Historically High - The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

The Challenger Disaster marked one of the lowest points in the history of NASA, and what's worse is it was completely preventable. The Space Shuttle program had been kicked off in April 1981 and had executed 24 successful launches prior to January 28th, 1986. For a while it had been known by Morton Thiokol, the builders of the solid fuel rocket boosters that carried the shuttle into orbit, and NASA, an issue with the boosters O-Ring seals was present during launches. While nothing disastrous has happened it was the opinion of the engineers at Thiokol that it was only a matter of time. It was such a concern the night before the challenger launch, a group of engineers flat out told NASA staff they did not recommend launching until the issue could be resolved. The few individuals at NASA aware of this chose to ignore the experts warning and launch anyway. 73 seconds into the launch the nightmare became a reality. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I was just about to say we're going to space today, but technically, well, at some point. We're headed towards space today. Feels good. I wonder what a bell sounds like inside of the space shuttle. I wonder if it sounds different, if it doesn't feel like a school bell. We're in the classroom. We're sitting here in the studio.

We get to go back to NASA. We talked about Apollo 11, a great feat for human history. and then we hit Apollo 13 where you get NASA having a savior complex and that carries all the way to 1986 when that savior we can do no wrong

and if we do something wrong complex we can save them gets cashed in it's a weird progression like talking about because we did we do Apollo 11 first we did that intentionally you kind of try to go in order

Apollo 11 greatest achievement at the time you know in technically in like human history. I'm still saying maybe ever. Yeah, I mean, you then get a situation that goes badly and you show, hey, even when shit goes completely south, we still got the goods to try to figure this thing. A lot of luck and skill crew and all that kind of stuff. And then you get to a point where this is just about like NASA was the good guys in both of those circumstances. They were the thing on the Apollo 13.

That, we talked about that. That was like a freak accident that happened. That was the stirring of the, like, tanks and everything. We had one exposed wire that sparked because the Teflon had burned off. Yeah. And so now this is completely, this is the going from the hero, from the face to the instant heel. Like, NASA's not good at this point. And growing up, the Challenger disaster was one of those things that,

for both of us, neither of us were born at the time. Well, actually, this was what? January of 86. Okay. So no. No, man. I was a whopping seven months old. So I completely remember it.

It's like me remember in the 80s. But as a kid, looking at it, maybe you heard that there was a space shuttle that blew up. I know that it took them a while after this to get back into sending shuttles up after they had to do a complete. complete. 32 months. Not that long. Probably not long enough probation. But the way that they, they, leading up to this, what they kind of turned into from this pioneering,

space, adventuring type, like doing it for the benevolency of like mankind for the accomplishment. Now it's just kind of like, well, we got to start kind of making this a business. Capitalism kicked in. Yeah. Whole American capitalism reared its head. It happens because as just Americans and I guess humans in general, we have a very short attention span. Yeah, you can see a card trick ten times, and by the fifth time, you don't quite understand how it's happening, but you've already seen it four other times. You're not on by it anymore, because you've seen him do the trick four other times.

Yeah. And then you think it's not that great of a trick. Like you just do the exact same trick. It becomes less impressive, despite how insanely impressive. putting anything into spaces. Well, we're not even talking about the Apollo space program as a failure, because by and large, the amount of accidents that happened during the Apollo space program, as opposed to how many flights they successfully completed, the number is very small.

It's a small percentage of these flights that went wrong. But the problem with space travel is that when something goes wrong, it's the worst-case scenario every single time. I'm trying to think of how to kind of say this. You went from like, what were the launch times for? Do we remember the Apollo program? It was spaced out pretty far, right? A number of months at some points, I think.

Well, the testing was. Okay. We get to a point where when you saw the launches between the dates like 81 up to this date in 86, where you just like, wait, what the, what the shit? Like, how are they launching that many? That's insane. So had the Challenger left on the 22nd, which was the slated day prior to some pushback, it would have been within two weeks of the launch that had happened previously. And would have been the 25th launch since 1981.

Yeah, and this is all a part of it. We'll get into why this has to happen and why they felt that they needed. to get these things off at such a rate of speed. But there's just an issue that comes up of they're smelling their own farts. They believe that just because any information that they're getting about things that could be going wrong is coming to them. Every time they launch, nothing bad has happened. So how can you prepare for something that's bad if it hasn't reared its ugly head? And in this situation, when it does rear its ugly head, it takes seven people's lives.

Yeah. All right, we're getting into it a little bit too much. Remember, everyone, patreon.com slash historically hide, get signed up. We just recorded a bonus episode before this one. Yeah, get a little bit more for your fix. Yeah. And then same socials as always. Oh, by the way, if this is your first time, hi, I'm Professor Chris.

That's Professor Adam. Hey, two weeks in a row that we remember to do introductions, right? I think they called it a streak. That's right. Let's not break it. But you got anything else? No, let's jump on. Oh, yeah.

ratings, reviews, subscriptions. We're looking at those numbers all the time. We love seeing your guys' reviews. Subscriber numbers, I believe we finally broke 25,000. So congratulations to you. Congratulations to us. We're doing this as a team. We might be the captains of the ship.

We might be the professors, but we would be nothing without our students. We use the body system. Body! All right. Let's get into the Challenger disaster. All right. So we kind of have to explain the difference at this point leading up to the disaster. It's two different

NASA's basically and two different ways of going about space travel. Yeah, and we have to put a nice little bow on the Apollo program. December 11, 1972, Apollo 17, which had reached the moon, makes its landing back on Earth to close out the Apollo

space program. The reason that it's closing it out is because prior to that, on January 5th of 72, Richard Nixon announces a new space shuttle program. And the purpose is to revolutionize transportation into near space. So we're not digging into deep space.

We're not going back to the moon. Nixon had such a boner to try to ruin anything that Kennedy had done because Kennedy made him look like a sweaty, fat-faced liar on TV. That he wanted to dismantle this stuff. And part of me, at this point in time, looking at it, the budget for NASA was huge. Yeah. I mean, buddy, it was the space race. what was the national pride about getting into space,

getting to the moon first and beating the Soviet Union worth? Bet the house. You have all this funding at NASA. And as soon as you're done, the Apollo program has to peter out just simply because, guess what, we made landing on the moon kind of look a little bit mundane. We're sending guys up there and we get them back all the time. Well, what else are you going to do?

Mars is really far away. That is exactly what I was going to say. the next phase isn't even well can we get guys to land on the moon they're like no that's that's even that's you know that's even before mars technically we would have to have people there but I mean it's dicey as shit getting two guys up there

landing them and then getting them back to earth we're just really good but to keep someone there to launch enough like structures to actually be able to live on the moon we're so far away from that, it's not even funny. And as a Congress, budgetary type stuff, you're looking at being like,

so you're saying if we invest money and we're not going to see any payoff on this for a very long time? Yeah, if ever. Honestly, it's a crap shoot. Unless the moon is made of gold or cheese or some metal that we don't know about, not much money coming out of it.

So you have NASA, which is coming off an insane budget for the Apollo programs when the space race was on. All these people that you hired, all these people, that are working there, that directors of NASA are trying to keep together and everything for when they actually need those people. So you have to find a way when you're not getting as much funding from the government. You have to try to seek your funding elsewhere. And the money

that the government is spending the most on is going to be defense, right? Yeah, it always is. Okay. And what's going to be the new frontier of defense? It's got to be space, right? Having weapons up where your enemy can't get to them. satellites to broaden communications. GPS satellites. Anything like that. So just to point this out, the Apollo space program between 1960 to 1979

to 1973 cost approximately $25.8 billion and actual expenditures at the time. 20-23-ish, it's about a total of $257 billion to $318 billion. that you're spending on this. It's a lot of money. Before that, Gemini program

and everything that came before that was a total of about $28 billion. So you're spending $28 billion plus $25 billion for these two precursors. You've achieved your goal. We've kind of gone to the moon enough to be able to understand

there's not a whole lot beyond that. What do you do? Is this the thought process? So it's really expensive for us to get to the moon and honestly there's no reason for us to go up there should be relatively easy just to get into space though and if we can get into space we can start putting stuff up there so we need to shift you know shift our footing and say all right we're not just sending up a capsule with some guys trying to do an exploratory mission now we have to be able to take things of value that people are going to pay us for to take up there

so we can just even keep NASA going. And on that same token, every single time they create a Saturn 5 rocket, command and service module, lunar module. Just that cost alone is about $450 million to build those things. And it's gone. Yeah. It is a one-shot thing. $450 million goes up into the air and no money comes down. It's basically the dick fucking space and it's a one-pump money shot is what it is.

So if you have the ability to create a space shuttle that you're able to land back on Earth, if you have the ability to create these solid rocket boosters that we're going to talk about a whole lot during this episode to where you can attach something to float them back down to Earth and reuse them, that's just money in your pocket. This is Cold War time, right? So you're also wanting to spend more money on defense as well. So I think that's also why funding got taken away from NASA. but like you just said, hey, we need to be able to recycle.

