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Previously-Unseen Photos of Challenger Disaster Appear Online
Nerval's Lobster writes "Twenty-six photos of the space shuttle Challenger disaster have appeared online. According to io9, "Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster of 1986. To his knowledge, these photos have never been publicly released." Hindes told the Website that the photographer was "a friend of his grandfather, who worked for NASA as an electrician on the Agency's hulking, spacecraft-schlepping crawler transporters." Someone at Reddit (which also has a lengthy thread devoted to the images) also threw together a GIF of the liftoff and subsequent explosion."
from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch
The gif is pretty amazing, credit.
Is there any way to have them blown up?
Is that a joke?
I witnessed this even. It was quite jarring at the time.
Even now, these pictures are still disturbing.
when I was a child. The odd thing, is that my memory is mostly about my father's reaction, and the look on his face. A look of shock and disbelief. The failure of infallible American tech.
Francis R. Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Greg Jarvis, Payload Specialist
Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist
God speed to all of them....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Fucking morton thiokol, upper management should have been put in prison for man slaughter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Need Another Seven Astronauts
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was a young engineer working for Rockedyne on the SSME at the time and we were the last to know. The announcement over the intercom was that there was a "system failure" on flight 51 and incoming calls were blocked (pre internet day youngsters). I guess they didn't want anyone to panic and go back and edit the turbopump or engine build books that would impede any investigation. We didn't know about the catastrophic failure until people went out for lunch that day.
I saw live video, shot from roughly the same vantage point, including shots of the pieces hitting water. Seconds later, that live feed was cut. Since then, only certain portions of that video have ever (to my knowledge) seen the light of day.
Sigh... "No, I wanted a Bud Lite". I was in high school. Gallows humor I guess. It's not like we enjoyed the whole thing, really.
Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012)
Idiot.
My grandfather, John W. Townsend, jr., was called in to become Goddard Space Flight Center's 6th Director in response to the Challenger accident. I miss him and all of his stories about NASA and its beginnings. His NASA Medal of Honor is my most prized keepsake of him.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/releases/2011/11-072.html
That it all worked so well was really amazing. It is tragic we lost two shuttles and their crew, but while we mourn the loss, and learn from the mistakes, let us not lose sight of the fact, the more amazing success of the remaining flights. We should define ourselves by the successes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I read the title and summary, I was expecting something different. It is cool and all turning up something from an attic, but the pictures that were found were pretty much the same as the bazillion pictures and videos that were taken and shown twenty-something years ago. My expectation seeing this story was that these photos were somehow unique.
I was groggy collecting milk from the milkman at about 6 AM IST, having picked the newspaper Indian Express, Bangalore edition, from the front steps.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I just graduated in December with my freshly minted BS in CompSci. I was driving my 1977 Dodge Aspen to meet my new wife at the hospital.. She was a new LPN. The radio broke in that something happened during the launch. I saw explosion when I looked into a patients room. The first and only time I've every gasped out-loud. That was one cancer, one total-loss house fire, putting one child through college and another into college, ready to celebrate 30 year of marriage to the same nurse. (Now a RN administrator) ago.
I was watching the launch on TV when it happened. I still can't watch the videos or look at the pictures.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I dunno. I was at Morton-Thiokol when it happened, and I've read the Rogers report and Congressional hack job, and I'm pretty convinced that NASA told our upper management to overrule our engineers, and then when Boisjoly et al tried their damndest to contact NASA directly (bypassing Morton Thiokol's upper management entirely) NASA called us and said "shut down your loose cannons". So while I would not say Morton Thiokol's management was blameless, their actual fault was that they gave in to threats and let NASA Marshall bully them. And it's not entirely unlikely that the bullying ultimately came directly from the White House, where Reagan's handlers were anxious to have him give his launch speech, and were upset that the mass media was ridiculing repeated launch delays. Stuff rolls downhill, but not back up.
This is slightly at odds with the Wikipedia version of events, but that version has Reagan "quoting" High Flight instead of using the more accurate word "plagiarizing" so I tend to trust my memory more.
When then-popular news figurehead Dan Rather suddenly decided he was a forensic rocket scientist (after weeks of publicly ridiculing NASA for being afraid to launch in bad weather, and no doubt contributing to the pressure to launch) and told America live on-air that faulty SRBs were the cause of the disaster, our phones started ringing... and ringing... and never stopped, all the rest of that day. You wouldn't bother to put the phone down, just press the switch hook and take the next call before it rang. "No, mom, it wasn't our fault. As far as I know. I gotta go. <switchhook> No, Aunt Louise, it wasn't our fault, as far as I know. <switchhook> Hi honey, Yeah, I don't know yet, I'm sure I'll be working late, don't hold dinner, tell the kids I love them, bye" etc. etc. etc.
I remember that morning. I was watching the launch on TV as I was getting ready to go to work, and had to head out during a launch hold. Later that morning one of our part-time folks came in and asked if we had heard about Challenger? I felt myself go grey and took the rest of the day off.
Every generation has events where everybody remembers exactly where they were. I wasn't born when Sputnik 1 was launched, and I was a bit young to remember Kennedy. But I do remember Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Challenger, Lady Di and 9/11. Funny that four of those events are related to space...
Side note: a shame the pictures only show the left SRB, not the right one that caused all the trouble.
...laura
After reading a few of the comments, does anyone here know if there is a post launch abort procedure in the case of a system failure or ice strike or while the shuttle is still attached to external rockets?
