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)."

Comments

Live at school

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Live at school

[Anml4ixoye]

We lived just north of Tampa at the time and would regularly watch the shuttle launches from our yard. We would usually set up some sort of telescope or binoculars, but you couldn't zoom all that close or you'd have a hard time keeping up with it.

That morning we watched in launch on TV, then ran outside. It seemed to take a little bit longer than normal, and just as it cleared the trees is when it exploded.

Even though I was in elementary school, it was stil confusing, but I had a good idea what had just gone on.

Re:Live at school

[hey!]

I remember walking into work (late as usual) with my bike over my shoulder.

The secretary was sitting at her desk with a odd, hollow expression in her eyes.

"Is anything wrong?" I asked.

"It blew up," she responded.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"The space shuttle. It exploded." (I know this is not technically correct)

There was no TV in the office, and graphical terminals/workstations for offices were still five years away from being common, the Internet probably fifteen years away. If it werent' for the fact she liked to listen to music while she filed, we probably wouldn't have heard about it until we went out for lunch. But I remember the moment clearly.

It's odd that it was such an impressive event, especially for the non-geeks among us who probably couldn't name the first American in space, much less debate the wisdom of the Shuttle's redundant computer architecture as some of us did. Yet I think nearly every American felt the loss in a personal way -- not like losing a friend exactly, more like the feeling of vertigo you'd have if you were standing in the middle of a big bridge and suddenly saw one of the girders underneath you fall into the water.

I think that for many Americans, the instant of learning the disaster was the exact moment the myth of American invicincibilty died. We may have left Vietnam with our tails between our legs, but damn it nobody else put a man on the Moon.

I think the country has never been the same since that day. Before Challenger, optimism was an American character trait. Afterwards it became an ideology. I think that ironically collapse of the Soviet Union dealt the national psyche a second blow. Challenger destroyed our sense of competence, and the end of the Communist Menace destroyed our sense of shared purpose. I think we got a sense of what we lost on 9/11, which is the closest recent experience to the Challenger disaster. 9/11 was a moment of agony, but although few have dared to admit it, it was also curiously bracing. For a brief time, we knew what we had to do: we were going to kick somebody's ass.

Re:Live at school

[Professor_UNIX]

I think we got a sense of what we lost on 9/11, which is the closest recent experience to the Challenger disaster.

Some people may be forgetting that Columbia broke up on re-entry 3 years ago just a few days from now. That was far more devastating to me personally because it symbolized the end of the shuttle program. Discovery was a nice "pick me back up and dust myself off" attempt, but with so many people nitpicking the mission and the delays because of more foam falling off the external fuel tank I don't know if we'll ever launch another shuttle. It's sad really since there's nothing really as exhilarating as watching a shuttle power its way into space. Ah well, I guess we'll just have to wait 10 years for the CEV missions.

Re:Live at school

[Marillion]

For me, I was a high school senior. Here's my story of Myth #8:

This isn't the exact photo, but this photo is pretty close. But in my newspaper next to the "Y" shaped smoke plume that is burned into my memories was another photo of Christie Mcauliffe's family in the VIP viewing stands crying and hugging. My uncle was a television news photographer from Boston and was sent to cover the home-town school teacher. He was at the VIP stands and knows that the famous photo was actually taken before the accident. Those were tears of joy. He remembers NASA representatives escorting the family out of the stands, away from the media before anyone else figured what happened. No one in the VIP stands knew what happened until several minutes later.

I guess I was one of the few, and Canadian no less

[cerebis]

I watched the Challenger launch with passive disinterest in the library of my junior highschool.

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.

Myth about the myth

[robla]

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.

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.

Selective outrage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, in every mid-size town, more people will die in traffic accidents than got killed in the Shuttle. Today, in most counties, more people will be murdered than got killed in the Shuttle.

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.

Re:live at school?

[TallMatthew]

seeing that would be kind of horrible.

Not as horrible as those nasty little squares of pizza they served that day.

Yuck.

Re:Story not appreciated

[prockcore]

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.

Guess History is not important

[dreadlord76]

>>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.

Feynman's report

[19061969]

Obligatory link to Richard Feynman's report on the disaster.

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.

Most interesting report

[gowen]

The most fascinating report on the Challenger disaster remains Richard Feynman's dissent on the official line of the Rogers Report (on whose committee he served). Read it here.

"If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."

Whether you consider that "political interference" is a different matter.

NASA's Day of Remembrance

[FleaPlus]

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.

In the words of Memento's Leonard Shelby..

[Channard]

'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.'

Re:How widespread are these myths?

[georgewilliamherbert]

The myths are fairly common. Newcomers post them to space related websites and newsgroups and talk about them on talk shows and such all the time.

