Could the Challenger Disaster have been avoided? Why was the spatial program almost canceled so many times? And is there a Mandela effect here? Do you really actually remember watching the Challenger explode? Today, Rad 80s90s History is looking at the Challenger Disaster? Welcome to Rad!
80s90s History, a podcast looking at the last two decades of the 20th century. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Usually, I say it's a history of the last time things were relatively normal and chill, but today we're going to be talking about something that was definitely not chill. And in fact, might maybe be the emblematic traumatic news event for folks who grew up in the 1980s. To talk about this today, my special guest is Farhad Manjou Farhad, has been a New York Times columnist. I mean, he's been a columnist.
He's been reading people on the internet slate all over the place. Farhad, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really look forward to this. Do you remember where you were when the Challenger blew up, by the way?
There's definitely Mandela effect there because I was actually in South Africa, which is where I'm from, and we came here two years after the Challenger exploded. I can't imagine I have a distinct memory of watching it in a classroom, but I don't think that actually happened because I don't think we've watched it in South Africa.
Please save that because I have done a little research into that and I have a theory about that. But, okay, so I, yeah, I, I mean, I know what that iconic picture looks like and I've seen the video, but I do have a memory that maybe a false memory of actually watching it. I was in the second grade and I confirmed this with my mother because she was a teacher at my school. I said, I wasn't watching it, right? She said, no, I took you out of class and I told you about it.
So, like I said, we're going to get into that. But actually, when I reached out to you to see if you do an episode, an episode for this show, you mentioned that you had just read a book, which I had just read, which is called Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster. On the edge of space by Adam Higginbatham. It was a pretty amazing book, right?
Yeah, it was so good. I read his book about Chernobyl, which he wrote right before this. And I was like blown away in that book about all of the details he had. And then the details in this are even sort of there. It's amazing and sort of like amazing journalism, but also just like really interesting stuff about science and like how America worked.
It's just great science. And I would say bureaucracy for both of those stories. You know, a lot of that is, you know, the cover your ass stuff and the why did you make this decision stuff? And so to get into it in a weird way, I feel like we're going to spend half our time talking about the space shuttle program itself or maybe even the space program itself, because in a way, this is sort of, you know, it leads up to this disaster.
But the story here, we could start with just, you know, the moon landing 1969, a decades worth of work, Kennedy, the space race, the Apollo program. The, you know, the iconic images of the alarm strong walking on the moon, hopping around playing golf on the moon and things like that. The, the, the entire space program was huge in the, especially in the 60s, NASA had some 400,000 people working on the Apollo program at its height.
The price of the support facilities alone was 2.2 billion dollars, the total cost to the country to put people on the moon, the entire Apollo program was 28 billion dollars, which was. The equivalent of a third of all of the US military spending for 1969, which was the height of the Vietnam War. So that it wasn't a third of all of the military spending on the Vietnam War, but it was a third of spending of probably one of the, the, you know, prime years of the Vietnam War.
And it was, I mean, I think that the reason it was justified was because, because of the gold war, because we were sort of like, you know, in addition to the scientific curiosity and everything else, we were in an arms race, and we want to sort of demonstrate this amazing capability. And like Americans had been scared of, of Sputnik. And so you have this real like nationalism aspect to it.
And then I mean, what's interesting about like what happens after is that like the entire sort of reason for the space program kind of goes away. And then they need something else. Getting to that exactly right now. I was surprised by a couple things that we can hit right here, which is number one, the degree to which people's interest in the whole moon program fell off a cliff.
Yeah, there were there were six total moon landings, the first in July of 1969, the last in December of 1972. And there's a Gallup poll taken at some point after, you know, mission three or four, whatever that's 53% of Americans opposed moving on to doing like a Mars landing or something like that.
And there was another poll that said more than half the public wanted the president to spend less on space exploration. Now historically from the 60s into the 70s, you know, we've just had as we mentioned the Vietnam War, which sort of kicked the legs out from under the finances of the great society. And but also the 70s is known as a decade of austerity of oil shocks, right, stagflation. So there's a sense that we kind of can't afford to do everything anymore.
And so one of the things there's there's two things going on. The American public is sort of losing interest in this. There were rumors that like the last landing on the moon, the government might have put pressure on the TV networks to even cover it. Yeah, yeah. So the government is seeing here amazing, right? Like, if I didn't see people, I'd be watching it.
I don't know what I'm of two minds about that because number one, especially for the ability now you would have better cameras and better video and you could see more things like think of the grainy images and things like that. There was one or two cameras they could use. It was pretty boring. They're hopping around. Now I feel like you'd have like GoPro like cameras and you could see like them picking up the moon rocks. Right up close.
So on the one hand, I feel like it makes sense. There wasn't a lot to do. But at the same time, people still get really excited about, you know, every space, but again, maybe it's better production quality. Yeah. So I mean, also though, there's this aspect of like we've done that. And Americans get bored very quickly. Yeah. Well, it's. And so the idea was we would move on to Mars or whatever, but again, austerity comes in.
So there's two things going on. The government has sort of had their win. They're seeing that the public interest in the space program is waning. There are actual financial restraints coming in that they can't spend as much. There's not really a reason to spend as much. And so number one, what NASA is looking at is sort of an existential threat. Like what is our mission? What are we supposed to do? If we're not going to Mars.
And we have to do things cheaper than what are we? What is it that we're going to do? And one of the things that the book describes as sort of like the compromise solution or maybe the brilliant way to like spin this is, well, no, we don't have to go to Mars and then the Saturn or whatever.
What we do is we'll make space flight seem as common as jumping on an airplane. Yeah, it was like make it accessible. We can do it many, many times. The basic thing is the sort of the numbers they predicted of how often they fly there.
And you know, we'll find out they were totally off. But like the idea, I mean, even the name, the shuttle, it was sort of like going to be something that you would just use all the time and it would go back and forth. And like that reusability was like, you know, a key way to combat this idea that it was going to be expensive. Like we're going to make it so much more efficient and just like every day.
