This legitimately almost ruined NASA.
Can’t be ‘ruined’ in the sense that they were important for military purposes before they created the ridiculous space force.
Even Boeing, a private company that with all their failures and criminal behavior should definitely be bankrupt, gets massive help bcs they’re a military contractor.Imagine a space organization almost be>ng ruined by one explosion! NASA is obviously too weak to handle space.
i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.
Same. I think that episode was shown in-class, too, so I came alarmingly close to the XKCD.
It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.
I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.
But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.
I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.
It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.
The crew didn’t blow up(src).
The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.
We were led out of our classrooms to watch it since we lived in FL. When the launch went pear-shaped, nobody really understood what had happened, we just thought it was part of the fuel tanks dropping away. We went back in, sat down and continued our day. I don’t think the teachers ever told us something went wrong and I found out about it that night at home.
Um, actually!
The crew didn’t blow up instantly at all, at that exact moment! They spent another three minutes falling back to Earth, where they blew up instantly upon hitting the surface!
There were no explosive materials onboard the crew pod so no, still no explosion when hitting the water. If anything, it would be closer to an implosion.
Don’t like your teacher? Follow this quick simple trick…
The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.
Nobody asked.
the op meme is about the US space program publicly vaporizing a bunch of astronauts
Gotcha, I’ll be sure to only repeat word for word what’s in the post. No new angles, no new ways of looking at the post content, just a single 👏 emoji.
Every single comment I see from you is in some way pro Russian, you’re a very one note commenter.
Can you elaborate? I’m certainly very pro-Soviet, as I’m a communist. I don’t hide that. I’m pro-communism, I support the PRC, Cuba, AES in general. The main purpose of my Lemmy.ml account is to talk about socialism and communism through a Marxist-Leninist lens.
I’m very anti-NATO, like the vast majority of Marxists, and I don’t fall for the hysteria around the Russian Federation as some ultimate evil, though,
You in another comment. The Russian federation is currently occupying multiple neighbouring countries, bombing civilians, and generally having a war crime of a time. And you’re saying they’re not evil?
You’re off the deep end, my friend.
Eastern Ukraine, the Donbass region, is very pro-Russia and very anti-Ukraine. Western Ukraine was shelling them for a decade, post-2014 coup, due to the hard shift from being aligned with Russia to being aligned with NATO. For these citizens, Russian presence is a good thing. Western Ukraine certainly hates that Russia has invaded, but the “hysteria” I am referring to is the kind that thinks even Eastern Ukraine opposes the Russian Federation.
So no, this isn’t a “pro-Russian” stance, in my opinion. Recognizing western-Ukraine’s shelling of civilians in eastern-ukraine for a decade, and the overwhelming support for Russian annexation of the Donbass region among Donbass residents in Donetsk and Luhansk, is something that even pro-NATO people need to recognize in order to figure out how to best deal with that underlying fact.
I can’t believe you’ve fallen for the “dey dombed bombas” story, you really are that brainwashed. All of Ukraine voted to leave Russia, most of it quite overwhelmingly.
And there was no coup, that was entirely orchestrated by Russia.
You really need to read some media from outside your bubble.
always.The Soviet program is still haunted by the ghost of a frozen Laika in perpetual orbit.
The world’s bravest and first true cosmonaut.
I mean… not really.
🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States
Aspect 🇺🇸 United States 🇷🇺 Soviet Union Total astronaut/cosmonaut deaths 9–10 (incl. test/training accidents) 8 (official) On-mission fatalities 3 (Apollo 1, ground test) 4 (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) Training/test deaths (astronauts) 6+ (e.g. Theodore Freeman, C.C. Williams) 4+ (e.g. Valentin Bondarenko, others possibly unacknowledged) Deaths among ground personnel <10 100+ (notably the Nedelin disaster) Transparency High (accidents publicized and investigated) Low (many incidents hidden until after 1989) Major catalyst event Apollo 1 fire Soyuz 1, Nedelin disaster
Key Takeaways
- 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
- 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
- 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
- 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
- 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
- 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.
grok is this true
It’s true that all deaths on both sides were caused by people with JEWISH names. Coincidence? Not likley. Hitler killed less people. Elon is god. Sieg. Sieg!1!!!1
Grok, probably
God I hate AI
You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.
I wonder if this was when tape delayed live streams were invented?
