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Previously-Unseen Photos of Challenger Disaster Appear Online

Posted by timothy on from the things-in-odd-places dept.

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."

34 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. PHB's strike again by alen · · Score: 4, Informative

    from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch

    1. Re:PHB's strike again by Capt.Albatross · · Score: 3, Insightful

      from what i remember the worker bees warned against a launch due to ice and whatever but the bosses said to launch

      Then, on Columbia's last mission, the managers ignored the engineers' concerns over the ice impact that had occurred on launch.

    2. Re:PHB's strike again by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, with Columbia's mission I watched the launch and they immediately questioned the impact. Then a few days into the mission NASA was talking about how they wanted to inspect the damage after they landed. I was thinking the whole time "That looked pretty bad!"

      Then it blew up and NASA pretended it was all news to them. I didn't really get it.

    3. Re:PHB's strike again by EdIII · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As well they should have. Stuff happens, and I bet NASA did try to make it safe, but they failed horribly in this case.

      Richard Feynman ripped NASA a new butthole too. After listening to him it became readily apparent that there was a huge disconnect between the administrators and the engineers. In some cases the administrators decided to go with estimates that were several orders of magnitude different.

      I can give NASA a pass when it's really difficult to engineer and design a controlled explosion to get you into space, *and* then how to work, survive, and come back.

      However, everyone of those people that got fired deserved that and more for their "acceptable flight risk" mentality that was in hindsight unreasonably reckless.

    4. Re:PHB's strike again by nharmon · · Score: 5, Informative

      There was a great television movie last year about Feynman's involvement in the Rogers Commission. William Hurt plays the part of Feynman and does a magnificent job.

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/

    5. Re:PHB's strike again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Read Wayne Hale's take on it; he was there:

      The excerpt that sticks with me:

      Jon Harpold was the Director of Mission Operations, my supreme boss as a Flight Director. He had spent his early career in shuttle entry analysis. He knew more about shuttle entry than anybody; the guidance, the navigation, the flight control, the thermal environments and how to control them. After one of the MMTs when possible damage to the orbiter was discussed, he gave me his opinion: "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?" I was hard pressed to disagree. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don’t let them in your organization.

    6. Re: PHB's strike again by davidrgreenberg · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not ice - the warning was that the O rings sealing the joints between sections of the solid rocket boosters would be too stiff in the cold to seal properly and hot combustion gases could leak. That's what happened .

    7. Re:PHB's strike again by Talderas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles. Columba was a wreck the moment the foam caused the damage. She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.

      The only possible way to get Columbia's crew safely to earth would be to ramp up refitting Atlantis for launch use a crew of four astronauts, and figure out a way of successfully transferring crew from Columbia to Atlantis since they had no equipment to perform an orbiter to orbiter docking. That operation alone would introduce significant risk to both orbiters during the operation due to station keeping further complicated by the fact that air quality in Columbia would have to be significantly reduced so the CO2 scrubbers would last long enough. So hopefully all that station keeping and maneuvering could be solely handled by Atlantis while the cross space transfer of crew is performed.

      Performing the rescue itself would have involved doing things in time frames that were never intended and could introduce risk for Atlantis and her crew. It's tragic but I don't think there was any other outcome. The only way it could have ended without death would have been if the foam impact had been observed during launch while it was still possible to abort. It wasn't noticed until after Columbia was in orbit.

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
    8. Re:PHB's strike again by Discopete · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.

    9. Re:PHB's strike again by QuantumPion · · Score: 4, Informative

      The most egregious example of administrator disconnect, as uncovered by Feynman, was the notion that the O-rings had a safety factor of 3 because they were on burned through 1/3 of the way on previous launches:

      Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.

    10. Re:PHB's strike again by gishzida · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think it was a bit more nuanced than bosses vs. engineers. We've had 2 disasters shortly after "run NASA like a business" campaigns. That kind of culture leads to compromises that can work out well for disposable goods, consumer software, etc., but when you're talking about the razor's edge of technology, pushing a launch because delays are bad for PR is going to get people killed.

      *Very Nuanced*

      I worked for Rocketdyne, the SSME main contractor, through the 80's in the quality organization... the "way things worked" then was NASA gave delivery / target launch dates. If the corporate contractor delivered early or the launch went ahead of schedule, the contractor got a bonus.

