Doomed to Fail - Ep 138 - Touching the Face of God: Challenger

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

🚀 New Episode Alert! 🚀Join us as we explore the tragic story of the Challenger Explosion, the space shuttle disaster that changed NASA and space exploration forever. In this episode, we delve into the moments leading up to the launch, the aftermath, and the incredible stories of the brave astronauts onboard. 🌍✨Tune in for a deep dive into history, science, and human resilience. #Challenger #SpaceShuttle #NASA #Podcast #HistorySources:Challenger: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Challenger/Adam-Higginbotham/9781982176617https://heavy.com/entertainment/2020/09/michael-j-smith-wife-jane-kids-children/https://www.kltv.com/story/34454043/soccer-ball-recovered-from-shuttle-challenger-wreckage-reaches-space-three-decades-later/ Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B-A-019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. You're what? We are back, Taylor. We are back. It is round two.

The second episode, this is your episode. It's going to have to do with some appendages or residual limbs or residual. parts of the human body or something along those lines i assume no um but welcome to doom to fail where the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week every week today should be wednesday i am taylor and today is my term and as always i'm joined by farce always always hi taylor um are we going to play guest the topic today or no no i mean it's the one thing i was going to do last week damn that all right fine it's a good one it's really fun yeah no it's not fun no it's not fun but it's interesting it's actually very sad yeah yeah but it's interesting um cool

i want to talk about the challenger explosion um in 1986 and i read the book the challer uh the challenger by adam higginbottom he's the one who wrote the book Chernobyl which i've read as well so just like really good um historian talking about these this crazy times we'll talk a little bit about space the people that were on the challenger like what happened and what happened and what happened afterwards. But first, I want to tell you about John Giuseppe McGee Jr. He was a Royal Canadian pilot in World War II. And he died on December 11th, 1941 on a training mission in England. He was only 19 years old. But before John died, he wrote a poem called High Flight. And Ronald Reagan will reference this poem when he talks about the challenger the day it happened.

Kristen McCullough, the teacher in space, has a copy of it in her pocket, and several of the astronauts then now always keep a copy of it, like in their offices and at home. You ready? I know this one, yeah. You do? Do you know it by heart? Do you want to just do it? No, I don't know about my heart.

I know the poor words like kiss the... That's the end. That's the end. That's end. That's end. Ready? Sorry, go out. Oh, I have slipped to the surly bonds of Earth.

and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings. Sunward, I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things you have not even dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung, high in the sunlit silence, hovering there. I've chased the southern wind along and flung by eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious burning blue, I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace where never lark or even eagle flew and while with silent lifting mind i've trod the high untrustpast sanctity of space put out my hand and touched the face of god that's awesome that's very cool man you were so much older in the old days when you were young we're fucking real

i know um well good for him they wrote that poem bad for him that he died so young um but that's sort of like the idea of going to space people are just like it's very exciting um there's so many other space episodes that we should do what we should definitely talk about burner von brown um the apollo 11 the apollo 13 the columbia um there's tons of stuff happened in russia so i'm sure that there'll be more that we talk about the russian stuff is freaky i know who really know what they did yeah exactly yeah no exactly um so we'll talk about more of that but today we'll talk about the space program in America, who was on the Challenger, the teacher in space program, who made the Challenger, like physically, like what it was,

the components, and who raised alarms, and then what happened on January 28, 1986, and a little bit of the aftermath. So up until like the 70s, space is very heroic, right? like it's white guys they are military heroes who are going up into space and there was like this idea of an astronaut right you can picture him um it's like john john glan going up to space you know everyone's everyone's like a hero um but as we like rule into the 70s um there's shit happening on earth there's vietnam there's you know people are getting to get disinterested they like went to the moon cool like we're kind of good they didn't really want to do anything else and NASA was about to lose a lot of funding

because people were starting to be like, this is a little bit frivolous to sign money on this when we have our own problems here. Right. And so NASA starts a new space shuttle program. It will run from 1972 to 2011. So they contract with a company called Rockwell International, which has since been divided up.

But essentially what they do is they make the parts and they have other companies make the parts and then they ship them, down to Florida and they put them all together in one spot. Right. This is a quote that is possibly from John Glenn. The internet's not not sold on it. But John,

they asked John Glenn, you know, been to the moon, what he thinks about and he's in the space. And he says, quote, as I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind. Every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.

Which is funny and true. That is kind of scary. I didn't think about that. No, not great. And so they were playing with some designs. The idea was to make a reusable shuttle that could go on many flights. They wanted to do, like, several flights a month. They wanted it to be something that people could potentially buy tickets on.

You know, like they're doing kind of now, but, like, they wanted that in the early 70s. And so it was the orbiter, which is where the cabin sits, the people are, where you sit where you sit where you sit, where you're, you know, taking off or whatever, and then also where you, like, do your experiments in the back, there's that piece of it. And then you, everybody can picture this. And there's two solid rocket boosters, which are, like, the things that, like, push you off the ground. Those are white on the sides of the, of the actual shuttle. And then behind it is the orange fuel tank. So that big orange thing is a fuel tank.

Make sense? Yeah. Yeah. If you're, I mean, our generation has this, like, picture on their mind that's been memorized at this point. Yeah. I guess if you're younger, yeah. You might not know, but that's what it looks like. The first one was the enterprise.

