The soccer ball that survived the Challenger explosion

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/23902766/nasa-astronaut-ellison-onizuka-soccer-ball-survived-challenger-explosion

by cthulhujr • 8 years ago

273 81 8 years ago

espn.com

mercwear3• 8 years ago

I did not know what to expect from ESPN, this was a really well written article.

satsuma• 8 years ago

espn's more long-form storytelling is top notch. check out their 30 for 30 documentary series, they're fantastic.

mercwear3• 8 years ago

Thanks for the heads up - I'll check them out!

piyh• 8 years ago

That was incredibly touching

bdamm• 8 years ago

The entire story thread was really well done. If anything it’s evidence of NASA’s soul as played out in the people who have built their lives around rocket operations.

mixmastamyk• 8 years ago

The story of the Challenger that day is one of the few things that can reliably squeeze a tear or two from me. Interestingly, I've never heard about this part of it, thanks.

sidlls2• 8 years ago

Same here. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing, the smells and sounds, and how my teacher rushed to turn off the television we were all watching the launch on once it was clear what was happening. Kids crying, not understanding what was happening, the feel and look of the carpet, wall decorations, everything. It's the most vivid memory of childhood I have. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

I couldn't even read through this story.

jedberg6• 8 years ago

I too remember all those details. I was in third grade, and the whole school was watching together in the auditorium. After the explosion, they just sort of shuffled us back to our classrooms.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

how my teacher rushed to turn off the television we were all watching the launch on once it was clear what was happening

It’s funny, this is what causes trauma... if you interrupt the stress reaction and try to make it go away, you hold onto it. If animals are allowed to go through their full stress cycle, they forget the trauma.

jedberg6• 8 years ago

You may not know it, but you carry some of his words with you in your own earthly exploration, printed in every U.S. passport.

This whole article was fantastic, but this was the coolest part for me. To learn that his quote is on every passport. I've never read the quotes on my passport before, but now I have.

mercwear3• 8 years ago

This was one of my favorite takeaways too

rconti2• 8 years ago

As much as I hate the ESPN sports complex, everything I've seen from the ESPN documentaries has been fantastic.

awad• 8 years ago

What about the ESPN sports complex do you dislike?

giodamelio• 8 years ago

Exactly. That was a chills down the the spine moment.

I will definitely be taking a closer look at the quotes in my passport when I get home today.

caseysoftware• 8 years ago

I just went and grabbed mine to check. It's there. That's badass.

blahedo• 8 years ago

I agree. It's on the biometric passports but not the previous generation, on p28 (and is abbreviated from the full quote printed in the article):

"Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds ... to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation." --Ellison S. Onizuka

The background on that page is a palm tree and a silhouette that might be Diamond Head, but the facing page is a space scene (not to scale) with an earthrise over the moon and a satellite.

jedberg6• 8 years ago

but the facing page is a space scene (not to scale)

Sorry, but that made me laugh. Now I kinda want to see it to scale. :)

oska• 8 years ago

This whole article was fantastic

I personally found the writing somewhat overwrought, despite thinking it's a story worth telling and feeling respect for the astronaut involved and sympathy for his family. I wouldn't call it good writing. But I'm not a US American, so maybe it's a cultural difference.

runciblespoon• 8 years ago

"the solid rocket boosters ignited and somewhere in the right booster, a 0.280-inch-wide O-ring failed due to the cold."

The 'solid rocket boosters' being constructed in segments because they had to be transported by rail from Utah. They had to be constructed in that state as part of the deal to get the politicians to vote in the finances.

jedberg6• 8 years ago

I see what you're getting at, but the separate construction and transport was not the issue here. The O ring was a necessary pressure valve, but it failed because the cold made it brittle.

The bigger issue here was the politics between Nasa and it's contractors. The contractors told them that the launch would be dangerous at the temperature, but they were ignored.

Pica_soO• 8 years ago

At such projects, everybody is constantly mumbling about what all could go wrong, its just legally relevant background noise- not actually "sticking" out warnings pointing at a particular point of failure.

robryk2• 8 years ago

The O ring was a necessary pressure valve (...)

