Good morning. I'm Scott Sloan. This is seven hundred wudwity.
Thanks for checking out the show on air and of course streaming anywhere you go. Reportable these days in the iHeartRadio app and you can catch the show afterwards too. It's podcast will may get easy for it, Easy Easy Easy. Today is an historic day because this landmark moment, this tragedy occurred forty years ago today go up.
It happened just over one minute inch of flight one a minute fifteen.
Seconds flan City, twenty nine hundred feet per second, altitude nine aautical mileth downrange, just in the seven nautical.
Miles from mission control.
Silence, Then the bland chilling report.
We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded. Flight Director confirms that we are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point.
A search effort couldn't begin for some fifteen minutes after this debris, they said, just kept raining from the sky. The head of the Space Shuttle program had no explanations, just sorrow at the tragedy.
I vividly remember when that happened.
For a lot of folks it might have been school kids, and still even more folks don't remember it because they happened outside their lifespan. But I'll remember that like I remember nine to eleven. And how do we get to this point? We've got this great space race going out right now, of course privately speaking, but everything we know about space and how to get to outer space and travel is written in blood. Writing about it in the Burning Blue is Kevin Cook, Kevin, welcome to the show.
I'm doing fine.
Hopefully I set that up well enough for you too, tying those things together. But I think there's something to be said about that, right, is that we're in the new space race, but it's private space race between ultra the ultra rich. Doesn't mean they're gonna cut corners, but man, you know, when you're competitive like this, these are the things that.
Happen, right.
I think you set it up just right, and it's an exciting time in space exploration. These are eventually going to be public private partnerships. I think we'll see SpaceX and NASA working together, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and NASA
working together. We're gonna have Moon missions again, and in before too many decades past a Mars mission with human crew on it, and there is going to be schedule pressure again, there are going to be engineer's warning, well, I have concerns about this or that aspect of the machinery,
and again these things are going to crop up. There is a program at NASA now called the Lessons Learned program that encourages listeners to remember things like disasters like the Challenger accident, so that we don't have such a thing happen again.
Well, and the lesson here coming out of the Burning Blue and the Challenger disaster, is that why Krista mcculloffe was on that flight to begin with.
That's true. It had aspects of a publicity effort on NASA's part. After Sally VI made worldwide news in nineteen eighty three as the first American woman in space, Shuttle flights came to seem routine, and NASA was eager to have the teacher in space, the first civilian to fly on a Shuttle mission. And Christa mccaulliffe, to her great credit, I think understood that she was wonderful on television. She was sincere, she was herself, but she had a purpose
to a cause. She didn't want to get famous. She wanted to promote the cause of school teachers. She was an active school teacher, a great one. She felt that teachers were overworked and underpaid. I think that's true even more so today. So she inspired an awful lot of people to become teachers. I think that's one of the things that we could take from a story like the
Challenger disaster in nineteen eighty six. There are a lot of teachers, dedicated teachers who followed her example, who are still teaching today.
Yeah, I remember that moment. I think we all did it. If you're old enough too, or if you just go back. It was an excellent documentary on this. I think it was on Netflix or maybe HBO, but Netflix. It was great about that whole story too, because, man, you remember what it was like being a little kid, and you know everyone was following, here's a teacher.
I've got a teacher. It's like my teacher.
Right, you could identify as a kid with Krista mccauliffe and every kid in America at that moment. That morning, that cold morning, he sat there and watched it on TV when they rolled a big old you know, CRT two TV in the classroom and everyone's watching the Challenger and where everyone clapped and was so excited, and then there was a catastrophe, And you want to talk about traumatic moment in your childhood, that's it right there.
That's true. I've encountered so many people who remember exactly where they were as I do. When we should start to see what had happened. The one thing that that the television documentary did not address was the fact that when that awful explosion happened and the pitchfork in the sky that we all saw on television, that was not the end of the astronauts. They survived that moment that
was the explosion of the fuel tank. They survived for another probably two full minutes and forty five seconds, trying to regain control of the craft, which was impossible as it turned out. I think they were heroic in any case, and trying to reconstruct what happened after the explosion, between that and the moment that actually killed the Challenger astronauts, which was when the falling of Shuttle struck the Atlantic
at two hundred and seven miles per hour. Reconstructing those moments was one of the more grueling and also fascinating aspects of working on the Burning.
Blue Yeah, and on that day in January nineteen eighty six and watching that and so they were alive, didn't die instantly. Were they aware that they're about the crash into the ocean and at over two hundred miles an hour, which is fatal.
