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Challenger Tragedy - In Depth, and Deeply Felt
Patchw0rk F0g writes "On this, the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, Jay Barbree has a moving and in-depth piece on this international disaster." From the article: "During several earlier shuttle missions, disaster did everything it could to crawl into the shuttle launch system and turn it into tumbling flaming wreckage. The primary O-rings on those flights suffered severe erosion from superheated gases, sometimes accompanied by lesser erosion. And the erosion had occurred after launch temperatures much higher than on this freezing Florida day -- 53 degrees was the lowest launch-time temperature up to that time. The booster engineers felt helpless. For months, they had been studying the O-ring seal problem. They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"
Aha. Very international.
in making purchases based on the lowest possible price. Sooner or later, it all catches up at once. I'm reminded of the phrase, "Pay now, or pay later. Either way, sooner or later, payment is necessary."
I was in class, when they announced it over the intercom. For the Generation X'ers this was our 9/11. The moment that replayed in our minds for years to come.
I suppose I'll remember those last words
"Go at throttle up"
Hopefully, one day, we'll look back at this tragedy and say:
"Those pioneers sure had courage! I can't believe the things they did with such primitive technology."
Then we'll ask the space attendant for another coffee as we head off for a holiday to the moon.
"They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed." Oh I'm sure someone tried, and probably was shut by the long arm of politcs like this guy http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 28/1816238
Feh! Let's drill right down to the basics. Remember that old engineering chestnut, Pick any two: - Good - Fast - Cheap You certainly don't understand anything about reality: Discovery has risk.
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of--wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
June 9, 1922 - December 11, 1941 (age 19)
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
5 pages on the astronauts and one page on the actual engineering that led to the failure, and most of that writing was awfully emotional and fact free. It would have been nice to see that side of the story covered in some more detail. No surprise the human element grabs the attention, but there was probably a good human story on the ground too, and one that actually had a causual relationship to the event.
"Tragedy" is one of those words that gets thrown around too lightly. These were people who knowingly took a risk in order to do something they believed in. They wound up losing the bet, and getting killed. That's not a tragedy. A tragedy is Romeo and Juliet, or a 10-year-old factory worker in Thailand getting killed while working to pay for medicine for his sick mother. A tragedy is not astronauts getting killed in an explosion, or mountain climbers getting killed by bad weather, or a volunteer soldier getting killed in a war he believed in.
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Crap. This is still taught as an ethics lesson. An engineering manager (Roger Boisjoly) was told to think like a manager rather than an engineer (I believe the term was "take off your engineering hat and put on your manager hat") and the process was approved. I feel for the guy that had to make this decision, because it occurs on the knife-edge that most of us engineers are taught about, but never experience. However, he came to that point, and history will record that he MADE THE WRONG DECISION.
...'No one stepped forward and said, "Stop this train until it's fixed,"'" IS CRAP. Someone said "Stop." Then, he said, "okay," after he switched hats and the world has never been the same since.
"The booster engineers felt helpless
The reason I'm so harsh about this is that it could've been any one of us that call ourselves "engineers." We should NEVER forget the lesson from this. Someone went against his training AND his instincts and, as a result, PEOPLE DIED.
"but no one stepped forward and said, 'Stop this train until it's fixed.'"
And if anyone had, we would have never known about it, and they probably would have been fired.
The didn't step forward and say anything because no one in management wanted to hear the bad news. If they complained, they might have lost their jobs.
Just got done watching a documentary about Enron. Same thing happened there. Many people saw potential problems and critics and anyone questioning them were fired or put down. One of the Merrill Lynch analysts who questioned Enron's earnings was fired after Enron pressured the company to get rid of him and they did. Then got 225 million in business from Enron.
As goes NASA and Enron, so goes the whole country right now. We've carried that philosophy into government and now it infects every level. Our government, the military, they're all telling everything is fine when we know there are serious problems. Anyone sounding the alarm is fired. What we know is scary enough.
Imagine what we don't know.
I don't think I'm being paranoid or alarmist when I say we may be in much deeper shit than we realize as a country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Am I the only one that thinks that Columbia was the worse of the 2 shuttle crashes? I mean really, Challenger was catostrophic but was unsurvivable once the SRB ignited. Columbia was in orbit for weeks with its fatal problem in view of the entire planet had anbody thought to look. They say nothing could have been done had they found the damaged in orbit, but I have this funny feeling that we, as a planet, probabaly would have come up with something and not let them run out of O2.