Do I understand correctly that you're saying that the O-ring would be necessary even if the SRBs were constructed as a single long tube, instead of segments that are assembled together?

If so, would you mind expanding on that? I was under the impression that the only reason the whole O-ring and caulking of the joints was necessary was the existence of the joints.

gmiller123456• 8 years ago

The O ring was a necessary pressure valve

Do you have a reference for this? Seems very intriguing to me. To me it seems the last thing you would want, under any circumstances would be to have hot gases coming out anywhere near the hydrogen tank and you'd make every effort to contain any overpressure until it exited beyond the hydrogen tank.

colechristensen• 8 years ago

You seem to be implying that a root cause of the accident was the political spreading around of construction.

Rockets are incredibly complex machines, you could use this sort of post hoc reasoning to find cause and blame for any anomaly by saying such a part could have been done differently. You couldn't ever use this reasoning to make design decisions that prevented accidents.

jcranendonk• 8 years ago

What it really comes down to is that the Challenger exploded due to man's folly in exploring outer space. /s

cortesoft• 8 years ago

I mean, was the alternative to construct them on site? Is that what would have happened if not for the political pressure? It seems likely that they would have been manufactured SOMEWHERE requiring transport, no matter what.

erik_seaberg• 8 years ago

Could have used a ship; that's how they delivered the larger Saturn V stages from New Orleans and Seal Beach to Cape Kennedy.

Symmetry• 8 years ago

For example, SpaceX builds all their rockets in LA and transports them by truck to the launch site. With their next, bigger, rocket they'll send them by ship.

Blue Origin is planning to build their big rockets in Florida near the launch site.

madrox• 8 years ago

The post hoc ergo propter hoc going on in this comment and its responses are wild.

The O-ring failed because it was a bad O-ring, and no one in positions that matters appreciated it was a bad O-ring. Politicizing it into a witch hunt to make congress look bad doesn't do anyone favors. It just feeds existing rage.

CamperBob2• 8 years ago

Didn't the O-ring fail because it was used outside its specifications? My recollection is a bit hazy but it seems that it was more of a political problem than an engineering problem.

b1c837696ba28b• 8 years ago

There is a book, "Challenger: A Major Malfunction: A True Story of Politics, Greed, and the Wrong Stuff". There is also Feynman's report. Recommended reading!

greglindahl• 8 years ago

Segmented SRBs are used on Ariane 5 and Northrop Grumman's upcoming Omega rocket, while Vega, Vega-C, and Ariane 6 will use a single-segment SRB. It's a choice that was dictated by politics for the Shuttle, but it's also a choice that can be made for other reasons, like a smaller composite segment using a cheaper tool (Omega and the Boeing 787 fuselage tube).

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

In general, "need to be segmented for transport" is not necessarily a political thing. Russians have the Proton rocket which looks as if it had boosters bolted to it, where in fact those are parts of the first stage. I heard recently that the reason for this design is precisely because if those side parts were internal, the rocket wouldn't fit on a railcar.

Rebelgecko3• 8 years ago

I think that's an oversimplification of a complicated issue. It's certainly possible that the NASA administrator chose to go with Morton Thiokol to keep congressmen from Utah happy, but as far as I know there's no proof that there was any "deal", and there's plenty of technical reasons to go with a segmented design (although there's tradeoffs).

One of the bidders on the contract actually wanted to make a monolithic SRB, but that brings a new set of problems and limitations, especially at large sizes (you can look up the Aerojet 260" for some more info).

The shuttle SRBs were built in 7 segments, some of which were joined together at the factory. The multisegment design was based on the flight-proven Titan SRBs, which supposedly would help with R&D costs. However manufacturing constraints (if the SRB just used the Titan design and scaled it up, they'd need bigger hunks of metal than anyone was casting at the time) and design tweaks led to changes that degraded O-Ring performance and potentially kept both primary and secondary O-rings from being properly seated. There was really a whole confluence of things that went wrong, and a lot of missed opportunities to fix any one of the issues that led to O-ring failure.

