperatures were in the known operational safety ranges. So losing the Astronauts was like losing a Brother, Sister, Mother, or Father. The NASA management then were all very intellegent men. The bueacracy in place at NASA is there to ensure the safety of the vehicle and the lives of those working with it. I have read some of the comments from others. The article is very accurate. I was there, I know! I recall walking down to the FR consoles and looking at the displays. I remember the speed and altitude of the vehicle before the telemetry stopped. The screens were all frozen with the same data. The fact as to whether the vehicle exploded or did a fast burn is irrelavant! The fact that the Astronauts died is! The greatest respect we can pay to these men and women was to make the program safer, but also to never give up on the exploration. We are all meant to be explorers, whether its scientific, business, or flying through space...its what we are and how we should always remain.
We saw it, too: I was in 8th grade at STA Middle School in the suburban Twin Cities, and it was during Mr. Bassett's "Model Rocketry and Aeronautics" class. (A highly-desireable elective, by the way: the teacher *ruled,* and making & flying paper airplanes and model rockets -- like Chris Ginther's six-foot monster -- so close to the MSP flight paths entailed a great thrill of danger.)
Mr. Bassett silently rolled in the giant TV-on-a-five-foot-cart and switched it on. We'd never seen him do this during class before -- he usually slipped into the passage behind the whiteboard to sneak sips of coffee, but I think this time he just stalked out into the halway and returned with the A/V cart -- so we all stopped. We watched them replay it over and over, no longer paying attention to the model rockets and paper airplanes on the tables in front of us.
Looking back, it seems almost contrived, but that's what happened.
Mr. Bassett died this past weekend, and he was one of the finest teachers I ever had. Mentioning his death in conjuction with the anniversary of this tragedy also seems contrived, but he was a warm, funny, and smart man and a fine teacher, and he will be sorely missed.
It's not uncommon for an automotive fuel tank to rupture during a high speed rear end collision. Sometimes it's a design flaw, like having a bolt positioned to pierce the tank on impact (the Pinto).
In any case, the fuel spills on the ground, under the vehicle. As the parent suggests, occupants of said vehicle are roasted over the flames.
Although, from what I've seen of airplane accidents, it's not uncommon for passengers to get soaked with kerosene after impact. Fuel gets splashed everywhere.
Lesson learned: high speed impact, humans, and fuel make a toasty warm fire.
I heard, maybe it was on Buchanan/Huzinsky's Organisational Behaviour, that the real reason for the incident was the project management side of things - in this sense it was a project management disaster. Looks like the article backs up some of this: unreasonable requests from non-technical people, lack of communication between parties, delays that have to be made up for by cutting other things (like safety) etc.
So is this a myth too?
IIRC, one of the most inept parts of the design was that the O-ring seal cupped upward, allowing precipitation to collect in the seal groove and then freeze? A downward-opening groove would have been more logical.
Or Dick Spring, the Irish politician
MythTV is going on right now. It's constantly running somewhere...maybe everywhere. I just checked...it's recording something for me now.
I just so happens, that the challenger disaster happened on my birthday. That can be very tremadic for a kid who love's space and science.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
But I guess now I'm not so sure... I was watching the US armed forces channel in Germany - for me it was the afternoon, I guess. Mom was in the kitchen, preggers with my brother, dad was at work, and I was hunkered down in front of the tv watching the launch on the one-and-only channel available.
Anyone know if the overseas armed forces broadcast was live?
My sig sucks.
I did not IN ANY WAY defend either the Reagan or Bush administrations. In fact, I defy you to find ANY quote of mine that defended either administration.
You were so determined to show your hatred - and, yes, it is hatred - for Republican administrations that you oh-so-unsubtly just skipped over just as corrupt an administration because it was convenient for you to do so.
