Challenger disaster

Thats fine, take this somewhere else

They thought they had found some of the remains of one of the astronauts, but it ended up being a water hose from a 57 Chevy!

How do we know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?

They found her head and shoulders on the beach.

The launch was sponsored by 7UP.

What does NASA stand for?

Name Another Seven Astronauts.

Not only was Christa the first schoolteacher in space, she was also the first woman to cook in space.

I was too young to remember it first hand, just the [italic]Punky Brewster[/italic] episode about it with Buzz Aldrin walking in on Henry, who was Mrs. Johnson's dress dummy, thus bringing [italic]Tootsie[/italic] full circle in what turned out to be their last NBC episode.

They did find their remains, didn't they? And didn't they think they were conscious till they hit the water?

I'd never heard any Challenger jokes before. Fun.

Has anyone ever interviewed Christa McAuliffe's children now that they are adults?

What do Playtex tampon users and Christa McAuliffe have in common?

They both should have stayed on the pad.

If you could call it remains r8 umm more like a soup.

My father used to bust out the McCuliffe jokes, could never understand why this national tragedy was funny vs. other ones.

What were Christa McAuliffe's last words to her husband?

You feed the kids - I'll feed the fish.

I heard a lot of these jokes in 3rd grade.

Did they ever determine if the astronauts survived the explosion itself only to die from the impact with the water? Or did the shuttle just disintegrate from the explosion?

Here is the video of a grown-up OP & friends finding out Diana died.

Cunt R1 is really bringing it today.

r16 They concluded that a couple of them activated their air tanks after the explosion. I don't think any of them were awake, if alive, when the hit the water.

R17 You can't post that without posting this.

Did you know Crista McAullife's eyes were blue?

One blew that way and one blew THAT way!

Coverage on CNN leading up to the disaster

No joke.

Christa McAuliffe actually wasn't NASA's first choice for the mission. Their original idea was Big Bird would go into space. NASA nearly killed Big Bird in front of millions of watching children.

[quote] NASA has confirmed reports that space officials discussed putting Big Bird on the space shuttle Challenger, before it was lost along with its entire crew in an explosion in 1986. But the space agency said the plan never got to the point of giving Caroll Spinney, the human who portrays the 8-foot-2 bird on the "Sesame Street" TV show, a spot on the passenger list. NASA said the talks involved the Big Bird character as well as his teddy bear, Radar.

[quote] "I once got a letter from NASA, asking if I would be willing to join a mission to orbit the Earth as Big Bird, to encourage kids to get interested in space," Spinney recalled last month in an essay published by The Guardian. "There wasn't enough room for the puppet in the end, and I was replaced by a teacher."

[quote] "In 1986, we took a break from filming to watch takeoff, and we all saw the ship blow apart," Spinney wrote. "The six astronauts and teacher all died, and we just stood there crying."

I recall when the ship blew up the long range television image seemed focused on one large piece of falling wreckage. Later I understood why, this was the sealed crew compartment/ flight deck that had broken off nearly intact from the cargo bay.

They should have had a parashoot on the back of the compartment.

The rumour back then was the blast was done on purpose because NASA knew there were major safety issues and they needed more funding to improve the space program.

r25 That's a stupid rumor considering it put a major black eye on them and brought a lot of heat on what they were doing.

I really didn't care. I suppose it's because I was an adult when it happened and had seen so much death and destruction on TV in my lifetime that it was just another mishap.

Assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, riots, massive violent anti war protests; close ups of green bloated bodies in rice paddies in TIME magazine; Apollo 1 fire; Apollo 13 near disaster, hurricanes like Camille.

I thought it was a given that something like the challenger could happen at any time. I was shocked that people were shocked. The space program was dangerous. It had always been dangerous.

[quote] They should have had a parashoot

Jesus Christ.

Just going up in a regular jet can end in disaster, so no surprise a rocket can explode fall out of the sky, too.

[quote]Just going up in a regular jet can end in disaster, so no surprise a rocket can explode fall out of the sky, too.

Not if it has a parashoot.

RIP, i remember this, i was a baby but I remember watching this on tv

I went to college with a girl who had been one of Christa McAuliffe‘s students. She had an 8x10” photo of her on her wall which felt annoying in 1991. I bet she used that experience for her college application essay.

I worked the evening shift and went in that day at 4pm. I hadn't been there 5 minutes before I heard "need another seven astronauts." Things traveled fast in pre-internet days.

