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That's what I heard. They were alive until the compartment hit the ocean. |
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I recall that was the conclusion of the investigation at the time; several airpacks had been turned on, they could only be turned on by the crew, and a few minutes of air had been used. Remarkable they could learn that from whatever remained after impact. Hopefully they passed out quick, but unfortunately they lived long enough to know they were going to die.
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I have a copy of the Offical Report. Its not available anymore but you might find it in a library somewhere. There is a picture in the report with the crew cabin circled. It was found fairly intact for hitting the water from the altitude it did. All of the crew were found together in the wreckage of the crew cabin. NASA was able to almost completely re-assemble the entire vehicle. Yes, there is evidence that some of the crew survived the initial break-up of the vehicle. Specifically that some of the crew turned on air packs. The report is quite condemning of NASA. There are pictured of the gantry and vehicle with icicles hanging off of them. Not to mention the problems with stacking the booster that was the cause of the accident. Burn through started within milliseconds of booster ignition. There are pictures of black smoke coming out of the seam, where the burn through took place, from gantry cameras before the vehicle even started to leave the pad. ETA: If you follow the full view link from the above link you'll be able to see the recommended actions and implementations taken but not the part with all the pictures. I can kind of understand as the pictures in the accident analysis are not very pleasant to look at. They make NASA look like a bunch of asshats. Which they were. |
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+1 Its laugh or cry.....pick one. |
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NASA has stated that they were alive but unconscious until they hit the water.
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Yep, that's some of them. The second picture is one of series of about 6 or 7, IIRC, that show the smoke starting immediately at ignition and becoming progressively greater as the vehicle begins to ascend. The one above is about a second or so after ignition, again IIRC. I have not looked at the report in several years. |
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I always heard this was what happened.
That explosion happened on my first birthday. |
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I was in the Anti Submarine Warfare Training Center in San Diego,CA. |
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Same here, but I think it was 5th or 6th grade. |
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I know where you are coming from swingset. Sad, but true. As usual, you bring common sense into the issue. |
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I've heard that some of the crew were still alive for the 3 min long free fall to the ocean.
That would be Hell. |
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Alive? Likely. Conscious? Unlikely. The PEAPs that were activated did NOT provide pressurized air. At the altitude of the explosion, you only have a few seconds of consciousness without pressurized oxygen. |
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challenger is probably history making moment i can remember in my life,
i still have very clear memories to this day of sitting in mrs. strabs second grade class at okolona elementary school and watching it all unfold on a little tv mounted on the wall in the corner of the class room. until that day all i ever wanted to be in life was an astronaut, after that day not so much. the whole thing was a big deal at our scholl cause the teacher was going into space, i don't really remember what mrs. strab said to us when the shuttle crashed all i really remember is dead silence for a while after the crash. |
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i remember it also in middle school, you must be 35 |
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According to what I've read and been told by my mom, who stayed abreast of the news when Challenger exploded, at least one astronaut survived the explosion long enough to turn on his air pack and do something with the controls (she doesn't remember any details) but did not survive the fall to earth, obviously. |
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When it blew up I think they were traveling at about 4500 mph correct?
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I saw ONE closeup replay of the explosion that showed the crew cabin leaving the "cloud" of the explsion. Once. It was clearly identifiable as such. And appeared to be "intact", as best I could tell.
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I just watched the COLUMBIA break up footage on the Discovery Channel , MAN o MAN that was horrible.
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Especially if you forget to design the door on your space module to open from the inside in case of a fire. We and the Russians lost a lot of fine men and women in the quest for space. Some were avoidable and died because of someone else's stupidity, most were just casualties in an extremely dangerous endeavor that no one had ever tried before. Their sacrifices have not been in vain. |
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Don't fly much but I was at 39,000 a few days ago....man that would be a hell of a fall
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+10,000,000 They know that when they go up, things can go wrong. They are willing to take that risk so we continue on in space exploration and science development. I hope we keep funding NASA and other space research big time, because if we don't, their lives were wasted. |
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Geesh, at the time of the fire on Apollo 1 we were barely out of the vacuum tube era. The technology used back then that actually got us to the moon and back is primitive compared to todays technology. The reason there wasn't a easy open hatch is due to the Libety Bell 7 incident where the blow away hatch accidently deployed on Grissom after splashdown a few years earlier. NASA determined the same thing could happen during flight and discontinued the blow away hatch. |
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On a related note, there is actually a sci-fi(ish), horror(ish), short story that references the accident, the crew's probable survival (in whatever state) of the fall to the ocean, and the effects on those who played a part in the whole affair.
