I was ten and watched it at home. We were out of school because of snow or widespread sickness, I can’t remember which, but I flipped over from the Beverly Hillbillies to watch the launch. We have a lot of teachers in my family, so watching Christa McAuliff die like that hit me particularly hard.
I remember the day so well. Jan. 28 was my mother’s birthday and she had died the previous summer.
I woke up depressed that day, and the day never got better.
I was at work, my first job after graduating from college. I was working in a drafting room, drawing diagrams of electrical cabinets on mylar with ink. It was quarter to 12. I was thinking about lunch, and the radio was on. They weren’t even broadcasting the launch live–such was the attempt at routineness. A few minutes before the noon news, they broke into the program to say that there had been an ‘incident’ at the launch. Then the news began. And it didn’t stop.
The next day, the Toronto Star had this editorial cartoon. I cut it out and stuck it in my sketchbook.
Home from school (2nd grade) recovering from surgery. Had odd premonition it’d happen.
Just finished a demo in the computer lab in college and getting 100%, which compensated for the nasty head cold. That faded away when walking into a classroom, I saw Dan Rather holding the Space Shuttle on the classroom TV. He was looking very serious, and I asked a friend of mine in the classroom what happen.
Gawd, that day sucked. And three days later, the first dark joke about the disaster was making the rounds. I still cringe when I hear it.
I was only three years old at the time, so I don’t remember it. It was my brother’s seventh birthday, and he remembers watching it on TV at home because he was too sick to go to school that day.
Jesus. Don’t sell that guy life insurance.
Judy Resnick was from my hometown and went to the high school I’d start at 18 months later. Many of my teachers had her as a student, and years before I had been on a conference call with her (and the rest of my second grade class – one of the teachers was her cousin). So as you can imagine, that plus the Teacher In Space program made it the talk of the town.
That day school was canceled because the bitter cold had busted some pipes (yes, really). I planned to watch the launch, but I overslept a bit. As soon as I flicked on the TV, before I could even process what I was seeing, my mom called me in tears. I spent the rest of the day watching the news coverage.
–Cliffy
I was a junior in high school. We were just about to start trig class when the PA system clicked on and the principal told us what had happened. I remember very clearly he said something like “it is feared there may be no survivors”; I thought immediately that unless they had parachutes, and I was pretty sure they didn’t, it was a given that there would be no survivors. Our math teacher picked up a piece of chalk, dropped it, and then asked us to please study quietly as he couldn’t teach just then. I don’t think we studied much but we were dead quiet.
When I got home I turned on the TV and watched whatever news coverage I could find until it sunk in.
I was in 8th grade, in Florida on the Space Coast. We went outside to watch the launch. When it blew up we just stared at the sky not quite understanding what had happened… it affected me a great deal, seeing it in person like that.
I was in the Navy and serving on the USS Ranger
It was a slightly unusual morning on the ship. The shuttle launch was getting extra coverage as the school teacher was going up with the Astronauts. I was always a space buff anyway and a bunch of us arranged to be in the shop and glued to the TV for the launch. We stared in horror at the scene that unfolded. It seemed impossible; it was too hard to understand what just happened. When realization finally settled in I was just numb the rest of the day. Well with one exception, some wise-ass that afternoon cracked the 7-Up joke and I without thinking punched him, dropped him, called him an ass and walked off. This was especially odd as I cannot think of another punch I threw as an adult. I don’t think I have and it was just an automatic reaction.
I was in grade four. Our teacher wheeled a TV into the class so we could watch the launch. When it exploded, I don’t think most of us really understood what just happened. We were all stunned.
I don’t remember the teacher discussing it with us, I do remember my parents telling me what happened and what it meant.
Although this may have been the public perception of the STS/Shuttle program, the reality is that all credible technical estimates of the composite reliability of the Space Transportation System (STS) gave the odds of catastrophic failure at between 1:50 and 1:100 launches which bounds the range for actual failures to date. This is in line with the Saturn-Apollo family (estimated at 1:50 to 1:75) and probably better than Titan-Gemini, Mercury-Atlas, and Mercury-Redstone (although I’m not sure that any quantitative risk assessments for the composite vehicle were even performed on those systems). The major problems with the STS were twofold; one is that because the STS was a unified propulsion system–Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) in the Orbiter Vehicle (OV), fed by liquid propellants in the External Tank (ET), with main boost provided by the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB)–it was much more difficult to modify the design to account for problems that were discovered during testing such as o-ring blowby, cracking in propellant lines going to the SSMEs, fractures in the high pressure turbopumps, falling ice debris damaging thermal protection, et cetera; the other was that due to the configuration of the Orbiter as an integrated heavy lift cargo vehicle and personnel return craft, there were and still are no viable escape modes during the bulk of the ascent phase, and none upon descent until the last few minutes before landing.
