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30 Years Since The Challenger Disaster: Where Were You? (space.com)
Martin S. writes: Thirty years ago today, NASA suffered a spaceflight tragedy that stunned the world and changed the agency forever. When I mentioned this at work most of my colleagues are too young to remember this first hand. When I heard the news, I was in a middle-school science class; our teacher walked us solemnly over to the school library, where we watched the television news. It hit especially hard because one of our other teachers had pursued the slot that was eventually filled by Christa McAuliffe.
In the gym, watching the launch with the rest of the school. I only remember the explosion, hearing gasps and then crying.
in Primary School. Everyone immedietly burst out in tears. Teachers were speechless.
I was probably pooping myself at home. I was only seven months old.
Installing a Novell Network. We all gathered in the conference room to watch.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
We kind of joked about it. We would throw paper airplanes into the wall and go: "Look! It's the Challenger!"
I was being born, I just celebrated my 30th birthday.
captcha: recitals
Thankfully not watching the launch, they interrupted class and announced the tragedy over the PA and we sat and discussed what it meant for a long time. I think I was just old enough to grasp the severity of it, it was certainly clear from the reaction of our teacher and the tone of the PA announcement. Very memorable moment in my life.
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I wasn't that old but still remember standing my driveway watching as it went up
In the library watching it with the entire school...heartbroken when it exploded.
... live, like million of others people I guess
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I was walking across the lawn to the Humanities and Fine Arts Building at UCF. In the sky, the contrail from the launch didn't look right. It was a Y. I'd seen many rocket launches before this one, and I knew this wasn't right. When I got inside, a portable TV was on in the English Dept office. They were just getting some info from launch control about the anomaly, but the replay showed pieces of the shuttle falling. A few minutes later, in class, we talked about what had gone wrong. Most people had parents or friends who worked at the Cape. We didn't really know what we were talking about. It made us feel better to talk. Like it mattered.
Who gives a shit?! This is something that's always bothered me: a major catastrophe anniversary and everyone's gotta put in their two cents worth about where THEY were and what THEY were doing at the time! That's totally fucking irrelevant! The disaster occurred, let's focus on THAT, NOT what you were fucking doing at the time, no one gives a shit about you! Buncha egomaniacs this species is...
And yet, here you are, giving YOUR opinion, like anyone cares.
Fucking USELESS ACs... I wish Slashdot would get rid of the AC concept entirely. It is FAR too often simply an excuse for abuse and hate-mongering.
with the rest of my class. Space Shuttle launches were something they stopped classes for back then, but we were all excited about this one because we knew a teacher was on the flight, and we would actually be taught LESSONS FROM SPACE. That was probably one of the most exciting things I could have imagined back then.
5th grade. One of the students from an adjacent classroom ran in and breathlessly announced that the shuttle had blown up. Instant silence. My teacher walked to the other 5th grade classroom to confer with the teacher there, then they opened the partition between the two classrooms and wheeled in the TV-and-VCR-on-a-cart so we could all watch the news together. I just remember feeling like I had been kicked in the gut.
I was 5 at the time, so I have some very vague memories of people being upset about it, but I don't remember any specifics. I remember more about the aftermath over the next couple years as my childhood memories start solidifying, plus my family was big into aerospace and the space program in general.
I was about 1 month away from being conceived. The first national tragedy (if you can call it that) I remember is the 1996 Olympics bombing, and that's just because I had just left the Olympics that night and it happened sometime between the time we left and the time we got home about 1.5 hours later.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I was thirty at the time and I have no recollection of where I was or what I was doing.
I was a young teen but even then I understood that the Shuttle was more a PR machine than anything serious about space. So I wasn't following it live, and I didn't really care.
I was at Canadian Tire trying to get their liquidation items of old weird Commodore machines and game cassettes. Their store TV was carrying the broadcast and that's where I saw it.
I was the first person to see it in my school I think. i was In the a/v room getting a tv and vhs for Science class and one of the TV's were on on those movable carts and I saw it blow up. at first I thought it was just smoke, but then an adult in the room turned it up and the news just keep replaying it over and over again so you knew it was bad. i walked back to my classroom pushing a tv cart and announced it to the class and my Science teacher Mr. Diamond. I dont think we were able to see it because back in those days the dinosaurs needed tv antennas and reception was bad. The teacher didnt believe me, left to the library/av center and came back after a few minutes solemnly acknowledging the incident. sad day and time for all.
Buncha egomaniacs this species is...
I notice you claim that other people have ego problems yet you feel compelled to tell other people how they should think. That's pretty interesting, wouldn't you say?
--
In my 7th grade class, Paul had just gotten a Swiss Army knife for Christmas and was having a problem not taking the chairs apart in the classroom (young people may now be astonished that kids carrying knives to school was normal just 30 years ago, in the pre-Bush America). So, when the Principal came in to "break the news" (I'm sure more than seven other people died that day) we immediately suspected and blamed Paul.
My god, were the tasteless Challenger jokes awful soon thereafter. Shameful - eleven year-old boys can be sociopaths.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was just about to turn 16, and lived in Poland at the time of the accident.
Half way through some TV program, the station cut in into "an important news event". The moment I've heard the launch countdown. Right away I knew there was a major accident
To this day I look back and remember how the whole 2-3 minutes of footage shown with no local commentary, just a raw footage recorded a few minutes earlier from a satellite feed. I just knew something went wrong, but I didn't know what to expect. Just sitting there, expecting the worst, made it for some of the longest 2 minutes of my life.
It's not really about where people were or what they were doing, that's just how we as humans prompt each other to share our feelings about events that happened so that we can relate to each other. Large scale tragedies and our experience of them are things that all people who lived through them have in common. I find it comforting to talk to other people about how they experienced these things, particularly strangers - anonymously or not.
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Lived in central FL at the time... 5th grade. We were moving stuff for a play. I was all excited about the 'separation' because I hadn't seen a day launch yet. Just night. I thought it was normal, but couldn't figure out why the number of objects (smoke plumes, really) we could see didn't add up to 2 srb's and 1 shuttle...
I had a sucky sig.
After that class was our morning break period. I immediately went to my next class, which was physics. In the back of the classroom, many of my classmates were huddled around a portable radio, listening to the news. No one said much. (I didn't actually see the video footage of the explosion until I got home that day.)
Yet the gods do not give lightly of the powers they have made,
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid,
Though a nation watched her falling, yet a world could only cry,
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky!
- From "Fire In The Sky," written by Jordin Kare
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I was in third grade and we had a TV set up to watch the first teacher get launched into space. I had relatives working at NASA at the time and was obsessed with space so seeing it happen live in class was just that much more traumatic.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
True, but it also allows people to offer opinions that are different enough to the prevailing slashdot view without being eternally hounded for them.
I got rid of my Disqus account because I made the mistake of jokingly responding to some guy who was angry about the Minions all being male. The way a litany of MRA commenters (and one 'woman' who argued in such an identical way it was clear she was actually a guy) responded made it very clear to me that I would be followed around websites using Disqus and sea-lioned for ever more.
Slashdot is about 30% sea-lion. Commenting anonymously limits their effectiveness.
I had been following the space program since I was a kid, so I had read the book that was published after the Apollo 1 fire that also pointed out other problems with NASA safety - in particular the shuttle's SRBs using o-rings and segments instead of a single-piece srb as mandated by the military, because the only way to ship the rings from the pork-barred supplier (martin-thiokol) to nasa was in pieces by barge.
I had stopped by my mother and was watching it on tv when I saw what looked like a small plume of gas coming out the side of one of the srbs, and immediately said "bet you it's a joint failure." A few seconds later, ka-boom.
The whole disaster could have been prevented if the manufacturing plant had been located close enough to the launch facility not to have required the srbs to be shipped in segments. The real disaster has always been political influence on procurement programs.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There were quite a few kids that cheered when the principal announced it. Quite a few of us were optimistic that this would end the largest corporate welfare scam in the history of mankind. The sad thing is that nothing changed. The Republicans kept taking money from us to give to corporations.
I didn't go to high school that day and was sitting in bed listening to the radio. I was brought up on the Apollo program so I'd been interested in the shuttle program since that first free flight of the Enterprise.
It was shocking, but with everything that's happened since then no tragedy shocks me now. Our society devours tragedy and despair.
I was in 6th grade reading class, when another teacher came in the room and exclaimed something like "The space shuttle just exploded and everyone died.", and then left and spread the word. Don't remember what we were reading or anything else about that day or 6th grade really. One of the few times I can remember where and what I was doing for an event not directly related to my life.