I actually got to, I saw the enterprise when it was flying into New York City in 2012. Do you remember that? It like got a piggyback ride. Yep. Yep. I think I saw it too, but I might have just been like recreating other people's memories. Maybe. But I mean, I had, I worked at a hedge fund and our office overlooked Central Park.

It was gorgeous. And so it like flew by Central Park a couple times. And now it lives on the Intrepid, which is the Air and Space Museum or just like the Air Museum in New York City. It's on an aircraft carrier outside of it. But the enterprise is mostly just for tests. So that one didn't go to space. It did some like flying. They had a bunch of things where they had to, you know, you're trying to make something that's like so, that's reusable. And they get really beat up going into space and coming back, you know. Yeah, they look at it. Yeah. So they had to like try a whole bunch of things. So that's, they use enterprise for testing.

the other ones were the Columbia, the Challenger, the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the Endeavor. The Challenger was originally just for testing, but they needed another one, and it was easier to make the Challenger into a working chip than the Enterprise, the Challenger

became one of the official part of the fleet. It was named after the Challenger expedition from Britain in 1872, and the Apollo Lunar Lander from 1972 was also named Challenger. they've ever used names a lot they're not very good at this that's the challenger deep that's when they discovered the deepest part of the ocean yeah yes get get more names you hear call taylor she'll come with chat jbt i remember that one episode of um

of um of doing uh last podcast when they're like come with fake names you just like sort of rattling off fake names i'm so bad at coming up with fake names and i do i do ask chat gpt for fake names because i'm really bad at it john sampson john nand Anderson. With the Challenger, went to space 10 times. So it went to space many times. It had successful orbits and landings. It orbited the Earth 995 times in total.

So it wasn't brand name. So another thing they needed is they needed new ships and new fleet. They also needed new astronauts. So they needed to start reaching out to people who like maybe hadn't been in the military or maybe didn't fit that like exact white guy mode um so the challenger is going to have a really diverse crew and there's going to be a lot more diversity not a ton of diversity but like more than nothing in nassah during this time um these people are so freaking smart um their their spouses are so smart like everyone has like several several degrees it's just like very very very

very incredibly smart people um and what nessa will does they select astronauts in sections and they it's like a kind of good class like a group of people that get picked to be astronauts like every it's every couple of years during this time I think now it's a little bit more often but a lot of some of the astronauts are from NASA Group 8 and that was the first like one that was diverse it had they were selected on January 16th 1978 it was the first one since 1969 and if you go on Wikipedia you can see the groups and like Group 7 and group six as you go back like it's they're very cute but they're all just like white guys with their 60s haircuts in like 60s coloring and it's they look cute and they look excited but you can tell

it's just the same kind of guy um group eight is going to be the first diverse group 35 people were selected of that there were six women one of the women was Jewish there was one Asian American and three African Americans um so it was they also had made a new um a new role called payload specialist where you didn't have to necessarily be an astronaut to do it, you just had to be the person that was like in charge of whatever you were like delivering to maybe the space station or whatever. So maybe at a job that they could bring in more people to, you know? I feel like I'd still want to be as qualified as an astronaut. If I'm going to be like tinkering in the cargo hold of a giant spaceship. Hey, guys, what does this do? If I press this to the bad.

The way? Like, what does this do if I press this button? ejects you to get these more diverse group of applicants so they had to go out of places so they like they advertised in a bitty magazine and they went to the NWACP and to historically black colleges and they like trying to get like you know more people to do to apply um the group that um this group eight. There were 20,000 applications that NASA sent out. They got 8,000 applications back and then they have their final 35

people. And I mean, if you are ever feeling sad, you should, I know this is going to get sad, but like, you should look at astronaut portraits. They're so, they're so lovely. So the first black guy in space is named Guy Bulford, and he his astronaut picture is so cute.

And there's one now, like, he's a little bit older. He's like, has graying hair. He's just so happy to be an astronaut. You know? Is you the one with two golden retrievers with his two dogs? I don't know if that's him, but I've seen that one, too. That one's so good, too. That one's awesome. They're just so happy.

So of this crew, of these, of Group 8, they're going to have the first American woman in space, that's Sally Ride, the first African American in space, that's Guy Bulfard, the first American woman to perform a space, the first American woman to perform a space, the first American American to pilot and command a mission, the first American. to launch on a Russian rocket. I don't know what that means. So so many things are great. It also has in this group was also the first American active duty astronauts to get married, which is great. Good for them. So this group is like a very, very talented group of folks. They're going to move to Florida, do training.

The training, like we said, there's like zero gravity stuff. There's sitting. A lot of it is like, can you sit in your suit and barely breathe for like six hours? and not have a fucking panic attack, you know? I think I would fail that. I would totally fail that. There's a lot of that. A lot of it is like sitting still and waiting,

especially when you're getting prepared to launch and all of those things. So people kind of, there's a lot of patience. You also learn like water survival. So what happens if you do crash into the water and you have to like survive, you know, all the things? My dad lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida and we've talked about that.

But he was telling me he lives in a house that the whole street had like the same type of houses because they were made for like the NASA contractors and NASA people because he can see it from from his house like when they do launches in Florida. So the program is going pretty well. There's several more successful space flights. And some folks start to notice an issue with the O-rings, which we'll talk about in depth. But it's not stopping NASA from sending out flights. But like people start to notice that like something potentially is wrong. And I'll tell you what exactly what they do in a little bit. One thing that the Challenger was going to do is they were going to be really close to haley that really close whatever but be close to

haley's comet and track it do you know that no isn't that weird like i don't think that's crazy is that a heaven gates comment yes yeah so maybe the heaven's gate alien ship blew up the challenger so that the challenger crew wouldn't see the alien ship behind the comet no man heaven's gate was like 95 Oh, you're right. It was Halebop. It wasn't Haley's Comet. It was Halebop? Oh, boo.

