20 years ago this weekend maked the (first) explosion of the Space Shuttle. One of thosemoments... I've mentioned this to several older types who have told me, That's nothing compared to President Kennedy's shooting.

Whatever, old people are coffins waiting to happen, so fuck them. I was sitting in Mr. Sandiford's geometry class. He was no genius, but apparently he was a great football coach. My friend Rob and I had just invented a version of Connect-4 you could play in 2 dimensions. The school principal bursts in on the PA. You know, the one where you got called for detention. For the rest of the day, people walked around dumbstruck...watching every TV available.

What fucking brilliant people we thought we were.

I believe I was in 3rd grade when the fucker exploded, growing up in Florida. I had no idea who the hell the Christa McCauliff (sic) was or what the big deal was, but yeah people were freaked by the whole thing.

I am very anti space shuttle, it is a piece of outdated junk and is way too expensive to operate. I am all for space projects, but the shuttle is shit.

Malice

Interesting how the cameras lingered on the Teacher's parents (who were in Florida to view the launch) post-explosion. Rarely are such private moments made available to live TV cameras, and the nature of the medium was laid bare. I will never forget it. It's almost quaint now, of course.

I was in 4th grade, in the lunch line, when Mrs.Kaiser came and told everyone...I remember the joke that followed...NASA (Need Another Seven Astronauts)

I was running my Evel Knievel stuntcycle off the edge of my desk (1st grade or kindergarten, I forget which.) when a hysterical teacher burst in the room screaming: THE CHALLENGER JUST EXPLODED!!!!!!!!!!!

I kept playing with my stuntcycle, since I really didn't care about the space shuttle. (And, yes, Tony...the shuttle is an over-engineered mess. Too much can go wrong in the thing.)

I regret that I don't recall any of the ghoulish jokes, however. I think they involved modified women driver jokes about Christa McAuliffe piloting the shuttle. Oh, well...

I was in the computer games business at that time and was in the publisher's office that day when the production manager ran in and said “The Shuttle landed in the Atlantic!” He'd heard a report on the radio and I thought at first that they had done an RTLS abort and were flying back to Florida. Then we turned on a TV and saw the spilled fuel fireballs and the SRBs (solid rockets) still firing and knew it was a lot worse than that...

The Shuttle really isn't outdated per se, but rather too “advanced” in some important respects, and Max Faget did make (or was forced into) some bad guesses. Trying for horizontal landings (wings, etc) was a bad idea, using hydrogen fuel was a bad idea, solid fuel boosters was a bad idea... But the basic problems were senior management's fault – grossly raising the payload spec with funding to redo the design elements already completed for a much lighter lander, and going ahead at all without the money to even do the most basic flight test. Trying to do everything with one vehicle was not a good idea either.

As for cost, yes the shuttle is too expensive. But that's not the problem: it's the stuff you *don't* launch that is what soaks up the money. The incremental cost of launching a shuttle is maybe 10% of the operations cost *without* any launches: the way things are structured it doesn't cost much to launch an extra flight, and it doesn't save much to ground the fleet.

On the plus side there aren't any other systems with nearly this much flexibility, or any heavy lifters that don't exceed 3g's at any point for any payload mass or target orbit, or that can return anywhere near as much payload (not that the Shuttle's nose gear is likely to survive a heavy landing). It really can do a lot, but with hindsight what is really needed is cost reduction, not a heavy lifter with extreme mission flexibility and heavy landing capability.

None of the Russian systems can even come close to what the Shuttle can do ... but they can do what they do cheaply and reliably, and that's what matters. Moreover, they Russians have engineers with experience designing large rockets, whereas NASA has none (all of the Apollo/Shuttle engineers are long gone).

5th grade. The class down the hall watched on TV, but we were still in lesson, maybe taking a break. It was a quiet affair after that, midwestern folks are calm like that, I guess. I also happened to have been home sick on the day of the first launch of them all, the Columbia in '81 I think. I watched it on the portable black and white from my bed, and considered myself pretty lucky in retrospect that I got to see it first. That it was the first launch of a doomed craft has soured that memory, we know what became of the Columbia as well. I've begun to have serious doubts about the orbiter program as it's 1970's technology still has about a 1% failure rate. I know we have some wacky flying shit out in the Area 51's of this country, but what's the point sending up astronauts right now anyway? Space is just the big Nothing at this point, we've got too many problems on Earth.

Thanks for the rebuttal JRV, good stuff.

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Space is just the big Nothing at this point, we've got too many problems on Earth.

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Most people find long-range weather forecasts handy, as well as other things impractical without orbital technology.

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On this last point, I meant that outer is really just a big hole that we could pour money into for years with no return on the investement. The argument that money could be better spent on the shit conditions of so many humans on earth seems to resonate more within me as NASA's percieved performance continues to sag. Until we make some possible quantum leap in interstellar transport methods, the orbitals are of course the only things really relevant to our high budget space programs, IMO. That said, I am a huge armchair fan of all things "space program", and it pains me to have come to this realization. Sorry for running on and basically rehashing the common arguments out there these days, I suppose I should just say that my opionions have undergone a sea change and its kinda sad.