Dick Scobee
Ronald McNair
Christa McAuliffe
Ellison Onizuka
Michael J. Smith
Judith Resnick
Gregory Jarvis
Lest We Forget.
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in years past, I had a very-front-row seat for that. I’m not a terribly sentimental person, but it’s one of the few life events I have trouble speaking about without choking up.
I was on the Space Shuttle Support Team until I took a new job in April, 1985. I still remember the day I came to work and one of my coworkers said, ‘The Space Shuttle blew up.’ 
And I didn’t even hear about it for a couple of days.
What were the circumstances behind that? (See footnote)
I have long believed that this mission would never have happened had it not been for the whole Teacher in Space program, or at least would have been further delayed.
Several years later, I read somewhere - and it was a reliable source - that the astronauts’ bodies were transported from one holding area to another in garbage cans in the back of a pickup truck. I cannot find this online, nor can I remember for the life of me where I read that, but I find it believable. 
Footnote: My brother didn’t see any 9/11 footage until the next day. He was at work, and went straight from there to dinner at home (his wife didn’t have the TV on because she didn’t want to scare their kids) and then to a concert with a neighbor, for whom they already had tickets and established that the show was still on. I’d never previously heard of Bela Fleck, but have since and he’s quite a talented musician.
What is the legacy of the Challenger Disaster? Yes, we should not forget those that were lost, but did the event deal a death-blow to the shuttle program? Did it impact other space programs positively, or negatively? What about NASA, how were they viewed afterward, as well as space exploration in general?
33 years later we have a different kind of space program altogether, ISTM. Focus now seems to be on un-manned probes, space telescopes, and more practical uses of space (GPS, weather surveying, how to clean-up space debris) as opposed to manned missions. The International Space Station does not get much love these days, and China just landed on the moon to prove that they…well, that they can. Does our current path on space exploration and use result from that day in 1986?
Yeah, do tell. I found out, and watched it on TV, minutes after it happened.
“The Chinese lunar orbiter Chang’e 1 executed a controlled crash onto the surface of the Moon on 1 March 2009. The rover mission Chang’e 3 soft-landed on 14 December 2013, as did its successor, Chang’e 4, on 3 January 2019.”
Shuttle missions had become semi-routine, to the point where they were usually only mentioned in passing. The “Teacher in Space” thing led to lots of extra publicity; in the end, the shuttle program was suspended and the next flight happened about two years later.
Things were already starting to wind down by the time of the Columbia disaster in 2003. I later worked with a woman whose husband was, at the time, in the Texas National Guard, and he found, shall we say, something. Out of respect for the person, I won’t say who or what it was, but he had PTSD and had to get counseling on top of the debriefing that is required for anyone who experiences something like this. One thing the searchers found that wasn’t publicized was that they actually found 9 bodies in the debris field, not 7; the two extra bodies turned out to be victims of a serial killer that was in the region, and neither had even been reported missing. :eek:
I found out about it at work, because a co-worker had a radio on her desk. Another co-worker saw it on a TV during lunch, and he came back and said, “There is no way in hell anyone could have survived that explosion.”
I was a student in Quebec, studying for mid-terms with no tv or radio. Wasn’t that close to the francophone students in the house, and the one other anglo also didn’t have a tv or radio, and was also studying, so not much chatter.
Can’t remember when I heard about it - a couple of days? And, since no tv, I don’t think I actually saw the footage for some time afterwards - maybe a month?
The lack of tv really diminishes the scope of the memory. If you see, live on tv, a horrific accident that kills several people, it’s more likely to stick in your memory than being asked “Est-ce tu as entendu que le navette a explosé?” as you go into the exam hall.
Long time ago and all fuzzy now in my memory, but that’s what I think happened.
I was 16 and my brother and I watched it live. When things started to go awry we were confused and kept saying “Is that supposed to happen?”. The whole thing is burned into my brain.
Off topic but it always reminds me of when Elvis died. I was 7 and we were at the beach which was full of other beachgoers. Suddenly all the kids noticed that all the adults were crying and talking quietly and seriously. It was such a weird experience that it, too, is burned into my brain.
I was a high school at the time, in physics class as it were, and one of the other teachers stuck her head in the door and said the space shuttle had blown up. We had a TV in the room and tried to tune in the news but couldn’t get a good signal.
I remember Peter Jennings on ABC and they just kept rerunning the tape over and over. My mother thought it was important enough to tape so for a while there was a VHS of it but I suspect it got recorded over with Doctor Who at some point soon after. I might have to look for it next time I am over there just to see.
For an interesting read, try Richard Feynman’s “Personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle”. The opening paragraph is pretty sobering when you think about how often people throw odds around without really understanding what they mean:
Freshman in HS when this happened. Our school was building a science center building and named it after Christa McAuliffe. It was a prep school and I’m surprised it’s not changed to honor someone like Dick Cheney. But at least that’s still there.
Raising a glass to Ron McNair. to all of them, actually, but the others tend to get lost in all the fanfare about McAuliffe. Ron gets special recognition from me because I knew him, and co-authored two papers with him. when I heard the news on the shuttle “crash” (as they were reporting it) that morning on my car radio on my way in to the University, I was devastated.
One of these days I want to visit Lake City, SC and leave him a tribute.
