Challenger Disaster

The 35th anniversary is in three day's.

I will say a prayer and place flowers at Christa's grave stone in Concord, NH.

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If it flies, I can crash it!

Last year Earl posted a memorandum on all three disasters in NASA history.

The three disasters were within days of each other,
A Day of Remembran0thce will be on January 30th.
I plan to place flowers on Christa McAuliffe's grave stone on Thursday January 28th around 11:30 A.M.

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/dor2020/#home

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If it flies, I can crash it!

My Christa McAuliffe story.

Part one.

I used to be a semi-professional musician in the New England area.

On New Years Eve 1985 I was playing a restaurant in Concord, NH.
The city of Concord had a parade in honor of Christa McAuliffe.
After the parade ended, Christa and her family went around to all of the establishments who sponsored her parade and to thank them personally.
I was playing in one of the establishments.
I would like to think Christa liked what she was hearing and stayed long enough to make a request.(I think they were cold and stayed to warm up)
She asked if I could play John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane".
I played her the song, she cried a little, hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
Her husband, Steve, took photographs of us during this time.
They left and you know the rest of the story.

Part two.

That summer of 1986, the city of Concord had an airshow, but this airshow was in honor of the McAuliffe family. I was there with my brother who spotted the McAuliffe family in the crowd.
I said to my brother "Let's go meet them"(my brother didn't know the above story)
We caught up to them and Steve remembered me.(to the surprise of my brother)
Steve said he had copies of photographs he wanted to give me but did not have my information to send them to me.
(Neither of us had a pen on us at the time to exchange our information.)
Just as we were about to part ways when an aircraft crashed ending the show and we were all told to leave the area.

Steve has since remarried but I don't know if he still lives in the area or if he still practices law.
I respect his privacy.

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If it flies, I can crash it!

That is a great story and I am sure some very bitter sweet memories for you. Say a prayer from all of us at Christa’s grave. It would have been wonderful seeing her bright personality teaching from space 35 years ago.

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
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Rocket-Brained Since 1970

The biggest "defining" tragic moment from the era I grew up in (70s/80s) was the Challenger disaster. I was in HS Geometry class when the news broke.
JFK was my parents generation.
9/11/2001 was even bigger.

To this day I cannot watch the Challenger disaster without it sending chills down my spine.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, and HAVOC !

I just got back a little over an hour and a half ago from visiting the grave site.
While I was waiting, another car drove up and stopped.
A man got out with a camera. He took some pic's and walked over to me in my car. I stopped him because he did not have a mask on. I put my mask on and got out of the car. I kept my distance while he got his mask.
He then introduced himself and explained why he was there.
He worked for the Concord Monitor newspaper and wanted pic's for tomorrow's story.
He asked if he could take some pic's of me and the grave site.
I agreed.
I don't know if it will get published tomorrow or not.

Will see.

BTW, he ask me if I knew Christa and told him of my chance meeting with her.

Oh, I did say a prayer for all the crew's.

__________________
If it flies, I can crash it!

Those are wonderful stories and testaments. It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. I was still in my 20’s and in Sonar “C” school at ASW school in San Diego when it happened.

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4 out of 3 people struggle with math.

Chemically, alcohol IS a solution.

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Today is the 35th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which occurred on 28 January 1986. Seven astronauts, expecting a launch scrub due to the extremely cold temperatures overnight at the Cape, due to an unusually strong cold front that blew in the previous afternoon and plunged temperatures at the launch site to a low of about 17 degrees IIRC, got their orders to suit up and head for the pad, and boarded the shuttle later that morning. Among them was New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe, winner of a nationwide teacher contest NASA had orchestrated to select the first "teacher in space" from among thousands of school teacher applicants from across the US. She had won after a series of interviews and other selection criteria were conducted. She joined six other astronauts on the shuttle that day. Unfortunately, none of them knew about grave concerns that certain engineers had with launching the shuttle in such cold temperatures, and a bitter disagreement they were having with management over that very issue, and how it would lead to their deaths 73 seconds after liftoff that clear, sunny, cold morning.



