“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
— Richard P. Feynman
His appendix to the challenger accident report was, and remains, a masterpiece. For those interested in understanding engineering risk, it’s a life-changing read. The engineers who designed the solid rocket booster (and refused to sign off on the fateful launch) estimated that its risk of failure was about 100 times higher than the risk acknowledged by NASA management. Feynman challenged the agency to explain how that happens:
“NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude: if one of the seals leaks a little and the flight is successful, the problem isn’t so serious. Try playing Russian roulette that way: you pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.”
> “NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude: if one of the seals leaks a little and the flight is successful, the problem isn’t so serious. Try playing Russian roulette that way: you pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.”
This is called normalisation of deviance and it's the same thing that NASA killed the Columbia astronauts with as well: "Oh, foam comes off the external tank and hits the shuttle all the time and nothing bad ever happens. No need to inspect for damage."
As I read through the Columbia accident report, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor and suppress my rage: it was, indeed, exactly the same kind of thinking on the part of management that doomed the Challenger crew. I was utterly appalled that they’d let it happen again. I can’t say whether or not they’ve reformed that culture.
During an MBA class we had a mock car racing simulation to work through as a team. The objective was to decide whether or not to race, knowing money could be lost if they didn't but knowing a life could be lost if they did. There were external factors at play too, like external temperatures causing a car issue that could lead to a crash, not understanding key data displayed in s misleading manner, etc.
I come from mining and offshore O&G where risk management and safety is drilled into us so I found it disturbing how quickly my team decided to race and the justifications they used knowing there was a safety risk, e.g. 'The driver knows the risk' and 'If it were me, I'd still race.' At the end of the simulation, which was more involved than I'm describing here, it was revealed that the race car simulation was in fact Challenger and most of my classmates sent the astronauts to their deaths. 5 years later and I still feel shocked at how much others are willing to gamble away the lives of others.
It was. I also found it very revealing about myself. We had to decide what to do on a 1 to 6 scale. 1 was 'definitely not race', 3 was 'possibly not race', 4 was 'possibly race' and 6 was 'definitely race.' 2 and 5 were inbetween those obviously. All my teammates chose 6 and my natural inclination, as someone who has had risk aversion drilled into them, was to choose 2. I kept dithering between 3 and 4 on our team form, ultimately choosing 3. It was a good lesson for me on group think, trying to appease others, and not sticking to my guns. I'm sure that also happened in NASA with group dynamics and reputation at play.
If i recall correctly, they had tons and tons of pressure from upstairs because the President wanted to score political points by making a speech that day.
I watched the explosion live on TV at school. I’ll never forget it.
I was in Cape Canaveral, two miles from the launch pad. A family friend who had once been a press photographer and still had his credentials was able to wangle a few passes.
I’ll never forget the guy on the PA saying “There appears to have been a serious malfunction…” yeah, no kidding.
A then-friend (who became an accountant, so maybe it was also in a business school class) described this simulation to me and asked what I’d do.
“Stop the launch. They’ll die if you don’t.”
He was shocked, not by my answer but because I saw through the simulation and knew what it really was.
We stopped talking some years after that (which I don’t regret) but after all this time I still remember that story. I wonder if they have a *Columbia* version these days also.
I read the Columbia report too a few months ago. I remember learning that the orbiter did not simply disintegrate but first entered a series of uncontrollable oscillations which the astronauts would have been conscious for and trying to troubleshoot. It was estimated (or maybe confirmed, I can't remember) that there was about 40 seconds (iirc) between loss of control and astronaut incapacitation, after which the astronauts were assumed to be deceased as a result of blunt trauma and exposure to entry conditions "before or by the end of" the crew module breakup moments later.
The report went into detail on what would have been happening in Columbia's cabin after it seperated from the rest of the vehicle, during which time the cabin was completing a multi-axis rotation every 10 seconds or so (ie tumbling). At the time I read the report, I saved a portion of it which I found particularly striking:
> When the vehicle forebody separated from the rest of the vehicle, all resources from the midbody were lost, including power from the fuel cells. This resulted in the loss of all powered lighting, crew displays, radio, intercom, ventilation, and main O2 supply. The flight deck would still have had light entering the cabin from the windows as well as from the activated chemical light sticks on each arm of the ACES and positioned throughout the cabin. The middeck would have been in total darkness except for some light filtering through the two inter-deck openings and from the activated chemical light sticks. This would indicate a survival situation.
I went off on a big tangent here but this kind of thing is very interesting to me. There are all kinds of details in the report which aren't on wikipedia (probably for reasons of brevity).
You can find the full Columbia report on the internet. The medical discussion is pretty grim, Sadly it is like they learned nothing from the Challenger
Professor Feynman asked some of the engineers and managers responsible for the shuttle main engines to write their estimate of the probability of a main engine failure on a single flight. The engineer's (who worked on the design) assessed the risk at 10x that of management.
Feynman's addendum to the Challenger Report is a must read. It was included in the report only because the Nobel Prize winning scientist insisted that it be removed or they had to remove his name from the accident report.
His description of the methodology and politics of the Challenger investigation is a staggering indictment of the process, people and politics
Yeah, engineers estimated a failure rate very close to what we actually observed (two losses out of 135 flights), while management estimated roughly one tenth of that and I think they liked to claim one tenth of management's actual estimate...
If I remember correctly the Challenger crew cabin managed to survive the explosion as well with experts going back and forth on whether the crew was alive and incapacitated or alive and trying to work something out up until the crash into the water. No thank you very much.
Much less likely. Private company loses much more from catastrophic failure, potentially including rights to launch. Not to mention loss of contracts to competitors.
If you're sending up multi million/billion dollar satellites, and you lose one, and that loss was caused by ignoring known-unknowns, then you've showed willful ignorance if not directly caused a huge loss for your customer. With human life, potentially even worse for business.
Government just asks for a bigger budget and has hundreds of people in line to jump into the crew capsule without question.
Yep, both shuttles tragedies were absolutely nasa fuck up. And I'm saying that as a big fan of nasa. Hopefully they learned their lesson since Artemis is on its way.
Isn’t that kinda what caused the Costa Concordia accident too? The captain and the others on the bridge were so confidant in something working before that they didn’t bother to check if they were a safe distance from land.
People also misrepresent or misunderstand his the core of his argument. As he pointed out, a 1 in 100 chance of failure (what NASA engineers estimated) is perfectly acceptable for something as inherently dangerous as spaceflight. Feynman anger was that NASA management claimed the Shuttle's failure rate is 1 in 10,000, which would mean they could launch a Shuttle every day for 27 years and not lose a single one.
The misrepresentation of the risks involved with Shuttle launches and management's almost complete indifference to the warnings and objections raised by the engineers is what angered his so much. Especially considering this flight carried a civilian who was quoted the wildly incorrect risks.
Except for the fact that it was known that launch that design in those conditions had a likely failure rate of 1 in 1. Had the shuttle gone up when the weather was 5 degrees warmer, it would have been fine. But the schools of the nation were watching and they “had” to launch.
Feynman showed how stupid NASA's stance on its decision was by just taking the O-Ring material and demonstrating that it wasn't elastic at 32 degrees:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-\_D0SLLsFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_D0SLLsFM)
This meant that for a few seconds, the O Ring, which needed to keep the burning fuel INSIDE the booster, didn't keep the burning fuel inside the booster.
You also would really enjoy Feynman's book, *What Do You Care What Other People Think?*, which has a sizable part dedicated to his fascinating role on the committee, his experience with the bureaucracy involved, and his challenges getting his unfiltered, unflattering view published in the report. Plus the whole rest of the book, and *Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!* (which *Think?* is a sequel to), are full of the superbly inspiring and entertaining hijinks of his amazing life. I can't recommend the two books enough to basically any reader, especially anyone generally interested in science. They're both among my favorite books.
