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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
It's 20 years later, and the first Shuttle disaster is still making it into pop culture. There's a country song from just last year with the line, "The Space Shuttle fell out of the sky, and the whole world cried" - 19 Something.
I remember that someone made a movie a few years after called Challenger I think, and I begged my parents to let me stay up to watch it. It turned out to be a really lame movie though, I thought it would have stuff on what happened after the disaster, but the whole movie led up to the explosion and nothing after.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
An excellent account (and really, one should expect no less from Richard Feynman) of the Challenger disaster was given in the book `What do you care what other people think?' It highlights the political and managerial problems at NASA. If you enjoy this book, I highly recommend grabbing the rest of Feynman's books as well, such as `Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman' and of course the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Feynman was by far one of the greatest minds of our time. Too bad he died fairly young (70 years), he still had a good 10 or 20 years of time to contribute to human knowledge.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
A fact often missed by the popular media when dealing with the Challenger accident is emergency egress provision.
The 'big step' taken moving from the Saturn V launcher to the Shuttle for manned flight was not just moving from expendable to [partially] re-usable vehicles but the total reliance in the new vehicle for launch safety.
If practically *anything* were to go wrong during the launch of a Shuttle, it would be curtains for the vehicle and crew whereas the Saturn V had the 'option' of the Launch Escape Tower which could (in theory) give the crew one last chance of getting clear of the failed vehicle using it's relatively small solid rockets.
I've often imagined what could go wrong with a shuttle launch, there are possibilities such as:
*Catastrophic multiple SME failure just after SRB ignition leading to an over-rotation heads-down
*A Mis-light of an SRB on the pad (prior to launch) - Apparently NASA takes huge precautions with their SRBs due to volatility of the solid fuel.
*A Mis-light of an SRB on launch causing over-rotation of the vehicle away from the lit SRB(NASA *says* this is of infinitely small chance tho)
*Failure of the SRB release system on the pad (the tie-downs which hold the vehicle in place prior to launch)
*A simple bird-strike causing damage to the orbiter's pressure hull.
And of course, there is the failure of components leading to rapid combustion of the LOX/Hydrogen fuels.
Perhaps none of the above could realistically happen, perhaps some could. (I'm no expert, just a fan of manned spaceflight).
What I do know is that I'll be happier about people sitting on top of massive potential energies when they give them a Launch Escape System again. It's not a certainty but it's nice to know that the Astronauts get one last chance if the rest of the vehicle falls to bits.
Disclaimer: I am not one of these people who thinks that spaceflight is, should be, or can be as safe as say civillian aviation.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Are you forgetting that NASA, and Morton Thiokol management is solely responsible for the disaster, the engineers protested the launch.
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.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
The Challenger disaster sparked a lot of insightful commentary about the shuttle program from Richard Feynman.
The Rogers Commission relegated the bulk of his thoughts to an "Appendix" because no one wanted to release a report that was too critical of the space program (even though that's exactly what they were appointed to do). It almost wasn't included at all, but for Feynman's dogged insistence.
He deals with his role in the Rogers commission in No Ordinary Genius (that's a link to the beginning of the Chapter from Google Print).
That chapter is filled with funny anecdotes, and enraging stories about the bullheadedness of beaurocracy, told by one of the most charismatic geniuses of our time about one of the most important events from my childhood.
Highly recommended.
"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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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?
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.
The temperature was actually in the low 20's (-6.67 degrees celsius) that morning. I think they let it warm up a bit before the launch, but it was still much colder than any of the other launches. From what I remember, no testing had really been done at that temperature.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
"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.
First off, I actually read the article - all eight pages of it. I was also a college student attending Purdue the day of the crash studying, oddly enough, aeronautical engineering and taking a class in propulsion with a proffessor who was a consultant for Morton-Thiokol (just Thiokol soon after). I remember a few things about this in particular.
It seemed that, almost as soon as the camera crew realized what had happened, they zeroed in on McCauliff's family. It took a while for the cameraman to get his payoff though, she didn't really react for quite some time. No doubt not fully able to comprehend what just happened.
When I got to my class that morning (psychology), I found the professor had also just seen the footage, he cancelled the class. None of us were really into it at that point.
The local news was all over the propulsion professor asking him for theories/insight. At that point though, nobody really knew what had happened and speculation is foolish.
By the end of that day, I was hearing "Need Another Seven Astronauts". In contrast, I've yet to hear any such wise-assed remarks about the Columbia reentry disaster.
===
It's easy to second guess NASA's decision making but, when you are in that moment, it's a hard trigger to pull. I've no doubt that engineers were concerned about the integrity of the O-ring seal. However, when they launched, they were within published spec. Sadly, the spec was wrong. In that situation, it becomes your (expert) opinion vs. established data. You might be right, but it's hard to push through.