The point, that you so arrogantly decided to ignore, is that ALL administrations are corrupt. Just because Clinton was clearly your boy does not make him som kind of martyr who never did any wrong. He did a hell of a lot of things wrong, not the least of which include lying under oath, raising our taxes, allowing his wife to try to further turn this country into a socialist state, and developing Echelon, which was his version of the Bush wiretappings. Unlike you, however, I do not condemn his entire administration as totally corrupt. There were many points about the Clinton administration that I *do* agree with. There are many points about the current administration that I despise. I'm not going to bother to point them out because you obviously wouldn't believe me anyway.
You're so filled with anti-Republican vitriol that I'm not even going to bother responding to anything else. A brick wall would be better conversation. So, you go ahead and fill your ego with the last word. It's clear that your ego and venom won't accept anything less, so have at it. I'm not going to help you to continue your unbearably biased rant any more. We have enough uninformed trolls on Slashdot as it is.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I was attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Univ. in Daytona at that time. We paused a class I was in to stand outside and watch. At 73 seconds, we knew what had happened.
It's not uncommon for people to believe falsely, in retrospect, that they witnessed something "live" on TV. Videotape "looks" live, and if the replay comes very shortly after the event, the confusion is often inevitable. Millions of older Americans swear they saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald "live" on TV -- in reality, only NBC carried it live. (ABC didn't even have a remote unit at the site, and CBS was in the middle of a commentary and cut to Dallas about a minute after it happened. But they all played videotape of the shooting endlessly over the next few hours.) And let's not forget that Dubya claimed he saw the first plane that hit the WTC live as it happened. Conspiracy theorists latched onto this as evidence of foreknowledge of the attack, that Bush somehow had a "secret satellite feed" of the attack, etc. When, in reality, he was probably just mistaken. (Always a safe bet when Bush is involved.)
And, no, the Challenger didn't "explode," but try explaining that to the average layperson whose knowledge of physics and aerodynamics is probably nil. I've tried to explain the difference between a fireball and an explosion, tried to explain concepts like slipstream and aerodynamic forces to friends over the years. Mostly, I am met with glazed over eyes, or stubborn insistence. ("I SAW it with my own eyes!! It BLEW UP!! Any idjit can see that!!") So, hell, if folks want to believe it exploded, no skin off my nose. The accident is just as tragic, regardless.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Ford is involved in various lawsuits because the Crown Victoria bursts into flames on rear impact. This is not really noticable because a high-speed rear impact on a big car is relatively rare - typically only police cars make a habit of parking on expressway shoulders where ADD drivers manage to hit them directly butt-on.
Same problem as Pintos - pointy bolts just below the tank; when the car crumples ina a collision, they rupture the tank while sparking.
Maybe this needs debunking too, but I clearly remember that there were recordings of conversations on board the shuttle that NASA would not release "out of respect for the families." I don't recall if they were radio communications or recordings on the black box. Does anyone else remember this? It's not mentioned in the article.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
There's always one smart arse! :-p
Last time I used 1600 ISO film (instead of on my digi) the grain was aweful! I still find 400 hard enough to look at, the thought of using 400 for outdoors work I find surprising - maybe for newspapers it's fine - I don't know I don't do that kind of photography, maybe 1600 is ok for journalists...
Maybe I'm too used to England with the lack of sunlight, but there's no way I've ever been able to use 1/1000th sec on anything slower than f5.6 (approx - I don't pay it that much attention).
Humm, I think I know what to do this Saturday now - try and prove myself wrong to my satisfaction...
If only I'd had mod points I'd mod myself off topic...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
It is also worth pointing out that even back then a few independent TV stations had co-marketing agreements with CNN, and were carrying CNN's feed live.
As I recall, in Los Angeles KHJ-TV (Channel 9, now KCAL) was carrying the feed live.
So you think it's more likely that a Reuters or AP reporter with his job on the line if found guilty of doctoring pictures inserted the picture of bin Laden with Bert, and didn't see Bert, than it was for a pro bin Laden demonstrator to print out the picture and not see Bert? I disagree.
Q: What color were Christie McAuliffe's eyes?
All your base are belong to us!