Written by Dan Simmons (of Dhimmitude fame), it is titled, simply: "Two Minutes Fourty Five Seconds" and it was originally published in Omni magazine. I know I'm dating myself when I say I miss Omni! It should still be available in Simmons's short story compendium, "Prayers to Broken Stones". Well worth checking out, as is all of Simmons's work. FluxPrism |
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+1 "Sacrifices must be made" --Otto Lilienthal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal http://www.skygod.com/quotes/lastwords.html |
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Apollo 1 was on my tenth birthday. Not a birthday I like to remember. ETA: Challenger was the day after my 29th. |
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And he ended up giving his life for the Apollo project. |
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One might argue that if we're not losing a few crews every year then we aren't doing enough, nor pushing the limits enough. |
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I'd rather fall out of the sky than burn alive... But yeah, my mom at the time worked for Rocketdyne, which made the main engines for the Shuttle...they were shook up for months until it was believed to be the SRBs...she was 6 months pregnant with me at the time... |
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If you compare the safety guidelines of today to those used during the Apollo missions, your jaw would drop. We used to play for keeps back in the day. Now, crew safety is a much larger (read #1) priority. Although that is certainly not a bad thing, it has also hindered the program. For example, even though the problems which caused the Challenger disaster were diagnosed rather quickly and fixed, it took innumerable Congressional hearings and studies before the Shuttle flew again. I'm not sure that the level of legislative involvement in what is ultimately an engineering issue is necessary. It just causes delays and extra expense. Like I said earlier, this is a dangerous business and everybody involved knows the risks. We will continue to lose brave men and women in our quest for the stars, that is just the reality of the situation. |
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my understanding is when those fires are lighted there is no turning them off. how do they abort at that point? |
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No need to separate them from the stack, the orbiter - as far as I know - would just detach from the main fuel tank, and glide back to earth. (Yeah, right.) The range safety officer could blow up the SRBs. They were blown up after Challenger exploded. |
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Did they not wear the full pressurized g-suits with helmets like they did during the previous Friendship, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and now subsequent flights? |
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You don't. Once the SRB's are ignited, you cannot abort. They are giant chemical propellant firecrackers. The main engines can be shut off, though. I was at a launch years ago where they fired up the main engines and then scrubbed about 2 seconds before the SRBs were to be lit. Once the SRBs are lit, you are committed to the process...for good or bad. |
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isn't the chute from one of the Solid Rocket Boosters? |
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While that sounds practical, it really isn't because the shuttle is still towing the external tank. All of the studies on that point found that the most likely result would be a loss of the vehicle anyway because it would no longer have enough thrust to move forward. If you dumped the ET and the SRB's, the shuttle would still fall like a rock because it would lose too much momentum. Plus, the payload is still going to be inside the vehicle. It was never designed to fly in "airplane" mode with the payload. |
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I've heard many, many times - before and after Challenger - that the shuttle can abort and return to launch site, or abort to Africa, by detaching from the stack. Not once have I believed it. |
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This was the problem that popped into my head. If they separate early they are still going to fall like a rock. |
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It is a falsehood. It COULD work only in a very specific set of circumstances. All of those circumstances essentially assume that there wouldn't be a catastrophic failure of one of the mission systems anyway. Which begs the question...why would you abort unless you had a catastrophic failure? It's just unrealistic, unfortunately. If something serious goes wrong on the way up or the way down, its just time to grit your teeth and pray. |
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:o SHIN-RA came up with a solution to the solid rocket booster shutoff.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PpWXpWnLo |
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Once the SRB's fire. They can't abort. I was in 1st grade watching it live. Sad day indeed. |
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So prior to the Challenger disaster, Shuttle Astronauts only wore jumpsuits and not pressure suits during liftoff?