I say all of this because I'm right in the middle of something similar. I see a situation that management characterizes as "agressive" and I would call "reckless" - but it's just my opinion. I can't go to the appropriate regulating agencies with anything that would stick. All I can really do is what I've done, I resigned. On paper, I said the recent benefits change was not meeting my needs. Behind close doors, however, I went into very frank detail about how I felt their current philosophies could put people at risk, and how I could no longer represent them in good faith.
I looked for a way to compel the needed changes from my position, but was unsuccessful. I was well respected there, perhaps by resigning and making sure they understood why, they will be motivated to re-evalute. I don't really know.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.
Generally large fireballs are associated with explosions, which this seemed to be. More specifically, the shuttle was wrenched off course suddenly by the disintegrating and burning fuel tank (i.e. the exploding (or as others will be sure to point out to me-rapidly burning) part). While the crew cabin survived and plummeted to the ocean at more than 200 mph. It has been heavily rumored that buried in a secret safe in NASA is a tape recording from one of the astronauts (who had a recorder running during takeoff in his pocket) muttering the Lord's prayer during the descent.
There is sufficent evidence that the bodies of the astronauts were put in barrels on the back of a flatbed when brought ashore as to not raise any suspicion
Pieces of Challenger still occasionally wash up on the beach, with a large wing portion showing up on the beach in the late nineties. Pieces of the wreckage of the shuttle are "entombed" in a missile silo on Cape Canaveral.
There is this very prescient article written while the shuttles were being built. He also wrote an excellent followup after Columbia. Personally, I thought Challenger was a "one-off" and that things had been fixed, but I lost all faith in the space agency (and its subsequent funding for the expensive shuttles).
There never been an exact cost released by NASA for what it takes to launch a shuttle, but I'm quite sure that it is very much more than the 500 million they said before the Columbia disaster. Some say more than a billion dollars.
Which I believe would be the cost to build a decent Hubble replacement and launch on an unmanned rocket. Food for thought.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
First, multiple SME failure just after SRB ignition was problematic, but it has never been problematic due to over-rotation---there is sufficient steering ability even with just the SRBs. The problem is that multiple SME failure causes too much of a difference in thrust between the shuttle and the boosters, which would overstress the struts attaching the SRBs to the shuttle. In addition, a failure of two or more (of the three) SMEs would result in insufficient power to attain orbit.
Since Challenger, the struts were strengthened, so they can now survive even a three-out situation. A two-out failure can now be dealt with without loss of life throughout the launch (although it would require a ditch and loss of the vehicle through some portions). A three-out failure is still problematic, but should be survivable for the crew after 90 seconds, and might be survivable just after launch.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One of the reason more failure modes are now survivable for the crew is that post-Challenger a bailout ability was added: If the shuttle is stable and under control and still not too high, but has insufficient power to either attain orbit or reach an emergency-landing airstrip, the crew can put it on autopilot and bail out with parachutes, using an egress pole that allows them to clear the left shuttle wing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The Shuttle is expensive to launch. When we lost the Titan IV in 1998, the rocket itself was valued at 400 million (by far the most expensive expendable rocket) and the satellite was estimated at around 800 million. Shuttle costs probably would exceed 1 billion per ignoring all the return to flight issues.
This is why whenever I hear space advocates and astronomers whining about trying to get the Hubble fixed using the shuttle, I want to grab them by the throat and throttle them. It would be much cheaper and would stop diverting valuable resources to focus their energies on getting the next generation Hubble replacement into space on an expendable rocket. With the savings they could get ITS replacement into space. An expendable launch on an Atlas V or Delta IV would run less than 200 million, possibly less than 100. Plus, now they would have a presumably better satellite in space. Also, the satellite would not have to be designed so that an astronaut could fix it.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
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.
Hot gas from the leaking O-ring burned through a structural member,which caused a partial structural collapse, which caused the spacecraft to yaw violently, which caused it to disintegrate under aerodynamic loads. The main fuel tank ruptured and the contents burned, while the solid rocket boosters continued to climb by themselves. The orbiter, with crew inside, fell to the surface mostly in one piece.
It was not an explosion in the literal sense of the word...it would have been merciful for the crew if it were.
rj
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.
That is the dumbest comment I've ever heard. I watched the launch in my high school library as it happened, and I can tell you that, while horrible and shocking, the destruction of the Challenger is nothing at all like 9/11. They don't even fall into the same ballpark. The Challenger accident was just that, an accident. Nobody wanted it to happen, but it did. It was a terrible accident that happened during our quest for knowledge and discovery. 9/11 happened due to meticulous and malicious planning on the part of some extremist followers of Islam. 9/11 killed over 3000 people. People who, unlike the 7 astronauts killed when the Challenger went up, didn't realize they were taking a risk when they went to work (or got on an airplane). Never, ever compare the two, its like apples and oranges.