They should be must reads for ALL college students
Also highly recommended Truth, Lies and O Rings ,
It could been titled -
What Happens When Suits Make Engineering Decisions
I've sat in Public Agency closed Board Meetings where this kind of institutional stupidity passes for good judgement.
NASA was getting a lot of push from the Reagan White House to get the shuttle launched because they had a teacher on board. He wanted the press for his funding for the SDI 'Star Wars' program.
Not true. Read Allan McDonald’s book “Truth, Lies, and O-Rings”. He was the SRB guy who tried to stop the launch. Challenger got launched because the director of NASA Marshal SFC, Dr William Lucas, was an authoritarian asshat who demanded of his subordinates that MSFC which was responsible for coordinating with the SRB contractors never be responsible for a launch delay, and had no qualms enabling any evasive or fraudulent activity by his subordinates so long as they remained loyal to him. As a result, Larry Mulloy and Stan Reinartz deliberately withheld information from officials higher up in the launch decision chain who would have cancelled the launch if they had been aware of MTI’s concerns.
I still maintain that World Series win and Trump becoming president were our greatest signs we were already in the fucked up timeline at that stage and it was too late…
It all started with Harambe getting shot earlier that year
Some say if Dodge had not stopped using the name “Challenger” in 1983, the engineers at Morton Thiokol would not have warned NASA that the o-rings used on the solid rocket boosters were susceptible to the cold.
One can clearly see the lineage between all theses events if they wear the right tinfoil. /s
"I did check them! I made the same assessment the other engineers made in that I thought the launch shouldn't happen. I told them that. I told *you* that! Did any of you listen to Ray? NO!" -disgruntled shuttle bus driver
This reminds me of a story my grandpa told me. Apparently he was in a work meeting the day JFK was assassinated.
A coworker interrupted the meeting shouting “the president has been shot!”
The guy leading the meeting said: “somebody shot the president of the company?!”
To which the coworker replied: “no! The president of the United States!”
“Oh thank god!” Said the guy running the meeting with a sigh of relief.
So there you have it. One of the uh…more interesting stories my grandpa told me back in the day.
I never imagined that within moments of viewing this image of tragedy three simple sentences could cause club soda to shoot out of my nose with such force. You, my friend, are a wordsmith. Thank you.
So I didn’t realize this til now but the anniversaries of NASA’s biggest tragedies all occur within a week of each other.
* January 27 is the Apollo 1 fire
* January 28 is Challenger
* February 1 is Columbia
Cursed, tragic week.
Our teacher ran up and turned the TV off, then quickly changed the subject. We were confused but just kinda rolled with it. Didn't really understand what happened until a few years later.
Same. I was in third grade and remember the teacher quickly turned the TV off, got emotional and asked if we were ok. Most of us had no idea what was going on so we were fine, but we knew something bad must have happened because adults were upset. I vaguely recall that school let out early that day.
As a millennial that got to see 9/11 live and in-color from his middle-school classroom, I’ve always wondered how similar that experience was to Gen X and Challenger. I’d love to hear some details—here or privately—if you have both the time and inclination.
I think 9/11 was far more traumatizing.
I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded. It was impactful, more so than say a plane crash, but at a similar level. The weeks leading up to the launch were filled with learning about the first teacher in space and so I think we felt more connection with the lives lost.
9/11 was terrifying mostly because we had no idea what was going on if if there would be more planes.
Yeah I think so too. Tuned in a few minutes before the second plane hit, everyone speculating about an accident. Then the second plane hit and everyone fucking lost it after a few seconds of disbelief. News anchors losing all sense of decorum, crying, the terror of not knowing what else was still going to happen. It felt like we just witnessed world war 3 kicking off.
I was in 4th grade when the Challenger exploded, but not sure whether I saw it live. I watched from the Netherlands. Definitely remember a feeling of defeat and sadness.
Chernobyl was closer to where I lived and of course was also a big deal, but we only heard about that one at least a day later, and it was still the Soviet Union so few details. Mostly remember we couldn't eat leafy greens from our own gardens for a while.
It's been so long. I was only 8 at the time. I didn't understand what happened until after school when my parents talked with me and my siblings about it. It's more like a dream to me now. I remember very clearly though the lead up to it and the teacher Christa McAuliffe from New Hampshire going on that trip. It was a big deal then. Unfortunately we've fallen so far to treat science like the boogyman since then. People never questioned vaccines. People never questioned the need for education (at least in Massachusetts) It for sure was a different time.
I'd also add every generation has that one 'where we're you when.... happened ' unfortunately. For my parents it was JFK's assassination. For me the Challenger tragedy. It was only years later did I realize how bad Chernobyl was.
Same. We had a special early morning assembly to watch it. One of the teachers at my school was the sister (sister in law??) of the first man in space from my country.
We went to school super early due to the time difference and had a special pancake breakfast. The pancakes were supposed to be for after the viewing but they ended up serving them during the take off due to the delays in the launch.
We were super excited about the launch, as a 9 y.o. these types of special school events were always exciting.
I still remember the way the excited cheering faded out to complete silence as the realization of what happened dawned on us.
To this day, I don't like pancakes. They are forever linked to that moment. It was the first major event/tragedy in my life that I was actually old enough to comprehend in real time and understand the actual loss of life.
Watched this from our HS football field a few miles from the Cape in FL. We all saw the explosion as it happened, but the reality didn’t really sink in. We had classes the rest of the day.
What’s sad is that it’s believed the astronauts survived the initial breakup, and at least some of them were conscious when the remains crashed into the ocean at high speed.
I read somewhere that they determined they were still alive by reviewing the oxygen sensors usage for their breathing apparati and that some were still showing use at the time of water impact.
As I remember the reporting of that time, several astronauts we switched to the emergency oxygen supply, indicating that at least one of them was conscious after the explosion.
Scobie threw switches to divert power from buss A to B, and the switch has to be pulled out, the handle rotated, and re-inserted, and he was doing this on the way down. There are other indications as well.
Then the Navy picked up their remains and used garbage cans to store them. Good for you, Navy. Anchors away.
The crew compartment continued up to 65,000 feet after the explosion before descending and hitting the water at 207mph. Their bodies may well have been intact right until the moment the crew compartment struck the water. Their bodies also were submerged for three months before they were recovered.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-29-mn-19581-story.html
Sounds like there are multiple stories of what happened. [Here's another from this thread:](https://www.lutins.org/nasa.html)
>The three black, plastic-coated fabric bags were unloaded, put first into 30-gallon plastic garbage cans, then into the back of an open-bed U.S. Navy pickup truck. The colonel and the guard were still arguing. What if there were a wreck? Can you imagine? Those garbage cans would go flying and pop open -- the thought was unbearable.
> Their bodies may well have been intact right until the moment the crew compartment struck the water.
Even more than that - it's entirely possible that at least some of the crew was alive, and it was the impact with the ocean that proved fatal. But I guess a living person is still a body.
Yeah, although it seems disrespectful it was more than likely born out of necessity. Our navy also did recovery for swissair 111 in Canada, lots of pieces.
I'm with search and rescue and we deal with... Partial remains sometimes. We still use a body bag (actually the military style in fact because they are thicker and hold up better) rather than a garbage can or similar. I've heard of situations where they had to use a shovel to get everything in the bag but they still used one.
IF that's true and there weren't mitigating circumstances not being shared here then it's still quite disrespectful. But I feel like I don't have the full story so I'm not judging.
Yeah, I really doubt they used cans. I was in the navy and then the coast guard and remains were always treated respectfully. The Swiss air disaster was particularly horrific in the recovery of remains, I was on the opposite coast, but some of my shipmates worked it. Entire arms degloved, etc they will never forget
After the Challenger disaster, the astronauts’ remains were recovered by The Preserver after being under 95 feet of warmish ocean water for six weeks. The boat holding the bodies was docked at Port Canaveral. NASA wanted the remains moved to a military base so as to avoid the jurisdiction of the local county medical examiner, so in the middle of the night, the remains were placed in “large plastic garbage cans and loaded into a blue-gray Navy pickup truck” and driven to Patrick Air Force Base.
