Space Shuttle Challenger, 20 years after (1 Viewer)

[Lynda-Marie]

I was a freshman in college, and taking Astronomy 100 at the time. My late father, (had politics been kinder to the people of Czechoslovakia) would have been an astrophysicist and probably a cosmonaut. He ALWAYS had his eyes on the stars, and I grew up watching EVERY single item about the space program and anything to do with astronomy.

It saddened me, greatly. I was glad my dad did not live to see this.

HOWEVER, I was rather upset with all of the news coverage about Christa McAuliffe. This is NOT to diminish the fact that she was a courageous, admirable woman. I read article after article, saw broadcast after broadcast, and you would think, with a hasty, one time only mention of the names of the astronauts, that she was piloting the shuttle all by herself.

I couldn't help but wonder then and now, what the families of the others thought about this slighting of their loved ones. Yeah, they were astronauts, and they had to know that it was a dangerous job while Christa was a civilian, but to trivialize the others BECAUSE of this was and remains, piss poor journalism.

 

[MikeH1]

I was in grade 6 and came home from school when my parents told me the news.

 

[andrew markworthy]

There is a large academic literature on this, and I don't claim to know all of it. However, there are several (very obvious) prerequisites:

(1) it must affect a figure central to people's lives or if it involves ordinary people, it must affect a large number of them

(2) it must occur at a time when there is otherwise very little news

(3) typically, the event must be totally unexpected

(4) it must be easily comprehensible

(5) the event, though it is newsworthy at the time, does not necessarily have to be in the long term historically important.

Thus, mass casualties within a war or death of a leader during a war is unlikely to be a big news item (e.g. the death of Rooseveldt didn't have the effect it might have had in peacetime because the war was still on). Likewise, the dropping of the first A-bomb (arguably one of the most important events in the whole of human history) had little impact since few people understood what it meant.

In terms of news coverage, the big stories of the last hundred or so years have included the sinking of the Lusitania, the sinking of the Titanic, the shooting of JFK, and 9/11.

There are also news stories that are bigger in some countries than others. E.g. Challenger was a big news story around the world, but it didn't have quite the impact elsewhere that it did in the USA. Ditto the death of Princess Diana in the UK media.

It's interesting what *isn't* on the list, like the shooting of Ghandi (turbulent times, so not unexpected), or Hitler's invasion of Poland (part of a continuing series of similar events, so not unexpected).

It's also worth noting that everyone thinks they remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news (a so-called 'flashbulb memory'). This is not necessarily accurate. There's a famous anecdote (well, famous in psychology, anyway) about an expert on memory who had an incredibly clear memory of hearing about Pearl Harbor on the radio, because the announcement interrupted the commentary on a baseball game he was listening to ...

To answer the original question - I had just got my first job, came back to the apartment I was sharing and my flatmate said there was something on the radio about the space shuttle exploding. We switched on the TV and saw the pictures. We watched the news bulletin that evening but to be honest, the media coverage in the UK wasn't all that intensive. Everyone felt sorry for the lost crew (and the pictures of the 'reserve teacher' as she watched the disaster unfold were shown repeatedly) but the attitude over here was that space travel was inherently dangerous and this might be expected to happen (sorry, that last sentence isn't meant to sound callous).

 

[David Von Pein]

Space Shuttle Challenger;
01/28/1986; 11:28 A.M. EST;
STS-51-L;
Mission Length: 73.137 seconds :frowning: :frowning:

 

[Doug Miller]

I was in 6th grade. I seem to remember them making an announcement, then the teacher brought a television into the room and we watched the coverage. I remember asking "Are they all dead?" The class made fun of me for saying it, which hurt. Was it really that unreasonable to think there would have been a way for them to live, especially in the 6th grade? Funny how a 6th grader is smart enough to know they should have an ejector pod or something, but NASA still hasn't figured it out... after two lost shuttles.

Doug

 

[Andy Sheets]

I don't know enough about the Columbia explosion, but some kind of escape system would not have saved the Challenger crew. The shuttle was basically doomed from the very instant it took off but no one realized that until the shuttle had exploded.

Personally, I was sick and home from school that day and I think I was flipping channels on the tv when my dad called and informed me that the shuttle had blown up. I don't think it quite hit me how significant that was, maybe because I liked studying the space program and knew about the Apollo accident that burned the three astronauts on the launch pad (for some reason, it seemed like most people I knew had completely forgotten that, although my dad witnessed it firsthand as a journalist), so I understood that sometimes accidents would occur in space exploration. I sometimes get frustrated that we seem to have collectively lost the will the explore outer space.

 

[Chuck Mayer]

I was in English class in 6th Grade. I went to a school that routinely produces astronauts...more than any other school in the country. We lost alumni on both the Challenger and Columbia. I don't remember my emotions to the Challenger as well. But I do for the Columbia. I think the atrsonauts continued to represent the very best of America. Pioneers, explorers, etc. It's devastating to lose them.

 

[MarkHastings]

Yeah, and that may also be why we see it as so tragic. The Space Shuttle represented American Pride. We all watch it on TV with this sense of "USA! USA! USA!" mentality. When it exploded, it devastated the country. It's like watching your countries flag burning. The symbol of what you stand for was just destroyed and that's why it seems to affect people more so than other news stories.

Again, just like the death of a president...He is a symbol of out country and when someone like JFK is killed, a little bit of America dies along side of him.