It's much easier to hold deep depth of field with a wide angle lens than a normal or telephoto. With a 24 f4 lens I've hand-held shots with depth of field from a few feet in front of me to infinity. In addition the perspective of a wide angle view creates greater apparent depth in the image, so the bird and demonstrators would look farther apart in the print than they actually were.
Likewise a telephoto lens compresses perspective, and makes all the cool background shots possible that the paranoid poster refers to. A person does not have to be walking right in front of a huge poster of Saddam. With a 400mm lens the photographer can simply wait for someone to walk between him and a poster 100 feet away, and the compressed persepective makes the poster look huge in the background.
Resolution matters too. If there is a little bit of motion blur it is unlikely to show up in magazine or (especially) newspaper printings, because of the rather coarse dot pitch. So you can hand-hold at a much lower shutter speed than you would for fine art. I've hand-held a 24mm lens down to 1/8 sec. and gotten usable shots.
Ultimately the paranoid poster is undermined by the long history of photojournalism, which predates digital manipulation by many decades, and whose history includes many interesting shots like the one he descibed.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I was on the roof of the Orlando Regional Medical Center's then new admin building with 4 or 5 others from the IT department. We didn't really know _what_ we saw until later...
But if you must know, my 1998 Jetta has more than three feet (possibly more, but I would have to measure) between the rear of the front seats and the tank. The tank is under the trunk and does not appear to protrude under the rear seats. I know, I had to put in a new in-tank fuel pump which was really annoying.
I suppose I should have used more precise language.
Blar.
I am one who thought it was a live broadcast I saw, but I was 9 at the time so.... I have to say, I was unaware the othe 6 were even myths.
http://crimespree.ca/ - photography, mountain biking
One of the engineers who first tried to raise the issue of the potential failure of the O-rings spoke at my college when I was freshman, as part of some sort of "ethics in engineering" seminar. From my (admittedly vague) memory, it wasn't just the managers bullying and bamboozling, but also some of the other engineers.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
but I remember the announcement over the PA in homeroom class when I was in 9th grade, that the shuttle had exploded (probably not the exact wording). However, I saw it on the news so many times in the days following, that it is indelibly ingrained in my memory. In my senior year, in Government class, the first shuttle after Challenger was launched. Our teacher had requisitioned an A/V cart so that we could watch it live. The launch was delayed a little bit, and we ended up staying after the bell I think, but we did get to see the shuttle take off successfully.
September 11 was much the same. I did not see it live, but my mother-in-law-to-be IM'ed me while I was playing EverQuest, and told me that two planes had hit the WTC. I thought at first that she meant some small commuter plane or something. Then I went into the living room and turned on CNN. I was watching when the towers actually collapsed. I was so upset by the thought of it that I tried to reach my (now) husband at work, just to hear his voice. We lived in Virginia at the time and were much closer, but it was still incredibly shocking and terrifying. The plane crashes were replayed so many times that they are permanently etched in my memory, as if I had really watched them as they happened.
Check out http://www.lutins.org/nasa.html for a copy of an excellent article published by the Miami herald on 13 November 1988 detailing NASA's concerted attempts to cover up the fact that the astronauts survived the initial breakup.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Actually I saw this happen in Hackney in 1997. Me and a few friends were chilling on the roof of our block of flats on a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, just off Graham Road, and suddenly there was an almighty boom and loads of black smoke went up by the road. We went down to take a look and there was a parked up Robin Reliant on fire. Quite a few people standing round looking, everybody well confused and amazed. Some guy's car was parked next to it, he rushed for his car and his girlfriend was screaming because she thought he'd get caught in it all but he moved his car out of the way. It was really weird, kinda surreal, and kinda funny, everybody just stood around chatting and chilling, enjoying this strange little bit of excitement on a sunny lazy afternoon, no owner turned up, maybe he was out. We could only guess maybe an aerosol can got hot on that nice day and exploded? no idea...
One of the funniest things was that it was a 3 wheel Robin Reliant, they are made out of fibre glass so it burnt right down to the axles, no metal frame. Melted the paint on the cars next to it as well. Weird.
