I saw an interview with Roger B & I felt so sickened by the way he was treated, he was a hero in my eyes, he did all he could to stop that launch. It was gut- wrenching to hear how he felt afterwards. It’s sad that whistleblowers usually pay with their careers, especially where lives are lost.
I like the quote Regan told about seeing them this morning and now all of them are dead within a few minutes. Infantry solders in war sleep by our comrades and speak to them right before they go out on a mission. The pain and horror are masked by the rules of war one you don't cry during normal events that make many people sad. That means 2 Bradley's, The LT and his gunner as well as the SSG on his Bradley with his gunner and all the dismounts in both vehicles which depending on the mission 14 dismount's and lastly both drivers. Personally I watched a team of Marine Force Recon enter our FOB signaling to our towers that friendly was coming through. I gave them a briefing of our hide sites. Lastly every person had to pass through the the checkpoint and counted. I recommended they go out the back door and not to occupy our hide site. Entering it from the front. They watch us constantly. I was still amazing about their silencers and awesome optics. The rest of the night was spent cleaning up Their body parts, blood, brains and rpg aftermath. The one I spoke to had his brain missing but it was such a magnificent ambush the enemy conducted that we had no body bags so we had to just throw them on the back on the Bradly and take them to the freezer located at our Fob when S1 hq. and etc. When we where able to clean our vehicles Lynn was just staring at a chunk of the operators brain bc it looked like ground beef that spoiled
Let us not forget Roger Boisjoly , who I had the pleasure on hearing speak at a conference on ethics, and Arnold Thompson. If only NASA had listened to these three men.
This is why you don’t have individuals who clearly don’t know what they are talking about make decisions on these kinds of things. Instead of thinking about these kinds of things from a PR or a management level all of this kind of stuff needs to be done, purely from an engineering level. If the engineers do not have confidence in the machinery then you need to wait until they do. Do you know what’s sad. In the early days of the space race unlike the Soviet union which basically took a brute force method to their space program if United States instead intended to do things with a lot more testing and safety. It seems that in 1986 the NASA higher-ups had become complacent. I find it ironic that they didn’t want bad publicity for delaying the launch. But in the end, they ended up having an even worse thing happen because somebody didn’t wanna look bad to their bosses. I mean, seriously. They could’ve simply delayed the launch a couple of hours. And chances are things would’ve been better. But no, they decided to go ahead and seven Americans paid for it. The worst part, though in my mind is the fact that there is evidence to support the likelihood that the crew were actually still alive when the shuttle exploded and the remains, began falling down to the ocean.
I will never forget when this unfortunate tragedy occurred when I was stationed at Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton in California. I was a Hospital Corpsman at the Physical Therapy Department when a Marine told me about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. At first, I was in disbelief because I grew up in Orlando, Florida, and I saw many launches of spacecraft with no problems at all. My father worked at Kennedy Space Center near Cocoa Beach as a security guard, and he told me about some of the space missions that he witnessed while working there. As soon as I was able to leave my job for lunch, I went to my room in the barracks and turned on the TV to see the news about it. ABC News was replaying the footage of the explosion, and it blew me away when I finally saw it for the first time. When ABC News showed the icicles on the space shuttle, they should have been a warning sign not to go ahead with the launch. It seems the management at NASA was more concerned about their image and not about the safety of the astronauts. If they had listened to the contractors at Morton Thiokall that the O-rings could not survive at temperatures less than 53 degrees Fahrenheit, those people on board might have survived if they allowed the space shuttle to launch during some warmer weather. Why did NASA hire these contractors if they were not going to listen to their knowledge and expertise? That was sheer stupidity and pure ego. This management team at NASA was responsible for the deaths of those honorable people. You would think management at NASA would learn their lesson about what happened to Challenger. Alas, they did not learn anything, and they allowed some more astronauts to die on the Space Shuttle Columbia after it exploded upon re-entry of the Earth. NASA needs to hire some exceptional engineers and scientists who want to become more responsible and prevent any crew deaths. Finally, NASA also needs better management who want to make safety a major priority, and they need to listen to everyone involved in case some design flaws or bad inclement weather might affect the safety of the astronauts and the spacecraft. Both of these horrible events could have been so preventable instead of wanting to meet some crucial deadline. RIP to the crew of Challenger and Columbia. All of them are sorely missed.