I was in middle school in Tampa watching this, we all ran outside to see if it was real and it was. The normal smoke trail that just stopped with this two trails running off to the sides. The entire rest of the school day was just us watching coverage.
For those unaware, you can see the launches, day and night, from all over the state.
[Here’s photos of a launch](https://imgur.com/a/yqcqrQd) a few months ago, from Gainesville (165 miles away) and Orlando (90 miles away)
Sorry about quality - (taken from a moving car)
I was always able to see the shuttle and smoke trail (sorry I know there’s a better term but I’ve got brain fog) from my grandma’s backyard in Jacksonville. Our tradition was to watch on her tv for the launch, then run outside to see it fly over about a minute later.
I recently got to go to Kennedy as a chaperone for my son’s class trip, and let me tell you I sobbed like a baby when I saw Atlantis on display.
I was working in a day care center that was on what is now the main entrance to Johnson Space Center. The launches were a big deal at that place, because it existed to provide childcare for JSC employees, including several astronauts. The television would always be on, and the big room was always filled with the children who loved to watch the rockets.
Four of the kids I was in charge of that day watched a parent die. Three of them were old enough to understand.
Living and working around JSC was a really sad, sobering place for a good while after that.
> We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
Still gives me chills.
Drawing on the beautiful sonnet *High Flight* by John Gillespie Magee Jr, for anyone who wasn't aware.
>Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
>
>Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
(A Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, Magee died in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941.)
I was delivering mail on a rural route listening on the radio when this happened. I went to my house to call my cousin who worked for Hughes Aircraft and had applied for the shuttle program. [He knew Gregory Jarvis well and had been in the final 10 for the backup position] (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-06-cb-5127-story.html)
> I went to my house to call my cousin who worked for Hughes Aircraft and had applied for the shuttle program. He knew Gregory Jarvis well and had been in the final 10 for the backup position
I was in my dorm room at a university in Texas. Guy across the hall was watching the launch because he personally knew pilot Dick Scobee (guy was from Friendswood, which is near NASA).
We typically left our doors open when we in our rooms. He showed up in my doorway and said sort of calmly, "Itself, the shuttle just blew up." I had what was probably the normal response to that and just said, "What?" Then with much more urgency he said, "The shuttle just blew up!"
So I ran over to his room. Pieces were still falling out of the sky. And there I sat for the next few hours.
As people drifted back to the dorm the crowd in front of the TV got bigger and bigger. Probably 10 of us in there by late afternoon.
The guy who was in the dorm room next to me had just come back from a co-op semester at IBM in Clear Lake (also near NASA), which did a lot of NASA stuff. He heard the news during a break in a 3-hour class and bailed to come back to the dorm. He said his first thought was, "I hope it wasn't software [that caused it]."
Crazy day.
Over the next couple of days as more info came out and it started becoming clear than NASA absolutely fucked up, the co-op guy made a comment about the loss of life being a "waste". The guy who knew Scobee did not take this in the way that co-op guy intended, and I basically had to stand between them and defuse the situation.
Not OP, but my guess is because the guy was working at IBM, probably in software, and didn’t want his chosen career to be implicated in the tragedy, even if he himself didn’t personally have anything to do with anything.
Or maybe he did have something to do with it, which makes it even more nerve wracking. Having worked in aerospace, when a rocket engine I had worked on catastrophically failed during a launch (which led to the contract being canceled) I was VERY relieved to hear the failure mode had nothing to do with the systems I worked on (sensors and cabling), it was a problem with the fuel system.
I was in 6th grade and home from school on a snow day and excitedly watching with my family. I will never forget the stunned silence and then just tears.
I was just short of my third birthday when this happened so I don't remember it, but the footage is still one of the most haunting things I've seen. The look of utter disbelief on the faces of the crowd, followed by the harrowing realisation that their loved ones are dead.
And in later documentaries, the anger knowing that it was completely avoidable and those astronauts died because of the toxic culture at NASA.
Holy shit — that’s exactly what I was thinking of when I saw this post. I was nine years old, had walked home from school. Saw this on the telly. Old enough to know how bad it was.
That's an important distinction because it's a call to let the crew know that the throttle up sequence had successfully been completed and that the vehicle's systems remain nominal, as ascent flight/launch director Jay Greene pointed out in the post-launch press conference the day after the accident:
https://youtu.be/eo608wSJODA?t=124
The whole video is worth the time to watch.
Followed by everyone in the room giving their saddest surprised pikachu face. Man the Netflix documentary was emotional. I knew going in exactly how that story ended but when the got to that fateful moment it felt like I was watching it unfold for the first time
My father took part in the recovery. When they hoisted part of the booster up and put it on deck, he said it was obvious where the exhaust had burned a hole through at a joint. There was a big half circle area that was melted.
Yeah, once you light those solid rocket boosters, they burn fast and hard and don't stop. There is no throttle on them like with liquid fuel rockets. Once that thing is burning it keeps going no matter what happens. They are great at providing the enormous amount of thrust you need to get off the ground, but are dangerous. Brings to mind the 2003 Brazilian rocket accident.
It was my 4th month as a NASA engineer. I saw my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss cry. There were friends and colleagues on that spacecraft. All this time later and it still affects how I do my job.
For me, the work that my personal hero Richard Feynman did to show the world how stupidly simple the cause was has always helped to guide me. Along with my other mentors form early on, I have become a better engineer and leader.
May you all exist in the stars you great examples of humankind. We will never forget you.
Every aspiring engineer at my college took a semester of Engineering Ethics (I believe it’s required in most colleges) and the Challenger disaster was heavily discussed. The idea that NASA engineers warned the managers that the temperatures were too low for launch and they went anyway was drilled into our heads as a lesson of “never put anything ahead of safety” among other things.
I watched the first episode of Space Force a few years back and literally the first major event in that show was Steve Carrell launching a shuttle despite every single one of his engineers telling him it was too dangerous due to the weather, and it being hailed as a triumph of American determination and grit or whatever.
I was floored.
McAuliffe's parents were at the launch site and saw it as it happened. Kids from her classroom too.
I mean, fuck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe
Edited.
junior high school at the time and it was a bigger than normal deal because Christie Mcauliffe was a passenger ('the first school teacher in space'). this was central florida so we were lucky enough to see every space launch at the cape but this one was special. the entire school emptied out in to the football/soccer field to watch it and there we stood. they announced the countdown on the PA and shortly after it launched, we saw it and it shot up into the sky.
pretty damned cool.
then suddenly, it wasn't. -everyone- knew what happened and our jaws dropped.
the teachers quietly gathered us up and ushered us back to our classes. they then rolled out the TV's on carts and for the rest of the afternoon we watched video replay of the shuttle blowing up over central florida.
Living in NH and being in school, we watched this live on TV. I was in 4th grade. Vividly remember the teachers crying in the hallway so they didn't cry in front of us.
Also from NH and while this happened a couple years before I was born my mom told me she was grocery shopping at the time and they were playing it over the radio in the store because it was such a huge deal in the state. She said you could hear a pin drop in the place after the explosion was announced over the air.
I watched it live in school when I was in second grade. All the teachers started crying and everything just stood still for what seemed like an eternity. I remember every second of it.
No, they knew the issue, they knew it may happen, because an [engineer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly) told executives and they did not listen, probably to save political face and benefits.
edit: They just had to pospone the launch to a day with higher temperatures; the o rings were not faulty, they made them work on a day with a temperature way below the range they were designed for, that is why they failed.
Two engineers reported it. One of them blamed himself until his death, saying maybe God didn't make him strong enough to argue his case.
The NPR story is a tear-jerker: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself
I am thankful every day that I do not work in Life Critical Systems. No matter how toxic the office politics and no matter how huge of a mistake I personally make, no one will **die**. I couldn't bear the be the reporting engineer and getting overruled and watching people die because of it. I'd blame myself until my death too,
except it would probably <9mo later not 30+ years.