I was waiting to be borned. Another 10 years! Not even sure what a "space shuttle" is.
We could actually see the shuttles go up and it was a once-a-week gifted pull-out class, so we were outside watching it directly. It looked really strange, with the contrail splitting and curving oddly, and we had to go back inside to figure what had happened. I vaguely recall being sent off to play while the teachers regained their composure. That, I think, was the worst possible launch to have an accident on -- but, for the same reasons, the pressure to launch on schedule was that much higher.
I remember not having school on that day. I was all hyped up watching this live on TV. Like the commentators, it took me a moments reflection to realize the deflagration was not normal. I remember being quite shocked by it. When my mother came in from work and I announced it to her, I was amazed at the indifference she exhibited, contrasting my thorn feelings on it.
You gave them what they wanted.
Programming, when my manager and another programmer walked by my cube, and told me they were going to what I jokingly referred to as the "accessory meeting room" (the bar next door). They told me Challenger had exploded, I joined them, and we all had drinks as we watched the reruns on the tv over the bar.
*shit*
Fucking "launch it anyway, the President wants to mention it in his State of the Union speech tonight".
mark
I skipped school that day to watch the launch. We had a satellite receiver and I found the NASA wild feeds (the unfiltered video that is sent out without all the talking heads and commentary). It really gave a different take on the disaster than what was on the networks. Much more unfiltered, at least until they killed all transmission.
We had a 2 hour delay that morning (western PA) so buds decided to ditch the whole day (9th grade). Took out the family beater (1978 Suburban) to play in the snow. Went home for lunch and to jam on my C64 but spent the rest of the day watching the news of the event.
I personally was about 5 months shy of dropping out, but my father-in-law was best friends with the pilot of the Challenger. They grew up together in Beaufort, NC and both went to the Naval Academy (my father-in-law went into submarines though). He and my mother-in-law were invited to go down to the launch but couldn't because she had just given birth to my wife!
He's still pissed off about it. It was a purely political decision to launch that day. The engineers said they shouldn't and said there was an unnecessary risk due to exact problem that ended up happening. But because it was already delayed several times before, they were pressured to launch against the engineer's recommendations. Because of that people needlessly died.
Saw the last 30-40 sec of the launch from the front of our office in Boca Raton, 100+ miles to the S down the coast. We commented that the launch was strange only to come inside and hear on the radio that the shuttle had "exploded". Very, very sad day. Pray for the families and let us remember that it was largely failures in policy and bureaucracy that lead to all three disasters: Apollo 1, Columbia, and Challenger. Also see this article about the use of Power Point contributing to Challenger: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB
I was in a band called Warrren Frank's Current Name. We played in the Cellar, the U of Arizona Student Union hot spot, for the Eat To The Beat concert series that day. I heard the news on the radio of my 1959 Cadillac as I was driving the equipment over to the place at nine AM.
Naturally, our audience was all upstairs, watching events unfold in the big public TV set. It was all right, as the band was doomed anyways.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
"Quit explaining things! Can't you see I just want to be mad?!"
Watching the show
My immediate reaction to them was to tell them "and I still want nothing more than to fly on the shuttle, I'd be on it tomorrow if given the chance."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'm probably one of the few people in this country that found out about the Challenger explosion with a sigh of relief.
I was a senior in HS, and was taking classes offsite at a local college in the mornings. I had a tape deck in my car, so I rarely listened to news in the morning, and I think that day I'd even decided to skip class, sleep in, and screw around. So I'm minding my own business every morning.
I had to check in to my HS for the afternoon, though. When I walked into school, it was quiet. Like, CREEPY quiet...there were something like 2500 students in my highschool, it was lunchtime, and nearly completely silent. As I came into the commons, I could see that everyone - hundreds of kids and teachers alike - was just shocked, gobsmacked.
This was the 1980s. The era of Red Dawn, Reagan, The Day After, and 50,000 nuclear warheads. I genuinely feared that nuclear war had been announced.
When my g/f told me that the Challenger blew up, I may have even said aloud "Oh? Is that all?"
To this day, what I remember of that moment was my feeling of tremendous relief.
-Styopa
and I don't exactly remember where I was then. Cannot afford those past-life hypnosis programs !
I was probably still a scattered assembly of hydrocarbons, inorganic molecules and amino acids primarily in the body of the cow that would later become a burger that my father would ingest two years and change later.
I was trying to teach myself machine language on my Commodore 64. What stuck me most deeply about the event (and remains with me to this day) was the revelation that the more complex a system is, the more fragile it is.
I was in high school, studying at a friend's house for our biology midterm, when her sister came running down the stairs shouting "The Challenger just went up." And my friend said "Yes, the Challenger is going up today." And the sister said "No, no, it blew up."
A couple of years later, I was in college taking Freshman Physics 102. The professor was supposed to be running an experiment on the (grounded) Space Shuttle. Instead, he was teaching Freshman Physics 102. And he never let us forget that. I think the mean on the first test was around 30% before somebody got a higher-up to step in.
Watching from the beach, after my dad decided we should skip school to go watch.
I have pictures of it from before launch til after the anomoly occurred ... And several pictures of random shots that happened when I stood in shock and awe looking at the sky and not realizing I was still pushing the button until my dad grabbed me and pointed out I was out of film.
I was in 3rd grade.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I was in fourth grade, I remember the principal made the awful announcement over the intercom. We were dismissed early and I remember watching Walter Cronkite later on the news with my parents.
We were all sitting around the wardroom (in port) waiting for lunch, and the TV was on (it was in a locker above the sideboard.) I was standing next to the table watching the smoke column, when the explosion happened. There was a moment of silence, then someone (maybe even me) said something like, "What the hell was that?" We were just starting to talk when the Captain came in for lunch and got the news. I don't remember a lot of emotion, it was more like shock.
On the flip side, within the week we had a (highly unofficial) Ship's Challenger Joke Coordinator, a former taxi driver who filled the same role for Princess Diana jokes (he hated the British.) In case you were wondering why I didn't identify anything better before ....
We were on a touring yacht around Antigua. As a result, we only got sporadic radio reports for the first few hours. Bit of a downer in the middle of an otherwise idyllic setting.
Once I found out the contract was "wired" (i.e. internal nepotistic corruption) for Morton Thiokol and they refused to build onsite, and that that was the only reason the damn two-piece body was chosen over a single structure, I was thoroughly pissed off.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I was in the Navy at the time serving aboard the USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) out of Norfolk Virginia. Was the middle of the morning work period when we were all told to make immediate preparations for an extended at sea period. Unusual, but not unheard of for my little submarine rescue ship. While the intent of the Kittywake was to rescue the crew of downed submarines, she has extremely well decked out for all sorts of diving and recovery operations. Got underway a day or two later and held station over various collections or wreckage which we raised and brought to a hanger back at the cape (or thereabouts). Few months of that and we were back to Norfolk. Occasionally they would let us off the boat for a night or two.
In case you are interested, the Kittywake is now an artificial reef off the coast of Grand Cayman island and is a major diver attraction. I got to watch them sink it.
I was a junior at Columbia. Walked into the dorm after taking a math test, I'm pretty sure diffEqs, and ran into a girl in the hallway. "Did you hear what happened to the Challenger?" she asked. I replied, "What, did it explode?" I have no idea why I gave this answer. Certainly I didn't know enough about the science back then to believe the shuttle was in danger of explosion. Perhaps I was just being a wiseass. "Yes," she said.
I was highschool age. There was no school that day. I slept in. I was having a dream about this crystal perfume decanter that was one of those "don't you dare touch that because you might break it" objects in the house. In the dream, I had removed the top which is a thin 3-sided pyramid about six inches tall. I fumbled the top. I was like "oh crap, gotta get this back on". For some reason I couldn't get it back on straight. I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. It was my Mom. She told me to turn on the TV.
My parents are both gone now. I pulled the decanter out of the estate stuff. I still have it. In fact, all I have to do is glance to the right while typing this and I can see it. It does in fact have some chips out of it now; but I have no idea how that happened. It was packed away in newspaper and/or bubblewrap for a long time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I was a sophomore in high school in central Florida. By this time enough launches had gone up that we no longer went outside to see the launches live - they were routine.
Between classes, one of my buddies came up to our group - 'Hey did you hear? - The shuttle blew up". "Bullshit" I responded. "No way" from others. It couldn't happen. Impossible. The stuff was routine by now. A lot of people realized that day that there's nothing routine about space flight...