The entire problem with the Shuttle was that it abandoned the vertical stack design of previous spacecraft in favor of a "paralllel" stack. The Apollo program had the escape tower because the humans were on top. Ice and debris from the stack could not hit the heat shield and cause injury. The Shuttle is right next to the rocket and cryogenic fuel tank. No escape systems, no protection of the heat shield against debris strikes. The next generation of planned manned craft will revert to the entire vertical stack concept.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
entire poem located here...
The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet --
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the friendly skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
You do not hear jokes about Columbia's re-entry because the topic has faded from the limelight. People are not all up at arms (bad joke) about the space race. People generally do not care about the shuttles, about the stardust probe, or about anything space related any more. We are entering another dark age; people had been told of the great things the future could hold. And it didn't. So no, they do not care about the current shuttle program. Where is my flying car? Why don't I live on a moon base? Remember that geeks don't rule the world. Regular people do. As a direct result, nobody cares about nasa. Not any more. they bought the snake oil the first time, and lost 7 astronauts. They are not interested in another round of bus fare, as it were. I am seriously trying to not sound like a troll here, but honestly, normal people don't care about probes hovering over the north pole, collecting stardust, or another failed shuttle mission. They are used to being disappointed by nasa so much, that they no longer pay attention to nasa at all. You just have to remember, normal people don't care about nasa any more. They grew up with dreams of exploring space. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... can't get fooled again.
If you think that the step directly above you is doing something foolish, you have the right to call that person's boss.
Hmm, you mean like notifying the NASA officials from the Marshall Space Flight Center who were higher in the chain of command than the engineers' direct managers? Furthermore, there was no way for the engineers to know that "more senior NASA managers responsible for the launch commit decision" weren't told of their objections to the launch after the objections had been raised with the previously mentioned NASA Marshall Space Flight Center officials.
The "more senior" managers would have been informed if the chain of command had been properly followed -- the breakdown did not occur at the engineers' level. Again, the engineers had no reason to believe their objections had not been sent further up the chain of command after NASA officials higher in authority than their direct managers had been informed. In other words, the boss was called.
It's obvious that some Anonymous Cowards not only don't understand engineering, they don't understand a chain of command either. Further comment on this issue would just feed the shrill comments of the ignorant.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
I didn't see the live event but I saw the replays soon after... I may be wrong but this might have been the first time news networks replayed a live disaster over and over. The disaster was bad enough but the replays made it hypnotizing, overwhelming.
The same thing happened on 9/11 with jets crashing.
I hope when the next thing happens I'll have enough self control to shut the damn tv off. I sure didn't those 2 times.
It was a tragedy, an accident, a misfortune.
A tsunami that kills 125000 people and makes millions homeless is a disaster. A hurricane and weak levees that kill hundreds, combined with a helpless Department of Homeland Security that unhomes 1.3 million, that's a disaster.
An earthquakeor volcanic explosion that kills hundreds or thousands and destroys entire towns, that's a disaster.
A vehicle accident that kills 7 people is not a disaster, no matter how expensive the vehicle is or how famous the people are.
It is the "Challenger Accident", not the "Challenger Disaster".
Keep some perspective.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The shuttle is a perfect example of why the military and bureaucrats should not be allowed to meddle in scientific discovery. The shuttle is over-designed, overbuilt, way too expensive, and based on designs that were, at best, a compromise even at the time. They attempted to design a vehicle with reusability as the primary concern in an effort to cut costs. The other main concern was retrieval of satellites (which they have done, IIRC, exactly once in the twenty-five years the shuttle has been in service).
It quickly became obvious, however, that they had to do so much rebuilding with every launch that it costs more per launch than disposable rockets and offers negligible advantages over such designs. In short, the design is generally considered a complete and total failure at achieving its goals. So what did the government do? They built three more of the damn things. Then, Challenger happened.
The Challenger disaster should have been the end of the shuttle missions. There were so many fundamental problems that had already been discovered by that point (including the problems that later caused the destruction of Columbia) that the shuttle should never have flown again, but political pressure resulted in this fundamentally flawed design being redeployed and one more of the damn things being built.