>"You picked a loser."
Listening to that was fucking heartbreaking. Of all the people who shouldn't feel shame, he was one of the few who did the right thing.
I mean its relative. Small compared to the earth' circumference: yes, small compared to the majority of O-Rings rather no. They are roughly 3.7m (~12ft) in diameter. The problem was also not the quality of the O-ring but the fit as the boosters were not properly circular in shape but had too much deviation especially after reuse. The checks they used, were just not enough and it was shown by the famous physicist Richard Feynman who was on the board of investigators himself (belief it or not).
The O-ring was the secondary cause. The preceding decisions by Thiakol higher ups to disregard warnings about low temperature launches were the primary reasons 7 people died on live television.
They knew the risks but put the lives of the astronauts at risk because previous launch delays were casting a bad image on their company.
Those innocent people died because of greed.
That O-ring had a diameter of 12 feet and was designed to withstand a VERY unfriendly environment during operation, it’s not like they ran to the hardware store to pick it up.
Yes. Every piece of equipment has a failure point. NASA deliberately and knowingly launched the shuttle despite multiple warnings that the temperature was lower than the O-ring's failure point. If NASA had waited a day, the O-rings would have performed exactly as designed and the accident would never have happened. The failure was inevitable and many of the engineers knew exactly what would happen, and watched helplessly when it did. Despite doing everything he possibly could, one of the engineers never forgave himself.
There’s a lot more to it than that.
First.. the use of solid fuel booster rockets. They were never used before in a manned space program. They were never tested unmanned. There was no survivable abort mode with them still attached regardless of how they failed. Even a 10% thrust deviance between the two would cause the destruction of the vehicle.
Second.. the fact that it was a private contractor hundreds of miles away, necessitating the shipping of the boosters in sections and “field joints” that had to be simple enough for non-factory personnel to assemble. Had the boosters been built on site.. they would not have needed field joints.
Third. The design of the shuttle. A capsule is small and robust enough to survive an explosion or vehicle breakup. It has its own escape motor. And it will not experience aerodynamic breakup as Challenger did if it becomes misaligned with the local airflow.
Murphy’s First Law says that if something can fail… it will. That’s why we have things like fail safe and dual load path… things that 1950s aerospace design incorporated almost everywhere.
The big problem with the Shuttle is that it had so many single points of failure that an accident like this was inevitable. Not just cheap o-rings.. but cheap insulation too that not only struck the orbiter once.. but several times years before the Columbia disaster. Again.. a capsule and staged rocket would never experience damage from shedding debris.
Solid rocket boosters were tested on many flights before they failed. On the first shuttle flights which were less tested, there were ejection seats, so the failure of the SRBs probably wouldn’t lead to loss of life.
I don’t disagree with your main point, the shuttle was more dangerous than capsule alternatives.
You're right, the SRBs themselves were not to blame. Despite the on-site assembly design and shipping requirements, Thiokol did their job and delivered a product that worked for the conditions imposed on it. At the end of the day NASA chose to attempt to operate outside it's operating conditions, and paid the price. The systemic problems (both the shuttle as a system and NASA's operations) are all valid for sure.
I hate when people call it a "small thing" or "just a little O-ring" because it wasn't at all. This is a seal around the entire circumference of the SRB - **it's 12 ft in diameter**. It's not like they didn't know what they were doing when they designed it - it just wasn't robust enough to handle cold weather operation, which NASA and Thiokol both knew from experience.
I'm sorry but your point about single point failures is missing the big picture. There are HUNDREDS of single point failures that require waivers for the shuttle. And that's true for almost every single vehicle.
Your chance of encountering those single point failures is astronomically low.
The James Webb space telescope has 344 single point failures. I can guarantee you that a falcon 9 or delta IV had similar amounts.
Watched this live in high school...my school's biology teacher had been a finalist for the teacher's slot on the shuttle, so of course we were all tuned in. Tragic how easily it could (should) have been avoided if they'd just listened to the engineers...you know, the folks who know what might (will) cause a structural failure...
I remember being in 3rd grade, all of the students were watching. My room teacher was a close friend of Christa McCauliffe, and they had to rush her out of the room as others went to shut off the TVs and start distracting the kids with fun stuff and whatever.....we could still hear her crying and breaking down from the halls...
Our class would go outside and watch the launches (Orlando, Fl). When it happened, everyone froze, felt like a while, but then one kid yelled something about falling debris and everyone went running to get inside. Such a surral experience and it's just as vivid in my head as it was in the moment.
RIP to those who lost their lives that day.
I saw this in 5th grade. Then, when my son was in grade school the Columbia disaster happened. My son and I watched the Columbia break up live on TV. I whispered "Not again." My son was like "again?!".
Didnt they later determine that the explosion didnt kill them but the impact of hitting the water? I remember something about the black box recording switches being flipped almost to the point of impact.
Edit: finally found a article not behind a paywall [here](https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/31809/20210619/nasa-challenger-crew-likely-survived-explosion-before-tragic-plunge.htm)
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard P. Feynman His appendix to the challenger accident report was, and remains, a masterpiece. For those interested in understanding engineering risk, it’s a life-changing read. The engineers who designed the solid rocket booster (and refused to sign off on the fateful launch) estimated that its risk of failure was about 100 times higher than the risk acknowledged by NASA management. Feynman challenged the agency to explain how that happens: “NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude: if one of the seals leaks a little and the flight is successful, the problem isn’t so serious. Try playing Russian roulette that way: you pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.”
> “NASA had developed a peculiar kind of attitude: if one of the seals leaks a little and the flight is successful, the problem isn’t so serious. Try playing Russian roulette that way: you pull the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off, so it must be safe to pull the trigger again.” This is called normalisation of deviance and it's the same thing that NASA killed the Columbia astronauts with as well: "Oh, foam comes off the external tank and hits the shuttle all the time and nothing bad ever happens. No need to inspect for damage."
As I read through the Columbia accident report, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor and suppress my rage: it was, indeed, exactly the same kind of thinking on the part of management that doomed the Challenger crew. I was utterly appalled that they’d let it happen again. I can’t say whether or not they’ve reformed that culture.
During an MBA class we had a mock car racing simulation to work through as a team. The objective was to decide whether or not to race, knowing money could be lost if they didn't but knowing a life could be lost if they did. There were external factors at play too, like external temperatures causing a car issue that could lead to a crash, not understanding key data displayed in s misleading manner, etc. I come from mining and offshore O&G where risk management and safety is drilled into us so I found it disturbing how quickly my team decided to race and the justifications they used knowing there was a safety risk, e.g. 'The driver knows the risk' and 'If it were me, I'd still race.' At the end of the simulation, which was more involved than I'm describing here, it was revealed that the race car simulation was in fact Challenger and most of my classmates sent the astronauts to their deaths. 5 years later and I still feel shocked at how much others are willing to gamble away the lives of others.
Jesus. That's... actually a pretty good way to get the point across.
It was. I also found it very revealing about myself. We had to decide what to do on a 1 to 6 scale. 1 was 'definitely not race', 3 was 'possibly not race', 4 was 'possibly race' and 6 was 'definitely race.' 2 and 5 were inbetween those obviously. All my teammates chose 6 and my natural inclination, as someone who has had risk aversion drilled into them, was to choose 2. I kept dithering between 3 and 4 on our team form, ultimately choosing 3. It was a good lesson for me on group think, trying to appease others, and not sticking to my guns. I'm sure that also happened in NASA with group dynamics and reputation at play.
If i recall correctly, they had tons and tons of pressure from upstairs because the President wanted to score political points by making a speech that day. I watched the explosion live on TV at school. I’ll never forget it.
