This is very disturbing

Great Debates
1

I apologize in advance if this has been discussed, but I couldn’t get the damnable Search thing to work for me tonight.

Anyway, observing an anniversary – 28 January 86, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded roughly 74 seconds after lift-off.

Having seen the explosion in dozens of videos, it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone could allege that the crew might have survived long enough to realize their fate. Nonetheless, I remember the debate raging in numerous forums at the time.

This evening I ran across an alleged ‘transcript’ which purports to demonstrate that the crew did indeed realize, in horrific detail, what was to be. The site of this ‘transcript’ is not well-known for the balanced nature of its reportage, but the fact that they would post this ‘document’, especially today, gave me pause.
www.rotten.com/today/jan/challenger.html

Thoughts?
Dr. Watson
“Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.” – Minna Antrim

2

This has been debunked approximately sixteen trillion times…

Why do people make up crap like this? I can’t articulate it right now, but somehow - it figures.

3

Cooper: what’s been debunked - the transcript (which to my mind seems obviously a hoax) or the idea that the astronauts might have known what was about to happen?

If the latter, someone ought to tell Cecil to update his column on the subject.

4

Uncle Cecil addressed this in a previous column.

For more info, see the extended notes on Challenger-related news items.

The only official transcript of the Challenger voice recordings is posted on NASA’s web site on their history page.

Parts of the official accident report are also available online: online.

5

They know the crew lived because oxygen was used. According to the history channel anyway.

6

I thank ye gentlemen. This was my first experience of this alleged ‘transcript’, and again I apologize for the rehash of an obviously played out subject. Yer links have provided a rapid, if superficial, education.

I can’t help but note that in Cecil’s column on the subject, some nine years after the event, even the skeptic’s skeptic made reference to the possibility that the crew could have survived for up to 2 1/2 minutes after the explosion.

My own onboard long-range crap-detector lit up like Baghdad on a bad night when I saw the alleged ‘transcript’, but in remembering this anniversary only too vividly, even the possibility of a mere 2 1/2 minutes of realization seems too disturbing to bear.

I’m happy to accept, if only for reasons of peace-of-mind, that the transcript itself is a fraud. On the other hand, I’ll not be as pleased to accept an argument from NASA that they lacked the technology or desire to keep their own ‘black box’ operational in the event of the very type of accident the recorder was designed to survive.

I’d make an unlikely conspiracy theorist, but my crap-detector is lighting up at both ends now, and I expect we’ve not heard the end of this story.

Dr. Watson
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson

7

Heck, everyone knows that the last words spoken aboard Challenger were, “What does this button do?” :wink:

8

What I find more disturbing is that people have spent much time and money trying to determine the exact fate of a handful of people, who all knew there was risk involved in their decision, but almost completely ignore the last minutes of the 88 people who died yesterday returning from vacation. I’m sure their last minutes were horrific.

Shuttle missions were grounded for years after the Challenger accident, but I don’t know of one flight that was cancelled yesterday. For that matter, test pilots have been dying in high-risk missions for many years, but there is little public outcry or concern.

Why was this accident different?

9

Perhaps foremost is the fact that they didn’t know what had caused the Challenger disaster.

Now, I grant you they may not always know immediately what caused the airline disaster, but there is a well-established procedure for investigating the crash and reaching conclusions.

In the case of the thousands of commercial flights going right now, there is a high degree of confidence that each will end safely, with the only bad experience being an obnoxious seatmate or a bad in-flight movie.

In the caes of the shuttle explosion, on the other hand, we hand only a handful of previous experiences to guide us, and no real certainty of what had gone wrong.

  • Rick

(An aside: I attended some of the open hearings on the Challenger disaster, and met one of my personal heroes, Dr. Richard Feynman. Dr. Feynman was the one who figured out that the rubber used in the O-rings was not elastic at freezing temperatures, and that O-ring failure caused the blowback).

10

frolix:

It was on the boob tube, which gives it official late-20th century sanction as Reality.

Uke

11

Actually, many of the scientists had severe qualms about the O-rings’ ability to function in very cold weather. Even before the launch they argued that cold weather had resulted in O-ring problems previously. Tufte, in one of his books (Visual Display of Quantitaive Information?) claims that if they had done a little clearer chart of the connection between cold weather and O-ring problems could have convinced those in charge to delay the launch.