At some point, we need to step back and look at the situation, then ground these death traps for good. Standard rockets like the Soyuz don't have these sorts of failure rates. All of the disasters there were pretty much in the 1960s. I think there might have been one since then. With no disrespect towards those who have lost their lives, taking a risk for scientific discovery is courageous, but taking an unnecessary risk for scientific discovery is foolish; continuing to fly these flying bathtubs is foolish.
Just my $0.02.
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In that sense, Challenger followed by Columbia were of an identical nature. The chain was breakable at any time, NASA made the concious choice NOT to break it, the deaths were entirely preventable but a severe attitude problem made prevention impossible.
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 sorry but I fail to see the big relevance of this accident. Everybody will agree that it was a sad thing to happen, but these people took the risk willingly and knew they could die.
Every day people die in, for example, car-crashes. Where is the outcry from the public every time seven people die in the U.S.?
To me this just seems like a case of totally misdirected nationalistic pride that makes people focus on events like these and forget that hundreds of americans die every day because they could not afford the healthcare they would have needed.
Every country has events like these happen, followed by the usual period of national sorrow, but this one just makes me realize how skewed our perspectives are: we mourn the death of 7 volunteer astronauts but refuse to think of all the other deaths that could have easily been prevented...
Why? My bet is both on human nature and the way these cases are presented (by the media). They give us a sense of companionship in sorrow, but are a great distraction of all the other shortcomings of our society today.
A while ago I read a newspaper article that included an interview with a sports commentator. The commentator was known for his way of putting all his heart into the soccer-games he commented and it was not uncommon for him to refer to a loss of his team as a "horrible tragedy". However, one day one of the players collapsed on the field and died, leaving behind his family and friends. This, the commentator said, made him realize the true meaning of the word "tragedy" and helped him put things into proportions. From this day on, he never used the word "tragedy" again in connection to sports. While losing a game might not be a happy thing, way worse things could happen to you. Similarily, the deaths of seven volunteers on a risky mission decades ago is a horrible thing, but let's not forget to put things into perspective and look what things are going wrong right now and how catastrophic the situation is for so many people all around the globe.
Ok, so what about when they got to Max Q, when the breakup ocured? Tougher, but doable. The cabin in Challenger survived intact with at least one crewmember alive after the explosion. (No, I don't give a damn about the fact that some people do not consider a fireball an explosion - re: an earlier story. I take the line that a powerful outrush of hot gasses as the result of an uncontrolled reaction is an explosion, with a powerful inrush being an implosion. I would, however, agree that there is no proof they ALL survived. Adjustments made to the controls only prove that one person was concious.)
Since at least one person survived at that point, one could argue that the question becomes one of whether it would have been possible to extract any survivor(s) between the time of the disintegration and the time of impact with the water. I am going to argue that it was. It would have been hard. Very hard. And extremely dangerous. But impossible? No.
Ok, how could it have been done? There are two answers, depending on the angle you want to follow. If you assume EXACTLY the same resources and EXACTLY the same configuration (ie: no escape chutes, etc) then survivors would have needed to have opened the hatch at close to the maximum altitude (ie: when the cabin was no longer supersonic) and sky-dived. Hey, I didn't say it was going to be easy! The chase-planes would have needed to converge on the cabin during this time. They'd have had a very small window to pull this kind of stunt. They would have to get close enough at a high enough altitude that, on ejecting, they could hook up with the survivors and do a tandem descent on the pilots' parachutes.
In either case, do I think all 7 could have survived? Probably not. But even 1 survivor would have been a massive improvement.
Ok, what about adding equiptment? Well, since the booster rockets were connected with explosive bolts, all you really need to add is a guidance system in each rocket. Then, onm the launch pad, you could have jettisoned the rockets safely and escaped at your leisure. That's the absolute minimum, and again assumes people payed attention to the launchpad cameras.
After the explosion, you have two possibilities. One would be to have a parachute on the cabin, so that it could descend at a more controllable speed. The other would be to have a more shock-absorbing skin (good for surviving space junk strikes anyway) and an external air-bag similar to the ones used on the probe carrying the Mars rover. All you need is to reduce the shock of impact with the water by just enough to not jelly everyone. We're talking an instantaneous deceleration, the crew wouldn't need to remain concious or even completely intact. Oh, and you'd need a submarine with an escape hatch capable of hooking up with EITHER the door hatch OR the hatch that would have led to the payload bay.