Someone came into the room quickly and said "Challenger just blew up!" I first said that's not true, it's just media complaining about another launch delay. But a minute later, I realized it was real. It seemed everyone stopped what they were doing and productivity went to zero for rest of day. A calibration lab and also that repairs VCRs taped the launch footage and were playing it back and forth in slow-mo, kind of their own analysis trying to pinpoint the cause. Kind of interesting because just a few short years before only major investigative teams had these kinds of tools. I'm sure many households were doing the same. Though it took a few days when they released footage showing the flame coming out side of SRB, that seem to completely change the discussion of the cause. Me along with many others had no clue what that flame meant but it was very unusual. We had to wait until Feynmann spoke.
Contrasting to Columbia disaster in 2003, the country didn't seem to stop and mourn like after Challenger because the country was gearing up to invade Iraq.
mfwright@batnet.com
So... NASA started playing Kerbal Space Program back in good old '86
With all due respect, I would suggest "harrowing" is overstating things. Tragic certainly, but not harrowing.
How is babby formed?
We have thousands of years to play in space, and because robotic development cycles can be far more rapid than meat tourist conveyance systems we could get more actual "exploration" done. Humans require barriers between them and everything in "space", and must have efficient robotic systems to exploit resources on other planets. We also need robots on earth with the eventual goal of ending most human manual labor.
The loss of Challenger was a blow to a space program focused on sending meat. Just as we use UAVs to remote-man the dull and dangerous task of war, so we can remotely man space exploration for a very long time until the transport and other systems are far more reliable.
Pure win, no downside. The childish Cold War space tourism race is over. If Challenger had been full of robots instead of humans, the explosion would have merely been expensive entertainment.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I was in 6th grade and our school had open space 'units' where we would switch teachers and classmates for different subjects. During class switch, I was standing in the science teacher's area waiting for class to start.
One of my friends, a trickster, came down the walkway from gym and said "the space shuttle blew up!". I didn't take it seriously and blew it off even though he wasn't smiling like he always did. Next thing I know, teachers are gathering students and bringing in TV sets from the av room. The hooked them up and we sat down and started to watch the news live. I realized my friend hadn't been kidding and got that startled, electric shock feeling. All the channels showed the entire launch, little bits and pieces of footage on repeat, lots of analysis from experts, etc.,.. all of it over and over.
I could walk into that same school today and stand in the same spot where I heard the news. 28 years later, it seems like it was yesterday.
It was the "Kennedy Moment" of my generation.
You might wonder how it could be more interesting to be asleep. Why was I asleep anyway? IIRC, there was actually a teachers holiday in our district. Everybody was home from school.
So. I was sleeping in. I was in high school and you know how they always send you in early, so when you get a day off you just. want. sleep. I was a real night owl back then so the night before I must have stayed up pretty late to still be sleeping when it launched.
OK, bear with me now. My mother had a crystal perfume decanter. It was a heavy thing, with a slender 3-sided pyramidal top, about 10 inches high. The top was fragile. From a young age, it was kind of like the glass egg that you weren't supposed to touch. Of course by the time I was in high school you'd think this wouldn't matter very much; but the memory was burned in.
So. I'm having a dream about, of all things the crystal decanter. You know in dreams things can seem far more important than reality. I was dreaming that there was something important in there, something meaningful, and I had taken the lid off and was holding it in my hand. Then I felt it slip--the terror! The dream ended with a noise not entirely unlike shattering crystal, although I didn't drop it in the dream.
The noise was my mother calling. "Turn on the TV. Something awful happened to the Space Shuttle". And then, and only then was I transfixed by the endless replays, the disbelief.
My mother has passed away, it's been over 10 years now. I made sure to pull the decanter out of all the other knick-nacks from the estate. I still have it. You know what? There was already a chip in the top. I guess she told us kids not to go near it because she knew how fragile it was.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I was a PhD student with background as a mathematician in the AF, who had worked on ballistic missile codes (boost, sub-orbital and reentry). I had been writing a sci-fi story that followed almost exactly what happened (SRB blow-through failure), except that my SRB failure was away from the main tank, the shuttle just failed to achieve orbit (I had done the calculations) and the story was about the attempt to rescue the cargo (the story was all about the precautions you'd take if the cargo was so dangerous that it could not be allowed back into the atmosphere). Needless to say, after this I never was able to open that folder again, it is still in my stack of unfinished short stories.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
No, the report effectively validates the "they're dead, Jim" assessment.
The "repair" theory was so riddled with uncertainties that NASA itself acknowledged that it was too high risk to even contemplate. Basically, they'd have to do a spacewalk just to figure out the extent of the damage, then jetison all the cargo, then try to jury-rig some sort of thing. The idea they had was laughable: use spare metal parts to pack the hole with something of substance, then use an ice pack to try to maintain wing aerodynamics. Then make it back through re-entry, where a best case scenario exposes the patch to several hundred degrees of heat and Mach 25+ airspeed.
The "rescue" option was only slightly less hair-raising, and, frankly, ran a significant risk of loss of TWO orbiters.
The realistic assessment is that as soon as the accident happened, they were doomed. Citing low-probability theoretical (and that's all they were, theoretical) plans that have never been tested or even simulated, and that would have to be executed under extreme time pressure as evidence that they weren't doomed is muddy-headed wishful thinking.
The report makes it pretty clear that saving the Columbia was about as realistic as saving the Titanic.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
The report makes it pretty clear that saving the Columbia was about as realistic as saving the Titanic.
I'm glad you weren't in charge of Apollo 13. : ) Seriously, I think your interpretation is unusual (or maybe we're talking about different documents). The CAIB pretty clearly says the scenarious were plausible. Obviously risky, with no guarantee of success, but not impossible. I can't see how you got from that to "certain doom".