R16, Yes. No. It was a separation. The astronauts survived until contact with the sea, some found with clasped hands.

R25, There was no such "rumour," except in your non-American head.

I didn't realize until a read a couple months ago that not all 7 astronauts were seated on the same level and able to look out windows.

The teacher McCaullif and some others were seated an entire floor (level) below the rest and had no windows to look out of. They must have been confused and terrified.

Well, Christa’s last words were “What does *this* button do?”

My Mom was in the hospital at that time, and it seemed like we watched that video on loop for days. Reagan was an old bastard, but he could deliver a speech.

I've never heard about the bodies being found with clasped hands. It took about a month to find them, and by that time they were basically unrecognizable as human beings. Most of them were dismembered.

[quote]I've never heard about the bodies being found with clasped hands. It took about a month to find them, and by that time they were basically unrecognizable as human beings. Most of them were dismembered

R34 is some Christian freeper fundie cunt that's trying to put some Jesus spin on it.

Peggy Noonam wrote the speech for Reagan. Say what you will about her...but she's a fantastic writer.

How is r34 fundie? Just because he says they were found with hands clasped? That's not a Christian trait.

Christa had asked for her favorite song to be played at her funeral if the mission went wrong. It was Patsy Cline singing "I Fall to Pieces."

For those of us who were schoolchildren at the time, this was the firs "shit just got real" moment of our lives.

[quote] Just because he says they were found with hands clasped?

Because that's the bullshit type of statement a retard Christian would make.

Christa was charismatic and totally media-ready. I'm convinced she would have become a successful media or larger public figure had she survived.

From wikipedia:

"Inside the twisted debris of the crew cabin were the bodies of the astronauts, which after weeks of immersion in salt water and exposure to scavenging marine life were in a semi-liquefied state that bore little resemblance to anything living, although according to John Devlin, the skipper of the USS Preserver, they "were not as badly mangled as you'd see in some aircraft accidents". Lt. Cmdr James Simpson of the Coast Guard reported finding a helmet with ears and a scalp in it."

[quote]For those of us who were schoolchildren at the time, this was the firs "shit just got real" moment of our lives.

I remember the day quite clearly.

I was in high school, and walked home for lunch (in -25C Ottawa weather). Made some Kraft Dinner to eat then sat in front of the TV, expecting to see the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right. Instead it was Dan Rather holding a model of the shuttle and trying to explain what was going on . He clearly had little idea himself since the accident had just happened. Rather suggested that there may have been an engine failure and that perhaps the shuttle could be returning to land at Cape Canaveral, or possibly in Senegal.

Then they replayed the video of the explosion and it was immediately clear the shuttle had been lost.

I watched the coverage for a bit in disbelief, then returned to school for the afternoon. I told my other classmates about it and they didn't believe me! We forget that at that time we didn't have cell phones or email to keep us connected to events happening outside the classroom.

I was never much impressed by Christa, though perhaps part of that is my general distaste of the stupid publicity stunt thinking that got her on the shuttle in the first place. However Judy Resnik was the real deal. This was an Astronaut.

Upon graduating from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970, she was employed by RCA located in Moorestown, New Jersey; and in 1971, she transferred to RCA in Springfield, Virginia. Her projects while with RCA as a design engineer included circuit design and development of custom integrated circuitry for phased-array radar control systems; specification, project management, and performance evaluation of control system equipment; and engineering support for NASA sounding rocket and telemetry systems programs. She authored a paper concerning design procedures for special-purpose integrated circuitry.

Dr. Resnik was a biomedical engineer and staff fellow in the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1974 to 1977, where she performed biological research experiments concerning the physiology of visual systems. Immediately preceding her selection by NASA in 1978, she was a senior systems engineer in product development with Xerox Corporation at El Segundo, California.

And on top of that was a classical pianist.

Beautiful, intelligent, and talented. Impressive in every aspect, but forever upstaged by the political stunt casting.

A young, calm and collected Peter Mansbridge:

Managed to find the Dan Rather coverage, wow just as I remember it!

My high school physics teacher was one of the ten finalists for the teacher's spot.

They were alive all the way down.

What a fiasco. It was supposed to be this joyous event, with schoolchildren watching in celebration and merriment, and the damn space shuttle blows up, killing everyone inside. The footage of the reactions of the doomed astronaut's friends and relatives is still jarring. They're screaming, crying, looking upward in total shock. What a horror story.