With the Apollo program, every rocket used was destroyed. The only thing that they brought back intact was the actual crew module. And so it's only now, thanks to companies like SpaceX that you can reuse rockets. So to a certain degree, what the shuttle program was was sort of the technology at the time, allowing for a hybrid model. The idea is, can we have rockets that we can shoot up and then they'll fall back into the sea so that we can recover them and reuse them to a certain extent.
But what will be completely reusable is they originally were going to call it the space clipper, the astro plane, the starlighter, they settled on the space shuttle. And it's a good name. And as you said, they were planning on doing like they would want to they wanted to do a flight a week if they could. But to me, this is already this is the contradiction at the heart of what we're talking about. They the government in NASA do not want to give up the magic of space flight.
They want it to become routine, but that's also in aid of doing it on the cheap not on the cheap. Maybe that's a little too critical, but cheaper. Yeah, right. And so it leads to these, you know, you sort of design it in a way that. In a way that it wasn't the thing is that what's interesting about it is it actually didn't turn out to be on the cheap.
So they actually did spend a lot on it, but right at the start, you have this idea that like we're going to do things in a way that's just kind of much more business like we were going to run this like a business instead of like the blank check that we had an appala well or what ocean liners were when it became an ocean liner has a schedule. And it will leave a dock every week at this time on this day or what airlines do now that your plans are to leave at 302 PM or whatever.
When when President Nixon announces the the space shuttle program, he says that it's designed to transform the space frontier of the 70s into familiar territory easily accessible for human endeavor in the 80s and 90s. It will revolutionize transportation into near space by routineizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronauts. But again, that to me, that's the conflict, which is there's a quote from Hagenbatham in the book.
In some ways, it was as if the 16th century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circumnavigation of the world by rowing across Lisbon Harbor and back. So you and I as kids and maybe Americans generally in the 80s thought this was cutting edge G with science and it was. But I wonder what that did to morale inside of NASA because they know they are they're seeing their budgets cut back and they know that they're ratcheting back.
They're ambition basically right there they're aiming for something that is sort of it's it's like if Apple like built the iPhone 11 again sort of like you they're aiming for something that they've already done. They're just trying to kind of make it. You know, look like they're like it's something that you could do often make it more accessible, but they're not.
There's no like at the heart of it. There's no innovation in the in the like goal here like going to Mars would be the next thing that would be the G was I can't we're pushing the boundaries of human endeavor versus hey we're just going to.
Okay, we'll have a cool thing that we can reuse will shoot it up and it'll fly down like an airplane, which is what the space shuttle was designed to do and what are you going to do up there. I don't know both spin around for a week or so and do some experiments and yeah well they had this goal also this sort of far off thing of the space station and they were and the shuttle was to get to the space station they were both sort of like a tandem project right.
Well, and this is the second point that I wanted to lay down already it surprised me the degree to which and in retrospect, this is obvious. It surprised me the degree to which everything justifying the continuation of the space program was because there could also be a simultaneous military use even with the space station. They're they're talking about you know, obviously not only the government, but even the CIA still launches their own spy satellites and stuff like that.
But the reason that the space shuttle is designed with a 60 foot long 15 foot wide sort of cargo bay is not only so you can put things like the Hubble Space Telescope up there, but you can also put spy satellites up there and they literally were thinking about offensive operations against Soviet spacecraft in space if it was necessary.
So this is this is a craft that as opposed to just a module that's in orbit and has little control other than you know firing rockets here and that if we have to go blow up a Russian satellite, maybe we can use the space shuttle to do that. Anyway, like I said, it's it's obvious in retrospect, but the fact that a civilian space program continued probably wouldn't have happened if they weren't thinking of the military component as well.
Yeah, and I don't remember this perfectly, but this like caused a dissension in NASA, right? Like there's this idea that like we are civilian program and there were people who sort of did not want to build for the military, and which was not sort of in high standing at that point. Certainly, tail end of the Vietnam War. But mining up again, the contradictions were still doing great stuff in space, but it's going to be routine, right? It's going to become commonplace.
We're still doing great stuff in space, but we're going to do it on the cheap the budget allocation that they wanted for the shuttle program was $14 billion. That's what NASA asked for. They got $5.5 billion, and I believe even that was cut down. Remember from the book, there's this infamous Alan Shepherd quote Alan Shepherd, the first American in space about the lowest common the lowest bitter. Do you remember that? I don't remember the quote, but I remember that sort of.
Yeah, when asked what he was thinking about when what was he thinking about when preparing for launch aboard his Mercury Redstone rocket, Alan Shepherd, the first American space, infamously replied the fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bitter. So from NASA's point of view now, we've been talking about the government's point of view for continuing this NASA is feeling, like I said, an existential sort of sort of damically hanging over the head.
They're afraid if they don't produce something, then civilian space exploration could just end. So when they start to it's not that even with the Apollo program, they were going out to civilian contractors and the lowest bitter would get the contractor whatever. But now they're doing it with without the third of the resources of the Vietnam more.
They're now doing it sort of like any other sort of military civilian or government contracting out where they're for each component of it as opposed to design. They're designing it in house, but they're leaving sort of the details and the bits and pieces to these individual contractors. Yeah, and they're sort of overwhelmingly military contractors whose people, companies who sort of other business is to be the lowest bitter on all kinds of things.
And this is like we're talking about like the smallest parts, like, you know, like the thing that was the failure point was this rubber seal, but like, you know, imagine how many rubber seals there are on a thing like that.
Like it was, I mean, it's how government works, but it's also like, it's also like you would, you would imagine that like everything, everything that you would, you would need for a program that is sort of like done for the first time, you know, wouldn't be kind of off like you wouldn't have any kind of off the part of the shelf park.
Right. The so what they end up with is the orbiter, which is the part of the shuttle that the shuttle it resembles an airplane, it glides back down after coming in orbit. They have the external tank, which is if you're visualizing, if you see it on YouTube right now, the biggest tank, the center tank when it launches that was to it held the liquid hydrogen and the fuel to just get into orbit.