      When NASA down-sized all of its Engineering talent after the Apollo program, it became dependent upon the corporate contractor's for 'assistance' in making the engineering decisions . The ultimate decisions were made by the Bosses of the Engineers because the bosses saw dollar signs rather than safety and science... and NASA went along.

      Morton-Thiokol was the main contractor for the SRBs modules which stacked together and held together with "O" rings and interface pins. The ring materials becomes brittle in "low temperatures" [below freezing as it was that morning]. Their engineers did not want to launch in the cold since it was far colder that the SRB had been designed for. Management at Morton-Thiokol knowing a bonus depended on the launch told NASA "go" and so they launched. I still cannot look at those pictures without getting upset. I could not event look at the full set of these.

      Just so its clear-- the problem is with NASA isn't that its run by the government. The problem is that it is run by a bunch of ex-aerospace revolving-door [public-private] rubber-stamp management administrators and not run by true engineers... if NASA had then had a real engineering staff for the Shuttle program rather than playing for money and politics, things would have been different...

      The people that made those decisions should have been "hung out to dry" for both of those shuttle "accidents". They should have been criminally charged for the deaths... with the corporations financially liable to the victims and to the government for the losses. But as the recent financial crisis has demonstrated yet again-- the corporations squeal, the politicians make "oratory", and then the government [you and me] pay for those corporate mistakes. Then after a while everyone forgets how they were robbed... of lives, money, and honor by greedy types that only see term profits as good....

      The Shuttle program was about science -- or at least it was supposed to be... but what it became was "Aerospace Corporate Welfare"... [just as the various subsidies paid to various industries by the Government are corporate welfare...]

      You should not play politics with science... or at least be aware you do it at your peril -- go ahead play politics with the laws of gravity [or "O" rings] and see how far it gets you. You can do science or you can do greed but not both. In this case seven people were killed because someone wanted a bonus.

    11. Re: PHB's strike again by Whorhay · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The point, I think, is that the engineers warned the administrators of a very specific danger based on hard numbers. And despite that they launched anyways. Which resulted in the specified part failing exactly as warned resulting in loss of life.

      Those O-rings, like every other part of the shuttle, were designed and produced to very exact specifications. For a rubber gaskett ambient temperature is one of those critical factors. I learned all that as a teenager when I got to hear a presentation from one of the guys that lead they investigation into the whole disaster.

    12. Re:PHB's strike again by Talderas · · Score: 3, Informative

      February 15th was the date beyond which the survival of the Columbia crew was unlikely due to suffocation.

      A Soyuz has a three person capacity. I don't think Russia had enough lying around waiting to be launched. You're looking at 3, 4, or 7 launches to rescue the entire Columbia crew with Soyuz and they would need to occur in short order. Atmosphere loss from cycling the airlocks would be too great and cause the February 15th survival date to no longer be tenable.

      As for the Atlantis rescue. Me thinks you believe it to be far simpler than it truly was.
      http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030523rescue/

      --
      "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
    13. Re: PHB's strike again by Medievalist · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We actually wanted to build it without O-rings, we wanted to cast the propellant into a mold and wrap the slug afterwards with carbon fiber, which would have been a fraction of the weight and far stronger than the segmented steel casings NASA insisted on.

    14. Re:PHB's strike again by Enigma2175 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.

      Every mission except STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission. Since the orbit of the ISS has a large inclination relative to the Hubble they planned an in-space rescue mission if TPS damage made it necessary.

      --

      Enigma

    15. Re:PHB's strike again by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Funny

      That operation alone would introduce significant risk to both orbiters during the operation

      They could just jump out the airlock with the fire extinguisher, fly across space to the other station, and then kill off George Clooney for no reason at all.

    16. Re:PHB's strike again by Alomex · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A Soyuz has a three person capacity.

      You could use a Soyuz as a resupply vehicle, and a particularly large one at that if you get rid of all the reentry gear that you'll never use.

      Apollo XIII showed that under pressure, equipment can be made to perform tasks very different than those it was designed to do. The only way to know if they could have been rescued was for NASA, Roscosmos, ESA and the Pentagon to each try their best to get supplies to them and find a way to bring them back. Maybe they would have failed, maybe they would have succeeded. Certainly with Apollo XIII no one knew if they would make it until they heard the signal from the capsule upon splashdown and the entire Com broke into applause.

