5 ms·

I was only 5 when this happened, but I remember what a blow this was to my school. Were past missions, like the Apollo's, dismissive of concerns like this as we

• digi_owl 10y ago
  No data to back it up with, but i think during the space race things were new enough that they often didn't know the chances. But the time of the shuttle, NASA had moved from a prestigious project to pork barrel politics. End result was that managers and politicians were endlessly overruling the engineers.
• jartelt 10y ago
  Since the shuttle was designed to do repeated take offs and landings, it was very complicated. Of course the Apollo mission were super complicated as well, but the only had to design for one launch. This is part of the reason why the shuttle program was so expensive.
• billsmithaustin 10y ago
  The Apollo 1 cabin caught on fire on the launch pad. All three astronauts died.
  • mturmon 10y ago
    And Apollo 13 was a near loss, although it worked out ok.
• dbcurtis 10y ago
  My understanding is that the attitude of NASA management changed from the Apollo era's "Prove to me we are good to go." to one of "Prove to me we can't go." Some might put it: Gene Kranz retired. Source: Anecdotes from an old friend who is a quality assurance engineer. He was one of the boys on the ground in Huston that brought the Apollo 13 crew home.
  • aidenn0 10y ago
    Another comment on this thread linked to a paper[1] that tells a narrative that the "Prove to me we can't go" was specific to this launch (specifically it claims that since NASA didn't want to ground all shuttles for 2 years, they instead accepted the recommendation that no launches be made outside of the environmental envelope of previous launches, but then this decision was reversed specifically for Challenger). Not in the paper, but from my own memory, the launch was high profile due to the first civilian on a NASA mission and was repeatedly delayed by the time they launched. In fact my family had tickets to the launch, and we ended up getting various tours of the space center instead since they kept on delaying. [edit] Also, my understanding is that Kranz's hard-line began after the Apollo 1 tragedy. Was your friend there early enough to comment on that? 1: https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf
• nradov 10y ago
  If NASA had flown 135 Apollo missions they might have lost some. Due to the small sample size, we'll never know for sure whether it was actually safer than the Shuttle or if they just got lucky.
• dispose13432 10y ago
  Pre-shuttle, the astronauts were test pilots, and the majority of deaths were not related to space flight. People feel that there's a difference if a test-pilot dies in an uncontrollably dangerous environment for a cause than if a civilian dies because middle-management were too cheap.
• zb 10y ago
  A similar situation existed prior to the Apollo 1 accident. After that they renewed the focus on safety, which lasted a while until they started to lose it again, culminating in the Challenger accident 18 years later. Then exactly the same thing happened culminating in the Columbia accident 18 years after that. However, the shuttle design (which placed the crew compartment right next to the giant explodey bit, to use the technical term) was also inherently much less safe than the rockets that preceded it. (That it was chosen anyway was due in part to the degradation of the safety culture in favour of other goals.) It's really, really hard to keep an entire organisation laser-focused on safety when they haven't seen an accident in nearly a generation.