The issue was that the shuttle's solid rocket boosters on either side of the enormous external fuel tank were sealed with rubber o-rings, 12 feet in diameter. The coldest weather a shuttle had launched in previous to that was 53 degrees, and it had been over 30 degrees colder than that overnight at the Cape. Various shuttle flights had returned with burned or eroded O-rings, but that flight had returned with the O-ring not only completely burned away, but a hole as big as a basketball burned through the side of the 2 inch thick maraging steel (special steel used for submarine hulls) booster rocket motor casings that the O-rings were supposed to seal. Fortunately that flight, which had Senator Jake Garn aboard, had experienced this leak too late in flight to destroy the shuttle, and the burn-through hole was on the opposite side of the booster from the nearby huge fuel tank, and didn't get big enough to destroy the shuttle before the boosters expended their propellant and burned out. Challenger would not be so lucky. Engineers met in phone meetings throughout the night and the low temperatures were a concern, but the engineers were overruled by the shuttle program managers, who were already chomping at the bit to launch because the mission had been scrubbed a few times already and the shuttle program overall was behind schedule and not able to meet the flight rates that NASA had promised. Their curt reply to the engineer's concerns was, "My god, Thiokol (the subcontractor company that built the boosters and whose engineers recommended not launching in the cold), when am I supposed to launch? Wait til April?" The decision had been made. There was also anecdotal statements that there was pressure by some people in gubmint to launch the much ballyhooed "teacher in space" mission on-time that morning because her "lesson from space" would coincide with President Reagan's "state of the union" address a couple days later or so, but no confirmation of this has ever surfaced. At any rate, their fates had been sealed. The mission would launch.



The shuttle External Tank, a huge fuel tank 27.5 feet in diameter and over 150 feet long, was filled with super-cold propellants-- the conical upper tank filled with liquid oxygen at -273 degrees, and the much larger lower cylindrical fuel tank below it filled with hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen at -423 degrees, all to feed the three 500,000 lb thrust each shuttle main engines at the back end of the orbiter itself. The astronauts were strapped into their seats and the hatch closed and countdown continued. As the countdown neared zero, the 3 main liquid engines on the back of the shuttle ignited in sequence, and a few seconds later the two huge SRB's were ignited. As the boosters ignited, pressure from the dozens of tons of burning ammonium perchlorate solid propellant (APCP), a mixture of the oxidizer ammonium perchlorate (similar to dry fertilizer chemically), aluminum powder for the fuel, and a rubber binder to hold the mixture together, would raise the pressure inside the SRB casing to over 750 PSI. This wave of pressure was supposed to blow the O-rings tight in their grooves, sealing off the paths that gas would use to escape, and preventing the flow of hot burning gases to the rubber O-rings. BUT, the cold O-rings, especially the one on the RH booster which had been shaded by the tank's shadow all morning from the warming morning sun, was still chilled from the bitter cold the night before and was very stiff, and the sudden puff of air blown through the joint by the burning propellant in the middle did NOT seat the O-ring and create a seal. Hot burning flaming gases quickly poured through the gap, and burned the rubber O-ring to a cinder, emitting a large puff of black smoke that was recorded on automated cameras at the launch pad filming the rocket's liftoff, for later analysis in case of such a problem. But nobody knew, and there was nothing that could be done then, as once the boosters were lit, they were like a firecracker or skyrocket-- they cannot be stopped til they burned up all their fuel. Alumina "slag" and other gunk from the burning propellant was also swept into the gap, and solidified and wedged into place, forming a fragile "seal" of sorts, temporarily plugging the leak. The shuttle lifted off uneventfully into the morning sun, as engineers at Thiokol in Utah held their breath thinking the shuttle would explode immediately, and thus the danger was past...



As the shuttle ascended and sped up, it quickly approached and then broke through the speed of sound. The 3 liquid engines on the shuttle orbiter were throttled back, to reduce pressure on the vehicle as it passed through the thick lower atmosphere at this ever increasing high speed, a point called "max q" where the air pushes hardest on the vehicle, creating the most air drag and stress on the structures. After this point, the air is getting steadily thinner even as speed increases, so the stress levels taper off. The boosters were designed in such a way to slow their burn rates at this point, to reduce the forces on the vehicle. As the shuttle continued to ascend, it passed through the strongest wind shear forces ever experienced by a shuttle launch, at precisely this point of maximum stress on the vehicle. The additional vibration and forces were too much for the fragile "seal" of gunk bridging the gap in the SRB seal, and it crumbled and was blown out by the 750+ PSI pressure inside the booster. Again flaming hot gases started racing through the breach. It just so happened, the spot that the O-ring burned through was not pointed away from the tank, but almost directly toward it. It was also a lot earlier in the flight than the previous blow-through on the earlier flight, not just a few seconds before burnout like had happened before. The hot abrasive gases, at several thousand degrees and containing burning particles of aluminum (turning to aluminum oxide as it burned with the rubber binder and ammonium perchlorate, which supplied the oxygen for the reaction) started blasting toward the breach, and blowing out the gap, which started widening due to the blowtorch effect with each passing second, as the roaring blast eroded the steel casing away, widening the gap in an ever accelerating process. The shuttle continued on its ascent to orbit, nobody was aware of what was happening, least of all the astronauts who were just about 100 feet in front of this growing conflagration taking place below them.



