The soccer ball that survived the Challenger explosion
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I can remember the numbness I felt in his living room as we watched the Challenger explode. It's something once viewed that you can't unsee. Words fail you in trying to explain it.
I had no idea at the time that there were five engineers who tried valiantly to stop the launch because of the cold weather and failed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
This sent chills down my spine... the world just shouldn't be like this.
Warning fatigue is a thing and reasonable to wonder whether that happened at all here.
Morton-Thiokol and NASA set criteria for safety margins on the Shuttle system. And the Shuttle kept on violating those safety margins again and again. Instead of grounding the fleet or studying the problem further or attempting to ameliorate the problem the safety margins were loosened, deviance was normalized, unsafe operations were normalized. And those who called out the legitimate safety problems with the Shuttle were harassed and derided because their views differed from the orthodoxy (that a Shuttle loss was a 1 in 100,000 probability) and got in the way of their goals (the high flight rate of dozens of launches per year that were necessary for the Shuttle system to meet its promises).
Later analysis of the Shuttle system [2] has indicated several other potential key failure modes that could have caused a loss of vehicle and crew, especially during the early flights. Not just the SRBs and the thermal protection system (the weaknesses which doomed Challenger and Columbia) but other systems such as the APUs, SSMEs, flight software, etc. led to a risk of catastrophic loss as high as 1 in 10 during the first several years of flights, 1 in 20 around the Challenger disaster period, 1 in 50 during the return to flight period after Challenger, and about 1.1-1.3% during the post-Columbia period.
1: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...
2: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201100...
I'm not sure how anyone could say that with a straight face.
Serious events happen with commercial aircraft at a rate of about 1 in 1M. Figure that a rocket is inherently 100X more dangerous. And that the lack of repetitive experience with rockets bumps the risk another 1:100. Meaning you build a lot of aircraft and fly them all the time you get good at knowing where the design holes are. Also consider that each serious failure when mitigated improves the odds of the rest of the fleet. You don't get that when you're only flying a dozen flights a year.
Est risk: 1X10-6 X 100 X 100 gives 1% chance of loss.
Notable the Apollo program flew 15 flights 3 had serious failures[1][2] and 1 near loss event (Apollo 13). For consideration the Saturn V was a well tested conservative design which the Shuttle was not.
[1] Apollo 6 and 13 had early engine shut downs due to failures of the S-II engines.
[2] Apollo 12 lightning strike took out the command module computer.
There was also a bit of self-delusion going on. The Shuttle system was, by design, the backbone of spaceflight (manned and unmanned) in the US at the time. On the one hand you could believe that the Shuttle system was a modern miracle, fully capable of achieving (or nearly so) its design promises of cheap and ubiquitous spaceflight, ushering in a new space age, including the launch and assembly of a next generation space station in the near future, and possibly including the realization of manned missions to Mars within the next decade or two. The competing view, that the Shuttle was a risky launch system that could never achieve its design promises even within an order of magnitude, was a vastly depressing (though in retrospect realistic) one. Holding that view meant that we would have to go back to the drawing board and spend maybe another decade building a new launch system that would reset us back to the way things were in the 1960s, and then we'd have to slowly crawl our way toward incremental progress. That was a very difficult truth to accept, ironically more difficult the more you were invested in space exploration.
Sometimes reality is a tough pill to swallow.
What I think is interesting is how you could judge the success of the Apollo missions. One one hand they succeeded if your willing to ignore the Apollo 1 fire. But as I referenced the four critical failures. I think sober hindsight paints a picture of luck on the ragged edge.
One thing though I I think one needs to be aware of how risk gets amortized over time. Airliners are in heavy service and so the catastrophes due to design and operation holes is atomized over a lot of flights, where the shuttle never really was ever anything more than a few prototypes. Consider Boeing's first three 787's. Boeing planned to sell those but they've been written off. One can guess why.
There was some coverage of the relatively high risk values in the popular science press well before Challenger happened.
During a late-night teleconference the night before the launch, the engineers pleaded with their managers not to launch. One decision maker was told, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat," and he reluctantly changed his mind (a decision he has regretted for decades, of course).
It's also telling that, after the decision was made to approve the launch, none of the engineers agreed to sign off.
https://www.engineering.com/Blogs/tabid/3207/ArticleID/170/c...