McAuliffe had the planetarium in Concord, NH named after her, until they did a major renovation and rebuild, and decided to also honor another NH space pioneer. It’s now the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, honoring Alan Shepard as well as Christa McAuliffe
One legacy of sorts is the PEPCON disaster, which killed two and injured hundreds more. PEPCON made the fuel used in the shuttle SRBs, and they kept making it (and stockpiling it) while the shuttle fleet was grounded. after two years, there was a fire that resulted in a series of kiloton-scale explosions, flattening the factory outside of Las Vegas and producing a blast wave that shattered windows and damaged structures as far as three miles away.
Clearly the Challenger disaster did not deal a death blow to the shuttle program, seeing as they continued to fly for another 25 years after Challenger - 15 years longer than originally planned. My recollection is that NASA’s reputation took a hit when the circumstances leading to the disaster became public; I remember my dad describing NASA’s attitude as having gone from “can-do” in the days of Apollo to “can’t fail” in the days of the shuttle program. However, at the time it was expected that NASA would learn from the disaster, as engineers have throughout history, and become the better for it.
AIUI, the thing that killed the STS program was cost: there was PR value in putting astronauts into space using US-owned hardware, but it was cheaper to buy seats on the Russian-built Soyuz missions, and to use other US- and Russian-made vehicles for launching hardware. So instead of replacing the aged-out orbiter fleet with new orbiters using the same 35-year-old design, NASA made the fiscally sensible decision to end the STS program and put people and hardware into space using more cost-effective means.
The best documentary I recall seeing about the STS program aired on the Discovery channel in the mid-1990s; if you have 90 minutes to kill, I recommend watching it. You will get a sense of all the man-hours that went into taking a just-landed orbiter and prepping it for its next flight*. It’s not like flying a 747 across the ocean, where they basically just restock it with food and fuel and send it on its way. Every little thing on that orbiter got inspected by a team of people, and in many cases re-inspected by another independent team. Among other things, every thermal tile got inspected, many got replaced; every windshield panel got inspected for micrometeoroid impacts and polished or replaced. All of that refurbishing activity ate up money in a way that single-use rockets do not.
*In that documentary, take special note of the “oh my god” post-touchdown sway at 4:06. :eek:
One of the most affecting editorial cartoons I ever saw was just the helmets of all seven astronauts, with their names listed underneath. The caption was a quote from Thucydides.
"But the bravest are surely those with the clearest vision of what lies ahead, glory and danger alike.
And yet notwithstanding, they go ahead."
RIP.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, not exactly. NASA continued to use the STS after the LOCV failure with Columbia because it was the only vehicle capable of delivering modules to complete ISS assembly. Of the 22 post-Columbia missions, 18 were ISS assembly flights, 3 were ISS logistics and crew rotation, and only one was a contingency Hubble Space Telescope servicing (which was initially rejected as too risky and/or expensive). NASA moved to Russian Soyuz flights for astronaut rotation because they had no vehicle, as the STS program was shutdown to free up funding for Constellation and later Space Launch System development, including modification to the Vehicle Assembly Building and ground support equipment.
SLS has already cost over US$7B with not even a test launch until mid-2020, and an estimated cost of US$35B through 2025 with a flight rate of not more than two flights per year. A simple amortization gives a per-flight cost of over ~US$3.5B. It isn’t entirely fair to break up the cost in that way since a lot of the costs are overhead and labor that have to be maintained even though there are currently no flights but even generous assumptions still have the SLS costing nearly twice as much as the STS per flight, albeit with substantially more payload capacity to LEO and a very different mission capability.
The Commercial Crew Program a.k.a. Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) funded efforts from Boeing (CST-100/Atlas V), SpaceX (Crewed Dragon 2/Falcon 9), and Sierra Nevada (Dream Chaser/Atlas V) but all have seen significant delays, setbacks, and redesigns, and none are practically expected to fly a crewed flight until near the end of 2019 or after. Commercial crew has cost over US$8B to date, and will have half the crew capability of STS, so it’s going to require a pretty good flight rate (6-8 fligts a year between the systems) with a low operating cost to actually be comparable to even the expensive Shuttle program, and nobody expects it to be even competitive with buying seats on Soyuz…but the US doesn’t want to be hamstrung by being dependent upon Russian flights to access the ISS, even though the station will probably operate for only another 5-6 years under the current agreements.
The other points, and particularly the PEPCON disaster that occurred due to unplanned stockpiling of aggregate ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, are entirely correct.
Stranger
On a sort of side note, it’s fascinating, looking online at all the remembrances of the disaster, what a remarkably large number of people claim to have seen it live - which of course isn’t possible. One might have seen it live if they were at school, or among the still few households with CNN if they were home watching on a workday, but most people were not/did not, and it wasn’t run live on any major network. I would guess that out of every twenty people who claim to have watched it live, 19 did not.
That’s not because people are dishonest, it’s because memories like that just aren’t reliable over time. The disaster was run a billion times on TV afterwards, and in time, your brain decides you saw it live.
A few days ago I watched a video in which Barbara Morgan, the backup “teacher in space” candidate for Christa McAuliffe, was attending the launch of Challenger. The camera catches her excitement as she watches Challenger climb into the sky. There’s a brief cheer from her and others when an expanding cloud of smoke appears at T+73 seconds - maybe this is SRB separation? - and then a slowly dawning realization among the spectators that something has gone horribly wrong.