Former Morton Thiokol engineer Bob Ebeling has passed away at 89. He was the man that made the call that tried to get NASA to scrub the fateful Space Shuttle Challenger launch due to the risk of failure of the SRB o-rings. Ebeling has spent much of the past 30 years consumed with guilt over his failure to get the launch scrubbed. Thankfully an outpouring of public support for his efforts to stop the launch over the past several months helped him realize he did everything he could to save seven lives that day.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/21/470870426/challenger-engineer-who-warned-of-shuttle-disaster-dies?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160321
Challenger. *Tear. I remember it very clearly and I was just a 10 year old kid.
You know what I remember most vividly about the event? The Nooooz people kept telling us how to talk to our children about it AS IF there was going to be some real crisis of children just falling to pieces because of it.. No idea how that stuck, but my kids were little at the time and they didn't fall to pieces..
I get that though. Well, it affected me. I never forgot it. When somebody says Challenger, a 'video' of seconds appears in front my eyes. The colour of the sky. The explosion. I remember a talk about woman who was a school teacher. She had wavy -or curly?- hair down to her shoulders? I swear these are from memory.
The reason for that is because in 1986 we didn't have real live videos of people dying in different ways thrown at us from 4 corners like we have it now thanks the net. It was a big deal to watch someone die in front of a camera. The idea is nonexistent. And I was a child.
Think about something like that; a space shuttle is exploding live on tv while millions or watching in time of a media culture when the only mass communication is radio and television.
And here I thought this thread was going to be about Antonin Scalia.
I was in Middle School (the called Junior High) when it happened. I remember the teacher rolling in a television to give us the news. I also remember the question, "Which was the worst tragedy? The Challenger disaster or the Chernobyl disaster?" Of course everyone said that Challenger was worse, to which the teacher's response was essentially that we are all a bunch of ignorant pricks holding the lives of just 7 Americans above the lives of the thousands who would be affected by Chernobyl for decades to come.
I was in college at the time, and my asshole roommate, who was known for telling lies and who I could never trust, approached me in the college bookstore and told me the space shuttle had blown up. Of course, I couldn't believe something so preposterous, especially coming from him. Later, I walked into the TV lounge of our dorm and there it was... the news on the TV.
The image is as clear as day: "Roger, go at throttle-up." Then Boom... a cloud with two tails of smoke shooting out, like a grotesque beast with antennas.
Agreed. Ebeling should be remembered for what he tried to avert, he and Roger Boisjoly. I was working second shift and my mom woke me up and said I needed to see the news -- I had always been a close follower of NASA. She said she thought that now I understood what it was like when Kennedy was shot.
I suppose. I spent the rest of the day in a daze, and much of the next few days as well.
Which was as nothing to the rage I felt when Richard Feynman pointed out how obvious the fault was.
Quote from: trdsf on March 23, 2016, 01:59:29 PM
Agreed. Ebeling should be remembered for what he tried to avert, he and Roger Boisjoly. I was working second shift and my mom woke me up and said I needed to see the news -- I had always been a close follower of NASA. She said she thought that now I understood what it was like when Kennedy was shot.
I suppose. I spent the rest of the day in a daze, and much of the next few days as well.
Which was as nothing to the rage I felt when Richard Feynman pointed out how obvious the fault was.
Things are always obvious after the fact, even to Nobel Prize winners. I am glad the review committee didn't succeed in covering up.
On my last engineering assignment, for about 9 months, I worked on Titan-III launches prior to this one. This was the last launch, I had already left.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seT2dZ5aKGU
Unfortunately it failed after leaving Earth orbit.
Here is an earlier failure before I joined the program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBl03wVHOY
The actual explosion is from the activation of the range destruct system (on all non-military-hostile launches). I was usually an electrical engineer, but I was brought on the program as a system engineer, by the guy who did the post destruct analysis on this particular launch.
Notice the two solid side rockets on the Titan III, same conceptually as the Space Shuttle system.