“We Have No Downlink”
By Mitch Berg
It is, of course, the 25th anniversary of the Challenger explosion .
I was in the control room at KSTP-AM, getting ready for the Michael Jackson show to come down the satellite. An alert came down the AP wire – John MacDougall called in to control from the newsroom that “the shuttle has blown up”, and that I should monitor the ABC News feed for special coverage. It was there; switched over to the live coverage, for a few moments, until we realized there just wasn’t much to cover. We went back to Jackson, in progress, who was covering the explosion non-stop, of course.
I sat, buzzing with adrenaline, as the program continued. When Jackson ran out of information – it didn’t take long; he went to the phones.
The first call was a smug, unctuous, counterculture-sounding jagoff; “Yes, Michael, I think we had this coming; it’s revenge for this nation’s excessive macho”.
I got as angry as I have ever been in my life; I bit my tongue so hard, trying to concentrate, that I think I drew blood. I don’t remember.
That night, Reagan gave one of his great speeches.
And we needed it.
I needed it.
January 28th, 2011 at 9:55 pm
I was sitting in my office. My first job post-college was working for my college, which had hired me to be the sports information director and a staff writer for the public relations department. One of my work-study students came in and told me. Not much got done the rest of that day.
I definitely remember Reagan’s speech. The lefties on campus who usually were hooting at Reagan didn’t say a word afterwards, which was how I measured the effectiveness of what he’d said. And you’re right, Mitch — we really needed that speech.
January 28th, 2011 at 10:08 pm
I was in a communications class in college when another professor came in at the end of class to ask if he could turn on the TV – I think we had the only one in the building and it had a VCR about as big as an oven. No one could believe the shuttle might blow-up – shuttle shots were as common as a drive to the store – and most thought that they must be in an escape capsule. Then – the dark humor, eg: Teacher hazing taken to a new level; last words – hey what’s this button do?. Old Dutch gave a good speech (…slip the surly bonds of earth…) and I visited the memorial at Arlington two summers later. Now thinking back – the shuttle was produced at roughly the same time as the aluminum engine Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Not American manufacturing’s finest hour.
January 30th, 2011 at 9:41 am
I was in the lab, showing some students how to run the ion implanter and yelling at another student for being careless with the hydrofluoric acid (nasty stuff, that). It had been a lousy morning and I was getting frustrated with the students’ cavalier attitude towards stuff that kill could them and me pretty quickly (you’re only immortal for a limited time, and while the students were still in that phase, I wasn’t).
Another student came in early for the afternoon section, looking dazed, something you don’t want when you’re dealing with high voltages, arsenic gas, and really nasty chemicals. I was about to send him home when he said in his very, very thick Vietnamese accent that the shuttle had blown up. It shook the whole class up, and I wrapped up the lab for the day pretty fast. We didn’t need shellshocked folks wandering around the lab, and I felt myself distracted, too.
Years later, I worked on some projects that went up in the Shuttle while at NASA. And I talked to folks who had worked on the design and found out just how screwed up the design process was and how frustrated the engineers were on that program. It was the politics of the funding that fundamentally created a whole slew of conflicting demands. The originally concept was good, but when it came to getting funding for it they changed so much of it that the whole program really crippled a lot of NASA’s other programs and priorities.
January 30th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
I have a friend who is sort of an amateur NASA nut and has done some research on this whole thing. In a nutshell, Morton-Thiokol was asked for temperature restrictions and they gave NASA the safe range of temperatures. When they launched, the seal failed due to cold temps. NASA came back to M-T to say “Why didn’t you tell us not to launch in those temps??”, M-T said “We didn’t think anyone would be STUPID enough to launch in those temps.”
Sadly, there was evidence discovered in the wreckage of the crew capsule that the initial explosion did not kill the astronauts. They were performing emergency actions and processes while the crew capsule was falling to earth.
January 31st, 2011 at 9:24 pm
I was laying upon the operating table at St Ansgar’s getting the mangled fingertip re-amputated feeling my chances of becoming a Naval Aviator were going up in flames as was the Challenger. Now we fly Air Patrol over the cape for every launch! Strange how fate deals the cards.