Plenty of people still use segmented SRBs today, especially for their modularity. The (first version) of the SLS boosters are based on the shuttle design, with extra segments stuck added on.

rmason• 8 years ago

I was visiting farmers reviewing plans for the next crop year. I'd just arrived and the farmer says do you mind if we watch the Challenger launch before starting? It's got that teacher going up in space. I told him that my high school government teacher had been one of the ten finalists so I took a pretty keen interest myself.

I can remember the numbness I felt in his living room as we watched the Challenger explode. It's something once viewed that you can't unsee. Words fail you in trying to explain it.

I had no idea at the time that there were five engineers who tried valiantly to stop the launch because of the cold weather and failed.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...

mehrdadn2• 8 years ago

The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. That night, he told his wife, "It's going to blow up."

This sent chills down my spine... the world just shouldn't be like this.

T-hawk2• 8 years ago

One important piece of data to correlate with that: how many times previously had engineers issued similar warnings for launches that then proceeded fine?

Warning fatigue is a thing and reasonable to wonder whether that happened at all here.

CloudNetworking• 8 years ago

It's amazing how I've never heard of this story before and how much I've heard about Gagarin's friend knowingly dying to save Gagarin's life...

BrandonMarc• 8 years ago

Texas A&M's engineering program has a required course called Engineering Ethics. A portion of the course is devoted to analyzing the Challenger disaster.

During a late-night teleconference the night before the launch, the engineers pleaded with their managers not to launch. One decision maker was told, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat," and he reluctantly changed his mind (a decision he has regretted for decades, of course).

It's also telling that, after the decision was made to approve the launch, none of the engineers agreed to sign off.

https://www.engineering.com/Blogs/tabid/3207/ArticleID/170/c...

hluska• 8 years ago

I was in the third grade when this happened. My elementary school was (un)fortunate enough to carry the launch live, so I watched it happen with a room full of my 8 and 9 year old peers.

Like you, I can remember the numbness I felt in the classroom as we watched the explosion. And, I will never forget the look on my teacher's face as she shut off the television.

tigeba• 8 years ago

If you listen to the NPR story above you will want to know that about a month later they ran a followup story.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/25/466555217...

mncharity2• 8 years ago

The failure allowed heated, pressurized propellants to leak out onto the external fuel tank, causing catastrophic structural failure. Seventy-three seconds into its 10th flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart, killing all seven members of its crew. It was 11:39 a.m.

Sigh. It's perhaps silly of me in an age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, but I'm saddened to see this line repeated yet again, 30 years on. Perhaps Malinowski is just echoing old reporting. But a journalist of her caliber seems likely to have run this by NASA. Which suggests NASA PR is still prioritizing spin over integrity, even all these years later.

For those who haven't seen this line before, the template is "<explosion> <fast> <dead>". As in 'the explosion ripped apart the shuttle faster than the blink of an eye, killing the astronauts'. By such word-smithed sleigh-of-hand, NASA would leave readers with the impression that the crew was killed immediately, a quick non-lingering death, without flat-out lying.

One thing we're sure of is that some of the seven were not killed in the breakup at 11:39. I don't recall whether Onizuka's air pack was one of those found, and found to be manually activated. Nor whether there ended up being any evidence of cabin depressurization. But my understanding is that now, as then, there's no reason to believe that some of the seven didn't survive until cabin ocean impact minutes later.

On the roof of the launch control tower, the families of the crew desperately searched the twin trails of smoke that twisted skyward for signs of the crew cabin.

:/ Perhaps it doesn't matter. It's not that different a story. And there's the "little white lies are fine" interpretation of integrity. Why shouldn't popular history get a prettified version? And given how NASA is funded, embracing integrity might be quite unhealthy. And yet... I'd have been happier if Malinowski wrote this paragraph a bit differently.

ddoolin• 8 years ago

Or, given the overall tone of the piece, she didn't feel it necessary to go into those details. I'm sure there are plenty of other details that also went glossed over. Your own tone implies they're lying for a possibly nefarious reason -- what is it? If I'm right, it might be more accurate to point out how she failed to mention the engineer's warnings to NASA and other supervisors about the high risk of failure of the gasket(s), as that, to me, makes them look markedly worse than the astronauts surviving the breakup.