We got to start recycling these spacecraft. Not only are we going to recycle the shuttle and it'll land and we'll use it again, but you guys are going to need to actually recycle the rockets that take it up into space. So when they land in the ocean, you've got to go get them. We'll get them all fixed up and everything. And then we can go ahead and reuse those. Well, the 13 years of the Apollo program, if you're saying 28.5 billion, the 10-year development period between 72 and 82 and 82,

for the space shuttle program, cost of the price tag of about $10 billion. So from $72 to $802, $10 billion, but that's a lot of upfront costs in development for things that you should be able to reuse. Do you think that, like, when they're presenting this to Nixon as well, and he's talking to these people at NASA and he's like, oh, why can't you make it like an airplane? And you can just have it take off and land, right? That's how it works. And they're just like, is this fucking guy serious? Like, is this his understanding of like how spacecraft?

are launched and recovered. He thinks if airplanes just keep climbing up, they'll just continue on. He's like, well, we have airplanes that fly so high. You're just a little higher than that, right? Probably no clue. Why didn't they shoot you instead of Kennedy? So the space shuttles as Chris is talking about

were designed to be partially reusable. You had a spacecraft that was launched with two solid rocket boosters that were equipped with parachutes, which detached after liftoff. They would float back to the, ocean to be reused, we would send barges or ships out to grab them and tow them back in. There was an external tank. External tank, you weren't ever going to be able to rescue.

This was going to be of such a light material in a shocking thing that you explained, because we're talking about weight to me. These things were bright-ass orange. So they were bright orange because, and I think it was the initial launching of the Columbia, not when it's taking a full load of astronauts, but when they're like, let's put a couple guys in here and hope we can get this thing. into space. I believe it was painted white. They then figured like, well, we're just spraying this thing with insulation and then painting the insulation. The insulation is that orange color. By skipping

on the paint, we save 600 pounds, which if we can go to the military, a private sector for telecommunications or what fuck we have, how many satellites for direct TV and all that kind of stuff in space, if that's, if we can sell them 600 more pounds of space, think how much money that is. This is what we're trying to do, we are trying to maximize the space trucking business, basically. Yeah, we're maximizing profit. Along with that,

you would have the external tank disintegrates, you're not getting that back. It's just not worth it at that point. It's cheap enough that you can do that. The orbiter contain the crew and the payload. It's the shuttle. It's what you think of

when you think of space shuttle. That's what the orbiter is. So, orbiter fuel tank to solid rocket boosters. And the orbiter is this winged vehicle that's launched vertically and it's returned to Earth landing like an airplane. It's incredible to watch and to just try to think in your mind that that was just up in space. Well, talk about how many times the first one alone just orbited the Earth an insane amount of times and then it just lands like an airplane.

Yeah. it's and well when it lands it's technically they said it's a 98 ton glider because you're not using the engines because technically as far as control surfaces go that thing only needs control surfaces to keep it at level it's not banking to make turns really that much or anything you don't juice to twist yourself in the air because you're getting yourself in position when you are in space with like you know your boosters and then you're entering the atmosphere a very specific way when you look at it

the landing craft in every or not the landing craft but like the command service module and the lunar module during the Apollo program very small in the grand scheme

of the entire setup when you get to an orbiter you're going to have to have something that's bigger and it's going to have to be heavier so you have to move away from a propellant that's liquid

that's not going to provide as much thrust to solid fuel Now, solid fuel, it took me a couple days before I actually had to look it up because solid fuel is so confusing to me like that thought. But then when you learn about it, it all kind of makes sense. So the ET held liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This was used for propulsion. The SRBs provided the majority of the thrust.

They ran on something that was a solid propellant. It was a mix of ammonium percolate composite. And basically what it was was. just like when the Chinese people invented gunpowder and they invented fireworks. Yeah. This is just like heavy gunpowder basically. It's how it works. It's you light it and it doesn't burn out until it's done. So you have. It's rockets of like it's seriously rockets of the simplest magnitude. Yeah. And you go from a liquid source that you're able to basically just have a a spiket that you can turn on and turn off, a dial that you can cut the,

fuel source. All it is, it's a tube full of flammable material and the only end of it that is open and where the force can escape is pointing down at the ground and that's going to point and that's going to make you go up. It's the, like, I know it's not a simple principle for trajectories and things like that, but if you're just thinking about it and saying like, fill a water balloon full of water and hold it down at the ground and then let go of it and have the, that is the same principles that rocket, just the force going downward. to lift the thing up. To give you a slight hint

at how dangerous these SRBs were with the solid propellant inside of it, the Russians didn't even want to mess with this. The Soviets said no to using solid propellants. That was how dangerous it was. But it was cost effective, right?

Cost effective, and it provided the thrust that was necessary. Five orbitors were built during the space shuttle program. There was one prototype before the prototype Enterprise. It was used,

basically just for approach and landing tests in 1977. It wasn't equipped for any sort of space flight. So we're just trying to get the methods down before we start with the madness of going to space. You have the Columbia that rolled off first, followed by the Challenger, the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the endeavor. Surprisingly, out of all those,

the Atlantis didn't sink. Didn't sink into the ocean. March 19, 1981, there's a ground test that, Kills two ground crew who were inside of one of the aft compartments. And I believe they said that the aft compartments get filled with liquid nitrogen. It's whatever fuel is in there. And it leaks out.

Oh, fun fact. Remember in the videos where the sparks are flying sideways, you always see that underneath right before the shuttle fires up, like the engines and everything. You see those sparks that are flying across and they're actually created. That's so there's no buildup. because gas will kind of leak out of there. The big tank that it's strapped to, that is what fuels the three space shuttle engines.

I always thought that was like the flint that was creating the sparks to light the... Nope, because... Oh, okay, that makes way more sense. So this is going to sound... I know everybody already probably knows this, but this is something that I got a long time, but probably later in life than I'd like to admit, when you look at the space shuttle and you look at it

and compare it to the Saturn 5, Saturn 5, you can get and say it's literally launching one thing up like a rocket. Like, I get that concept. The space shuttle, from a balanced perspective, you're looking at it and you're like, the weight should all be as soon as that thing takes off. How is it not just leaning back and firing off? Yeah, we're just firing the space shuttle either flat and parallel with the Earth or straight down into the ocean.

It just looks, yeah. The space shuttle engines, all three of them, that's the main purpose of those engines. it's not to navigate in space. It's to get out of the atmosphere. When they're in space, it just takes the little like puffs of, it looks like little puffs of error, but it's the releases.

That's how it gets all of its maneuverability. That entire tank strapped on the front is just to fire those and the force that that creates keeps it pointing in a straight-up direction. Yeah. Huh. So the two victims,

John Bjornstad died that day. coal or forest coal died two weeks later they were in a compartment that was filled with nitrogen that swapped over to pure oxygen for safety during test firing and as soon as all of the pure oxygen had been purged out of that and it was just nitrogen it just basically zapped these guys

there was a third technician named Nick Mullen he was resuscitated but even being able to be saved he survived some pretty nasty permanent brain damage this feels a lot like the precursor with Apollo 1 when we had the fire that happened. Yeah.

It wasn't a launch. They weren't doing anything. Whereas Apollo 1, they were getting ready to do this. But you still are starting to see deaths in not training. First time for everything. Yes. Type stuff.

Yeah. Sorry. Getting to my point about the sparks, I know we went off on a complete tangent there. Because that fuel, there's constantly a source of that, like the fumes and everything. If they lit it build up that entire time, and then kicked on the rockets,

there would be some type of pocket there. And that would be like an explosion happening underneath it that they couldn't control. Propane explosion. So those sparks are constantly there to actually ignite in a way that you can't see because there's so little of it, but it's actually igniting all of those fumes

that are to keep them clear. I thought it was a blowtorch situation. It was lighting the rockets or something like that? I did too until I really looked into it. Underneath the space, shuttle rocket engines, there's this big square, and it's where, like, I guess you would call it like a blast pit, but it's down there. And as they take off, that has huge like sprinklers that just throw out jets of water. It's to absorb the concussion of the rockets to not damage the launch pad

and to lessen the sound. They also have like canals underneath it too to suck up the sound as well. And like to disperse it out. Like, yeah. Just a, that would be a fun Patreon of not worrying about spaceflight, but just the ground crew and what everything looks like. Write that down. Let's do how they assemble the shuttle. Because again, it's assembled in that building and then wheeled out. Yeah. The pregame.

Yes. Okay. So in addition to having the ability to take cargo up to space, NASA is also on board with this because they're like, we can send more people. up to space, which means formerly we were basically taking naval test pilots and teaching them how to be astronauts. And they were extremely good at it,

but from a science perspective, maybe a lot of them didn't have a scientific background. We can now do the same thing by having our pilots or our commanders of these shuttle missions, be the military pilots because they have that experience. But now we can send up scientists who aren't military

or who don't have that kind of experience, but we want them to study certain things in gravity or like zero gravity or be able to, you know, take pictures of space and do all that kind of stuff. This might be one of my favorite parts of this episode. Class of 1978, known as the 35 new guys.