I thought it was that one. Anyway, they're going to trap with, but it's a comment. They were going to track it. And they're also going to drop off two commercial satellites and do some, like, science experiments and stuff. So the people that were on the Challenger, there were seven astronauts on the Challenger. I'm going to tell you a little bit about them. There was Dick Scobie.

He was the commander. He was 46 years old. He went to his, he had a. bachelor's degree in science and aerospace from the University of Arizona. He was a pilot in Vietnam, and he was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. So he was a, so he had been, you know, he flew a ton, just a ton. And he was married to June Kent Scobie. They had two children. One of his, his son is a lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force today. June was a university professor at Texas A&M, and she since retired. She, a lot of the,

the widows will start the Challenger centers. There are now 35 Challenger centers around the country to inspire kids and teach them math and sciences, which is super cool. Scobie was the pilot of the Challenger. This was on the fifth Challenger mission in 1984. And also just a note on that mission, that Challenger mission, they almost didn't, they had to change the name of it because it was called Mission 13 and people were nervous. So they had to change it. Makes sense. Michael J. Smith was the pilot.

He was 40. He also went to Vietnam. He went to the Naval Academy. He had a master's degree in aeronautical engineering. And he was selected in group nine. So Scooby was corrected in group eight. Michael Smith was in group nine. He was married to Jane Smith and they had three children.

Jane Smith remarried. Her last name became Walcott. But in 2018, Just for fun to tell you, she was honored by the Virginia Beach Society for prevention of cruelty to animals because she loved rescuing. She just loves rescuing animals and it's a big helper to animals. She's my favorite person. Smith was a very, very experienced pilot from being in Vietnam, from being in the Navy for so long. And this was his first space fight.

So he had not been to space. Yeah, this was his first one. The mission specialist was 35-year-old Ronald McNair. He is the first, the second African-American to go to space. He is so cute, such an inspiration. He's so, he, you know, obviously like went through a ton. He grew up in South Carolina in a house with no electricity, no running water. In 1959, he refused, he was just a kid, he refused to leave a library because they

wouldn't let him take a book because he was black. And the police and his mother ended up being called and he ended up being able to integrate the library. and they started giving books, like letting anyone get the books. What we talked about this? We might have. You might have.

The library building that that was in is now named after him. I counted 24 schools named after him on Wikipedia. There's so much stuff named after Ronald McNair. He graduated as valedictorian from his high school. He has a PhD in physics from MIT. One anecdote in the book that I read was that at some point, all of his research for his PhD was stolen for like three and a half

years of research and he started over and just got it down really fast. He was very like I'm going to persevere and I'm going to do this. He was also part of the group eight. He had a bunch of hobbies. He played the saxophone and did like karate martial arts. He was he played his saxophone in space

on his first flight but the recording of it got lost. There's pictures of him playing a saxophone in space but there's no recording. For the Challenger flight, he was working with a French composer for a new song that he would play live from the spaceship while the composer was like having a concert and that composer said quote Ron was so excited about the piece that he rehearsed it continuously until the last moment made the memory of my friend the astronaut and the artist Ron McNair live on through this piece he like plays the song they wrote together

which is sad he was married to Cheryl Moore McNair they had two children Cheryl's LinkedIn says that she is the founder and executive director of the Dr. Ronald E. McNair Educational Science Literacy Foundation. So she's doing a lot of work in education as well. And he had already been on the Challenger. He was on the Challenger's fourth white. So this would be his second time in space.

Next, we have Ellison Ozanuka. He is the first Asian American in space. He's 39 years old. He grew up in Hawaii. and earned a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering for the University of Colorado. He was another one from the group eight. He was a flight tester for the Air Force, and there's many streets that are named after him. There's a street in L.A.

There's airports in Hawaii. His body was actually taken back to Hawaii to be buried. He was married to Lorna Onizuka, and they had two daughters. He was a soccer coach. He coached their soccer team, and he took the soccer ball into space. on the second Challenger flight and it was recovered in the ocean and another astronaut

in 2017 brought it back to space. They found his body? I'm going to tell you about it. Okay. Yeah. So they found a soccer ball. Yeah, soccer ball is it made of like just water and

it explodes on, anyways, go ahead. He, so this was the second space flight he was on the discovery about a year earlier um next we have judy resnick she was 36 years old she was a mission specialist she's like so freaking whip smart she was smart like immediately when you went to school they were like this this girl is really really smart she had a bachelor of science and electrical engineering from carnegie mellon she had a PhD in electrical engineering um she was one of the group eight as well so when she was trying to decide if she was going to do it or not she got you know found in that call it's like get more women out into space um she

met with John Glenn. He was a senator in Ohio where she lived and he told her that she should do it. So she became a pilot and started to get ready. She's, I know this isn't part of it, but she's cute as a button. She just looks really fun. And she hated like, you know, she hated the press part. She just wanted to like do her science and like be in space. It was pretty much up between her and Sally Ride on who would go first. And Sally Ride ended up being the first woman in space. But Judy did go. She coded software for NASA. She had been on the discovery. You'll see pictures of her in space. Her job was to use the robot arm out in the space into whatever they're doing up there. But she's the one who had the note that said, hi, Dad, when she was in space the first time. Like that was like on the news. She told Ronald Reagan that Earth looks great from up here. It was cute.

And on her locker in on the space shuttle, she had a bumper sticker that said, I love Tom Selleck. Who did him back then? Why not? She was not married and had no children. And this was her, this is going to be her second flight. And then our last two people, there's Greg Jarvis. He's a payload specialist. He was 41 years old. He was an engineer and he was a person who was building satellites and he got on a list to be able to go. So he was like, he was supposed to go on several different missions and kept getting pushed back.

And then finally they put him on the Challenger. This was his first space flight. He was married to Marsha Jarvis. Marcia still watches the sunrise every January 28th to commemorate her husband. And he was like, not an astronaut, like never thought he would be able to do it. You know, so he was like probably like the most like geeking out about it because he like, what he just couldn't believe that this is where his life had taken him. He was so excited, you know.

And then our last person is Kristen McCullough. She's a payload specialist and the first teacher. in space. She was 37. She went to school in Massachusetts. She had her degree in education and history from Framington, Framingham State College, and a master's education from Bowie State University. She was married to Stephen McCullough. He is a judge. He is still a judge. And she was chosen to be the first civilian to fly in space as part of the teacher in space project. So I guess you've heard about that. What do you think that is? It's probably a way to get kids interested in space and, like, reclaim kind of like the glory days.

Yeah. And really, they're trying to figure out who they wanted to go and wanted civilians to, like, be invested and think that they could possibly go someday, you know? So they were thinking they should have, should they have, like, a journalist or a artist or, you know, someone joined, but they ended up on a teacher. and Ronald Reagan announced it in 1984. It wasn't officially canceled until 1990. It is now back. It's called the Educator Astronaut Project. And in the 2000s, three educators, you know, went to space and during the program,

one of them, Dorothy Metcalf Lindenberger, is, this is hilarious. She's the first person to graduate from space camp and actually go to space. Wow. out of all those kids all those kids were just so fun but for the 1986

1985 there were 11,000 applicants of them there were 114 finalists and 10 semi-finalists the final time we're flown to DC where they were training

and doing you know getting physicals and just making the last last things last interviews and such she was officially

Kristen McCullough was officially announced as the teacher in space on July 19, 1985 in a press conference by Vice President George Bush. Krista and another woman, Barbara Morgan, Barbara was the runner-up. She was the finalist, she did all the training that Krista did, just in case something happened. She seems great. So Barbara Morgan quit teaching. 10 years later, she quit teaching, went to NASA in group 17.

and in 1998 she went to space so she doesn't count as the first teacher in space because by the time she went to space she wasn't a teacher anymore she was actually an astronaut it's pretty cool good for her yeah she seems great like I'm just that's super cool um Chris McCullough she she you know she won she was charming people really like they liked that she was like

really down to earth like she wasn't too like I'm smarter than you she wasn't anything she was like a real girl next door the describe her as a girl scout just like a very nice woman She had two kids, you know, like a mom. She went on Johnny Carson, you know, so she needed to be like personable. She was supposed to do two lessons live from space and that would be like beamed into classrooms. One was called the ultimate field trip and the other was called where we've been, where we're going. Why?

She's also going to keep a journal of her time there and potentially publish it. And she spent, you know, the months before in Houston doing all the training. that the astronauts did so she knew how to do a spacewalk just in case like you were saying like she learned how to do everything right but she didn't need to do everything so okay that is that is the that is the crew those are the seven that are on there um and then it really is a story of like really poor communication and not saying anything when something is wrong or saying something and it not being taken seriously. And something that had happened in the past like 10 years or so,

that was kind of on the minds of these engineers and these like shipbuilder people was the crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 in 1974. It was a McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 plane, and this was the worst airline disaster until Tenerife. So it was like a really bad one. But the cargo door broke off. causing the plane to crash and it had happened before and it had happened on an american airlines flight in the u.s so the turkish airlines fight was flying from turkey to paris um but the

american airline flight in the u.s um they the door had fallen off because it was hard to lock like something was wrong with it and the pilot was able to land the plane safely but they knew it was happening um an engineer dan applegate wrote a letter being like we'd have to fix this And basically they were like, it's too expensive, and they ignored it. And then it happened again. And then they, then they fixed it, you know. Was it the American Airlines one, a McDonald-Douglas, was it the same plane? Yep.

It was a McDonald-Douglas, D.C. 10-10. Yep. Got it. And the people who had closed it, they were like, it was really hard to close. Like, but it wasn't closed all the way. But it also didn't, like, the light didn't go off that it wasn't closed. Right. So all those things.

So, like, there's like, you know, a history of it's happening probably forever. And, like, if you know anything about the Challenger, you know, it's the O-rings and the solid rocket boosters, they fail to expand correctly and, like, keep the pieces together. And that's what caused the explosion, but I'll tell you what that means again. So, again, the way that the shuttle looks, cabin, SRBs, fuel tank, orange, big, big and orange, SRBs. So the solid rocket boosters provided the boost. So those are the ones that are going to like push the rocket off the ground and they fall off. So you do expect stuff to fall off of a spaceship, you know. So they fall off and then they find them in the ocean and they reuse them.