That was not reusable that, you know, was destroyed after each launch, but the two solid rocket boosters on the side were reusable. They would burn off all of their fuel and crash land back in the ocean. But, okay, budget cuts mean that lots of things are cut doesn't a dozen orbiters were originally planned so a dozen space shuttles were planned and they only did, you know, half a dozen over the course of the program.
As you said, they wanted to launch weekly. They were only occasionally over the course of the shuttle program able to go monthly. There were 135 shell missions over 30 years. So on average, they're only doing four and a half a year now that averages out that way because after accidents, they shut down the program. Shocking to me, they did things among the various cuts that they do, there were always plans to have a escape system.
So that the crew could, you know, jettison, if there was something going on in launch, the other thing that shocked me far had is they the first launch of the shuttle system with the two astronauts on there, the first launch ever was a man launch with people on board to cut costs even space X to this day, they do multiple launches before they tried to put people on there. And then, you know, I think that's why they're trying to do something.
Because they're having a limited budget and they're trying to rush to prove that they can do something. It shocked me to learn that the first ever launch of the space shuttle with people on it. Was was basically the trial red. Yeah, you know, I'd never thought about the escape system before because like you're imagine, you know, if you, if you have a problem in space, you, you can't use an escape system.
The thing that happened in one of the Apollo missions was like on the launch pad, they needed to escape because the thing was on fire. And that was like a big lesson from the Apollo program that they needed to improve the way that somebody could escape from that. And then they just sort of ignored, and then they did that for the rest of the Apollo program. And then they just kind of went back on that and and kind of ignored it or, but it wasn't like a thing that needed to be done.
And we can't afford an escape system basically. Right. So you're mentioning the. The, the, the, the thing that maybe we should acknowledge also at the top is space travel is dangerous. And we're also at a time where they're still learning as they go.
So, you know, one of the things that people will ask is was NASA to reckless or whatever, but we should, you know, stipulate it up front that this is to this day going into space is not something that is like air travel, which is relatively safe at this point.
That's also the sort of irony here is that they tried in some ways their goal is less ambitious because they weren't going to Mars, but also they were, they were sort of aiming for the sky in terms of making it like, you know, like a product like accessible to everyone and civilians could go on it. They were aiming to do something that, you know, in some ways would would be more difficult, especially this is like, you know, a whole new thing to humanity and we're going to make it like weekly.
Just an aside, you mentioned the, the fire, the Apollo one mission in January 1967 where three astronauts were killed again. This wasn't in space. This was their testing things on a launch pad. But that story blew my mind because so there's a fire cause we think by a spark and the reason that it ignited is because at that point the modules interior where the astronauts were was filled with pure oxygen.
Now, think of the original star Trek where the ship is flown by switches and things like that. There's not touch screens. So imagine an interior where there's tons of switches and buttons and lots of opportunities for little things to spark unprotected wires. Also Velcro Velcro, the sort of the role that Velcro played in that basically because it's extremely flammable and they had it everywhere in the in the cabin because they had like checklist that they had up and so.
And you know, and they knew that this was a problem and you know, again, sort of like overlooked it. Well, I would say that they learned lessons from it to they change the management and safety culture after that. But it is weird to think that it possibly happened because someone pulled a Velcro thing off the wall where the clipboard was and that's what it.
So NASA is not unfamiliar with the danger not unfamiliar with disasters, but they also want to they want to like they say show that this is something that can become commonplace and and something that's reliable to do this with their goal of maybe launching once a week.
They throw open the applications for astronauts to plenty more people that the Apollo program, there were maybe a few dozen because there were only so many missions, but if you're going to do a mission a week, they're throwing open the the astronaut program to hundreds of people.
I'm not going to suggest that they lowered the standards in terms of training because what they actually did was they sort of bifurcated the roles on a shuttle mission you would still have the pilots and the people that were supposed to know how to get something in orbit and how to get it back and do all that stuff.
But then because you're going up to do scientific experiments and things like that, they they create new roles, new actual like titles like payload specialists and mission specialists and that would be well, I'm not I've gone through astronaut training, but maybe not as intensively as the pilot because I'm strapped into the back. And I'm just along for the right essentially because once we get into orbit, I'm the scientist that's going to do the experiments.
Right. There's this aspect though of a lot of this being marketing for NASA, like we're going to make it. We're going to have civilians on it. We're going to make it accessible to wider numbers people and each time they sort of announced this and then they have this huge contest to pick the civilians. It was marketing. It was new. NASA was in the news kind of constantly because of these initiatives. So those are true.
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So you can continue to build smarter more meaningful relationships with your customers. Build smarter digital relationships with your customers and make every moment count with Klavio. Learn more at klavio.com slash bfcm. They're throwing open the astronaut program to more people. I think I saw that there were like 25,000 applications in the 70s of which 8,000 were considered.
So they're doing real numbers in terms of like putting you through space camp, but they are also clamoring as you said for this idea that, okay, if we are going to have routine space flight. Then we should have normal folks up there. We should have civilians up there. And it was made known that NASA was considering this and lots of people jumped on this and thought it was a great idea. The writer Norman Mailer campaign hard that he should go up Walter Cronkite.
The the the news anchor apparently was very interested in going up. John Denver was mentioned celebrities. I just want a side on that is like I found that kind of mind blowing and like really a testament to the 80s is like or 70s and 80s is like as being like sort of better than our time is like. They considered like normal people and the only people we consider to go up in space now are billionaires.
Right. So like that's our that's our version of the school teacher. They were talking about doing things. They talked about potentially opening it up to rich people to pay their way, but also introducing shuttle clubs where you could pull your money and you know sort of become a part of it. But who were the actual first non real real astronauts to go up were this blew my mind politicians.
Yeah. So I did not know that either. In 1985 Senator Jake Garn went into space as part of the shuttle program and in 1986 representative Bill Nelson of Florida became the second sitting member of Congress to travel aboard the space shuttle. And Garn is like right before the challenger right or I'm going to come to that. But Garn. This is from the book Garn maintained that it was a constitutional necessity for him to fly aboard the shuttle as an observer.