What was it? The documentary, I think, that we focused on a lot was called Challenger, the Final Flight. It's on Netflix. It's a four-part series. It's fucking incredible. 35 new guys. guys. The FNGs

that they talked about in the military. The fucking new guys. Yeah, fucking new guy. Yep. The TFNGs, they included six women, three African Americans and one Asian American. They introduced mission specialists as far as scientists,

engineers, and physicians to work alongside these pilots. So the class of 1978 was the first time in NASA's history that it wasn't just white pilots. White male pilots. This is also when you have to have payload specialists. Remember when we talked about during the Apollo missions,

yeah, they each had different jobs, but they kind of all knew how to do each other's jobs. You had the one guy who was actually piloting the craft all the way there. Then once they got into orbit, it was the other guy. Then once they got into lunar lander, it was one guy that landed it. These people don't have to be cross-trained like that. So if you have somebody that is just really good and very precise about using a robotic arm

to pull these extremely expensive delicate satellites out of this loading bay or guys that will do the spacewalk that are really good at the assembly process or that have some type of engineering or mechanical background. We now can send those people up without having to worry about them

having to pull dual role jobs like piloting something. So now, yeah, you have entirely different roles. You now have commanders, pilots, mission specialists, and load specialists. We talk about it occasionally, and I know that some people, for some reason, hate this, but representation matters. Yes. To be able to see six women astronauts, to be able to see African Americans,

to be able to see Asian Americans in the roles of astronauts, the majority of the United States isn't just white males. Yeah. So now you're opening up a possibility for all of these other, people from all these other different fields too. Yeah. If you're looking for an engineer, there are so many different engineers out there that specialize in different stuff. But like, what if one of them comes to train as an astronaut and they just get your stuff? You don't got to be a pilot. You can be a physicist. You can go into any of these different fields and you can still end up doing the same thing.

And now, if we find experts in a field, we could just give them a little bit of training and have them be astronauts and enough. to go up and just be able to do studies. I mean, NASA's trying to stay afloat and stay open because it still wants to do this thing. They are just kind of having to trade out the mission. Their mission is now secondary. What they want to do is now secondary to getting, being a courier service. Yeah, and brilliance comes in all shades and genders to be able to draw from a bigger pool to be able to do what's going on or what they need to do on the space shuttle.

they're able to go out and as they're placing these satellites. This is kind of the first big rush to satellites, but at the same time, the space shuttle program is one of the main drivers behind the International Space Station. They were the ones that were running the pieces up to be able to construct that. At this point in time, if you are a Soviet company, you can probably go ahead and still have them launch your satellites into space, just using Saturn Vier rockets, yeah.

if you're anybody else a company worldwide company whatnot there's kind of one game in town here for getting your stuff up and so when and here's where kind of the different source of funds the NASA is going to be sourcing from comes into play you still get funding from the government but now you have to supplement that somehow so you're supplementing by now taking some of the money from the Department of Defense or whatever for sending up military GPS things like that. Then you're going into the private sector and you're sending up satellites for telecommunication companies or what have you. You have to be on a schedule for this kind of stuff because you have to have a time frame if you're doing a contract with these people. You can't just say,

you know what? When launch windows happen, we'll make sure we get your stuff up there. You're fourth in line, but we don't have a date for you in sight. No one's going to pay you for that. So you have to be able to basically stick to a schedule in order to make enough money from those contracts to be able to stay in business. Well, what did they say? The number was 16 launches a year? Which is insane. Like, before you saw the figure, the first shuttle launches in April. It's on the 12th, 1981. That is when they launched the shuttle with two guys on it that are pilots. Yep. They go up. How long do they rotate for or do they orbit? Launch off, like you say, April 12th, 1981 at 7 a.m.

This is the space shuttle, Columbia. Launches from Kennedy Space Center. John Young and Robert Crippen are the two men that are on board, the two pilots that are on board. They're up there for 54 hours, and they do 36 orbits in 54 hours of the world, of the Earth. It's crazy to think how fast you're actually going up there. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously, that's not one an hour, but we're also talking about navigating, circ-navigating the world. It's the first time this thing has actually been in space. Everything up to this point has been their best guess,

but it's theoretical. Yeah. So you kind of have to test this thing. You have two guys up there that are doing it. This is also like, and it's weird to think about just kind of from like, not fun standpoint,

but kind of, you have space now in the shuttle to where like, now you get, the guys doing backflips, getting to sit and float there in zero gravity, whereas during the Apollo missions, you're cramped into that capsule. Asses and elbows. Yep. And you're kind of strapped to that sea for a good chunk of time.

Yeah, the freedom of movement has to be so freeing. And then there's the ultimate danger in just what the fuck is going on when you have to reenter? Because there's a large portion of time when you're just kind of falling to Earth. And it's hot. And it's really, really hot. Isn't that crazy to think about beforehand? They were like, well, we just take a big piece of metal and we're going to have you guys going backwards. Yep.

And then, you know, parachute will come out and you guys will just land in the ocean. We'll pick you up. They're like, solid. Sounds great. Now they're like, you're going to take this space plane. And what you're going to do is we think based on the size, the speed, how it's going to, you know, the force against it when it's coming into the atmosphere. Our best estimate is that if you hit it at this, you just, trajectory and you know at this part this time this part of the world you'll then be able to glide

to this designated airfield in california prior to this you guys fall ass first into the water now we want you to place these six tires on a runway drive it not even drive it to the point where like at the first time they're like honestly just get it into the atmosphere and then if you guys need to bail out on parachutes, we'll figure out that part as long as we can get it into the atmosphere. They're like, nah, we give you guys wheels. Like, well, hold on a second, but there's also the heat shield underneath us. They're like, yeah, so the wheels are going to go up under that and it's going to, the whole time, those first guys were just like, oh my God, the one guy I remember during an interviewer during one of the podcast was talking about how in the capsules,

you could see the heat kind of dispersing, but you were looking back down your own ass. were coming in and it was like they could see it coming up past the windshield of this. And he's like, it was red and then it was pink. And he's like, and then it started to get less pink. And then we started to see clouds. Well, this first landing that happens at Edwards Air Force Base in California might have been one of the smoothest landings that I've ever seen. He just glides.

I don't remember if it was younger, it was Crippin that ends up piloting it down in. but this landing, they could have had a sleeping baby on board and it wouldn't have woke him up. I got a little worried because I was like, oh, I'm like, oh, dirt, because just thinking about it, they're probably like, you're going to be coming in fast. Like, much faster than a plane usually comes in,

you're going to need a lot of room. So we are going to have to kind of land you out in the desert. Yeah. Well, you can do the calculations as far as like it should take you X amount of feet or meters or whatever to stop. But because you're lighting, you have to have an area long enough. for them to maybe overshoot it by a couple miles.

Yeah. Because they're coming down not under power. Well, we're back to the glory days. We're back to the Golden Age. This is the space shuttle now. This is the shuttle era. So everybody is sitting there to watch this happen. Fucking Cowboys, baby.

We got a new game. Did you see what the jet was flying right next to it when it was coming down? Imagine being that jet pilot and being like the fuck, just how big it is. What's he going to do? What's the jet going to do? He's giving him a thumbs up. The guy's in this shuttle giving him a thumbs up. You're just hoping to see that the jet or that the pilot's not giving you a thumbs down in the air.

Now, the space shuttle was and probably still is at this time the most complex piece of machinery ever constructed. Yeah. The amount of miles of wire within this thing is just insane. It weighs about 250,000 pounds. And the majority of it, if you ever look at. look at an image of it up in space with the cargo bay open and then kind of look at the cockpit or like the crew quarters,

you can really tell how much of that area is taken up by that cargo bay. Like, maximizing every inch that they can fit in there. Well, it's what we talked about. Every inch has a dollar value attached to it. Exactly. But

I mean, the cargo bay is not insanely, or sorry, not the cargo bay, but like the living in the cockpit in the crew quarters is not insanely huge. The solid rocket boosters just to give some stats on it. So these things are 150 feet tall as well. Or the shuttle, I can't remember the dimensions of the shuttle,

but these things themselves, you okay over there? Yeah. Did you just blast off? Virgin lungs. That's going to be a problem here in about five minutes. We'll see. 150 feet tall, they are 12 feet in diameter, and they weigh 1.3 million pounds loaded.

Now, a majority of that, as you can imagine, is that solid fuel. We're firing that up into the air. We're lifting that much weight off the ground. So the space shell itself, the way it's designed, is it's structurally made to take the forces in the direction that it's supposed to be, I guess you would say pointing, right? It's designed in a way that the way it should be traveling, that's where it's able to take the biggest stresses. So this thing is not created for a trip to the moon. That's not happening. It is made to be livable for a week or however long it needs to be.

be up there to launch its satellites or do whatever, has to be able to just stay in orbit, has to be able to carry a crew complement, at least reasonably comfortably. And then it has to be durable enough that when it comes back down through the atmosphere, it's a pretty quick turnaround time. Because they got four of them in this fleet, right? They got Columbia. But that's over time. Yeah.

So I think it originally comes out with Columbia, Discovery, Atlantis, and Challenger, right? That's the old board Columbia Prototype was Enterprise Then you have Enterprise never went into space No it wasn't built for it Columbia Challenger

Discovery Atlantis And then Endeavor is the last of the fleet Actually got to go inside space shell At the Johnson Space Center The one in Houston? Yeah Yeah we got to figure out How to get down there with cameras

When you're talking about a swap over from the Apollo to the space shuttle mission, anywhere where they were using like stainless steel is now having to be replaced by aluminum. So you're turning basically like a solid steel fortress into a pop can.

You have to make it much, much, much, much, much bigger. And you can use stainless steel when you're designing a tiny little capsule. Yeah. Where cost of that capsule is literally not an issue. And wait. Yeah. Because it's going to have the biggest fucking rocket you've ever seen

strap to launch it. Pretty much. That's always a crazy image to see, right? Like after we did that episode and you look at it now and you're just like, that thing at the very top is where they're at. The reservoir tip is really what gets fired here. What we're riding in. So from the second flight, the company that was in charge of building and testing

these SRBs, they were Morton Thiacol. It's this company that is in some part of Bumfuck, Utah. I think the closest scene. like Brigham City or something like that. Thial begins to notice as they're going out and they're picking up these SRBs and they're bringing them back.

