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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.
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 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.)
From working with telemetry data myself the data has a lag that can be a few seconds long from when it is received to when it is displayed. Control systems on the vehicle work in real time of course. That guy was probably just looking at the data as it was still rolling in and was trained to not let his attention stray from it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning