Thanks KS - more to come

@@lunarmodule5 Awesome as a possum with a blossom!!! Looking forward to that eventuality!! :) :) :) :)

You're very welcome!

Many thanks!

Hi Steve, wonderful to hear from you on here and glad you now have a copy of these. Just wanted to say, having listened to you on this commentary many times and on the day itself, thank you, your calm professionalism that day has always been appreciated. Regards Simon - LM5

Steve, I can only echo Simon's thoughts. Thank you.

@@lunarmodule5 I appreciate your comment. In case you haven’t seen it, Netflix has a documentary series called “Challenger: The Final Flight “ that I participated in. I thought the series was well done. Also, there’s a podcast in the series “We Interrupt This Broadcast “ by Joe Garner that I interviewed with a couple of years ago.

Thanks Hicham

Dittos - In Memoriam (Jan 27 2022)

Continued... At the time I had harbored a young man's dreams of potentially becoming an astronaut one day... the shuttle was to bring in a "new era in spaceflight" and the popular theme being presented at the time was of shuttles building everything from space telescopes to space stations to massive power stations in orbit, beaming their electricity back to Earth as microwave energy, converted back into electricity in massive ground stations that would power our cities and industry... the magazines of the time were filled with images of shuttles one day building massive O'Neill cylinders which people could live in, creating new homes and towns and farms and stuff on the interior surface of the gently spinning cylinders for artificial gravity, lit by the sunlight piped in through the ends along the cylinder's center core... The shuttle had been sold to the public as the "DC-3 of space", a 'space dump truck' that was, as soon as the few remaining kinks were worked out, would be capable of "safe, routine, cheap access to space" and making this entire future possible. While I enjoyed being a farmer and didn't really want to go to college for years to be a scientist astronaut, I figured maybe at some point they'd need space welders, which even at 15 I was already very good at, so maybe I'd get to space that way. At any rate, the destruction of the Challenger certainly was eye-opening, if not in the way that Christa McAuliffe had intended... it laid bare the fact that NASA had been selling a 'bum steer' all along in the shuttle-- so desperate in the post-Apollo era to maintain its fiefdom and relevance (and funding) even as the heyday of the "space race" or "moon race" was a fading memory, while the Cold War despite it's brief respite of "detente" in the early-mid 70's had descended back into the depths of paranoia in the early 80's, the promise of "glasnost" wasn't even on the radar then, and which nobody at the time knew would abruptly end with the Soviet collapse in 1991. Shuttle had been sold and NASA had beat the drums as hard as they could to convince everyone, inside and out of government, that it was the "be all end-all" of space transportation, when in reality it was a technologically brittle, extremely expensive, and inherently dangerous and limited space vehicle, based on flawed assumptions and flawed compromises which had inherently hobbled its design and purposes, and ensured it would NEVER be what NASA had convinced everybody it would be. BUT NASA was SO heavily invested in it, and SO desperate to maintain their funding and relevance, that they continued to sell this bill of goods to the Congress and public long after they KNEW it would never be as safe or cheap or "easy" as they had purported it to be. NASA had taken to flying Congressmen and Senators in charge of NASA funding on the shuttle, now that they had 7 seats available after the removal of the ejection seats present on the first four flights, once shuttle was declared "operational". Jake Garn, now head of NASA, had in fact gotten Greg Jarvis's seat on a previous shuttle flight-- Jarvis had won his seat in a Hughes Space Division contest for a free shuttle seat for NASA contractors. As a mere company engineer, he was bumped from the flight to make room for Garn, an influential space-state politician at the time, who could argue for more appropriations for NASA at the time. Jarvis would end up on Challenger. The "teacher in space" program had been announced to great fanfare over a year earlier, when I was in middle school... I suggested to my social studies teacher, Mr. Reichardt, who had played football with my Dad at Shiner High back in the mid-60's, that he should apply... he just laughed and said they wouldn't get him up there! He told me later how he'd worked on Jupiter missiles in Italy or Turkey when he was in the Air Force after graduating high school, so he'd seen enough to know that he didn't care to go LOL:) The professional astronaut corps, they surely had to know of the shuttle's problems, and bravely decided to take the risks, but poor Christa and Greg, they were sold a "bill of goods" by all the press surrounding the shuttle program; they put their faith in the system and were let down by it, and paid with their lives. Challenger burst the bubble; it really laid bare the fact that NASA had been "cooking the numbers" all along on the shuttle in order to get it approved and keep it funded, and that it would NEVER be what they had promised it to be-- cheap, easy, routine, and SAFE transportation to space. It laid bare how far NASA had strayed from its roots as well, where management during Apollo, after the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire (which was the 55th anniversary of yesterday, 27 January 1967), had concentrated on managing risk and danger and ameliorating it wherever possible, even to the point of becoming somewhat risk averse, particularly after the Apollo 11 moon landing had been achieved, to a bunch of bureaucrats in upper management positions more worried about their careers, maintaining funding and meeting political aims of the program, and keeping to "the schedule" to keep the image intact that NASA had carefully crafted for the shuttle. To the point they overrode their own engineers in the face of AMPLE evidence and reversed their stand on "prove it's safe" to "prove it's unsafe" (which you can never prove a negative completely) and in so doing killed seven astronauts and blew up a multi-billion dollar spacecraft. It also brought into the stark light of reality just how far you can trust the government, at least in the mind of one teenage Texas farm boy LOL:) We ate our lunch that noon while watching the coverage of the unfolding disaster on TV, which went nonstop for the rest of the day essentially. After lunch I had to get back to the field and Dad had to go back to sleep for awhile to go back to the nuke plant to work that night, so I popped in a blank tape into the brand new Sears top-loader VCR I'd bought for the whopping sum of $350 on sale (because it was a close-out model) at Sears the previous fall with most of my crop money I'd made for the year... they'd been out a few years but NO WAY could I afford them when they were $500-700 like they had been a few years before... you could buy a GOOD used car back then for that kind of money (better if you put a little more with it!) I watched the tape that night and kept it, periodically watching it. Also taught me a lot about how the media REALLY works, in all the rubbish they were "reporting" at the time, and of course the stuff that came out of the Roger's Commission later on investigating the Challenger disaster. NASA at the time had known the danger and was already designing the "improved" O-ring seal design used on subsequent flights... but had chosen to keep flying until the new SRB casings with the new field joint designs became available for flight hardware. They KNEW the response to cold, as the previous flight (IIRC it was Garn's) had come back with an SRB with a hole burned through the casing the size of a basketball-- fortunately for his flight the seals didn't disintegrate the hole start burning through the casing until *just before* SRB burnout, and the hole was on the side AWAY from the vulnerable External Tank, so the hot gas vented harmlessly away from the vehicle, and didn't get too bad before the SRB's burned out and were jettisoned. That flight, IIRC, had established the 53 degree launch criteria, which IIRC the temperature was 27 degrees in the right SRB when Challenger launched that morning. Sadly, NASA didn't learn its lesson for very long, either, because on 3 Feb 2003, just a hair over 17 years later, NASA would lose another shuttle, Challenger's sister ship Columbia, along with its seven crew, to another WELL UNDERSTOOD and previously experienced damage causing foam strike to the orbiter's heat shield-- a problem which was basically unsolvable with 100% certainty, which led to a reboot of the space program and ultimately to the shuttle's retirement for good... which it was a shame didn't occur after Challenger back in 1986, honestly. Shuttle was horrifically expensive and inherently dangerous, and could not be equipped with a meaningful crew escape capability in all phases of flight, unlike previous vehicles, and by the early 2000's it was apparent it needed to be replaced, its lifetime was limited due to it's 40+ year old technology and the fact that it would cost billions to upgrade it, billions that could be better spent on more cost-effective and safer spacecraft capable of going further (like back to the Moon) which shuttles could NEVER do... BUT nobody could see how NASA would ever get the funding to retire a "functional" shuttle system and the billions in funding necessary to design and build a replacement system for it. Sadly, Columbia drove that point home and provided the impetus to make the hard decision to retire shuttle and replace it with other vehicles. Sad because it took such a disaster to make what was otherwise a straightforward and sensible decision, and it took another 7 astronauts lives to make the point and get it done. Later! OL J R : )

Yes it's Barbara..she was Christa's back up for 51L then years later became an astronaut proper

@@lunarmodule5 Thanks! Indeed, but it is still strange to me that a back-up also shows up at a photo shoot like this. And also, apparently Jarvis is missing. Was he a later addition to the crew?

I remember when that aired and videotaped it. I’ve seen it several times and it’s consistently a horrible and disappointing movie. Such hokey writing, silly acting, so many errors and editing and other things, just a real major disappointment ever movie.

So it was intentional?

It is always easy to judge with the benefit of hindsight. Yes, a lot of things went wrong, a lot of people made wrong decisions, not only around the launch, but for years. But if you read Diane Vaughan's book, it is understandable how this "Normalization of deviance" happened, with everyone believing that he was doing the right thing. What is hard to swallow is that the two leading managers from Marshall until today at least publicly never admitted any regrets or failures from their side. But maybe that's the only way for themselves to be able to live on... Every person is different - there are a lot others more or less really responsible for what happened not only in Challenger, but in all the three accidents, who really suffered from what happened, some really having trouble to go on - just to mention Joe Shea... Some of the people around Columbia still ask themselves these endless what - if questions, believing that they could cope better "if at least we had tried something...", even if the chances after the fomestrike realisticly were very remote.

Having to live with the decision to override Thiokol perhaps was punishment enough for those involved that evening before launch who decided to proceed.

@@mrFalconlem I would agree for most people - the two I am not sure about are Lawrence Mulloy, the Marshall program manager, and William Lucas, the Marshall Center director. Until today they always insisted in having done nothing wrong and that they would make the same decision again. There is one additional point that is not very often discussed: It might have been that the cold was not the only reason for the accident, as there had been blow-bys before even in wormer conditions. There are very qualified people who believe until today that the general design flaws in the joint and maybe even an error during stacking at the Cape had contributed as well. Which does not exonerate Marshall Management at all, because problems with the boosters were know since 1978 and downplayed and often not forwarded properly to the Shuttle Program Management in Houston. Glynn Lunney, who was the Program Manager from late 1981 to summer of 1985, told me in an interview in summer of 2020 that he later always

felt betrayed by Marshall...