Of course, every single time they're going through and checking to see what went right, what potentially went wrong, what they need to look at. From the second flight, Thiacol is noticing that these O-rings that are inside these SRBs and we'll talk about why they're there. That join these connecting

segments are showing signs of burning on this primary ring. Now, the way that these are built, it's basically like stacking pegs on top of each other, would you say? Yeah. Before I forget, so the shuttle, the orbiter, is not even designed by Thiakol. Oh, yes. Or my NASA. It's designed by, I think, Rockwell Aerospace or something like that. So this is the age of, I'm trying to think it was Deke Slayton that said, something about it. I think it was in the documentary about, uh,

we're surrounded or this thing is built out of pieces by the lowest bidder. Yeah. So you have these companies that design this kind of like in the same way with like the Apollo missions. The lunar lander was built by a different company. Uh-huh. But you have literally this company's rockets, this company's orbiter, who designed the fuel tank? I, I don't even know at that point. I'd assume it would have to be Rockwell to work in conjunction with it or something like that with a launch pad designed by NASA. It's a weird. It's space by committee.

And those committees are all coming together to then work for other businesses in the government and everything to launch their stuff into space. Everybody outside of NASA was chosen by NASA because they could do it for the cheapest amount of money possible. We weren't going for like the mid-level bids. It had to be the cheapest way that it could be made. Yep. That's very scary. I know. So like you were saying, the SRBs like stack together like pegs. I think of them like wizard sticks.

Yes. If you were to take two cans, a beer, soda, whatever, have you. Yeah, for those of you who don't know what wizard sticks are, it's after you finish a beer, you set it down. After you finish a second beer, you then stack it to make the bottom part around the ring and then you duct tape them. And whoever ends up with the longest one by the end of the night. All his staff, yeah. Gets to beat the others with it. Is that how he used to play it?

I thought you were just a wizard for that evening. Yeah, okay. Because I feel like halfway through, we were all pretty much drunk enough to just start sword fighting with them. That's just what it devolved into. I'm not fucking hitting someone with aluminum, man. Those things break open easy.

I don't need a fucking ER visit doing that. There was alcohol inside of it. Yeah. So it's, it's an... Not enough. Not in fucking key light. The 4.5 is not going to kill anything. Jesus.

Okay, so the Solid Rocket Boot go together kind of like cans of pop or whatever you want to call it. Now, as those go together, it is made up of eight separate, you know, cylindrical pieces. Before it leaves Morton Thiacol. Was it eight total? Were they each and four pieces? Or it was a single SRB, eight pieces? A single SRB was eight of these cylindrical sections. And then, like you said, the cone piece and then the nozzle. Okay. So we're talking about each one of those pieces has two O rings inside. So we're talking about 32. O-Rings permission.

So they would be the way that they fit together, and because they had to be transported, it's probably pretty hard to transport something 150 feet long. You got to break it up and let it be reassembled. They would take two of the sections, and they would put them together at Thornton-Morton-thiacol in Salt Lake. They would then, so you basically have four sections now. What was eight, each of those got paired up, now it's down to four sections. When they sent those to NASA, those would be a seven. assembled by Morton Thiacal people as well as the NASA engineers.

And the way it looked is they would have to then connect those. Make sure, of course, that the O-rings that went, if you'd had a can of like soda or beer and you basically took a rubber band and just put it around that thing at the bottom and then put another one right along the inside ring of the top of the can it was going to be sitting on, that's kind of how they went down. So it was supposed to be two layers of O-rings. one that was sitting inside the other one. And then that was the first one that would expand after the heat kicked in, sealing any gaps.

The other one was there to expand as well. And so if anything happened to that first o-ring, it wouldn't be able to have any of the hot gases or the flame escape out and punch out the side of the rocket. And we're talking about a synthetic rubber that they said was about the width of a pinky finger. Yes. So these weren't for as big as these SRBs, were these O rings were tiny. And they're the one piece that's the, I guess you would say, oh, it's the circumference, I guess. I always mix up radius diameter circumference.

Circumference is the distance around the circle diameters all the way across and radius is middle to the side. Okay. So that's D&D math is, baby. So one piece of these O rings, so you would have to be going around the entire 12 foot or however big that was, greasing. it, putting it down, making it sure it's secured, then slowly lowering the other section down to where it could seal, and then it looked like they had to match it up where the entire thing

was connected by a huge series of like rivets that then connected these two piece segments together to form the main rocket. And there's a little bit of a problem to that. Because when you have these sections, if you don't have a sturdy, interior frame. As the propulsion is going up, these sections aren't going to be jiggling a lot, but these little micro movements that they're making

have to be filled up by that O ring being able to expand and cover however minute that little shift is. But it has to be that responsive. Yeah. It's not like it, you know, the gap opens up and then a couple seconds later it expands. If it opens and it leaves a gap,

flame and the rockets are controlled. old explosions. Like we said, you light these things and there's no putting them out until they're out of fuel. All it is is it is a explosive tube that has an open down and out the back and thankfully that's where all the explosions go. So if there is any opportunity for all the force in here to try to get out to the sides, it's going to go. Now, like you said, these rockets, they did have these because they're in pieces regardless of how much you're putting them together. They also said that there was some twisting because of the forces. That not only was it kind of side to side,

but there was also a little bit twisting back and forth. And as that happened again, like you said, those O-rings have to go ahead and be able to kind of like go with that as well, not get snagged or anything like that. It just, it feels like such an insignificant piece, but they play such a vital role in what's going on. The forces of that rocket taking off, they said it, you could feel the vibrations.

in the ground from a very long way away. Now imagine if that's the force, imagine how bad it's vibrating the shuttle and that entire platform. You might not be able to see it if you're watching a shuttle on because you're watching it from further distance. You can't see what six inch to foot side to side vibrations.

Well, it's still literally shaking the camera that's recording when you're watching. And there's smoke and there's all the smoke from the flames. But that thing, I always, I don't want to make a video. Diesel Fast and Furious reference here, but you know when at the end he's racing pole and he gives it

the juice and the challenger and the thing it twists, he's like it twisted the chassis. There's so much fucking torque coming out of those rockets. It fucking is just it's a fucking bronco and they're just trying to hope that science has figured out and the pilot in there can keep the thing pointed up.

Well, we didn't even talk about it. So wherever Rockwell's facilities were, I believe they were on the West Coast, just to get the space shuttles to Cape Canaveral, to get them over to John Kennedy Space Center, they had to attach them to planes and fly them there. Dude, this is one of my favorite images is seeing this thing. I have a Lego set from a kid, from when I was a kid, that is the transportation plane. Oh, yeah. And then the space shuttle Lego sits on, or the Lego Spatio sits on top of it. And it was that transportation.

But isn't that an insane thought? You're like, we just fly planes like these space shuttles on top of our planes. Yeah. And this was such a safe way to transport these things that as the shuttles were landing in Florida and they were checking them over and giving them once over, they realized that just the speed of flying on top of an airplane was enough to start loosening up these heat shield tiles on the of this. That's a little bit scary.

And they did say that part of the reason why they loosened up so much were because they were kind of just cosmetic because there were people that were watching it take off that they wanted to have the heat shield look like it was all in place. Yeah. I think it's, you know how when like you look at a ship that's being like brought out? If it's brought out and it's almost complete, you're just like, oh my God, that's beautiful.

Yeah. But like, you know, technically it used to be just a hole that was getting back down with nothing. And you're like, oh, that looks, that doesn't look say. I think it was a perception thing to be like, I would rather some of these like cosmetic tiles fall out and have it visibly look good. You can't fly these sections on top of a plane, of course,

because they're just big hollow circles. So you're going to have to truck those across the country. I'm sure that they were sturdy enough and hardy enough that there wasn't a whole lot to that. I think they said train. Most of the time they did you ship by train. Yes, it was trained. That's correct. but just to be able to move something all the way across the country like that, again,

because the company that won the bid is stationed in Utah in California. That's the reason that they use the solid rocket booster as well is because when it wasn't lit, it was fine to transport. It was able to be stored for long periods of time. It was just once it was lit, then you're kind of shit out of luck. The test videos of where they're in the desert in Utah. Yeah. when they light them up just on the ground.

It's the most insane thing. I know. You're just waiting. It's almost like I wonder if when they light those off, if the world, like if they have to face it a certain direction, it like pulls the world a millisecond faster. I don't believe so. But that reminds me of in Mass Effect, that's when your missions is to light rockets on an asteroid. So it actually changes the course of it. That's got to be the, like, how do you explain that job to somebody?

It's like, what are you doing this week at work? You're like, oh, man, you know, I got deadlines to me, schedules, all that stuff. He's like, what are you doing this week? He's like, I got to actually be out in the desert this week. We're firing off one of the rockets. And I have to just make sure that this thing, you know, is able to get the space shuttle into space. 120 foot rocket? Yeah, we're just going to go ahead and attach that to the ground and make sure it doesn't go anywhere.

I got six of them. I got to test all six. That's a week. I'm doing quality control this week. They found out of these O-rings that the combustion. inside was weakening these seals by eroding the O-ring out. In August 1984, there was a post-flight inspection that revealed that there was actually soot that had been blown past the primary O-ring and was sitting in between the primary and

the secondary. That's a bad sign because soot only comes from the rubber being burned. Yes. So... Which means that it wasn't just, oh, hey, it got singed because it unsealed for a second and seal itself back up. The O-ring itself was being burned through. Yep.

Yeah. 1985, you have a test flight that was the coldest to date. It was, this is stupid. It was 62 degrees or 17 degrees Celsius outside at the time of launch. 62 degrees is going to feel like goddamn paradise compared to what we're talking about. The post-flight analysis showed that there was an erosion, again, in the primary O-rings of both SRBs. So now we're not just getting a single at this point in time in both of the SRBs. there's O rings that are being degraded by this heat.

I don't know if they mentioned what part of it, because like you said, the segments, you know, it's in segments. So I didn't get the exact number. So it could either be the sections that were joined together already had their O rings installed or because they were permanently together and done at the factory. They didn't have to have those. But I would imagine every joint at all would have them. So like you said, it's probably 32 per SRB.

There's eight sections. There's two. It's not just like these O-rings are like, hey, we found there are in some situations a couple different sections of it where there's some of this stuff happening. So you can't really be like,

well, which ones are, was it happening to? There's probably something that says, like, well, it's toward the bottom. But at the same time, it can happen anywhere in the course of where that rocket is segmented. These Morton-thi-Cole engineers

are determining that colder temperatures are causing a loss of flexibility and the decreased ability to seal all of these joints. That's a bad problem when you're talking about that much explosion that's going to be trying to force out of a small hole because if it gets a gap anywhere, that's just where it's coming out. Yeah.

The thought of, I don't know, we'll talk about it when the explosion or when the, yeah, when the explosion actually happens. Spoiler. Well, it's called the Challenger disaster. Disaster. if this Sutton Hot Gas is being past this first primary O ring and it's not happening on all of them, that's maybe okay. But when it's happening at a frequency enough that you're seeing it

for the potential for it to blow past the primary O ring and then burn past the secondary O ring, you're just in trouble. There's nothing you can do. Is it weird to think that there was just at some point, and there still is, just a private company that's just like, yeah, one of the things we make is rockets. because they make other stuff. There's an automotive division at this place.

Like, doesn't that just seem very random? Yeah. I think that was Thiakol had like an automotive division too. And it's not even just Thiakol because there obviously had to be multiple companies bidding for this contract that they won. So there's just companies out there. They're just like, we're Thiakol.

We make rockets. And we also make carburetors. So these Thiakal engineers, Alan McDonald is one of them. We're going to talk about a lot of them during this episode. And then we get to my favorite one, just based on name alone. Roger Bojolet. Bojolet.

They propose these significant changes after they see what goes on with these O-rings. And they are proposals. They want to change a couple of things. But at the same time, they're launching these rockets. What you said, between the first launch in 81 and then when the disaster happens, there have been 24 successful launches. Challenger was going to be 25. It's just, it's one of those things that when you hear that number,

these people are bringing this problem to the forefront and to NASA. And NASA is saying, well, yeah, you're saying this is happening, but guess what? We're 24 for 24. So how big of a deal is it really? Yeah. It's, you're playing with people's lives. It's, and I know it might not sound super impressive,

but thinking early 80s, this is 24 launches. in like four years, eight months time. That's a lot when you think about like how long it should take to really, you know, put these things together and training of all the astronauts, all that kind of stuff. And you're breaking it down to be like, well, we understand that that's the case, that we do invest a lot of time. We're just going to have four sets of astronauts and backups going at the same time. So that way it's not all the same astronauts.

It's not all the same space shuttle. But we're using the same manufacturer, not the exact same ones, but the same manufacture of these solid rocket boosters. And then we could just crank them out because, man, there was a 10th Challenger mission. Was the disaster, the 11th Challenger mission? It was the 10th. It was the 10th. That thing had been to space nine times before. Successfully.

Successfully. But that's the thing, too. And it's reintered the atmosphere nine times before. You've got to be, how closely can you be going over every bit of that thing? They said that the rate of movement that they were getting on sending these things up was so great that they were just cutting out like daily checklist items for safety or anything like that because there just wasn't time. And they were burn out. There were times when this was literally 40 hours a week. just think of how many different divisions

are working here through assembly, the astronaut training, all that kind of stuff, all the people that are mapping out, watching the weather, every single thing being accounted for. And they're basically like, hey, we need to be getting basically like what, one of these up, if not more, a month.

I want to say, thinking back of it, I should have looked when we were talking, I think the Apollo missions, they were somewhere spaced between like nine and ten months apart. Yeah. Which is forever in between when these are happening.

So this 10th flight that you were talking about, the Challenger, was originally scheduled for July 1985. That is how far back these are starting to get delayed. There were more delays that happened that pushed it back to January of 86. That's just how far they had to go with it. And because like Chris is talking about, we have 24 successful missions that have gone up. Public had kind of grown tired of these flights.

I mean, how many times could you watch, semi pull out to take something from a manufacturing plant. It's a little more impressive than that, but essentially it's the same thing they're doing. No, yeah. Like, I get what you're saying. So basic, but people don't know that. It's not like NASA's being like, we're

the UPS of space. You thought they were going up there in the way that it sounded. It was never like, hey, they're taking AT&T satellite up there. It was like you got to see the astronauts that you, scientists and everything, and you're like, they're going up there to do like some cool stuff. But at the same

time, like you just said, you watch five of them and the launch looks similar every time. After that fifth or sixth one, you might be looking at it, I've been like, this is cool, but I'm not going to like set my schedule around this thing to watch it. Or I'm not going to tune in, you know, this is, oh, they've cycled back to the same group of astronauts again because they're going to be launching this shuttle again. Like, I already remember about these people. It's not taking over networks on TV. It just became mundane and routine.

But again, when it gets mundane and routine, that's when you start to get complacent. And like you said, you get that attitude of like, guys, we got damaged spacecraft back from the moon back in the 70s. Like, we're killing this thing. Like, what we're doing is working. We don't need to really, you know, they're doing little tweaks that they find about visible problems. But these big problems that haven't become an immediate issue for them, they're kind of just being like, we'll get to it when it becomes an issue. I guess. At the same time, you got to get the people back, because this is a for-profit business now.

So you need eyes on this product. You need to be able to sell feeds to TV networks and shit like that. You can't just make your nut off those two sponsorship deals between the military and those private companies. You got to have all three of those lined up where you still need that government funding. Yeah. And in 1984, we get Ronald Reagan introducing the Teachers in Space Project. What's also insanely feel good?

like you look at like space travel we're going to the moon and we're going to be sending a teacher up there to teach us all a lesson teacher wasn't even the first option they'd cycle through a couple of them they were potentially taking big bird up there they were going to take mr sunshine on my goddamn shoulders john denver to space Denver in space but instead that would have been an album it could have been yeah he could have played a concert in space that's what he could have done he could have brought his

guitar up there and just strummed away in space. Instead, we use academia. We start this teachers in space program. Well, prior to that, using their poll on committees, I'm guessing, and everything, we did have two congressmen

that went up on previous missions. Well, prior to Challenger, but after this, and very close to when the Challenger goes up. Because there's one guy that got hosed more, than probably anybody in this whole entire store.

Yeah, the first guy went up, I want to say his name was Senator Jake Garn. He went up in April, like on the 12th of 1985. Yep. So about eight months before, eight, 12 months before. Yeah, before the mission launch. But as far as the teacher search, we start that in 84. Oh, that's right. That's right.

Yeah. So the teacher search, they get 11,000 applicants that are going for this position. and the applicant that was chosen, her name was Christa McCullough. She was chosen as the primary teacher. She was from Concord, New Hampshire. She was a high school teacher. And this was huge news. She was a very good teacher as far as the kinds of things that she was teach.

I believe she was a social studies teacher. Yeah, she was like 11th and 12th grade or something like that. And then it was also, this was like, like, who are you going to send up? If it's going to be an educator, it's going to be somebody that people can also relate to. Everyone has a teacher that they can look up to you. This is going to get all the students into this, especially like when they were talking about how like some people would, you know, be like, oh, I'm going to grab the applications for you two.

We'll all sign up together how, like, Krista was talking with her friends. You had teachers that were like filling out these things in front of their classes talking about this kind of stuff and then got to follow along because this wasn't just like, hey, we're going to pick a teacher and then the next time you see her is going to be when she's loading up on the shuttle. This became a thing where after they picked her, they followed her throughout the entire process and not just her, but it drew that attention back to NASA and the rest of the crew and everything to where there was this pretty consistent coverage for the teacher in space program for a solid, what would it have been like a year, almost a year and a half leading up to the launch itself?

You have McCalliffe going on Johnny Carson. She's doing TV spots talking about this. It's big, big news. Her backup was a potentially, hopefully a future BBOH Patreon episode. She's an elementary school teacher named Barbara Morgan. She's from a little town called McCall, Idaho. and she was chosen as the backup. You have somebody who's going to be going through the same training as McCullough,

because if she gets sick, if there's an issue in her training or anything like that, which is going to be much less, you need to have somebody in reserve to go up. I think as far as her title went, she would be considered one of the payload. Payload specialist. So just like all of these astronauts as well, she's not just going to be like, hey, you get to teach all the way up until the point that we're ready to go in space. she doesn't have to train as much as the astronauts do in regards to like the specialty portions of their job but she still does have to go through training and part of that again is done because of the attention

the publicity that it'll get for her going through that but just like every astronaut has a backup crew that's training right behind them to fill any of those spots should any of those crew members not be able to go they had to have her as a backup so this woman is right there by christmas McCullough the entire time doing the exact same type of things that she is. And I was talking when my wife were watching the documentary, it shows her in the stands, watching as it happens and everything. And I kind of looked down and I was like, what would that feeling be like that all it would have taken

was for Krista to catch a cold a few days before or for her to twist her ankle during training or something like that? and then you would have to step into that role. And what would your level of survivors guilt for that be like? Because there would be guilt about it. Like it would have been so easy for me to be up there. If my name didn't get flipped around or they saw something different on my application that made me number one.

Uh-huh. There's a certain humanity that we're going to have to talk about when we get to the time of the launch because there's a few interesting choices that I would kind of want to bounce off you and see kind of how you feel about it too. Before we introduce the full crew, we want to jump on a bathroom break? Yep, let's do it.

Cool. All right, coming at you with Big Dick Scooby. He was the commander. He was a former combat aviator in Vietnam. He had been a test pilot for so long. There's a part in the documentary that they were just badass. There's no other way to describe it. as they're on their way down to the space station,

as they're being moved, the pilots take those planes. Oh. Oh, to the space station. Okay, to Kennedy Space Center. Yeah, the Space Center, yeah. Yeah, they had, well, okay, so this is where you've got to remember, NASA is not just like Cape Canaveral,

the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That's just where they launch. After that thing has cleared the tower, command of that thing and all the communication then goes to the Johnson Space Center. in Houston. Texas, or not, sorry, not Texas, Huntsville, Alabama is where basically

like the propulsion and rocket manufacturing is because remember, there was a weird community of people that weren't from, that lived in Huntsville, it was a German population? And it's weird because it sprouted up like what, right after World War II, like late 40s? Yeah, yeah. Maybe like there was an operation

to sweep up a bunch of non-th century. scientist for some reason. Where is it? They were building the rockets there in Huntsville, Alabama, right? Nice little secluded place. But anyway, yeah. So they're the Nats. Nata. Nata. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. So the rocket, basically the rocket division was in Huntsville, Alabama. So they would be either in Houston doing training and then just take their little kind of like, I guess the, like, you always see you like a Russian mig. like in movies that looks like the small little plane,

that's what they look like to me. Bad ass. Yeah. Non-combat jets, but just fast little dart jets. Yeah. Like we're commuting. So the pilots, Dick Scoby and the mission pilot, Michael Smith, got to take those down to the Kennedy Space Center.

And everybody else. I had a geo for my commuter. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody else has to get on the NASA plane and head over there. And there was a segment in time where everybody's families were there. They were traveling together on this plane. They were all getting to know each other.

And you get a real good snapshot of how much these people kind of bonded. And I mean, how do you not bond around this? So you had Dick Scobie. There was the commander. You had pilot Michael Smith that was doing the piloting. You had mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, who was the first Asian-American astronaut to reach space. First Hawaiian. Pretty big deal.

Yeah. He was from Hawaiian. I guess it's bigger that he's first Asian, but narrowing down, yeah, pretty small little rock to get an astronaut from. Yeah. And these people have been together. Krista McCullough is coming in much later in the process as far as this goes. This is a group, like you said, back when it was the 35 new guys had been put together

in this group. I'm sure there had maybe been a couple changes, but for the most part, they had all been training together. Well, and everybody had also gone up on missions. This wasn't pretty much, well... It was the first four, I want to say, Greg Jarvis and Christa McCullough, was there one other person? Was it Mike's first? It could have been.

And Jarvis and McColliffe, both being the, and we'll talk about on the payload specialists, become why this is their first mission up. So after you have Onizuka, you're going to have Judith Resnick. And Judith Resnick is... she's everything she's smoking hot she is a genius she's hot she had kind of big hair yeah it was poofy i don't i don't like the way that she was treated in the press because it was definitely that very like condescending is like they didn't come out and say it but you could tell like at certain points people are like we're like how do you make a sandwich in space she's like i have a fucking doctorate in electrical engineering so fuck you also you guys got to

us this. When we talk about hot dudes enough on this podcast, let us, let us gawk over Judith for a while. Is that something we're known for? I think we, we tend to point out the looks of our figures. I think we point out and say he's a good looking dude, but. I don't think we ever throw, talking about handsome women. We have, you act like we have segments for this. We could have a hot dude segment if you want out of this, out of this crew, who was the good looking dude? Oh, Ron. I think Ron, I think Ron was the best looking dude. Yeah, Dick had a very, he had a nice chin on him.

Dick was older, though. Yeah, it depends on what you're looking for. Silver Fox. He was a grandfather. That's right. Judith was the fourth woman to ever be in space. She's a second American woman to fly in space after Sally Ride had gone up. I believe it was three missions prior to this.

So for as much love as Sally Ride gets, she's an awesome lady. We'll definitely talk about her more eventually, but Judith Resnick is a superstar. She's the one. you had Ronald McNair, who is the second African-American to fly in space. He flew up on the 84 Challenger mission as well, so he had already been up. I want to say that he was like a physicist. Very, very smart, dude. Also, I think he was an electrical engineer.

Okay. Whatever he specialized in, it's fucking, it's cool as shit. You know what he did specialize in? He was nice on the saxophone. Yes. Didn't he also, he made something. like he knew how to cook something. I'm trying to remember one of the guys made a comment,

or was it? No, no, no, it was Ellison that would do the roast pig when they would all get together and everything. I know. They grew up doing that shit.

He was, they couldn't figure out why he brought a shovel and some lava rock when he came to training. He's like, give me a sec. You guys will see. You'll understand. You had the payload specialists who were Greg Jarvis. He worked on,

or he worked for Hughes Aircraft. He was up there for a specialized function. And then you have Crystal McAuliffe, who was quote unquote, the first civilian in space. If you're Greg Jarvis, technically you're a civilian, right? I'm not taking anything away. What I'm just saying is that he basically won kind of a sweepstakes or a contest through Hughes Aircraft. And because they were probably one of the ones that was either designing something for NASA or had a contract for satellites or something. that's so weird that it's like a corporate perk.

That's really kind of what it was, right? I mean, he knew he was going to be the one, the control technician for like the arm and everything and be able to unload it. So he was also probably someone within that department who knew how to do that. But at the same time, if it's down to several people and you simply do a contest to kind of see that, that seems like a, yeah, a little bit of a corporate perk. Great prize for a while. But as far as just making it on her merits, Chris is the first.

Yeah. Well, and the reason I say quote unquote, not only because of Greg, but we're going to talk about what Greg got the shaft here. And this truly pisses me off. Like this, this is very, very aggravating. Maybe it's just my dislike of Congress and government people and all that kind of shit. So Jarvis was initially set to make his first flight on, or in April of 85. He ends up getting bumped by a U.S. Senator, Jake Garn, that you had mentioned earlier, because they were going. to Congress and trying to justify the budget for NASA. So taking a congressman on board to show them their advances in what they're doing is what happens. That's

fucking ridiculous. He's then rescheduled for the earlier flight in January 1986, the one that we were talking about that took off right before the Challenger. So yeah, so that was Columbia. So when Discovery was the one Garne was on, Bill Nelson

was the congressman that went on Columbia, that one was supposed to go like in November or December. And that one, that's how far back, like how, like we talked about the schedule, you talked about what Challenger was originally supposed to be. And it was what six months later, right? Yeah, I think so. I think it was July of 85.

And you have the one behind it. Also six months or whatever behind. It gets to the point where Columbia goes up January 12th. this is January 28th the challenger goes up how insane is that 16 day turnaround that's like that's the kind of situation

where you watch the launch and you forget that the next launch is two weeks just start preparing no no no what I'm saying is like just as a person like you turn and you look at the TV and you're like oh they did a launch and then two weeks later you're walking by your TV and you see it and you're like are they still showing footage of that launch from two weeks ago

they're like no this is a new one you're like are you fucking kidding me We got a new one that's going up. So yeah. We're goddamn Yosemite salmon. These fucking, pew, pew, pew, pew, just launching these things. It's fucking space travel, man. Like, yeah. Is there just a lack of understanding of how non-pedestrian trying to get a rocket into space

and figure out how to do it without killing everybody is? Or was it just made to look that easy? At the same time, I have to look at it on my level. when I look at how you get on an airplane pretty regularly, whatever, you don't ever think about everything that goes into making that airplane go up

because everybody kind of makes it look very nonchal. I do. I do of like the 10 minutes before takeoff. That's what I'm going through in my head. Oh man, I've made my peace with that. I don't know how it all works. I just assume that everybody that's doing that shit knows out.

Yeah, exactly. Well, here's the thing too. Buddy, how many people can drive a fucking stick shift? Less than half the world. Change their own tire. Change their own oil. True.

And yet they'll look at a space launch And just being like, huh And just like assume it's Yeah, maybe they just assume that it's fucking sorcery It's just Rodney Dangerfield They get no respect Like I can throw a fucking ball up in the air It's just a really powerful ball, right?

Same idea, same thought, I'm sure A lot of people have that But Greg Jarvis Gets push back twice He gets bumped for two congressmen for a goddamn senator and a representative. The representative, I believe, was on the House Finance Committee.

