Challenger

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I first posted this in 2005. The link to Dr. Sanity’s blog is still good.

As some of you may know, I grew up on Florida’s Space Coast. My father was a Quality Control engineer for IBM, working on the Instrument Unit (guidance system) for the Saturn V rocket. I got to see all of the manned missions up through Skylab launch from just across the Indian River, except for Apollo XVII – the only night launch. I watched that one from my front yard in Titusville.

There were two dawns that day.

Consequently, I’ve been a space exploration enthusiast from a young age. I try to watch all the launches, or at least listen to them on the radio. I remember listening to the launch of the Challenger early in the morning here in Tucson, and thinking – as the station broke for a commercial – “At least this one didn’t blow up on the pad.”

Morbid, I know, but I’m also an engineer. I wasn’t then – I had just graduated from college in December and didn’t have a job yet – but that’s been my orientation for most of my life. I knew that each manned launch was a roll of the dice, a spin of the cylinder in a big game of Russian Roulette, and that NASA had become just another government bureaucracy. (And I also knew just how close we had come to losing three men in Apollo 13 because a series of small, innocuous errors had cascaded into a catastrophic failure in a system that was almost neurotic in its quest for safety.)

It was just a matter of time.

Still, I was shocked when they came back from commercial to announce that Challenger had been destroyed in a launch accident just minutes after liftoff. I knew that all seven of the astronauts were dead. I knew that the “teacher in space” wasn’t going to get there, and that a classroom of students had to be devastated by that realization. Many, many classrooms, but one in particular.

I watched the footage of the liftoff, now splayed in endless grisly loops on every network – all of which had previously declined to show the launch live and interrupt really important stuff like “Good Morning America.” I watched as the flame bloomed out from a Solid Rocket Booster joint, impinging on the huge external fuel tank, and said, “That’s what killed them. What the hell caused that failure?” I watched the Satan’s horns of the SRB exhaust tracks as they trailed up and away from the epicenter of the blast. And then I watched it all again.

Over and over.

Later I discovered that the engineers at Morton Thiokol had tried to get the launch scrubbed, knowing the problems that cold weather caused in the O-ring joint seals of the SRBs, but they had been told to “take off their engineer hats and put on their manager hats” in order to make a launch decision. The launch had been delayed too many times, and President Reagan would be making his State of the Union address that night, with a call to Crista McAuliffe – Teacher in Space.

I decided right then that I didn’t ever want to be a goddamned manager.

I also found out later that the crew, at least most of them, probably survived the destruction of the Challenger, and were alive and aware all the way to impact in the Atlantic. I like to hope not, but facts are sometimes ugly things.

And I wondered if NASA could regain the spirit, professionalism, and devotion to excellence it’d had during the race to the moon – and doubted it severely. As I said, NASA has become just another government bureacracy, more interested in expanding its budget and not making waves than in the visceral excitement and attention to minute detail that space exploration should inspire. (I’m speaking of the upper-level management, and many of the lower-level drones. I’m quite certain that there are still hundreds of people there still dedicated to the dream. They’re just shackled and smothered by the career bureaucrats and the nine-to-fivers who punch the clock and wait for retirement.)

Anyway, all this is leading to a blog I found while perusing my sitemeter links tonight. GM’s Corner, which linked to me last month, has a recurring “new blogs” post. This month’s entry is Dr. Sanity, the blog of Dr. Pat Santy – who happened to be the flight surgeon for the Challenger mission. She has a post up about that day, and it’s well worth the read: Challenger – A Flight Surgeon Remembers.

Highly recommended.

And if you want to read something even more inspiring, I strongly recommend Bill Whittle’s essay Courage, about the Columbia disaster. Warning: it gets dusty towards the end.

One Small Step…


On this day at 02:56 UTC 44 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to leave one of these on the surface of another astronomical body. Three years and five months later, Eugene Cernan became the last man to do so, so far.

