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

Am I callous?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in preschool or something when the disaster happened. I had no awareness of it until many years later.

But when I think of the disaster now, I have the somewhat odd reaction that I don't really feel that the real tragedy was the loss of Challenger and its crew.

When I think about the 20th anniversiary of Challenger, the tragedy I feel is that it seems like NASA has done almost nothing of note since then.

It seems like somewhere around the Challenger disaster, the pioneering attitude of NASA that had been its hallmark up until then took something of a backseat. Somewhere around 20 years ago, probably not at Challenger or because of it but certainly sometime around then, NASA changed from being a truly important thing of importance to the public to just being something the government does. 20 years later, the manned space program has not progressed one single step beyond where it was when Challenger blew up; we're still stuck using the exact same shuttle fleet, and the manned program has been entirely preoccupied with the maintenence of a couple of space stations that aren't really that far beyond SkyLab and whose crews are preoccupied just keeping the things in the sky. NASA has had a small handful of true triumphs with its unmanned probes since that time, but the successes have been far between and have tended to receive only a fraction of the attention given in the public eye to NASA's failures.

And when I think about this, and realize that it represents, essentially, the loss of the nation's manned space program sometime about 20 years ago, it tends to overshadow entirely in my mind the tragedy of the loss of Challenger's intrepid crew sometime about 20 years ago.

Is this a callous response, or a reasonable one?