Slashdot Mirror
Challenger 25 Years Later
25 years ago, I peered inside through the playground window of my school. I was never particularly interested in being outside, and there was a shuttle launch on the library TV! The images of what I saw that day will stick with me forever. I didn't know what it really was I saw; I just made jokes. It's still how I deal. But I think I'm a bit wiser today, having maybe learned that the bleeding edge is sometimes literal. The technology we take for granted descends directly from the people willing to do what we never could. Thanks to the crew of Challenger,
Columbia and Apollo 1.
To be honest, my memory if it is actually a funny one. I remember chuckling at the guy still reading the telemetry data as if nothing had gone wrong after it blew up. I remember thinking "Hey asshole, you might want to look at your monitor." And even when he did realize something had gone wrong, I remember him calling it something like a "major malfunction." Yeah, major malfunction, no shit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an NASA office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
To be honest, my memory if it is actually a funny one. I remember chuckling at the guy still reading the telemetry data as if nothing had gone wrong after it blew up. I remember thinking "Hey asshole, you might want to look at your monitor." And even when he did realize something had gone wrong, I remember him calling it something like a "major malfunction." Yeah, major malfunction, no shit.
In his defense, there's not a lot of room for emotion in that line of work. And said emotion often leads to inefficiencies. Imagine what sort of data might have been missed had he exploded in tears and rushed out of the room. While information is still coming in, remaining stoic is probably the optimal course of action for such a position.
My work here is dung.
I was in grade school... home from the day for some reason (sick maybe?) and I was watching cartoons on the local CBS/NBC affiliate. Then they cut in with the shuttle launch. KABOOM. My parents weren't home. I just sat there watching the news for hours on end. It was the first time I was ever interested in what was on the news. By the time my parents got home I knew more about space shuttles than any grade school student should ever know.
This was a waste of perfectly good life. Not a race to push technology to new limits.
Like Columbia, this was an example of short-cutting and not listening to nay-sayer engineers who turned out to be correct. And simply not following the safety rules that NASA itself established.
It's a hell of a thing watching people die on live T.V.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It was on a Commodore 64, connected to a local BBS.
"What were the last words spoken on the shuttle? Okay, fine. Let the bitch drive."
Followed closely by:
"You hear Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? Yeah - they found her head and shoulders on the beach."
I still recall it very clearly, almost like it happened only a year or two ago. I was a senior in high school at a private school up in New Hampshire, which is probably part of the reason why I recall it so well. I had a free period so I was relaxing in my room just before heading down to the cafeteria for lunch. My friend came in and told me the shuttle had blown up so we listened to the radio for a little while before going to lunch. When I got to the school cafeteria the woman serving the food apparently saw I was distressed and asked if I was ok. I mumbled that the space shuttle had blown up. She just laughed and said something like "yeah, right". I was so incensed by her reaction that I stared right back at her and practically yelled at her, "Turn on a radio if you have one around here" then went out to eat my lunch. About 15 minutes later I went back for seconds. This time when she saw me all she said was "I'm so sorry" and I could hear they had a radio on in the kitchen. Most of the rest of the afternoon most of the students were hanging out in a large auditorium where they had a projection TV running the news. The teachers pretty much let anybody stay there if they wanted rather than going to class the rest of the day.
I was living in Orlando at the time. I can remember going outside to watch the launch. All the neighbors did it, shuttle launches in my neighborhood were like tailgating is for sports in other towns. It was of course obvious something wasn't right but to most of us watching we thought one of the canisters simply dropped early. A few minutes into the launch one of the neighbors came running out of the house screaming that it blew up...I just remember a lot of screaming and crying., the shuttle was something Floridian's have a sense or pride and ownership with, its something that others identify the state with. The shock and grief pretty much killed my neighborhoods enthusiasm for launch parties, perhaps its superstitious but the rest of the time I lived there no one I knew made a point of watching launches again it was just too painful. The only lauch I personally watched live after that was when my father had been invited to watch from one of the observation decks on base, we were both extremely nervous the whole time, but it was rather healing when the launch went off without a hitch.
I was switching between classes when I heard a friend of mine say the shuttle just blew up. I thought he was just bull-shitting and went on with my day. Then I got home from school and saw all the news coverage. It was a sad day after that.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
I was in 9th grade. I remember being in algebra class and one of the kids had brought in a ham radio. The teacher let us listen to the Challenger lifting off. Once it was in the air, she had him turn it off. It wasn't until next period when I I learned what had happened. After that, all of the classrooms that day had CNN on (first time I remember watching that network). Very surreal day for me.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Q: What does NASA stand for?
A: Need another seven astronauts.
I recall where I was by virtue of the fact that I didn't know about it right away. I was walking to my friend's house after school, probably to play legos. When he told me the shuttle had blown up, I thought he was trying to kid me until I saw the news clip of the explosion.
"Roger, go at throttle up."
Why can't they listen to the engineers?
I was 16. It was the last class before lunch. Houston time zone.
An office aide came to each class and gave us the news.
During lunch they set up TVs in some of the classrooms so we could watch the replays.
It was my generation's Kennedy assassination and 9/11.
I was at school in Port Orange (small town next to Daytona Beach). We could see it from the playground, they sent us all home. All the teachers were crying, got home, parents had come home from work and they were crying. It was pretty surreal for an elementary school kid.
I distinctly remember the SRB's winding down from the explosion.
