To Absent Friends
Jan. 28th, 2006 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tracker720 years ago this morning, my brother and I were snowed out of school. We were staying with my grandmother, as per usual. There wasn't much snow, to be honest, but because of the terrible quality of many of the county's roads, it didn't take much snow to shut down the schools.
A little before noon, we were setting up a boardgame and turned on the radio. The news had just started coming in.
Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded.
We went to the den and turned on the TV. CBS was showing the launch from every angle available. It's a sequence I'll never forget. Portside view of the shuttle on the pad. Engines fire. Shuttle clears the pad, 300 tons of machine riding a pillar of fire. View switches to a camera further away from the pad, and it's that classic shot of a shuttle launch - the tower in low-center, surrounded by steam and smoke, with the tower of smoke rising from the pad, the bright glare of the shuttle's engines and SRBs, and the shuttle itself.
Long-range shot, now, as Challenger has already started rolling and is heading downrange. Those perfect professional tones from Mission Control - "Challenger, go with throttle up."
And then, it happened.
A seal between two segments of one of the SRBs had failed, and the fuel was burning through the side. Imbalance of thrust, the SRB started to break away from the stack, and it penetrated the external tank. The stack lost aerodynamic integrity. Structures failed, tons and tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen blew out from the tank, and the Shuttle and tank disintegrated. She just broke apart.
The smoke trail, from the ground, looked like a misshapen Y. The SRBs continued to fire and roared off over the Atlantic. Where the arms and stem of the Y intersected, there was the cloud of liquid fuels converted to vapor, looking like a brightly-colored tumor.
Challenger's launch, STS-51L for those keeping score at home, was one of the first Shuttle missions that didn't get nationwide television launch coverage. The Shuttle program had been spectacularly successful, and the promise of routine spaceflight was coming true.
Six astronauts and a teacher were lost that day, along with the spacecraft. Challenger was the workhorse of the Shuttle program. The civilian-in-space program was cancelled.
32 months would pass before the next Shuttle launch. The belief in infallability was gone forever.
I believe, without condition or reservation, that space exploration and, yes, exploitation is among the greatest endeavors mankind can undertake. Even after Challenger and Columbia (the loss of which broke my heart, and hurt much worse than Challenger), I would go up tomorrow. There are riches of knowledge and science and ... everything. It's all out there. More than we can even imagine.
A little before noon, we were setting up a boardgame and turned on the radio. The news had just started coming in.
Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded.
We went to the den and turned on the TV. CBS was showing the launch from every angle available. It's a sequence I'll never forget. Portside view of the shuttle on the pad. Engines fire. Shuttle clears the pad, 300 tons of machine riding a pillar of fire. View switches to a camera further away from the pad, and it's that classic shot of a shuttle launch - the tower in low-center, surrounded by steam and smoke, with the tower of smoke rising from the pad, the bright glare of the shuttle's engines and SRBs, and the shuttle itself.
Long-range shot, now, as Challenger has already started rolling and is heading downrange. Those perfect professional tones from Mission Control - "Challenger, go with throttle up."
And then, it happened.
A seal between two segments of one of the SRBs had failed, and the fuel was burning through the side. Imbalance of thrust, the SRB started to break away from the stack, and it penetrated the external tank. The stack lost aerodynamic integrity. Structures failed, tons and tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen blew out from the tank, and the Shuttle and tank disintegrated. She just broke apart.
The smoke trail, from the ground, looked like a misshapen Y. The SRBs continued to fire and roared off over the Atlantic. Where the arms and stem of the Y intersected, there was the cloud of liquid fuels converted to vapor, looking like a brightly-colored tumor.
Challenger's launch, STS-51L for those keeping score at home, was one of the first Shuttle missions that didn't get nationwide television launch coverage. The Shuttle program had been spectacularly successful, and the promise of routine spaceflight was coming true.
Six astronauts and a teacher were lost that day, along with the spacecraft. Challenger was the workhorse of the Shuttle program. The civilian-in-space program was cancelled.
32 months would pass before the next Shuttle launch. The belief in infallability was gone forever.
I believe, without condition or reservation, that space exploration and, yes, exploitation is among the greatest endeavors mankind can undertake. Even after Challenger and Columbia (the loss of which broke my heart, and hurt much worse than Challenger), I would go up tomorrow. There are riches of knowledge and science and ... everything. It's all out there. More than we can even imagine.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-29 02:55 pm (UTC)I'm going to hate seeing the Shuttles retired in a few years, as they're the only American spacecraft I've ever seen launch. I have high hopes for the replacement system, especially since it's being built around the best parts of the Shuttle - the main liquid-fuel engines and those monster SRBs.
That was a defining day, to be sure. Our parents had JFK's assassination, we had Challenger. Somehow it makes sense, given Kennedy's commitment to space exploration.