They were built in pieces by a company called Morton Thiacol in Utah. They were, I think that some of the manufacturing was done by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints. Hold on one second. yeah that was weird sometimes when luna freaks out it's like that was unusual and i went to the front door and the front door was wide open you should look at that that's happened to you before we were talking about doors not closing and people dying so well what happens is that the house is is like moving on the hill you know and so every now and then if i close the door but i don't lock it the latch doesn't hit right and i guess i came in and just didn't lock it

i guess hopefully or i'm about to be killed i hope you don't thank you okay sorry go ahead okay um so solid rocket boosters built by morton thioch in utah in utah a lot of it is done by the fundamentalist mormon church which is interesting just an aside they were shipped the pieces separately and then put them together so each section of a solid rocket booster was put together and then sealed with an o ring so an o ring's like kind of like a rubber washer that you would put on um anything that you are like a pipe but they are the dimensions of this are like kind of unfathomable to me and like the consequences like it's just a small number so they the entire thing is the diameter of the a booster so it's has a 20 foot diameter which is like the cross the circle right but then it's only 0.280 inches thick which is 7 millimeters so it's like so small yeah it's like paper thin paper thin it's crazy so at first the o rings were listed in the the list of importance as critically 1R which means that they um if one failed the other

another one would be behind it. So they had a redundancy. So it wasn't critical that the first one worked. So it wasn't like people didn't, it wasn't something that it had to work in order to go because they thought the second one could fix it. Later, it's going to be put into just R because it has to work. One of them has to work. There's no guarantee the second one will work. They would put two in and then put put put put put putty between them to kind of just like seal that part, those two parts together. In the 1970s, in 1977, they found that the O-rings could move 0.5 to, I'm sorry, not even 0.052 inches, and that could cause them to erode because it would cause gas to come out of the booster and damage the O-ring. So, like, just an insanely small movement. Margin of air is, like, very low.

So low. some of the engineers requested that they put a shim in there, which is like a metal triangle that you kind of put in to make sure that it stays, but that letter never got answered. In 1980, NASA engineers asked for more tests that were never done. And then in 1982, they moved up to being the critically important list. On both Columbia and Discovery missions, the O-rings had eroded. They found dust between them, which like shouldn't have happened. They found that they were kind of like that they were leaking, and it was very dangerous. And they're trying to figure out why this was happening.

And Morton and Thiochol did some tests. And they found that the colder it was the worst that they did. They weren't able to expand the way they were supposed to to complete that seal. The colder it was outside. Right. They also suggested that they add like the shims and like a little metal lip to like kind of cover it and make sure it stays together. Those were in design, but they weren't going to be shipped until the summer 1986. So they knew it was dangerous and they had a new, a plan, not a concept of a plan.

They had a plan to fix it and it just wasn't ready yet, but they went anyway, you know. Crazy. So at Morton Thiochal, there are these two engineers who are our heroes, as much as you can be a hero in this story. They couldn't stop it from happening. But Alan McDonald and Roger Buzerle are the ones who would recommend again and again and again, they don't fly and they can only do so much they would say like don't go don't go and then if they went anyway then um you know they couldn't they couldn't do anything about it but these two guys also spoke up after the incident and they were like I have all my paperwork like they

told everybody to leave. They said everybody leave your offices leave them as they are then we're going to have an investigation and like we usually took all of this stuff with him because he was like no you're going to cover this up and like I told you this would happen you know. didn't they like lock the doors right after it happened like it was like a nobody can leave nobody can talk to anyone yeah absolutely i'm not going to bring that up but yes like that's exactly what happens like nobody nobody say anything um so in the meantime nassas also going through some shakeups there's a new chief the old one is like on probation and everyone's kind of fighting and it's it's hard to tell who's in charge um but the career of the challenger is ready to go like they've done

all their training. They're ready. They were planning to leave on January 22nd, but there were delays. It was cold. They didn't know. They had different weather patterns coming in. The 27th was actually probably pretty nice, but they didn't go that day. They had already called it the night before. And they had at one point gotten pretty far into it. And while you're waiting, you have to sit there for like five hours in your spacesuit, in your chair, but your chair is tilted back. So you're like laying down with your legs up. Yeah, yeah. You know, for a while. Um, so the night before they, the night before January 28th to January 27th, they're like, we're launching in the morning. Like, we have to. And they have a conference call between Morton Thiochol and NASA, which is wild. Like at some points, they cannot hear each other because there are a 1986 conference call. Yeah. Yeah. But like on this 1986 conference call, they're talking about sending one to someone to space. it's crazy you know like the technology just like it's so interesting that they can do both at the same the same thing you're saying shitty call sending people's face crazy um the martinthiakal engineers were like you can't go it's going to be colder than we expected like seeing they were tested at like 50 degrees and that was too cold it was going to be like 28 degrees like you cannot go um like you shouldn't do it um and then they said no okay no go then the call pauses while the more enthyacal people like the management has a meeting to the side then they come back and then they say let's go let's do it probably because they needed the contract and they couldn't if they their contract was about to end and if they were like no to this like they weren't going to get another one and they needed it there's just motherfucker who worked there named um robert lund he's a VP of engineering he is so it's so hard for him to make decisions.