So, there are certainly scenarios in which one or more of Challenger's crew would have lasted out the day.
Columbia is an easier one all-round. A space repair would have been impossible and I'll allow for the fact that they were in the wrong orbit
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)
It's sobering to reflect that more than 20 years after the first shuttle flights there are still no reliable, inexpensive modes of space flight from NASA.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I was at KSC during the launch and saw it live and in person. I can tell you there was no "boom" that one typically associates with the sound of an explosion. The best way to describe the sound was more like a "whooshing" sound, like the sound of rushing air or water. Based upon what I heard that day, I am convinced there was no explosion.
It is of course sad that these people lost their lives, but this article highlights a big problem with the American Media. All over the world people die everyday. People die from natural disaster and others die from wars. The problem is this: the US Media NEVER delves into any foreign deaths to any degree like this. Imagine this articles depth and emotion aimed at:
A Dead Palestinian Child ( Killed by an American funded missile - what went wrong to cause this death, why was this death wrong)
A Dead Iraqi Child ( Killed by an American funded missile - what went wrong to cause this death, why was this death wrong)
etc etc
Coming soon the never written article about dead Iranian Children.
So we navel gaze about this death or that death and was it preventable. If we perhaps demanded from our media to delve with such detail and emotion into the thousands and thousands of deaths that we either cause directly or indirectly every day by our misadventurous policies around the globe.
Every page we write and view about past events ( well past and well covered by now ) is one page less for the voice of those innocent dead that have no voice.
In the end with people resorting to "terrorist" violence as a reaction to attacks or injustice on them and their children, our lack of attention the root causes of these LARGE tradegies has and will continue to come back and bite us.
Sadly the Challenger explosion attracks the lazy voyeur in us all, easy to see and watch, compelling.......but in the overal scheme of things essentially meaningless except as a symbol of corporate greed and cost cutting which leads to short cuts. But we all know this and still do nothing.
So perhaps in the end, even if the American people were subjected to detailed heart wrenching stories of dead foreign babies, they would just yawn and turn the channel.
But who knows?
we do know that when there is a disease, failure to treat the root causes often leads to deaths. In simple terms we kill them they kill us and the cycle of ignorance revolves round and round.
Meanwhile, apologies for spoiling the feel good sadness over 7 deaths.......7 deaths that have had enough column inches by now.
You are correct. This is bit a simple example of how we are becoming emotionally distant from our actions. As such nations are becoming sociopathic.....part of the symptoms being "....a lack of anxiety or guilt about their behavior".
Thus when we abuse words like this, it's true meaning is devalued, and as a direct result of the misuse, our emotional response seems to become incapable of discerning the correct actions to take when a real disasters comes along ( hint: response = pay attention, take interest, express and feel empathy, take action to mitigate the effects of the disaster)
Eventually it leads to Nazi like mental contructs - the "others" who kill us (innocents) with a bomb are terrorists, ours who drop a bomb on innocents is a hero flyer and brave. The reality is both actions are the actions of terror. But we have constructed a web of deceit that allows us to keep some strange form of sanity where accidents are disasters and their dead babies are meaningless and ours are heart rendingly tragic.
Words. Powerful stuff. Where they go our emotions follow.
I was 4 when Columbia launched on April 12, 1981. I remember having to wake early to watch it. It was 4am in Edmonton, and the living room and house were still dark. But when the shuttle's engines ignited, the bridal white smoke from the shuttle's boosters filled our living room with light. Those same boosters propelled Columbia upwards, leaving a bright yellow trail of still burning fuel in the sky and on our tv screen.
I was tired. It was magnificent.
I had probably seen a rocket launch before, and I'm sure its raw power impressed me. But I think what drew me to the shuttle was its streamlined, white grace.
STS-1 was the first full launch and mission of a space shuttle, and it is one my first memories.
I have another space shuttle memory just as vivid. I am at the part of my daily journey from school to home where the park's sidewalk meets the street's. I am staring up, wondering if I can see the white "horns" of the Challenger explosion from the blue of the sky.