I'm sure it's harrowing to have 2 and a half minutes to contemplate your inevitable death and try fruitlessly to stop it (and even for us to read about it) but I don't think it's nefarious to leave that bit out so much as some degree of respect to the families.

mncharity2• 8 years ago

your own tone implies they're lying for a possibly nefarious reason

Nefarious? Flagrantly wicked, abominable, impious? No, just PR spin - long-term repeated misrepresentation. Unremarkable in politics. Much less accepted in engineering. The question of "to what standards should NASA PR be held?", is indeed a root issue. For NTSB, it would be shocking. For DHS, unsurprising. NASA struggles to survive in a niche much more like DHS than NTSB. But the question repeatedly asked over the years, both within and without, is whether NASA PR weighs political concerns too heavily - to a degree sometimes simply unnecessary - and engineering/science-style honesty too lightly.

she didn't feel it necessary to go into those details

My focus is not on the piece in isolation. Though one might object to the piece in isolation reinforcing a widespread misconception. But my sadness stemmed from context. From yet again seeing the same, not "trope"... "spin"? - descriptive devices that have repeatedly been used to mislead people.

"Seventy-three seconds [...] broke apart, killing all seven members of its crew. It was 11:39 a.m." Other versions have had timestamps down to hundredths of a second, as if that somehow mattered. Comments like 'too fast for even the computers to notice', or 'if you blinked, you'd have missed it'. Crew deaths from ocean impact have little more connection with T+74 disassembly, than with T+58 plume. Crew experience has little connection with computer and ground observer experience. But NASA PR repeatedly used these same tricks of phrasing to establish and reinforce a misconception. I was just sad to see them yet again, so many years later.

failed to mention the engineer's warnings

My focus isn't on what is absent, but on what is present - this familiar structure of misdirection.

as some degree of respect to the families

It's been thirty years. Is the cost-benefit tradeoff really still in favor of continuing to use this same misleading description?

But here's a more upbeat interpretation: Perhaps the author simply modeled the paragraph on one decades old - it is "pretty" - and didn't run it by anyone. So maybe we're just seeing an unfortunate blast from the NASA PR past, rather than anything contemporary.

mirimir• 8 years ago

See retrogradeorbit's post (likely below) linking to a report about the crew's fate: http://www.space-shuttle.com/challenger1.htm

bawigga• 8 years ago

I went to Clear Lake from 2001-2004. Lot's of friends with relations to NASA and supporting industries. Sad I can't remember the soccer ball being on display.

Any other Falcons out there remember seeing it?

retrogradeorbit• 8 years ago

Not just the soccer ball but the whole crew compartment.

http://www.space-shuttle.com/challenger1.htm

ridgeguy• 8 years ago

On Challenger's last day, I had met very early that morning with a couple of angel investors who signed a funding commitment for my first company. Went home, watched Challenger explode. An hour later, angel investors called to say "never mind".

Watching Challenger blow up hurt worse. Especially in following months when failure analysis showed it could have been avoided by launching within the allowable temperature window.

Some days you really remember.

joering2• 8 years ago

They probably did you a favor by not being forced to deal with them down the road.

Unless you were as an engineer directly on Challenger O-Rings, I don't see any reason why anyone would cancel their financial commitment toward a startup project, because of this obvious tragedy.

RyJones• 8 years ago

I suspect the timing was a coincidence.

molteanu2• 8 years ago

"This is the story of the soccer ball that survived". 200+ points. Horrible. Seems like HN is getting worse and worse.

filleduchaos• 8 years ago

What is worse and worse about this post?

molteanu2• 8 years ago

The subject of it.

The soccer ball that survived the Challenger explosion

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