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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.
Every single person in a mission control facility is trained to deal with disaster. And part of that training is... don't stop doing your job.
That telemetry data that he sits there and reads off "like an asshole" is actually quite invaluable data from a post-failure analysis point of view. He wouldn't be helping any if he were to stop reading the data and scream "Oh, the humanity!". He'd just be making noise and contributing to an already chaotic environment.
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.
I was watching tv that day. I knew there was a shuttle launch and I was watching that instead of cartoons because I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. This is one of the only memories that I still have from my childhood.
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.
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?
Major malfunction is just NASA-speak.
The guy was struggling with what to say. I think the quote was something like "umm... obviously, a major malfunction".
What do you expect someone to say in that situation?
It's an example of a culture of remarkable achievement that had become susceptible to groupthink after a while.
Did you become an astronaut?
Or at least maintain a great interest in the subject?
My own reaction was how awful it is that everybody focused on the female school teacher, and not the six others that died.
And then it was all about "who can we blame for this", and not "what can we learn from this".
Yes, it was a valuable lesson in the shallowness of fellow man in general, and US media in particular.
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!
And they record this valuable data by getting some asshole to read it into a microphone? Please.
I wasn't born when JFK died or when we landed on the moon, but I know where I was when the Challenger blew up. I was in third grade math class. The fifth grade science class at the end of the hall was watching the launch, and their teacher came into our class room, spoke briefly with our teacher, then said "The Challenger exploded. It just - blew up." I think after that he moved on to the next room, but I don't recall what else much, if anything, happened for the rest of the class.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
My own reaction was how awful it is that everybody focused on the female school teacher, and not the six others that died.
Fully trained astronauts who have devoted their career to getting into space understand and accept the risks associated with their line of work, she was a school teacher who had "gotten lucky" to get on that flight. The great reversal of fortune combined with the fact that she was not a career astronaut made it in some sense a greater tragedy and in addition a better story for the media.
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.
Ummm no it didn't when this was a complete PR stunt. Interest in shuttle launches had be waning for years.
This was an accident that did not had to happen as the late great Physicist Richard Feynman point out.
NASA has a history of taking chances with people's lives.
And yet Richard Feynman demonstrated that fact simply by placing an O ring into a cup with ice in it.
Yeah people who do their jobs suck.
BINGO!
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.
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
The guy was watching telemetry data, not watching the rocket. For example:
Altitude Downrange Velocity
09,124 0345 0734
10,097 0390 0810
10,582 0424 1027
11,M$@ 000 0000
00,000 0000 0000
00,000 0000 0000
Of course he's going to call out that there is a malfunction. All his telemetry is dead.
Speaking of major malfunctions, I guess the TT tags are no longer working
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When I watched it live, being as young as I was (2nd or 3rd grade IIRC), I was in too much shock to really register what he was saying or how he was saying it. I was just staring at the screen while my space-obsessed brain tried to make sense of what had just happened. I probably sat there just staring for several minutes while they replayed it over and over again.
When I've watched it in later years, though, I'm most struck by his professionalism and commitment to his job. This guy had to know his voice was being broadcast around the world, and that this was the most watched shuttle launch in years (possibly ever). He was probably himself just realizing from the data (I'm not sure he even had the video feed available to him at the time) that something horrible had just happened, and people he probably knew and worked with had likely just died. Through all that, he kept a measured tone and suppressed whatever emotion he might have been feeling. His calm monotone and understated assessment of the situation was the perfect backdrop to the utter shock everyone was feeling at that moment. Having that guy panic or lose his shit would have made the whole thing much much worse.
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
No. Not an astronaut. I still appreciate astronomy and physics and have written some tangentially related software for the USAF, but that is about it.
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.
I guess I'm just a couple of years older than you (based on the grade you were in when the event happened), but I think of that as the second JFK moment of my generation. The first was the assassination of John Lennon. I remember being on the bus home from 6th grade, and I thought the person telling me was joking. My grandfather had died a year earlier, and to be honest, hearing John Lennon had been shot was much, much more shocking to me.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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!
Well said.
I was in college, working in the robotics lab. Within a few minutes there was a lot of speculation flying around Usenet. I wonder now whether any of it was on the right track.
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.