decisions that he called himself wishy-washy Lund like he called himself that and then when they said why are you changing it to a go he goes oh I'm just wishy-washy-lund so yeah so the way I recalled it was that the actual engineers who knew shit exactly were like don't do it and middle management was like think of the stock price you know exactly exactly so they say yes and then NASA goes to the team the people on the NASA people on the NASA people on the call go to the team lead and they say Morton Theiagal says yes they don't bring up any of the issues

they don't bring up the weather they don't bring up the O-rings they're like they say yes we're good to go and then NASA says great then we're good to go to they do it would be cold so they do the things where they like run the taps you know to make sure like the pipes don't freeze but then that caused

huge icicles to be all over the launch pad and all over all over the ship itself so they were able to be like ice is probably fine, probably not an issue, but it wasn't even the eyes up with the problem. It was just the cold in general. Right. Right. So the way that they're waiting in there to go, the way they're sitting in there, there are seven seats. There are the first deck is the flight deck. So if you're in the flight deck, you're going to be in the front of the thing. You're going to be able to see out the window. There is, it's Scobie, Smith, Onozooka, and and Reson.

they're the four they're in the front the other three McNair Jarvis and McCulliffe are in the mid deck so they can't see anything they all they can see is out of like a little porthole on the door so they don't they can't see anything which is like in a room it's not like the other ones can see anything

of consequence anyways it doesn't matter at least Claude Robio would be helped yeah yeah the astronaut spent times with their family the night before you know they've done before they said goodbye a couple times like finally like they're really going to do it. They were quarantined so they don't get sick, but they, you know, they were excited. Some of

the families had already left. Unfortunately, they were like, we have to go. We can't wait a week for this. And others, you know, stayed, extended their stay. And they were going to watch from a building that is like nearby. They're on bleachers watching this happen. As well as like a ton of school children and the press and a lot of people are there watching it live. Which you can watch their reactions and it's wild. I'm sure. So just because they don't know what's going on. So now it's a go.

It's 1138 a.m. They had pushed it back a little bit for the weather. They're on pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. Right away, you can see nine huffs of smoke coming out of the SRBs, which is bad. Because it means they aren't sealed. You know, 59 seconds in, one SRB explodes. There's a big plume that comes off of it, and it falls off due to the pressure. It doesn't sound like anyone noticed that had happened, like in the crew.

They didn't say anything weird in the, in the communication. And they keep going. So they boost higher. At 72 seconds post-launch, the right SRB falls off. And the last thing, last communication that got from the Challenger was Smith saying, uh-oh. Yeah. The one thing I would correct you on there is I don't think anybody actually saw the puff of smoke until after the disaster. like yeah yeah yeah yeah i think so you can see on the video i don't think they realize it was happening

as it's happening um and i don't know if it would have been i don't know how late you can stop it you know yeah it was why it might have been too late who knows yeah so the jolt caused the top of the fuel tank to come off and then there's fuel tanks in the fuel tanks and they crashed into each other um causing three million pounds of force to push the entire thing which caused um the other SRB to fall off. So the SRBs are falling and then the the whole everything is falling now. It's no longer going up that they are falling off way too early. And the SRBs would get self-destructed at T plus 110 seconds. So already like less than two minutes in like that those are going to get destructive because they could have got anywhere because they were way too low to have already gotten off. But they're going like past the speed of sound. They're going incredibly fast right now. Like even if there were, a way to like eject at this point like you would die it's not possible you know um so at the time of separation um when everything kind of blew apart they were going between 12 and 20 times uh 12 and 20 gs so they're going so fast and um within two seconds it dropped below 4g and within 10 seconds it was

in free fall so it happened like you're going faster than are they expected to be going 20 gs on takeoff uh not it's not on takeoff they just went a little bit further um they were accelerating but yes they were supposed to go that fast wow okay yeah um the probably that those changes in like pressure and in like speed as what injured the crew hopefully killing a couple of them you know like quickly but um but they don't but they don't know exactly like how how they all died um i'm sure you've heard the terrible thing that some of them had the oxygen tanks on. So when you're in the in the shuttle going up, you're drinking your breathing pure oxygen. And there's a backup oxygen switch that you have. And it wouldn't be, it's, it gives you like enough if the cabin's like quickly depressurized.

Out of the seven of them, three of them were on. Those of Smith, Resnick, and Onozuka so three of them that were in the front had turned theirs on Smith's was the he was the pilot the uh for some reason on his like the switch was on the back of his and it sounds like Onozuka leaned forward and turned it on for him um and there's there were stuff like on the things that like were moved in a way that it sounds like Smith was trying to figure out what to do but there was something he could have done you know we're like just call this in a little bit so it looks like the shuttle is like a single piece. It's actually not. It's like there's a part of it that's built inside of it, which is like the place for humans. Like the race cars. Yeah, like race cars are this. So like race cars aren't one piece. There's a monococ carbon fiber cockpit and then a car built around that. So worst case scenario, everything around you can be destroyed. And like that piece still holds, retains its strength. Right. Which is what they were written. Yeah. And it sounds like it did and then it started hurtling towards earth it fell for two and a half minutes which is the

amount of time that they can tell that smith was breathing in his oxygen shank so he at least was breathing when they hit the ground when they hit the me doesn't matter when they hit the ocean um they're going so fast the pressure is is going crazy um and it just it just smashed them to bits you know and um so everyone watched this happen on live TV. It was broadcast into classrooms all over the United States. I asked on Facebook and I asked my neighbor who was a teacher and she kind of remembers like turning the TV off and and like whispering about it. A couple of my friends, they remember, you know, their teacher starting to cry and turning off the TV and going home and like their parents trying to talk to them about it and just like

how terrible that would be. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine. And then the video of it, the, um, of like the families. watching it like they usher all the kids that were watching onto a bus like really fast when the first explosion happens people cheer because at some point the srbs are supposed to fall off you know so you don't know what's happening but then like you see out of the explosion like nothing's going up higher you know and that's when they knew like it wasn't like emerging from it they just like wasn't there um Ronald Reagan was supposed to do the state of the union that night um he was going to mention the challenger i mentioned the teacher in space program

But they ended up moving the state of the union, and he did a small four-minute speech where he did quote that poem from the beginning at the end of the speech as well. The search started immediately. The families were sort of, like you said, like the doors were locked at NASA. They were kind of like put away into a thing. And then they didn't know what was going on. Some of them held up hope. Like maybe they escaped. Maybe the pilot was able to like, you know, move it somewhere else or whatever.