Oddly enough, I am now living in Dallas which wasn't far from ground zero for the Columbia breakup. I remember hearing it thinking it was thunder, it was early enough in the morning that I was half asleep and didn't think it odd to hear thunder on a clear day. My sister called me to tell me to turn on the television. A buddy of mine was a brand new journalist in Tyler/Longview and covered much of the disaster. I think one of his stores or photographs was picked up by the NYT.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
It's an example of a culture of remarkable achievement that had become susceptible to groupthink after a while.
It wasn't even completely that. I read a fascinating excerpt of a book by Edward Tufte in college that basically showed that the engineers HAD the data, but it wasn't compiled in a way that clearnly said to any reader, "hey dumbass, nothing below this temperature is likely to be remotely safe".
A quick summary: http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
The book: Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_visex ) by Edward Tufte
Excerpt: Visual and Statistical Thinking ( http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_textb ) by Edward Tufte. (This is what I read in college. It's a reprint of chapter 2 of the aforementioned book. It was amazing.)
I was in a little private school and there was one class per grade, so each class went into a room to watch it on television. It was such a big deal to have a teacher going up into space that even the backwards Christian school I was in wanted kids to see it.
So that sucked. We all just sat there going from awe to horror and then we had to go back and try to do school work. Absolutely awful.
http://transformativeworks.org/
He threatened to leave officially the commission if they would not publish it.
He demonstrated the know weakness of the booster seals by immersing it in ice-water in fronty of the TV cameras.
And Apollo 1 - it was know that pure oxygen is a big risc - aks any welder.
So far for the sake of ignorance they paid dearly with their lives.
And Russian Kosmonauts too!
I've heard the Challenger disaster referred to as my generation's JFK moment: you will always remember what you were doing when you heard the news. I was living in Ocala at the time and it was routine for students to beg to be let outside to see the shuttle go up. Even though this was launch #25, we got a reprieve from 8th grade algebra to watch (thanks, Ms Donnelly!). I remember saying to myself "It's not supposed to do that" when the thrust column forked. We spent the rest of the day watching TV coverage and aside from the tragedy, it amazed me how fast they got the evening news guys in front of a camera.
bah.
this is my worst nightmare: something that I performed work on malfunctions and lives are lost. Mishaps occur. Sometimes, it is preventable. Sometimes, there is no amount of planning/engineering/contingencies that will allow for recovery. The amount of second-guessing and contemplation of "what could I have done?" can't be described in a number that I know of.
An earlier comment talked about remaining stoic at mission/launch control. It's the same for the knuckle-draggers on the ground as well. If anything, those directly involved with the launch have the hardest job. I personally don't think that I could have handled something like this the way that they did, so for that, I salute them and only hope that I can be half as awesome as they were on that day.
They KNEW the seals could poses a problem and launched anyways. Honestly every manager in the line that greenlighted the launch in spite of the warnings from the engineers needed to be put in the water pit during the next launch.
you NEVER go against what the engineers say.
The real tragedy here, is that as evidenced by the Columbia disaster, Challenger taught NASA absolutely nothing.
This was the first "tragedy" that was instantaneously burnt into my mind forever. I was 5 years old and numerous other classes from various grades where gather around TV watching the launch. Shuttle launches were pretty common but this one was special for the educational school system, so we all were engaged.
I remember when the shuttle blew, one the teachers covered her mouth in shock, froze for a few seconds and then began sobbing. I was, of course, to young to fully understand what was going on but it certainly left an impact. In fact, I was certainly affected by 9/11 but I had late classes (in college) that day, so when I awoke all of the events had already taken place. Learning about 9/11 second-hand from friends that day left less of an impression on me than this memory because this was one I witnessed as it happened. I can still get a little choked up about it when I think about.
My thought and prayers still go out to the families of NASA who have lost loved ones and friend in the name of space exploration, especially on days like today.
I mised the bus that day. My mother was painting the hall ceiling. It was cold outside so I turned on the tv to one of the three channels we could get to see if there was anything on. I was just in time to watch the launch countdown (or a commentary-free replay). I remember it feeling like an eternity between the first "that doesn't look right" twinge of adrenaline to my brain grinding through the "there are too many things on the screen producing exhaust trails and none of them are going straight" analysis to the "oh no" conclusion. I did nothing but sit on the couch watching the replays over and over all day.
The last thing to cross my mind that night before finally falling asleep was the old line "our reach has exceeded our grasp" and I drempt all night of falling from the stars.
... in 11th grade in high school and I was called into the office to talk to the principal. He told me that something very bad had happened with the shuttle and could I please figure out how to broadcast the radio over the school's intercom system (I did morning announcements). After I figured out what switches to throw, I was told that no one knew how to do it since the last time it was done was when Kennedy was shot. I then ran up to see the biology teacher (she had applied to be the teacher in space) - she was sitting at her desk watching CNN with huge tears running down her face. Worst damn day of my life, up to that point, and after, at least until 9/11.
Also was never so happy as when the next one finally went up...
I still remember that day like it was yesterday - I was 13...
We were in Study Hall at the time - school principal came on the intercom (he had a very thick Dutch accent) and I though that he said that the "chapel had exploded" and then continued on to mention that it was the launch with the "Teacher in Space" Christa McCauliffe (sp?) on board. Then I realized that he had said "shuttle" and not "chapel". I think I thought he said "chapel" because a teacher at the school had recently passed away, and I thought he was talking about the funeral home.