Hey payload specialist whose expertise was to understand where taxpayers money was going, which is a bunch of BS. Finally, what they decide on and we skipped ahead because we didn't mention that the the shuttle program begins in 1981. And so 1981, 1982, 1983. They're launching missions not like we said, weekly as they wanted not even monthly because they are finding problems all the time. So they will the the heat tiles were a problem. The landing gear was a problem at some point.
So every time they go up because they hadn't spent years testing this, they're finding things and they're having to fix things on the fly. But in 1984, President Reagan announces that the first civilian non politician to go into space will be a teacher. He announces the teacher in space program more than 11,000 teachers apply.
Apparently, instead of the teacher, the thing that almost happened was a journalist. They were going to send a journalist. So far, as a journalist, would you go now? Would you have gone into space in 1984? Yeah, I definitely would go either time. Yeah, really? Because I would definitely not. Oh, really? I mean, I like have kids and stuff, but like.
So I don't like I want to go skydiving, but I haven't. But going to them going to space. That's I mean, especially in the 80s, like I would have jumped at that. When you were a younger man and had no yes, no, no responsibilities. Right. One of the things that we need to mention is that I said that the shuttle program begins in 81.
It was almost canceled several times before it even has its first flight. During the Carter administration, it came very close to being shuttered, which is why they're trying to get the darn thing in the air. There's a quote from the book that says one of the engineers involved thought that the the chances of a disaster happening on the very first shuttle flight were 50 50, but it succeeds.
Even after it succeeds, the delays are bringing pressure on NASA. Because again, the government was promised this would be routine, Isable. This would be something that would be happening on the regs. There. Unbeknownst to a lot of people at NASA, some of the contractors are also getting concerned about the technology. And this is where we should bring in Morton.
So, it's a word. Yeah, so I call that that's a good way. Yeah. So, I call is a defense contractor or just an engineering firm that is responsible for creating the two booster rockets that are on the side. The solid, the solid fuel ones, which were like the novel technology on the shuttle. They had feared that on the very first launch that those solid rocket boosters were this close to igniting on the launch pad.
For years, they were modeling the effects of the rockets exploding during launch. Because again, those rockets only have to get the shuttle into orbit and then they fall back down to earth. So, the only problem that they have to deal with is, you know, the firing the initial stage, leaving the atmosphere.
But because again, a budget cuts and time constraints, they were cutting corners in the sense that they didn't have full scale test data for drawing conclusions about how, you know, the boosters would work as you're going through the atmosphere and air pressure is changing and things like that.
They had never been flight tested, never been flight tested. The only firing tests that they had done at their corporate head or, you know, test grounds or whatever in the Utah desert where they would turn them on their sides and turn them on and fire them. They had never shot them in the air. They had only, they never shot them vertically. They had only shot them on the ground. But they had this idea that they could make up for the parts that they hadn't tested by building in redundancies.
And so they had this very, I was surprised to see sort of like how sophisticated they're like list of redundancies they had. And they had various parts that like had no redundancies and they had strict regulations about it. And the failure happened on one of the redundancies. A redundancy that I would argue though is there because of a corner cut, which is the rocket boosters are huge.
There are nearly 15 stories tall. They weigh 590 tons. They're the largest solid rockets built to that time. Now they're so big that you cannot transport them across the country from where they're constructed easily. So you have to cut them into sections and then reconstruct the sections once you're at Cape Canaveral. So those rocket boosters are coming in these sections from Utah to Florida. Farhan, what would have been the logical solution if you had more money?
What the factory right next to it exactly. But because they don't have the money to do that. They're putting them in pieces and then reconstructing them. And because they're in these segmented pieces, that's where the O-ring design comes from. It's not one single chamber. It's multiple chambers. And the O-rings are designed to essentially allow the fuel.
The fuel to move through the entire structure without it being one single structure. And the way to think of the O-rings are sort of like in plumbing. Yeah. That seemed. Yeah. Or like the gasket in your kitchen faucet or in a carburetor or something like that. And then when pressure is applied, it's sort of like not really a foam, but similar to a foam where it will expand to fill and seal the various segments.
Right. It's. And it's that kind of. I don't know. I don't think it's actually rubber. Maybe it was, but it was that kind of rubberized material that is supposed to expand to fill sort of the gaps. It said it was a synthetic rubber compound. These O-rings. They were only a quarter of an inch thick, but they're 37 feet in circumference. Again, so large that they have to be shipped on railroad cars from I think it was Kentucky or Florida, whatever.
The company, how did you pronounce it again? The. The. The cycle is concerned from the beginning about the the how reliable these are. This material is because if you think about it, you know, it's it's in the middle of a blast furnace. And so, the they knew from the beginning that it was this was a delicate, as you say, part point of failure for the whole system.
And I think that what they they figured is that they felt like at one point, this is from the book. They made a calculation that a pair that quoting now a pair of solid boosters could be expected to undergo a failure resulting in the loss of crew and spacecraft once every 18 to 30 missions.
But the idea is you want to watch once a week. So it's they're taking calculated risks where they're saying, OK, hopefully we'll be able to get through the first dozen flights and will will be fixing things as we go. Right. Right. And that accounted for the delay between the flights is like they were noticing problems. And one of the problems was this.
The seals right. So like we mentioned the reason that they're only averaging for and a half lights a year is because as they're noticing problems, they're delaying, but they're also noticing things when it's on the launch pad and you could you know, they're actually there 10 seconds away from firing the rockets and the board abort because we're seeing this problem that problem.
On the one hand, it's not that they're being reckless and just going full scale ahead. They are trying to fix problems, but they're fixing problems on the fly. Yeah, I had a little bit of a like a mixed reaction to the whole program, which is like they were clearly cutting corners, but also it's it's just so incredibly complex.
I think that at the time it was like the most complex thing we've ever built. I don't know if like the large had an uncle either or something is bigger since but like it was. And so there's this like, you know, when they when they launched the first one and it works, I was like cheering for them because it's amazing that they were able to do this and you know, despite all the budget cuts and everything, they made this incredibly sophisticated thing. And it worked, you know, sometimes.
