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An Extra Credit Question
Years ago, I was beginning as a student teacher in a middle school in Westchester County, New York. It was exam week for the kids, and since I was new in town, I was given the task of coming up with an extra credit question for the 8th grade American History class. It was about 11:30 a.m, almost lunchtime.
I came up with this: “Who is Christa McAuliffe?”
Not that far away, in the skies east of the Florida peninsula, the following conversation between Dick Scobee (CDR) and Michael Smith (PLT) was heard by Mission Control and the rest of the Challenger crew:
T+58…………..PLT….. Throttle up.
T+59…………..CDR….. Roger.
T+60…………..PLT….. Feel that mother go.
T+60………… Woooohoooo.
T+1:02…………PLT….. Thirty-five thousand going through one point five
(NASA: Altitude and velocity report, 35,000 ft., 1.5 Mach).
T+1:05…………CDR….. Reading four eighty six on mine.
(NASA: Routine airspeed indicator check.)
T+1:07…………PLT….. Yep, that’s what I’ve got, too.
T+1:10…………CDR….. Roger, go at throttle up.
(NASA: SSME at 104 percent.)
T+1:13…………PLT….. Uhoh.
T+1:13…………………..LOSS OF ALL DATA.
The State of the Union speech was postponed. President Reagan addressed the nation:
I wonder if today’s average eighth-grader could answer that extra credit question.
Published in History
They did not die in the moments that the shuttle disintegrated. The crew cabin, which is design to hold pressure against the vacuum of space, remained intact until it hit the sea. It was a long two minute of free fall for the occupants of the cabin. The folks on the mid deck could not see anything, nor communicate with the crew on the main deck, who could see outside and their fate.
I suspect the fate of the crew on the Columbia was kinder, since as soon as the wing root opened sufficiently burn through the spar, the aircraft when into a immediate and violent yaw which would have everyone on board black out immediately from the G forces before the cabin disintegrated.
Getting into and back from space is still a tough and unforgiving business.
I met Judy Resnik a few time casually at the University of Maryland. She in her pre astronaut period was working on her PhD in engineering. She was also a member of SWE (Society of Women Engineers). I had a few female friends, who were also members, and I found if far more fruitful of my study time going to their lounge and getting help than from the more libatious crew at ASME.
She let me know I was not in her league….. so not much conversation was had. To be honest she was 8/9 years my senior, so just a double dweeb (young and an engineer) for her ambitions.
Ditto. My second son was born in 1986. Jan was dropping me off at work on the day of the Challenger disaster because she had an appointment with her obstetrician and we had one car. We got into a fender-bender on the way to work (the other driver’s fault, totally). I was at work (McDonnell Douglas, supporting the Shuttle Program) an hour or so when my mom called to tell me my grandmother had died. I turned to the engineer behind me and said, “I hear trouble comes in threes, and so far today I have been in an auto accident and my grandmother died. I wonder what is next?” About two hours later I found out.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
a)
When I look at the bios of Space Shuttle astronauts, I don’t see übermenschen. I see people with a relatively varied set of post-secondary credentials. Most of ’em have science degrees, but not all. Most of ’em have masters degrees and above, but not all.
Are we saying that anybody with a B.S. or higher automatically qualifies as übermenschen?
Rather than fighting a mythos that you have to be an übermensch to qualify to be an astronaut, how about fighting the idea that qualifying to be an astronaut that automatically makes one an übermensch?
b)
The reason that “space plumbers” currently need to have advanced degrees is because space travel is still too expensive to send up dedicated plumbers. Economic necessity dictates that the folk who go up to the ISS have to wear many different hats, and that requires a generalized set of advanced skills. In other words, it’s easier to teach an advanced engineer how to do maintenance work than it is to teach a maintenance worker how to do advanced engineering.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
Also, the people that qualify tend to be the very driven high achievers.
And when you don’t really have sufficient missions to keep them all busy, and a clear path to how and whom get selected for the few rides that are available they tend to do bat guano crazy stuff….
I just asked the 21-year-old intern that sits across the aisle from me if she knew who Christa McAuliffe was.
Not only did she not know, she didn’t even know about the Challenger at all.
Or Columbia.
I’m old. Kill me now.
Edit: I just showed her the crew picture. She’d never seen it. Then I showed her a picture of the explosion. She’d never seen that either.
Just to give myself some perspective, I then asked her if she’d heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Nope.
World War II?
Finally got a hit on that one!
I know at least a couple of the emergency air packs were manually turned on, and the amount of air consumed correlates with the time for the cabin to hit the water.