12

Perhaps it (Challenger) was treated differently (right or wrong) because of national pride, cost, new technology, media hype.

The STS represented US technology to the world. It was very expensive (and still is) to produce & support, a failure costs a lot of $$ in both direct and indirect costs. Failures in a new technology are more salient and receive more overt attention, witness what happened with the Meteor in GB at the dawn of jet powered flight. Media hype … what more can I say about that.

You can also continue the analysis and ask why no one reports the 6 people that died in the head on collision in Assboink yesterday.

Not to belittle anyone’s loss of course.

13

Perhaps the difference is that airplanes have been around for a long time, we know what works and what doesn’t, we know what makes them blow up and/or crash, and we know what happens when they do. The space shuttle is a new and limited vehicle. We don’t have very many, we don’t have much experience with things going wrong, and we’d never had one blow up or crash before, and didn’t know what to expect or how to react.

Also, the whole nation was watching the prelude to and launch of that particular mission and the people wanted closure. If we’d been following the lives of 88 people up to the point they got onto an airliner, and then watched it take off, then saw it crash, there would probably be a lot more coverage and concern over that, too.

For me, the challenger thing was the first time I ever watched someone die with my own eyes (not even on tv, I was actually there). It made an impression, and it did matter to me to find out as much as I could about what happened.

14

Nice to see you again, Opal.

To everyone who wants to know, I think the main reason this disaster was so disturbing is all the hype surrounding Christa McAuliffe, the first “ordinary” person to try to fly into space and because it showed how wrong a trusted authority can be. She was going to represent EVERY Joe and Jill who ever wanted to go into space but couldn’t become a professional astronaut. And NASA and Reagan assured us all there was some risk, some danger, but don’t worry, they’ll get back safe and sound, our guys ‘n’ gals can handle anything that happens. So the public identified with Christa, vicariously felt like WE were making the trip and the assurances of a grandfatherly President and a bunch of white-coated scientists and technicians told us all would work out as planned.

Do all of you now see how shocking it was to see that fireball and cloud of smoke, to see that pristine white-and-black vehicle shatter into a million pieces? One of US had just died in front of our eyes and it meant that Grandfather Reagan and the guys in white lab coats were wrong, wrong, wrong. Either they had lied to us about the risk or they had not really known what they were doing after all. One does not want ignorance or deception or incompetence from one’s leaders and savants.

And then after the disaster, there was so much attention placed on the McAuliffe family and on Christa’s students, wondering how they were going to bear up under the grief and shock, with very little attention placed on the families and friends of the other six victims, as if their grief was less important because the six were professional astronauts, as if their families should have expected them to die some day. (Some of this oversight has been corrected. In the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, there is an exact, scaled-down replica of the Space Shuttle in honor of Ellison Onizuka, the first Japanese-American astronaut. But what does it say about our country, our society, our culture that this monument to a fallen hero is located near the entrance to a shopping mall?)

And then there was the mistaken belief that flying in space was the one thing we Americans knew how to do right. No American astronaut had ever died while in flight (Apollo One was a fire on the launch pad; it never got off the ground) and the worst space disaster in American history (Apollo 13) turned out all right. This was something we knew how to do.

How shocking, then, to be forced to consider that we couldn’t even do THAT right.

It was a blow to our confidence, to our belief in ourselves, even to our faith. “God doesn’t want us to fly in His domain. That’s why He knocked the Shuttle out of the sky.” That’s what my boss told me. She actually compared it to the Tower of Babel. (And some of you wonder why I have trouble with Christians.)

And, yeah, crashes like yesterday’s are, sad to say, expected, common, ordinary. Space Shuttle flights are still something new, uncommon, extraordinary. The number of human beings who have flown in Earth orbit probably could all be placed into one Boeing 747 with seats left over.

I don’t know how to end this. I do know this, though: It’s morbid curiosity to wonder what they experienced. It’s tacky. And those who pander to those instincts ought to be made to take a “Challenger flight” of their own.

And I’m in a generous mood.

>< DARWIN >
__L___L