To bring it back to the teacher and space program, which is announced in 1984, the the shuttle disaster happens in January of 1986. So there's a two year period here where the government where NASA announces this program takes applications and Sharon, Christa Corrigan was born in September 1948. She met Steve McCullough at their small Catholic high school that they attended in Massachusetts. They marry in 1970 have two children.
She was a national honor society in high school. She gets a master's in education becomes a teacher teaches American history, English and civics. At the time of the teacher and space project, she's teaching at Concord high school in New Hampshire. She sent in her teacher and space application on the last possible day in February of 1985.
And one of the things that I found outside of the book was when she was when she was a kid and John Glenn orbited the earth for the first time she told a friend in high school. Do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon, maybe even taking a bus? I want to do that, which is ironic. That's again the routinizable space flight idea on her application form for the teacher and space program.
She writes, I watched the space age being born. I would like to participate out of the applicant pool. There are 114 semifinalists from each state or territory. So she's one of the finalists from New Hampshire. She becomes one of the 10 finalists nationwide after being selected. And she finally becomes the teacher selected. She takes a year of absence from teaching NASA pays her salary. And as I mentioned, she does receive astronaut training, which again, though,
I feel like the book sort of paints as it was astronaut training that maybe you or I could survive. So maybe not the rigorous astronaut training that had happened previously. Right. Right.
I thought she was amazing. Like 100%. It's the way that like what I especially loved about it was like so she becomes a celebrity is interviewed by kind of everyone and every and it, you know, she ignites interest in the space program and the reason everyone was watching the challenger, you know, explosion, the reason school kids were watching it was because there was this teacher in space, but she just seemed like an incredible teacher like,
just like the way the way that she positioned the, you know, in her application and in the way that she was talking to the media, the way that she talked about the mission as like part of education and kind of educating Americans and her own students in
science and just it just seemed like, you know, we don't have teachers celebrities anymore. Yes, we kind of do it like the vice president until candidate, but like it's not it's it's unusual. And like, you know, it was it was really cool that she just like became this huge star.
It's one thing to be brave and say I'm going to go into space, but it's another thing to be brave enough to take on the role of being a role model of I am going to be the face of humanities attempt to continue to explore space, but also at the same time be the face of sparking interest in science and things like that for children.
Right, she's incredible. She's she's personable. She's funny. She's charismatic. She goes on good morning America. She goes on Johnny Carson. Johnny asked her about the mission. And she says if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat just get on.
The plan is that she's going to do some experiments, but also teach lessons from space. Right. So she's going to do some science experiments around hydroponics magnetism, Newton's laws, that sort of stuff, which again, as opposed to being a teacher in, you know, a high school doing trying to do Newton's laws where you can't really do it right, but you can actually do that because you're in space and there's no gravity and stuff like that.
It's an amazing concept. She's also had a module called the ultimate field trip, a lessons about the benefits of space travel called where we've been where we're going. And this is key. NASA says what we'll do is we're going to broadcast this to millions of school children via closed circuit TV. So it's not just she goes on the tonight show or she'll be on CNN. We're also going to beam this into classrooms that is part of this is we want this to be sort of a teaching moment from space.
I mean, I just wonder like was there no kind of. I don't know risk analyst or something there that said, you know, this like could end very badly. Yeah, well, all the kids are watching. I guess we'll come to that at the end, but the by the way, I do want to mention there are six other astronauts on this mission. And I, you know, she's the one that's remembered because of this program. But there were NASA lifers on this on this flight.
They were former Air Force pilots Ronald McNair was the second African American ever to go into space. This was his first flight. Alison on Azuka was the first Asian American to go into space. Greg Jarvis hadn't been into space before, but he was in the Air Force. He had, okay, he was the one that had been scheduled to go up earlier, but got bumped twice for the two politicians.
So he was supposed to go up in April of 1985 got bumped for Jake Garn. He was supposed to go up in January earlier in January 1986, but it was again bumped for Bill Nelson, who I, that might, he might, Bill Nelson might have been on the flight before the Challenger. I should have looked that up. The launch of this particular flight, like many shuttle missions prior in the year and six months prior to it kept being delayed.
So it was supposed to happen not in January, but months before the mission that this is the 25th space shuttle mission. It's STS 51 L. They were going to deploy a satellite and then do some other experiments. In the months previous, the 15th shuttle launch, which was the first classified military flight in NASA's history where we assume they put up spice satellites or something.
This was the shuttle discovery had been pushed back due to record breaking cold weather that had swept down the eastern seaboard. So maybe this was a year previous, maybe this was the previous winner. Now the public is kept in the dark about that because they're not even told about this mission because it's classified.
But engineers admitted that the three consecutive nights of freezing conditions had caused icing on the launch pad for that launch, which at the time they're thinking is going to damage the, again, the heat shield tiles. And so that's one of the reasons why that had been proposed postpone multiple times. But back to the contractor.
They have been growing worried that they've been seeing the problems with the O rings in terms of maybe they're not making a seal so they're getting swarging, but they have become concerned about the temperature for the O rings because if the temperature goes too low, the foam is not as flexible. The material is not as flexible and might not make a seal.
And if that happens, then again, you have this hot fuel at God knows the temperature that could be leaking out that could be going into other components, compartments that it's not supposed to go into yet that again could explode. They expressed this internally at the company, but okay, NASA's under pressure to keep the space program going. And the contractor is under pressure not to lose this huge contract. It's there is I may be wrong, but I think it's like their biggest thing, right?
I think it was the biggest contract that they had. And they were a subcontractor of Lockheed, right? I think so, right. So, right, you give a big contract out to somebody, somebody else subcontracts, somebody else subcontracts. As you're saying, like screws, specialized screws could be subcontracted out to somebody. At the same time, there are signs of stress at NASA in the sense that there are 14,000 contractors and NASA employees working at the Kennedy Space Center at this point.
And they're working 12 hour days, seven days a week, often for months at a time, without a day off, because they're trying to keep to these schedules. They're already falling behind schedules. Hey, it's been two months and we haven't had a launch when are we going to be able to launch. A parent, this is quoting from the book, technicians had begun routinely skipping hundreds of maintenance requirements. And some of them began to fear for their jobs if they reported accidental damage.
