A background summary of important events leading to the Challenger disaster will be presented starting with January, 1985, plus the specifics of the telecon meeting held the night prior to the launch at which the attempt was made to stop the launch by the Morton Thiokol engineers. A detailed account will show why the off-line telecon caucus by Morton Thiokol Management constituted the unethical decision-making forum which ultimately produced the management decision to launch Challenger without any restrictions.posted by zamboni at 1:23 PM on March 18, 2011 [6 favorites]
The paper will continue with the post-disaster chronology of my working relationship with Morton Thiokol Management and conclude with a discussion on accountability, professional responsibility and ethical conduct which should be practiced in the work place, plus statements from the academic community about the plight of whistleblowers and my closing remarks.
111:36:55 Armstrong: Okay, I'll get it. When I get up there (to the porch). (Pause)posted by SMPA at 3:54 PM on March 18, 2011 [19 favorites]
[Just below the shoulder on each sleeve, Buzz has a small pocket ( 150k ). One of them contains a small packet of memorial items that he and Neil want to place on the surface. Buzz relates in his 1989 book, Men from Earth, that the items included (1) an Apollo 1 patch commemorating Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, the astronauts who had died in the 1967 Apollo launch pad fire; (2) a Soviet medal commemorating Vladimir Komarov, who was killed at the end of the Soyuz 1 flight when the parachutes on his spacecraft failed; (3) a Soviet medal honoring Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, who had been killed in an aircraft accident seven years after his historic 1961 flight; and, finally, (4) a small, gold olive branch identical to the ones that they were carrying for the three Apollo 11 wives.]
[NASA News Release No. 69-83F, dated 13 July 1969 mentions the Apollo 1 patch, the gold olive branch, and a silicion message disk but not the Soviet items. Ulrich Lotzmann has provided a summary. Goodnight CapCom Owen Garriott asks abut the message disk at 114:52:28.]
[In his 1973 book Return to Earth - repeated in Men from Earth - Buzz states that, when he was halfway up the ladder - that is, at about 111:26 - Neil reminded him to take care of this task. Clearly, the reminder came a little later than Buzz remembered but, as Journal Contributor Jim Failes notes, "it was a busy EVA".]
[Aldrin - "We had forgotten about this up to this point. And I don't think we really wanted to totally openly talk about what it was. So it was sort of guarded. And I knew what he was talking about..."]
[Armstrong - "About it being on your sleeve."]
On the same day that the initial orbital tests concluded-July 4, 1982-President Reagan announced a national policy to set the direction of the U. S. space program during the following decade. As part of that policy, the President stated that:Because of that, despite the problems they were have, NASA publishes -- in 1985, mind you -- a plan to reach 24 launches a year for STS by 1990.
"The United States Space Transportation System (STS) is the primary space launch system for both national security and civil government missions."
For the first time in the worldwide practice multifunctional displays based on CRT and electroluminescent tubes were used in this system. The main console was a electromechanical display. For the first time a video monitor displayed television and measurement information in individual and combined modes. The information displayed on the CRT was transmitted to the Earth over a television channel.Here's some info on the 7K-OK radio systems - I don't see a video channel listed, but that doesn't rule it out. Pictures that purport to be Soyuz-1 show the TV antenna (the circle with a cross on it).
The Soyuz television system operates on 463 MHz. Nowadays it is called the "Klest" system. The TV standard on Soyuz is SECAM (625 lines transmitted at 25 frames per second). A black-and-white video signal with 6 MHz bandwidth is transmitted by frequency modulating the carrier creating an RF bandwidth of 20 MHz. using Carson's rule we can the deduce that the deviation is 4 MHz. The transmitter power is 10 Watts.posted by zamboni at 8:36 AM on March 19, 2011 [7 favorites]
Once I heard the weather conditions down at the Cape for the launch, I figured out where the problem was. The solid rocket motors simply weren't designed to be launched with ice hanging off them. We had developed those operational rules over the years: all you had to do was follow them and you'd be all right.posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:04 AM on March 19, 2011 [6 favorites]
Not that anybody was talking about the shuttle as a perfect vehicle, or one that was a hundred percent safe. I never thought it was. I sure as hell wouldn't have said it was safe enough to fly congressmen and schoolteachers. It would do what it was designed to do with an acceptable amount of risk. They've had almost fifty flights and lost one; I guarantee you if we'd flown fifty Apollo missions, we'd have killed somebody. (We killed one crew on the ground as it was, and came down close to losing another.)
Going into space isn't as safe as getting on an airliner. And it's never safe if you're ignoring flight rules
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posted by casarkos at 12:33 PM on March 18, 2011 [6 favorites]