The fact that many managers may not understand the technical jargon of an engineer is meaningless here. Some of the managers at Thiokol WERE engineers. One who was skeptical of launching was told (I'm paraphrasing here) "Stop thinking like an engineer and think like a manager." I don't think the managers were stupid either. They were incompetent. In order to manage a technical program, you must understand technical jargon. Otherwise bad things will happen (i.e. the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert). Being an engineer who manages space programs, I place a large portion of the responsiblity for the Challenger (and Colombia) disasters on the shoulders of the management.
I lived in Alexandria, VA at the time and watched it over the air. I can't remember whether it was live national (Today show or something), or whether a local station just picked up the feed. Being so close to DC the local stations sometimes carried stuff like shuttle launches, snips of hearings, etc. that probably didn't make it on the air in other parts of the nation.
I too was home sick from school and I have the same memory--build up, lift off, disintegration, then semi-controlled chaos--cameras shifting, cutting to other cameras, stammering announcers ("obviously there's been a malfunction of some kind...").
That was a pretty heavy day, as I was a big fan of the space program and one of my earliest memories was the first shuttle launch on a little black and white TV (I was 5). It all came flooding back when I heard about Columbia.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
What you're basically saying is that it's possible to progress with nothing going wrong, which any engineer will tell you is a load of bollocks.
Of course thinking that nothing will go wrong is ridiculous, and that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the original poster trivialized the Challenger accident as something we can live with every now and then; I guess it would be analagous to saying that the accident was within an acceptable error margin since the astronauts were aware of the dangers and spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Just because we had an accident doesn't mean that we should stop exploring space, but it doesn't mean that the accident wasn't a big deal.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
I ditched school that day. I just happened to turn on the TV (CNN?) and watch the launch. When it started to "explode", it did not seem real. How could something like this happen? There was a teacher (civilian) on board. I had 100% faith in the perfection of NASA just before that happened. It was quite surreal to watch the shuttle disintegrate.
:(
I also distinctly recall thinking that nobody would die since they surely had some sort of plan in case of failure... how little I knew at the time.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
"what does this button do?"
Title: "Re:Wow. You're so biased you don't even know it."
Third Paragraph: "Just because Clinton was clearly your boy does not make him som kind of martyr who never did any wrong.He did a hell of a lot of things wrong, not the least of which include lying under oath, raising our taxes, allowing his wife to try to further turn this country into a socialist state, and developing Echelon, which was his version of the Bush wiretappings. Unlike you, however, I do not condemn his entire administration as totally corrupt."
Regardless of whether or not Clinton was mentioned, it was still a prime candidate for a rant. Kind of ironic when you compare it to the first line:
"I did not IN ANY WAY defend either the Reagan or Bush administrations. In fact, I defy you to find ANY quote of mine that defended either administration."
I have talked to engineers who were in the final meeting, and on the final conference call. Normally the contractor (Morton Thiokol) has to convince the customer (NASA) that it is safe to launch. Thiokol said "NO" and NASA tried to convince them to say yes (bass ackwards). After the final decision of "no" was reached based on the engineers advice, the conference call link was broken and when it was re-established the Thiokol managers had overridden the engineers and said "OK". IIRC the onsight (Florida) Thiokol manager refused to sign the necessary paper work, inferring what had happened when they were off the line. The next guy down the chain signed anyway, so they launched.
It was not a matter of management not understanding, it was a matter of the dollars that would stop flowing from NASA to Morton Thiokol if they scrubbed being worth more than the lives of the 7 astronauts.
An earlier poster had a very insightful analysis of what this meant to the US, and I've often had similar views of what it meant to the engineering profession. At the time I was a newly minted BSEE working for a government contractor. It wasn't geeky to be an engineer, it was actually cool and somewhat respected. This doesn't seem to be the case today.
NO!!!! BUD light!
