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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.
I was probably pooping myself at home. I was only seven months old.
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.
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.
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
Seriously. We were watching it in my eighth grade class, and the debris was still falling when the first wisecrack "...they let the woman drive" got mentioned. By the end of the day the NASA one and "Why did the vending machine serve only coke? They couldn't get seven up" were made.
Later, found the same jokes/variants were made at other schools. The take-away I got from that event was that jokes (and ideas) can have multiple independent sources, so claiming 'ownership' seemed silly. Somewhat think that was the most important thing I learned at school that year.