It's likely that they were. That there was no escape, That there were ejector seats in the very first Shuttle missions that became impractical later that you can't have seven people ejecting. There was no escape, there were no parachutes.
Those escape methods were built in after the Challenger disaster, and they're going to need to be part of these new efforts that we make, I think, to the near future missions to the Moon and Mars, to learn the lesson of the Challenger disaster and not repeat it.
What's scary is listening to that audio, the cockpit voice recorder, and I think it was Michael Smith that saw that, basically saw the catastrophic moment happen, and I think the last words on that recording were something like oh no, or.
It was oh he said. And then for weeks after the accident, it was believed that the last words from the Challenger flight deck were Roger go and throttle up. It was only later that was understood it was re assembled the audio from the flight deck that Michael Smith must have seen something just in the instance before all of the electricity and the communications went out, and his last words were, oh, that is the last thing that was ever heard from the ASK Challenger astronauts Kevin.
Cook, the Burning Blue, the unstoried untold Sir of CHRISTA mcauliff, and the NASA Challenger disaster.
But there's a lesson just a history.
It's also private base travel now with the Bezos and the Branson's and the Musks of the world, and you know that there's tremendous, tremendous pressure to perform here too. That was the lesson from the NASA Challenger disaster is there are a lot of warning signs ahead of this. One of those is the act that as I recall that the launch itself was delayed many times because of weather or other issues.
Correct, that's just right. And there was a debacle the day before in which the launch was scrubbed because a bolt malfunctioned in the hatch door, a bolt that you could have replaced if you'd gone to the local hardware store. Nobody could get to the local hardware store from the launch pad that day. They had to wait until the
next day. The next day was far colder, dangerously cold, And yet the decision is made to launch anyway because of terrible schedule pressure, partly because of embarrassment to the agency, because of what had happened in the scrubs that came before this. These are all things that are going to have to be born in mind by people who were making launch decisions in our near future.
If the weather were warmer that day in January. Now, to keep in mind, what January twenty eighth, nineteen eighty six. You're in Florida, but extremely cold by Florida standards. If it would have been a few degrees warmer, would we have not had this disaster.
I think it's likely, and there's certainly a great chance that hadn't been normal weather for Florida that January. There had been other missions that something similar happened with the old Rings. There was what was called blow by, and certainly it might have happened had it been colder in previous missions. I think it's one of the unknowables, but there is a very good chance that they would have been lucky again as as more than two dozen previous
Shuttle missions. Two dozen previous missions had had had some trouble, many of them, but they made it back. That's why the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Fineman said that previous missions had essentially been playing Russian Roulette with the astronauts.
Well, the issue then came down. I had a president a presidential commission. I believe on the on the O ring, right, and so the O ring you have the solid rocket boosters and that is the that's what's powering you into space at several hundred miles an hour.
Uh.
If you have a leak in one of these rubber O rings, you got problems. And uh they uncovered a momo from Morton Thia call the the engineers, the project engineers on this thing. And if you saw the documentary in the book, you detail this about engineers screaming for help or please, like we're going to have a catastrophic falure. People are going to die. Uh in that teme to fruition. Take me through that part of it.
Well, there there was a teleconference the night before in which the engineers that uh, that they had they had great worries and they would not sign on to UH to a launch. The next morning, their managers pressured them to UH, to change their minds, and eventually they did. It's one of those things that one has to if you put yourself in their shoes, you could say I've got great concerns about this. Then then the managers may say, well, what about the last dozen missions that tour went off
without a hitch. You were in a terrible position if if you, if you UH say I'm against this, and then they launched anyway and nothing bad happens. They were certainly vindicated by circumstance. And that's why there's a program called the Lessons Learned program in NASA now saying we've got to support engineers, support people who are willing to say this is too dangerous. Let's fix the problem. Before we launched.
Well, there were signs with other missions right in tests that that indicated the owerring was failing.
Correct, that's right. And the the idea that that one says, well, they looked like they were failing, but nobody got killed in the previous missions. That's the Russian roulette aspect. They came back. There was a task Force studying the Old Ring problem at more than DIACOL studying and studying, but it wasn't seen as important enough to delay any launches while the studying was done.
Explain how the rubber O Ring and the cold weather go to go what caused the explosion.
It's stiffened, as Richard Feinman demonstrated so beautifully on television during the Presidential Commission. He had a glass of ice water, he got a piece of rubber from the O Ring difted in there. Showed how it's not as elastic when it's cold, like like a lot of other things, it gets denser and not flexible.
