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Remembering Challenger
Twenty-nine years ago today I was wrapping up a class at the Navy’s Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Fla. Just before our lunch break, a Chief Petty Officer slipped in the back of the room and quietly said, “the Shuttle just exploded.”
About half of us laughed, because the thought of an space shuttle accident seemed ridiculous. Rocket and shuttle flights seemed routine to kids like us who had grown up after NASA’s early trial-and-error phase. A couple weeks earlier, a group of us traveled to Cape Canaveral to watch a routine Columbia launch in person.
When we turned around, the look on the CPO’s face showed he wasn’t joking. We all piled out of the classroom and looked to the east. A thick contrail rose into the bright blue sky, its ascent interrupted by a twisted, ugly bloom. It hung in the air for an hour and a half before dissipating.
Five hours later, it seemed the whole nation tuned in when President Reagan gave a televised address instead of the State of the Union that was scheduled.
Rewatching Reagan’s speech confirms the public’s blasé attitude toward the shuttle after 24 successful launches:
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
Reagan closed with one of his most famous lines: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'”
Where were you when it happened?
Published in General
I was working @ Goddard Space Flight Center on a science payload that was schedule to head down to the Cape for integration about a year or so later. We watched on NASA’s internal feed.
We were in stunned silence for the first few minutes knowing exactly what happened even though nothing was acknowledged on the voice feed (which is not the same as the mission control console loop) before someone remarked that “the odds have finally caught up with us”.
Yeah, we were doing dumber and dumber things with each mission. And the Galileo (61-G) and Ulysses (61-F) were coming up. Folks at JSC were calling them 61-Grenade and 61-Firecracker because they were so dicey.
Seawriter
Seawriter
We had the “dumber issue” on our side of the fence, having to tailor missions to the shuttle to justify an unsustainable launch rate (i.e. give you guys something to do and hopefully drive the cost per launch down). Do you know how hard it was to try and make some of the things we were designing “safe” enough to ride on a manned vehicle? Typically it overwhelmed any “savings” from the “free” ride on a shuttle.
I spent 18month doing design work on the COBE which was originally manifested for a polar shuttle launch. Once some serious eyes started looking at the mess that DoD was doing for a Vandenburg launch facility, that notion got scrubbed. That and the need for light weight SBR’s.
That was 18 month of career life flushed down the policy hole.
A couple of years after Challenger I worked on a proposal to sell engineering services to GSFC. I decided to tour the GSFC Visitor’s Center to see what approach would work. First thing I could see was Goddard Was Not Pleased with the Shuttle Program. Seriously Not Pleased. (Yes, it showed in the Visitor Center displays.)
As the pitch the team was going to make went along the lines of “we provided first-rate mission support to the most awesome spacecraft evah, the Space Shuttle, imagine the type of great support we will provide for your simple spacecraft.” (I am exaggerating a little, but not much.)
I convinced the senior guys running the proposal that would be a disaster. Instead we needed to emphasize our partnership with Goddard on the absolutely magnificent Delta booster (which GSFC was then lead center for), and . . . oh, by the way, if we could provide great mission support for a kludge like the Shuttle imagine what we could do with the great satellites GSFC operated.
They went with that theme. We won.
Seawriter
I remember seeing the news just as I was getting ready to walk to classes. I stuck around and watched some of the replays.
Interesting to contrast the rocket explosion that happened in Virginia just a few months ago. My kids and I were outside to watch the “fire in the sky” and also watching the live feed from NASA on my phone. As we watched the explosion, my kids were just disappointed to not see a real live rocket, but I was glad there were was no one on board.
Like EJHill, I saw it happen live. I live in Central Florida, about 60 miles west of the space center, and a bunch of us had gathered in the parking lot at work to watch the launch. The launches were routine, but still amazing, and we tried to watch them whenever we could. Launches from the Kennedy Space Center always head out over the Atlantic Ocean, and so from our vantage point, with the shuttle traveling almost directly away from us, it wasn’t immediately obvious that something catastrophic had happened, but it was very clear that something was wrong. We’d seen dozens and dozens of shuttle launches, and when we saw the solid rocket boosters fly off way too early — and more smoke than there should have been — we knew pretty quickly that something was different. One of the guys near me was listening to the launch over the radio through earbuds, and after a moment he said quietly, “It exploded.” We all just stared for a while, and then headed back to our desks. This was pre-Internet, so the only source of news at my desk was radio. Within half an hour I announced that I was going home so that I could watch the news on TV, and pretty much everyone else in my group did too.
It was actually worse than it sounds, because even at 109% throttle at Main-Engine Cut-Off the Orbiter would have been in an Abort-to-Orbit altitude. That meant those missions had no ATO option. You might have been able to do a Trans-Atlantic Abort (a TAL rather than a TAA – go figure), but if you had an engine failure at a point where you had too much energy to put down at the TAL site and too little for an Abort-Once-Around, you were going down in the Indian Ocean.
Well, that was not a worry for two reasons.
The first is the flames would be left behind you. Even in an RTLS you did not follow the same patch of sky during the fly-back portion, and even at the zero point the insulation would protect the Orbiter until it got out of the flames.
The second is the control system went through a singularity at the fly-back point. Theory said the divide-by-zero would be trapped out, but there were a lot of folks who figured the control system would just pack up and go home at that point. If so, the flame damage would not kill you – the Orbiter tumbling out of control would.
Nah. The real problem was they put in too small a diameter on the vent plumbing. If you got the Orbiter on the runway, the Centaur would still have a significant amount of fuel aboard when you stopped. That would be when the Orbiter cooked – because you were no longer leaving the hydrogen and oxygen behind you, and it would just dump around the stationary Orbiter and burn.
The Centaur upper stage was less a bad idea than a poorly executed one.
Seawriter
I was working rehabbing apartments and was installing a dishwasher. I had a boombox with the local Classic Rock station on. The morning DJ was actually a pretty sharp guy, fun, but capable of being serious if need be. (Thank goodness the universal buffoonery of today hadn’t taken over everywhere on the dial yet.) A song (can’t remember which) ended and the DJ said something like “You might want to turn your TV on. It appears that the shuttle has suffered a disaster of major proportions. He then went straight to the next song, which I think was Elton John’s “Rocket Man”.
I flipped the radio over to the 24-hour news station and left it there the rest of the day.