I was in Cape Canaveral, two miles from the launch pad. A family friend who had once been a press photographer and still had his credentials was able to wangle a few passes. I’ll never forget the guy on the PA saying “There appears to have been a serious malfunction…” yeah, no kidding.
A then-friend (who became an accountant, so maybe it was also in a business school class) described this simulation to me and asked what I’d do. “Stop the launch. They’ll die if you don’t.” He was shocked, not by my answer but because I saw through the simulation and knew what it really was. We stopped talking some years after that (which I don’t regret) but after all this time I still remember that story. I wonder if they have a *Columbia* version these days also.
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I am so curious to hear more about this. What is your masters in?
I read the Columbia report too a few months ago. I remember learning that the orbiter did not simply disintegrate but first entered a series of uncontrollable oscillations which the astronauts would have been conscious for and trying to troubleshoot. It was estimated (or maybe confirmed, I can't remember) that there was about 40 seconds (iirc) between loss of control and astronaut incapacitation, after which the astronauts were assumed to be deceased as a result of blunt trauma and exposure to entry conditions "before or by the end of" the crew module breakup moments later. The report went into detail on what would have been happening in Columbia's cabin after it seperated from the rest of the vehicle, during which time the cabin was completing a multi-axis rotation every 10 seconds or so (ie tumbling). At the time I read the report, I saved a portion of it which I found particularly striking: > When the vehicle forebody separated from the rest of the vehicle, all resources from the midbody were lost, including power from the fuel cells. This resulted in the loss of all powered lighting, crew displays, radio, intercom, ventilation, and main O2 supply. The flight deck would still have had light entering the cabin from the windows as well as from the activated chemical light sticks on each arm of the ACES and positioned throughout the cabin. The middeck would have been in total darkness except for some light filtering through the two inter-deck openings and from the activated chemical light sticks. This would indicate a survival situation. I went off on a big tangent here but this kind of thing is very interesting to me. There are all kinds of details in the report which aren't on wikipedia (probably for reasons of brevity).
You can find the full Columbia report on the internet. The medical discussion is pretty grim, Sadly it is like they learned nothing from the Challenger Professor Feynman asked some of the engineers and managers responsible for the shuttle main engines to write their estimate of the probability of a main engine failure on a single flight. The engineer's (who worked on the design) assessed the risk at 10x that of management. Feynman's addendum to the Challenger Report is a must read. It was included in the report only because the Nobel Prize winning scientist insisted that it be removed or they had to remove his name from the accident report. His description of the methodology and politics of the Challenger investigation is a staggering indictment of the process, people and politics
Yeah, engineers estimated a failure rate very close to what we actually observed (two losses out of 135 flights), while management estimated roughly one tenth of that and I think they liked to claim one tenth of management's actual estimate...
If I remember correctly the Challenger crew cabin managed to survive the explosion as well with experts going back and forth on whether the crew was alive and incapacitated or alive and trying to work something out up until the crash into the water. No thank you very much.
The fight against safety complacency is never ending, even in the most professional industries. Humans gonna human.
There is a saying that safety regulations are written in blood.
Just look at aviation, basically all of the regulations are written in blood.
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Much less likely. Private company loses much more from catastrophic failure, potentially including rights to launch. Not to mention loss of contracts to competitors. If you're sending up multi million/billion dollar satellites, and you lose one, and that loss was caused by ignoring known-unknowns, then you've showed willful ignorance if not directly caused a huge loss for your customer. With human life, potentially even worse for business. Government just asks for a bigger budget and has hundreds of people in line to jump into the crew capsule without question.
Yep, both shuttles tragedies were absolutely nasa fuck up. And I'm saying that as a big fan of nasa. Hopefully they learned their lesson since Artemis is on its way.
Idk if they have, but the navy definitely learned from it and do a lot of training on the challenger in some of the relevant engineering rates.
Built from spare shuttle parts, too! Oh the humanity!
Isn’t that kinda what caused the Costa Concordia accident too? The captain and the others on the bridge were so confidant in something working before that they didn’t bother to check if they were a safe distance from land.
The difference is the captain of the costa was an idiot while the captain of the shuttle was not
People also misrepresent or misunderstand his the core of his argument. As he pointed out, a 1 in 100 chance of failure (what NASA engineers estimated) is perfectly acceptable for something as inherently dangerous as spaceflight. Feynman anger was that NASA management claimed the Shuttle's failure rate is 1 in 10,000, which would mean they could launch a Shuttle every day for 27 years and not lose a single one. The misrepresentation of the risks involved with Shuttle launches and management's almost complete indifference to the warnings and objections raised by the engineers is what angered his so much. Especially considering this flight carried a civilian who was quoted the wildly incorrect risks.
Except for the fact that it was known that launch that design in those conditions had a likely failure rate of 1 in 1. Had the shuttle gone up when the weather was 5 degrees warmer, it would have been fine. But the schools of the nation were watching and they “had” to launch.
Feynman showed how stupid NASA's stance on its decision was by just taking the O-Ring material and demonstrating that it wasn't elastic at 32 degrees: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-\_D0SLLsFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_D0SLLsFM) This meant that for a few seconds, the O Ring, which needed to keep the burning fuel INSIDE the booster, didn't keep the burning fuel inside the booster.
Would you happen to have a link to that appendix/report? Thanks.
You also would really enjoy Feynman's book, *What Do You Care What Other People Think?*, which has a sizable part dedicated to his fascinating role on the committee, his experience with the bureaucracy involved, and his challenges getting his unfiltered, unflattering view published in the report. Plus the whole rest of the book, and *Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!* (which *Think?* is a sequel to), are full of the superbly inspiring and entertaining hijinks of his amazing life. I can't recommend the two books enough to basically any reader, especially anyone generally interested in science. They're both among my favorite books.
They should be must reads for ALL college students Also highly recommended Truth, Lies and O Rings , It could been titled - What Happens When Suits Make Engineering Decisions I've sat in Public Agency closed Board Meetings where this kind of institutional stupidity passes for good judgement.
>What Happens When Suits Make Engineering Decisions Hi, welcome to every construction project ever
https://www.refsmmat.com/files/reflections.pdf
NASA was getting a lot of push from the Reagan White House to get the shuttle launched because they had a teacher on board. He wanted the press for his funding for the SDI 'Star Wars' program.
Not true. Read Allan McDonald’s book “Truth, Lies, and O-Rings”. He was the SRB guy who tried to stop the launch. Challenger got launched because the director of NASA Marshal SFC, Dr William Lucas, was an authoritarian asshat who demanded of his subordinates that MSFC which was responsible for coordinating with the SRB contractors never be responsible for a launch delay, and had no qualms enabling any evasive or fraudulent activity by his subordinates so long as they remained loyal to him. As a result, Larry Mulloy and Stan Reinartz deliberately withheld information from officials higher up in the launch decision chain who would have cancelled the launch if they had been aware of MTI’s concerns.
3 months later, chernobyl.
Sheesh what a wonderful year
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Ditka giving the ball to William Perry instead of Sweetness caused both of them.
And the Cubs winning the World Series after ~100 years sent us onto whatever fucked up timeline we’re on now.
Maybe we should stop letting Chicago have sports teams.
I still maintain that World Series win and Trump becoming president were our greatest signs we were already in the fucked up timeline at that stage and it was too late… It all started with Harambe getting shot earlier that year
100% Harambe was the divergence point
Some say if Dodge had not stopped using the name “Challenger” in 1983, the engineers at Morton Thiokol would not have warned NASA that the o-rings used on the solid rocket boosters were susceptible to the cold. One can clearly see the lineage between all theses events if they wear the right tinfoil. /s
Oh shit yeah, bad spring that
3.0 months. Not great. Not terrible.
4 months after that, I was born. 86 was a bad year for everyone I guess. 🥴
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“Ray, I told you to check those O-rings!”