…no, i think that was a nipplegate thing…
My entire school was gathered in the cafeteria for the event, televised live.
We were all sent home for the day (some took the week) in the ensuing chaos.
And thats why we call it the gulf of america
The…Atlantic Ocean?
Whoa there, if your not careful they will start calling it the American ocean
By then shuttle flights were so routine I didn’t even get up to watch the liftoff. My mom called me before work and told me it blew up.
Christa McAuliffe trivia: she was the only one in her training group who didn’t throw up on the “Vomit Comet”.
That we know of.
You know who could have been on that shuttle instead of a teacher? A Muppet.
Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!
When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.
The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.
My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.
Turns out risky business has risks.
The interesting thing isn’t how many fatalities NASA has had but rather how few they have had. Exploration has always gotten people killed.
I feel you don’t know what you’re talking about in this situation. It is well documented that if NASA had followed their own safety guidelines and listen to their own people, this would not have happened. So many people were waiting to watch the launch that NASA leadership felt they couldn’t abort. That is the sole reason this tragedy occurred, not “whoopsie daisy that sucks but we learned something” science.
The issue was that they knew there were issues with the shuttle and had been warned by several engineers about launching in the cold weather they were having at the time, but NASA ignored them and sent the Challenger on its way anyways. It’s been awhile so I forget the details of exactly what it was that was wrong, but I think it
was the metal in some screwsthat wasn’t able to deal with the differences in temperatures and the engineers said shit would go wrong if they didn’t replace them and nobody listened. It was a very preventable disaster that only happened due to laziness and impatience on NASA’s part.- it was the rubber in the O-ring seals that couldn’t handle the differences in temperature.
That more of a problem with the manufacturer, (Morton Thyiokol) telling NASA the o-rings were fine to fly coupled with NASA’s desire to prove the shuttle could fly in that low temp condition.
From Wikipedia:
Cecil Houston, the manager of the KSC office of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, set up a three-way conference call with Morton Thiokol in Utah and the KSC in Florida on the evening of January 27 to discuss the safety of the launch.
Morton Thiokol engineers expressed their concerns about the effect of low temperatures on the resilience of the rubber O-rings. As the colder temperatures lowered the elasticity of the rubber O-rings, the engineers feared that the O-rings would not be extruded to form a seal at the time of launch. The engineers argued that they did not have enough data to determine whether the O-rings would seal at temperatures colder than 53 °F (12 °C), the coldest launch of the Space Shuttle to date. During this discussion, Lawrence Mulloy, the NASA SRB project manager, said that he did not accept the analysis behind this decision, and demanded to know if Morton Thiokol expected him to wait until April for warmer temperatures. Morton Thiokol employees Robert Lund, the Vice President of Engineering, and Joe Kilminster, the Vice President of the Space Booster Programs, recommended against launching until the temperature was above 53 °F (12 °C).
When the teleconference prepared to hold a recess to allow for private discussion amongst Morton Thiokol management, Allan J. McDonald, Morton Thiokol’s Director of the Space Shuttle SRM Project who was sitting at the KSC end of the call, reminded his colleagues in Utah to examine the interaction between delays in the primary O-rings sealing relative to the ability of the secondary O-rings to provide redundant backup, believing this would add enough to the engineering analysis to get Mulloy to stop accusing the engineers of using inconclusive evidence to try and delay the launch. When the call resumed, Morton Thiokol leadership had changed their opinion and stated that the evidence presented on the failure of the O-rings was inconclusive and that there was a substantial margin in the event of a failure or erosion. They stated that their decision was to proceed with the launch.
When McDonald told Mulloy that, as the onsite representative at KSC he would not sign off on the decision, Mulloy demanded that Morton Thiokol provide a signed recommendation to launch; Kilminster confirmed that he would sign it and fax it from Utah immediately, and the teleconference ended. Mulloy called Arnold Aldrich, the NASA Mission Management Team Leader, to discuss the launch decision and weather concerns, but did not mention the O-ring discussion; the two agreed to proceed with the launch.
Dunno about you, but it sounds a lot like NASA, especially Lawrence Mulloy, practically twisted Morton Thiokol’s arms until one of them (Joe Kilminster) relented and signed off on the launch. Mulloy even lied by omission at the end there to get his way. I wonder how he could sleep at night after this stunt.