Jokes, black humor is one of our coping mechanisms. A custodian of a museum in Nazi transit-camp / death camp, with whom I had contact, understood this; didn't seem to mind it and actually _almost_ participated.
(too bad the "had exploded" was being reinforced almost immediately; what looked like an explosion, was actually mostly burning of dumped fuel _behind_ the Shuttle - which was disintegrated mostly via aerodynamic forces)
One that hath name thou can not otter
He wouldn't be helping any if he were to stop reading the data and scream "Oh, the humanity!"
No, it would be more like, "Looks like I picked the wrong time to quit taking tranquilizers.... How 'bout another cup of coffee Johnnie"
"No thanks"
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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.
The lesson still hasn't been learned. We put glory seekers into leadership position. Disaster is the result. And the blame inevitably comes full circle.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I thought it was
Never A Straight Answer ...
Aka, something strange is filmed here when the tether breaks, but they just ignore it...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8524267568796529301#
Likewise, this is ON topic .. when the shuttle explodes something funny can be seen off to the side around the ~3:05 mark or so
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmbSupnmK8k&feature=related
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.
Disgusting. But you aren't too far off.
http://astronomer.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=challengerandcolumbia&action=print&thread=1734
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.
I was working at a Rockwell subsidiary, and I and several friends remember us joking that it was probably due to some middle manager screaming "WHADDYA MEAN I CAN'T SHIP ON TIME?"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Thanks also to the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.
A reminder courtesy of the Bad Astronomer.
I think there was room to be placing blame. NASA launched, and in fact pressured Thiokol to go the SRBs for launch against their better judgment. They knew what the O rings did in the cold. That experiment that Feynman performed in front of the cameras came about because he talked to an O-ring specialist who told him "Hey, guess what these things do when it gets cold."
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
No, not partcularly.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
NASA == Need Another Seven Astronauts"
Flamebait?
Wow...some people have no sense of humor...either that, or they weren't around then to hear all the jokes...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
The only connection here is that there were two accidents involving a Shuttle.
And management overruling engineers with valid safety concerns.
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.
The guy saying that wasn't watching the shuttle as you were, he was watching a telemetry readout. He had no idea what actually had happened, all he had was "WTF? I just lost my telemetry.".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
GP has a point. And you have the literary sense of Terri Schiavo's corpse.
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.
What? The o-ring on the SRB failed, causing hot exhaust gasses to blowtorch directly onto -- and then into -- the fuel tank. The tank (and fuel) exploded. The orbiter was half blown apart from the blast and the rest disintegrated due to aerodynamic forces. The SRBs went off on their separate ways.
I guess you could say that the orbiter itself didn't explode, but at that point in time the "shuttle", the Space Transportation System, consisted of the orbiter, the main fuel tank, and the two SRBs. And the STS most definitely did explode.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
Major malfunction is just NASA-speak.
The guy was struggling with what to say. I think the quote was something like "umm... obviously, a major malfunction".
What do you expect someone to say in that situation?
How about "DUR, IT BLOWED UP."
I remember the spectators watching the event at the site cheered...
Bow-ties are cool.
Really, read about it some more; that's the position of final reports. The failure of SRB caused mostly its partial _detachment_ - one which compromised the stability of whole stack and allowed the SRB to _mechanically_ wreck havoc around it (further leading to structural failure of _rear_bulkhead_ of fuel tank / its contents being rapidly dumped / what only further destabilized the stack)
Heat doesn't cause things to explode automatically; not when the thing in question is a non_mixed_with_oxidizer hydrogen. OTOH - the disaster happened almost exactly at max Q moment.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Exactly.
I seem to recall that he did NOT have a monitor at his workstation providing a video feed of the launch. Which is why the "OH WOW SO HEARTLESS AND COLD" thing doesn't really hold water. Dude was looking at the raw data feed and didn't have anything else to go on.
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.
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.
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 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.
You are a stupid fucktard.
Here's Richard Feynman's review of the Challenger disaster: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/feynman.html
Here's the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board: http://caib.nasa.gov/
The root causes are exactly the same. People in decision making roles totally unqualified to understand risks, no accountability. With sadly predictable effects.
With Challenger, the o-ring erosion was ignored despite the fact that they were never designed to erode.