Uh.
So it was in the cold it was unable to to uh to prevent the leak. The leak leads to a plume of flame that then burns right through that didn't hide and outer covering of the external tank, and that causes the giant explosion we saw on TV.
Yeah, and we finally have some closure in that too. But I think the interesting part about it is is really how little the families were awarded.
Yes, and I mean I think it's hard to sue the government. Uh And and several of the crew members were members of the armed forces. That that plays in to it as well. There were settlements. They didn't make news because there really wasn't much space program news in the two and a half years after the Challenger disaster. That's when things will being put back together in a
safer way. Of course, before long, shuttle flights will seem routine again, pressure will increase to launch and that leads to similar problems and the Columbia disaster.
Yeah, the relationship there between the Columbia disaster and this is what.
Well, it's the fact that lessons learns need to be observed. As Mike Tinellian, that's a wonderful person who runs the Lessons Learned program down into Kennedy Space Center talks about it's similar. We have a presidential commission. It's a little bit like driving a past the wreck on the highway. You see the smoke, you see the ambulances, and then you're driving with your hands at ten and two for a little while. But before long, as he said, you're back to having your foot on the wheel and the
other foot out of the window. If you forget the crucial importance of safety in the preparation for a launch, that's what happened with Columbia after Challenger, and that's what future planners are going to have to bear in mind as we get to remarkably exciting and complicated missions to the Moon and to Mars.
Somebody's going to die in the future.
It's bound to happen again, because yeah, we may learn the lessons from history, but there's tremendous pressure. And look what led to the death of the Challenger crew, right had we got to put Krystal call on our teacher because you know what, now all of a sudden, school kids are getting interested, we get them hooked, their parents will be interested. Hey, great, we're putting someone on there
for the only reasons. It's a pr move. I don't know what research a teacher can do in space, but nonetheless there's an every man component to that.
It's marketing, is what this is.
And then the pressure to launch the to launch because we want to see Krystal calf in space ended in tragically in her death. We did the same thing with Challenger to some degree as well. With private space missions happening in the near future, at some point, people are going to die again, aren't they.
Well. Elon Munk seems to think so it is a risky operation. It's a risky thing to do with space exploration. I think the job of NASA, the agency as well as it's private partners. I think these will be public private partnerships the missions, especially when we're talking about Mars. I think one recognizes the risk and the likelihood that people may die. But for those preparing for missions like that, your job is to do all you possibly can to
prevent that, to make them as safe as possible. That lesson was forgotten afore challenger, and.
Even with the technology of the way it is because you know, Elon must have said, well, we can't have a it's not like you have an airline, let fly fifty sixty missions. The human body can't withstand that. So solving that is through autonomous meaning self driving aircraft, self
driving spacecraft. All right, that's all well and good, and we have more technology and monitors and the things we did, but you still can't get past the fact that that's an incredibly traumatic procedure for any airframe to go through, and that is launching, relaunching and making something a regularly scheduled flight.
Ultimately, that's what they want to.
Do here Physically, is that possible for any aircraft?
It's sure difficult. And again, the spacecraft has so many parts. The space level was the most complicated machine ever built. Well, when you have a lot of parts, Murphy's law stares you in the face every day with every decision. That's what the Elon musk, that's what visos, that's what Richard Branson, that's what face looking forward. And the lesson is it's difficult,
it's complicated, it's dangerous, it's potentially lethal. These are things that need to be born in mind just before the word go it's given to send somebody into space.
Yeah, and I think it's gonna be interesting too. At some point there's going to be a failure. Once again, I don't think that means we stop trying.
Uh.
It means you learn from those lessons. But if the lessons keep getting repeated, as it started with the Challenger, then I guess that that's also human nature too. We have to accept a certain amount of casualties if this is the price, if this is the goal. Kevin Cook, The Burning Blue, the Untolt Ster of Crystal Calf and nashis NASA Challenger disaster.
Thanks again for the time, Good luck, with the book.
Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it and it's good to be on w l W. I grew up listening to to Al Michaels and then Marty Brenneman and Joe Dunsall in Big Red Machine.
Wow, how about that. So you're India, We're in Indiana.
Indianapolis.
Oh, Indianapolis. Okay, very good. Yeah, So all the best to you and thanks again for coming on, Kevin. Thanks gotvingeh Kevin cookback on the show. It's the fortieth anniversary of that challenge with Chet forty year Where were you forty years ago?
Today? Most people said, well, I wasn't
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