Lessons From the Challenger Tragedy | Retro Report on PBS

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[krumplethemal]

The most heart wrenching is seeing Christa's mother in the audience nervous before the launch even began. She is seen visibly out of breath. After the announced loss of the vehicle the cameras still filmed her reaction to her understanding of what happened and disbelief. Every engineer and systems who works on future human space flight should be required to watch her mother's heart break and loss happen as a reminder of what is most important.

[rocknroller]

Watched this in elementary school. Even at that young age, I knew right away what happened. RIP Challenger crew. We still remember

[mrjones]

We all watched the Challenger accident happen live in middle school. I'll never forget it.

[ubcphysicsyangbo]

Not trying to provide an excuse for NASA or anything, but I think people often forget how intricate and difficult it space programs are - you are trying to get huge hunks of mass to go at amazing speeds so that they can escape the gravitational pull of the earth, we should always be super vigilante and awe-inspired by these amazing feats. There is a CNN program called Cold War that details the US and USSR space programs respectively, it’s a amazing series I highly recommend everyone watch it.

[MomMomCubs]

I was 3 when I saw it, on C-SPAN. I'm almost 40 now, and I still cry when ground control gives that fatal order.

[tetchuma]

To me, this was the milestone when America stopped being superior.
A corporation decided to risk lives to maintain their government contracts, essentially defrauding the government, and not one person was arrested…
Morton Thiokol even retained their contracts, provided that they cease punishing the whistleblower.
It showed now matter how badly you messed up, how many lives it cost, or how much it tarnished your country… as long as your job title was executive enough, you could escape a prison sentence for your involvement in the crime.

[baxter]

Can't believe this happened 35 years ago. It doesn't feel like it's been that long ago.

[chaci]

How scary, to watch this happen live while in school. I remember being in 1st grade and our teaching turning on the tv when the towers were going down. How traumatic

[bunter_burt]

Great episode! Especially timely given the recent news about the FIU bridge collapse.

[WTFPodcast]

Probably the first major news event out of America I remember

[ncrdisabled]

i was in the navy on a submarine off the coast where i seen it off the deck of the sub. they should have fired all of them and not let them get any parachute money

[mariekatherine]

I wouldn’t call it an accident. It was haste, public image, and preference of money to human life. They were warned, repeatedly, tempted fate, and lost. NASA should be ashamed.

[MijoShrek]

This is a prime example of you get the people who are way out of their realm of knowledge. The managerial position of administrations in companies. Squeezing down on the engineers who actually build things to it's purest form. And managers who want damage the integrity of what is being created and built.

[stephaniecooper]

I was born in 87 so I have no idea of this happening

[BBT]

You can see the regret on Mulloys face after realizing of the great error they had, deciding to launch 🚀.

[jerrybeloin]

Lessons learned damm just follow the experts advice the ones who build the equipment

[johnmasursky]

In the numerous heated conference calls the night before the Challenger launch about delaying the mission just one more 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.

Reagan's TV address wherein he says the deceased astronauts "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God" was an inflection point in his presidency. 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.

[TheWoodland]

There were so many risks and lies with this situation. That mission was doomed before takeoff. Plus those poor innocent people didn’t die instantly like nasa made people to believe. They died when they hit the water.

[toweleeielite]

Mulloy was thrown under the bus on this, MTI had no problem recommending launch the day before where temperature was below the 54degreesF launch temp recommended the very next day, MTI went to NASA in august of 1985 explaining why it was SAFE to continue flying after the 51C erosion incident in january 1985, but then suddenly decided it was a bad idea hours before as for NASA, they never learn, STS26 the 'return to flight' and STS27 both suffered severe foam strike impacts that almost doomed both missions, but continued to dodge the bullet until STS107, as feynman said in the challenger enquiry, just because it didnt fail last time doesnt mean it wont fail next time, its a kind of russian roulette youre playing look how that ended. Ham robbed NASA of an incredible rescue mission, I wont comment on her total involvement in the STS107 disaster as the columbia facts are more well hidden than challengers were/are.