When I got home from school I watched all the news coverage until I went to bed. The images of the fireball, smoke cloud, and the wandering SRBs sticks in my mind so clearly.
Strange day. Sad day. A day I remember like 9/11 and will probably never forget.
Enough of the jokes people. Have some compassion/respect...
And yet Richard Feynman demonstrated that fact simply by placing an O ring into a cup with ice in it.
I was in a Canadian Tire store combing through their Commodore stock, priced to sell. I was watching it on the TV there. I bought a VIC-20 cartridge.
I was a Marine corporal stationed at Camp Lejeune w/ 1/6, 3 months away from my EOS. I had just gotten back to my barracks room from the Dental unit, getting my last checkup and a cavity filled, when I turned on the TV to find the count down in its last couple minutes. I thought, what the heck, slap a tape in my VCR and record it. Imagine my horror to know that I had captured the event live. I was working for the battalion S3 shop so I carried the VCR and TV, on foot, the quarter mile across the parade deck to that office. Nearly all the officers and senior NCOs that worked in the building stopped in, the battalion CO included, to take a look at what happened that morning. If I look hard enough, I could probably find that tape in amongst some of my stored belongings.
One of my professors at the time noted that there would have been no O-ring to fail if the thing had been built in one piece. And it could have been built in one piece if built local to the launch site. Which it could have been. But it had to come by train because the bid was won by someone who did not manufacture locally. And since train cars aren't big enough for a whole fuel tank, they had to make the tank in pieces. Supposedly the winning bid had been landed with help from someone in elected office to help out their district. It can be very hard to predict the consequences of our actions.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
/salute those who lost that day
Ok, but Feynman should never be compared to any other human being. His ability to make the most complicated things simple was absolutely unique.
Mod parent up
Would that be a JFK moment as in sleeping with a woman that isn't your wife? I don't remember the when, the where, or the what... just remember thinking at the time... when people loose at Russian Roulette... why is it considered an accident (or in this case, a disaster.). These days I think whole space program is built by people on a deadline, trying to stay under budget, and there is more politics, ego and nationalism in that system than rocket fuel (not to mention a room full of the brightest of the bright that never thought that a contained space with a pure oxygen environment and a thousand electrical contacts might be a bit of a fire hazard).
Just graduated that December with my BS in CompSci and I was going to meet my future wife, she was an LPN, at her hospital for lunch. I heard on the AM radio in my Dodge Aspen there had been a problem with the launch. I remember stopping and looking into a patient's room at the TV. The only time I've every gasped outloud in my life. Before or after.
Only thing I remember (I was just 3 at the time) was seeing my mom pick me up from preschool and clearly look like she had been crying. She had apparently been sitting in the car for an hour listening to the coverage of the launch and the aftermath. She didn't tell me what happened, but explained that people were going up to the stars and something went wrong. We lived (in fact still do) in New Hampshire, so this hit especially close to home for everyone around here.
A few years later (in fact, when we went to the opening of the planetarium in Concord, NH named after McCauliffe) my mom told me about that day and I finally was able to link up the memory of her crying to the actual event.
This is the wrong message to take from Challenger. While it is true that there are risks that were taken with the space program, lets not forget there was a civilian teacher on board that shuttle, and at the time the flight was considered to be reasonably safe. The major contributing factors to Challenger were due to management taking priority over good engineering. That is a lesson we can't afford to forget.
My dad took me on vacation down to FL to watch a shuttle launch. It was the Challenger. We got down there and waited around but the launch got rescheduled and delayed multiple times until eventually we needed to fly home so he could go back to work. The next thing I know I'm at my elementary school, sitting in a room with about 30 kids and a few teachers watching the shuttle launch. When it exploded, as kids, we were mostly confused, then shocked. The teachers were crying at first, then some tried to distract us. If I recall, this was a mission where a teacher was on board. Feels like yesterday.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Today it's been 25 years since the Challenger explosion. Today, I turn 25 years old. Word has it that I clawed my way into this world at almost the exact same time as the accident. And here I am, working in the space industry as an analyst, to ensure the safe launch and function of the rockets the USA launches today. Sometimes you have to love irony. Cheers, fellow slashdotters!
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
25 years ago this morning I was huddled next to a tiny fire with a few other grimy, cold and tired soldiers in brief respite from a long training mission when our Lt. walked up to us with a stricken look on his face to tell us that the space shuttle Challenger had blown up just after lift off. He said "The shuttle blew up." and walked off and we just looked at each other and tried to figure out if what he said was real or not. Training continued. A few days later, back at the barracks watching a recording of the event, I realized it happened on my otherwise forgotten 21st birthday. I count this day among others of personal significance like November 11th and December 7th.
It wasn't even completely that. I read a fascinating excerpt of a book by Edward Tufte in college that basically showed that the engineers HAD the data, but it wasn't compiled in a way that clearnly said to any reader, "hey dumbass, nothing below this temperature is likely to be remotely safe"
Well, in a few thousand years, thanks to the glory of the internet - there might be someone to look back at your dribble and write a book going "this dumbass was a dumbass - but he never had the overwhelming gift of hindsight in place to see the idiocy of his own words".
