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.'"

Comments

"international disaster"

[orangeguru]

Aha. Very international.

Re:"international disaster"

[Anonymous Coward]

Space ship blows up with schoolteacher and first civilian on board, I'd call it pretty international even if it's an American ship.

I like the ever-so-impartial wording implying that they should have been able to see it coming. It's easy to talk like that afterwards but obviously they did not know or it wouldn't have happened. People who write this kind of journalistic sensationalism by exploiting human tragedy disgust me.

This is one of the problems.....

[ezratrumpet]

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."

Re:This is one of the problems.....

[darklordyoda]

So when NASA tries to keep costs down, people say they're cutting too many corners and endangering lives, and when they spend extra for the quality, people say they're too bloated and need to run things more like a business.

People will complain no matter how NASA runs things, I say give them a bigger budget than the measly amount they get now and see what they can do with it.

And yes, 16 billion is measly when you consider that it seems sometimes like they're our NIH for everything not health-related; that is, they have a finger in every stewing "pot" of research.

I remember exactly where I was...

[voss]

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"

Re:I remember exactly where I was...

[mtaht]

I was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs when I saw Challenger explode. I slowly slid down the stairs, and then watched the video again and again, again, until every frame was burned into my memory.

And although the last words on the black box might have been "uh, oh", the last words heard over the air were: "Go for 104 percent".

Then there was this horrible "Snick!" as the radio went dead.

There's a sample of the last sounds from the shuttle on this song.

I saw Richard Feynman's eloquent demonstration of why the boosters failed, and watched him be ignored by the other members of the commission. I learned of the group of engineers at Thiokol that were overrulled by their management to give the "Go" to this mission...

I visualize these moments in time every time I am given management directives that attempt to contravene physical law, and to this day I stay true to my profession as an engineer, and do the right thing by the physics. It's the only way I can sleep at night.

Still, I remain haunted.

Re:I remember exactly where I was...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the Generation X'ers this was our 9/11.

That is asinine.

-Gen X

Re:I remember exactly where I was...

[thesandtiger]

9/11 was our 9/11.

Challenger was Challenger.

The two aren't similar in any way, shape or form, except that people who shouldn't have died, did.

It bears repeating.

[Corf]

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
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)

"tragedy"

[bcrowell]

"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.

Re:"tragedy"

[pjt48108]

You are correct, even though people are flaming you. 'Tragedy' IS a word too freely used, as is 'hero.'

You correctly note that they were aware of the risks, they took the risks, and lost. It's not technically 'tragic' or 'tragedy,' but that doesn't at all dismiss the deeply sad, unfortunate nature of the accident, despite the binary view some are ascribing to your comments.

The accident itself is just one in a larger series of events which might collectively be considered 'tragic." As someone noted in comments, there is usually a tragic flaw--such as hubris--giving rise to the tragic events, collectively known in literature as 'tragedy.' In this case, the tragedy is the larger story of humans defying nature and assuming nature had been conquered. This is hubris, on the part of American administration officials, members of Congress, engineers, management officials, and contractors, etc., across decades, culminating in the Challenger disaster.

The 'Challenger Tragedy' is what you could call the story leading from the end of Apollo to the loss of Challenger, and its immediate aftermath, such as the hearings, etc.

Likewise, the 'Columbia Tragedy' would have a similar narrative background, with its own tragic flaw: management deciding to eschew on-orbit imaging because there was "nothing we can do," if damage was found, anyhow."

Both are sad, dramatic events, but not tragedy. I take a contrary view to what yet another commenter wrote, that it was offensive for you to compare real loss of life to fictional loss of life. To be more accurate, people calling the loss of either shuttle a tragedy are themselves using literary terminology to oversimplify a complex series of decisions and actions into a cable news soundbite, and this oversimplification ("The astronauts' deaths were tragic") cheapens, in my view, the loss of seven Americans engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

And with that, I shall adorn myself with aerogel pants and await the flaming...

What a bunch of....

[mswope]

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.

"The booster engineers felt helpless ...'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 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.

no one stepped forward

[llZENll]

"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.

What about the other one?

[EBFoxbat]

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.

Re:The Launch Escape System.

[darkmeridian]

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.

OK, one correction is needed here...

[JetScootr]

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.