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Do you remember what you were doing...


sobo

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...when this happened, 23 years ago today?

 

challenger_explosion.jpg

 

Winter quarter of my sophomore year at VA Tech. I had just returned to my apartment after taking a Mechanics of Deformable Bodies midterm, and my neighbor across the hall banged on my door to tell me he just saw it on the news. We ran back into his apartment and watched the coverage for the next few hours, then drank beers in the stairwell and talked to all the other apartment residents about it as they came home. Surreal...

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Fourth grade in... can't remeber her name but she was a BIATCH! THe principal was all worked up about it and there was much grumbling between the taqchers about how to break the news. I thikn most of the adults were way more worked up than the kids.

 

It's interesting that for (relatively) how few shuttle flights there have been, there have also been two catostrophic failures. Going into space is dangerous!

 

I can't imagine what it was like for the flight engineers to watch those events go down.

 

Nova has an awesome program about the second shuttle breakup. 50 minutes with lots of amazing telescopic footage (not to be morbid) and analysis of the "NASA culture".

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/columbia/program.html

 

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Senior year at Stanford. I got a phone call from another ME, telling me to turn on the TV. I sat stunned and missed my dynamics class.

 

Pretty much changed the direction of my life. I had a job offer from Hughes to do analysis in Redondo Beach and then be at CC for shuttle launches when they were sending up a satellite. During my interview that December, they'd talked to me about the employee, Jarvis, who would be going up in January and how they'd pay for my graduate degree if I wanted to go that direction. I was going to accept the job, but then with the investigation and then a different job offer from them, I ended up doing something totally different instead.

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ya'll are some old mother fuckers! i was in 4th grade at the time and living in germany, so it didn't happen until after i had gotten home from school - i remember the endless stream of nasa jokes i heard, created and passed along for years afterwards more than anything!

 

what's "NASA" stand for?

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what was the last thing that went through christa mcauliffe's mind? :)

 

A large fragment from the forward Reaction Control System helium storage tank?

 

In grew up in NH, so the first teacher in space was a big deal for us. Everyone was watching it on TV at our high school so we got to see six people die before lunch. I remember being stunned by the stupidity of the people around me as some asked if the astronauts would be OK. Um...no.

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You have an engineering degree??? And you write romance novels?? WTF!?!? now i've heard everythign!!!

RuDY, your podiatric tribulations notwithstanding, this is ancient news.

Mel the Resident Scribe/Former Commercial Airliner Engine Thrust Tester was outed here very publicly several months ago.

 

linky

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Was working at Digital Equipment Corp. in Nashua, NH and living up in Francestown about 40 minutes SW of Mcauliffe's home in Concord. It was pretty much a bummer for an extended period across all of Southern NH in general as I recall. I do remember later wandering out to Joe English Hill, soloing up to a favorite perch, and just staring up at the sky along with the giant Air Force satellite dish nearby which was doing the same.

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I was hiking the coast from Hoh to Third Beach with a group of ten juvenile delinquents from Maple Lane. One kid stole the tobacco stash and we had Kangaroo Court at Scott Creek. It was a HUGE deal and (to us) much more serious than any rocket ship deal. Had our inquest identified the culprit, he would have wished he was on that rocket.

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