I want to stress again, it's not that they're missing the, they're trying to be safe. They're trying to do all the checklists. But the term that keeps coming up in the book is what is an acceptable risk? What are you're weighing the scales of? It's been three months. I think we've got the problem fixed. Can we just go so that we can go?
There's also like this compartmentalization of like knowledge where like the engineers who are working with the O-rings, you know, have some, have some worries about it. And then they tell it to their bosses who sort of like change it and paint it a little better for the people. There's contractor and the people at NASA seem like there's all these, it was interesting because they don't have like, they don't have the internet.
But there's all these conference calls and they spend a lot of time on the phone and conference calls. And it just seems like the meetings are very unproductive because like the engineers are sort of pointing out what's wrong. And then the bosses are sort of pushing back and being like, well, you know, we can still launch though, right? Right. And we're going to come to a really crucial way that that decision is made here. And the Challenger mission that we're discussing, STS 51L.
It's the 10th flight for the Challenger itself. It's the 25th flight of the space shuttle fleet, as we mentioned. So all the way into 1986, we've only done 25 flights. I'm bringing that up again because it's not like they had done 100 flights. They're still so early into this. They're supposed to originally launch January 22nd, 1986. But there's delay delay delay for various technical reasons. And when I say delay, it's not just, oh, we're supposed to launch tomorrow, but we scrub it overnight.
They would be going on to the shuttle. And they'd be maybe even starting the countdown. And it's like, all right, everybody get back out. We'll try again tomorrow. You've got NASA worrying about the delays. You've got the contractors and the workers at Cape Canaveral. Oh, my God, this is where we're not going again. But think about the astronauts themselves, you know, after the fourth time you've been pulled out of that uncomfortable position. You know, maybe they want to go at some point.
There's all these moments where they're about to launch. And then, and then they have to stop. And there are people, there are astronauts who like sort of are wondering if they'll ever fly. Right, right. Like, because they constantly get bumped. And yeah. Sure. Well, or good bump for a politician. Right. So they're supposed to go up January 22nd. They finally go up on January 28th, 1986. The problem is that overnight, there's a cold front.
And when I say cold front, this is like the coldest cold front in recorded Florida history or something like that, like a 100 year cold front overnight measurements taken say that the around the launch site itself, it gets down to 25 degrees Fahrenheit or minus four Celsius. And, but also different parts, depending on where you are, like it might have gone to as low as eight degrees Fahrenheit. Especially in the morning when the sun comes up, like there's still parts that are in the shade.
And they're initially worried about things like pipes freezing or what is this going to do? Like what if ice falls off and it hits again, the heat tiles or punctures. I don't know, one of the rackets or whatever. Back at Morton Theocl, the engineers, especially two of them who have been really concerned about this for years are raising the alarm about what the temperature will do to the O rings.
They, they implore upon their bosses, we need to stop this launch because of the temperature. The night before they reach out over conference call once they hear about the overnight temperature, they schedule a conference call with NASA. And they let 9 p.m. the night before the eventual launch. And they get on with NASA and they say we really don't think you should go because of the temperature they explain the O rings situation. And NASA.
This is I'm not saying this is negligence or criminal or anything like that, but at least according to the book, this is where really NASA is like, oh my God, you guys now are coming to us with this. You hadn't thought of this before. They're really dismissive of it almost in the sense that if this was a problem, why didn't you bring it to us before? Why are you bring it to us now?
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Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Lib Sin ads. Go to Lib Sin ads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today. Yeah. And they had the NASA people were sort of relying on the idea that it had previously launched in the cold. And so they were like, they were like, as you said before, it seemed like an acceptable fail.
That class, the classified mission that had gone up in cold weather, which is ironically why the engineers at the contractor were convinced that there was a problem. But NASA is saying, well, we, we've already done it. So we proved that it's not a problem. Yeah. Here's here's the really, and this, this chapter, I don't know if you felt this way. This one, this is where it really felt like that book Chernobyl or whatever.
This was like a real like, you know, pot boiler like on, I'm on the edge of my seat. They have the conference call. The kind, they get off the conference call. They say we want to commiserate amongst ourselves. We'll call you back. And in between this and when they call back, they change their tune and they say, okay, NASA, we think you can go. NASA asked them to put that in writing. And so essentially the contractor delivers a stated decision to proceed with launch.
The leadership submitted a recommendation for launch. The teleconference ended behind the scenes according to the book. Some of the engineers that had been essentially whistle blowing on this are not in favor of this, but they're overruled. Yeah. So right there, it's tragic because that they could have stopped the launch right there. They got this close to stopping the launch and blew through that sort of safety barrier there.
Yeah, that's the really the moment where you're like, this is like a decision for money. They're doing this for time and money. And like they're not like not money. It's the pressure of everything. It's my career. It's losing the contract, but it's also it's we got to we got to produce. You know, I guess it all comes down to money in a way, but reputation wise.
Well, I mean, especially at the contractor, a thiacal, they're like, they're the reason they change their decision is because they're afraid they're going to lose this contract. And it's like, it's like the thing that they're doing and NASA's their main contractor. And they're also worried that NASA's going to choose some other fuel system or sort of open it out.
And so it really seemed like this is on the line for them. And they, you know, really had to deliver even if some of their people thought that it is risky. From NASA's perspective, at least what they say subsequently and maybe even at the time is that what we thought happened is that they had gone over their data. A second or third or fourth time and thought twice about it and said, okay, this is fine. We've got concerns, but you're right. We looked hard at it and we think we can do it.
There's still one more chance for them to stop because in the next morning when the sun rises, there is so much ice. One of the technicians on the like, gantry, you know, to it's a giant superstructure to get the astronauts up into the shuttle at the top. He says it looks like something out of Dr. Javago. There's ice on the gantry. There's ice covering the lower half of the right hand booster rocket.
Because again, one of the rockets, even if part of the craft is in the sun and is maybe melting, the other half might still be in the shade for a while. And so even though by the time of launch, ambient temperature has risen to 34 degrees, so above freezing, which 34 degrees was apparently the formal limits to launch. People pointed out subsequently, there still could have been parts in shadows that maybe weren't at that temperature.
