1/30/2024 0 Comments Alan mcdonald space shuttieThe biggest immediate problem that day was the cold. The "Challenger" broke apart 73 seconds after launch. RELATED: 9 Nonfiction Books About Space Travel The communication pipeline to these top managers had been plugged along the way by a few people who thought they were making the right decisions.Įither one of them, Moore or Thomas, could and would have postponed the flight, if they had had that information. Every engineer in that meeting told their bosses that they should not launch Challenger in the freezing weather that had blanketed the Kennedy Space Center. They were not told about a meeting at the Thiokol factory in Utah, which had built the solid rocket boosters. It could have been placed that morning to either Jesse Moore, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Flight, or Gene Thomas, the Launch Director. Many months of investigation later, though, it became clear that one phone call could have prevented the accident. He could only say, “…obviously a major malfunction.” Despite multiple television shots and a room full of consoles monitoring every system and electronic spasm, that was about all anyone could have said at that moment. But as protocol dictated, commentary was switched to the Johnson Space Center as the Challenger cleared the tower, and Steve Nesbit had the job of interpreting the conflagration in the sky. I was the “Voice of Shuttle Launch Control,” so it was my voice that was heard around the world. It was my fortune to be in the Firing Room (the launch control room) at the Kennedy Space Center during the launch. The lives of thousands of other people were changed and, for a time, it was feared the entire Space Shuttle program could be cancelled. A billion-dollar space shuttle was lost and, as astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz later said, “We lost our innocence.” Six career astronauts and one schoolteacher were killed.
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