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Are we playing "who died the most gruesome death"? Because otherwise, I really don't see your point.
a lot of school kids DID see the launch live. NASA provided live feeds to many schools. It was also broadcast on CNN. Many schools showed the launch on CNN. Why? Because of the teacher in space program. It was a huge public relations event for NASA and was used to encourage kids to get interested in science. My sciene teacher at the time had tried for the spot on the shuttle.
So maybe it wasn't millions of Americans but it was a healthy percentage of American school kids that got to see the launch live.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"Reaganomics: Help the poor by giving to the rich!" rather than helping the poor directly."
I think you need to attend a more centrist univerisity. Reagan definitely had his good and bad imprints on US history. His economic decisions fueled our economy, promoted the technology boom and pulled us out of Carter's recession. Unfortunately he did not get to see his impact based on his illness. Bush Sr. and Clinton rode out his legacy for free (until the market collapsed).
That of course came at a price, and that was he was not very sympathetic to the real poor - people that cannot help themselves. And that is a shame. His overspending cut many programs and made many peoples lives harder. But even more benefitted. College enrollment exploded in the 80s fueling our technology/engineering foundation today. Children who otherwise had no change to get into (pay) for college could. I am not sure how any competent "economist" (and I used that term loosely) could possibly say reagonomics were summarily "bad".
I am a staunch liberal and even I can see his place in american history even though I disagreed strongly with many of his views and policies. I still can recognize his economic legacy that we enjoy today. The 80s could have turned out very differently if a different president just sat on the pot (like Bush Sr, Clinton, possibly Bush Jr). I look forward to the next time we elect a truely "Great" president and not just a sleezy politician.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
The engineers have commented on these slides, and how hastily done they were. The engineers were sure that there would not be a launch, due to the previous night's temperature being below the limit that they had been forced to compromise and accept. When they heard that NASA was pushing to override this, they claim that they had about 10 minutes to grab whatever evidence that they could find and hustle to the conference room for a teleconference.
Would anyone ever drive if there was one fatal car accident for every 50 car journeys...
If there was a car that could drive the equivalent of around the world hundreds of times before getting in an accident, I would think that is pretty freaking good!
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
How many deaths per mile flown for the shuttle compared to automobile?
More on topic, I remember seeing the launch, since they made about half of my junior high (all that would fit in the auditorium) watch it live as part of the whole Teacher in Space thing. After about 10 minutes of everying being basically stunned and traumatized, they shut the TVs off and tried to distract us.
I was watching it live on CNN while home sick from work. I remember looking at the multiple smoke trails from the fragments and thinking, "Boy, that doesn't look right. But if something happened, why aren't they saying anything?" It was just a camera trained on the smoke trails and the only audio was the range officer counting distances. Nothing else. It seemed like that went on forever.
Chris Mattern
saw it all happen. I got the idea something was going wrong and then all of a sudden it blew up. My teacher freaked - he turned off the TV and left the room to cry.
Architect isn't a verb!
Oh grow up.
It happens all the time.
Ever heard of "The Golden Rule?"
He who has the gold, makes the rules...
Sheesh!
1) The first tests of the SRBs revealed a startling and unexpected effect. Ballooning of the casing under the ignition transient caused "joint rotation" - the field joints between the booster segments tended to open at just the wrong moment. This was well documented and occurred on all SRB launches. The joint rotation phenomenon worsened when the lightweight SRB casings were introduced.
Morton-Thiokol worried about it enough to have had a new field joint design on the drawing-board long before the disaster. Implementing this new design would have meant delaying the program and NASA were NOT keen.
2) Field joint rotation interfered with seating of the silicone rubber O-rings that provided the final seal. Unlike older designs, where the O-rings were hand-seated on assembly, this design depended on the ignition transient to seat the O-rings.
It was well-known that cold weather delayed O-ring seating - the lower the temperature the more "blow-by" and O-ring damage there was.
3) Attempts were made to pre-seat the O-rings by means of a compressed air "pressure-check". But this pressure check produced "blow-holes" in the packing putty that served as conduits for hot gas.