Like you, I can remember the numbness I felt in the classroom as we watched the explosion. And, I will never forget the look on my teacher's face as she shut off the television.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/25/466555217...
This whole article was fantastic, but this was the coolest part for me. To learn that his quote is on every passport. I've never read the quotes on my passport before, but now I have.
"Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds ... to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation." --Ellison S. Onizuka
The background on that page is a palm tree and a silhouette that might be Diamond Head, but the facing page is a space scene (not to scale) with an earthrise over the moon and a satellite.
Sorry, but that made me laugh. Now I kinda want to see it to scale. :)
I generally enjoy sports, but don't care about the endless commentary and talk shows that populate ESPN 24/7, nor do I like the fact that their properties drive up everyone's cable bill by $20-$30 per month, an order of magnitude more than any other network.
It's one of the primary reasons I don't have pay TV; I wish I could allocate my pay TV dollars to the programming I find more valuable.
I personally found the writing somewhat overwrought, despite thinking it's a story worth telling and feeling respect for the astronaut involved and sympathy for his family. I wouldn't call it good writing. But I'm not a US American, so maybe it's a cultural difference.
I will definitely be taking a closer look at the quotes in my passport when I get home today.
The 'solid rocket boosters' being constructed in segments because they had to be transported by rail from Utah. They had to be constructed in that state as part of the deal to get the politicians to vote in the finances.
One of the bidders on the contract actually wanted to make a monolithic SRB, but that brings a new set of problems and limitations, especially at large sizes (you can look up the Aerojet 260" for some more info).
The shuttle SRBs were built in 7 segments, some of which were joined together at the factory. The multisegment design was based on the flight-proven Titan SRBs, which supposedly would help with R&D costs. However manufacturing constraints (if the SRB just used the Titan design and scaled it up, they'd need bigger hunks of metal than anyone was casting at the time) and design tweaks led to changes that degraded O-Ring performance and potentially kept both primary and secondary O-rings from being properly seated. There was really a whole confluence of things that went wrong, and a lot of missed opportunities to fix any one of the issues that led to O-ring failure.
Plenty of people still use segmented SRBs today, especially for their modularity. The (first version) of the SLS boosters are based on the shuttle design, with extra segments stuck added on.
The bigger issue here was the politics between Nasa and it's contractors. The contractors told them that the launch would be dangerous at the temperature, but they were ignored.
Do I understand correctly that you're saying that the O-ring would be necessary even if the SRBs were constructed as a single long tube, instead of segments that are assembled together?
If so, would you mind expanding on that? I was under the impression that the only reason the whole O-ring and caulking of the joints was necessary was the existence of the joints.
[1] https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/...
Do you have a reference for this? Seems very intriguing to me. To me it seems the last thing you would want, under any circumstances would be to have hot gases coming out anywhere near the hydrogen tank and you'd make every effort to contain any overpressure until it exited beyond the hydrogen tank.
The following is a link to his book, but I actually heard a presentation from him.
https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Lies-Rings-Challenger-Disaster/...
Rockets are incredibly complex machines, you could use this sort of post hoc reasoning to find cause and blame for any anomaly by saying such a part could have been done differently. You couldn't ever use this reasoning to make design decisions that prevented accidents.
Blue Origin is planning to build their big rockets in Florida near the launch site.
The O-ring failed because it was a bad O-ring, and no one in positions that matters appreciated it was a bad O-ring. Politicizing it into a witch hunt to make congress look bad doesn't do anyone favors. It just feeds existing rage.
Contractor: "We don't want to launch, we're worried about how the cold will affect the O-ring"
NASA: "Do you have any data showing that the O-rings will fail at 50°F?"
Contractor: "No, but we don't have any data showing that they won't fail at 50°F"
NASA: "We launched when it was cold before and nothing went wrong" (The coldest launch before Challenger was successful, although both of the SRBs had badly charred O-rings)
Contractor: "Once, and there is circumstantial evidence that the O-rings had issues on that launch. (managers kicks engineers out of the room). We're not telling you not to launch."
That said, the hardness of the O-rings wasn't the only issue (at least, by itself it may not have caused the Challenger to explode). There was some putty around the O-rings that had problems. It was known to let water in, and the night before the launch it rained and was cold enough that the water that got in next to the O-rings could've frozen and kept them from maintaining their seal. There were primary and secondary O-rings, but the secondary O-rings didn't really give good redundancy.