--Mark
I'm relieved to see that you used your full legal name here, "macs4all", and not some sort of a pseudonym or alias. Otherwise we'd have to think that you're posting your hatred anonymously, like some sort of a coward!
I was in HS and stayed home that day ("sick") to specifically watch the launch. I remember when it blew apart and knew instantly that is was over. The announcer on TV kept going on and on and on about how there might be a problem, this doesn't seem normal, they're checking the status, etc. I was screaming at the announcer to shut-up, understand, and realize a bunch of people just died. He didn't hear me.
In South Jersey we also had snow, so school was let out early. We were supposed to watch the launch at school, but between the launch delays and the snow day we were at a friend's house with the TV on when it launched. I was in the kitchen making hot cocoa when my friend yelled, "Hey, guys! The space shuttle blew up!" We said, "Shut up, Charles," and ignored his protestations to come in and watch. When we finished making the hot cocoa, we finally saw that, sadly, he wasn't making shit up this time.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I was a senior at college. I don't remember if I saw it live on TV, or if I got back from class too late and then saw all the replays. A few minutes later the recruiter from the company where I really wanted to work called to tell me they wouldn't be offering me a job (yes, people still used phones for stuff like that). And a few minutes after that, my Mom called to tell me that my Aunt & Unlce's house had burned to the ground the night before (fortunately noone was injured).
Later that day I got very, very drunk.
Because catastrophes are only catastrophes in the way that they effect the people who live through them. Pretty simple concept but I guess not as simple as it needs to be for a sociopath like you.
Our grade school class had just got back from a trip to a planetarium. We saw it on a TV in the teacher's lounge on the way back to class. I do't remember if we discussed in class or not. I do remember seeing an very special episode of Punk Brewster. And Prince referenced it in his song Sign O The Times.
I was on hold with the local library to renew a book, and someone turned on the TV nearby and I saw the news. When the librarian came back online I asked her if they had a TV there, and she replied,"No, why?" I told her the Challenger appeared to have exploded during launch, and she said,"That's terrible, and that teacher was on it too wasn't she." I said yeah she was, and there was a pause, and then we went back to renewing my book. All day it was the news, Dan Rather trotting out shuttle models and pointing to them, and the same clip of the explosion right after they switched cameras, played endlessly. I had grown up with the shuttle program and it was pretty traumatic.
12:50 - press return.
As a 14-year-old self-identitying geek interested in all things science & technology, I'd just got home from school after staying an extra hour to mess about in the computer room (networked BBC Micros) and was watching TV (the 2 main TV channels here at the time programmed kids entertainment between around 3pm and 6pm) when John Craven's Newsround came on (around 5pm) and broke the news Newsround is a highly-respected news programme aimed at children, set up by the BBC in the '70s, which often pulled no punches with its reporting and more tan once scooped breaking news stories, as it was broadcast an hour before the 'adult' news bulletins at 6pm. I vividly remember being pretty distraught and running into the kitchen to tell my mum that 'the Space Shuttle has just blown up!'
Who gives a shit?! This is something that's always bothered me: a major catastrophe anniversary and everyone's gotta put in their two cents worth about where THEY were and what THEY were doing at the time! That's totally fucking irrelevant! The disaster occurred, let's focus on THAT, NOT what you were fucking doing at the time, no one gives a shit about you! Buncha egomaniacs this species is...
And yet, here you are, giving YOUR opinion, like anyone cares.
Fucking USELESS ACs... I wish Slashdot would get rid of the AC concept entirely. It is FAR too often simply an excuse for abuse and hate-mongering.
Pot, meet kettle.
I was in French I class failing miserably when we were told about the accident. IIRC we were sent home early but after 30 years hard to recall for sure. Sad to day heard the first in poor taste joke about the accident at the same time
I grew up in Cape Canaveral Florida and went to Cocoa Beach High School in Cocoa Beach Florida. Yep..."I Dream of Jeannie" territory. Having grown up there with friend's fathers who worked at NASA never seemed like a big deal until I saw the impact of this on them. I was sitting in the commons area of our high school when the shuttle launched. Being so close to the launch site, all I simply had to do was look up in the sky from where I was sitting at the base of one of the statues. Having grown up in Cape Canaveral, rocket launches were old hat to me. It looked pretty as usual and then finally boom. I ran into the library because they usually had the launches on a TV in there and we watched the replays. It was incredibly sad and disheartening. A friend of mine at the school knew one of the astronauts who died. She was devastated and in tears all afternoon. Plenty of kids were upset and at a loss. I will never forget it. I will always have a picture in my mind of that event. It took a long time for the area to move past that day.
I was at home, working on my plumbing, wondering why I received space grade o-rings instead of the cheap ones I ordered.
they effect the people who live through them
"affect", not "effect"
I remember watching the launch and aftermath on the Dinnie's Den (the campus bar) big screen TV. Thinking back now, the weeks immediately following included an off-colour lost-and-found ad in the campus newspaper, which was then turned into an awesome (but still inappropriate) prank on its editors by some students with whom I may or may not have been associated.
Less is more.
I was in Elementary school and was coming in from recess when a kid came running out of the school shouting that the space shuttle blew up. My first thought was "impossible!" but then the whole class sat down and the teacher brought in a TV and we watched the news horrified that it was true.
Watched it live in elementary school, several adult faculty/staff sighed out exclamations in dirty words, which made a lot of the younger kids laugh at hearing this and initially getting scolded for what was perceived as laughter over the tragedy.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Now I'm dead.
Was watching live, sitting on the floor with the rest of my grade school class.
I'd watched enough launches before that, to know that it didn't look right. I stood up and said something like "it blew up", and was scolded and told to sit down, shut up, and watch the rest of the launch... sigh.
I was working at Indian Space Research Organization, in Trivandrum, Kerala, India.
After the disaster, we went back to the drawing board and replaced all the solid motor booster rocket joints with dual tongue and grove design.
when were you when challenger dies?
i was sat at home eating cosmonaut ice cream when buzz lightyear ring
'challenger is kill'
'no'
NASA folks were at my facility for a week long class in Lewisville Texas on how to use our (Texas Instruments) TI4100 Global Positioning Receiver. A 50 lb white box, no map display and externally powered off 28 volts. It would keep you warm in the winter. A very sad and depressing day for everyone.
My school (or maybe just my teacher) thought it would be great an inspirational for the kids to watch the launch. It was quickly turned off.
I was at college in the bookstore when I heard the rumor that something has happened. Since I was working on the Galileo Project and that was slated to launch next on a Shuttle Wide Body Centaur, it was bad news.
As for your final statements. How silly. First of all, the SRB segments were delivered by train, not barge. The segments were stacked and O-Rings and attachment pins installed at the Cape. The ET manufactured by Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) was delivered by barge, reusing the Apollo facilities at Michaud LA. Distribution of R&D and manufacturing is one of this great nation's strengths. You simply cannot co-locate America's space technology manufacturing in one, rural, remote place in Florida. The SRB O-rings failed because they were flown out of temperature spec. Thiokol Engineer Roger Boisjoly tried in vain to postpone the launch. The only politics at play were the internal politics at NASA. The sealing material was too cold to deform properly under pressure. Subsequent SRBs flew with joint heaters and redesigned tang and clevis. The manufacturing site had nothing to do with it. The SRBs are also too huge to be cast as a single segment, especially at the time. I also suspected the SRB from the first. The SRBs performed perfectly for the next 25 years goes unnoticed. This is your old friend amightywind setting the record straight.
At RPI (a geek school), whenever Star Trek was on they put it up on the big TV in the student union.
If you pass through the first floor of the union between classes and see a hundred people all looking at the TV, that's what you expect to see.
They weren't watching Star Trek.
I still remember those demon horns curling into the sky and thinking WTF is this?
For a while the fear was that we'd build something so complex that we couldn't maintain it for long enough to use it.
still get a chill thinking about that day
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I was onboard the USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) in home port Norfolk Virginia. First I heard of it was an MC1 announcement from the captain (highly unusual) to make all necessary arrangements and preparation for an extended underway period. At lunch we all were able to see it on TV. We where haze grey and underway the next day. We went from one location to another picking up wreckage from the sea bottom. The Kittiwake, being a submarine rescue ship designed to rescue the crew from downed submarines, was well decked out with diving and salvage equipment including two recompression chambers for extended and/or deep diving. Every week or so we would bring a fantail full of assorted space technology to a big hangar over near the cape where they were reassembling the craft. Did that for several months. One of the most somber underway periods I ever had.
