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.

Comments

Re:Too soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stoicism Sometimes a Necessity

[eldavojohn]

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.

Why I'll never forget

[grapeape]

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.

Re:Hell of a Thing

[ElectricTurtle]

At least with Challenger it was still slightly abstract. You knew there were people on that machine, but you couldn't see them. Now watching people jumping to their deaths from the WTC... that was... magnitudes more visceral.

Re:No dieing to push the envelope. Plain old go fe

[gknoy]

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.)

Re:Hell of a Thing

[doconnor]

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream

And not forgetting

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> 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.

Re:I remember...

[thomst]

As a seventeen-year-old kid, on July 16, 1969, I stood in the front yard of our rental home in Satellite Beach, Florida, and watched Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. It was THE high point of my life to that moment (although the lunar landing and historic first footstep replaced it as such four days later).

Flash forward to January 28, 1986, the day I began working for an audio-visual rental services company in Oakland, California. One of our routine tasks was to test equipment that had been rented out, to ensure that it worked properly before renting it out again. As the brand-new guy, I wanted to impress the boss with my willingness to work, so I started checking a bunch of gear that had been returned at closing time the previous day. Early on in the process, I tested a TV/monitor. I hooked up a VHS player, and that worked fine, and - going the extra mile here - I then hooked up a set of rabbit ears and checked the TV tuner.

The channel that came up was the local ABC affiliate, and I switched on the tuner just as their network announcer broke into Good Morning America to say, "We've just received this raw footage from Cape Canaveral." I watched the two minutes or so of launch footage, and saw for the first time the main fuel tank explode, and the solid fuel boosters' exhaust form the "devil horns" that would become so painfully familiar over the next few days. When the clip began to loop, and the announcer said, "We're not sure what we're seeing here," I muttered under my breath, "Well, I'm sure," and walked up to the front of the warehouse to the manager's office.

"Dan?" I said, "You probably want to see this. The space shuttle just blew up and killed everyone aboard."

Just barely more than 17 years later, on February 1, 2003, I stood in the East pasture of our little five-acre spread in Mariposa County, and watched the Columbia reenter the atmosphere above California. I wondered why I kept seeing pulses of light beneath its wings, but I was so happy to have the opportunity to view an actual shuttle reentry, that I pretty much dismissed it from my mind. Then I went back inside, posted an account of the experience to The Pigdog List, and went to bed (I'd just pulled an all-nighter working on a column for the late, great Boardwatch Magazine). When I woke up that afternoon, I checked my email, to learn ... well, we all know what I learned.

I spent the next ten days writing and recording a song about the experience.

It's the second-saddest song I've every written.

Reagan's Speech

[pz]

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".

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.

Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."

There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'

Thank you.

President Ronald Reagan - January 28, 1986