I couldn't even read through this story.
It’s funny, this is what causes trauma... if you interrupt the stress reaction and try to make it go away, you hold onto it. If animals are allowed to go through their full stress cycle, they forget the trauma.
Watching Challenger blow up hurt worse. Especially in following months when failure analysis showed it could have been avoided by launching within the allowable temperature window.
Some days you really remember.
Unless you were as an engineer directly on Challenger O-Rings, I don't see any reason why anyone would cancel their financial commitment toward a startup project, because of this obvious tragedy.
Any other Falcons out there remember seeing it?
Sigh. It's perhaps silly of me in an age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, but I'm saddened to see this line repeated yet again, 30 years on. Perhaps Malinowski is just echoing old reporting. But a journalist of her caliber seems likely to have run this by NASA. Which suggests NASA PR is still prioritizing spin over integrity, even all these years later.
For those who haven't seen this line before, the template is "<explosion> <fast> <dead>". As in 'the explosion ripped apart the shuttle faster than the blink of an eye, killing the astronauts'. By such word-smithed sleigh-of-hand, NASA would leave readers with the impression that the crew was killed immediately, a quick non-lingering death, without flat-out lying.
One thing we're sure of is that some of the seven were not killed in the breakup at 11:39. I don't recall whether Onizuka's air pack was one of those found, and found to be manually activated. Nor whether there ended up being any evidence of cabin depressurization. But my understanding is that now, as then, there's no reason to believe that some of the seven didn't survive until cabin ocean impact minutes later.
> On the roof of the launch control tower, the families of the crew desperately searched the twin trails of smoke that twisted skyward for signs of the crew cabin.
:/ Perhaps it doesn't matter. It's not that different a story. And there's the "little white lies are fine" interpretation of integrity. Why shouldn't popular history get a prettified version? And given how NASA is funded, embracing integrity might be quite unhealthy. And yet... I'd have been happier if Malinowski wrote this paragraph a bit differently.
I'm sure it's harrowing to have 2 and a half minutes to contemplate your inevitable death and try fruitlessly to stop it (and even for us to read about it) but I don't think it's nefarious to leave that bit out so much as some degree of respect to the families.
Nefarious? Flagrantly wicked, abominable, impious? No, just PR spin - long-term repeated misrepresentation. Unremarkable in politics. Much less accepted in engineering. The question of "to what standards should NASA PR be held?", is indeed a root issue. For NTSB, it would be shocking. For DHS, unsurprising. NASA struggles to survive in a niche much more like DHS than NTSB. But the question repeatedly asked over the years, both within and without, is whether NASA PR weighs political concerns too heavily - to a degree sometimes simply unnecessary - and engineering/science-style honesty too lightly.
> she didn't feel it necessary to go into those details
My focus is not on the piece in isolation. Though one might object to the piece in isolation reinforcing a widespread misconception. But my sadness stemmed from context. From yet again seeing the same, not "trope"... "spin"? - descriptive devices that have repeatedly been used to mislead people.
"Seventy-three seconds [...] broke apart, killing all seven members of its crew. It was 11:39 a.m." Other versions have had timestamps down to hundredths of a second, as if that somehow mattered. Comments like 'too fast for even the computers to notice', or 'if you blinked, you'd have missed it'. Crew deaths from ocean impact have little more connection with T+74 disassembly, than with T+58 plume. Crew experience has little connection with computer and ground observer experience. But NASA PR repeatedly used these same tricks of phrasing to establish and reinforce a misconception. I was just sad to see them yet again, so many years later.
> failed to mention the engineer's warnings
My focus isn't on what is absent, but on what is present - this familiar structure of misdirection.
> as some degree of respect to the families
It's been thirty years. Is the cost-benefit tradeoff really still in favor of continuing to use this same misleading description?
But here's a more upbeat interpretation: Perhaps the author simply modeled the paragraph on one decades old - it is "pretty" - and didn't run it by anyone. So maybe we're just seeing an unfortunate blast from the NASA PR past, rather than anything contemporary.
These things were truly marvels of engineering (in both positive and negative respects). The kinds of thought that goes into these kinds of things, and so many other in the physical engineering world, make "hacking" look trite in many ways.