My recollection of that moment is still very clear, the shuttle launches at that point feeling almost commonplace and not meriting any special attention. This launch of course was designed to reignite the public interest in our space program and the value of the mission with the inclusion of a civilian teacher. I was in computer science class and the television was tuned into the launch. We all knew what happened and the moment sticks in my mind the same way the the Air Florida Flight 90 crash, the attempt on Reagan's life, and 9/11. These are all major milestones in my life that demonstrated the the worlds insanity and the bravery of individuals. It is much easier to look at a crash scene and be upset then it is to jump into the icy Potomac, walk into a skyscraper on the verge of disintegrating, or continue to announce telemetry data when you know everything just went upside down. I also learned another lesson during the Challenger. Although a geek now, I was certainly not interested in advertising my love of books and history and just wanted to be one of the cool kids. There was one kid in my school, Lyle, who was different (we have a likely diagnosis for this nowadays). Lyle was always reading, did not socialize, and was the butt of merciless teasing due to his unique disposition. Lyle, in a rare moment of social interaction (or frustration) responded to a juvenile assertion about the cause of the Challenger accident that at the time made absolutely no sense to any of us (O Ring Seal?). The statement was probably ignored by most, but it stuck with me and was immediately recognizable as the same outcome provided after the accident investigation. I don't know what happened to Lyle, but much to my wife's dismay, I generally seek out the 'different' people at parties to hear what they think, and I am a better man for it.
"Thanks to the crew of Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1." Lets not forget the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.
A computer networking show, probably Interface, was underway in Washington DC and in our booth we had a live network connection to our corporate intranet. I was running the tech support for the booth and got an instant message from one of my co-workers back at the office telling me what had happened. This is in the days before cell-phones, so the buzz spread from our booth very quickly. The show just stopped for a while until people could take it all in. It was a shocker. The report that followed was good insight into the workings of NASA and flight operations. In the history of discovery, space is still a lot safer than the early days on the ocean were.
I remember being in a school assembly for an earlier launch - Columbia or Atlantis, I think - and the whole way up, I just kept thinking to myself, "explode, explode, c'mon explode. please explode. c'mon, this is booring... explode!" not out of any malicious or malevolent intent, but just because I thought it would be cool and I wasn't old enough to realize the ramifications.
When the Challenger disaster happened two years later, I was mortified. By that time I already could understand what it meant and was wracked with guilt, convinced it was somehow my fault for having wished that such a thing would happen.
Which, of course, is silly. But just in case - I really hope that no more shuttles or rockets explode.
Apparently I was (and still am) a lot older than most of those here. I was in college, which in those days meant limited access to cable TV (and obviously no web). All I could do was sit in my dorm room and watch the endless replays of the explosion on broadcast TV instead of going to class. It was a Tuesday; I remember that still. I'm too young to remember the Apollo 1 disaster, or the Apollo 13 near-disaster when I was in pre-school, so it was my first real understanding of the danger of space travel, which - like so many people - I was beginning to think of as something in the past. To this day, every time I see That Photo of the SRBs veering off in different directions, I flinch.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I was working at the old IBM facility at JSC in Houston, as an operator on a mainframe server that housed a database called SED that tracked every part on every shuttle. My manager walked in and told me what happened, and told me to lock the mainframe down until instructed otherwise. Some of the engineers were trying to run some tests on some shuttle computers, and were miffed that they couldn't get in until I told them why.
I wasn't allowed to leave the computer room for another two hours, but when I did, the cafeteria was full of crying people watching the news coverage on several TVs which were brought in to watch launches on. To a person, all of the engineers were worried that it was a software fault because they wrote the code. So the tears and horrified looks were very fearful.
It was a creepily similar feeling when 9/11 happened... everyone sitting around the TV feeling totally helpless.
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
> Thanks to the crew of Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1.
And Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11 and all the astronauts and engineers of whom we seldom hear who are listed here but who all gave their lives for the cause.
If I had mod points today the above post would get them.
Tufte's critique of PowerPoint thinking is very relevant. See also Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". The point is that the disaster was predicted and the bad decision to "go" was a consequence of poor management structures and arguably a psychological issue rather than technical.
Regarding the Columbia disaster one of my colleagues/best friends had to fill out insurance/loss documentation for some data gathering devices attached to the astronauts. She had to fill seven forms and tick "Accidental Damage" on each. The collision of bureaucracy and death felt horrible.
In Hawai'i, the Challenger was news for a year before the shuttle launch. Ellison Onizuka was the state's first astronaut. With the state so removed from the mainland, each time something happens in or related to the state becomes nationally relevant, everyone takes notice. Our studies for the week focused a lot on space exploration, who the astronauts were and how they trained, and what they would be doing when they left the planet. Every classroom in the state had a TV wheeled in or sent the students to the auditorium to watch the events live.
We were all sent home that day, even though the shuttle launch was early in the morning, Hawai'i time.There's a monument on Hickam AFB, near the commissary, if I remember correctly. I hope its draped in leis today.
Thanks also to the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.
A reminder courtesy of the Bad Astronomer.
The last radio transmission from the Challenger was the teacher asking " What's this button do?"
No, not partcularly.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I was in 3rd grade. I believe we were going to watch a recording of it in a school wide assembly later that day, but instead, we got news over the intercom that the challenger had exploded, and that our parents were being called to pick us up...school was cancelled. Probably the only time I ever felt bad about school getting cancelled!
I also remember that being about the time that I began to no longer think of space exploration as "here and now". Its hard to say if I was just immature at the time, but I really used to think we lived in a country where anything was possibly (and probable) regarding our future in space. I recall enthusiastically reading an article about manned missions to Mars (probably in PopSci) that predicted "by the late 90's". I remember thinking "Really!? dangit...that's like, forever-far-away!" Now, I'd laugh hard if someone told me we'd be on Mars in 10 years! I'd be surprised if it ever happens in my lifetime, given the USA's current attitude toward NASA and space exploration.