O-ring scorching and blow-by (which were never meant to be seen AT ALL!) increased after the pressure check was introduced.
4) Morton-Thiokol engineers were really worried by the persistent problems of O-ring damage and memos flew for YEARS! NASA were not that interested - after all, nothing had happened yet.
At the time of the Challenger launch MT engineers were so worried by the unprecedentedly low temperatures that an urgent telecon was arranged with Marshall/NASA. NASA were incensed by the thought of a further delay (the launch had already been delayed once by a faulty door-closed indicator light) that they insisted that Morton-Thiokol PROVE that it was unsafe to launch. MT admitted that they couldn't prove that it was unsafe and were pressurised by Marshall/NASA into approving the launch.
Lots more.
We all know what happened next.
With a fast shutter speed (needed to catch the dove) you have minimal depth of field.
Shutter speed has fuckall to do with depth of field.
Apeture controls depth of field.
The only reason shutter speed would affect depth of field is if it forces you to open/close the apeture in order to get the proper exposure.
Strangely enough, the actual last word on the black-box recorder was "Uhoh". NASA has put together an excellent page documenting the accident.
In Richard Feynman's book "What do You Care What Other People Think", I believe he said the real reason that the solid rocket booster failed, was from an under-specification on the torque by a factor of ten, on the joint where the shuttle connected to the booster. This resulted in a warping of the booster segments out of round. Each time the segments would get reused, they would get more out of round. Some were distorted by more than half an inch in diameter. The putty and o-rings would have to make up for a worse fit between segments as they were reused. Apparently, the Morten-Thiokol engineers had been quietly working on this problem for over a year when Challenger went down. Feynman said the o-ring was a red herring he was given to direct him away from the real problem.
The F111 also only has two crew members, and they will generally be bailing out at relatively low altitudes, vastly simplifying the problem.
The idea of an escape system was floated, but it would have been too heavy. That said, if the shuttle were built today, advances in mettalurgy and other materials sciences could probably lead to a much lighter orbiter if the plans were followed precisely, only with modern materials. Tweaking it could probably lead to a crew escape mechanism that could have saved the Challenger astronauts if the materials and techniques were available in the late 70s when it was designed.
Which is the way I think they should go to replace it. Take the basic design, which is essentially proven, albeit with some flaws. Take advantage of modern materials and construction techniques, and safety could be dramatically improved at far less cost than designing a completely new system.
All nouns can be verbed.
Q: Why didn't the Challenger astronauts take a bath before boarding?
A: Because they knew they'd be washing up on shore.
Well, I dunno. Like I said, I lived through this period as a young adult, and it wasn't much like the way you paint it.
/. crowd I expect) would be forced into tax slavery to pay the burden off were laughably wrong.
For example, the primary focus of Reagan's economic policy was the defeat of "stagflation," the combination of poor economic growth and high inflation. I remember when the prime rate was nearly 20%. Imagine a mortgage with a rate of 22%, huh? That's one hell of a discouragement to investment and growth. His solution to the anemic growth rate was a tax cut, which was bitterly debated at the time because of the (for the time) large deficits that resulted. He blithely assured us the growth in the economy would take care of that problem, and that the growth in Federal tax receipts during a booming economy would just soak up that horrible projected deficit without any pain. He was, of course, right, since that's exactly what happened in the late 80s and early 90s. And the legions of Chicken Littles who said the Reagan deficits would force "the children" of tomorrow (which includes most of the
Inflation was broken by Paul Volcker's brutal squeezing of the money supply, with the result that unemployment in '82 or '83 reached dismaying levels, maybe 12% or so as I recall. Reagan was bitterly criticized for those unemployment levels (although I believe Volcker was appointed by Carter, ironically), but unemployment had subsided by the time he was re-elected, and inflation had been broken. You can have no idea how gratifying that success was unless you live through 10-12% inflation year after year, which just grinds you down and impoverishes you.
