1st Gen Lunchtable Thread - General Discussion

1986 challenger launch too old for you?

 

I was a year old then, I remember talking about it in 3rd or 4th grade and the teacher breaking down in front of the class while going over it.

 

Can't imagine what a challenge that must have been to get that right with once chance per week.

 

Off the top of my head, the Challenger disaster was due to a simple O-ring failure because of the cold weather launch right? Crazy

 

At the technical level yeah. The reasons why that o-ring existed in the first place, and why the launch wasn't scrubbed, are far more interesting and terrifying.

 

Yeah, I was a big shuttle fan. Watched nearly every launch. That one, talk about gut wrenching. Years later to find out they were most likely still alive after that explosion in the crew portion of the vehicle as it burned up. F-d up.

 

Yeah it was a frozen o-ring on one of the boosters. I remember watching it live. At that age I couldn't really comprehend what had just happened.

 

We talked about poor old Roger in our engineering ethics classes. Dude lost his whole career trying to bring awareness to the fact it was likely to fail.

 

I was in fourth grade and we all saw it happen live on one of those TV/VCR stands that roll into the class. I still remember the teacher running up to turn it off after it exploded and was falling back to the ground in pieces.

Not a great day.

 

Then there was Columbia in 2003. Another gut wrenching disaster.

It's no wonder NASA scrubbed the Artemis launch. Can't have that thing blowing up.

 

Same.

We have a pretty horrific track record with whistleblowers

 

God, that one just seemed to go on forever too. It was terrible.

 

If i remember right, didn't they conclude that the crew was alive until their compartment hit the water? I think they found that their air supplies had been manually turned on, signalling they had survived the initial explosion.

 

I was in school and around 7 years old. I don't remember much about it. Not sure if we watched on tv or just heard about it.

 

I STILL remember wondering, “Is that what’s supposed to happen?”…

 

We sure do, I feel like it's a side effect of chasing profits.

I think the unintentional takeaway was "shut up and CYA"

 

Probably correct. Both crews were still ticking I bet. FFS. To know your time is ending like that. Geez.

 

Yeah.

I still think capitalism in some form is the best (imperfect) system we have, but fuck… it gets so gross sometimes.

Can’t fuck with that almighty shareholder value, can we?

 

line must go up at all times

 

Looks like they are going to attempt it Saturday at 11ish Pacific time. Hope it all is it all goes well. NASA is expecting 400,000 people in the area to watch it.