20 years ago....

[Zkribbler]

January 28, 1986: We lost the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch.

Killed were commander Dick Scobee, pilot Mike Smith, astronauts Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis and civilian school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

[Winston]

It was terrible. I was in the midst of my military training, and actually didn't learn till several days later, but it was a mortifying event.

The tributes paid to the crew and mission in the years to follow, by NASA as well as other people from different walks of life are still very touching to me. And President Reagan gave one of his better adresses from the Oval Office to commemorate the great loss, which was felt by all.

[reds4ever]

RIP. I remember it well, I can't believe it was 20 years...

[Asher]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11031097/

7 myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster

Myth #1: A nation watched as tragedy unfolded
Few people actually saw what happened live on television. The flight occurred during the early years of cable news, and although CNN was indeed carrying the launch when the shuttle was destroyed, all major broadcast stations had cut away — only to quickly return with taped relays. With Christa McAuliffe set to be the first teacher in space, NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the full mission into television sets in many schools, but the general public did not have access to this unless they were one of the then-few people with satellite dishes. What most people recall as a "live broadcast" was actually the taped replay broadcast soon after the event.

Myth #2: Challenger exploded
The shuttle did not explode in the common definition of that word. There was no shock wave, no detonation, no "bang" — viewers on the ground just heard the roar of the engines stop as the shuttle’s fuel tank tore apart, spilling liquid oxygen and hydrogen which formed a huge fireball at an altitude of 46,000 ft. (Some television documentaries later added the sound of an explosion to these images.) But both solid-fuel strap-on boosters climbed up out of the cloud, still firing and unharmed by any explosion. Challenger itself was torn apart as it was flung free of the other rocket components and turned broadside into the Mach 2 airstream. Individual propellant tanks were seen exploding — but by then, the spacecraft was already in pieces.

Myth #3: The crew died instantly
The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 ft before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.

What's less clear is whether they were conscious. If the cabin depressurized (as seems likely), the crew would have had difficulty breathing. In the words of the final report by fellow astronauts, the crew “possibly but not certainly lost consciousness”, even though a few of the emergency air bottles (designed for escape from a smoking vehicle on the ground) had been activated.

The cabin hit the water at a speed greater than 200 mph, resulting in a force of about 200 G’s — crushing the structure and destroying everything inside. If the crew did lose consciousness (and the cabin may have been sufficiently intact to hold enough air long enough to prevent this), it’s unknown if they would have regained it as the air thickened during the last seconds of the fall. Official NASA commemorations of “Challenger’s 73-second flight” subtly deflect attention from what was happened in the almost three minutes of flight (and life) remaining AFTER the breakup.

Myth #4: Dangerous booster flaws result of meddling
The side-mounted booster rockets, which help propel the shuttle at launch then drop off during ascent, did possess flaws subject to improvement. But these flaws were neither especially dangerous if operated properly, nor the result of political interference.

Each of the pair of solid-fuel boosters was made from four separate segments that bolted end-to-end-to-end together, and flame escaping from one of the interfaces was what destroyed the shuttle. Although the obvious solution of making the boosters of one long segment (instead of four short ones) was later suggested, long solid fuel boosters have problems with safe propellant loading, with transport, and with stacking for launch — and multi-segment solids had had a good track record with the Titan-3 military satellite program. The winning contractor was located in Utah, the home state of a powerful Republican senator, but the company also had the strengths the NASA selection board was looking for. The segment interface was tricky and engineers kept tweaking the design to respond to flight anomalies, but when operated within tested environmental conditions, the equipment had been performing adequately.

Myth #5: Environmental ban led to weaker sealant
A favorite of the Internet, this myth states that a major factor in the disaster was that NASA had been ordered by regulatory agencies to abandon a working pressure sealant because it contained too much asbestos, and use a weaker replacement. But the replacement of the seal was unrelated to the disaster — and occurred prior to any environmental ban.

Even the original putty had persistent sealing problems, and after it was replaced by another putty that also contained asbestos, the higher level of breaches was connected not to the putty itself, but to a new test procedure being used. “We discovered that it was this leak check which was a likely cause of the dangerous bubbles in the putty that I had heard about," wrote physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the Challenger investigation board.

And the bubble effect was unconnected with the actual seal violation that would ultimately doom Challenger and its crew. The cause was an inadequate low-temperature performance of the O-ring seal itself, which had not been replaced.