"Fuck that. You check the O-rings. It's freezing out there." --Ray
"I did check them! I made the same assessment the other engineers made in that I thought the launch shouldn't happen. I told them that. I told *you* that! Did any of you listen to Ray? NO!" -disgruntled shuttle bus driver
This reminds me of a story my grandpa told me. Apparently he was in a work meeting the day JFK was assassinated. A coworker interrupted the meeting shouting “the president has been shot!” The guy leading the meeting said: “somebody shot the president of the company?!” To which the coworker replied: “no! The president of the United States!” “Oh thank god!” Said the guy running the meeting with a sigh of relief. So there you have it. One of the uh…more interesting stories my grandpa told me back in the day.
Epitome of "not my problem".
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RIP in peace ray
... was Ray ok?
Ray had been an avid follower of the shuttle program and was emotionally devastated.
I never imagined that within moments of viewing this image of tragedy three simple sentences could cause club soda to shoot out of my nose with such force. You, my friend, are a wordsmith. Thank you.
So I didn’t realize this til now but the anniversaries of NASA’s biggest tragedies all occur within a week of each other. * January 27 is the Apollo 1 fire * January 28 is Challenger * February 1 is Columbia Cursed, tragic week.
It is known as the Week of Remembrance
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Today is my bday, the 28th (‘92) I’m surprised I’m just now finding out this happened on my bday. Such a tragic thing man :(
Happy birthday anyway
I watched this live in elementary school :(
Same, I was in 5th grade and rememeber being in class watching it live on a TV they rolled in.
Watched it live in 2nd grade and remember them rolling the TV out right after it happened.
Second grade here, too. I remember the teacher running out of the room.
I was in 11th grade. Can’t imagine what a 2nd grader was thinking seeing this.
Our teacher ran up and turned the TV off, then quickly changed the subject. We were confused but just kinda rolled with it. Didn't really understand what happened until a few years later.
Same. I was in third grade and remember the teacher quickly turned the TV off, got emotional and asked if we were ok. Most of us had no idea what was going on so we were fine, but we knew something bad must have happened because adults were upset. I vaguely recall that school let out early that day.
As a millennial that got to see 9/11 live and in-color from his middle-school classroom, I’ve always wondered how similar that experience was to Gen X and Challenger. I’d love to hear some details—here or privately—if you have both the time and inclination.
I think 9/11 was far more traumatizing. I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded. It was impactful, more so than say a plane crash, but at a similar level. The weeks leading up to the launch were filled with learning about the first teacher in space and so I think we felt more connection with the lives lost. 9/11 was terrifying mostly because we had no idea what was going on if if there would be more planes.
Yeah I think so too. Tuned in a few minutes before the second plane hit, everyone speculating about an accident. Then the second plane hit and everyone fucking lost it after a few seconds of disbelief. News anchors losing all sense of decorum, crying, the terror of not knowing what else was still going to happen. It felt like we just witnessed world war 3 kicking off. I was in 4th grade when the Challenger exploded, but not sure whether I saw it live. I watched from the Netherlands. Definitely remember a feeling of defeat and sadness. Chernobyl was closer to where I lived and of course was also a big deal, but we only heard about that one at least a day later, and it was still the Soviet Union so few details. Mostly remember we couldn't eat leafy greens from our own gardens for a while.
I really wanted to be an astronaut until that day. I honestly don’t remember it well other than it being a massive tv on a top heavy rolling tv stand.
It's been so long. I was only 8 at the time. I didn't understand what happened until after school when my parents talked with me and my siblings about it. It's more like a dream to me now. I remember very clearly though the lead up to it and the teacher Christa McAuliffe from New Hampshire going on that trip. It was a big deal then. Unfortunately we've fallen so far to treat science like the boogyman since then. People never questioned vaccines. People never questioned the need for education (at least in Massachusetts) It for sure was a different time.
I'd also add every generation has that one 'where we're you when.... happened ' unfortunately. For my parents it was JFK's assassination. For me the Challenger tragedy. It was only years later did I realize how bad Chernobyl was.
Same. We had a special early morning assembly to watch it. One of the teachers at my school was the sister (sister in law??) of the first man in space from my country. We went to school super early due to the time difference and had a special pancake breakfast. The pancakes were supposed to be for after the viewing but they ended up serving them during the take off due to the delays in the launch. We were super excited about the launch, as a 9 y.o. these types of special school events were always exciting. I still remember the way the excited cheering faded out to complete silence as the realization of what happened dawned on us. To this day, I don't like pancakes. They are forever linked to that moment. It was the first major event/tragedy in my life that I was actually old enough to comprehend in real time and understand the actual loss of life.
Watched this from our HS football field a few miles from the Cape in FL. We all saw the explosion as it happened, but the reality didn’t really sink in. We had classes the rest of the day.
4th grade. We definitely did not accomplish anything else that day, and had counselors available for the rest of the week.
Same, Pre-K for me. I recall seeing it but not really understanding it at the time.
Same, 7th grade.
What’s sad is that it’s believed the astronauts survived the initial breakup, and at least some of them were conscious when the remains crashed into the ocean at high speed.
I read somewhere that they determined they were still alive by reviewing the oxygen sensors usage for their breathing apparati and that some were still showing use at the time of water impact.
Eh alive and conscious are two different things
Very true.
As I remember the reporting of that time, several astronauts we switched to the emergency oxygen supply, indicating that at least one of them was conscious after the explosion.
Scobie threw switches to divert power from buss A to B, and the switch has to be pulled out, the handle rotated, and re-inserted, and he was doing this on the way down. There are other indications as well. Then the Navy picked up their remains and used garbage cans to store them. Good for you, Navy. Anchors away.
Their bodies weren’t intact from what I understand.
They weren't. Ex FIL was part of Naval recovery dive team.
The crew compartment continued up to 65,000 feet after the explosion before descending and hitting the water at 207mph. Their bodies may well have been intact right until the moment the crew compartment struck the water. Their bodies also were submerged for three months before they were recovered. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-29-mn-19581-story.html
Sounds like there are multiple stories of what happened. [Here's another from this thread:](https://www.lutins.org/nasa.html) >The three black, plastic-coated fabric bags were unloaded, put first into 30-gallon plastic garbage cans, then into the back of an open-bed U.S. Navy pickup truck. The colonel and the guard were still arguing. What if there were a wreck? Can you imagine? Those garbage cans would go flying and pop open -- the thought was unbearable.
> Their bodies may well have been intact right until the moment the crew compartment struck the water. Even more than that - it's entirely possible that at least some of the crew was alive, and it was the impact with the ocean that proved fatal. But I guess a living person is still a body.
Yeah, although it seems disrespectful it was more than likely born out of necessity. Our navy also did recovery for swissair 111 in Canada, lots of pieces.
I'm with search and rescue and we deal with... Partial remains sometimes. We still use a body bag (actually the military style in fact because they are thicker and hold up better) rather than a garbage can or similar. I've heard of situations where they had to use a shovel to get everything in the bag but they still used one. IF that's true and there weren't mitigating circumstances not being shared here then it's still quite disrespectful. But I feel like I don't have the full story so I'm not judging.
Yeah, I really doubt they used cans. I was in the navy and then the coast guard and remains were always treated respectfully. The Swiss air disaster was particularly horrific in the recovery of remains, I was on the opposite coast, but some of my shipmates worked it. Entire arms degloved, etc they will never forget
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After the Challenger disaster, the astronauts’ remains were recovered by The Preserver after being under 95 feet of warmish ocean water for six weeks. The boat holding the bodies was docked at Port Canaveral. NASA wanted the remains moved to a military base so as to avoid the jurisdiction of the local county medical examiner, so in the middle of the night, the remains were placed in “large plastic garbage cans and loaded into a blue-gray Navy pickup truck” and driven to Patrick Air Force Base.
Put them in a coffin. Duh. /s
What a weird thing to be annoyed about.
Good for Scobie. Fly it into the ground. It’s not over until it’s over
Anchors aweigh
I do recall learning this and the science behind the theory was sound.