The design of the OV with the massive delta wing requiring extensive and delicate thermal protection was entirely driven by the need for cross range for a once-about polar orbit and return to launch site after deploying or recovering surveillance and weapon satellites. This was artificially driven by USAF requirements to launch from SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB and return to nearby Edwards AFB, even though the Air Force didn’t want to perform this mission using the STS and fought against the retirement of reliable ICBM-based expendable launch vehicles like Atlas, Thor/Delta, and Titan (to which it returned after the Challenger disaster). In reality, there was no reason to incorporate both heavy lift and (partially) reusable crew flight vehicle into one system; by the time the STS came to fruition, the United States had the Keyhole family of surveillance satellites that would record and beam back images rather than deploying film canisters like the older Corona family, and the United States has never had a coherent policy or workable technology for deploying space weaponry, the Outer Space Treaty notwithstanding.
The only reason that the STS was pressed forward in development were the perceived cost savings in combining all functions into one vehicle and the supposed reusability of the system–oh, and the fact that every major defense contractor had a piece of the system to spread the love around. In hindsight (and the foresight of many systems analysts) it would have been vastly more cost effective to develop the maturing Saturn family–especially the less-costly and more capable Saturn IB and the S-IVB–into a mass production line with a credible economy of scale. The S-IVB with a longer tank and uprated performance from an aerospike engine was actually proposed in a few different configurations of Phoenix-type SSTOs, and the Saturn V remains the most reliable super-heavy lift vehicle ever built. (The heaviest versions of the Soviet Energia rocket had more throw weight, but never flew.) The STS was a bastard child of political bedfellows, designed by a committee of blind men, and an answer to a question no one really asked.
It is a tragedy that fourteen people died in the Challenger and Columbia failures, but the even graver tragedy is that there was plenty of warning for both failure modes, which could have been averted had NASA Marshall not adopted (and forced upon their contractors) a combination of risk-adverse and risk-obtuse attitude, ignoring obvious problems and reclassifying anomalous behavior as nominal just because nothing had failed just quite yet. Allan McDonald’s Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster is a remarkably good retelling of the situation and is surprisingly unbiased (about the technical aspects, at least) given that McDonald, the director for the Morton-Thiokol produced SRBs at the time of the failure and was penalized by his employers for resisting the fatal launch of STS-51-L and speaking out about the known problems with the o-rings in cold temperatures during the Rogers Commission investigation. He also explains that the problem with ice and insulating foam debris falling from the cryogenic ET, which had been a concern from the very first launch of Columbia, made itself apparent in the STS-26 Return to Flight launch of Discovery, showing the worst debris damage to date and resulting in some design mods to the forward ramp on the ET which subsequently failed to stop ice from accumulating.
One nitpick of significance because it goes to appreciating the failure modes of the STS is that Challenger did not “explode” in any way, shape, or form. The right-side SRB had a significant leak through the field joint that cut into the ET, causing it to vent fuel and then fail structurally. This caused the ET to become partially detached from the OV, which resulted in a large shock from the thrust change and reoriented the OV in a way that caused aerodynamic forces to break a wing and part of the fuselage away from the OV main cabin. While the combination and combustion of leaked propellants occurred around the same timeframe, the resulting conflagration did not significantly damage the OV. The SRBs, despite dynamically breaking away from the ET structure and, in the case of one SRB flying end-over-end, survived intact until being destructed by the RSO about ten seconds before the end of action time. While what you see might look like an explosion, it was aerodynamic forces that tore the OV apart and make it unable to execute an abort mode like Return to Landing Site or Transoceanic Abort Landing.
Stranger
I was in fifth grade. We didn’t get to the see the launch itself (wasn’t it only on CNN and not the Big Three?) but a group of teachers were watching it in their lounge. We peeked through the blinds to see them. Although I wasn’t close enough to actually see what was on the TV or how the teachers acted, it became very quickly apparent something horrible had happened. So I’ll always associate Challenger with peeking through blinds.