The Kittiwake, a fairly small ship, is now an artificial reef and world class diver attraction just off the coast of 7 Mile Beach on Grand Cayman Island. I got to watch them sink it!
all I remember is the vehicle clearing the towwer, a big cloud of birds, and a big ball of fire... and every space nerd in my school (myself included) bawling for a week.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I worked at SLC-6, the west coast Space Shuttle site at Vandenberg AFB. At that time I was working evening shifts, so I was still asleep when one of my housemates woke me with the news.
It was surreal. All morning I watched it looping on TV, until I left for work. I worked in the primary Launch Control Center (again, at VAFB). It was indeed a somber day. Part of our team had been to Florida to work this launch for training, but had returned to Vandenberg due to the previous cancellations. They were fortunate in not having to witness the explosion; indeed they were fortunate not to have a direct hand in that launch at all, lest they feel some responsibility--however remote--for what happened.
We were saddened by the loss of life, of course, but we also strongly suspected that this would seal our fate at VAFB; the utility of the Shuttle at Vandenberg was already seriously in doubt. It could not meet the payload requirements, nor the promised launch rate. We knew that this thing that had brought local prosperity, and given us purpose, was doomed.
DHI do you realize that most of the readers here weren't alive??
is it true that your heads are so far up within yourselves that ur unable to see the forrest from the trees?
Slow news day Right DHI.
A runner came in and told the teacher who then told us.
The next class period was lunch/study hall. Some classrooms around the building had TVs and some of those were unused during lunch. They opened their doors for people who wanted to watch the news reports.
It was our generation's "Kennedy Assassination" moment.
I had turned 16 less than 2 months before.
I was in my teens over mid-winter break and my father had taken me down to Florida to watch a Space Shuttle launch since I loved the space program so much.
Every day for the week we had gotten up before dawn, trudged out in the cold and driven to the Visitor's Center to be bused out to the Visitor viewing area on the peninsula across from the launching area.
I remember when it launched everyone cheering, and then it exploded and people were confused that it didn't look right.
The bus driver who had seen lots of the launches already immediately knew something had gone wrong, and then we were all stuck there for a few hours while everything was locked down.
Somewhere I might even have a Kodak Disc with shots of the launch and explosion, but I fear those pictures have been lost to time except in my memory (and in truth, they weren't that great).
As a long time fan of Richard Feynman (my father had read me his first book as bed time stories), I kept following the news as all of my major focuses at the time converged and overlapped.
Tempus Fugit
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Oh, I remember, I was being constructed by the testicles!
Can't wait to dive in to the pool for the egg race.
I'm SO going to win.
...the live video of pieces hitting the water, and then all live feeds being abruptly cut off? And then never seeing that impact footage again?
Our teacher applied for the program and was one of what was probably many alternates for the Christa McAuliffe spot.
Everything we did that year revolved around NASA and the space program. I
It hit home when we realized that our teacher could have possibly been on that ship.
Another student walked into our college art class saying it blew up. On the way back to the dorm I stopped by the student union, and saw the endlessly looping clip of it disintegrating, with the booster rockets careening away. Watching that made all those sci-fi novels I'd read as a kid seem more distant. I later found out my high school physics teacher (who was really great) had made it into the top 12 candidates for the "Teacher in Space" program.
I'm relieved to see that you used your full legal name here, "macs4all", and not some sort of a pseudonym or alias. Otherwise we'd have to think that you're posting your hatred anonymously, like some sort of a coward!
I have used my Slashdot Username; which, I notice, is FAR more than you used, YOU STUPID FUCKTARD!!!
Hanging around
I watched it on TV. Riveting. What a spectacle!
I was at home after breaking my ankle that weekend. I got to see the explosion over and over.
It was all that was on, on every channel. No web to surf or Netflix back then.
I was driving to the hospital in Hawaii my Daughter (first child) had been born the night before, and I was listening to the morning radio show, and the disc jockeys were talking about the shuttle blowing up. I thought it was a bit done in poor taste for the morning commute. It wasn't until latter that I realized what had actually happened. My Daughter turned 30 yesterday, and I was wondering if there would be any press on a 30yr anniversary today. So far /. is the only source i've seen.
I was in the gymnasium with the rest of the school to watch the launch. After the explosion, they cancelled classes, and sent us home. It was weird, because I was excited to get an early release from school, but also sad that it was because of why they let us out.
I arrived that morning at my office, where I was on the faculty of California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo), in the department of Computer Science.
I had office hours that morning. A student came in, and told me about the explosion. I didn't have a chance to see footage of the explosion until I went home that night.
We had just gotten for the first time a TV system that all classes could be fed news and information. Watching the Challenger make its way to space was one of the first broadcasts to test our new system. The room was silent as we watched the ship make its way into the sky. When the explosion occurred, we looked at each other in disbelief wondering if we were watching was actually live TV. When the teacher left the classroom weeping to join other teachers in the hall, we realized that indeed this was real.
snorting cocaine. Hey, it was the eighties! Everyone was doing it!
I was walking to my Middle School in Lakeland, FL. We were close enough that we could see the trails of every launch, and generally the glow of the engines. I stopped on the nearest hill to watch, as I always did, but this time to be greeted with an extra large glow. I know almost exactly the spot I was standing, just up the hill from Scott Lake. Its a day I'll never soon forget, as every class was nothing but re-watching the same tragedy over and over.
The local news was filled with storied about Christa McAuliffe for days and days afterwords. She was supposed to be the first School Teacher ever in space.
It was also a day filled with jokes. While somewhat sick, it is a very common way for people to deal with the pain.
I still remember almost every joke, they are forever etched into my memories.
I just remember gathering a bunch of markers cutting out four leaf clovers from sheets of paper, coloring them green and taping one clover to each marker. Then I put all of the markers together into a huge stalk of four leaf clovers as good luck so it would finally launch.. They had kept scrubbing launches over and over again at the last minute. Where I was when it blew up I honestly have no idea.
For Columbia I stayed up late watching NASA TV until something like 3-4 AM they were two minutes away from a deorbit burn when I finally turned the idiot machine off and went to sleep. The next day was at a party where someone mentioned it.. I was like ur funny.. what are you talking about? I was sad and angry and just left, party was lame and pretty much a sword fest.
For Atlantis I was in the Movie theatre watching a documentary about meteor strikes with my parents.
Was very interested in the investigations, organizational / political structures and known technical failures leading up to both disasters. Where were you when questions involving death and destruction have always seemed a little creepy to me but the Windows on previous times are interesting.
I enjoyed going thru 9/11 pager dumps they brought back so many memories of what life was like at the time .. one-way pagers, whats up, Novell, Exchange. It was minutia having nothing to do with any disaster I found interesting. While adrenalin associated with notable events helps people to remember things over time remembering what things were like in the past is interesting in and of itself. Every time in history has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. Remembering what previous times were like can provide useful perspectives going forward.. or in the case of US manned space program going backwards.
Everything was about the teach and no one else.
rent a car shuttle Delaware RI airport. I grew up listing to 2 way radios, I heard the call on their radio.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Woke up in the morning, and walked to the front door. Milkman dispensed half a liter of fresh milk from a can, groggily picked up The Indian Express, (Bangalore edition) and it was front page news with the iconic contrail picture. I was an aerospace engg grad, working for a Dept of Defense in unmanned aircraft, and was following space news well, so it was a big shock to me. Indian English newspapers do a pretty good job of covering the world and was quite to up to date. Sadly the newspapers in America proved to be a big disappointment. Nothing compared to the Science, Engg, Technology section of The Hindu (Madras edition). Even now I find Indian newspapers cover the world and America better than American papers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm pretty sure I was turning on the TV, expecting to watch The Adventure Game, but all I saw was the footage of Challenger. At first I did not comprehend what I was seeing, and then it sunk in.
US Army Aviation Center and School, Fort Rucker, Alabama. I know of two candidates who were concerned about the dangers of flying and this was the proverbial 'icing on the cake' and they subsequently left the flight training program.
I was 16, and a sophomore in high school. We were watching it live on TV, when it exploded in front of us. We were horrified and students were crying. It was hard. There was an extra emotional element, our old 6th grade teacher Robert Forrester was the runner up for that program. If for some reason Christie couldn't go, he would have been next. When we were in 6th grade, he would always tell us that he was going to go up in space and we never thought he would have gotten a shot. But he got as far as he did, and luckily he didn't get on there because he would have died. I'm sure he was willing to pay that price. (for some reason I couldn't find a reference to it.. but it was announced at school at the time)
Saw the explosion on some kiosk TV, looked for a minute and said "wow", then went to Millers Outpost to buy some stone washed jeans before hitting the arcade.