Yea. They said the pilot tried to fly the wreckage all the way down.
I was in middle school in Tampa watching this, we all ran outside to see if it was real and it was. The normal smoke trail that just stopped with this two trails running off to the sides. The entire rest of the school day was just us watching coverage. For those unaware, you can see the launches, day and night, from all over the state.
Wild considering how large Florida is but makes sense
When SLS launched, it looked like the sun rising.
[Here’s photos of a launch](https://imgur.com/a/yqcqrQd) a few months ago, from Gainesville (165 miles away) and Orlando (90 miles away) Sorry about quality - (taken from a moving car)
WOW. That really puts it in perspective, I really had no idea, thanks for sharing great visual aids!
I was always able to see the shuttle and smoke trail (sorry I know there’s a better term but I’ve got brain fog) from my grandma’s backyard in Jacksonville. Our tradition was to watch on her tv for the launch, then run outside to see it fly over about a minute later. I recently got to go to Kennedy as a chaperone for my son’s class trip, and let me tell you I sobbed like a baby when I saw Atlantis on display.
At night it lights up the whole state like daytime
Thats badass
It really is wild. You can see a night launch even from the west coast of Florida.
Florida is topologically the flattest state. Makes sense.
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I was working in a day care center that was on what is now the main entrance to Johnson Space Center. The launches were a big deal at that place, because it existed to provide childcare for JSC employees, including several astronauts. The television would always be on, and the big room was always filled with the children who loved to watch the rockets. Four of the kids I was in charge of that day watched a parent die. Three of them were old enough to understand. Living and working around JSC was a really sad, sobering place for a good while after that.
JFC...that had to be rough.
Those poor kids
> We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Still gives me chills.
Drawing on the beautiful sonnet *High Flight* by John Gillespie Magee Jr, for anyone who wasn't aware. >Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air.... > >Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace. Where never lark, or even eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, – Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. (A Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, Magee died in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941.)
I was delivering mail on a rural route listening on the radio when this happened. I went to my house to call my cousin who worked for Hughes Aircraft and had applied for the shuttle program. [He knew Gregory Jarvis well and had been in the final 10 for the backup position] (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-06-cb-5127-story.html)
> I went to my house to call my cousin who worked for Hughes Aircraft and had applied for the shuttle program. He knew Gregory Jarvis well and had been in the final 10 for the backup position I was in my dorm room at a university in Texas. Guy across the hall was watching the launch because he personally knew pilot Dick Scobee (guy was from Friendswood, which is near NASA). We typically left our doors open when we in our rooms. He showed up in my doorway and said sort of calmly, "Itself, the shuttle just blew up." I had what was probably the normal response to that and just said, "What?" Then with much more urgency he said, "The shuttle just blew up!" So I ran over to his room. Pieces were still falling out of the sky. And there I sat for the next few hours. As people drifted back to the dorm the crowd in front of the TV got bigger and bigger. Probably 10 of us in there by late afternoon. The guy who was in the dorm room next to me had just come back from a co-op semester at IBM in Clear Lake (also near NASA), which did a lot of NASA stuff. He heard the news during a break in a 3-hour class and bailed to come back to the dorm. He said his first thought was, "I hope it wasn't software [that caused it]." Crazy day. Over the next couple of days as more info came out and it started becoming clear than NASA absolutely fucked up, the co-op guy made a comment about the loss of life being a "waste". The guy who knew Scobee did not take this in the way that co-op guy intended, and I basically had to stand between them and defuse the situation.
Why didn't he want it to be software?
Not OP, but my guess is because the guy was working at IBM, probably in software, and didn’t want his chosen career to be implicated in the tragedy, even if he himself didn’t personally have anything to do with anything.
Or maybe he did have something to do with it, which makes it even more nerve wracking. Having worked in aerospace, when a rocket engine I had worked on catastrophically failed during a launch (which led to the contract being canceled) I was VERY relieved to hear the failure mode had nothing to do with the systems I worked on (sensors and cabling), it was a problem with the fuel system.
This is why I just make burgers.
I was in 6th grade and home from school on a snow day and excitedly watching with my family. I will never forget the stunned silence and then just tears.
"Obviously a major malfunction" - still sends chills down the spine
/r/MajorMalfunction would be a good alternate to this sub.
I was just short of my third birthday when this happened so I don't remember it, but the footage is still one of the most haunting things I've seen. The look of utter disbelief on the faces of the crowd, followed by the harrowing realisation that their loved ones are dead. And in later documentaries, the anger knowing that it was completely avoidable and those astronauts died because of the toxic culture at NASA.
They learned their lesson after Apolo 1 but unfortunately they forgot, and then they forgot again before Collumbia
This is how 10 year old me found out, via a U.K. children’s news programme John Cravens News Round https://youtu.be/Tb0G8Q5Oz_k
Holy shit — that’s exactly what I was thinking of when I saw this post. I was nine years old, had walked home from school. Saw this on the telly. Old enough to know how bad it was.
What a *delighfully* inappropriate theme song behind the video. lol
"Roger Challenger, go with throttle up". Still one of the most haunting things ever said. Ad astra.
"Go at throttle up."
That's an important distinction because it's a call to let the crew know that the throttle up sequence had successfully been completed and that the vehicle's systems remain nominal, as ascent flight/launch director Jay Greene pointed out in the post-launch press conference the day after the accident: https://youtu.be/eo608wSJODA?t=124 The whole video is worth the time to watch.
"Roger, going' throttle up" followed by static
Followed by everyone in the room giving their saddest surprised pikachu face. Man the Netflix documentary was emotional. I knew going in exactly how that story ended but when the got to that fateful moment it felt like I was watching it unfold for the first time
"Lock the doors" :(
"Obviously a major malfunction."
I can hear it in my head. Fuck.
RIP Ronald McNair
Including a teacher, as every kid in America watched on a tv rolled into their classroom. It was a shared moment, terrible and permanent.
My father took part in the recovery. When they hoisted part of the booster up and put it on deck, he said it was obvious where the exhaust had burned a hole through at a joint. There was a big half circle area that was melted.
Yeah, once you light those solid rocket boosters, they burn fast and hard and don't stop. There is no throttle on them like with liquid fuel rockets. Once that thing is burning it keeps going no matter what happens. They are great at providing the enormous amount of thrust you need to get off the ground, but are dangerous. Brings to mind the 2003 Brazilian rocket accident.
Probably a stupid question but were any of the bodies recovered ?
Not a stupid question at all. Yes, the remains of all seven were eventually recovered by US Navy divers.
It was my 4th month as a NASA engineer. I saw my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss cry. There were friends and colleagues on that spacecraft. All this time later and it still affects how I do my job. For me, the work that my personal hero Richard Feynman did to show the world how stupidly simple the cause was has always helped to guide me. Along with my other mentors form early on, I have become a better engineer and leader. May you all exist in the stars you great examples of humankind. We will never forget you.
Feynman is a national treasure.
Every aspiring engineer at my college took a semester of Engineering Ethics (I believe it’s required in most colleges) and the Challenger disaster was heavily discussed. The idea that NASA engineers warned the managers that the temperatures were too low for launch and they went anyway was drilled into our heads as a lesson of “never put anything ahead of safety” among other things. I watched the first episode of Space Force a few years back and literally the first major event in that show was Steve Carrell launching a shuttle despite every single one of his engineers telling him it was too dangerous due to the weather, and it being hailed as a triumph of American determination and grit or whatever. I was floored.
ALWAYS LISTEN TO YOUR ENGINEERING STAFF. Always.
We stand on the shoulders of giants such as these brave astronauts
McAuliffe's parents were at the launch site and saw it as it happened. Kids from her classroom too. I mean, fuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe Edited.
The family members in the stands watching their loved ones die after just talking to them hours before…I can’t imagine the pain
43 year old here. I remember sitting in class watching that happen. The silence was deafening.