So again, this was another, we're trying to get some more money for this shit. Greg Jarvis ends up having to go up on the Challenger mission. What bad luck. This guy could have gone up on two separate missions and come back safe. He ends up getting bumped because two assholes want to flex their power end up going in front of him. It's awful. even do what he was going to do. No, they were a long for the ride.

It was the other payload specialist that was having to probably do what they were, would be doing if they were an actual payload specialist. Do you think these assholes got any training? Maybe a week, two weeks, something like that? I think they probably went through similar training to Krista. And I think that's how they kind of knew what training to give her and what like either the minimum or what they could get away with,

giving her as far as training goes. And then just, because she wasn't going to be doing anything. potentially it just it feels like these guys wouldn't have had a whole lot of run up if they were just showing up with their hands out to congress like well you have to prove it okay that guy that guy gets to go with this it had to been at least someone i don't know at this point after doing this topic you know what buddy yeah there could have been a budgetary meeting on thursday and they're just like we have a show launch in three weeks he's like fuck i'll be on that clear me a spot and if you miss that one there's another one in six weeks can we count on your vote to give us more money you get me

to space, you got my vote. Pretty good deal. So this Challenger mission was tasked with deploying something called a TDRSB tracking and data relay satellite. They were also supposed to retrieve the Spartan satellite, the Spartan Haley satellite that had been tracking Haley's Comet coming through.

We've talked about Haley's Comet in old-ass episodes, kind of mid-range episodes, and now we're up in space. We were talking about when Appleman. Galileo? No.

Newton. Yes. We were talking about Newton taking a look at Edmund Haley's stuff for the comet all the way back in like the 1600s. We talked about Haley's comment in a more recent episode. Kind of a reoccurring character. Yeah, the comet just keeps coming through. That fucking comet.

The crew was tasked with stuff. studying the comet as it did pass around the sun too. So not only did they have missions of dropping off this data relay satellite, retrieving the Spartan Haley satellite, they're also up there studying the trajectory of what the comet's supposed to go. This is a pretty full mission, not to mention. Krista McAuliffe, I want to say like halfway through maybe day three, day four, is going to deliver two teaching lessons from space.

Yeah. That are going to be broadcast to all the children in school. It's a It feels like a lot to do And it bums me out even talking about what their mission was Because things are going to go Slightly pear-shaped here And we're going to start talking about some of these delays

That don't really seem Florida-esque I guess maybe some of the weather does But really ultimately The day that it gets pushed to Feels like the least Florida day that there could be right? Yeah It's just incredible to look at So also kind of leading up to this disaster, again, the problems with the O-rings, they're still not really being addressed.

There's people that are kind of sounding the alarm at Thaical, but they're only able to pass it along so far. Once they get to their bosses or their executives, it's at that point that they're supposed to get the information to NASA. And so it's like a game of telephone trying to get this information through. but as far as passing information along to NASA, like you said, they're looking at it and saying, yeah, but nothing's happened. I mean, you guys said that it's getting through the first one. That's exactly why we have a second one in place.

Like, well, it's getting some damage. We've seen some instances of damage on the second one. They're like, but no damages outside of that one, right? And they're like, well, no. They're like, okay, so the second one's working. If there were damages to the second one, everybody, or if there was a full penetration of the second one, everybody'd know.

Yeah, by now, right? This wouldn't be something where you would have to look at the post-flight logs to be like, yeah, that went wrong. Now, the guy that this kind of falls to as the director of the Solid Rocket Booster Program was a guy named Larry Malloy. Larry Maloy was the ultimate nasshole. Yes, that's a great. Hey, good time. I'm proud of you for that. I was going to sit on it for as long as I could, and as soon as I heard his name. So this guy is just, and he was in the documentary. I don't this Mr. Magoo looking fuck

He kind of looked like a combination of Mr. Magoo and Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace But this guy is a fucking cut We can say that on this podcast because Yeah Yeah Yeah and we can say that on this podcast because we I checked the box for explicit content so But we use the C very often but this feels like it's pretty fitting But this guy was getting information about this O-ring damage.

But again, the attitude was the second one is working, nothing's happened. I'm on a schedule and I'm already behind schedule. There's no way that I can slow down and stop this and delay this until we make a new designer or do anything like that. And by the way, you guys have to keep making them and providing them because when you are the ones that cause us not to make a scheduled launch, it's $10 million. off of your contract. I think there was an $800 million contract

between NASA and Thichol. So every time that they caused a delay, $10 million off their contract. It was coming due too. Rebidding of this contract was on the horizon. So this was not only you trying to save the current contract you're on, but hopefully potentially continue this business.

This is not a situation either because there's just business overrifice. writing everything, where if the engineers see something, they simply don't have the ability to say, no, we're scrubbed. There had to be something coming from the rocket manufacturer where it was unanimous or they were very adamant and saying, hey, there's something wrong with these rockets. It's only a matter of time. It could be the next mission where something catastrophic is going to happen. We are not providing. They could say, because they, you know, NASA already had rockets that they could use that, you know, they had built up a stockpile of.

Thaacall could say we are, you know, we do not endorse or we're not endorsing essentially in saying that any launches past this date are going to be successful. Anything at that point is on your guys' shoulders. We're not going to make any more rockets until we get the problem fixed. Well, if you come to them and they say, okay, have this fixed by the next launch, so you potentially have as little as 16 day. to come up with this problem that you've been noticing and talking about for the last four years? It's impossible.

And this becomes such a series of factors that come into trying to explain why this is dangerous. And the factors that are going to come into play is you have launches that have occurred over the last four years, four or five years, that have been at all times during the year. Now, when it's been cold, they've done launches and they've been successful and they have been successful. not had any issues or anything like that. But the circumstances, once they really start looking into these booster rockets, they start to kind of see a correlation with colder weather launches, seeing more of this damage.

It's more likely to happen. So they get information together, and they're like, they come to a threshold, I think, for a certain degree in which that's kind of their baseline of saying, the engineers, the guys who designed these mother, are saying, hey, underneath 53 degrees for these launches, these things are not expanding like they should. The cold.

52 degrees isn't cold either. No. It's cold, but it's not. Here's the thing, too. They found the below 75 degrees. They didn't expand correctly as basically they became hardened. It would cause a delay. But it wasn't enough where they could say it's really hitting the second one a lot.

That wasn't, you know, that wasn't going to. going to cause, they would set it there if they could realistically do that, but that's not going to cause a catastrophe or they could, that would be an assumed risk. Was it assumed risk or an acceptable risk? Sorry, acceptable risk. So I was going to say there was a very odd phrase that they used. Acceptable risk. It falls within the field of acceptable risk for the percentage.

Uh-huh. They determined that anything below 50 degrees on these O-rings never fully expanded at all, just leaving gaps for the gas to escape. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty bad thing to determine. And 53 degrees is a much higher number than we're going to be dealing with. So delays ended up pushing this launch back to January 26th. That was the day of the Super Bowl.

It ends up getting delayed that day to Sunday from thunderstorms that had pushed the launch back into Monday. I don't know how many of those, the hangars, I guess you would say, shuttle assembly places NASA has. You always see just the picket. picture of the one. If they have a, because the launch for Columbia, the one prior to this, that was delayed six times due to weather technical failures. That's so many times. So basically they're rushing to get these technical failures figured out to get this thing

launched. Well, at the same time trying to get this other delayed launch, which is Challenger, those technicians are also trying to get that one taken care of as well. Yeah. If they only had one shuttle assembly, that would mean that after the other one got out there, they had to assemble these rockets and the space shuttle and everything together in maybe like a month, which it should be much longer than that. Oh, way less than a month.

Well, I'm saying because it was a 16-day gap. Yeah. I don't know when they took the other one out there. They took them out, like two days, three days prior to launch. I would have to, yeah, it would have to be something like that. So 21 days. Let's say three weeks. when you're getting these delays happening back to back to back days,

you're not disassembling everything and taking it back inside. It's sitting out on the launch pad. Yeah. So you're going to have factors of these elements coming in. And I think we talked about this during Apollo. One of the questions they were asking, and this gets pushed back because of thunderstorms, what happens if one of these things gets hit by lightning?

And NASA's answer has, I think, pretty much always been, we don't know. That was, they're like the one thing we do not, that we're not going to find out. Yeah. There weren't going to take that chance. So they're going to have to sit this one out. Roll into Monday. And this is where the turn of events start getting pretty ridiculous.

Because Sunday, you're not going to have kids at school. Super Bowl is on. There's not going to be a whole lot of watching in case something goes wrong. We're talking about the Challenger, right? Yeah. Okay. But at the same time, the Challenger on Sunday had it long. and the thunderstorms may not have been a big idea or a big problem probably would have been fine right it's a good chance weather wise everything else a sunday launch may have been successful for the challenger sunday was the 27th right the no sunday was the 26th okay you get moved into monday because of these thunderstorms on super bowl sunday the 27th and they do great they have all of the astronauts loaded up they go through this thing called the white room i don't know if it had dark curtain

but it was them basically getting everybody loaded up. I think it's within the structure. I think it's what takes them all up. The elevator up and then to get into the shuttle. It's a decently sized room because there's people that will carry stuff for them in like the suits and everything like that. I think it's just a very, very decent sized elevator that takes them all up at the same time. So they get up there, they get all the astronauts loaded in.

Everybody seems to be ready. They go to close the hatch. They close the hatch. and they're getting readings on their hatch sensors saying that the hatch is still open. So they go through, they override the sensors, they say the hatch is closed, this is what it should be like, and everything's fine.