The hole got bigger and bigger, faster and faster. The only thing to tip off the mission controllers that anything was wrong was, the gas escaping the booster itself was growing bigger all the time, and soon the ever-growing hole was creating a pressure loss in that SRB compared to the one on the other side which was operating normally. As the pressure fell, the thrust became imbalanced, but the shuttle was designed for a certain amount of that. The hot gases escaping through the hole were not going through the nozzle as intended to create thrust to push the vehicle, but instead were now blowing through this unintended hole. As the hole grew bigger, the amount of gases blowing through it became bigger, accelerating the hole's erosion and growing it ever faster. Soon the escaping gases started creating a side-thrust on the shuttle, which the guidance computers detected and corrected for, steering the shuttle's 3 liquid engines to compensate, pushing back against the growing side-force from the hole in the booster. As the seconds ticked by, the process simply accelerated and grew worse. The capcom in Houston called the normal response at this point in flight-- "Challenger, go with throttle up" and the commander aboard the shuttle responded in kind, "Roger, go with throttle up" as the computers automatically throttled the shuttle's 3 main engines up to maximum power to accelerate through the thinning air toward orbit. Meanwhile, the shuttle's guidance system was fighting to control the vehicle-- the ever-growing hole and greater side thrust it created was detected by the computers, and the engines steered more and more to the side to counteract it, but they could only be steered SO MUCH before they "hit the stops" and couldn't swivel (gimbal) any further-- like a car's steering wheel turned "hard over against the stops" trying to make a hairpin turn. But the booster's hole would continue to grow, and at that point the shuttle would tumble out of control and be destroyed, tearing itself apart in the wall of air it was ripping through like a bug on a windshield. As it was, the location of the hole would cause something different to happen, though the end result was the same.

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Continued...

The flames started out small enough to simply be blown back along the booster between it and the tank by the airstream blowing past the vehicle, but as the hole grew and the blast of hot flaming gas grew, it soon overpowered the thinning air racing past the vehicle. It reached out across the gap between the booster and tank, and soon the blowtorch of flame started blasting against the couple-inch-thick layer of spray-on foam insulation on the side of the thin aluminum tank wall, and the flames roaring back in the slipstream to burn one of the thick struts that connected the aft end of the SRB to the tank wall, connected to a thick aluminum swivel welded to the side of the tank's thin aluminum sheet metal skin. The SRB was held in alignment with the tank and the rest of the vehicle by these struts, against the push-pull effect of the shuttle's gimballing engines steering the vehicle, and the SRB's own gimballing nozzles on the aft end helping steer the vehicle through the air. But now the blast from the hole was pushing the whole vehicle "sideways", trying to turn it clockwise when viewed from below, as the shuttle engines were steered by the computer to push back and keep it flying straight by arresting this twisting force. The forces continued to build up, even as the foam insulation burned away in the conflagration and soon the blast of flaming gas was heating the thin sheet aluminum tank wall itself. The thin aluminum would have melted away almost instantly in the firestorm, but on the backside was liquid hydrogen at -423 degrees, which would have begun to boil vigorously as it touched the hot aluminum sheet, heated by the blowtorch from the booster. Soon all this was more than the structure could handle, and the thin sheet aluminum tore, or the strut holding the booster pushing against the vehicle stack as the shuttle orbiter engines pushed back, while being engulfed in several thousand degree flames from the hole, simply snapped, or the tank wall it attached to buckled and broke. The pivot simply ripped away from the broken aluminum tank wall and the crack instantly ripped to the seam along the bottom of the tank, where the aft dome was welded to the tank, supporting the hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen at -423 degrees inside, and the 35-45 PSI or so of pressure inside the tanks that helped push the propellants through the pipes to the shuttle engines in the orbiter, and helped maintain the stiffness and strength of the tank walls to support the loads-- just like a pneumatic tire that when properly inflated can support the weight of the load of a semi truck and its cargo, likewise the pressure in the tanks stiffen the side walls to support the enormous weight and forces acting on it. Now the aft dome, its welds cracking all the way around in a split-second, simply rips off the tank from the tons of liquid propellant pushing down on it against the acceleration. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen spill into the air behind the shuttle in that instant, and now like a blown tire the shuttle tank's thin aluminum wall can no longer support the strain... The booster aft end is free as it rips away the aluminum sheeting of the tank wall around the connections. The forward end of the SRB was the main connection-- essentially a giant trailer ball hitch connected it to the thrust beam in the tank running between the upper conical oxygen tank (where most of the weight of the propellant was, in the dense liquid oxygen, being pushed from below by the enormous I-beam shaped thrust beam, and the larger hydrogen fuel tank below, which held FAR more liquid fuel, but it was relatively light weight liquid hydrogen that weighed less than the oxygen above. The ball-and-socket attach point took almost all the force the SRB exerted, 1.3 million pounds of thrust from each SRB in fact, and transferred it into the External Tank and shuttle vehicle stack itself as the orbiter flew into space. Now with the aft end free and the hole pushing hard against the SRB's aft end away from the disintegrating hydrogen tank, the upper end of the SRB started swinging INWARDS like a jackknifing truck trailer towards the upper oxygen tank. The SRB front end and nosecone contacted the thin sheet aluminum of the oxygen tank near the bottom, and continued pivoting inwards like a giant can opener-- it split the tank wall wide open and the tank wall ripped allowing the thousands of gallons of -273 degree liquid oxygen to spill out into the thin air around the shuttle. All this happened in a fraction of a second, and the mixing ball of liquid hydrogen and oxygen boiling off into vapor ignited into a huge fireball engulfing the vehicle. At this point, one of the astronauts said, "Uh oh!", and that was it.

