Space Shuttle Mission Archives – Challenger, January 28, 1986
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
I dial. It rings. It connects. There's staticky air, like a radio signal that is quiet, nobody talking on it, but the mic is hot. Suddenly a voice says, "Roger, go at throttle up." Then there is a click, a strange click sound, which to this day I shudder to recall. A loud clicking sound like someone turned off a switch. A very long pause, and then the voice of NASA saying something like "well obviously we've had a malfunction"... and over the next minute or three it becomes clear that the shuttle exploded within 5 seconds of my dialing Dial-A-Shuttle. I heard the "Roger, go at throttle-up" and ... the click.
I've never forgotten the moment.
In other words, at least some of the astronauts may have survived the initial explosion, although they likely lost consciousness in the two minutes and forty-five seconds before the crew compartment hit the water.
It's very much worth reading, although some of the dialog can be a little dry.
Appendix F ( http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm ) was authored by Richard Feynman and provides a flavour for the rest of the report, if you don't have time to read it all.
I remember seeing the explosion, and the TV being turned off rather quickly.
Always thereafter, when watching a Shuttle launch, I would be (at least figuratively) holding my breath between the "go at throttle up" call and SRB separation.
Yet the gods do not give lightly of the power they have made,
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid,
Though a nation watched them falling, yet a world could only cry,
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky!
- From "Fire in the Sky," written by Jordin Kare
How can we, as engineers, learn from this so that similar things don't happen on our watch?
It's so easy for truth to be lost when communicating between widely disparate "levels" in large organizations, but more often than not there is a reckoning when perception and reality come into sharp conflict, and reality will always win.
Still stings to think about it.
I sort of expected better space craft by now.
Do the space shuttles continue to evolve had their been no accidents?
The STS was supposed to be a first generation system, to fly for 10-15 years before being replaced. By now we should be on a third-gen STS, having learned the lessons of the first few. Had that happened, they might have a pretty good system by now. But NASA got locked into a flawed 1st gen system by over-buying the first run out of over-confidence, by politics, inertia, etc. (Part of the problem was that the orbiters were designed for 100 flights, so NASA wanted to get something like that out of them. But the flight rate ended up so far below expectations that the darn things just wouldn't wear out.) I guess it's just as well; NASA doesn't really have the structure for cost-effectiveness. STS v3 might have been good enough to stifle the emergence of something like SpaceX, which has a much better shot, long-term, of really making spaceflight work.
Falcon 9 should be about 90% reusable within the next few months (the first stage will be reused, the second stage will be thrown away, but the vast bulk of the rocket is in the first stage) and Dragon 2 should be reusable from the start.
It should also be a lot safer since the entire Dragon 2 capsule can fly away from the rocket if it starts to explode. If a Challenger-like scenario happened there somehow, everyone would most likely survive, and you'd just need a new $50 million (roughly) rocket for the next shot.
Progress has been slow, but it's still there.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Challenger-Launch-Decision-Technol...
I told her I thought a ride in the shuttle would be a fun birthday present.
"You'll never get me up in that thing," she said. "I've seen the plans."
I also remember New Scientist running a feature with a ball-park statistical risk assessment of the entire program, which estimated that if nothing changed two vehicles would be lost before the program ended.
So... tragic. But predicted. And so nearly avoidable.
If it is colder than 50 degrees fahrenheit outside, do not launch. IAO would say: "what temperature is it outside? 50 degrees?" Runs over to the abort launch button.
Reading the Challenger O-ring process and its reduction in perceived danger as it progresses up the management ladder reminds me of reading Tufte's discussions on the Columbia failure (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...).
The engineering for parts is amazing, but it is so easy to make things "within specification." The section where a part was reduced from 1-R critical but with redundancy to 1 without redundancy juxtaposed against the blow-by that occurred on multiple occasions strikes at the heart ethics.