Very good story by NPR today about this tragedy. As a Brigham City kid who’s father worked at Thiokol (he died in 1981 ) I also knew a lot of the kids of key figures in this story. Al McDonald had lived a few doors away. Jerry Mason lived about a block and a half away and his daughter was one of my sister’s best friends. I was a young engineering supervisor at Hercules at the time. We were in the middle of investing $300M to become a second source supplier for shuttle boosters, which in no small part contributed to Thiokol feeling pressure to not be a cause for delay. About a year earlier when I was working a project related to making graphite/epoxy motor cases for ths Shuttle, I had been on a phone call with Larry Mulloy of MSFC. My impression of him was he was a complete ■■■, and when it came out how he pressured the Thiokol guys to say OK it didn’t surprise me at all.
The ideas of normalization of deviation and proving negative hypotheses (prove it won’t work), pop up all over. Even NASA fell prey to it with the Columbia fatal flaw. Do we ever learn?
In the fall and winter of 1985, as I was a semester from completing my Computer Science Undergrad at Westminster College in SLC, I volunteered to write assembly language code for a single board 6502 computer to control a project for a group of biology students at USU. The project was to study cell-to-cell interaction and blood viscosity under zero gravity, and was scheduled to go into space on the shuttle then scheduled to follow the Challenger.
I made several trips to USU, gathered all the requirements, and specifications for the devices the software would be controlling, and had completed an initial coding effort. I was waiting for my first set of devices to perform initial testing the day of the Challenger launch, and was watching it live in the Computer Center at Westminster, where I worked at the time.
The Challenger disaster resulted in all future plans for launches being put temporarily on hold. I graduated, moved on to the early part of my career, and missed what would have been a fabulous opportunity.
Somewhere in the attic of my garage is a file box with the prototype single board computer, all the original specs, and my code on a floppy disk.
I remember, as though it were yesterday, the horror I felt watching the Challenger, and am stunned to think It’s been 40 years.
Wow, it’s been 40 years? The images of Challenger are still pretty fresh in my mind’s eye when I think about it.
I was a Sophomore in HS at the time. I had one thing indelibly etched into my memory from that tragic day. I had just gotten my braces put back on, so my mouth hurt. I remember walking into my history class and we had a tv on for the coverage. I had heard about the tragedy earlier on the radio, so to see it was beyond surreal to a 15 year old kid.
I don’t remember much else from that day, just the orthodontist trip and Challenger. I’d not remember the orthodontist w/o Challenger. Memory acts in strange ways it seems.
Among the most heart breaking news events of my life. As I was leaving work at a department store and ready to head to class, someone commented the Space Shuttle had exploded. Walked past the electronics area on my way out and stunned people were crowded around TV sets. I turned on the radio while driving to school and when they talked about the students watching their teacher go from elation to shocked disbelief I was so wracked with sobs I had to turn the station so I could maintain my composure to drive.
NASA’s tolerance for risk went through the floor. They actually had a flight set stacked at Vandenberg AFB and ready to fly the first polar orbit with the STS system. Twenty years later found me with the job to try to convince NASA that it was ok to use graphite/epoxy for primary structures and cases. Stunningly, there were very few people at NASA who knew they had actually qualitied composite cases for STS. We had to dig up the old reports and photos and prove it to them multiple times. That was beyond weird.
I was a Senior in HS in my last semester. I had come home from my only morning class which was computer programming. I had been working on creating an adventure game which pretty popular at the time and writing all of the code in Apple BASIC. It was pretty fun stuff for a teenager. I had an off campus spare period the rest of the morning until after lunch. I got home and my baby sister who was 5 was mad because she wanted to watch Sesame Street and “there’s only news on TV!”
I am pretty sure I missed watching the actual launch but was catching the coverage right after the accident. That day is seared in my memory. I got an A in that computer class but never did finish programming that game. I probably still have it on a floppy disk in a box somewhere.
I know there is a lot of debate about this and who actually saw it live on TV and that many people remember seeing it live, who didn’t. HOWEVER, I was of that generation in elementary school who claims to have that memory, and I do too. Whether it was live or not, I remember that we as a class had done a big space unit and were excited about a school teacher going on the space shuttle.
I remember they rolled out the TV on the cart so we could watch the launch, and I also remember being shocked it blew up. I was already a big space nerd and so this whole unit and experience was right up my alley. I had long dreamed of being an astronaut.
I remember being shocked about it and our teacher not really knowing what to do after, and so they eventually turned off the TV and we talked about it for a minute and then continued on for the day. I remember being confused by what happened. Not that they had died, but by the rockets that continued on for a bit after the explosion.
Kind of fascinating to think of how they handled things like that back then. Also kind of fascinating to consider the technology back then that made either instance happen. We were special because we got a live broadcast, or we got a delayed broadcast but there wasn’t really a way to warn people what they were about to witness? Either way - a core memory of my childhood.
A year or two later I was insanely jealous of Lisa Book who got to go to space camp - I was certain she’d get to be an astronaut and I wouldn’t. I’ve still got a shot right?
I was cleaning my M16 for turning back into the armory when the Challenger exploded.
My platoon was watching the launch on TV. We had just got back from field exercises and cleaning weapons (it was too damned cold outside to work on cleaning the APC’s). All of us were stunned by what we saw happen, and it became an ongoing discussion after the explosion was officially reported.
I was in Clark Knowlton’s Sociology class waiting for the lecture to begin when a classmate, a middle aged woman from Germany, came in and announced “The Space Shuttle blew up!”
Later in the day Reagan had some remarks, but they weren’t very comforting. A grim time for the nation.
I was working in an outdoor, month long intensive program for adjudicated young men. There was no radio or TV. We were just told matter of factly. I didn’t see the imaging for almost a month later. What struck me as a child growing up with Mercury through Apollo and the space station…how little the participants knew or cared about it. Just like taking comercial flight for granted, compared to my grandparents. I think what affected me most was the knowledge of the kids watching because of Ms McAuliff and later, in an intact cabin, it’s a terrible long time to be aware of imminent death
I was in a freshman biology class at Alta High School and the physics class next door was watching it. We heard some commotion and then someone came around to the opening of our classroom and told us that Columbia had exploded. We all went in to the back of the physics class and watched in horror at the repeated images of the explosion. The rest of the day felt eerie and weird, kind of how it felt after 9-11. It was a great loss and everyone was feeling it.
Those are the moments that remind you of what a loose grip you have on your existence. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Peggy Noonan lifted “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God” straight out of WWII poet John Magee’s “High Flight”, and there was no credit given in Reagan’s speech. That’s a little bit of shady political chicanery right there.