Inside the fireball, the tank simply ripped to shredded aluminum, it's shards of thin metal would in coming seconds be visible falling out of the fireball as a cloud of glittering confetti of small bits of sheet aluminum, light and with enough surface area to stop almost immediately. The two SRB's, still roaring under thrust, simply ripped away from the remains of the tank and, being made of roughly 2 inch thick solid steel like a submarine hull, simply flew through the huge fireball unscathed, and continued on like nothing happened, tracing a wild corkscrew pattern through the air, since their connection with the guidance computers in the shuttle controlling their nozzle gimbals was now severed-- they simply stuck where they had been when the wires connecting them ripped away. The orbiters computers, sensing something was wrong in those last split seconds, registered the sudden loss of hydrogen pressure to the pump inlets of the 3 main engines in the orbiter's tail, and shut down the engines, even while the guidance system was still trying to gimbal the engines to counteract the enormous side-forces the booster was pushing with, and then that force's sudden disappearance as the tank broke up and the booster ripped free. The engines were nearly "hard over" and essentially when the tank broke up, the orbiter was "overcorrected" and "skidded" sideways in the wall of air it was flying through-- something that the orbiter structure (like any aircraft) is simply not designed to handle. The orbiter was smashed to bits by the onrushing air around it inside the fireball as it careened out of control; it broke apart into a million pieces, with the largest and strongest parts continuing upward, coasting through the fireball and continuing onward in a wild spinning mess of twisted metal and broken hoses and wires. The heaviest parts like the relatively strong crew cabin and the 3 main engines, and large pieces like the rudder and parts of the wings, continued coasting upwards until air drag and gravity won, and started pulling them down into a long fall back to Earth below. In Mission Control, a "major malfunction" was noted as stunned controllers looked at their monitors and the TV feed from the Cape showing the launch. In the Range Safety Officer's (RSO) console at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the RSO pushed "the button" which sent a signal up to the wayward careening booster rockets still tearing across the sky under thrust-- radios aboard the boosters received the signal and detonated linear shaped charges running the length of the booster motor casing segment walls. The shaped charges cut through the steel instantly like a building implosion charge cuts through steel beams to bring down a skyscraper, and the 750-ish PSI internal pressure instantly ripped the boosters wide open to relieve the pressure, snuffing out the boosters and "terminating their flight", since out of control they could possibly impact back on land and kill civilians or destroy property. The terminated boosters would then fall into the sea, with the rest of the doomed Challenger mission.

To be continued...