It's a trope that students in the arts don't understand or respect science but that wasn't the case where I attended university. A large group of science nerds and artists gathered to watch the launch on campus in the Student Union.
When Challenger blew up, within moments, wordlessly, everyone in the room knew that something terrible had happened. Stunned students silently filtered out of the room and ended up gathering outside on the quad to commiserate together.
A very sad day. The closest similar event I can recall from my college days was the Dec. 8th, 1980 when John Lennon was shot.
I was right in the cockpit next to the pilot
Signed,
Brian Williams
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I was driving to a job interview at TRW. This was noteworthy because TRW made the communications satellite that was in the bay of the Challenger when it exploded that morning. Needless to say, the folks in the office were a bit stunned.
My knee jerk reaction while at work concentrating at a particular task, someone ran in "the Challenger just blew up!" As I remember the day before when launch was scrubbed because they couldn't remove the door mechanism off side hatch. A handle assembly is attached to side hatch on Orbiter for crew entry, hatch is closed, and White Room techs remove this assembly. However, some bolts were stuck, they couldn't remove the assembly (was taking too long) so the launch was scrubbed. Meanwhile media people were criticizing NASA for continual delays of this flight particularly the first teacher in space. I remember many people saying "well back in the days NASA was able to do a launch one after another without all these delays." Hmm, they must have forgotten the 1960s launches had lots of delays and lots of exploding launch vehicles.
Shortly after I knew the Challenger did explode. I also remembered some of the guys play back on their VHS decks in slow-mo and pause to do their own analysis. Another remarkable thing because only few years before only crash investigators had those tools. Of course everyone can to wrong conclusions. Rest of day and the week was really sad, like it was night time even in the middle of the day.
mfwright@batnet.com
Your best app is probably "hello world"
We were watching the launch on TV in our Elementary school (I want to say I was in 4th grade) science class.
That class more-or-less became the Challenger discussion class from then on. We followed all of the latest developments in the investigation and I want to say (though I don't recall 100%) that it was in this same class that we learned about the O-ring problem and what it meant.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I was in an ethnic grocery store fronting Bloor St W, somewhere between Ossington and Dufferin, buying rutabagas to make a vegetable stock for a fancy Swedish meatball recipe (three different kinds of ground meat) from The Joy of Cooking, when the radio behind the cash register booth came on with the breaking news.
I can even recall where I was standing in relationship to the interior shelving. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure I had been reading Surely You're Joking just a week earlier (not that the connection was especially direct at that time).
I already held the opinion that the shuttle was a financial albatross compared to other ways the same funds could have been spent, so I certainly had some conflicting emotions in the moment. While it's definitely gratifying to see a rather stupid publicity stunt reveal itself for what it truly was, the human cost was extremely high. Perhaps they should have used a stunt double for the teacher astronaut, Wag the Dog style. Maybe they did, and she's now living somewhere in deep cover under witness protection.
Somehow I don't think so. It's much easier just to fold the American flag into that fancy croissant and bow our heads in heroic grief.
I was all of like, 1.5 years old, so probably naked wandering around the house eating Cheetos straight from the bag, getting the cat all orange.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
For somebody who is supposedly against anonymous posting, abusive comments, and hate-mongering comments, you sure do seem to like to post abusive, hate-mongering comments anonymously!
There had been a big build-up to the launch since there was a teacher (Christa McAuliffe) among the crew. It was rather unusual to watch live TV broadcasts during our high school classes, but for this they made an exception. I'm not sure why our civics class was one of the few classes in my high school selected to watch it, but the AV dept sent one of their few (~3) TV-on-a-cart units to our room so that we could watch the launch live on TV. I'd watched several shuttle launches before on TV, so it didn't seem like it was going to be that big of deal. About 73 seconds after launch that all changed.
Seeing the Challenger Disaster on live TV was one of the most gut-wrenching things I've experienced - it's so painful to see a disaster unfold where innocent people are suddenly killed.
On a related note, I later met Roger Boisjoly (who had tried to stop the launch) when he spoke to my engineering class in college.
I was a freshman at the University of Florida that year. I'd been at the student union playing nine-ball with a friend waiting to watch the launch on one of the many TVs. As soon as the shuttle cleared the pad I headed out to my next class across campus. When I got there someone told me what had happened. I didn't believe them at first. Wasn't long before the plume was visible on the horizon.
Shameful - eleven year-old boys can be sociopaths.
The jokes in my school were primarily spread around by the girls.
I was working and very busy that day. Had no access to TV nor the time. I do remember then POTUS Ronold Reagun made a statement about 10AM. I was broadcast over all radio and TV stations, So I got to listen to his solemn remarks on the radio. It was a quiet, sad day.
Not much recollection
I was home sick (probably faking it like usual) from 7th grade. I was so excited I was about to watch my first live launch ever. Only my mom was home with me. I was sitting right in front of the TV. It started off amazing....then...went wrong. I knew immediately something wasn't right. I slowly turned around to look at my mom. She asked me, "Was that supposed to happen?" I slowly shook my head back and forth, feeling dread and sadness well up. I remember it like it was yesterday. :(
Just leaving the dining room in Pioneer hall, and on my way to physics class at UMN, saw the aftermath in the TV lounge. There was always a small group avoiding class and watching some soap opera. But that day, the lounge was full, everyone standing, most in silence. A few sobs. A few "holy fucking shit" or something along those lines. Got to class, and Cecil J Waddington opened his lecture with "It's a bloody awful thing, isn't it?"
For somebody who is supposedly against anonymous posting, abusive comments, and hate-mongering comments, you sure do seem to like to post abusive, hate-mongering comments anonymously!
WTF are you prattling on about?!?
I think I can count on one FINGER the amount of times I have posted as an AC on Slashdot, and I have the Karmic Scars to prove it.
Now STFU and GO AWAY
We both worked night shifts, me as a paramedic, she as a computer operator. Both arrived home at about 7:15 AM, did what newlyweds do when they go to bed and turned the TV afterward, just in time to see the launch and subsequent explosion.
You know, I never thought about it until today's /. article, but our first son was born on October 27, 1986. Coincidence, I think not.
Shoulda named him Challenger...
I was a junior in college at home that morning. Walked outside to watch the launch, I lived in Merritt Island, like I did for the previous launches and knew immediately that this was not good....
I was really into the space shuttle--I used to build models of various proposed space shuttles when I was a teenager into model rocketry. At the time of the disaster, I had found my way into a program in the psych department at the local community college that tried to study the effects of living in enclosed spaces by using a space shuttle mockup built out of plywood, TV monitors, some Atari 800s and electronic hardware from the surplus yard down in Taunton. It was very not realistic, but at the same time not bad--apparently it felt very convincing to the people who were in it.
So needless to say, we were all pretty wrecked. I don't know how many times I watched the explosion on the instant replay, but it was a lot. Lots of crying, very maudlin, but on the other hand the lot of us were able to hang out together and grieve with people who got it. Looking back on it, it's a funny coincidence that we were all there when it happened, but we were.
Except that it was a very cold January morning in NJ and that the jokes started flying maybe an hour after it happened. (please don't kill the messenger here)
love is just extroverted narcissism
... in college, at the time. Another student came into the room and asked, "Did you hear the Challenger exploded?" He was a well-known practical joker, so I figured this was just another one of his jokes. The fact that he was an engineering student and delivered the news in a completely deadpan voice didn't help, any. When he turned on the TV to show me, I couldn't believe it. I'm pretty sure it took about an hour to really sink in, and I couldn't do anything for the rest of the day but sit there and watch in horror.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
I was a Junior in High School, had finished lunch and went to the choir room as I had choir in the period afterward and the choir room was a cool place to hang out for awhile - we could lay on the carpeted steps before putting down chairs later for practice. Someone had turned on the TV/VCR for playing educational tapes and tuned in a fuzzy broadcast station. I remember having been happy and boisterous before walking in the room, but the silence immediately changed things. It had been two to three hours since the explosion. I couldn't believe what we were watching and no adults were around quite yet. I also remember the choir teacher having come in and given us some time, but then forcing us to start choir practice. We were all in shock and singing was the last thing we wanted to do, but the teacher was the boss.
Why does it matter where I was? I had nothing to do with it.
Whenever the shuttle was scheduled to launch, most classes took a break and we filed out to the playground to watch. And that day was no exception.