Also, I don't know if that's enough time to thaw from 25 to, you know, Fahrenheit to 34, but yeah. So at 1138 AM Eastern time, the shuttle lifts off at 1135, a few minutes before that CNN switch switches their broadcast to live video of the launch.
The family members of the astronauts are all there on the ground watching and when the when the shuttle takes off, everything seems to be going normal so much so that back at the contractors watching this, the ones that have worn about the O rings and the temperatures literally say, wow, we just dodged a bullet. They're totally relieved. Yeah. And that's because for 73 seconds, everything seemed to be going right and then we've all seen the footage.
And it turns out that it the failure of actually, I'm going to read to I get the technical part right here. The cause of the disaster was the failure of the primary and secondary redundant O rings seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. The record low temperatures on the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber O rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints shortly after lift off.
The deals were breached and hot pressurized gas from within the SRB leaked through the joint and burned through the affed attachment strut connecting to the external propellant tank and then into the tank itself propellant tank, not good. That's what makes things blow up.
This is where we can get into the Mandela effect. Why does everyone remember watching this live? Well, on the one hand, I saw in the book, they estimate that by that evening 95% of the American public had seen the video of the explosion. And so right most 95% of Americans were at work or at school, so they couldn't have seen it. So part of it is is that it was, you know, an image that we all saw over and over and over and over.
But the reason that a lot of children remember this is because NASA had arranged satellite broadcasts into TV sets in many schools because of McCullough's role in the mission. And this is why so many people remember that it's I the book makes the point that even the people on the ground like the family members when it first happens, they're not sure that anything wrong has happened.
And there's almost like a half a minute where it doesn't dawn on people. So I wonder the TV coverage does pull away and the news anchors start to say something seems to have gone wrong. But I don't think it was like if I was in third grade and I'm watching this, it's not going to occur to me that, oh my god, they're all dead.
Yeah, I'm one of the amazing things about like reading about history now is like you can go back on YouTube and watch all this stuff. And I really recommend watching all these videos. It's just like they're inside into the 80s in like multiple different fronts like one is like I was watching like kind of behind the scenes at CNN and they don't have computers and they're calling each other to figure out what's happening.
And I was just amazing like scene of a newsroom in the 80s. But what was interesting about it, if you watch these videos, there's videos from the, you know, the perspective of the family watching it, you can kind of hear them and they they're not. There's no there's a little bit of like surprise to see it, but there's no gasp. No one, no one thinks it has blown up until.
You know, until at least like 30 or 40 seconds later, CNN, there's a CNN shot of the anchor saying, you know, another successful launch and then the like B, B role is on the on the shuttle as it's going in the guys about to cut away. And then there's this spark and yeah, it was not clear what had happened. And you sort of only can tell like when you're watching it afterward, you can tell that it doesn't look.
It's not something good that has happened. But if you're watching it at the time, I don't think that you would have known that, especially if you were a kid, I don't think you would have known that it exploded, you know, immediately. I don't think if you were an adult, you would have known it. Eventually when you see the two rockets, that famous picture of them, they're sort of flying willy nilly often. Well, that's not supposed to do that, right.
But again, I'm saying that this is the argument I'm making for the Mandela effect of it wasn't like classrooms full of children were all the sudden screaming instantaneously, like it would have been something that even it would have to be explained to adults. Here's what's happened. Oh, God, that's sad. So while I can obviously this is something that was tragic and impactful, probably not instantaneously.
Although that does get into my sort of opening line usually of back when things were relatively normal and chill, I do it's not like the 80s and 90s were perfect calm, peaceful times, certainly not everywhere on the planet. Something like this being the disaster that people of our generation remember as like that was the tragedy, you know, this is it's not the equivalent of 9-11, but like that's the closest we have for the do you remember where you were when you heard a sort of thing.
Yeah, I think that's right. I also think though, like the best, the best one of the best bars for me of this book was sort of the aftermath because it just shows in America that is just so much better functioning than the whole they they they convene in Congress. I think this presidential commission on the space shuttle Challenger accident also known as the Rogers Commission. Actual experts are on this so there's you know, there's Sally ride. I will tell you Sally ride Neil Armstrong himself.
Richard Feynman's on it Richard Feynman's on it. We'll get to him in a second. So they hold hearings and not you know, we're used to again 9-11 commission happens years later whatever they had they had hearings and this commission like the month later.
It's not partisan. It's so it's so interesting because it's there's no there's no like people grandstanding for the cameras. They're like scientists asking like scientific questions and the engineers that the companies are sort of responding and like with the technical details and it just seems like they're actually investigating this, which is like, you know, just not something you see anymore.
And nobody's trying to play it for political points like this is why because you cut so much money. This is why this happened or you know, whatever. The we mentioned Feynman. There's very colorful anecdotes of him in the book. He almost didn't sign the final commission recommendation and paper because he thought to a certain degree there was whitewashing going on because NASA wants to continue and no one wants to believe that there was serious negligence at fault.
In these like you're saying in the hearings, he will to explain how the O rings happen. He'll like take out a cup of water and like a sponge or something like do like Mr. Wizard style stuff right there in the hearing to explain why what you just said in your testimony was kind of BS because look at this.
Yeah, it's it's like it's like demonstrating for the public the science of it. I thought it was amazing. I went back and watched that too and it's just incredible. And then yeah, he almost doesn't sign it. They have to allow him to write an appendix where he like sort of has a descent of some parts of it in order for him to sign off on it.
Just that even that like the way that they went about investigating it. I like sort of wish for that time. It was clearly like and oh, and the other thing it goes into the. The Ronald Reagan response to it, which has this amazing sort of poem. It sort of ends with Peggy Newton writes this speech like immediately and he ends with his speech with saying something like they they slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God, which is like just such an amazing thing to say.
It just seemed like a lot of parts of it seemed like the movie response to a disaster that you would like want in like an ideal situation that we don't have anymore. Right. It's almost like a West Wing style. Hey, look at the government could function or everybody's acting in good faith and right.