I am afraid that a piece of debris will land on me.
My childhood is filled with references to space. I devoured space books. I vastly preferred space Lego to the plain city bricks. When my friends and I played, we imagined we were in space more often than not. My parents raised me on a steady diet of television and film science fiction, not the least of which were Star Trek and Star Wars.
I'm not the only to have a space-filled childhood. Look no further than the 1986 film Space Camp. The movie is really just a series of plot devices so as to create a childly plausible situation in which a few kids get to pilot a space shuttle. In the end, the boys get the space shuttle, the girl, and the robot. You can't argue with that. It's a horrible movie actually, but I remember my friends and I seeing it several times, and re-enacting its scenes. It was cool.
My brother believed he would turn his room into a spaceship. Even though I frequently teased him about it, I secretly admired his tenacity. He studied schematics of spacecraft, starcharts, and physics. He's still working on it.
This month's Wired features an amateur spy satellite tracker named Ted Molczan. He is older than I am, but his childhood sounds similar, only with Apollos instead of Columbias and Challengers.
There are many of us, to us space meant more than emptiness. It was an ideal. Space represented progress, hope, and nobility. To think about space was to wonder. Culture reinforced this. Star Trek was perhaps the best example, with its frontiered hyperbolic optimism. But even the fairly vapid Star Wars infused space with adventure and excitement. Planetside was filled with moisture vaporators and blandly colored sandstorms. Space was permeated with color and sound, excitement and destiny.
Last night I had another visceral memory. When I threw the newly-purchased baby clothes into the washer, time stopped. The collective white of onesies and soft blankets froze in mid-air and I realized that I was washing a child's clothes - my child's clothes - for the first time.
Having recently read the Wired article, my immediate second thought was that my son or daughter would never know the wonder of space like I did, like we did.
I was sad.
This is how it is: space is now empty, dirty, and dark. The space shuttle is an antique. The laptop that I write this blog post on is incredibly more powerful than the ones that control the space shuttle. NASA is a joke. Americans see space more as a source of tourist dollars than a place to find ourselves. Bush's announcement of a moonbase and a trip to Mars was more political foliage than inspirational provocation. Culture is either ignorant or apathetic of space. It is merely a place where things happen, a set, and little more. And, of course, we have no room for something as ridiculously triumphant as Star Trek. Fifty years of unrequited romance has fundamentally changed our perception of the big black.
What kid wants to be an astronaut anymore?
I'd like to say mine, but I've changed too.
Yes, they will. Any product will have intrinsic linmitations. Every user's manual has a list of limitations on that product, telling you which ways you shouldn't use it. Of course, the stupidity of user's sometimes exceeds the foresight of documentation writers, and someone misuses a product in a way no one had foreseen. In the shuttle's case it was a record low temperature.
Edward Tufte, in his book "Visual Explanations" has a chapter dedicated to the Challenger disaster. There he shows how the report presented by the engineers the day before the launch was insufficient to convince the managers, because it didn't display properly the correlation between low temperatures and O-ring failures.
There was too much extraneous information on that report. For instance, there were diagrams showing the position of each failure in each flight. That was totally unnecessary to show the correlation. Tufte, in his book, presents an example on which kind of diagram should be in the report. In page 45 there is a diagram showing the temperature on each launch, with the severity of O-ring failures, if any. Below 66 degrees Fahrenheit, every launch had had O-ring problems. The predicted temperature the day before the Challenger disaster was in the 26 6o 29 degrees range.
However, despite what Tufte says, engineers are neither salespeople nor diplomats, it's not their duty to convince anyone. They should just present the facts. It's the managers' job to be able to understand what the team they lead are trying to say. And I wouldn't blame managers either. They have so many factors to ponder that, if they stop the launch on any possibility of failure, no one would have ever flown an airplane, much less a space ship.
I believe the real culprits in the Challenger disaster are all the people who say "Oh, why explore space? Think of the children! We should never go to space while there are hungry children on Earth!", and so on, ad nauseam. To counteract that kind of corny non-argument the politicians invented such stunts as sending teachers to space, stunts that make it very difficult to cancel a launch that has political implications, even if the circumstances all point to the dangers in launching at that exact moment.