With Columbia, the foam falling off was ignored despite the fact that it was never designed to fall off.
In both cases, it's the same fundamental problem.
So do yourself a favor and learn some critical thinking before making an ass of yourself.
I referred to it as just that today. I was in 8th grade and we had a snow day. One of my friends called me right after it happened.
Thank you, I was waiting for someone to say that. Do you know that it's true? I think everyone thought it was an odd thing to say, but even at 14 I thought "hmmm... I guess he's only reading the telemetry". Kind of reminds me of the way BP photo-shopped their gulf disaster response to show them watching the same footage we were seeing at home, because obviously they would all be watching the oil spewing constantly to remind them of what they were trying to stop. The idea that it takes hundreds of people to put a shuttle into the air and not all of them are going to be watching it launch because they are too busy launching it seems to be lost on the majority of people who think there's nothing more to anything than the most exciting or glamorous aspects that happen to make for good TV.
Nesbitt's job, as the official public voice of NASA going out to the world during the launch, was to provide a running stream of information. The data came from what today seems like an amazingly primitive source — a single black and white, 9-inch monitor with lines of numbers and cryptic letters scrolling across constantly.
On a piece of paper in front of him Nesbitt also has the mission timeline, a listing of what was supposed to happen second-by-second with the shuttle. "About every 15 seconds there was a new milestone coming in on the timeline," he says.
Nesbitt was focused on the 9-inch computer screen in front of him, reading off numbers. The only actual visual of the launch he could see was a small television off to his left but he couldn't watch it and the computer so he wasn't looking at it.
Sitting next to him was the Navy flight surgeon for the launch, a young captain. "I heard her say 'What was that?' " Nesbitt remembers.
He finished reading the numbers off the screen and then looked over at the TV screen. "At that point there was just the trail of smoke. And I thought 'Oh, crap. There's something not right.' "
Note: Mission control may get a different video feed than the cross-cut CNN feed that we are all familiar with. Also, they are in a windowless concrete bunker a thousand miles away from the actual launch. The telemetry and the video feeds from the various tracking cameras are all they've got to go on.
There's a 15-second pause between his last words, "seven nautical miles," and the next ones. Neither Nesbitt nor anyone in the room knew what had happened. "I'm not hearing anyone in Mission Control saying 'The spacecraft just disintegrated.' No one's saying anything," he says.
Something was horribly wrong, he knew that. But he had no idea what it was, what had happened to the spacecraft and, most importantly, what had happened to the crew.
What Nesbitt did know was that it was his job to explain to the public what they were seeing on their TV screens. "I had this feeling 'I've got to comment on what's happening,' but I didn't have any information."
So the next words he uttered were the now famous quote: "Flight control is here looking very carefully at the situation, obviously a major malfunction."
Some at the time expressed surprise that his voice never changed during the next hour as the full extent of the tragedy became evident. But that wasn't Nesbitt's job: It was to give accurate information as quickly and smoothly as he could.
Nesbitt did an amazing job in my opinion. Sadly, sometimes no matter what you say it is the wrong thing to say.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
Ummm no it didn't when this was a complete PR stunt. Interest in shuttle launches had be waning for years.
And interest in NASA had been waning in general since the moon landing. Right before the Apollo 13 accident occurred, they were worried because moon landings and space missions seem to have become ordinary.
This was an accident that did not had to happen as the late great Physicist Richard Feynman point out.
NASA has a history of taking chances with people's lives.
And the political pressure (from both inside and outside of NASA) grows even more the further behind you are. The commentator mentions it at the start of the Challenger flight: "After more delays than NASA cares to admit..."
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)
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.
What do you expect someone to say in that situation?
"HOLY SHIT! The fucking space shuttle just blew up! "
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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!
The Shuttle wasn't retired, despite already fulfilling its only attainable practical goal (provoking ignorant Soviet generals into pushing for their counterpart, on the basis of fairytale notion that STS gave any "strategic advantage"; greatly contributing to the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union(*))
It was allowed to suck NASA dry for over two more decades (and with another hiccup in the middle); they didn't even learn it was a high time for replacement.
(*)But then, while the Soviet Union had the decency to recognize such outcome and dissolve itself quite peacefully... the US, while not far behind, went on a spending frenzy.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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."