I was 18 years old and working at a Radio Shack in Quincy, Mass.. All the TVs on the "TV Wall" were on, all tuned to the launch. As it lifted off the pad, everyone in the store (I was the only employee, but there were 4-5 customers) stopped doing whatever they were doing to watch. When the explosion happened, I remember the stunned silence and I said: "Holy shit ! It exploded !". A few seconds later the commentator on the TV said the classic line: "It appears there might have been some kind of malfunction". And I said, "You think?"
I'll never forget that day...
Anyone who was there remembers the tasteless jokes that spread across the media in the days after the disaster. Let's try a few!
Q: What was the Shuttle's last transmission?
A: "I said I wanted a BUD Light!"
Q: What does NASA stand for?
A: Need Another Seven Astronauts
Q: Did you know why they only drink Sprite at NASA?
A: They couldn't get 7-UP.
Q: Did you hear that they are sending up another teacher on the next shuttle mission?
A: She's going to be a substitute.
Q: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue eyed?
A: One blew left and one blew right.
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?
A: "What's this button do?"
Q: What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband?
A: "You feed the kids - I'll feed the fish."
Q: What subject did Christa MacAuliffe teach?
A: Social studies . . . but now she's history.
Q: What's the difference between the Patriots and the Challenger?
A: The Patriots made it past Miami.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Well, as always - it's not quite that simple.
You see, the nay-saying engineers on the night of the 27th were the same engineers who'd been assuring management since the mid 1970's that even though they knew the design was flawed - it was safe to continue flying. (Yes, the mid 70's. The joint rotation problem was discovered in the earliest tests of the SRB's, that why they added the backup O-ring.) The engineers even produced a pretty infographic (the same one that would later be ripped by Edward Tufte) 'proving' that it was safe to continue to fly.
So, at least to me who isn't biased for or against either 'side', it's pretty understandable why management was more than a little confused when the engineers reversed their positions and were unable to provide hard evidence to support that reversal.
I was in math class. A chap (I've forgotten his name) came in saying Challenger had blown up. We first responded as you might, with "Ha ha, what?" But the school had wheeled out a TV on a cart, and the few of us gathered on a couple of couches in the big common room to look at the TV, showing re-runs and re-runs and talking heads commenting. We just sat and stared, for well over an hour.
Then Peter lifted his head, looked around, and said, "Where did all these people come from?!!"
The room behind us had filled, so quietly we didn't even know they were there, with most of the three hundred people on campus, just silently standing behind us, watching the same thing we were. That was highly eerie.
But Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, put it well - Sometimes people are going to die. That's what you get, striving for ever greater things. Sometimes through negligence, sometimes through stupidity, sometimes just because. But that's no reason to stop trying.
AC
Look, I'm against "petty patriotism" as much as the next guy... but at least the Challenger astronauts died doing something, as opposed to most of us here whose major contribution to society and scientific advancement is making inane and cowardly comments here on the GoogleWeb.
Question the reason why they were in that situation in the first place all you want, but when a soldier dies under enemy fire attempting save a friend, or when firemen die after rushing into a burning building looking for survivors, or when seven individuals die pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, they, the individuals, the fallen, all deserve our honor and our respect.
Anyone who doesn't get the difference is doing a pretty pale imitation of being human...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I was in Kindergarten and the teacher actually brought a TV into the classroom to watch the launch so we were all crowded around watching. When it happened, some kids cried, some (like me) made jokes but had a sick feeling in our guts, other kids seemed oblivious. After school that day, the teacher stood out in the parking lot and told the parents picking up the kids what happened.
Other than the explosion on the TV, I remember her crying in the parking lot more than anything else. I don't know if it was from a parent laying into her for showing us the launch or guilt over what we witnessed that got her going, but it was a sad day. Only thing I've seen on TV that was worse was 9/11.
Bullshit. Engineers are people. People make mistakes. Five people can take the same set of data, and each draw different conclusions.
An engineer can say, "This is a risk. Don't do it." Another can say, "It's a risk, but it's an acceptable one. The probability of a failure is low. Launch it."
Someone has to make a decision. Sometimes that person is wrong. But all too often we take the stance that ANY potential risk, however unlikely, is unacceptable.
You know driving is a risk, but you do it. You know that texting while driving is an even greater risk, but you probably do it anyway, thinking, "Nothing will happen to me, and this is important."
And then it does.
And then some back seat driver will cry out, "But it was a KNOWN risk! Why did they do it???"
Why indeed?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Ah...I remember that year.
NASA == Need Another Seven Astronauts
How do you fit eleven NASA astronauts in a VW Bug?
Two in the front
Two in the back
Seven in the ashtray
Come on, it's been 25 years. It's officially OK to laugh now. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
I was in 11th grade. It was cold as hell in NY, it was my birthday (as is today coincidentally)... It was mid-terms week, and I was going into my "Math Course III" midterm. The kid behind me (Chris Wheeler) said "hey, did you hear the space shuttle blew up?". I thought he was kidding, until a few minutes later a few other kids came in and said the same thing. I was flattened. I remember finding it a bit hard to concentrate, but I finished my midterm, went home after school, and remember watching the replays on the tv for HOURS.. That's literally ALL that was on (we only got like 13 channels on cable then). At about 7 PM my Dad finally said "Enough. Turn it off. There's nothing else to say or that anyone can do." So we did, and I still recall almost every minute of that day as one of the most surreal birthdays I ever had. It seemed quite strange to be "celebrating" and eating cake later that evening. In my bedroom was still a poster of the space shuttle that I got when in Florida for the 2nd launch of Columbia, and I STILL have a Challenger baseball cap that I bought a few years later in FL when Challenger first flew. (Its real ratty, cause I wore it all the time as a kid before it blew up).