In the numerous heated conference calls the night before launch about delaying the mission even just one day, the actual determinative call was between NASA manager Larry Malloy at the Cape and Presidential press secretary Larry Speakes with Ronald Reagan in Washington DC. This has largely been sanitized out of the historical accounts. The "teacher in space" idea had been an initiative of President Reagan (which he had been ridiculed for) and on the night of the launch he was scheduled to give his State of the Union speech. During this presentation Reagan was to have a surprise direct uplink to the Shuttle crew with all of Congress and a national TV audience watching. A speech predicated on this had already been written and loaded into the teleprompter. The President's popularity rating had been under strain at the time. And because of the way the shuttle mission activities were planned, a one day delay would have put Christa McAuliffe's "lesson from space" on a Saturday when students are not in school thus creating more fodder for Reagan's political adversaries. Longtime Reagan close friend William Rogers was put in charge of the commission to determine the cause of the explosion not because he was an expert in science and aeronautical engineering. He was a lawyer who had no relevant training. His sole task was to insulate President Reagan from the inquiry and direct the mainstream accounts of what went wrong toward much less culpable yet plausible alternatives. And he succeeded. This video cites Reagan's TV address wherein he says the deceased astronauts "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God". This line worked so well on multiple psychological levels to stir people's emotion and it was delivered by a true professional. This gave a huge boost in his political solvency. How ironic it is how words get crafted for public consumption that are so antithetical to the truth. My sister worked in the Orbiter Processing Facility at the time of the accident and she still has vivid memories of walking outside minutes after the explosion to see security personnel hustling the parents of Christa McAuliffe away from the public area. Many other people who worked there at the time also knew the ROOT cause of the tragedy was simple petty politics.
That pretty much jibes with Richard Cook's account. Essentially that Mulloy was told by the WH that this launch was a go, no matter what, and that it was his job to make it happen.
One day I saw a film of one of the shuttles taking off and, seeing all that flame and power, I turned to my dad and said, "That thing is going to blow up one day and kill everyone on board." The next day they announced the shuttle had blown up. That was a very sad day for me! 😢😢😢 I will never get that day out of my mind!
The name of this documentary should have been Christa: A Rush to Launch. Why didn't they use that seat for one of the engineers who designed the craft?
I was in 3rd grade in Columbus Ohio watching it live on TV , Teacher was visibly excited about a Teacher being on the crew then remember a few girls screaming teacher tearing up very surreal 9 yrs old remember like it was yesterday
I have been reading about some of the Apollo astronauts that got space sickness.Frank Boreman on Apollo 8 and Rusty Schweickart on Apollo 9 both puked.Even these guys who were test pilots succumbed so it can happen to anyone.
The Age of Space for All Mankind - Began according to Moscow Time. according to the Time of the Country with the Capital in Moscow. Gagarin - The First Earthman who Made a Manned Flight into Space. Titov - The First Earthling who Made a Manned Daily Flight into Space. Leonov - The First Earthling who Made the Entrance into the Open Space. The First artificial satellite of the Planet Earth 🌏 - Russian Sputnik 1. The First stable Signal from Space (which Mankind managed to receive) was Sent to Planet Earth - Russian Sputnik 1. Russians are Pioneers in the Sphere of Space.
I wonder if this is why every time we look under the hood of our cars and trucks, we see one cobbed together shoddily made gizmo jammed on top of another one and another, where nobody can even fit their hand to work on anything. Management hurrying engineers along.
I come back to this mans statements from time to time. I was working that day at NASA. There were others saying ' WHAT? launching? today? They can't! " that I later became aware of, and well, obviously those folks didnt have their voices heard either.
Unfortunately, the human factor, which should always be paramount in any risky endeavor, is often put on the back burner, behind schedules, political pressure, cost, etc. That was the case here. "We don't know where the cliff is, but we know it's out there." Very prophetic, and you won't know where it is until you're on your way to the bottom, waving goodbye. Suffice it to say, the cliff wasn't far off from 53 degrees fahrenheit, and everyone at Thiokol knew that
What's so sad about this whole story is i use to work for a company that tested gaskets and so clear the difference in gaskets used in temperatures above and below freezing temperatures. How all those engineers didn't know that the gaskets o-rings would not work below freezing is crazy and so sad.
this is an especially sickening documentary to watch in light of the current goings on at Boeing. At the time of writing, we are just a month short of the 23rd anniversary of Dr. L. J. Hart-Smith’s Paper, pointing out the dangerous path of his Company, a path it was enticed onto by ex-McDonell-Douglas Management, right after they ran their first plane maker into the ground. Something has to give. We are loosing way too many innocent souls to the hubris of slimy MBAs and corrupt regulators. Just why?
There is a club for life changing events? Really???? No one told me this when I Iost my soul mate to a drink driver 27 years ago! No one was there to support 'me' when they told me she was dead and so was my child! It's not only astronaughts that have to deal with life changing circumstances! Many people have to on the surface of the moment! And 'WE' are never recognised!