Finally, Jimmy Carter certainly did not campaign on the promise of legalizing marijuana, whether or not that was some minor out of the way part of the Democratic platform. He campaigned on a platform of transparency and integrity in government. He contrasted himself with Nixon, who had resigned two years earlier, as I recall, and with Ford, who was considered harmless in himself, but heir to the Nixon legacy of shifty assistants, Haldeman and company, although flattop himself wasn't around. In any event, as I recall, people were in no mood to tolerate liberal drug policies, inasmuch as crack was then bursting on the scene with hideous results.
The energy "crisis" was laid at the feet of Carter unjustly, yes, but that was partly his own doing. He responded to the oil shocks by more or less telling us we just had to accept it, that things would probably get harder no matter what we did, and that belt-tightening and practising a Zen acceptance of our limits was the order of the day. Then, when all of that turned out not to be true, that is, when oil prices dropped and the belt-tightening turned out to be unnecessary (or at least premature), he was roundly condemned as a scaredy-cat do-nothing, and the feeling grew that it was not that no one could do anything about the energy crisis, but that Carter couldn't. Whether that's true or not is not the point; the point is he was seen as having "cried wolf" when the anticipated end of the world as we knew it failed to occur on schedule, in 1985 or so.
I thought Carter was a good man, but he was never a strong leader -- he was terrible at inspiring people to follow him. And his almost Catholic levels of pessimism made people almost enjoy making him the scapegoat when things turned out not as grimly as he'd predicted.
Either way, those of us who were watching the launch on TV saw it live, our school turned it off as soon as they realized something went wrong. We were all watching for the first teacher in space, as were probably most people who say they saw it live.
And don't try to tell me that a 15 second relay means we didn't watch it "live", in the conventional sense. "live" means "not later that night on the news". "live" means they didn't just interrupt your soaps to replay what just happened. "live" means you were watching it BEFORE the tradgdy and saw it happen yourself, before the news was all over it.
#2 is just as bad. Yes, the "challenger" shuttle itself did not explode, but it was next to a fuel tank that did "explode", and that caused it's distruction. I'm so much smrtr thn u kauze I Ply smnantk gameez! From NASA's 51-L postmortem:
Sure sounds like the blowtorch effect of the SRB o-ring failure cutting into and igniting the hydrogen fuel tank caused an explosion to me, which directly caused the orbiter to break up. Had the o-ring leak been on the far side, not cut into the main fuel tank, would the orbiter have still spontainously disintegrated at 73 seconds into the flight?#3 isn't so much a persistant myth as a comforting white lie. Yes, we all know at least some of them lived through the structural breakup. No, we don't like to think about them on a terminal ballistic arc that peaked at 63,000 feet and ended up smacking the ocean at 200mph.
#7 is not a myth either, it's very true. While yes, one specific thing could have been fixed, people fail to realize just how many possible things could go wrong. At some point, you have to either go for it, or scrap the program. While it's sad, none of the 7 astronauts expected this to be as safe as stepping outside for a quick walk in the garden. The launch was the day after the 19th anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that claimed 3 lives.
The engineers approved flights despite evidence of O-ring erosion (even though the specs said no erosion). The engineers approved flights when the temperature at launch time hovered near or below the lowest temperature allowed by spec. Thus when managment questioned them about their reticence over the 51-L launch - they hemmed, and hawed, and did everything to avoid making a clear and straightforward call.
Unfortunately, it's not as simply as them being bullied and bamboozled. The engineers insisted that the launch was potentially unsafe, and when the managers asked for evidence - the engineers were unable (unwilling?) to make their case clear. *That* is highly unprofessional - making a claim (this launch is unsafe), and then failing to back it up.In the end, when the engineers were polled for their reccomendation, not one stood up and called for the launch to be halted. Not one.
To this day they insist they were overruled and that they 'just did as they were ordered'. That's what the concentration camp guards claimed too... Mighty poor company for a 'professional' engineer.
"Evil Ernie"???
See? That's what this whole constructive memory thing is talking about. Everybody who's seen the pictures knows that it's Evil Bert, not Earnie. Puh!
