Greg was a quite guy. Good engineer. Athletic. Smart. Perfect candidate for the Space Program.
Posted on 01/18/2016 6:17:27 PM PST by truthfinder9
I think I read that FReepers were some of first to report about Columbia.
Was in the process of giving a chow call on 6-4 in bancroft hall for noon formation as a plebe when I got ‘shoved off’ (told to shut it and skedaddle). I never got shoved off I was such a screen. Quickly found out what was going on and everyone converged on the wardroom. No one cared about class or rank. It was a very somber lunch.
Better to have a few really good people going to space than a diversity roster.
I was on my way to a dentist appointment at LAFB. I heard it on KFYI and was shocked.
Nobody watched like earlier take-offs and it was expected to be routine. I know they have footage I do not want to see.
Sad day for America and our brave Astronauts.
I was on a thread about it. Lots of Freeper eyeballs on the shuttle and reporting that it seriously didn’t look right.
A few years before, the band Rush witnessed the first launch of Columbia and wrote a song about it.
Countdown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-8yCKwhBE&list=RDXW-8yCKwhBE
I didn’t intend to hijack your thread with Columbia. Apologies.
I have family members on the designing crew of the Shuttle and learned that the problem was hasty production of the O-rings.
...
The O-rings didn’t function in cold weather. Later Shuttles had heaters for them.
The problem was management ignored warnings about them.
Canceling the Shuttle program and deleting 200K jobs in Los Angeles was the cruel act of selfish and crazy politicians.
...
The Shuttle was too expensive, too inefficient, and dangerous for its mission. But in some ways, it was still an awesome and inspirational spacecraft for its time.
Close to freezing and they were warned.
Time over-ruled safety. That is inexcusable.
I was at JSC when alarms stared going of on the old line printers chunking out telemetry data. I told my manager that it looked like we lost the vehicle and he responded don’t even joke like that.
Here’s a song that mentions them.
“Fire In The Sky”
by Kristoph Klover
from the album, “To Touch The Stars”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ryd_p20XEU
That and other space songs can be found here.
http://www.prometheus-music.com/thestars.html
I was at Patrick AFB hospital. We watched from the parking lot behind the hospital. It was surreal moment when the one trail of exhaust became two and no one spoke. The hospital went into lockdown, we set up multiple trauma stations in the ER to accept casualties. No one was admitted except for one of the astronauts wives who was suffering psych trauma. We were expecting that the debris would fall back down on the coastal community. In the days and weeks that followed everyone would bring stuff they found on the beach for examination. We never found anything from the ship. I was in the seventh grade when Kennedy was shot and it was the same sort of feeling I had then.
Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster Nova documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJUAGc9yH6A
Challenger: The Untold Story Part 1 of 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaZzRmpa1iA
Still love the old school rockets. They were a rough ride to orbit but absolute awesomeness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HcnmthntUo
“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
RR
I miss him.
Roger that. Dumb actions by management. I worked on the program for 36 years.
Some years ago, I was tasked to develop a presentation on the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters for use at company-sponsored brown bag lunch professional development lectures. I used the NASA reports on the Challenger loss as primary references. NASA pulled no punches about the shortcomings in decision making and leadership on both the contractor and government side that set up the fatal situation. The report also provided extensive background information on the cost and schedule pressures that had developed to get the shuttles recycled for their next launches.
The multivolume report is available on line at the NASA website and is worth reading.
A key point of engineering information in the report was that there was a .5 second window after ignition of the solid rocket boosters (SRB) where an effective seal between the propellant segments had to be obtained to prevent the burn through that ultimately destroyed the spacecraft. SRBs recovered after previous launches showed this sealing wasn’t reliably occurring and that partial exhaust burn through was the result. The problem could be solved with a redesign of the casing joint seals and retrofitting it to the SRB fleet. But that would have a huge impact on the shuttle launch schedule; a political non-starter.
The Wikipedia link below has a good summary of the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
By the time the black puffs of smoke begin to appear from Challenger’s right SRB at T+0.678 seconds, the fatal casing joint failure had already occurred (across 70 degrees of the joint). The astronauts, with no realistic during-liftoff escape system, were effectively dead; but they had to wait another 72.5 seconds to find out.
Greg was a quite guy. Good engineer. Athletic. Smart. Perfect candidate for the Space Program.
One of those days we will never forget where we were when it happened.
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