• zod000@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn’t get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn’t say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn’t just watch people blow up live.

    • Punkie@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.

      • zod000@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        I remember that last part from the announcer and we were all like “you don’t say…”.

    • mienshao@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      You actually didn’t watch people get blown up live. The crew survived the fire blast—it was the crash into the water ~3 mins later that killed them.

  • candyman337@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    The engineers knew! They begged them to stop the launch, but of course, no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling! profit progress at all costs!

    • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

      When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

      Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

      I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

      It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”

    • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      no one makes the wheels not capitalism stop rolling! profit progress at all costs!

      I am honestly not sure what you’re trying to say here but I’m curious what NASA is selling that you threw capitalism in there.

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I think I was in 7th grade. We were watching. Right in front of our eyes and could hardly believe it. Everyone inhaled sharply and then a couple of short screems, then silence. After a good 5 minutes, our teacher came to his senses, turned off the TV, and started talking about being right with god because you never know when it’s your turn.

  • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    By then shuttle flights were so routine I didn’t even get up to watch the liftoff. My mom called me before work and told me it blew up.

    Christa McAuliffe trivia: she was the only one in her training group who didn’t throw up on the “Vomit Comet”.

    • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Can’t be ‘ruined’ in the sense that they were important for military purposes before they created the ridiculous space force.
      Even Boeing, a private company that with all their failures and criminal behavior should definitely be bankrupt, gets massive help bcs they’re a military contractor.

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Could have been worse. They wanted to send Big Bird.

    Also, I wasn’t in kindergarten yet or I’d have seen it. I think this is a core Gen X memory that Millennials don’t have.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      There’s speculation that Reagan was the impetus behind the “go fever” that caused the Challenger disaster. The idea is that he wanted to have a live uplink to Challenger during his State of the Union, and that his desire to use them as props was why NASA was in such an all-fired hurry to launch no matter the consequences.

      No idea how grounded in reality the speculation is, but it tracks for Reagan.

  • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    I watched it in person, sort of.

    I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.

    And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.

  • vfreire85@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.

  • davel@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.

  • PunnyName@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.

    But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.

    I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.

    It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.

  • Øπ3ŕ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    My entire school was gathered in the cafeteria for the event, televised live.

    We were all sent home for the day (some took the week) in the ensuing chaos.