I remember watching it live as it happened. Such a sad day in US Space history.
30th anniversary of this.....
- Thread starter GLR5555
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I remember watching it live as it happened. Such a sad day in US Space history.
I was 4 so don't remember it. Why was everyone watching it again, was it the first time a woman was going into outerspace?
not just a woman, but a school teacher, Christa McAuliffe. cannot quote the entire story, but she was part of a teacher in space program they were doing. she basically won the sweepstakes or whatever, not to mention was able to meet the qualifications to do it. but it was being televised all over the country to schools through NASA tv live. i was in elementary at the time. they were going to be doing school related "stuff" and televising during the mission. so it exploded with kids all over the country watching live at their schools, in gymnasiums or wherever.
I believe it was a snow day for us. I was a senior at Owensboro HS. There was so much hoopla about the first teacher in space and all eyes were glued to TVs all over the country. I remember the sky was so clear and when the explosion happened, most probably thought it was part of the tanks falling off the shuttle. Her parents were right in the crowd. The crude jokes that followed were pretty awful.
"Woo hoo! The TV cart is rolling into the classroom."
"oh."
"oh."
I was in first grade. I think pretty much every elementary school kid in the country was watching live, and the whole "first teacher in space" thing had been hugely publicized.
I was at work, and met a client for lunch. He was the first one that told me the news, only he said "somebody just blew up the Space Shuttle"!! He was mistaken of course, but still a really sad day. Then it happened again a few years later on re - entry, it takes some real big ones to climb into a space ship, I don't care how advance the science has become.
I just happened to be in our break room at work getting a drink from the machine as the countdown had began so I hung around to see the launch. Remember thinking when seeing the explosion..."that's not supposed to happen"... then realizing what had actually happened.
As a kid whenever there was a space mission I could never get enough. Fortunately all three networks gave extensive coverage to each and every mission so there was a lot to take in.
As a kid whenever there was a space mission I could never get enough. Fortunately all three networks gave extensive coverage to each and every mission so there was a lot to take in.
We used to go out and watch the shuttle launches at canaveral from my elementary school field in central florida. I was 3 when this happened, so I don't remember it.
I remember watching it live as it happened. Such a sad day in US Space history.
Same. 1st grade.
Remembered this joke:
What does NASA stand for?
Need Another Seven Astronauts
Yes, and IIRC, the o ring was made here in Ky. I can't recall the name right off the top of my head though. Been around a long time.
I was watching it also, I was 23 at the time. Just a sad day to know those lives were snuffed out, not to mention all the kids all over the country seeing it live.
I remember seeing it in 7th grade. I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid so this will stick with me probably until I die.
"We have a major malfunction."
When the countdown dude said that I thought what an understatement! But at the moment nothing was more precise or succinct. That phrase has become part of my venacular and when something goes really wrong it's the phrase that cuts through the bs...
When the countdown dude said that I thought what an understatement! But at the moment nothing was more precise or succinct. That phrase has become part of my venacular and when something goes really wrong it's the phrase that cuts through the bs...
Yeah.
Then, years later with the Columbia shuttle, it was a piece of foam insulation hitting a wing during the launch, causing damage to some heat shield tiles... which led to the disaster upon reentry.
A piece of loose foam.
In the movie The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager says: Monkeys? You think a monkey knows he's sittin' on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV. Ol' Gus, he did all right.
I watched it live on CNN at Kenwood Elementary school in Louisville. I was in the 3rd grade. We read about Christa Macauliffe and Barbara Gordon (her back-up) for months before the launch in the Scholastic News and the school made a huge deal about the teacher-in-space event. So, I remember seeing the explosion on TV and my teacher quickly went and turned the TV off and told everyone to pull out the book we were reading in class, "Where the Red Fern Grows" and read quietly to ourselves and she left the room for a while. We heard a bunch of commotion out in the hallway, but none of us realized what had happened until later. We were all pretty confused.
It was such a sad thing to happen, especially when you see the two small children she left behind. Her six year old daughter didn't want her mom to go up, which is really sad to see her say in hindsight.
It definitely made an impact on me because I've never forgotten a single moment of that random school day back in 1986 or the events later that day up to and including President Reagan's statement broadcast later that night. It's strange how something out of the ordinary causes things to stay with you much longer than if everything were normal. Had the shuttle completed lift-off into orbit and completed its mission, I don't think I would've remembered anything about that day, but because of a tragedy, I can't forget a moment of it.