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The crew, meanwhile, inside their ruptured but intact crew cabin, once part of a gleaming orbiter now torn to shreds around it, continued tumbling upwards for a few seconds. One of the astronauts seated behind the pilot switched on his emergency oxygen as they'd been trained to do. Down in the lower deck, the astronauts (like Christa McAuliffe) would have had little idea what had happened but would have known something was terribly terribly wrong. The astronauts on the upper deck would have had a front-row view of the entire thing, with the earth and sky careening wildly outside the front windows. The air pressure inside the crew cabin rapidly vented out into the rarified upper atmosphere, rendering them unconscious. Their "launch suits" at that point were little more than glorified motorcycle suits, flameproof coveralls and "motorcycle helmets" that could supply them with extra oxygen to the pilot and commander in the front seat, but little else. They didn't wear full "pressure suits" like earlier astronauts before the shuttle era had on Apollo and Gemini and Mercury-- the shuttle was deemed "safe enough" not to need such bulky and expensive things once the first four test flights had been completed-- they were done away with along with the ejection seats, to allow for seven astronauts to crowd into a shuttle and for EVA suits needed once in space, stowed below in lockers. This would be reversed and pressure suits reintroduced when shuttle would fly again. But on Challenger, the astronauts would have felt the air rush out of the cabin through the ruptured pressure hull, felt the intense cold of the thin upper atmosphere, and most fell unconscious from lack of oxygen pretty quickly. The pilot, his backup oxygen turned on, as he and the commander would have flown the orbiter back to the Kennedy Space Center runway to land it after a "normal" abort, would have remained conscious most likely, barring serious injury. After all that's what the systems were designed for. But, trapped in a ruptured pressure hull of the disintegrated orbiter, it's wings and tail and virtually the entire structure having been ripped to shreds, there was NOTHING anyone could do now... the cabin spiraled down in its death tumble towards the open sea far below-- two minutes after the disaster tore Challenger asunder, it impacted the ocean at over 200 mph. No one could survive. The shattered cabin, held together by miles of wires for the controls and instruments and sensors on the shuttle and its computers, settled to the ocean floor in about 135 feet of seawater, where it would be found a couple months later (IIRC) by Navy divers. It was recovered as part of the investigation and returned to nearby Cape Canaveral, and then entombed with the rest of the remains of the vehicle in an abandoned Minuteman test missile silo on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which was subsequently sealed and preserved as their final resting place.

Speeches would be made, funerals would be held, and the nation mourned. Vows were made to "carry on" the shuttle program, which continued for another 25 years, in a flawed vehicle that would ultimately cost another seven lives in the Challenger's sister orbiter Columbia almost 17 years and 4 days later on 1 February 2003 when that shuttle broke up during reentry due to fatal damage it received during launch 2 weeks earlier due to foam breaking off the tank and shattering the leading edge of the wing, causing it to burn through in the intense reentry heat and break off, dooming the vehicle to the same fate as Challenger suffered midair... raining parts down over a strip from California to Texas to eastern Mississippi, and taking another seven lives with it, including Israel's first astronaut, Elon Ramon. The loss of Columbia finally signed the end of the shuttle program, though at that point we were SO reliant on it to complete the International Space Station that it had to continue flying until 2011 when it was FINALLY retired, and thankfully so. There had been MANY near misses in the shuttle program-- several flights came back with holes burned through the boosters from O-ring failures prior to Challenger, and shuttles returned from orbit with holes burned in their bellies from missing tiles from foam strike damage, but NASA management failed to recognize or effectively deal with the problems, thinking foolishly that "no harm, no foul"-- since nothing bad HAD happened on THOSE flights, nothing bad COULD happen and they could continue on as usual until they could come up with a solution. Fate proved them wrong, for as a Challenger accident investigator noted, "nature cannot be fooled".

SO let us honor the sacrifice of those brave men and women of both the Challenger and Columbia, and the 3 astronauts before them lost in the Apollo 1 fire-- and vow to never allow "go fever" and the "necessities" of the program or political considerations like funding and program support in government to allow warnings of problems leading to unsafe vehicles to ever supersede the requirements of taking the time, money, and effort to make sure that TOTALLY AVOIDABLE disasters such as these never occur again-- because these were NOT accidents, they were DISASTERS-- accidents can happen due to unforeseen circumstances or things beyond human control-- ALL THREE of these situations were due to factors known and understood WELL IN ADVANCE, but the signs were IGNORED for various reasons, with fatal and tragic results.

Our people deserve better!

God speed the crews of Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 1. Rest in Peace.

OL J R

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