No doubt the explosion of the shuttle Challenger 73 seconds of takeoff was not the only mistake of the Nasa, but the biggest. The reasons can easily be pointed: ignore the warnings, security parameters rule, choose non-professional crew. And the latter is the main reason that thirty years after the event people remember the incident as if it were today.
It was the January 28, 1986 and the world prepared to see as a teacher, that could be any teacher, started within an apparatus into space. Unlike rockets, this device of 2000 tons was considered the most ordinary of devices created by the agency, whose acronym derives from National Administration of Aeronautics and Space.
They were reusable, they could not rise more than 643 kilometers, and had imposed a simple task: place or remove satellites orbit.
The official website
Nasa that only six ferries were built in order to each perform about a hundred missions. Participate in one, it was a dream come true for many mortals. Holstering a spectacular space suit and go into nothingness at high speed with all the attention that entails. And the agency made it happen.
At 37, Sharon Christa McAuliffe became the first civilian to face the challenge, chosen from more than 10,000 applicants. His idea was to “demystify the organization and spaceflight”, in his own words.
The choice of ordinary people for this particular trip it was not made on a whim. The organization wanted to draw media attention to the program to demonstrate how safe it was, and that was how the teacher Christa, a payload specialist Gregory Jarvis name, a member of the US Air Force named Dick Scobee, a ship pilot named Michael Smith, the engineer Judy Resnik, Hawaiian-born engineer and physicist Ellison Onizuka Ronald Mc Nair, first African American in space.
At six o’clock in the evil day, a dozen children rushed to get dressed. They were students at Concord High School in Massachusetts to which McAuliffe taught, who would launch from a VIP lounge located about five kilometers from the platform. The same space where parents of teaching, her husband Steven, his children aged nine and six, and the relatives and friends of the rest of the crew would be.
The event was presented
more surprising than it actually was, because these ferries did their work routinely. In fact, the Challenger himself had gone into space on nine occasions, but this time you would dressing the ‘PR’.
media agree that this particular Tuesday was too cold, so connoisseurs of the subject thought the takeoff would be postponed for the third time.
After a meeting
last minute the crew were ordered to put the suits. At 9:00 am they began to prepare.
What was it that happened? This is what people have less clear. However, the agency unraveled.
gums that sealed the joints of the engines, which normally dilated and contracted, it did due to the low temperatures of launch day. The result was the escape of hot gases burned rapidly external fuel tank and one of the connecting parts with the propellant.
joined the physical failure, according to NASA research, “the lack of verification systems, underestimation of the engineers about the possibility of an accident, lack of an emergency system abort the takeoff when anomalies occur. ”
Morton Thiokol, the expert corporation that manufactured parts of the impeller, he brought a team of engineers who alerted the problem on the boards though for other reasons. “Boards failed mainly because of repeated compression … this anomaly was warned but the pressure led NASA to authorize the take off”. And tragedy struck.
The most accurate way to remember what happened and how the world lived it, is through home video that came to light in 2012, released by Steven Virostek in The Huffington Post . Steven
like his wife loved this kind of activity, so they moved to Florida only to see the launches, which were not lost even one.
That morning, the teachers cheered for his project The Master in space. “We Christa, we go …!”, Steven’s wife alternated with beautiful expressions about what the device looked in the air. Exactly 40 seconds takeoff, both understood that something was wrong, but not the rest of them.
family and friends watched the smoke as a normal part of a pitch, to the point that there are troubled by the apparent explosion until Steve Nesbitt, NASA official voice, he began broadcasting strange phrases. “Flight Control is here watching the situation very carefully … … has obviously been a great damage”.
They
television cameras, confused, in turn they showed the face of family and smoke in the sky. At 73 seconds into the flight the shuttle was fully engulfed in flames and uncontrollable because of its speed, it disintegrated, but the cabin where were the seven astronauts. That piece took three additional minutes to fall to the ocean where he eventually destroyed.
The inquiry determined later as ‘unlikely’ that some of the victims had consciousness upon impact at sea, but it was logical to try to minimize the pain of the families.
The real truth is that at least four crew activated their systems to make oxygen and tried to help each other.
Many were then asked, and even today, why there were no survivors when the capsule is detached. The reason is that fell from 15,240 meters in height to 400 km per hour, with the aggravating recognized later: the ‘astronauts’ had no parachute or ejection equipment, either training to overcome this fact, which triggered criticism the agency. The traditional costumes and ejection seats the commander and the pilot were dropped in view of the mission was considered safe enough.
locate the remains of the crew it took the organization over a month. On March 7, they found and destroyed an extra appendage cabima vehicle with the remains of the astronauts, however, the autopsy results were never disclosed.
According to NASA, Challenger disintegrated at 11:38 in the morning “with an estimate of catastrophic accident during launch, in the 1 chance in 438″.
Apart from the incalculable human loss that exhausted the credibility mission of NASA and, according to Professor Alex Roland, about $ 20,000 per pound carrying the shuttle, so it He was considered the worst space accident registration until today.
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