I too thought it was a shame how the media only focused on the school teacher dying. And also all the crude jokes that came out not even days later.
It was a snow day for us. I was 15. The sound bite "go for throttle up" is forever imprinted in my brain. Unfortunately so is the joke that NASA stands for "Need Another Seven Astronauts".
captcha: imprint
I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Cook's class. My class was not one of the ones that got to go to the library to see the launch on television. The class troublemaker, Michael, had gone to the library on a hall pass. He ran into the room, yelled, "the space shuttle just blew up" and the teacher calmly said, "Michael, you stop lying this instant or you will get a paddling." Five minutes later, the principal came on the school's PA system. My teacher just started crying.
I was a 24yr old sailor on the USS Koelsch (FF1043).. I happened to see the lauch on the mess decks TV (we were off the coast of Jacksonville doing remedial engineering ops since we failed our last OPPE). It was a snowy picture, since it was antenna reception from off the coast, but I remember seeing it happen. Six hours later we were enroute to Cape Canaveral. The SAR Helos were flying the area and dropping smoke floats into the sea where they identified floating debris. We launched our small boats (Captain's Gig and whaleboat) to recover the flotsam. Over a period of 18 hours, we collected 2500lbs of the wreckage. The entire skin of the shuttle was honeycomb aluminum and floated, as did the cermaic tiles. Some of the pieces we recovered were larger than 4 X 8 sheets of plywood. We stored it all in our hanger bay. Quite a collection of stuff. And yes, we DID take a ceramic tile and test it out with an acetylene torch. Problem was, no one would touch it while it was glowing, but it WAS touchable, we ultimately found out. Then, under cover of darkness at 3am, we moored at Cape Canaveral and silently unloaded everything under the watchful eye of guys in white labcoats and blue hardhats. Fast forward to 2001. I was an invited guest of NASA for STS 103 when my software (Emergency De-Orbit Program) was making its maiden flight into space. Peace be with them all.
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing
the SRB were cast in pieces because it is impossible to cast and pour such a large amount of rocket propellant at once.
More likely, the preferred vendor (read Utah prok co.) found it impossible to cast such a large amount of propellant at once.
ref:
In the early 60's Aerojet and Thiokol both had test projects build a single monolithic (?) solid rocket motor for Saturn and follow on programs. Aerojet had some success in three tests. Thiokol blew theirs up.
The 260 - the Largest Solid Rocket Motor Tested
Space: Biggest Booster Yet" Time Magazine, Friday, Mar. 12, 1965
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well said, sir. They don't let just anyone be an astronaut; those guys (and girls) are studs. Typically top-of-class engineers, soldiers and super-jocks, we've lost some good Americans to the pursuit of the bleeding edge.
Jim
It turns out that President Ronald Reagan was due to deliver the State of the Union Address on that day, 25 years ago. The event was cancelled, and, instead, he gave this very moving speech, perhaps the best of his presidency. In case anyone doesn't recognize the two lines he quotes at the end, they are from a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., called "High Flight".
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I remember watching this right before I went to school, at age 6. It was the first time I realized that science had a dangerous side to it, and that the things we strive to accomplish come with a heavy cost.
Personally I've always been in support of unmanned missions since then. We can do a lot with robots (just look at the Mars rovers) without endangering any people.
You are absolutely correct that Mr. Feynman was a genius at simplification. The sad fact is, the material did not need to be simplified. *All* sealants have an operating temperature window, below which they are not resilient enough, too hard or even brittle. If there will be any movement at all (and there is a lot of it in a rocket launch) the sealant must be above that temperature, otherwise it will fail. When it fails, whatever it is supposed to seal, is not sealed anymore. That part is *not* rocket science.
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle. Instead there is a there is a gentle hardening with lower temperatures while the material retains its elasticity for a wide temperature range, then the material gets less resilient and harder quickly, then the material gets brittle. Roughly these are elastic, plastic and brittle phases. The sealant must be used in the elastic range, but for short periods of time it may work in in the plastic range. That does not mean one can rely on using a seal that is not resilient if the time is short, rather it means that the failure is progressive. It may be that you are done moving the sealant before it has time to fail completely. Apparently, NASA launched knowing full well that the sealants are not in the elastic range for many times, and classified partial sealant failures as success, and used the "success" of prior launches as a proof of sealants ability to withstand cold weather. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but for the life of me, I cannot see how Thiokol engineers had been overruled *initially* so that such data could be gathered. What made NASA directors to ever think that polymers phase diagrams are negotiable?
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
... But I think I'm a bit wiser today, having maybe learned that the bleeding edge is sometimes literal.
I'm not exactly sure what you think you maybe learned but both shuttle disasters were caused by management overriding engineers and making engineering decisions.
It's not uncommon that managers in stressful situations somehow loose faith in engineers and make their own engineering decisions. All too often this happens, perhaps the consequences are often not dire but it regularly causes major issues. There is an endless list of them. Google for "challenger bhopal engineering management" and you will find endless discussions on them. Needless to say the report on the Challenger disaster points its finger directly at the management - alas it did little to remedy the situation having another shuttle disaster happen only a few years later again with management not listening to engineers and overriding their recommendations.
