They spread astronauts and an Idaho grade school teacher Christa Macauliff all over the Ever Glads. This after they knew they were burning through two of three oring seals on the schuttle boosters. They were warned. It’s the money, to hell with the people.
I thought the accident happened because the O-Rings weren’t rated for the weather and that in the month prior to the launch the O-Ring was re-engineered to remove the offending chemical compound in the ring.
I remember that day.
My wife called me at work to tell me the Challenger had exploded on launch.
I thought she was kidding....................
He was investigating a year before the explosion?
Roger Boisjoly spoke up too, 33 years ago.
1986, not 1985!!!
One of those moments I know exactly where I was when I heard.
As I recall, two Morton Thiokol engineers were arguing against a launch as it was too cold outside.
That mission was doomed as soon as NASA started treating the shuttle program as little more than a multicultural passenger bus.
They had burned through the o- rings on the SRB’s multiple times prior to that time. The only reason they didn’t have a catastrophe prior was because the cutting torch was never aimed at the LOX tank. They knew it would happen eventually but wanted to launch for the teacher.
Absolutely criminal.
Wha the late Ray Breen referred to as “getthereitis”
We went over to the NASA side of the building and watched the unedited footage being fed to us from KSC.
He watched the event once with no external input or narration and said that it was the seals, right off.
The accident was 1986, not 1985. I had to look it up. I had just started my working career around that day.
I was at a board meeting when the chairman’s secretary ran into the room crying that the shuttle had exploded. It was horrible. Everyone in that room was speechless.
So which is it? Did he say this on Jan 28, 1985 or today? Find it hard to believe he said it today since he’s dead.
President Ronald Reagan
It looked like an explosion but actually wasn’t. The center tank disentegrated. What looks like an explosion is the fuel escaping at that high velocity and altitude. The strain completely pulled the shuttle apart and thw crew cabin was blown clean away. The astronauts were likely alive all the way down.
The O rings were so well known as an issue, when the USAF built a Shuttle launch facility at VAndyland, they had added jet engines to the tower infrastructure to heat the SRBs prior to launch.
Of course, with this loss, there was no longer any ‘spare’ shuttles for military launches from the Air Force Base
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-space-shuttle-s-military-launch-complex-in-californ-1710303170
The fraction of Rocket Scientists at NASA has been on the decline for decades......
It was ‘86...