    17. Re:PHB's strike again by loshwomp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Columbia crew were dead men walking the moment the foam damaged the tiles. Columba was a wreck the moment the foam caused the damage. She would never reach earth's surface whole once she entered space.

      This claim was solidly refuted in the official accident investigation report, which explores parallel scenarios--one for rescue, and another for improvised repair while on orbit.

      The report is a fascinating read, by the way, and highly recommended. It manages to be satisfyingly technical without going over the head of a typical engineer or even lay person.

  2. Link to GIF by clinko · · Score: 5, Informative

    The gif is pretty amazing, credit.

  3. I remember watching the disaster on television by CarlStanley · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by netsavior · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think in many ways, this was the end of "The Future" The space-age ended the day the Challenger exploded.

    2. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by deathcloset · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      It was the failure of 'infallible' American money.

      Money and technology are such strange bedfellows. On the one hand the connection between them is obvious and inextricable, but on the other lies the question of progress. Money is required to develop and ultimately build a technology, and yet by virtue of the money invested that technology is expected to create money - usually more than was invested in the first place. So, in an way, from money's perspective all that technology is designed to do is to create money - anything else that technology does is a mere byproduct of the process of developing it to make more money.

      In other words, according to money, any technology which does nothing but make more money is a perfect technology.

      This might explain why things like FOSS and any "Open" technology movement is perceived as so vile and abominable a thing by money. How can a technology not take nor make money? I think it causes money to be a little nervous that technology can exist without it. After all, since money is anything accepted as payment for goods or services, doesn't that mean that money can actually be nothing?

      And by the way I asked money if it cared that I anthropomorphize it and it said it couldn't care less.

    3. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 3, Informative

      The freakiest thing was when someone said the crew compartment survived the explosion. It's one thing to die from an explosion--quite another to watch it coming at you in a fall from 48,000 feet.

    4. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by Ellis+D.+Tripp · · Score: 4, Informative

      Analysis of the wreckage showed that at least a few of them survived long enough to activate emergency oxygen systems and flip some switches in an attempt to regain control.

      --
      Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
    5. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Really? I always pinned it at the time when Gene Cernan made a little speech on the Moon and then we, as a species, packed up our shit and left, never to return. (There's no money in it, you see.)

    6. Re:I remember watching the disaster on television by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes and no. A bunch of us in and around the space biz already knew the Shuttle would never live up to its promises, but the general public was (as usual) blissfully unaware until then.

      Some of us re-convened the CACNSP and concluded that the Shuttle program be kept alive but without expectation of any significant advancement (as a "No Output Division" for aging bureaucrats), that the hypersonic NASP was a dead end, and we started pushing toward what eventually became DC-X. Our belief in the space-age lasted a few years longer.

      Alas, eventually the bureaucrats at NASA eventually took over DC-X and broke it, then diverted attention with X-33, a technology development program (DC-X was intended to re-use existing technology wherever possible) with silliness like Y-shaped LiAl tanks and linear aerospike engines, and the worst possible mixed mode launch and landing (VTHL) with no survivable abort mode in the first minutes of launch.

      SpaceX and a few others finally seem to be swinging the thing around. Someone should institute a D. D. Harriman prize just so it can be awarded to Elon Musk.

  4. The fallen.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. Rocketdyne days by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Where's the video? by Jawnn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:An oldie from back ni the day... by sabs · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why does NASA only have Sprite?

    Because they couldn't get 7 up.

  8. Re:An oldie from back ni the day... by blueturffan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That joke was never funny.

  9. The amazing thing was not Challenger disaster. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The amazing thing is all the remaining missions that were successful. Challenger disaster was particularly harrowing because, people have gotten accustomed to launch after launch going of (seemingly) flawlessly. To get a magnitude of the engineering, quality control and the process control behind NASA programs, one just has to take a look at the Saturn V rocket engines displayed in Houston. Those things get as hot as the surface of our Sun, the heat shield works by vaporizing ceramics, ...

    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
  10. It was a pretty horrible day at Thiokol. by Medievalist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. "That's BS, they're exaggerating" by k6mfw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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