Posted on 01/28/2005 5:17:59 PM PST by silverleaf
Edited on 01/28/2005 7:01:57 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
I remember running down to tell my mom.
Its interesting that I learned about the Challenger and 9/11 on the radio. I heard about 9/11 while driving to work, on the Howard Stern show no less.
Very sad, I also heard people joke about it. I honestly don't understand how anybody could have thought it was funny. There was a bit of residual anti-Americanism in the air at that point, left over from Jimmeh and friends, but still...
I saw that too, and I thought exactly the same thing. The poor man simply couldn't believe it.
I saw it live at my mom's house. My first comment was "That's not good".
Updated from various posts on the thread, moved to breaking news, an American tragedy, hope you don't mind.
At about... what was it... 10:00 am? A young woman who worked in the administrative office (and who rarely if ever talked to me, she was way too cool to talk to an engineer) came over to my desk and said "did you hear, the rocket ship blew up! At first I didn't understand what she meant. Rocket ship? What the...? Then I remembered that the Shuttle was launching that day. I went out to my car to listen to the radio. I was shocked and dismayed.
The routine of our flights into earth orbit was one of the things that made life seem so positive, hopeful, and exciting to me. I loved the way we could carry a payload the size of a city bus into space. I watched with joy the images that came back during each flight... the beautiful video of satellites being released, of the astronauts on EVA in the shuttle main cargo bay. It all underscored my pride in our country.
That night, I taped the coverage on my (brand new) VCR, and watched the fire ball over and over. I remember talking about it with my roommate, explaining to him that the whole shuttle was covered in refractory material, and that it still was virtually vaporized by the heat of the explosion. In time, I found out that this was not quite true.
I remember stopping one frame of the tape, about four frames into the explosion. You could see a blue-white ball of light at the leading edge of the fireball. It looked like a huge electric arc. I later learned that the liquid oxygen reservoir was at the nose of the external tank; and the hydrogen took up most of the cylindrical portion. That blue-white fireball was a huge boiling slug of LOX, accelerating the explosion.
In that first morning, theories were flying fast. One guy on NPR suggested there might have been some sort of "water hammer" effect in the 18-inch diameter pipes that carried LOX and liquid hydrogen to the shuttle main engines. It wasn't until later that second day (or maybe the third) that the first reports of flight imagery showing hot gasses escaping from one of the solid motors.
By the third morning, everyone was talking about the O-rings and the "capture feature." There was a Morton Thiokol engineer named Roger Bujoleis (or something like that) who had expressed concerns about the performance of the O-rings at low temperature. NPR was all over this, covering the mad search for the "culprit" who had overruled these concerns.
Pieces of the shuttle (and the astronauts) were recovered for the next two weeks or so. Maybe longer. They were entombed in an unused missile silo at the Cape, as I recall.
It was about a year and a half before another shuttle was launched. Much science and defense work was postponed.
The shock and sadness took a long time to wear off. The visions, during quiet times, of the event, and thoughts of the lost astronauts, took a long time too.
(steely)
I was a boot Seaman on the CGC Polar Sea. We were in port in Seattle, and I was on duty. I was cleaning the stateroom of MasterChief Smith when the pipe came over the 1MC: "Now on Polar Sea: The space shuttle has exploded on takeoff. News coverage is available on the mess deck."
We sat transfixed for hours after that. I can't believe it's been 19 years. I remember it like it was last week.
It was the day I entered the Army. I was at the MEPS station in Kansas City and was playing pool when someone came in and told us the shuttle blew up. We didn't believe him and continued to play. A few minutes later we heard the commotion from the room where the TV was and quickly learned the horrible truth.
I was skipping fourth period in high school. Myself and a friend were trolling the local Walgreen's watching the launch on the tv's for sale. We couldn't believe it when it exploded. Matter of fact, I wasn't sure what had happened because we couldn't hear the commentators.
I was working as a Public Information Aide at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (Kitt Peak) office in Tucson that morning. We had two astronomers with experiments on board, and I got to spend the day helping field phone calls with tears streaming down my face. Truly one of the worst days in my life up to that point.
I remember watching the coverage on TV, and I also remember the tribute to Challenger at the beginning of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when I first saw it in a theatre a year later. The audience applauded.
I was working on a technical support line, and a co-worker ran past me, turned on a radio and said, "Challenger just blew up."
The grave marker at Arlington is right next to the Rescue Attempt grave marker.
Universal Camera Site 8 between LC 40 and LC 41. Freezing my @ss off and wondering why we were launching the thing in freezing temps.
Brilliant 20/20 hindsight you have there. Must be some special talent.
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