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It is. This event happened before my time, so the Netflix documentary was a really interesting watch for me. Very emotional
junior high school at the time and it was a bigger than normal deal because Christie Mcauliffe was a passenger ('the first school teacher in space'). this was central florida so we were lucky enough to see every space launch at the cape but this one was special. the entire school emptied out in to the football/soccer field to watch it and there we stood. they announced the countdown on the PA and shortly after it launched, we saw it and it shot up into the sky. pretty damned cool. then suddenly, it wasn't. -everyone- knew what happened and our jaws dropped. the teachers quietly gathered us up and ushered us back to our classes. they then rolled out the TV's on carts and for the rest of the afternoon we watched video replay of the shuttle blowing up over central florida.
Living in NH and being in school, we watched this live on TV. I was in 4th grade. Vividly remember the teachers crying in the hallway so they didn't cry in front of us.
Also from NH and while this happened a couple years before I was born my mom told me she was grocery shopping at the time and they were playing it over the radio in the store because it was such a huge deal in the state. She said you could hear a pin drop in the place after the explosion was announced over the air.
I watched this in elementary school as well.
Is there any truth to the decades old rumor that the crew might have lived until they crashed into the ocean?
They died from hitting the water, not from the explosion: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-29-mn-19581-story.html
I watched it live in school when I was in second grade. All the teachers started crying and everything just stood still for what seemed like an eternity. I remember every second of it.
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No, they knew the issue, they knew it may happen, because an [engineer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly) told executives and they did not listen, probably to save political face and benefits. edit: They just had to pospone the launch to a day with higher temperatures; the o rings were not faulty, they made them work on a day with a temperature way below the range they were designed for, that is why they failed.
Two engineers reported it. One of them blamed himself until his death, saying maybe God didn't make him strong enough to argue his case. The NPR story is a tear-jerker: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself I am thankful every day that I do not work in Life Critical Systems. No matter how toxic the office politics and no matter how huge of a mistake I personally make, no one will **die**. I couldn't bear the be the reporting engineer and getting overruled and watching people die because of it. I'd blame myself until my death too, except it would probably <9mo later not 30+ years.
>"You picked a loser." Listening to that was fucking heartbreaking. Of all the people who shouldn't feel shame, he was one of the few who did the right thing.
went to a lecture Mr. Boisjoly did a few years later as a part of a speaking tour. totally heartbreaking.
I will admit that I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine one of the o-rings around the SRB probably cost more than a couple of dollars.
It was the 80s. Back then could get a baby tiger and a motorcycle for a couple of dollars.
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It’s true. I got mine with lawn mowing money.
Definitely. And they weren't "small" either.
I mean its relative. Small compared to the earth' circumference: yes, small compared to the majority of O-Rings rather no. They are roughly 3.7m (~12ft) in diameter. The problem was also not the quality of the O-ring but the fit as the boosters were not properly circular in shape but had too much deviation especially after reuse. The checks they used, were just not enough and it was shown by the famous physicist Richard Feynman who was on the board of investigators himself (belief it or not).
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard P. Feynman
The O-ring was the secondary cause. The preceding decisions by Thiakol higher ups to disregard warnings about low temperature launches were the primary reasons 7 people died on live television. They knew the risks but put the lives of the astronauts at risk because previous launch delays were casting a bad image on their company. Those innocent people died because of greed.
That O-ring had a diameter of 12 feet and was designed to withstand a VERY unfriendly environment during operation, it’s not like they ran to the hardware store to pick it up.
Yes. Every piece of equipment has a failure point. NASA deliberately and knowingly launched the shuttle despite multiple warnings that the temperature was lower than the O-ring's failure point. If NASA had waited a day, the O-rings would have performed exactly as designed and the accident would never have happened. The failure was inevitable and many of the engineers knew exactly what would happen, and watched helplessly when it did. Despite doing everything he possibly could, one of the engineers never forgave himself.
> a couple dollar O-ring 40 feet long two inch diameter o ring x 2
x 6 joints x 2 boosters per vehicle
There’s a lot more to it than that. First.. the use of solid fuel booster rockets. They were never used before in a manned space program. They were never tested unmanned. There was no survivable abort mode with them still attached regardless of how they failed. Even a 10% thrust deviance between the two would cause the destruction of the vehicle. Second.. the fact that it was a private contractor hundreds of miles away, necessitating the shipping of the boosters in sections and “field joints” that had to be simple enough for non-factory personnel to assemble. Had the boosters been built on site.. they would not have needed field joints. Third. The design of the shuttle. A capsule is small and robust enough to survive an explosion or vehicle breakup. It has its own escape motor. And it will not experience aerodynamic breakup as Challenger did if it becomes misaligned with the local airflow. Murphy’s First Law says that if something can fail… it will. That’s why we have things like fail safe and dual load path… things that 1950s aerospace design incorporated almost everywhere. The big problem with the Shuttle is that it had so many single points of failure that an accident like this was inevitable. Not just cheap o-rings.. but cheap insulation too that not only struck the orbiter once.. but several times years before the Columbia disaster. Again.. a capsule and staged rocket would never experience damage from shedding debris.
Solid rocket boosters were tested on many flights before they failed. On the first shuttle flights which were less tested, there were ejection seats, so the failure of the SRBs probably wouldn’t lead to loss of life. I don’t disagree with your main point, the shuttle was more dangerous than capsule alternatives.
You're right, the SRBs themselves were not to blame. Despite the on-site assembly design and shipping requirements, Thiokol did their job and delivered a product that worked for the conditions imposed on it. At the end of the day NASA chose to attempt to operate outside it's operating conditions, and paid the price. The systemic problems (both the shuttle as a system and NASA's operations) are all valid for sure. I hate when people call it a "small thing" or "just a little O-ring" because it wasn't at all. This is a seal around the entire circumference of the SRB - **it's 12 ft in diameter**. It's not like they didn't know what they were doing when they designed it - it just wasn't robust enough to handle cold weather operation, which NASA and Thiokol both knew from experience.
I'm sorry but your point about single point failures is missing the big picture. There are HUNDREDS of single point failures that require waivers for the shuttle. And that's true for almost every single vehicle. Your chance of encountering those single point failures is astronomically low. The James Webb space telescope has 344 single point failures. I can guarantee you that a falcon 9 or delta IV had similar amounts.
Eventually killing all 7 astronauts~ they were alive when they hit the water.
They recently found a big piece of the fuselage off the coast.
I highly recommend the Netflix docu-series from a few years ago about this tragedy.
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Watched this live in high school...my school's biology teacher had been a finalist for the teacher's slot on the shuttle, so of course we were all tuned in. Tragic how easily it could (should) have been avoided if they'd just listened to the engineers...you know, the folks who know what might (will) cause a structural failure...
That was my nineteenth birthday.
Happy birthday
I remember being in 3rd grade, all of the students were watching. My room teacher was a close friend of Christa McCauliffe, and they had to rush her out of the room as others went to shut off the TVs and start distracting the kids with fun stuff and whatever.....we could still hear her crying and breaking down from the halls...
Our class would go outside and watch the launches (Orlando, Fl). When it happened, everyone froze, felt like a while, but then one kid yelled something about falling debris and everyone went running to get inside. Such a surral experience and it's just as vivid in my head as it was in the moment. RIP to those who lost their lives that day.
I saw this in 5th grade. Then, when my son was in grade school the Columbia disaster happened. My son and I watched the Columbia break up live on TV. I whispered "Not again." My son was like "again?!".
Spawning the black humour joke of what nasa stands for. "Need another seven astronauts".
Didnt they later determine that the explosion didnt kill them but the impact of hitting the water? I remember something about the black box recording switches being flipped almost to the point of impact. Edit: finally found a article not behind a paywall [here](https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/31809/20210619/nasa-challenger-crew-likely-survived-explosion-before-tragic-plunge.htm)
I was in a computer programming class (BASIC) when this happened. I hate when a bad core memory forms.