I was 6th grade Soviet school student at that time.
State TV was showing this sad footage almost every hour - it was really sad: beautiful strong people smiling and waving and then launch and boom...
I remember that in that day I drew at least 3 short graphic stories about miracle rescue of Challenger crew to share with classmates: 1st story was about secret rescue device that took everybody and saved them from the blast and used parachutes to land them, 2nd story was about Russian rocket that saved everybody onboard somehow and 3rd was about aliens involved in the rescue (I don't remember details). It's sad that miracles are not possible in this world...
Now, in a typical plasticized polymer made from polydisperse monomers (such as polysulfides used in shuttle o-rings), there is usually not a single temperature at which the sealant material turns from elastic to brittle
Correction: The shuttle o-rings were made of FKM, not polysulfide (PS). There are a lot of differences between the two, however the basics are same. Those differences make FKM turn from elastic to brittle more sharply (in a narrower temperature range) than PS and at a much higher temperature.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I was 19 years old and working at Radio Shack. We had the TV's on all day as the customers came and went from the store. The mood was very somber throughout the day. I distinctly remember an older woman standing in front of the bank of TVs, watching the replay and she broke down crying. I went over and tried to console her, the best a 19 year could do, and when she stopped crying, she told me that she was a teacher and that she taught the same grade as Christa Mcauliffe. I had put a tape into one of the VCRs and recorded about 6 hours of the broadcast, including President Reagan's speech. Every now and then I will watch it, and I still get tears in my eyes.
I apologize for the typographical error; I make them occasionally when I am typing quickly. Opera doesn't seem to have a spellchecker the way Firefox does. I salute you for your dedication to spelling pedantry, for I too recognize the value of clear communication. :)
I remember Challenger, I'd just left school and was coming back from a holiday, I'd been on a plane when it happened.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think Tufte's point (if I recall right) was that tine infographics they made did a very poor job of revealing the degree of the vulnerability to cold, and the point at which it became Too Cold to Launch Safely. They organized it by launch date, rather than launch temperature, among other things, and cluttered the display with pictures of rockets, which was distracting from the valuable key information. So, when the consumers of those infographics went to pitch them higher and decide policy, they weren't adequately informed.
It was a reminder that riding towers of fire into outer space is not a safe thing to do, no matter how good the engineers at Boeing and Lockheed Martin were. But I prefer to remember what happened later: the proof that a clear head, a lack of fear or favor, and willingness to design a simple experiment can be more important than technology. I prefer to remember Richard Feynman’s simple, graceful proof that the space shuttle’s O-ring was not able to handle the cold.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
http://blogs.forbes.com/matthewherper/2011/01/28/the-challenger-disaster-and-a-cup-of-ice-water/
Eventually you run out of other people's pain.
that was my 1st reaction when i heard the news about jfk: i was sitting in 9th grade bio when the teacher came in w/the news...i thought he was joking, so i parrotted my parents' republican animosity toward jfk & said "oh, that's good"
i don't think the teacher liked me from then on...
where old Ronnie Raygun actually seemed to be kinda, sorta, human.
Perhaps he felt some guilt over his planned use of the "Teacher in Space" as a talking point in his canceled SOTU address? Will we ever know how much the administration's desire to capitalize on the event contributed to "launch fever" on the part of NASA management?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Then I spent part of the afternoon, along with some others, watching the video replays of it and the unfolding tragedy in a conference room by Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab, all the time hoping it was just a misunderstanding, and the astronauts were all right or something.
One of the hopes of some at the Robotics Institute was that robots could do more of the space exploration more safely, including preparing the way for humans. Was that really a quarter century ago? :-) Well, the robots are finally starting to be here:
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
Or in some cases, even come and gone, sadly:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_center_detail.html?type=publications¢er_id=7&menu_id=262
"Space Robotics Initiative (SRI)
This center is no longer active."
Always wanted to work there and make Hewey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, and the space habitat biospheres they maintain. :-) But that was not exactly their focus.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
That Challenger tragedy was doubly sad with a school teacher on board, considering all the school kids who had been encouraged to watch it. I can wonder if that was part of the further collapse of the US space program?
Still, as much as such tragedies are awful, I later wrote that a big problem with the US space program is that not enough people are taking risks and dying from the consequences. If you think of how many people have died in ocean voyages in the early day of sailing, an active space program seriously oriented to extending human life into the cosmos should be willing to accept hundreds or thousands of deaths a year by astronauts taking calculated and reasonable risks (as in, a 80% chance of success).
The obsession with perfection and zero risk by NASA ultimately seems to have grounded the US space program. That, and an acceptance of overly complicated designs. If astronauts are willing to accept a 20% chance of disaster so they can fly more often (or at all), I say let them. If current astronauts don't want those odds, find new astronauts.
I'm not saying take foolish risks, or 99% risks of death, or risks not worth risking death for. I'm just saying, we probably could be launching 100X as many cheaper rockets and having a lot more success, and having thousands of people going into space every year, if we accepted more causalties (on the order of 20% of launches failing like this shuttle did 25 years ago). Obviously, such a program should be voluntary and people should understand the risks as best as they can. Ideally, over time, the risks would be reduced by better engineering to that of the current risks for air travel in commercial aircraft. But it is just too early to have that expectation.