[quote]Christa McAuliffe actually wasn't NASA's first choice for the mission. Their original idea was Big Bird would go into space. NASA nearly killed Big Bird in front of millions of watching children.

And that was just after he was in a movie with Waylon Jennings, who was almost on the plane that crashed with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper in it.

What’s the official NASA beverage?

Ocean spray because they couldn’t get 7UP

What were Christa McAuluff’s last words?

“What does this button do”?

Where did Christa McAuliffe spend her vacation?

All over Florida.

r17 I still find it sad that she died.

I was really annoyed by the nonstop coverage that went on for weeks. I mean, come on. plane crashes that killed hundreds of people weren't continually covered. It was like the media and govt were demanding we lose our shit over it. "A nation united in grief..." "An unspeakable tragedy has plunged the entire country into mourning..."

Not really. We're OK!

The truth of it is that collectively, as a nation, we never really recovered from this.

[quote] It was supposed to be this joyous event, with schoolchildren watching in celebration and merriment

The hype of the "Teacher in Space" had been pushed so hard they HAD to launch. The audience was primed and waiting. Had it been a normal shuttle crew of astronauts there would have been a greater chance the safety concerns might have been taken more seriously that day.

There had been several delays, and if the launch had been delayed again that day, they would've had to wait for at least a couple of months. NASA and the White House were getting antsy to just get the damn shuttle into space already because there was so much attention.

I was living in Gainesville, Florida, going to UF, and able to walk out the door and see a silver flash in the sky.

I was in first grade. I remember we spent at least a month in class drawing pictures of space shuttles and learning about space and astronauts. My teacher was probably in her early twenties and totally hyped us about Christa and being astronauts someday. Then the next day, she was completely silent about the whole thing and acted as if the entire month never happened.

I think we drew a storybook about lions after that.

My teacher said that soon everybody would be able to fly into space. That dream went down in flames.

We watched it live in junior high. Of course back the they didn't bring in therapists to help us with our grief. We just continued on the day.

I remember how Elton John reworked one of his classic songs in honour of this tragedy:

Oh no no no I'm a rocket lady Rocket lady burning out her fuse up here alone

It didn't do very well.

OP, I was home eating tomato soup when they announced the death of Princess Diana!

I was in fifth grade. I remember the next day or maybe the day after, our teacher had us stand in a circle holding hands while she played a recording of the Olympic theme on a little tape deck. I remember thinking "WTF?" in disbelief as I scanned the room. At one point she lifted her hands up in the air, so there we all were standing with our joined hands in the air listening to John Williams. She then opened up the floor for conversation to talk about our feelings but no one had anything to share. I think she thought we cared more than we did.

i remember being horrified when they panned to the parents of christa when the thing went down,

such horror and confusion on their faces.

branded into me

GOD DAM NASA WENT ON WITH THE THING EVEN THO IT WAS TOO COLD AND THE E RINGS WERE FROZE. MURDERERS!!!!

If you look at the footage before take-off and see the icicles on the shuttle and booster rockets it's like "WTF were they thinking?" Even planes aren't allowed to fly before they're de-iced, why not the damn space shuttle?

"Obviously a major malfunction." That must be the understatement of all time.

The very perky Amy Teitel explains what happened at link.

She skirts around the underlying awfulness of NASA management at the time: the Morton Thiokol engineers knew all too well that their solid rockets were rated safe to launch only above 53°F and protested the launch at 32°F to 35°F. NASA management ignored them and launched anyway. This was done because Ronnie 'Alzheimer' Raygun demanded the launch as part of a PR point in his State of the Union address. Blood on Republican hands, what a surprise.

R39 is wrong. The bodies were retrieved quickly. Death occurred due to impact to the water. I remember hearing they didn’t drown. There were conchoidal impact fractures on the long bones. I think Larry Angel or one of his students did some of the forensic work.

I remember seeing clips of the Challenger commission’s meetings. Feynman was amazing and all of NASA hated him after those meetings.

r75 Six of the astronauts' bodies weren't retrieved until March, and Greg Jarvis's body was found in April.

r76 Only because he slipped away as they were retrieving him with the others

R49 Wow. Very impressive C V. She really was overshadowed by McAullife.

