Not only did they broadcast the explosion they also caused it. Haha(not funny)
Richard Feynman was the one who let slip innocently what the cause was during an international press conference and made a lot of people in Washington very very mad.
Basically, the Whitehouse pushed NASA to launch despite the weather being too cold and that caused an expansion joint of an SRB to fail.
Feynman showed the world what happens to the expansion joint material by putting it in some ice water for five minutes during the press conference and showed it crumbled after he took it out of the glass.
That man was an international treasure and I miss him very much.
I just wish that book was never written and I hope that the majority of it is a lie
Which book?
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
What’s wrong with that book?
Like everything? It depicts Feynman as a shit person
This legitimately almost ruined NASA.
Imagine a space organization almost be>ng ruined by one explosion! NASA is obviously too weak to handle space.
Can’t be ‘ruined’ in the sense that they were important for military purposes before they created the ridiculous space force.
Even Boeing, a private company that with all their failures and criminal behavior should definitely be bankrupt, gets massive help bcs they’re a military contractor.
By then shuttle flights were so routine I didn’t even get up to watch the liftoff. My mom called me before work and told me it blew up.
Christa McAuliffe trivia: she was the only one in her training group who didn’t throw up on the “Vomit Comet”.
José, can you see?
Americans Bein the First Nation dropping a nuke on another country…
nukes
We almost went to whole thread without someone mentioning that. Thank you for your service
Waaahhh waaaahhh moooommmmyyy everyone is mean to me since I nuked Japan twice, they are constantly reminding me of it waaaaaah
“stop making me feeling bad about us nuking 2 cities”
And thats why we call it the gulf of america
The…Atlantic Ocean?
Whoa there, if your not careful they will start calling it the American ocean
Turns out risky business has risks.
The interesting thing isn’t how many fatalities NASA has had but rather how few they have had. Exploration has always gotten people killed.
I feel you don’t know what you’re talking about in this situation. It is well documented that if NASA had followed their own safety guidelines and listen to their own people, this would not have happened. So many people were waiting to watch the launch that NASA leadership felt they couldn’t abort. That is the sole reason this tragedy occurred, not “whoopsie daisy that sucks but we learned something” science.
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mods are so fragile, can’t take a joke?
We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn’t get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn’t say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn’t just watch people blow up live.
It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.
I remember that last part from the announcer and we were all like “you don’t say…”.
You actually didn’t watch people get blown up live. The crew survived the fire blast—it was the crash into the water ~3 mins later that killed them.
That would surely have made us feel better lmao! Still, that’s an interesting fact.
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ableism
In my defense I have ADHD.
“In my defense I am asian”
Well they still got blown up didn’t they?
They didn’t get blown up. The Challenger did.
The engineers knew! They begged them to stop the launch, but of course, no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling!
profitprogress at all costs!Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.
When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.
Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”
I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.
It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”
I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.
What you call gut instinct, I call the output of an immensely complex yet efficient organic neural network that has been trained on years to decades of relevant experience.
If business leaders think AI is so great, they need to get in on this shit while they can still afford it!
no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling!
profitprogress at all costs!I am honestly not sure what you’re trying to say here but I’m curious what NASA is selling that you threw capitalism in there.
It’s the system that affects people’s clear thinking that is the issue. Not everything is about money or efficiency. Hence the use of capitalism in their sentence.
Merchandise. Toys.
I think I was in 7th grade. We were watching. Right in front of our eyes and could hardly believe it. Everyone inhaled sharply and then a couple of short screems, then silence. After a good 5 minutes, our teacher came to his senses, turned off the TV, and started talking about being right with god because you never know when it’s your turn.
LOL
Perfect time for some biblethumping🤣…the teacher chose threatening with hellfire and brimstone. OMG.
Lutheran church school.
Yeah, that tracks. With any religious person even at a non-religious school.
Damn that’s cold
“No matter how good your life is, you could be next, children!”
Sad thing is, it likely reinforced the already strong indoctrination of a handful of those kids
I realized something was “off” when I found out that they counted my donations and sent me a letter saying that I was behind.
K through 8th grade and then I dipped.
The crew didn’t blow up(src).
The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.
We were led out of our classrooms to watch it since we lived in FL. When the launch went pear-shaped, nobody really understood what had happened, we just thought it was part of the fuel tanks dropping away. We went back in, sat down and continued our day. I don’t think the teachers ever told us something went wrong and I found out about it that night at home.
My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.
You know who could have been on that shuttle instead of a teacher? A Muppet.
Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!
When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.
The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.
I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.
But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.
I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.
It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.
