Dont cha just love having your own comment he-peated back to you?
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This was one of the defining media events of my life. In a series. Sandoz, Exxon Valdez, Challenger, Chernobyl. It all became a blur of catastrophic events.
I think of this time fondly nowadays.
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Well, obviously, it’s only hearsay until that happens.
(/s)
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Rocketdyne built the Shuttles’ Main Engines. Working at Rocketdyne at that time, I did not watch the disaster as it unfolded… and neither did anyone else in our >100 employee test organization. Previously, it was our unwritten policy to roll out a large monitor onto our largest open test floor and, as a single group, watch Shuttle launches; we all supported SSME through all phases of build, so our interest was very strong. The novelty of previously successful launches eventually wore off leading to a business-as-usual complacency and the group viewings evaporated. We heard about the disaster a few minutes after it occurred from the SSME Fuel Turbopump gang at our location in Canoga Park. Protocol led to a three-week stand-down at our site (and very likely elsewhere) while the incident was being investigated. Our very vocal group watched all subsequent launches during which you could hear mutterings and shouts of “Fucking Thiokol” and comments directly aimed at the solids, such as, “C’mon, you fuckers! Get off!” along with collective sighs of relief once the solids were safely detached and away from the External Fuel Tank. Grief mixed with extreme anger. Not a healthy mix.
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The really depressing thing about this is that yeah, the SRB issue was on Thiokol… but it could have been you guys. It could have been anyone. The cultural lack of safety issues at NASA and contractors meant it was a problem that could have happened with any supplier. And then, when you had the Colombia Accident Investigation Board come to the conclusion that we didn’t learn from Challenger but for a few launches after the return to space post-Challenger… it just is sad.
I wouldn’t have been cussing those other guys. I’d have been worried sick the whole time.
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Maybe it was because I was already in high school but I just didn’t experience this as any more traumatic than any other tragic news event. Horrible things with massive fatalities were in the news every day (just off the top of my head a couple years earlier was the Lebanon barracks bombing, the Bhopal disaster, and epically large civilian airline disasters seemed to happen every couple of years) Certainly small potatoes compared to thinking that every day might be the day the nukes fly.
I think this has a lot to do with it. A portion of kids are always going to roll their eyes at whatever adults think is just so seriously important and sacrosanct. While I was certainly a big space exploration booster, even I was a little cynical about the teacher thing, that it was a little gimmicky.
This album found it’s way onto the nightly Album Preview at the local college radio station:
When it was time to flip the album over, instead of just listing the songs on side 2 the DJ went on a rant about how shitty the album was and you should stop listening (I actually kinda liked it, and was taping it). But whenever people talk about trollies as some kind of new online phenomena I think of this cover.
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Something I learned later that seemed counter intuitive as a kid, the solid rocket boosters were just to give it an extra bit of lift at the first part of the flight. The Shuttles main engines were what produced the most thrust and fired throughout the whole launch. But being as they were “hidden”, as a kid one tends to focus on the big solid rockets on the side.
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If I had been in a different stage of life, this would have been different, you are right
There were some catastrophic events which did register before. Bhopal influenced my perception of environmental issues, but Seveso had been much closer, and the discussion of the “Seveso toxin” came very close in 1984 when a factory in Hamburg was closed due to massive contamination.
Challenger would have been just one of many if the others wouldn’t have happened so quickly afterwards, hadn’t been so extraordinarily well covered on TV, and would have directly influenced every day. Sandoz, and Chernobyl, were affecting us. IRL. Environmental issues were already driving public discourse before, now, there was a direct and immediate consequence.
The ExxonValdez came on top of that, as one of the largest environmental disasters basically televised as it was unfolding. That was new, and formative. (As was the coverage of the Gulf War, later, but in a different way.)