Besides, and maybe I should not say this, but TV ratings would go up for the space program if NASA did not go out of its way to make everything look so boring with astronauts who have been training for years because there are so few launches and they are so expensive. The most interesting thing I ever saw on NASA TV was when that NASA astronaut lost her bag of tools while fiddling with a grease gun. :-)
http://www.space.com/6131-astronaut-laments
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Of course since Ellison Onizuka was the first astronaut from Hawaii and a school teacher was going up every public school student was watching this on TV.
I don't remember too much from that 4th grade class except everyone being confused as to what happened and as we slowly realized what went on we were pretty speechless. The teacher turned off the TV and I really don't remember anything else that went on.
I can say it was the most disappointing day of my life up until this point and once in a while when seeing anything about the shuttle I think back about Ellison and Christa.. still a little sad. I really had so much hope for the future that someone from my home state had made it. I also hoped that with a teacher in space they would give shuttle rides to more educators and scientists. I was hoping this would bring the future to us much faster.
I find it interesting now that being a nerd is cool, but politically anti-intellectualism seems to rule.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
After reading all these posts, I had to chime in. I work with a right wing semi loony, who holds beliefs in the usual stuff. No Dinosaurs, No Holocaust, Bible elevates white folks, etc, etc, usual garbage, which includes: No Lunar Landings, No true Vietnam War, and No True people on those Space Shuttle Rockets. I will save you from typing the bile of her reasoning. I have met and known many people like this, and even lived with one like this. So for today, it is a remembrance of sadness for the loss of life, a heart felt respect for the job they were doing, and a disgust for and the hope that, these loonies that trample on the truth, eventually fall off the Earth.
My apologies to all the great engineers and people who risk their lives in this pursuit but I don't see any evidence that the engineering mindset that used to dictated the way NASA worked exists anymore. It seems that the management mindsets that refuse to understand the complexity of the operations involved are still alive and well at NASA.
The political shenanigans that pull NASA every which way but a proper technological solution demonstrate that a properly engineered space program is not the objective. Instead budget allocations, pork barreling and other ways to channel money has turned NASA into a waterlogged ball that only gets kicked to see what comes out of it.
I'm sure it doesn't mean the end but I fear this does not bode well for the future of manned space flight.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I was working as a still photographer at WJLA-TV in DC and I was watching the network feed of the launch, capturing stills from the monitor to our electronic still storage system. I had made a series of captures as the launch progressed to "...Challenger, go at throttle up" then the unexpected fireball occurred. I'd already seen enough launches on TV to know that fireball meant that something was catastrophically wrong wrong wrong and immediately thought to myself "fly out of it... fly out of it... I expected the shuttle to do just that, gloriously emerge from the flames, the crew making a miraculous launch abort and return to launch site... but no. Debris continued on a ballistic trajectory then, its momentum spent, began to rain down while the SRBs traced those heinous arcs in uncontrolled flight. My boss, the station's Art Director was watching with me and asked what happened. I had to tell him it blew up.
Good! welcome to [url=http://www.verywo.com]chep wow gold[/url] for you,My friends
I venture a guess that's because it had been sitting in a Resolute Desk drawer prepared for sad occasions like this ever since JFK or even longer.
A memorably great and very appropriate speech it was, but at any rate doesn't sound like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minutes at all...
NASA sure did prepare this kind of things for critical phases of their flights early on, e.g. in case an Apollo would get lost on the dark side of the moon or on re-entry.
That does not explain why Bush's version for the Columbia disaster was so weak in comparison. Read here. It's a horrible speech that attempts to make political hay out of the loss of the Columbia. There is no sense of humanity. No sense of honor, no inspiration. Instead of being reassuring, it reads (and I remember it sounding) like a bully delivering a tough-luck Charlie message. Instead of closing with lines from poetry, he chose words to resonate with his conservative religious base: "may God continue to bless America." What a pitiful echo of Reagan's speech.
If these speeches were prepared in advance, and thus there was plenty of time to work on this one, then Bush's writers were even worse than we know them to have been.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
By the time I was a sentient human being able to form long-term memories, they had stopped making a big deal about space travel. (I think maybe when I was very, very young I caught a couple seconds of a flight one weekend morning on one of the Big 3.)
Which is very sad. I dream of making it to Florida to see the last shuttle launch (IIRC it got delayed and hasn't been carried out yet) with my own eyes, but, due to the economy, I can't afford it. I guess I'll never get to see the shuttle launch, completely missing out on one of the most important spans of human history.
I'm just hoping that we start funding NASA better (thanks, Obama!), so we can recapture a bit of that dream before I'm dead.
I was at home when my mother told me that the shuttle had blown up. I immediately asked "On the launch pad or in flight?" When she said in the air, I knew they were all dead. A sad day.
Have fun tracking it down, but I once came across an anthology of contingency speeches which were never given: _The Ungiven Speeches_ by Learie John Fraser. General Eisenhower's in case D-Day failed... President Nixon's in case Apollo 13 didn't make it back... Fascinating what-ifs!
I was on lunch break at Nuclear Power School in Orlando. From Orlando we could tell the boosters had seperated too early and we could see the cloud forming where the main fuel tank had been. We had a much better view of what was happening in the first 10-15 seconds than anyone at KSC. I was again in Orlando in 2003, laying in bed waiting for the tell tale sound of Columbia's pass as it approached KSC. When it was 10 minutes late I told my wife that I thought the shuttle must have had a problem on reentry.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."