Greg was a quite guy. Good engineer. Athletic. Smart. Perfect candidate for the Space Program.
Damn, am I really that old? I remember watching that on TV.
We didn’t give up spaceflight that day. We gave up spaceflight when the next moon mission became skylab.
No, it took until 2011 for that to happen.
Stayed home from work but came out to watch the liftoff. Couldn’t believe what we saw. Numb.
Watched it live and in person on the ground in Titusville, FL. from the parking lot of my high school. A lifetime later, I watched Columbia live and in person on the ground in DFW through the sunroof of my car.
Her mother’s facial expressions, I’ll never forget it. Joy turned to confusion, disbelief then heartsick. It was like being punched in the stomach, I literally felt her pain.
I was around 20 miles from Dodge City, KS, waiting for two other people. When the first one showed up she told me the Challenger had exploded.
The first question and answer: Yes, the school teacher too.
3rd grade. Home from school, too, and I can’t remember why. But I watched it with my dad & it’s one of those pivotal moments in my childhood.
I believe the address is still on YouTube. Unlike President Numnutz’s self-serving bloviations, President Reagan's speech showed true leadership.
Shared an apartment with a friend, he woke me up to tell me about it.
Challenger disaster. Very tragic and sad. Seems like five years ago. Please, hold the Christine jokes although they did relieve a lot of stress.
I have family members on the designing crew of the Shuttle and learned that the problem was hasty production of the O-rings. The solution is to encourage employees to get a full night’s sleep and to encourage the careful production of parts.
The image of the five white smoke lines expanding further and further apart still brings sadness.
Canceling the Shuttle program and deleting 200K jobs in Los Angeles was the cruel act of selfish and crazy politicians.
I remember when National Geographic called the Shuttle the best machine ever in history. True.
I was living rent-free at a relatives house at the time as they went to Florida for the winter and it was my job to keep an eye on their house and the driveway shoveled. I immediately went to that house and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the coverage on their old fashioned TV with the rabbit ears. They even had a rotary phone in the hallway on top of a doily on a small round table. That was a very strange winter. The next year, I got married.
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.
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 didn’t intend to hijack your thread with Columbia. Apologies.
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
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.