 

[James L White]

A bit of sad irony

Challenger exploded 19 years and 1 day after the Apollo 1 fire claimed the lives of 3 astronauts then 17 years and 4 days later Columbia fell apart

so you're talking about dates within less than a week obviously spread decades apart

 

[Craig S]

I've worked in the Shuttle program for my entire career - some 25 & 1/2 years.

On January 26, 1986, I was in my office when Challenger lifted off. Even for many of us in the business, Shuttle launches had become routine. I wasn't directly involved in supporting the current flight (most of us in the Flight Software organization worked several flights ahead) and so didn't make it to a conference room to watch the launch (the conference rooms were all wired with NASA Select, so all flight activities were shown live, intact, and without inane network commentators). I'm sure I was working on something that I considered important at the time.

A few minutes after launch time one of the senior guys in the area poked his head in my office and said, "The Shuttle exploded. Go downstairs". He didn't wait for a reaction but went on to the next office. I remember my first thought was it must be a joke. But this particular individual wasn't prone to joking, and of course no one would joke about such a thing in our business. I ran downstairs to the small conference room, which was by then overflowing with people, with more arriving by the second. The first thing that struck me was with all those people it was completely silent except for the TV. I stretched to see over the heads of the crowd, and saw the replay of the explosion on the TV. It was devistating.

Within an hour those folks in our group who worked on the launch code were immediately pulled into closed-door sessions to begin reviewing the telemetry up until the accident, part of the effort to determine what had happened. The rest of us were pretty much adrift for the rest of the day. It was an office of zombies. A group of us, having nothing else to do, went to lunch at the Applebee's that was then on NASA Road 1. It was a popular spot for NASA & contractor engineers. The place was full, but I have never been in a quieter restaurant.

The odd thing was, for those of us in the program the accident was a shock and surprise, while not being completely unexpected. I had had a conversation with a friend about a year prior, about some silly paperback book called (I think) "Shuttle Down", which had a cover showing the Shuttle making an emergency landing on Easter Island. After laughing at that, he got serious and said, "You know, we ARE going to lose one of these birds some day." We were all aware that the Shuttle was perhaps the most complicated machine ever built by man. We all remembered the Apollo 1 fire (I was 10 when that happened). We all knew the early years of the U.S. space program were plagued by rocket explosions, and we knew the Russians had had their share of accidents as well. We knew crashes were common in test flights by the military. We knew planes fell out of the sky, cars crashed, and boats sank. We knew that as the frequency of flights increased, the chances of an accident increased. We also knew that it was our job, as part of the vast Shuttle team, to do our work to the best of our ability it prevent that accident from occuring - to bring the astronauts home safe.

So though were were in a sense prepared, when it happened it was still a very personal shock, and indeed all of us felt a sense of failure. Those terrible contrails in the clear January Florida sky will remain burned in my mind until the day I die.

NASA has always used civilian contractors, from the very beginning. Check out the "Spider" episode of the brilliant HBO series "From The Earth To The Moon". It is a tribute to the Grumman engineers who designed and built the Lunar Excursion Module.

United Space Alliance (which I currently work for) is not a "something". It is a company jointly formed by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin to operate the Shuttle under the Space Flight Operations Contract awarded by NASA in the mid-90s. The purposed of this contract was to consolidate all the many jobs done by different contractors under one umbrella, to streamline operations and control costs.

That said, yes, there is still too much beaurocracy. The same can be said of just about any large, mature organization, government or civilian.

As far as "poor pay", my experience is that USA's pay is commensurate with other companies in the aerospace industry. I consider my salary to be fair. If you think the engineers you worked with are underpaid (and I'm not saying they're not), are you willing to write your representatives in Congress to ask that they increase NASA's budget??

Let me just finish by saying that it IS a privilege to work in the U.S. space program, and always has been throughout all the ups & downs of the past quarter-century.

 

[BrianW]

As usual, Jim Oberg brings his level-headed, journalistic accuracy to bear in this commemorative article.

 

[mark alan]

That is what I love about this forum. We have a thread about the space shuttle, and of course one of the members works on the shuttle.

 

[Stacey]

I remember this like it was yesterday. It was just after lunchtime and most of the grade 12 Biology class was gathering in the lab when one of the last few students came in at the bell and said the Challenger had exploded.

The whole class fell absolutely silent and then the questions started to fly. What exactly happened? Did anyone survive? The rest of the day passed in a haze as we all could not wait to get home to find out more.

Once I got home, I rushed to turn on tv and after a few news speakers had their say, they re-played the entire launch. As soon as I saw the huge explosion and the two rockets spirialing off...I knew the crew was gone.

I remember feeling just absolutely numb all over and spent the rest of the day watching the news and the constant re-play of the explosion....

:frowning:

 

[Jim Barg]

I had just turned seven a couple days before, and I remember my class being in the middle of our naptime, actually (ah, the joys of first grade). :b One of the other teachers came to see my teacher, turned on the news, and we had the coverage on the rest of the day.

I was a bit of a space buff from then on, truthfully, and it's really sad to see that the interest seems to have faded for the public.

 

[Brook K]

I was in 7th grade. It was "gifted day", one day a week several of us got out of regular classes to go do "nerd stuff". We were planning on watching the launch because our teacher had applied for the shuttle program and been talking about it; separating this launch from the "routine" others have spoken about.

We were late getting to the media room for whatever reason. I remember walking down the hall and our teacher coming out of the room crying uncontrollably and another teacher telling us what happened. We went in to the room and watched the news the rest of the day. I don't remember if we even said anything to each other, some of the girls in the class were crying and the whole situation seemed surreal.