I got in my first significant playground fight that day. While most of us were staring in horror at what had happened, the new kid was pumped, thought it was "totally wicked" and was cheering enthusiastically. This being Florida, where school kids practically worshipped astronauts and it was very obvious that seven of them had just died, I punched him right in gut. By the time the teachers got to us, a few others had joined in on my side. This being the '80s, when "boy will be boys" was still a thing, and the teachers were probably even more aghast in grief and horror at what happened than we were; we were separated for the day and nothing else was said.
There was kind of a half-hearted attempt on the part of the teachers at resuming the lessons for the day. But not much got accomplished, especially after the principal confirmed the destruction of the shuttle on the school's intercom. And no homework was assigned.
Imagine all the people...
I was watching the launch live, as part of our science class, in my middleschool library (I think I was in 9th grade?) and after we all realized that something horrible was happening, it wasn't more than 5 minutes before the first of many 'What's this button do?' jokes was heard. Of course, we were stupid teenagers, so there was no thought behind them, and needless to say, the teachers were none too happy at us, and quite emotional about what happened (they had, after all, just witnessed one of their own die tragically trying to promote science in the classroom).
This is now one of many 'events' I can clearly remember details of (9-11, columbine, start of 1st Iraq war, etc). In fact, I'm now no longer laying down indelible memories of where I was when tragic events occur, as they are occurring with increasing frequency, I find they are becoming just a blur of 'shit that happens'.
Maybe that's a good thing. I think I'd rather devote my limited 'memory' resource to happy memories, instead of dwelling on the negative.
I was in the Air Force at the Satellite Control Facility (Blue Cube) in Sunnyvale California.
The SCF was were a lot of communications for shuttle operations went through.
Let us spell it out for you, since you appear to have trouble comprehending these basic concepts:
1) "macs4all" is just as anonymous as "Anonymous Coward". You are posting anonymously.
2) Earlier you wrote that you consider "abuse and hate-mongering" comments to be unacceptable, yet you repeatedly post abusive and hate-mongering comments yourself. Please refer to your comments in which you wrote things like, "Fucking USELESS ACs", "YOU STUPID FUCKTARD", and "STFU and GO AWAY".
So in conclusion, you behave exactly how you complain about others behaving.
In fact, you may actually be worse, as you apparently don't even realize that you're being so hypocritical!
with a friend, 'nuff said ;)
The grad student down the hall was on leave from NASA. He heard about it from his co-workers. What I remember was turning on the TV after I got home to check the evening news for an update and finding all the stations were still on live coverage. Of course, they had long since run out of things to report. One anchorman was interviewing James A. Michener, just because he had written a novel titled "Space".
Absolutel NOT! I, for another, agree with original post. Unless we learn to focus on the lessons that should have been learned from such failures, we might as well just piss on the graves of those who needlessly lost their lives. Columbia was essentially the same craft, and it failed for similar reasons.
The Rogers Commission's investigation results to Congress are far more important than the disaster itself because of the assessment in Appendix F by Richard Feyman, who castigated the management at NASA for failing to respond to the risk assessments from their engineers. Those people, who were responsible for design, testing and building the shuttle within an unrealistically defined set of mission requirements and budgetary constraints, were ignored when they expressed legitimate concern, for political and economic reasons.
The shuttle program, as part of Reagan's grandiose Star Wars agenda, was the creation of industrial hubris and sold to the American public on the ridiculous premise that space conquest is part of human destiny, even thought at this point we are barely capable of putting thin cans into orbit and propelling them with chemical oxidization reactions for which we must lug more mass in fuel than we actually transport as structure or payload.
Space colonization is equally unrealistic, given our current state of technological development, but we've been barraged by a media blitz in favor of the wonders of "human endeavor" and the miracle of commercial entrepreneurialism that most of us have become conditioned to be distracted from such realities. The results are analogous to the promises made ever since the 60s.
I was in my used 81 200SX (Datsun), about a half mile from home when I heard the news. I drove home and parked in the garage and cried for a very long time. I don't recall anything of that night even when my wife got home. A truly sad day that will always be in my memories.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
I had just started a two year assignment to the IBM Boca Raton laboratory from the UK. I had arrived in the US on a plane to Miami on January 22nd, and I was still in a hotel room, working for most of the day and getting out in the later afternoon to meet with realtors to find somewhere to live. In those days, IBM paid hotel and car expenses for four weeks, but after that you were on your own. I was in a meeting in Boca, when an old time IBMer called Ron Cope knocked the door, came in and announced the news very solemnly. Many of the IBM older guys had worked at IBM Federal Systems Division at the Cape before joining the Boca lab, so it was a very personal loss to them all. I was very sad - not least since there wouldn't be another shuttle launch for the whole of my time in Florida, before returning to the UK.
When I heard the news, I was in a middle-school science class; our teacher walked us solemnly over to the school library, where we watched the television news.
I was probably in my crib or whatever, given I was like a year old. :p
Tasteless jokes, like, "When it comes to space flight or colonization, you have 3 basic constraints; safety, affordability and success, but you can only achieve two of those at our current level of development as a species." So go right ahead... pick two.
The engineers at my office wanted to watch the launch, so we invaded the accounting office that had the windows facing the Space Center. It was a beautiful launch, up to the time the exhaust trail forked, forming a "Y". The accountants all said, "Oh, look how beautiful!" The engineers all said, "Uh-oh. That's not supposed to happen. . . ."
But the investigation showed deep flaws in NASA management assessments of safety factors.
Yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around - but the rule of launches is that if someone (ANYONE) says no...you don't launch.
There was a LOT of political pressure to launch.
Don Lugo High School in Chino, CA in the locker room.
I had stayed home sick that day. I was a fan of the space program and had attended NASA's space camp the summer just prior to Challenger where I got to fly the old "Eagle" simulator as the mission commander. I was really, really into NASA in those days, and had even seen a couple launches live, one daylight, one dark outside, plus a handful of Canaveral launches on family trips as my dad is the one who really got us into NASA stuff. But for whatever reason I wasn't really aware of the launch that day when I stayed home. I watched tv and was pleasantly surprised.."oh cool..a launch today" and watched it live. Being keenly aware of the mechanics and procedure of the launch I knew it was a disaster right away, whereas in the crowd/newsroom you could sense some confusion over what they were seeing..trying to explain what they were seeing without comprehending that something had indeed gone wrong. My mom called maybe 30 minutes later from work and I told her "I watched the whole thing. It's still on". For years I always remembered myself as a grade schooler for some reason, even though I was actually a high school freshman then. I think it was because I was in grade school when the news of Reagan getting shot burst into our classroom at Rhein Benninghoven elementary.
This teacher from my school Shawnee Mission Northwest High School in Shawnee, KS, was one of the runner ups..was the finalist from our state of KS, so he almost went:
http://www.wendellmohlingfoundation.com/AboutWendell.html
As I recall I was temporarily between jobs and decided to watch the launch at home with my wife, who worked nights as a nurse. Being a big fan of the Shuttle, I tried to watch every launch, and when I saw the large y-shaped cloud, I realized something had gone *seriously* wrong.. The rest of the day was a blur.. Then again in 2003, I realized I had a good chance to see the firey trail of Columbia reentering the atmosphere, as the reentry path was close enough to Las Vegas to see in the northern sky. So I got up really early (for me) and drove out to a spot away from the bright lights of town, and right on schedule, there was this bright streak across the sky. I noticed it looked like flaming pieces were coming off of it.. Since I'd never seen a shuttle reentry like this, I didn't, at the time, realize anything was wrong.. That realization quickly changed when I turned the radio on, and listened to the latest news.. I'll never forget hearing Houston saying "Columbia.. Houston.. " quite a few times with no answer... I then realized, I must have been seeing Columbia breaking up during reentry.. I had to pull over as I couldn't drive safely for a while, and in fact, I'm tearing up just writing this... God Bless the brave souls who go into space and expand mankind's knowledge...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Was teaching at a private technical college then.
I was in the Television Lab with the other Computer & Digital Systems instructor watching the launch (like we always did.)
30 sec. after the explosion, both of his pagers went off (he was the contract system maintainer for the old Sperry Univac telemetry systems in Houston.)
He asked me to take his classes for the next few days, ran out to his car, and drove directly to the airport.
Didn't see him for a week.
He eventually had to testify to Congress about how the Telemetry Data was secured (he would not go into detail about it.)
As he told me after that: "Before I went in to testify I knew I had nothing to do with the disaster, afterwards I felt like it was all my fault."
Sad, sad day, will never forget it.
My teacher sent me to get the tv to watch. As I arrived in the room to pickup the shuttle launched and then exploded. My teacher was the runner up for Illinois in the astronaught training program. He was really shaken when I came back and told him.
