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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."
The gif is pretty amazing, credit.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 .
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 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.