Yeah, the major irony of the Challenger explosion ws that it was SO televised and such a major media event -- there had been several space shuttle launches before that weren't nearly as high-profile, and an explosion would have been a lot less dramatic, but with all the McAuliffe hype, there were millions of schoolchildren watching this launch live, so it made a much bigger impact.

It was a faulty O-ring that caused the explosion, wasn't it? Did that really have anything to do with the outdoor temperature at launch, as someone mentioned above?

I was in 6th grade, we watched it on tv in school. My science teacher lost it

R80 see R75. Yes the low temperature was to blame.

^I mean R74

R71 would fly in the retard shuttle.

They did find the oxygen tanks for individual crew partially depleted. The force of the explosion was many many G’s, however they quickly diminished.

The real issue was the pressure capsule intact, did it crack or develope a slow leak? Speculation is that the crew compartment was so heavily constructed that it did remain together. The seating of the crew placed astronaut Judith Resnick behind Commander Scobee and pilot Mike Smith - she was seated in the traditional Flight Engineer seat. (Few people realize Resnick was regarded as so brilliant she was also specifically trained as a 2nd pilot on the Shuttle as well as a Mission Specialist like the others). Resnick apparently turned on the pilots O2 as Scobee and Smith were Running procedures to restart the engines - switches were found out of place on on the systems panel indicating that was the action of the crew. It is probable they were alive until impact. It is a matter of privacy that NASA maintains “we just dont know if they were alive or not.”

At that time they had no way of knowing they were separated from the body of the shuttle, though there were certainly power failures. An escape mechanism was created after that if the crew was at a relatively low altitude, 1st stage of flight I am guessing.

This accident was the worst - Morton Thikol warned NASA that the O ring was only certified to 40*F and wanted to scrub the mission that day. NASA under pressure from low level White House aides wanted that teacher up in SPACE DAMMIT “do we have to wait until next spring?” So NASA incorrectly assumed the 2nd O ring would hold. It didnt. Stupid fucking political soundbites ruled the day.

The Shuttle Columbia disintegrated around 38miles above Earth upon re-entry. In my view they had it worse. Despite once again the public being told the crew didnt know - they werent stupid they all knew that those heat shields off in even a small area would burn their craft all to hell. They were hoping for a miracle. Didnt happen.

I remember this day in grade school. The teacher had the VCR/television wheeled in, and had left the room, only to return to a class of crying and scared little kids. She left to be a flight attendant a few weeks later. I was very confused, and it really upset me for days. We had mass for the astronauts a few days later, and I never recall discussing it afterwards.

R49 thank you for posting that bio of Judith Resnick. (R84 here) She was indeed one of a kind - totally without peer. Buried deep was that they trained her to also fly the shuttle - remarkable given that she didnt have as much as a private pilot license.

She was identified as being “single” and dedicated to her profession - as was Sally Ride - so I have long suspected she was also Gay. SHe has a niece that she was close to, that advocated for the Sciences in her Aunts memory.

Judith Resnick - an absolutely stunning and remarkable human being...

NASA liked to send Judy Resnik out to do press because she was so attractive. Female astronauts generally look like bulldaggers. Judy was feminine and truly pretty.

When Challenger blew, I was a young engineer in the middle of an O-Ring analysis for a rocket interface.

O-Rings bother me to this day.

At the time, my sister was a teacher and excited that the job was finally getting some positive press, and the politics of the tragedy left her angry and bitter for a while.

Dad was the saddest - Judy was also from Akron so dad was quite proud of her and called her "his gal.". When it happened, he didn't say anything at all.

[quote]NASA and the White House were getting antsy to just get the damn shuttle into space already because there was so much attention.

Trash, with blood on their hands.

I had just left the company I worked for with one other guy named Darren (who had recruited me away) and we were trying to help a competitor company get an office started up in the New York market. The office Darren had leased was in Newark but it wasn't really getting up and running (Darren wasn't very efficient) so we didn't go in every day. In fact, we hardly went in at all. We spent more time looking for an apartment for Darren than we did at the office in Newark. (Which I had no problem with, as the office and neighborhood was awful.)

ANYWAY.

I was sleeping that morning and Darren called me to ask if I was ready because he was going to come by to pick me up. I told him I had slept in and would get up and then he said, "oh shit, the enterprise blew up." I asked him if he was watching Star Trek and he said, no the real enterprise. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what Darren was talking about in that way he had, when he said, "you know the shuttle, the enterprise? It just blew up when it was taking off." And a cold chil went down my spine and I turned on the TV.