..on the factory floor, listening on am radio the leadman had
Building C-36, where we were helping Ronald Reagan transfer nuclear cruise missile technology to Saudi Arabian Wahhabists.
Not kidding.
I used to ride my bike about ten miles to work each day at a small Unix software developer in Brookline MA. I wheeled my bike through the front door and noticed the secretary was sitting at her desk with a stunned expression.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"It blew up," she said. You know how in books people who are overwhelmed with shock say things "in a hollow voice"? That was how she said it; I'd never actually heard anyone talk in that voice before.
"What blew up?"
"The Shuttle. It blew up."
So we all gathered around the radio -- this was before the Internet and before televisions were common in offices -- and listened to the news people speak in that special hushed tone they use for unimaginable catastrophes. Anyone who listened to the radio on 9/11 knows what I'm talking about, it's low and soft and ... hollow, like they're reluctantly whispering terrible things in your ear.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was born 275 days later.
That morning I was getting ready to go to class, in my last quarter of senior year at university. The one thing I remember vividly was getting home late that evening to find the picture of Columbia on her launch pad had fallen from the wall and the glass and frame had shattered. It was eerie and most likely coincidence, but gave me time to ponder what had happened that morning as I swept up the glass. That evening President Reagan came on television to speak to the nation, having decided to defer his state of the union message to instead deliver an extraordinary speech to lead the nation in mourning, while pointing to a bright future in space. A day that can never be forgotten.
Have a Day!
...because I was suspended, as was often the case. I didn't watch the launch live; I heard on the radio that it exploded.
I was visiting Orlando (first and only time). Our hosts were going to take us to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch, but gave up on the idea after getting up early for two mornings in a row just to have the launch postponed due to the cold weather.
So instead we were walking to a nearby IHOP to get breakfast/brunch and some locals in a slowly passing pickup truck told us "look in the sky! The Challenger blew up!" and I thought yeah, right, but the smoke plume did look odd. When we got to the IHOP, the radio was on with the grim news. A couple of the waitresses were sitting at the counter crying, and the rest of the patrons were really quiet. The only conversation to be heard throught the diner was from one booth of redneck types who were discussing whether they thought the crew were killed outright, or otherwise knew they were going down. After a long silent pause, one of the rednecks said, "Ever throw a rat into a fire? They swell up like a ball!", immediately followed by the sound of utensils dropping to the plates throughout the diner.
Sick but true.
Working in the dish room at the Memorial Union building on the Univ of Wisc Madison campus.
I was in German class, listening to a person from the Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji Minnesota. He was talking about their (long since abandoned :( ) German college in Bemidji. He was just about done showing a video when the announcement came over the P.A. Our teacher said that we needed to listen to the rest of the presentation and then he would let us take over the T.V. to see what we could find being broadcast.
Relatedly, I was actually the one who told my dad when he came home from work that day. As he came in the door I asked him if he had heard the news.
I was in the darkroom at school, rolling two rolls of black and white film onto spools to be developed. One was mine, the other belonged to P., who had asked me if I'd roll hers for her. I finished, walked out of the darkroom, and handed P. a tank with her film inside. She told me the shuttle had exploded.
This was a few years after I'd graduated with my engineering degree. I was working on a robotics project, and I would often bring my lunch and eat it in the lab/office that we had. So I was at my desk when the tragedy occurred.
My co-worker came in from the mall where he'd gone to get lunch, and said something like, "The shuttle blew up, eh?", and I was stunned. (Yes, I'm Canadian.) When I got home, I watched the explosion on the news, but after the first few times couldn't watch it any more. And for probably twenty years afterwards, that piece of tape was a trigger -- I would see the image of the flame leaking out from underneath the craft, and have to look away, with tears in my eyes.
I was most saddened by the excellent Time magazine article that detailed the arguments between the engineers "It was too cold overnight -- we're not sure the vehicle is safe to fly." and the managers "NASA going to lose a lot of face if we don't launch and postpone again." So NASA launched, over the objections of the engineers. And we know the rest.
Hard to imagine now... there was no widespread internet access, I didn't have a TV, and audio cassette tapes and LPs, not radio, were my main media. It was the same story with my friends. I saw the picture of the explosion and read about it in the Boston Globe the next morning at my doorstep.
I watched live on NASA's internal tv network, surrounded by co-workers, all of us part of the Shuttle Program.
We built the tanks and shipped them by barge to the Cape for launch. I was recently graduated mechanical engineer working on robotic welding processes for the Shuttle External Tank. I watched as our pride and joy blew the Shuttle and its crew to pieces. (The External Tank is the piece that actually blew up. The starboard SRB caused the anomaly, and the two boosters continued off on their own rogue paths until the range safety officer destroyed them by command).
NASA had live TV monitors in the office corridors and on the plant floor at the Michoud Assembly Facility, where the tanks (and before that, the Saturn V) were manufactured. At launch time, employees were encouraged to watch their handiwork make the nine minute ascent before it was tossed away for destructive reentry over the Indian Ocean. We were on an ambitious plan to reach 60 tanks per year, corresponding to more than one Shuttle flight per week. After over twenty missions, launches were becoming routine and we were less compelled to see every one. I had already missed a few, but on this particular morning the skies that day over Michoud were crisp, cold, and crystal clear. I knew same air mass was over the Cape. That meant the television optics would be clearer than usual. With this unusual weather in mind, I planned to watch the launch.
General NASA and company policy encouraged employees to take a break and watch launches, but I unfortunately had a new boss who had come from some other non-NASA Martin division and he saw no point in the watching launch video. He kept us sitting around his office in a meeting as the launch started. When I asked if we could be excused to watch, he huffed and griped, but finally relented and agreed to pause our meeting.
I walked down the hall and could see that the launch vehicle had already lifted off and was well into its ascent. I came up upon the cluster fellow employees watching the monitor just as the vehicle trajectory was somewhere near or just after Max Q (maximum aerodynamic pressure, always a moment of concern for the External Tank team).
As I had expected, we had an unusually clear view of the vehicle. A flare of vapor emerged briefly--interesting, as I'd never seen that. Suddenly the image was all smoke and fire. I said "wow, what a spectacular SRB sep, it's not usually that clear." One of my co-workers said quietly "I think we're a little early on that". As he was speaking, the NASA camera pulled back. The SRBs were spiraling off on their own. Debris was raining down over the Atlantic. The audio was momentarily silent and then the announcer said "obviously a major malfunction". I can still hear that in my head as though it happened yesterday.
We stood there in shock for about ten minutes, watching the smoke trails with the cameras zooming in and out as the camera operator tried in vain to find the orbiter. Some employees began crying. A few minutes more and the screen cut to black abruptly, without comment. I walked back to my work area. My new boss said snarkily, "Once you're finished grieving, we can get back to work." To this day, that remains the coldest thing anyone ever said to me at a job. Many employees left at mid-day. In the afternoon, our division president appeared on the monitors looking forlorn. He cautioned about speculating or talking to the press. At day's end I passed out of the gate where local news crews were jockeying with microphones, hoping one of us would chat. I went home to flip between CNN and the big news channels, the 1986 equivalent of Google News and Twitter.
A "tiger team" was immediately convened and two train car loads of manufacturing records were brought in for forensics. A tank failure was the suspected culprit, so every weld x-ray and component flight certification would need to be reexamined. It seemed obvious the tank had exploded, and indeed the failure of the hydrogen tank and the collapse of
I will never forget. I was in a small town far south in india, and was a middle school student. I read about the shuttle explosion in one of the newspapers that get dropped at home early morning, it was dusk in the US by then. A local language (malayalam) new paper (mathrubhumi) had this in in front with a barely visible photo of taken of a television showing the shuttle (I always wondered how the reporter got that). None of the other new papers mentioned this, local or english (which usually carries more science and tech news, but are printed in a far away town late night on previous day). I just happened to receive a late printed batch of new papers. Other news outlets reported only the next day. There was no TV anywhere nearby those days.
I wanted to rush to school to tell my nerd friends, we had to talk about this. Rode my bicycle quite fast, ran into the class, and announced that the challenger shuttle in america had exploded. Everyone laughed and some said I was joking. I was perplexed, not even one other person had heard about it. I insisted but most didn't believe till some teacher came late to school and said the same thing. A few of us went to the library and found one old magazine somebody donated that had an article about NASA.
There was a sad tinge to the day, but I felt a little important, as the class stood around my desk talking about it ('it goes up as a rocket, lands like a plane!'). I had brought the news to the school. It also left memories of that event and crew of a land far away with me forever. Rest in Peace!