But the recording of Smith saying “uh-oh” occurred before the stack broke up, because the radio transmission ended at that point.
There’s a “transcript” of an alleged recording of the crew from inside the cabin as it fell, but I’m told by sources that I trust not to BS me that it’s a fake.
Never mind astronauts. How many know who Ronald Reagan was?
That is pretty close to Nietzche’s definition of the ubermensch.
The 21-year-old intern does know who Neil Armstrong was. That made me feel better. I was pretty worried when I was asking her.
If she was Canadian she’d be Governor-General by now.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/08/21/incoming-governor-general-julie-payette-drops-fight-to-keep-divorce-records-sealed.html
I’m confident the fact that he was played by Ryan Gosling had nothing to do with it.
I confess I couldn’t have, either in 8th grade or 5 minutes ago.
My first (and last) teaching job out of college was in 1991, finishing out the year for a social studies teacher that had been activated with his National Guard unit for the Gulf War. On one test I had a question about who led the U.S. forces at the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. One kid in my class answered this question with a single word: “CUSTARD.” I counted the question wrong, and as fate would have it, he failed the test by the amount of points that one wrong answer cost him. He came up to me after getting his grade and tried to get me to change it, arguing that his answer to that question was correct. I told him that if he learned nothing else in my class, he would know that the U.S. cavalry was not led at the Little Bighorn by a guy named Custard. I probably would have been inclined to help the kid if he had tried his best, but he never paid attention in class, never took notes, and just tried to skate by with a barely passing grade.
I remember — I was in grad school in upstate NY, working on my dissertation; my daughter was 7, in school. my mom was a computer programmer for Grumman, worked launch backup, and I had grown up down the coast from Kennedy Space Center, watching the launches from the beach near our home.
I was in our computer lab, and one of my colleagues started making snarky comments about the Challenger blowing up — I had no idea and told him it wasn’t funny, he said he wasn’t joking, it had blown up. I was out the door so fast I barely had time to grab my bag. Because I knew the elementary school hype, the TVs in the classrooms, and my daughter watching something that meant so much to her beloved grandmother blow up before her eyes.
I imagine I was the only parent in Binghamton NY that day to pull a child out of school, go home, and have hot chocolate and snuggle. My mom was the only person from NASA who got any sleep that day — she had gotten off work, driven home, and waited in the car until the launch had reached the point after which they assumed everything was safe (moments before it exploded). then she went inside and went to bed. She didn’t know until she got up to go to work that afternoon/night.
My Binghamton colleagues were great people, but we were really from different worlds.
But it is not just the astronauts or engineers — NASA had collected amazingly skilled people into a critical mass, and when the space program collapsed they were just let go, floating to the 4 winds… the heat shields were made up of tiny panels hand sewn by local (mostly) women, who could make good money from their sewing skills, and be part of something amazing. When the Shuttles were decommissioned, they were let go. we may find better ways to do heat shielding — they certainly tried back then — but if we don’t those skills are gone. it was very helpful to build needed skills upon already existing sewing experience, which is not much in evidence any more. No-one is going to write up that piece of history.
Ok, first woman passenger. That’s even better. Contradict me again and I’ll call her “cargo.”
Nope. Sultan bin Salman Al Saud rode on STS-51-G. He had a B.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Denver, and an M.A. in Poli-Sci from the University of Syracuse. He was there to “represent” Saudi Arabia while the real astronauts launched a Saudi satellite.
Here’s the list of Payload Specialists prior to STS-51-L. Most of ’em were real scientists or engineers who were there to do a specific job or run a specific experiment. Some of ’em have, however, have more interesting bios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_specialist#Until_Challenger
If the average eighth-grader could answer it, doesn’t that mean it would be a really lousy extra credit question?
Her job on that flight was still more intensive than the Sultan’s was.
Neil Armstrong was not a military pilot.
Neil Armstrong had been a Navy pilot and saw combat in the Korean War. He became a NACA test pilot at least in part on the strength of that military aviation experience. As far as I can tell, Schmitt was the first NASA astronaut without any prior military service to fly in space.
My bad. I should have said, “not active duty military.”
Scott Crossfield was an X-15 astronaut, who was a civilian with prior military experience. So was William Dana, who got astronaut wings on the X-15 while a North American Aviation test pilot. He was also a DynaSoar astronaut. If you want Mercury-Germini-Apollo astronauts Elliot See was also a former naval aviator who became an astronaut after working as a civilian. He was part of the same astronaut class as Armstrong. He died in a flying accident prior to his first flight.