They certainly do now www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WdQHQY0xJs and www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwfsFtpACFw |
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Wrong. They wore the same suits they do today. They are not pressure suits. |
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Well that was a question. But I found an answer from wikipedia.
And today they wear ACES The next generation suits were just announced. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_Space_Suit |
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I can remember this like it was yesterday and you'll have to forgive me for posting at length about it, but I'm trying to pass a kidney stone and it's killing me so I'm a little emotional.
I was in the seventh grade with kids who were a year older because I skipped fifth grade. I was that geeky little girl with the stack of books in her arms at all times. My best friends were the teachers because I was *that* girl that *everyone* aims spitballs at. I was the nerd, the geek, the chubby bookworm who sat in the back of the glass and chewed on her hair. At any rate, the prospect of a teacher (and I loved all mine) going into space and a WOMAN teacher at that made me think that I could do ANYTHING. Christa was *real*. She wasn't a movie star, she was an ordinary girl just like me. I remember our Science class followed all the news footage and were assigned projects based on the entire mission for our grade for that cycle. The shuttle launched and we all leaned toward the television like we expected to be sucked in and up with them. It was breathtaking. No one made a sound. You could have heard a pin drop. And I can remember tears streaming down my face before it ever exploded because Christa McAuliffe was carrying MY DREAMS into space with her. And I was flying right there with her. It was such a big deal for school kids to know that one of OUR mentors had become an 'astronaut' so she could teach us all something from outer space. Learning was suddenly so cool. It made teachers something MORE than just flesh and bone for a second ... it made them larger than life. If THAT teacher could go into space, what could MY teacher do? It was headline news and in every paper. Christa McAuliffe was as recognizable as President Reagan. People talked about an average, ordinary woman going into Space like it was the most unbelievable thing in the world and it was. This was your sister, your wife, your mother, your neighbor ... doing something grand and it gave you hope. When the explosion happened ... desks scraped the floor as people pushed away from the television. It was absolutely terrifying. Even before they announced that something had gone wrong ... we knew. Our hearts skipped beats, our mouths fell open, and our brains began to process that we couldn't see the shuttle anymore. The teacher's aide rushed to the front of the room to turn the broadcast off, but our Science teacher overruled her and let us keep watching. I remember that he cried into a handkerchief that had been monogrammed with initials that weren't his and I had never heard a man cry that way in my life. I think he taught all the boys in class that day how to be men. My project for Science class was going to be a solar system rooted in an apple ... because for me ... I believed that the universe would cease to exist without knowledge. My project was already finished and ready to go. What my project became, however, was a headstone that I made out of wood and used my brother's woodburning kit to complete. It simply said 'Dreamers, Believers, and Stars' and listed all the astronauts alphabetically with the exception of McAuliffe and she was at the very top. My Science teacher asked me what my 'theme' was and I said 'remembering'. My niece recently had that same Science teacher and believe it or not, that headstone is in a glass case in his classroom to this day. Even though he only gave me a B for it. To this day, I will stop what I'm doing on January 28th and glance toward Space and remember that the risks we take are usually worth it, even if it doesn't turn out the way you planned. Christa died a dreamer, but she became a star. Sorry for taking up so much bandwidth. |
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I recall seeing a picture of the recovered crew cabin. The picture someone above referanced. I was shocked at the condition. It was intact to the point of retaing its original shape, and intergrity of the skin was "mostly" there. There were burn , and scorch marks all over it IIRC. But, it was in remarkable shape for what it had been thru.
That is a double edged sword, I guess. It saved their lives, only to prolong them enough they may have been awake at impact. I damn sure hope not, but I bet at least one was. There were pieces of tangled up skin, wire, and plumbing from the seperated end, but the designers built a strong area for the crew to occupy on the way up. |
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