It was my birthday, and the Challenger was destroyed. I have some remembrances of the event, originally posted eight years ago. That was the beginning of the end of the Shuttle program, less than five years after it started flying, though we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time. It was certainly the end of the fantasy that it was going to fly many times a year, and do everything for everyone. In that respect, it was a necessary wake-up call, and it provided the basis for today’s commercial launch industry.
[Mid-morning update]
A lot of memories over at Free Republic.
I don’t recall being as emotionally devastated as many report being, but I think that’s because it didn’t really shock me as much as it did many, who had believed all of the NASA propaganda about how safe the vehicle was. Those of us working on it knew better. The only real surprise was the nature of the failure — we had been betting on either a main engine explosion, or loss of tiles on entry (which did happen sixteen years later). I remember mostly thinking about the policy and (for Rockwell) business implications, and speculating on exactly what went wrong. And of course, I didn’t personally know any of those lost, except for having met Judy Resnik once in the cafeteria when she was visiting Downey.
[Noon update]
Clark Lindsey has more anniversary links.
[Update mid afternoon]
Memories from Miles O’Brien:
At first, I thought it was a cloud. But it was such an odd shape. Kind of like a big “Y”. It was, in fact, the awful scar that loomed off the coast of Cape Canaveral – more than 150 miles away. It seemed to be asking us all a question that to this day offers no easy answers: “Why?”naive-shuttle-concept
As you know, the truth is painful and sad. NASA managers were determined to prove their shuttle fleet was truly “operational” – even commercially viable. If their dreams had become reality, 1986 would have been the busiest year ever in the history of the Space Transportation System.
Fifteen flights were scheduled over 11 months. One was supposed to be the first mission to launch from the new shuttle facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Nine communications satellites, three classified payloads for the Pentagon and two major unmanned probes were to be carried into space in the payload bay of an orbiter that year.
NASA managers were trying to live up to years and years of their own unrealistic expectations, fanciful claims, pure science-fiction, and outright lies.
So when they discounted and discarded the firm “no-go” admonitions of engineers at the Thiokol plant in Utah where the solid rocket boosters are made, mission mangers team were, in fact, lying to themselves.
In many ways, when they continue to defend the status quo, they still are.
On your birthday? That really sucks. I also remember it well. I was shocked. At first I couldn’t stop reading about it and a bit later I couldn’t bring myself to read anything about it anymore. I turned over newspapers so I didn’t have to see pictures of the explosion.
On a much less shocking level various feminist groups insist on holding International Women’s Day on my birthday. To add insult to injury the paedophile’s support group (yes, we have one in the Netherlands) is called the Martijn Foundation.
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday. At least I hope it still is your Birthday.
It was a shock, but when I heard it was the SRB I couldn’t believe it. How could an SRB fail… it had to be something else. Then to find the engineers didn’t want to launch in the cold weather because they knew the history of the O-rings… There should have been public floggings.
Instead they whitewash the reports.
Happy Birthday, Rand!
I was in school at the time and much too young to put it into context that Rand notes. We all had a moment of silence for those lost. Teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe became a martyred hero overnight.
…and happy birthday, Rand. May the fires in your wake burn like candles on your cake…
Here is a video of music set to images of the Challenger disaster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8hkbVFdK3E
I found it extraordinarily moving.
The only real surprise was the nature of the failure — we had been betting on either a main engine explosion, or loss of tiles on entry (which did happen sixteen years later).
Actually, a lost tile occurred on the 2nd flight after Challenger, just shy of 3 years later. They just got lucky.
I had tuned in to NBC hoping to see the launch because I hadn’t watched a launch in a long time and this was the one with Christa McAuliffe. Instead I got a regular broadcast of “The Today Show” that was suddenly interrupted with live video of stuff falling out of the sky.
Of all the tragic public events that have occurred during my life, that I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first learned of it, this was the only one I can think of that I was actually trying to see the event that was supposed to happen. Even on 9/11 I didn’t find out about the planes until after they’d hit, and I’d stepped away from the TV before the first tower collapse began, and it was over before I returned.
I remember coming back to my office at a research lab in Connecticut. I had listened to the first 15 seconds or so of the launch on the car radio, then turned it off to concentrate on driving. When I arrived I got the bad news. Not much work was done for the rest of the day.
Greg Easterbrook had published a critical article on the shuttle in Discover magazine not long before accident, so the realization the thing was a turkey was percolating in my mind. The accident just reinforced that. I’ve had a jaundiced view of NASA spin ever since.
The experience of discarding comforting illusions was, ultimately, a liberating and illuminating one. I think many space fans have gone through the same kind of disillusionment in the subsequent decades.
Concerning the “emotionally devastated” comments. I was training pilots in the USAF at the time. I remember the Ops Officer going around and telling students they didn’t have to fly that day if they didn’t feel up to it. I distinctly remember wondering what the big deal was. I had one fighter tour under my belt, had already personally known at least two people who had died in an airplane crash, and knew that we lost about a squadron of airplanes AND a squadron of pilots every year. We accepted the risk because we got to do what we loved most (and got paid to do it.) Yes, there was always the human side of the hurt the families felt, but professionally you documented the lessons learned and got on with business. I never thought NASA “got on with business” after that.
I remember my boss coming back from the pad shaking his head and mumbling “why are they going to launch; the place looks like a scene from ‘Dr Zhivago’.
The sad thing is that if they went a day or so later nothing would have happened.
A song based on the Ray Bradbury story there used to be a video on you tube.
“Rocket Man”
By Tom Rapp
My father was a rocket man
He often went to Jupiter or Mercury, to Venus or to Mars
My mother and I would watch the sky
And wonder if a falling star
Was a ship becoming ashes with a rocket man inside
My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained
My father was a rocket man
He loved the world beyond the world, the sky beyond the sky
And on my mother’s face, as lonely as the world in space
I could read the silent cry
That if my father fell into a star
We must not look upon that star again
My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained
Tears are often jewel-like
My mother’s went unnoticed by my father, for his jewels were the stars
And in my father’s eyes I knew he had to find
In the sanctity of distance something brighter than a star
One day they told us the sun had flared and taken him inside
My mother and I
Never went out
Unless the sky was cloudy or the sun was blotted out
Or to escape the pain
We only went out when it rained
Challenger was almost the first launch we didn’t watch from one of our construction sites. I was walking west and saw a man on a bulldozer just sitting there. He pointed and said”The astronauts just f—ed up. I turned and saw the cloud in the sky.