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Too many run ins with that fat fuck
:)
You got injured because he weighs more than you?
I've got a hamburger/potato/cheese casserole recipe that'll help. Even more effective than double thick milk shakes.
Course, my cardiologist doesn't like it much.
A lot of people since have played the fear game for their own manipulative ends - even to justify selling weapons to a revolutionary government in Iran that wants to destroy the USA if it can and giving some of the proceeds to a drug dealer. Corruption didn't end with Nixon and isn't restricted to one party - and similarly should be fought against by all parties. Corruption and kickbacks led to the change of the booster design and the need for seals which had too high a glass temperature for the situation with the Shuttle - that is one thing that came out and got attention worldwide so local revisionism isn't going to change much.
This I remember as the followup punchline to "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
Well, atleast I'm consistent.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Please see my earlier post about this... There was a related Slashdot poll also.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Miles flown isn't a very useful safety measure for the shuttle. Hours flown would be better.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It gets worse when one considers the fact that you've taken the fact someone foed you as some kind of evidence he's an extreme left-winger. It could just as easily be that he saw you're the kind of person who responds to any "Such-and-such a person, who happens to be a hero to the right-wing, did bad things" as "Yeah, but so did the other presidents." You took the trouble to write a little hate-filled rant against someone criticising them for kneejerk responses when all you know about them is that they may have read a kneejerk response from you.
You're a typical right-winger, totally unable to justify the behaviour of your own side, yet completely unable to criticise your own side for its abuses. This is yet another example of the utter moral bankruptsy of the right. Nobody defends Clinton by saying "Yeah, but so did everyone else".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In the full testimony given for the Challanger, it was noted that the program managers had serious concern raised by Thiokol engineers that they had never tested the O-reing seals at the freezing temperatures prevailing on the shady sides of the boosters. The PM launch deciders were apparantly reassured when someone said that the Titan launches with 'the same' O-ring seals, had survived launch at low temperatures. They were not told, that 'the same' seals had the V part of the seals pointing down on Titans, but pointing up on Chalanger.
The Titan seals had a single O-ring that was manually seated on assembly. The O-ring did not depend on the ignition transient pressure wave to seat it.
/ docs/rogers-commission/table-of-contents.html
As, you say, the clevis faced down on the Titan, discouraging entry of moisture into the joint - in the SRBs the clevis faced upwards.
The Titan joint was simple and reliable, the SRB field joint was anything but.
The article was written by someone who hadn't bothered to read the Rogers Commission Report - http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l
Pathetic.
I should have said "forgotten". I was in third grade when it happened and our whole school stopped to watch the splashdown. Even so, and even living across the street from NASA in Houston I didn't really comprehend why they were landing early. No one explained and little was said about it afterwords. Most of us were just glad for the break in our routine. When I did learn the details a few years later I was stunned.
My point was that we forget and some of us hardly knew in the first place which amounts to the same thing. The movie, the parent article to this discussion, each have their shortcomings but at least they remind us of how difficult it is to be totally sure of anything. It is a much less costly way to shake ourselves awake when things seem to be going so smoothly. Unfortuneatly, it is also a lot less effective.
I heard the cabin audio from a NASA employee. Sally screamed the whole time until they hit the water. I hated my friend for a little while for playing the tape. It seemed wrong.
BS -- If the cabin depressurized (as seems likely), the crew would have had difficulty breathing. In the words of the final report by fellow astronauts, the crew "possibly but not certainly lost consciousness"
I concede that a good photographer, with good equipment, and good lighting conditions can make an image like that, but look at what it takes: journalist covers demonstration, suddenly a white dove lands on the balcony ahead of him, and he snaps a perfect image of dove + demonstration?
I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to get a white dove, or set up your camera at a huge poster (perhaps set up the poster too?) and wait for an appropriate-looking person to walk by. My point is that such "artistic", "illustrative" pictures are dishonest, and if they do that, I don't think they'll shy away from photoshop either.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.