Almost society can function. I don't want to make note of this, but I think to be a little bit thorough. Everyone is hopeful that you know this thing just exploded and disintegrated, but they spend months combing the ocean for debris. They find debris. They find eventually the remains of the astronauts because it turns out that the crew what happened is it didn't disintegrate the way the explosion happened made it break up into pieces.
And the crew compartment was essentially intact. And so it the they determined that the crew compartment. It falls for two minutes and 45 seconds now granted at more than 200 miles per hour. So once you hit the water, you're definitely a goner, but they also later determined that some of the oxygen tanks on the flight deck have been used for almost that amount of time. One like I think it was like a us. It was either the oxygen tank or something that would allow the pilot to get out of the seat.
The only way that that could happen is to pull a latch from someone sitting behind them and that latch had been pulled. So it seems likely that at least some of the astronauts were alive. As they're crashing to earth unfortunately. So yeah, I this is an aside, but I got I was thinking about this the other day because they determined you know the Titan sub that exploded they there was there was this theory that they they knew they were going to die because they
dropped their weights, but in fact, like there's this new investigation that suggested that they didn't know and it just kind of actually happened like the way we sort of wanted the you might have wanted the challenger to go where just sort of they didn't know. Yeah, that that part of the challenge disaster is just like chilling the idea that they knew they were going to die for like two minutes as they were falling.
At least there's also there's indication that why would you have the the oxygen tanks pulled because there would have been a loss of cabin pressure. So maybe you would have blacked out anyway, we don't need to dwell on this overly. So to wrap up here, we've sort of already been touching on this, but this whole disaster has been sort of like a case study for things like engineering safety, whistle blowing.
But on a more fundamental level, like it's it's not an accident that the person that wrote this book also wrote the Chernobyl book because it's also a case study in group decision making and the dangers of groupthink. I'm not saying that there needed to be antagonistic sort of divisions in this program, but everybody from the contractors to NASA to the government to the astronauts everybody is incentivized to take these calculated risks.
And again, maybe that's what is necessary to do a dangerous thing is to take calculated risks, but what do you think about the idea that there was there was no no one was ever incentivized enough to be like we absolutely should not go. I ended up feeling like I think that's right, I think that there's there clearly should have been, you know, a larger budget, more testing and some sort of an ombudsman that can that has the authority to say I'm responsible to nobody.
My job here is to if I think it's reached a certain threshold, I overall everybody like in nuclear subs like the whole idea of you have to have two keys to launch the missiles, right, like there, there didn't seem to be a fail safe that you reach a threshold and even though everybody else 95% of the the constituent parts of this program are ago, somebody has the authority to say no go.
Yeah, I think on the other hand, I do think that there's a little bit of like space travel is difficult and some accident would have happened and I feel like I feel like that there's I absolved many of the people of like wrongdoing based on that because like you have to figure out as a society how to do kind of.
You know things things yeah things that you've never done before as a as a species and and that are dangerous and can I tell you I've been reading a lot lately about ocean exploration and sort of like the exploration of you think of Shackleton and that that freezing and the Arctic and stuff like that.
But we think of the Titanic as this disaster that oh ship went down but it like 50 years before the Titanic going across an ocean was a risky maybe like one in five chance you might not make it thing and when you go even further back in history to like you know the 1500s or the 1400s all the time ships would just go out and you'd never hear from them again.
So think of how many times and how many thousands of sailors died exploring on the ocean or just you know on a trade ship and there's a storm or something that happens and that was just accepted as this is like you said part of human this is a dangerous human endeavor and this is these are the risks.
Yeah and and the and just sort of the inherent complexity of this whole project like that you have a failure in a small part seems seems like not that surprising and in fact you know and then the there was another there was another space shuttle that crashed for for the heat tile reasons which is also the thing that they that they had been worried about.
I came away from this book thinking it's almost made me feel like there could have been four or five more like that maybe it's there weren't yeah maybe two was as good as the luck could be you know yeah.
And to the final question on this how much of this when you were reading this were you thinking of it through the lens of space X now where I'm not saying that NASA doesn't exist but essentially what this shuttle program was was NASA on its all they were really doing was launching satellites and doing science experiments and that's essentially I'm not being reductive here NASA still does you know stuff with rockets and things like that but now NASA is where the people that do the science and space.
And every and and the getting into space space X and other contractors and private are there are the ones that are in charge of that. Are you asking like. Did you find yourself. I do you think that this is maybe the better model where don't try to do everything because you're saying it's this complex thing break it up into where the people that do the rockets and where the people that do the science and that sort of thing.
I don't know if space X is doing anything like nearly as complicated as the space shuttle so it's it's kind of what I was interesting is like to to the extent that I thought about space X and like the private space companies while reading this book it was it was mostly is like a way like it's kind of amazing that the government to this in the 80s and like 50 years later private companies are kind of getting around to it.
And like space X is biggest rocket is like as large as like the Titan rocket right it's like not they're not sort of doing something that hadn't been done before and so I don't know I got this. I just a lot of this book sort of sparked an nostalgia for like a previous time when like government got things done even though there was this big failure it seemed like the fact that they built it.
The fact that it worked the fact that they investigated the accidents it just seemed like a better functioning society. I think that's a good way to end it and because I felt the nostalgia for that too. Feeling like the eight you catch yourself thinking well I thought things were better because I was a kid and and everything seems to have rose colored glasses for your childhood or something like that but.
Yeah you're really underlying underlining something that I I felt too when I was reading this. But we should say again for people that want to read this book it is written by I'm going to have to edit this part Adam taken bottom up. The book was written by Adam Hagenbatham it's called Challenger a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. Farhad would you like to tell us anything do you have a book coming out do you where where can we find you these days if if nothing else.
I'm basically doing nothing. I may be writing a book I don't know I've been doing some writing for slate mostly I'm just on like I've been reading lots of books and listening to audiobooks and like. I'm spending time with my family as they say. Yeah so thank you for listening to this episode if if you're watching on YouTube like and subscribe if you're listening on whatever your podcast app is make sure you're filing but more importantly I don't think I've said this before yet.
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