Regarding exploded, I have to disagree. Cars don't explode in accidents, though they often get pretty badly mangled and have pieces break off. It's reasonable to say that a lot of things which aren't detonations are explosions... a pressurized cannister of gas say, if it has a structural failure... or a boiler. But Challenger wasn't pushed apart by any sort of internal force. It pitched up rapidly at twice the speed of sound, and like any airplane suddenly tragically flown out to several times its structural design margins, broke into pieces.

It's particularly hard to make this point as what people saw as an explosion... the fireball... in fact had minimal overpressure and thermal density, and essentially didn't damage either the pieces of the Shuttle (which had already broken up) or the solid boosters. People always think that the fireball caused, or somehow was related to, the deaths. It was completely unrelated. If the external tank had been filled with perfectly inert water, and the shuttle came up off the stack as it did, the breakup of Challenger and eventual deaths of the astronauts would have been exactly the same.

You may think it's nitpicking, but it often matters for people to understand exactly which part of something caused deaths or destruction. Katrina didn't devastate New Orleans because it was a Cat 5 storm; Katrina pulled in a water surge which damaged levees which flooded the city. If there had been no Katrina, and random liquefaction caused a levee failure on a clear day without a storm in sight, New Orleans would have been just as badly damaged. That's not true for a lot of surrounding areas though, where Katrina floodwaters from the storm surge did directly cause the damage, and the New Orleans levee breaks later were irellevant.

I'm designing manned spacecraft now, and the details of what can go wrong during launch, in space, and during reentry matter. There are a lot of things which can go wrong and may look spectacularly bad, but shouldn't kill the crew. I am more concerned about the ones which could kill the crew, some of which don't look all that dangerous to the naked eye. Soyuz 10's crew died because one small valve failed and let all the air out as the capsule was coming down. 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 and hit probably the single worst place on the whole Orbiter.

Not sure I agree

[Wyatt Earp]

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.

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/ docs/rogers-commission/Chapter-3.txt

"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.

Re:No explosion?

[georgewilliamherbert]

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.

1) Before the propellants had completely spilled, and long before (in terms of how fast the accident happened) they ignited and the visible fireball started, Challenger had already pitched up and immediately broken up. The fireball happened around the pieces of the orbiter after it broke up, and had nothing to do with the breakup happening.

2) The fireball had minimal pressure and a low enough temperature that it did not significantly damage either the already broken up pieces of the orbiter (no burn damage or crush damage from the fireball) or the solid rocket boosters.

If someone waved an industrial sized propane torch at you for one second, the kind they use to dry paint rapidly, you'd get mildly burned but it wouldn't kill you. If you were sitting inside your car when it was waved at you from outside, you wouldn't notice, unless it bubbled the paint a bit.

Not everything that looks big and bright and explosion-like kills and destroys everything inside it. I personally survived a small gas vapor fire where my body was essentially entirely inside the fireball, with only a few burnt hairs and what was functionally no worse than a bad sunburn on the parts of my skin not covered by clothing, and the clothes didn't catch on fire. I really don't recommend you try it yourself, but it won't kill you.

Re:No explosion?

[FireFury03]

What kind of strange definition of explosion does this guy have?

A (low) explosion is basically an over-pressure of the inside of a sealed container to the point that it breaks catestrophically. (High explosives are obviously different). That's not what happened here - the fuel tank ruptured (not caused by an explosion) and the resulting fuel spill just burnt in the air. That's really no different to if your car fuel tank ruptures and the petrol catches fire, it doesn't explode it just burns. Similarly if you set fire to gun powder in an unconfined space it just burns (quickly), it doesn't explode.

The craft then broke apart due to overpressure on the *outside* of the craft (caused by it turning broad-side in a supersonic airstream). If anything that probably constitutes an implosion, certainly not an explosion.

Re:Copied straight from Wikipedia!

[Daikiki]

Other way around. The first paragraph of the article was copied into wikipedia in the last few hours. The article was published yesterday.

Re:Story not appreciated

[Jaruzel]

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.

Re:Spaceflight is dangerous, so what

[Alioth]

"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?)

say what?

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:Sorry, but almost every point ....

[georgewilliamherbert]

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 crew were not subjected to particularly violent trauma from the breakup. Nor did the breakup knock them unconscious. All evidence available to us indicates that the cabin was generally intact, didn't get torn apart, wouldn't have tumbled violently enough to cause serious injury to properly strapped in seated astronauts. They went unconscious, we presume, because it had been damaged enough that the air leaked out, and they were at 65,000 feet by the time they started back down again, and you pass out if you breathe air at 65,000 foot pressure levels.

We don't know if everyone eventually passed out; the emergency air packs they had might have kept them conscious, and some of those were turned on. And they all might have woken back up on the way down as air pressure increased again. But we really don't know. The flight recorder stopped when the power went off in the breakup.

We know the breakup didn't kill them all, or knock them all unconscious, because if it had then they couldn't have turned on the air packs.

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.

The LOX tank didn't kill anyone. And you don't light the LOX tank.

Jim was referring to the solid rocket boosters.