I am a space scientist/physicist who worked directly on OMS shuttle components. I chose to resign in June, 1985, from a test engineer position at a major spacelab, citing insufficient support for safety and concern for the physics of flight: the environment of those times was, in my view, a concern for how much money could be made, and how much we individuals could pocket for ourselves. I was asked to lecture on my final day, and warned that someone would die, in a big way, if we engineers did not get back to thinking about what we were there for. Six months later, I flipped on the tube, saw Dan Rather somber, knew it popped, flipped the tube back off.
I've been watching a history channel show on NASA and the missions from the early 60's through today. It's interesting how deep the emotions are but one thing that's obvious is that the people in mission control have had to make some very intense decisons over the last 4 and a half decades. It's easy to blame engineers who did not yell loud enough or management that did not listen or political administrations that were pushing for success, but the truth is while there have been a handful (3) of tragedies resulting in some devastating accidents, there have also been some tremendous successes.
I've watched a lot of the films and read alot the news reports of the various NASA missions and it seems to me that the engineers and managers in the control room and the astronauts in the vehicles during the good times and the devastating times are some very dedicated people who know the risks and try to make the best decisions they can at the time. Remember folks alot of these earlier missions were run with slide rules or calculators and a hell of lot of gut and intuition.
I know we need to learn from mistakes and it's healthy to critically look at any error or tragedy, but let's be honest, the people in NASA are some pretty tremendous scientists, engineers, and managers and as far as I can see they are doing a pretty damn good job.
csh
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sorry to be a grammar Nazi on this. The media uses such hyperbole that words change meanings based on the emotional cliches spewed by the plastic hairdos on the news networks. Remember when there were no bad connotations to the word "hacker"? I do.
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=disaster
disaster n.
1. An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe.
Challenger accident was not a disaster. To say that money makes the difference between a tragic accident and a disaster is to devalue the real disasters - such as tsunamis.
I was working in the astronaut training facility in 1986 when Challenger blew up. Like many others that day, I didn't see it live, but I did see it on the first replay. My desk didn't have a line-of-site to the office TV and I was plinking away at some code on a 8088 PC.
The sound of a dozen coworkers watching friends die got me up and to the TV.
To those of us at NASA who worked with the crew, it is and will always be an accident.
Because accidents can be prevented, but disasters can't.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
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)
Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/ , a statistican and groundbreaking proponent of information visualization, has a very good illustration of what happened at the challenger disaster in his book "envisioning information", or maybe it was "Visual Explanations". i really can recommend his awesome books.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth(1),
And danced(2) the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed(3) and joined the tumbling mirth(4)
Of sun-split clouds(5) and done a hundred things(6)
You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung(7)
High in the sunlit silence(8). Hov'ring there(9)
I've chased the shouting wind(10) along and flung(10)
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious(12), burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights(13) with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle(14) flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space(15),
Put out my hand(16), and touched the face of God.
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.
You are right, the temperature was below freezing that day. I know because I was at KSC and saw the launch in person. I'm from California and wasn't used to that kind of cold. I didn't have any gloves and got a minor case of frostbite on my fingers while trying to hold my camera. I remember stopping at a gas station on the way to KSC and I looked over at some nearby bushes and there were icicles hanging from them. It was probably the coldest weather I've ever experienced.
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.
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.
I checked my Challenger file; the spelling is Boisjoly. Unfortunately I don't have a citation written on my photocopy of the interview with him: "Some of the things NASA booster manager Larry Mulloy said ... went beyond probing; it was the start of intimidation. But even with that, our chief engineer said he would not recommend launching."
I was just flipping through a 1990 Miami Herald article on Bill McInnis, who made repeated claims of a hydrogen fuel line leak with the shuttle (visible, he said, with Challenger). NASA grounded the fleet for a fuel line leak about two weeks after he committed suicide. The chilling part of this article: "He talked, too, of failures in the thermal protection tiles that keep the shuttle from burning up on re-entry, and of what he believed to have been a lack of proper testing..." The reason I was flipping through the article was to get Mike Clemens' name right. He was a Cape engineer who warned his boss about the O-rings; his boss didn't pass it up. Mike committed suicide after Challenger, feeling responsible for not successfully persuading his boss. I had a list somewhere--I think it had three names on it--of people who warned about the O-rings and killed themselves out of a feeling of responsibility later.
To claim "They knew a disaster was coming, but no one stepped forward" is inaccurate, irresponsible, and horribly unfair to people who lost their jobs over this. Furthermore, it continues to obscure the root cause of the accident. Of course, MSNBC doesn't have a link for feedback about the article.
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.
Looking through the article and several of the comments here, there doesn't seem to be much of a focus on the "big picture" lessons from the Challenger accident. There's a recent post Rand Simberg made at Transterrestrial Musings which sums up some of my own thoughts on the matter:
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http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/006406.h
It's twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA's confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn't severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.
Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it--they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.
But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn't be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it's childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn't that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.
This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)--that the American people won't accept the loss of astronauts. But we've shown throughout our history that we're willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA's goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.
Will the American people be inspired by that? I can't say--I only know that I am not.
Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we're going to get that from the current plan, or planners.