Challenger Requiem
Published on Jan 28, 2006 at 7:32 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under NASA, space exploration, space shuttle.
OK, so this one will show my age somewhat.Twenty years ago today, a group of graduate student friends were heading to lunch. We had met in church. One was a chemist, one a soil scientist, one a biochemist, and one a physics student. I had known that there was a shuttle mission schedule for the day. However, in those days, very little press attention went to spaceflight. NASA had a dream of making spaceflight so common that it was no big deal. They had almost succeeded, with a record number of shuttle flights going up. As I was growing up, every space mission was greeted with a copious amount of news coverage. The launches preempted hours of TV, if not most of the day. Eventually, it got to where a launch got only two to three hours of live news coverage. But so many shuttles were being launched that it was no longer news. Eventually, networks only broke into regular programming about 30 to 60 seconds before launch, and then returned to regular programming within a couple minutes of launch — hardly more than a commercial break. By 1986, though, shuttle missions didn’t normally even rate that. Rather, you might get a 30 second spot on the evening news showing the launch. The missions were very routine, and nothing unusual ever happened. I had thought that this mission might be different, given that they were doing a major PR thing: a teacher was going into space to conduct lessons from orbit. She was not the first person not connected to the actual mission to ride along into space aboard a shuttle. Earlier a congressman went into space. At a cost of over $10,000 per pound to put something into orbit, it was a rather expensive luxury. Alas, before heading to meet my friends for lunch, I stopped off at the lab prep area to see if there was any news coverage. No. Nothing.
So, I met my friends and we walked over to a place near campus called the Universal Grocery. Nominally, it was a convenience store run by Asian immigrants, with a lot of specialty food items in addition to the normal convenience store things. However, at mid-day, they had a lunch special. It was Chinese food. You got rice, an entree, an eggroll, and a drink for about $3, as I recall. It was pretty decent, and a lot of students went there around lunch time. Anyway, as we walked in, the owner and his workers, rather than manning the lunch line and cash register, were clustered around the TV over the dining area. All the diners were glued to the TV. No one was saying much except in whispers. We asked what was wrong. Someone said that something had gone wrong with the Space Shuttle. They had had a major malfunction. Not knowing yet what had happened, I was imagining various plans that NASA had for launch aborts. A failure during initial ascent was followed by the shuttle swinging back to the landing facility at KSC immediately after solid rocket separation. This was dangerous, because you would have to land on the landing strip as you came in, regardless of wind direction. So, there were wind restrictions placed on launch. A main engine failure later resulted in the shuttle making an emergency reentry and landing at a backup facility in Spain. An engine failure later would result in the shuttle continuing into orbit, but into a much lower than planned orbit. This could have resulted in too low of an orbit for the mission, and the shuttle would then land at the first opportunity that it again passed over either Edwards AFB or KSC. Very soon, I realized to my horror that none of those options were available. The shuttle had blown up, and pieces were raining down into the Atlantic off Florida.
Later, it was determined that a seal on one of the solid rocket boosters had burned through, allowing a stream of flame to penetrate the external fuel tank. This tank was filled with two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. It blew up. Ironically, the shuttle Challenger likely survived that event. However, the bottom of the orbiter was violently thrown to the side, and aerodynamic stresses then ripped the orbiter to bits. The crew compartment remained intact, with the astronauts still alive inside. Some minutes later, they died when the crew compartment slammed into the water.
An investigation into the accident found several contributing factors. The design of the solid rockets was not as robust as it could have been. The seals were then redesigned. Also, the launch criteria were not met, but the shuttle was launched anyway. Stated guidelines prohibited launch if the ambient temperature were too low, which it was that fateful January morning, yet a decision was made to go ahead with the launch. How could that be? The investigation determined that the decision to launch was basically made under pressure from higher ups to keep the shuttle flights on schedule to avoid a backlog of missions. This was due in part to bureaucrats and politicians calling the shots at NASA rather than scientists and engineers. Ironically, this was almost the same sort of indictment handed down by the investigation following the fatal Apollo 1 accident nearly two decades earlier. After that accident, things were cleaned up, but apparently the typical government agency climate had returned. After the Challenger accident, things improved, and safety was a major factor at NASA again.
Sadly, in a few days, we will be at the three year anniversary of another Shuttle accident. The Columbia was launched under pressure from administrators to keep the shuttle missions on schedule in order to avoid a backlog of missions that would delay construction of the International Space Station. This was despite severe concerns among NASA engineers about large chunks of foam coming off of the external tank in recent missions. In fact, two missions before, a large chunk of foam had fallen off and done significant damage to a solid rocket coupling. This very nearly resulted in a catastrophic launch failure that would have been very reminiscent of the Challenger accident. However, as with Challenger, the decision to launch was made anyway. Then, the government agency culture that had evolved again at NASA worked to keep effective discussion or exchange of information from engineers who might have come up with a way to deal with the damage caused to the Columbia by foam falling from the external tank during launch. February 1, 2003, another shuttle was lost.
This is a tough time of the year for NASA. January 27, 1967, the launch pad fire killed the three crew members of Apollo 1. Challenger was destroyed January 28, 1986. Columbia was destroyed upon reentry February 1, 2003.
-Astroprof
Gabriel Ghimpu on February 13, 2008 at 3:30 pm: 1
In the honour of those seven astronauts( Challenger), and the other seven( Columbia), a romanian musician - Stefan Baiatu - wrote a song illustrated with document images taken at that times. View the video( Columbia Requiem) on aol.com.