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.

The putty seal problems existed before the change in materials was made. The problem was unrelated to that change happening. It is a myth that the problems appeared after the change.

Please read more carefully.

There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin.

This is simply delusional, and requires no further comment

Claims were repeatedly made that the White House pushed on NASA to get them to launch in time for Reagan to do a live linkup chat as part of the State of the Union.

Phone logs, extensive interviews both with the White House staff and the NASA staff, repeated inquiries have shown that there is no factual evidence or ancedotal claim by anyone inside either the WH or the NASA program or its contractors that there was any such WH pressure.

If it happened, they erased all the evidence.

Things which are alledged and have no evidence are at best a myth or conspiracy theory. Calling it a myth, when it's been specifically repeatedly proven to have no factual evidence on the record anywhere, is a prefectly fair claim.

Your entire response seems to boil down to I believe these myths so they must be true!. The irony is astounding.

Re:Explosion

[Vintermann]

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.

Re:Spaceflight is dangerous, so what

[Archibald Buttle]

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.

composite aging?

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:composite aging?

[lbrandy]

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.

Two points of information: The failure was not part of the wing, but part of the vertical stablizer (the fins). And, secondly, the failure was part of the load-bearing honeycomb, which is not "composite" but mainly aluminum. The 'skin' of the aircraft is composite, and not load-bearing. F15s are all getting structural upgrades (as is noted in the article) to correct this problem, and the air-force has removed the "profile" used that day (which, as i understand, was pretty extreme).

I worked at Eglin shortly after this happened, and worked with many people involved with that aircraft.

Happens in every industry.

[Shivetya]

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"

Re:Sorry, but almost every point ....

[nagora]

The number of people who did observe this, numbers in the high hundreds of thousands at least; that hardly qualifies as few,

Compare with the number of people who remember it, that is very few indeed.

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.

Which shows why Wiktionary is a pile of junk like Wikipedia. That description could applied to a car hitting a wall at 100mph, or me stamping on a can. The shuttle did not explode, the external fuel tank did but with very little force. The shuttle was mostly destroyed by aerodynamic stress caused by this event. In either case the shuttle was destroyed from without, as opposed to an explostion which is an internal event ("expand suddenly with a loud noise owning to a release of internal energy" - Concise OED, a real dictionary).

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.

Almost three minutes is not instantly and, as was pointed out, there is some evidence that people were moving inside the cabin at least enough to activate some emergency equipment. The shuttle cabin was not destroyed by either the fuel tank explosion or the disintegration of the shuttle body and in fact the only reason the crew may not have been conscious is the de-compression idea which itself is unproved. There is no reason to believe that the crew were subjected to violent trauma which put them into extreme shock; that's just a figment of your imagination. NASA have been quiet about this point but in fact at the time of recovering the wreckage they did say that they thought some of the crew had been conscious when the cabin hit the water.

Any rational person would recognise the inherent danger in strapping themselves to the side of an enormous tank of liquid oxygen and lighting it.

And any rational person would recognise that the word "especially" in this context denoted relative danger rather than some absolute scale.

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.

Read the article again; he's not talking here about the O-ring that failed.

This is simply delusional, and requires no further comment

Wrong on both counts.

It is difficult to know where to start with this statement.

Well, since you clearly agree that the disaster was avoidable, as does the author, I would have thought a good place would have been to say "yes, that's right".

Well done. Worst post I've read so far this year.

TWW

Of course there was politcal interference

[mbone]

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.

I was working there when it happened and saw it

[snub]

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.

More intresting for myth's not busted or confirmed

[SmallFurryCreature]

• That the crew might have escaped safely had the shuttle been fitted with an escape mechanism. How extensive? I don't know. The F-111 bomber has a capacity for the entire cockpit to be ejected. Russian rockets have the capacity to fire the last stage allowing the "top" of the rocket to escape from the main rocket. This has worked and allowed for succesfull escapes during faulty launches. The shuttle has had numerous proposals for escape mechanisms NONE of wich have been implemented. It was and is a sealed coffin all the way.
• The crew was probably unconcious. Well that is easy, we don't want to hear that 7 people fell to their death in a coffin and maybe even survived on the ground only to burn to death sealed inside. Except that it seems pretty silly to not equip astronauts with basic fighter pilot equipment. Like an oxygen mask.

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".

Re:Explosion

[JunkmanUK]

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...)

What kind of car do you drive?!

[FatSean]

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.

Re:say what? Typical Slashdot moderation.

[WidescreenFreak]

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.

Re:Engineers bullied or bamboozled into acquiescen

[BoneFlower]

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.

Re:Engineers bullied or bamboozled into acquiescen

[ednopantz]

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.

  See Tufte's graphs:

badly excepted here: http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

reviewed here http://www.statview.com/support/techsup/faq/Tufte/ tufte.shtml

hooray, i wasn't wrong on any of the 7 myths

[Surt]

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.