For us, in Wester Germany, medial coverage was probably ten years behind on the US in style, frequency and density. That’s at the basis of my perception, I believe…
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We must be about the same age. I was in second year of my undergrad, and had been working in a bar late at night and dropped in to see some stoner friends on the way home (it must have been about 2.00am). I was the only one who’d seen earlier launches and had lobbied the others to watch it. I remember by oldest friend asking “was that meant to happen?” and not having any answer.
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Actually the SRBs contributed more than 70% of the thrust at takeoff. The Shuttle main engines were magnificent pieces of engineering, but comparatively puny compared to the boosters.
Yeah at take off, but don’t the main engines burn for much longer and overall most energy output? That is what that huge orange tank is for. I guess I should look up the numbers…
I know they stopped painting the tank white because of the weight savings!
I remember them gathering all four of the inter-related classes I was in at the time to watch this in one classroom. I recall the stunned, horrified silence in the classroom for several minutes before we all got sent back to our individual classes pretty quickly.
Rocket nozzle shape is designed for the density of the surrounding atmosphere it will be operating in. The Shuttle main engines were designed for greatest efficiency in the rarer atmosphere at high altitude and the vacuum of space. Although they are firing the whole time during launch their lower efficiency in the lower atmosphere necessitated the SRBs at launch.
The O-ring issue was communicated to Sally Ride via thiokol engineers. Knowing that she would not be taken at her word (despite being an accomplished scientist, misogyny ruled) she passed the info on to General Kutyna, who posed the leading question about the effect of cooling on gaskets to Feynman, who was of course credited with the deep insight.
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It was my senior year. A few months later i was in med school and for quite a few years had no time go pay attention to the world at all. 57 and feeling much, much older right now.
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Yeah at take off, but don’t the main engines burn for much longer and overall most energy output?
I think this is where we need a proper rocket engineer who can work through the rocket equation on our behalf.
The ET has to be huge because liquid hydrogen is only about 7% the density of water which means you need prodigious volumes to feed those amazing engines which burned for round about eight minutes and contributed the majority of the acceleration.
O-ring blow-by and erosion was a well-known problem, observed in multiple previous launches. The relationship between severity and temperature was clear, and the pending shuttle launch was the coldest ever.
Thiokol engineers spent hours the night before trying to convince NASA officials not to fly that day. NASA decided that since conditions were within design specs, they would go ahead and launch.
In fact, a stuck emergency-eyewash fountain on a launch-tower upper floor had been drifting a cold spray down the side of the rocket, where it wrapped around the doomed booster segment, chilling it well below ambient temps — and also well below design limits. This is plainly visible on the Ice Team’s thermal-camera images. If only the Thiokol engineers had had that data, they could have overruled NASA’s managers, refusing to operate outside design specs.
AFAIK, there was never any “cover-up.” Details like the eyewash fountain took a while to come to light, but it was clear from the beginning that management “go fever” had foolishly overruled prudent engineering advice.
Feynman did a good job showing the hearing committee exactly what “reduced elasticity of elastomeric seal” really meant in layman’s terms, but he wasn’t the one who figured it out.
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I was in grade 10, but home sick that day by myself. The news stations were all repeating that clip, and I must’ve watched it a couple dozen times that day.
A few years later, I was in first-year engineering. One course was basically where greybeard engineers come in and tell us “war stories” so we get a feel for the link between what we’re studying and what we’d be actually doing.
One speaker had been an aeronautical engineer at NASA in the 60s, working on solid-fuel rockets. He sketched a diagram of a booster rocket, and explained exactly how those o-rings work. And how they failed regularly; about one in every 10 launches.
The space shuttle boosters used two concentric o-rings - one inside the other - in case one failed. But if the failure rate was the same, it’d be one in every 100 launches, instead of one in every 10.
“I worked on these, and you couldn’t get me onto the shuttle for love nor money.”
Eye-opening.
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Your post made me watch the video. I didn’t know that.
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Did you watch the video? Or read my comment, which you replied to?
He didn’t figure it out. Someone told him.
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