It's not an attack piece, but it's not complementary of NASA. It's pretty much completely fair and if you're gonna be fair, NASA's just gonna look bad. Ultimately you get an explanation of some of the background that led to the decisions, but...yeah, it just wasn't great.
I know anyone likely to watch this is already aware of most of the major stuff with Morton-Thiokol and the O-Rings, but it does a great job of filling in the details and just some of the absolute shit luck that led to it.
It interviews the two decisionmakers who were ultimately best situated to pull the plug on the launch but didn't. It interviews family members of all 7.
It's really pretty remarkable work. I know this stuff better than most and I was still just tense as hell throughout.
Just such an incredible and avoidable tragedy. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Cheater5:
I watched the first episode last weekend and intend to watch more. I hate to ask this-- but I am morbidly curious; did they discuss any details about the crew's fate after the explosion? I read some disturbing things several years ago that there was actually flight data recordings of them speaking with one another in the cabin before impact.
Didn't mean to derail this-- but again I cannot help but think about their final moments.
No.
But a fair number of studies have been done on it. They almost certainly didn't die during the explosion and the crew compartment remained completely intact after the breakup of the orbiter (there are photos of it flying out of the smoke).
It stayed on a fairly steady ballistic arc for a hair under 3 minutes. A couple of the crewmembers were almost certainly conscious (I believe 2 mission specialists) because they'd tried to activate their evac equipment. The pilot was believed to have been conscious as well.
Kinda comes down to if/when/how the cabin depressurized. If it was quickly, they probably lost consciousness within the first handful of seconds and that was that. If the compartment stayed pressurized, sadly they may have just had to ride the thing out for a few minutes knowing full well how it would end.
One of the many cruddy things about it was the timing of it - there was really no reason for them to have been able to get to the rollover routine at all. That seal should've failed almost immediately; like on the pad immediately. They might have had a chance to survive at that point (hard to say what would've happened w/ the shuttle just kinda falling to the ground, probably not - but more possible).
And there's a non-zero chance that had they not been in the inverted position they were in when the tank disintegrated underneath them, the shuttle could've been put into a glide.
But when the were upside down like that and the external fuel tank they were attached to just vaporized beneath them, the aerodynamic forces on the orbiter just obliterated it almost instantaneously.
The explosion really didn't do much to the orbiter - its operating thresholds were well beyond the force that explosion would've put on it. The sheer that came from it essentially free-falling at mach somethingorother is what did it. [Reply]
I'll never forget that day. Ninth grade. We kept thinking stupid shit like, couldn't they just have ejected? Do they have parachutes? We thought there was a real possibility that they survived. Seems stupid now, but then we couldn't imagine that we had just watched 7 people die doing something that had (in the eyes of the public anyway) become as routine as flying a plane from Omaha to New York. No big deal.
I remember being mad that people were looking to blame people. It seemed wrong to me, NASA was awesome! They were experts, and all these idiots in the press were just looking to stir shit. Well...I had to grow up.
That was my JFK moment for sure. 9-11 was of course even worse, but that day was a serious loss of innocence for the country. [Reply]
Originally Posted by InChiefsHeaven:
I'll never forget that day. Ninth grade. We kept thinking stupid shit like, couldn't they just have ejected? Do they have parachutes? We thought there was a real possibility that they survived. Seems stupid now, but then we couldn't imagine that we had just watched 7 people die doing something that had (in the eyes of the public anyway) become as routine as flying a plane from Omaha to New York. No big deal.
I remember being mad that people were looking to blame people. It seemed wrong to me, NASA was awesome! They were experts, and all these idiots in the press were just looking to stir shit. Well...I had to grow up.
That was my JFK moment for sure. 9-11 was of course even worse, but that day was a serious loss of innocence for the country.
I was in third grade and really wasn't sure what I was watching. They combined two classes into one to watch it on tv, so we were more interested in talking to our friends that were there from the other class than we were in the shuttle. I just remember the teachers being horrified and getting the tv out of the room and the other class back to their room as quickly as possible. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Cheater5:
I watched the first episode last weekend and intend to watch more. I hate to ask this-- but I am morbidly curious; did they discuss any details about the crew's fate after the explosion? I read some disturbing things several years ago that there was actually flight data recordings of them speaking with one another in the cabin before impact.
Didn't mean to derail this-- but again I cannot help but think about their final moments.
Does the doc hint anything about how the shuttle was a military application to capture and return satellites or nah?
Because that should be a big part of the story; SpaceX and the continued use of Soyuz have shown that a reusable spacecraft wasn't wasn't super advantageous over capsules.. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Discuss Thrower:
Does the doc hint anything about how the shuttle was a military application to capture and return satellites or nah?
Because that should be a big part of the story; SpaceX and the continued use of Soyuz have shown that a reusable spacecraft wasn't wasn't super advantageous over capsules..
It talks about the idea of it having Military and commercial goals from the get go. [Reply]
That was a good watch. Thanks for the heads up DJ.
I was born in 83 so I don’t remember it happening. But I do remember the drive by history of it all. There was a lot of shit I hadn’t heard of. Really good look.
I had no idea the thing wasn’t completely exploded and they found the bodies. Fuuuuuck.
I’d forgotten how aggressive they were in that period. I mean, duh Buehler. Cold War was still on. But yeah, someone should have put the brakes on sooner.
And shame on everybody that decided to fire the rockets. Literally nothing fucking works in the winter. I Mean if I gotta work hard to start my semi at 30, no way in hell a space shuttle will go in the cold.
And nobody has ever fucked with any sort of rubber seal in the shit cold. I mean I’m a Dumbass, but good god [Reply]