I was born after the Challenger disaster, but In school we watched a documentary about it and how "group think" led to the decision to launch the rocket. Is it just me or does it seem like it was a much bigger cultural event than the space shuttle Columbia disaster? I remember watching that live, but I never see newspaper articles about the anniversary or anything.

I'd love to meet the guys from the Princess Diana scream video.

I remember the Challenger happening quite clearly, I have NO recollection of Columbia. So weird.

r91 The Challenger disaster was a HUGE moment in our culture. I was in grade school at the time, and it really affected people for a number of different reasons. It was a major national event on a big scale.

JFK getting his head blown off on an American street was definitely the "end of innocence" moment for America but this one was a punch in the gut.

I’m impressed with how steady and sober the ground control team remain as they move into emergency contingencies.

The difference between the two cataclysmic events and the resulting streangth of memories is quite real.

The Challenger launch was visible, a couple million people across Fla could watch it from their yards, the media was covering Christa McAuliffe, her family was in the stands and it was quite an event. Also the Shuttle had been flying event free for many years by this point. It was possible to trace the ascent with the human eye until the 72 sec mark when it blew. My own mother watching from her yard turned to my father and said - “they just blew up.” He didnt believe it thinking it was just an ordinary booster rocket separation. She was correct. IT was all themore tragic because Network cameras were trained on her very distinctive looking mother in the VIP Family Stands - and that was fricking HEARTBREAKING like nothing I have ever seen before.

Columbia was nearly 40miles up in the troposphere - no one could see it except chase planes at 206,338 feet altitude - and they were using long lense cameras to photograph that height. NASA was being very very careful with the entire story of the foam knocking fire retardant tiles off the fuselage. Very very few networks were speculating the worse outcome. They were not wanting to upset the families who still were in communication with the crew while they were on the mission. That was the difference.

Reagan said, when informed that the Challenger had exploded: "was that the one with the schoolteacher?" What an absolute dunce he was.

He already had Alzheimer's, the "official" story that he only developed it after he was out of office is such bullshit. He was going senile when he was still in his first term.

What I always choose to remember of that day is, of all people, Joan Rivers. She was guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show that night and after Ed or whoever announced her, she said to the audience something to the effect "after what's happened today, I really don't think it's appropriate to do a monologue" and they broke for a commercial. I always thought that was a classy thing to do. One of the many reasons I still miss Joan :(

It wasn't a disaster, more people are killed in Chicago on an average weekend

r101, my spree made that, AND Chicago, look like a minor car accident.

--Stephen Paddock

I was working at the local newspaper in Christa McAuliffe's hometown as a "stringer". While the reporters and editors in the newsroom were attempting to be shocked and saddened, I could tell they were really all excited and happy. People were already knocking on the parents' door. I made the mistake of telling somebody that my brother had gone to high school with her,, and two editors swooped in on me and wanted names of classmates, my brother's office number, etc. I was repulsed by the whole atmosphere, and decided right then I wanted to get out of the business.

Thank you r86. Even on the last day it was painfully obvious Christa should have been no closer to the shuttle then the Cocoa Beach Ramada Inn's parking lot with the rest of the tourists. There is though no blame on her personally. She wasn't even the first joyride shuttle passenger. Senator Jake Garn grabbed that "honor" for himself the year before, but at least Garn previously had a long career as an Air Force pilot.

[quote] As a payload specialist, Garn's role on the mission was as a congressional observer and as a subject for medical experiments on space motion sickness. The space sickness he experienced during the journey was so severe that a scale for space sickness was jokingly based on him, where "one Garn" is the highest possible level of sickness.

While I wrote about Judy that applied to each of the other actual astronauts on the crew. Each extraordinary, and each virtually erased in favor of the dead "celebrity" supercargo.

[quote]... NASA was being very very careful with the entire story of the foam knocking fire retardant tiles off the fuselage. Very very few networks were speculating the worse outcome. They were not wanting to upset the families who still were in communication with the crew while they were on the mission. That was the difference.

R97, I commend the press for being equally cautious at the time. I remember back when the Shuttle program first started, NASA mentioned how critical those tiles were for re-entry. When tile damage was mentioned about Columbia during the mission, many of us knew it could be tragic.

Can't help to think that if a similar situation happens again, it'll be blared across the internet.

Thanks for this thread. Very interesting.