I remember *exactly* where I was. I was in the driveway of my parents' house, working on a '72 RX-2. It was sunny that day, and cold. I had the hood on the car up, and I was standing next to it looking at the distributors (yes, it had two). I heard a weird sound I can't describe. Kind of a "ripping" sound, but it was as if the "ripping" happened inside a large-diameter pipe. Say, 6 feet. It also had kind of a metallic ring to it. It sounded distant, but it was very directional. I distinctly heard it from behind me, and it was loud enough that I immediately turned around to look (to the west). There was nothing there. It was a rural setting. None of the neighbors appeared to be home, no vehicles had driven past. I can't really describe the sound, because I have never heard anything like it before or since. About 5 minutes or so later, I went in the house, made a cheese sandwich, went into the living room, and flipped on the TV. And there it was, a news program playing footage of the Challenger explosion that had happened "a few minutes ago". It seems totally unlikely that the sound of an explosion over Florida would reach my ears in Missouri, but I've never been able to figure out why I heard such a weird sound at what would have been within a few minutes of the Challenger exploding.
I was in the Navy at the time and had just finished briefing for a late AM flight and was getting ready to go start the aircraft pre-flight checks when the news of the explosion came on the ready room TV.
I kept thinking, "at least it was quick." It was only later the world learned they didn't die instantaneously.
Second year university, just got home for lunch.
Bright sunny day with high snowbanks all around. Remained sitting in the rapidly cooling car to listen to the news on the radio.
Shocked, absolutely shocked. I didn't think that this kind a of things happened anymore.
I had just finished work and went home and saw see the disaster on the news. I don't mind saying I had tears.
I have been a tech/space type person and for some reason I found it hard.
I was playing the challenger game on c64
I was sitting in my 6th grade class watching it with my classmates when it happened. Sad day.
Biochemistry lab @ University of Leeds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3UTT9vDACY
I believe I was in a PA elementary school, and didn't know about this accident until the TV news at home. I wasn't into space stuff back then too. :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I posted my memories of where I was over at my blog: http://jrl755.blogspot.com/2016/01/challenger-30-years-later.html
18 years old, watched the whole thing, from 20m before lift-off, right up until the explosion... Walked down to my father's office, stunned, and went, "The shuttle just blew up." He thought I was joking... Dark ages for the space race...
They say every generation has a defining moment where everybody remembers where they were. Pearl Harbor. Kennedy. Challenger. 9/11.
I was home sick that day from 6th grade; my parents trusted me to stay home alone. As it was, my mother was a teacher and called to tell me to turn on the news. It was horrifying, but what strikes me today is that I didn't share this with my classmates. I wasn't at school watching the launch live like nearly everyone else in my generation.
I was kid in 6th grade I felt sorry for the US astronauts. I was on the other side of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War was still on. So they were showing this on the news countless times. Just to show how US had failed.
I was in grade 8. I heard about it when I got home from school I think. I don't really remember much about how I heard. I just remember drawing a picture of the shuttle, and how I envisioned it looked in flames. I was pretty upset by it. Spent quite some time trying to figure out what caused it.
P.s. freaking Slashdot. Tried to sign in for this comment, I long ago forgot my password, and in my laziness I grew accustomed to signing on via my Google plus account. Well, as luck would have it, I clicked the wrong account this morning and Slashdot, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided not to let me sign back out, so apparently I'm signed into this account forever. Thanks for nothing, slashdorks. ~jsh1972
...that on January 27, 1967 (49 years ago) Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom, and Edward White lost their lives in the Apollo 1 Command Module cabin fire.
I remember Walter Cronkite breaking-in on whatever show we were watching after supper with the news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Q: What does NASA stand for?
A: Need Another Shuttle Assembled
Q: How many astronauts can you fit in a mid size car?
A: Twelve. Two in front, three in back, and seven in the ashtray.
I was coming out of the Christian school in 1986, it was around 3:00 PM and as soon as I got home The Space Shud Challenger was taking off but within a few minutes it blew upðY±ðY" I don't think my generation will ever forget that ever happened, because it did ðY" It was a tragic day just like 9/11ðY'¦ðY"ðY(TM)ðYðY¥ Rest all in Heavenly peaceðYðY(TM)ðY
Elementary school as well. It was hot dog day. All of the students had their bought meals if their families gave them money. I typically didn't have money and ate a home brought lunch of PB & jam which had soaked into the bread, making it all soggy. (ew!) That day I think I managed to procure a hotdog.
I remember being disappointed but knowing that it was a possible outcome of strapping people to rockets and sending them up into the sky. I felt sad for the astronauts and the teacher.
Would have been grade 2 I think.
I notice you provided no links. The only one making anything approaching the size of the SRB was Aerojet who built the SRM for the Titan IV. And you guessed it, it was poured in segments.
I am quite serious, why this is so important, even after 30years? Based on the math I was almost two when this happened and given that I am not from USA this is the first time I even hear of this crash. (Perhaps I heard about it many times before but have never realized it was of any major importance).
I mean, there are air-plain crashes, train crashes, space rockets crashes and many other much more devastating occurrences every year in this world that take a live of many more people and ruin the life for many many others.
So, please explain, why after 30years this is such a big thing still?
I was behind the wheel in drivers ed class on the practice course when the instructor came over the two-way radio in the car and told us something had happened and to turn on the car stereo to hear the news (something we were never allowed to do normally).
I was in school, but was too young for them to show us in class. It's likely that students elsewhere in the school were watching. However, there was an episode of Punky Brewster that covered it.
He effected a bored affect.
I was working in the defense industry, specifically involved in DOD space operations. Pulled into work and was greeted by my fellow workmate who helpfully asked "Did you hear the shuttle blew up?"
We were intimately involved in the DOD shuttle missions and the primary "competition" - disposable rockets. We were the people who created the original Pentagon positions against the DOD use of the shuttle so there was a feeling of "Damn you, we told you so!". Since we also did the failure analysis for DOD space "mishaps" we also started analyzing the video like we did when our Air Force birds went down - people generally didn't die then however which was key.
Otherwise it was a normal day. We had plenty of existing work that needed to get done. Oh yes, we dealt with the stress of it with some of the most tasteless "space shuttle jokes" you've ever heard. SJWs and other PC fanatics of today would have fainted in horror. Fuck'em. When you are playing with stuff like this it's at a whole other level of intensity so you need to joke at a whole other level about it, good or bad.
I remember the Challenger very well. I was in U.S. Navy Nuclear Power school in Orlando. Our class was so distracted by the fact there was going to be a launch; our instructor took us out to the quad between buildings, put us in formation, and faced us towards Cape Canaveral.
We were all watching as the rocket went up and exploded with the radio commentary of the launch playing over the P.A. system.
NRRPT/RCT
sea-lion?
I was a COTR (Contracting Officer's Technical Representative) for the government, and I was on my way to a contract review in Melbourne, Fla on a bitter cold, clear day. I pulled over on an overpass to watch the launch, and saw the whole thing. I was (and am) a life-long space nut, having grown up in Florida and having experienced the earth-shattering roar of an Apollo launch from a nearby beach. I knew immediately that the Challenger had suffered a catastrophic failure, and there was no hope for the astronauts.
I went on to the meeting, but none of us at the table did anything but listen to the news reports. We were all technically savvy types, and we all knew there was no hope, but we kept listening anyway.
Since then I have watched the USA fritter away any chance it had for continued leadership in space, in a stupid and irrelevant search for 'PC-ness', 'gender-diversity', 'income equality', 'safe spaces', 'micro-aggressions' and other crap. My generation was certainly to blame for much of this, but *this* generation has gone even farther astray. OTOH, this generation has also produced Elon Musk and SpaceX, so maybe you'll do better than us ;-).
Somehow I had gone from this to AP Literature in high school. Through this, I learned that student assessments are highly subjective. Anyway... Mrs. Morrissey said that there was going to be a rescue mission save the astronauts. She was just parroting the news. Then she turned on the television perched in an upper corner of the classroom. Just as with the towers of 911, we all watched in horror. No one was going to be saved. Mrs. Morrissey cried. It was Christa McAuliffe's last ride. Within a week jokes were already circulating: "How do we know that the teacher had dandruff?" The joke went. "Because her head and shoulders was found on the beach ."
Oh, childhood... So innocent. So sociopathic.
My moment was on Ars Technica. Mod-bombed and then banned for disagreeing with their hive mind. Haven't been back.