But there was no chance. Like they, this was, there was no way that anybody had survived. they went deep diving to find it. They found it on March 7th. They found the crew cabin. It had been, you know, obviously like ripped apart, but the bodies were there. They were like also ripped apart in pieces, but they found pieces of all seven of astronauts. Jarvis's body was still in the crew cabin.

So when they were lifting it out of the water, whereas his body fell out and fell back into the water and they didn't find it for another month. such a war show but they found it um and eventually you know two of them i think are in or arlington national cemetery um on ozuka went his bodies in hawaii or you know whatever is left of it like went back to hawaii um and um the families were obviously like even more like there's nothing they could be like making less or more upset they were just like it was terrible to know that like the bodies were recovered and all the things it just made it you know worse yeah um so the commission that was the ones who um who reviewed it was the rogers commission at first it was commissioned by nassah but then they were like no like you guys aren't giving

us access to everything like we don't believe you like all those things so now it became like an independent commission um there was a noble prize winning physicist there and he demonstrated the rubber not going back to size when it was cold which i feel like totally make sense, you know, like rubber is more malleable when it's hot, you know, and the report was harsh. It recommended a lot of changes. You know, one thing they were like, they were planning to have like two launches a month and like make it a big thing and they just weren't ready. So they were like, NASA was like giving itself a lot of pressure. And it took almost three years for the space program to start up again. You know, it was a bit of,

a bit of group think, a bit of communication errors, just like all sorts of things. that made it, that, you know, made this happen, you couldn't get to the right person, the right information to be able to make the correct call to not do it. The astronauts that, that died, there's, you know, buildings and streets and traders on the moon and asteroids and rovers named after them, and they'll probably, you know, they use their names over and over again and all these things to memorialize them. The families sued. obviously. Michael Smith's widow sued NASA, but it was dismissed because he was a Navy officer and they were like he knew the risks. So she sued Morton Thiacol and got money from that.

Other families sued Morton Thiacol and NASA. Gene Resnick's parents did not file a claim. They just kind of wanted to be left alone. You know, they were just like, they don't want anything to do with this. One, a group of families settled, which kind of sucked. It sounds like they got a shitty deal. Warrant Thratfai call paid out $7.7 million to them, but it was like between three families and it was like, I don't know, they could have gotten a better deal. They would have like gone to court, whatever. NASA ended up paying $26.6 million to the families of restaurants kind of after it was all over and whatever. And that's it. So I remember this a little bit differently. Okay. So I remember this being.

the faults of NASA more than the fault. Well, it was Morton-Vicalls Morton-Vicall had the ultimate authority. Yeah, they had the ultimate authority to yay, nay, up, down, vote on this. And NASA would have to do

whatever they said to do because they were the engineers in charge of building the actual O-rings. But from what I recall, this was a downward pressure situation where NASA was, like we can't delay this. If I remember correctly, the year this happened was when the 88

presidential election had already kicked off. And what happened was that they wanted to postpone the launch until H.W. Bush could be down there as part of the campaign thing. And then for some reason he wasn't able to show up. So they kept pushing, they kept pushing it. It ended up being this day by virtue of those pushes and NASA was like we this is an embarrassment to the agency if we don't do it and y'all need to tell us that we can do it yeah i think it's i think that's i think that's part of it because i think that hw was there like the day before but they had already canceled it that day so that he had to go on his like next stop on his tour you know so that was some i'm that was definitely part of it and then also because like the state of the union was that night you know

So there's stuff like that that would be cool to have the president be able to be like this morning, our first teacher in space, you know, to think that was a part of it. And I think more than thial call, they had said no and then they like conferred and then they said yes. But like, NASA should have done their own checks. Yeah. You know? And then like it had been moved. They keep getting moved. All of these launches get moved so many times for like so many little things.

But this was like a big thing that people knew. I also heard that this could fall under the parameters of a white collar crime because at this point NASA started kind of functioning like a corporation in a sense because they were being subsidized to put these private satellites into space and they had to run on schedule and they had to make this routine in practice and in the optics of sending someone into outer space. And so, yeah, there was a lot of these outside pressures that we're coming down. It's also like a failure of middle management because the engineer who's like smart and kind of nerdy, he's like the annoying one who's always saying, no, don't do this, don't do this. And like middle management is like, but I have to report back to Congress. Yeah. Budget allocation.

I can't say no. I can't say no. Right. Yeah. So. Yeah. And they're like, you know, I mean, I feel like it's like there's risk and everything, you know, so like you can like write that off if you are like trying to justify it in your head you know

but like or like they you know like they know they know the risk this is a scary job and like yes but also um it was like they if if the right person on the launch pad would have known you know like they didn't they didn't know that the cold was going to hurt the old rings like that hadn't gotten to them you know the other fun fact about this case is um the story is that when that commission came together to kind of figure out what was going on with it, it was Richard Feynman who was the physicist who discovered that the O-ring was the problem.