The last Space Shuttle touched down for the last time on this day two years ago.

Elon Musk of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX fame has said that the impetus behind the development of SpaceX came when his son asked him, “is it really true that they used to fly to the moon when you were a boy?”

Now there are two-dozen or more private space ventures around the world. There is a plan to capture and retrieve an asteroid for commercial purposes. Other companies want to mine the moon.  Still another plans to put an observatory there.

If we can just hold it together for a couple more decades, humanity might get off this rock, and we might do it in my lifetime.

But it’s not looking too good.

(Updated and reposted from last year.)

I’m Geeking Out Here

Ok, one of these years I’m going to Comic-Con:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVpM3TNTVFY?rel=0]

My wife and I were in San Diego over Comic-Con weekend a few years ago, but not to attend the event.  I kind of regret not taking advantage of the timing, but …

I Push ELECTRONS for a Living

I am most definitely not a plumber.

Had a major garbage disposal failure Sunday morning. I knew the unit was failing and had bought a replacement previously, but I just hadn’t gotten around to swapping them out. The new one is longer than the old, and the discharge port is located at a different elevation than previously, so the undersink drain piping doesn’t line up.

Two days later, it STILL doesn’t line up. I’m tired of fv%$ing with it. Got a pro coming tomorrow. (Anything worth doing is worth paying a professional to do.) All I want is for it to drain and not to leak when it’s finished.

I may actually start posting things to the blog again afterward….

The Singularity is Coming

Back in 2004 when I wrote Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them, I cited Steven Den Beste’s piece The Four Most Important Inventions in Human History:

In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall effects.

I still think he was correct.

Thanks to David Whitewolf at Random Nuclear Strikes, I listened to what I think is a critically important speech given by Juan Enriquez just a couple of weeks ago at the 2013 Fiscal Summit presented by the Peterson Foundation.

It’s twenty-five minutes long, but well worth your time, I think.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpUV4BRqkf0?rel=0]

Change continues, and it’s still accelerating.

If we don’t go off the cliff first.

What Takes 55,000Hp Just to Run the Fuel Pump?

The mighty F-1 engine of the Saturn V rocket – recently reverse-engineered.


Interesting excerpts from an engineering perspective:

Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”

“Because they didn’t have the analytical tools we have today for minimizing weight, everything was very robust,” noted Betts, when I asked what they found as they tore down the engine. “That’s apparent in really every aspect of the engine. The welds—”

“Oh, the welds!” interrupted Case. “The welds on this engine are just a work of art, and everything on here was welded.” The admiration in his voice was obvious. “Today, we look at ways of reducing that, but that was something I picked up on from this engine: just how many welds there were, and how great they looked.”

“You look at a weld that takes a day,” he continued, “and there are thousands of them. And these guys were pumping engines out every two months. It’s amazing what they could do back then and all the touch labor it took.”

An engine like the F-1 is sort of like two separate rocket engines: one small, one large. The smaller one consumes the same fuel as the larger, but its rocket exhaust is not used to lift the vehicle; instead, it drives the enormous turbopump that draws fuel and oxidizer from the tanks and forces them through the injector plate into the main thrust chamber to be burned.

As with everything else about the F-1, even the gas generator boasts impressive specs. It churns out about 31,000 pounds of thrust (138 kilonewtons), more than an F-16 fighter’s engine running at full afterburner, and it was used to drive a turbine that produced 55,000 shaft horsepower. (That’s 55,000 horsepower just to run the F-1’s fuel and oxidizer pumps—the F-1 itself produced the equivalent of something like 32 million horsepower, though accurately measuring a rocket’s thrust at that scale is complicated.)

Fascinating article.

As I’ve noted previously, my father worked for IBM on the Saturn V Instrument Unit – the rocket guidance system. I got to see all of the Saturn launches as a child growing up on Florida’s Space Coast. I don’t think I’ll ever see anything that impressive again in my lifetime.