Two things I also remember about Challenger:
–It was really the end of space exploration as a popular obsession. The Space Shuttle had really revived popular interest in the space program. It seemed everything aimed at little kids in the early 80s had a Space Shuttle theme. After the horror of that day, it quickly died off. Remember how little notice was taken when the Space Shuttle program ended recently?
–Not to be disrespectful, but does anyboy remember how quickly Challenger disaster jokes swept the country? I grew up on the West Coast, which means it exploded around 9am. I swore I heard astronaut jokes by the end of the day, and certainly they were common by the end of the week.
Yes, by early afternoon that day I heard a dumb joke. I was in San Diego back then. I mentioned my very out of character reaction above.
That “joke” was what I was alluding to. About three years before the launch I briefly met an shuttle astronaut in training while working on the Get-Away Special at Cal Poly, SLO. I got his name mixed up with one of the crew that died on the Shuttle (don’t ask me now; I honestly can’t remember what he even looks like) There were mixed feelings when I finally figured out it wasn’t him. I’m glad he didn’t die, but it didn’t really make me feel any better about the crew.
But I didn’t know that when someone cracked the joke two or three days after the explosion at college church group; I walked away too numb to respond.
Kudos to Stranger on a Train for his summary. The accident changed my view of NASA as a place to work for, particularly on the manned space program. The Roger’s report pointed out NASA’s systemic failure to deal with issues; that was the red flag that they lost the fire in their bellies, and unless we put together a long term plan of 20 years to go to Mars or Moon Bases, NASA’s world will always be subject to political incoherency.
Still, seeing (and hearing) the brick coming in at 50,000 feet and land about two minutes later at KEDW is one of the highlights of my life; you never forget the sonic boom-boom. Somehow, for the second landing, we talked our way past security on the base, and as an added bonus, got to see Chuck Yeager escorting a hot blond telling her (in his Tennessee drawl) what a wonderful job she had done. You don’t get see that kind of fun in private industry.
I was in third grade and it was stuffed animal day, which actually turned out to be a good thing because it was nice to have something comforting from home that day. We weren’t watching the launch live (has anyone mentioned that launches had become routine by that point?) but our teachers did wheel in a tv so we could watch the coverage afterwards. At some point we had “quiet time” to reflect on the events of that day. I’m sure our teachers discussed it with us, but I don’t remember that part. I do remember a girl named Heather being extremely upset though.
I don’t think our principal made any sort of announcement because the little kids were having class as normal.
It was obviously very sad and confusing. I was one of those kids who wanted to be an astronaut until that day. Up until that point, I thought being an astronaut was just about floating around and drinking Tang. The Challenger changed that for me.
i watched it happen. i live in the tampa bay area, across the state from cape canaveral. we went outside to watch for the shuttle(once they got high enough in the air we could see them from where we were). i was only 4, but i remember it very vividly. i specifically remember seeing the two clouds of smoke split and start to come back down. we went inside and the news anchors were visibly upset, and that’s when i realized something was very wrong, because the people on the news never got upset about anything. i think it is actually one of my earliest memories because i don’t remember many other things from when i was that age.
Question about your nitpick, Stranger-I heard that it was the impact on the ocean that killed the astronauts, NOT the “explosion”. Am I correct?
It is believed that at least one astronaut was alive and conscious after the breakup based on some emergency air supply packs being activated, as well as the position of some switches in the cabin. It is not known how many survived or how long they remained conscious. But it is probable that at least one astronaut survived until impact, although they may have been unconscious, especially if the cabin lost pressure during the breakup.
You’re talking about the Personal Egress Air Packs (PEAPs), which were intended to be used for an on-pad egress. Most of the PEAPs could not be reached by the astronauts in sitting position, as the packs were located (for the front seats) on the back of the seats, although it is just barely possible that astronauts in the rear seats could have activated the PEAPs for those in front of them. However, the cabin went into a flat spin once it broke free, and with the dynamics it is unlikely that an astronaut, even if conscious, could have released himself from the restraints and reached forward. More likely is that the activation dials on the PEAPs (and other switches in the cabin) shifted upon impact with the water or another dynamic event on the way down. In all likelihood the astronauts were either unconscious, or conscious but stunned and hypoxiated during descent. They certainly didn’t survive or feel the effects of the impact at a couple hundred feet per second.
Stranger