It was such a sad thing to happen, especially when you see the two small children she left behind. Her six year old daughter didn't want her mom to go up, which is really sad to see her say in hindsight.
It definitely made an impact on me because I've never forgotten a single moment of that random school day back in 1986 or the events later that day up to and including President Reagan's statement broadcast later that night. It's strange how something out of the ordinary causes things to stay with you much longer than if everything were normal. Had the shuttle completed lift-off into orbit and completed its mission, I don't think I would've remembered anything about that day, but because of a tragedy, I can't forget a moment of it.
Pretty sure that O-Ring was the circumference of a plastic kiddy swimming pool.
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http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/result-would-be-catastrophe.html
Morton Thiokol - Ignored Roger Boisjoly, an engineer that said this could happen. And then it did.
For those of you wondering why it was televised - in those days a shuttle launch was still a very big thing. In Kentucky - many of us were home for a snow day.
Mt.St. Helens, Challenger, 9/11 - those are just some of the Pearl Harbors of my lifetime.
Morton Thiokol - Ignored Roger Boisjoly, an engineer that said this could happen. And then it did.
For those of you wondering why it was televised - in those days a shuttle launch was still a very big thing. In Kentucky - many of us were home for a snow day.
Mt.St. Helens, Challenger, 9/11 - those are just some of the Pearl Harbors of my lifetime.
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According to an interview he did for a documentary on the disaster, Boisjoly actually believed the Challenger would blow up on the pad and when it didn't he thought they had dodged a bullet. If you watch videos of the launch, there is a black puff of smoke from the right SRB. That black smoke is the o-rings vaporizing when they didn't seal correctly. In a fortuitous turn of events, aluminum oxide that had been added to the solid propellant had formed a slag that immediately plugged the opening and avoided blow-by and allowed the shuttle to lift-off and seemingly saved the lives of the crew and the mission, but extremely high wind shear (the highest ever recorded during a NASA launch) dislodged the plug at or around T+72 and once that happened, the blow-by ignited and the right SRB began to shift off its strut and caused the chain of events that led to the shuttle explosion at T+73.
You have to wonder if the aluminum oxide slug plugging the hole was actually fortuitous or not. Had the shuttle exploded on the pad, isn't there a slight chance the crew could've survived (there are many theories that they survived the entire descent in the crew cabin, although likely unconscious due to the lack of cabin pressure, until they smashed into the ocean pulling 200 G's)? I think they would have had a much better chance of surviving the explosion on the pad (the crew cabin sat at roughly 110 ft. in the air and had it been jettisoned by the orbiter breakup would've hit the ground, not accounting for wind resistance, falling at roughly 57mph - the speed of a bad car wreck) as opposed to being 48,000 ft. in the air and smashing into the ocean at thousands of miles per hour . Of course, even if the crew managed to survive a fall from that height (110 ft.), they'd have all probably suffered life-altering injuries as a result of it, but at least there would've been a chance versus exploding in the stratosphere.
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Amazing - makes me wonder if the the mission survived past the SRB being jettisoned, would they have ever known about the o-ring? (I guess they would by studying film of the launch) Would they have discovered the problem after recovering the SRB and inspecting it and then realizing the bullet they dodged.
They would've discovered the o-ring failure, either way, after they retrieved the SRB. Boisjoly's inital concerns over the potential o-ring failure was due to his routine investigation of the SRB's from the previous Challenger launch in October 1985 (STS-61-A), in which a complete o-ring failure had nearly occurred causing charring from escaping high temp gases escaping through the seal. This disaster near-miss is what led Boisjoly to investigate further and present his findings and voice his concerns to have the launch scrubbed because the air temps were unseasonably cold for January in southern Florida (it was 18° the morning of the launch). The o-rings weren't rated to function properly below 40°, but the launch had already been scrubbed three times and NASA was getting a bunch of negative publicity because of it, so when Morton Thiokol gave the inital no-go for launch, NASA was very upset. Morton Thiokol's contract renewal with NASA was coming up, and fearing that this may put them in a negative light and risk losing the contract, the upper management at Morton Thiokol overruled Boisjoly and the other engineers and changed their call and gave NASA the go for launch. The rest is history.
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Lol...in actuality, a couple of years later, Morton Thiokol split with the Morton side of the company focusing on the chemical aspects of the business, and Thiokol (later Cordant Technologies) focusing on propulsion technology and design.
How many astronauts can you fit in a VW Bug? 11...........2 in the front seats, 2 in the back seats, and 7 in the ash tray.