He went in like frozen O-ring and then like took it out of water. Like he put in the glass and then took it out. It was like, hey, like, look, it's not bending anymore. Like it's the way it is. He was also on the Manhattan Project. I think he was played by, damn, I can remember his name. Yeah.

Saffy, it was one of the Saffy brothers, you know, the Saffy brothers. They did that, oh, man, they're really talented. They do a lot of great movies. Anyways, whatever. He was a character in Oppenheimer. There's also a, oh, that's fun, he's cute. The person who played Bougillet in the movie that, was on made in 1990.

So Bouguilet is the guy who was like the smart engineer who was like trying to get everybody to stop. Ended up like talking about it. Like him and McDonald, they like stood up and they were like, this, no, I told them this is what happened. And he definitely got, you know, like ostracized at work. People were like, you know, mad because the plant essentially was going to close down. But the person who played him in the movie was Peter Boyle. Do you know that is? He's like the guy who played the Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein.

the monster young Frankenstein the dad in in everybody loves Raymond and he's such like a sweet big man you know that just like that feels like exactly the vibe for for bourgeois legacy was just like I'm trying so hard to do this and I'm I've sent up for what's right even when people then afterwards were like fuck you man I can't believe we're gonna lose our jobs and he's like what like I can't not say this like what's wrong with you you know which it's like exactly the story that was going on with Boeing with the starliner and NASA where like if you read the reports on that, they were like having screening matches with the executives there because Boeing is like, hey, like, we look like idiots. You're really fucking everything up for

Boeing. Our stock prices is going to take. And now to screen back, like, we can't kill people over your stock price. Like this is, it's funny. I had this discussion, or like this week actually, was like, this is the problem with like MBAs being in like leadership positions within organizations when they have no fundamental understanding of the underlying business or organizational like whatever the entity actually does because they're making pure financial calculations and aren't putting themselves in the shoes of like what about the engineering side of this? What about like the aerospace side of this? Like so yeah. And they didn't and they didn't really learn any lessons like they're still doing that. Yeah. Like they're not like it and and it's probably

for like you said the exact same reason. you know like we got to do this because it happened too with the other one i forgot what was it columb was it Columbia that yeah yeah because they knew they knew that it was compromised they saw the foam strike the heat shield or the tiles and um and they had a way to go into a space to get them but they were like we we don't know and it's not going to be worth it to undertake like a billion dollar emergency mission without knowing what's if it's going to be the problem or not yeah it's really going to be a problem or not so man it's not a risk that i would like to take yeah yeah it's a really interesting story there's so many facets to it um yeah it's very very it's just so sad

that like everyone was i mean i all the kids watching and being so excited about it and like you know i like the idea of sending a normal person to space not like a rich person you know like a normal person is cool it would have been cool to like have those lessons and like do those things and like see what would have happened and it would have been a whole different world yeah yeah um well thank you for sharing um yeah really really interesting story it's it's yeah i i went and saw the um uh what's the one is an endeavor that is um in the in la Yeah, I think I saw that too. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you live in L.A., the Science Museum there has that shuttle. One of the shuttles, I'm pretty sure it's in Denver, but it has a shuttle. And it's like just in a hangar, and you can go literally walk up to it. You can, you know, touch in, it's in front of you. And in April, every year, they have Uri's night in honor of Uri. Oh, God, I forgot his name. The guy, the first guy, Sean, the Outer Space, Gergerian.

Gary Gareen? Yeah, Greg Garrett, yeah. Something like that. Anyways, they have this party there. So it like starts at like 9 p.m. And they basically turn the hangar into like a club with like a DJ and drinks. And you're basically dancing. Everybody's wearing space outfits and alien outfits. You're just dancing underneath the space shuttle. It is so much fun.

I went there like multiple. I did this like multiple years when I was living in L.A. It was like my favorite thing to go to. That sounds really fun. I definitely went and like saw it from below and like all of that and looked at it. yeah crazy uh anyways thank you for sharing uh anything anything you wanted to lead us out lead us out with yes i just wanted to direct people to our website because i decided to make a whole page on our website about the things that we have done that we're also in the billy joel song

we didn't start the fire um and to me for you forever because square space kept um crashing when i was doing it but um they're on there some of them were in like more than one of them kind of like this one i'll i'll put under sally ride even though we didn't really talk about sally ride but still like we mentioned her you know um so uh yeah that i just thought that was fun to add that to that so it's stupid afeld pod right yes okay yeah and then obviously right to a stupid deflepon to gwiton.com all the socials um i didn't know you did this what this page i just did it like this is incredible this week but I was like thinking about it because I was like oh my god I can't believe you did this

so there's we did Joe McCarthy Rosenberg's H-bomb marlon Brando we mentioned communist block davy crockett sputnik edzel Kennedy's couple things in berlin John Glenn we just talked about him today JFK moonshot Reagan Tara on the airline we actually covered that a couple times like the couple different how crazy in the 70s it was to, you know. That is awesome.

Very cool. Anyway. Yeah, go check that out. You both in that list. Yeah, no kidding. Sweet. Thanks, Taylor. Anything else?

Thank you. That's it. Cool. Go ahead and cut it off.