Myth #6: Political pressure forced the launch
There were pressures on the flight schedule, but none of any recognizable political origin. Launch officials clearly felt pressure to get the mission off after repeated delays, and they were embarrassed by repeated mockery on the television news of previous scrubs, but the driving factor in their minds seems to have been two shuttle-launched planetary probes. The first ever probes of this kind, they had an unmovable launch window just four months in the future. The persistent rumor that the White House had ordered the flight to proceed in order to spice up President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union address seems based on political motivations, not any direct testimony or other first-hand evidence. Feynman personally checked out the rumor and never found any substantiation. If Challenger's flight had gone according to plan, the crew would have been asleep at the time of Reagan's speech, and no communications links had been set up.

Myth #7: An unavoidable price for progress
Claims that the disaster was the unavoidable price to be paid for pioneering a new frontier were self-serving rationalizations on the part of those responsible for incompetent engineering management — the disaster should have been avoidable. NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence. The skeptics’ argument that launching with record cold temperatures is valid, but it probably was not argued as persuasively as it might have been, in hindsight. If launched on a warmer day, with gentler high-altitude winds, there’s every reason to suppose the flight would have been successful and the troublesome seal design (which already had the attention of designers) would have been modified at a pace that turned out to have been far too leisurely. The disaster need never have happened if managers and workers had clung to known principles of safely operating on the edge of extreme hazards — nothing was learned by the disaster that hadn’t already been learned, and then forgotten.

[reds4ever]

P1ss poor post Asher, most of the points are well known and #2 is just irrelevant.

[PLATO]

I remember it vividly. I had just worked the 11PM to 7AM shift and was in bed asleep when my best friend called and told me the news.

RIP Challenger Crew

...

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by reds4ever
P1ss poor post Asher, most of the points are well known and #2 is just irrelevant.

RIP

[Odin]

[Barinthus]

I was among those who saw it alive - I was in elementary school that time and watched the launching.

[Gatekeeper]

I, too, watched it live.

I was in the fifth-grade then, and my science class had it on the television. The science teacher was there, as were a few other students; many, however, were outside on the playground (it was recess). I remember running out to the playground to tell them that the shuttle had been destroyed.

It's one of the earliest events in my life where I can vividly recall what I was doing at the moment it happened. The others before that included going into surgery when I was five and, at age six, being hit by a car while riding my bicycle.

Twenty years. God. Hard to believe that much time has gone by already.

Rest In Peace, crew of the Challenger. You did, indeed, touch the face of God.

Gatekeeper

[Asher]

I was one my way home from a 3-week stay at the hospital when the news was on the radio. I don't remember it obviously, I was too young.

[Donegeal]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
I, too, watched it live.

I was in the fifth-grade then, and my science class had it on the television. The science teacher was there, as were a few other students; many, however, were outside on the playground (it was recess). I remember running out to the playground to tell them that the shuttle had been destroyed.

It's one of the earliest events in my life where I can vividly recall what I was doing at the moment it happened. The others before that included going into surgery when I was five and, at age six, being hit by a car while riding my bicycle.

Twenty years. God. Hard to believe that much time has gone by already.

Rest In Peace, crew of the Challenger. You did, indeed, touch the face of God.

Gatekeeper

Hmmm... I was in 5th grade as well... watching it live. I had been facinated by the shuttle program since I learned about it and even wanted to be an astronaut.

Then the shuttle disaster happened. No, it did not stop me from wanting to be an astronaut, but I remember watching it happen and then looking at my teacher, Mrs.Colby. She was crying. It was the first time I had seen a teacher cry. It added a human element to them.

[Dis]

I was in school at the time. I heard about it during 2nd period, but didn't get to watch it on tv until 6th period, when the teacher turned on the television to the news. I also delivered the evening newspaper after school. And they have the picture I'm posting below real huge on the cover.

[Dis]

I will change my avatar to mark the occasion.

It actually isn't the challenger (it's the columbia). But we have a 3 year anniversary coming up in a few days. I will be marking that one with my avatar as well.

This is just one of the few news events that far back I can really remember. I was young and didn't pay attention to the news much back then. I only barely remember the iron contra affair on the news.

[Last Conformist]

How old were you then, Dis?


I vaguely remember the fall of the Wall, when I was seven. I remember GWI pretty well.