The next thing that they're tasked with doing is there's a temporary handle that they use to close the hatch and lock it into place. Like a key. Yeah, except for it's a key that you have to screw on or bolt on to the side of the shuttle. The way it looked to me is it was like, like tubular steel or like aluminum or something like that,

had two handles on it. Kind of like a, God, I can't remember what the grip is at the gym, but it's like the one that the grips are right, like a T-grip. You do for like lat pull-downs? Yeah, or like a small one when you keep it close, like a T-grip. And it looked like you just inserted it into a recess section of the door. There was something to lock it into,

and then that's how you sealed the door down. You pulled that key back out and you put the, there was a plug that went in there that was heat resistant. Yeah, I thought that it was. a tile that they had to It was a tile, but it was circular And it just went into that spot So this key had to be bolted onto the side of it

For what reason I don't know To get in there It had to go down into the door I thought it had like multiple bolts No, it was basically There was a bolt inside the door From what I understand And that's what you were supposed to turn to lock it down

The bolts stripped out and they couldn't get It somehow locked in Where the key key was in there and it kept them out. That's why when they cut it, they cut the handle off. Because they were trying to look down through it to get to the bolt. We're selling

ourselves short here on this story because after they can't get this key off, they call up for a drill because for some reason they didn't bring a drill with them to try to pull this bolt out. You don't. Why would you? In case you needed it?

No, the key is supposed to do that. I don't think that Okay, so there was the rule that had to be battery powered. Yeah, because if it's grounded, it could... With all that fuel and everything like that, maybe they were just like, we don't take anything really electric up there. If we have to, it has to be battery powered,

but we don't purposely take anything up there. Well, and we're NASA. We kind of created this battery-powered shit, so we might as well use it. It's a goddamn tubular metal key that goes into the door. Like, we designed this part to be relatively simple. We shouldn't need a power tool for it.

The documentary shows this truck that's traveling like... It's like the goddamn ice cream truck. The speed of smell this thing's moving as they're trying to get this launch underway. He's like they were going the speed limit.

It's like you don't go the speed limit in this situation. They bring the drills up. I believe the first one's dead. They have to cycle through some batteries. Eventually they get one that works and they're not able to pull this thing out. So now we go to the NASA Super Space Age tools

as the man that's running the operation. phones down and he says, hey, we got a hacksaw. We can just cut this bitch off and it'll be okay. And they're like, ah. Which I don't get that either because they did cut it off. If you're in that shuttle and you hear, no shit, huh? It's like, what are they doing out there?

They're like, they're just using a hacksaw to cut off the part of the key so they can pull it out. They're fucking using a hacksaw on the shuttle? You guys are about to launch us up into space and the best tool you have to use get us up there right now as a hacksaw? They got it off, but the two was still stuck in there. Yeah. At that point, they're like, they probably couldn't get the plug back in it. Also, when I was thinking about that, and they were like, what did you plan to do if you

could get the plug back in? And the thing got back down to Earth and landed, you were going to get to the door and be like, remember how the door was stuck when you launched us? Hacksaw, baby. Yeah. We're going back at this thing. Maybe we got a hot saw involved. Maybe we're not super worried.

Did you guys charge the batteries this time? Well, all of this, John, we're going to be. Jostling had taken place, the weather had changed, high winds had come in, and for all of this work that they had done, they end up having to push the launch back another day. And I don't know if this is exactly how this story goes down, but I do find it pretty funny. I guess Scobie comes out and talks to the guy that was working on it, and he tells them the problem with the bolt. And as they're getting ready to come back the next day, and Scobie's leaving, he goes, hey, have a good time. hopefully you can find some more bolts and the guy kind of laughs about it just ha ha whatever the next day

Tuesday the 28th is I believe they said the coldest day in Florida on record for like a matter of years it was super duper duper cold um oh that's what I was going to say so this launch on the 27th before I get into the super duper duper duper cold because I lost this uh They halted this at T minus nine minutes to launch. Yeah, they were, yeah. They were nine minutes away. Can you imagine you're going, trying to get that thing sod through as they're just counting down?

Dick sitting there looking at his watch. Like, wait, too late. All the cameras are on. You're on every news channel. Houston's waiting. Kennedy Space Center's waiting. The White House is probably watching and you're the dude up there by the door with the hacksaw being like,

this is not going to work. the amount of cigarettes that are getting burned down in mission control at this point in time is un-encalculable. Oh, God, there's just a haze. So also, when they have a scrub like this, and it's for the day to the next day, that entire main fuel tank, that thing gets drained. Really? Because the fuels that are put in there, they turn into gas so quickly that as they're sitting there on the launch pad, they're, you know, the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, they're cryogenic. So they boil off into gas while they're sitting. So they can't just leave it there because you're also sitting there with how cold it is.

All that equipment in there is just sitting in the cold, which means it makes it brittle the longer it's cold. So they have to empty that entire tank and then refill it in the morning for launch day. It's a lot. It's a lot of work to be done. So January 28th rolls around. Like I said, coldest day predicted was going to be. a low of 18 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 8 degrees Celsius overnight. It was projected to rise to 22 degrees or negative 6 degrees Celsius by 6 a.m.

And launch would be somewhere around 26 degrees or negative 3 degrees Celsius. Pretty well under freezing and very far under 53 degrees. The day it was scheduled to go. It was only supposed to be 40 degrees. So they're still underneath that. Do we want to talk about the night before the launch? The 8 p.m. meeting? The 8 p.m. teleconference.

So these thial engineers are contacted by McDonald that we were talking about earlier, who is the engineer that's in Florida. He tells them that they need to compile a list of O-ring shrinkage compared to the temperatures that it's at so they can present it to NASA during this conference call. This call takes place at 6 p.m. The conference call takes place at 8 p.m. So they have two hours to assemble all of this data. So he knows that the lower the temperature, the worst these things perform.

He knows something's going to happen. He looks at the forecast and sees that it's going to be what, the worst cold snap for Florida in like, how long? Long time. He's seeing this and he's like, they can't launch tomorrow. It's already not optimal with it being 40 degrees, even less. Like, you guys have to figure something out to show us that there is a. provable, you know,

non-acceptable, whatever you want to call it, like, risk, when this thing is below a certain temperature. And he's like, I don't care if you have, you've been working on this

for whoever's been working on this and help me out with this for the last few years. Any notes you have on it, it doesn't need to be a computer-generated diet, like draw something. Just explain this in a way

that I can sell it to these guys and have them call this off. Just fucking crazy. So all this information that they have said, or just basically to prove that they needed to push this launch because of weather. This wasn't just thaiacal that was thinking this. All of the astronauts, the ground crew, everybody else knew what the temperatures were going to be

and just didn't think this launch was going to happen based upon temperature alone. It had been the scheduled temperature for the day of launch at this point now after that delay was supposed to be 20 degrees colder than any previously attempted shuttle launch. It's bad. It's really bad. That's almost double what the temperature. sure was, is what they were shooting for. So, Diacol engineers end up getting on this call. The call included Marshall Space Force in Alabama.

His name was Cecil Houston. I believe he was like the, he ran everything in Alabama. You also have manager Lawrence Malloy that was there that just shows his ass on this call. ThiaCal had all of their engineers and all of their vice presidents management basically on this call. and the Kennedy Space Center had McDonald that was there and I believe there was a couple other guys. So yeah, so I think you have some NASA engineers as well

that are there basically in a trailer like what are they used to call them for in school portables. So basically like one of those that's kind of like off the launch pad like far away. And there I think like five of them are on that call. Then you have like you said in Alabama and then the executives and the engineers with them in Utah. You have the guy who, what was his name that was in Florida, the Thich Hall guy.

McDonald. McDonald is there. He's basically saying, hey, the weather here is going to be freezing. He's trying to get and give the information to the executives at that point. All the engineers there in Utah are backing him up saying, look at the information on this. like look if this is cold anything look what happens to these things as they as it gets colder like this is not an acceptable amount of risk Larry Malloy is not having it

Larry Malloy is looking at all this evidence presented in front of him and he's saying that you can't definitively say that this is going to happen because you have no data for this launch yeah he's saying the data is inconclusive it's the burden of proof, but he somehow fucks it up. So what he flips it is, NASA is supposed to be able to provide the likelihood of success, or the provability of success. He's making Thiochol try to give them the provability of failure.

Yes. Which is, again, opposite of what safety protocols for a launch would be. He's saying, tell me what's going to go wrong instead of tell me how we're going to stop things from going wrong, which you just can't do. There's no definitive way that you can say this, but you can show all of the evidence from all of these other tests, or from all these other launches.

The reason I keep wanting to call them test flights is because the, the orbiters, they were always basically test orbiters. Like, there wasn't ever a solid professional thing. They were always being tweaked. They were always being improved. Every launch was basically a test.

It was a machine that was like four or five years old. And so, of course, there. And I don't know if it was Scobie or Smith. One of their wives, was giving an interview and he had kind of, he was talking to her, you know, leading up to the launch and kind of debating whether to talk to Krista and then, sorry, I forgot the name of the other teacher. Morgan. Yeah.

Should I, you know, is it appropriate for me to actually talk to them about the actual risk to all this and everything? And she's like, I, you know, I think that would probably be good. I think that's something that they should know. And so he told me he's like, I know how this looks and how it's been made to look and everything. And, you know, chances are nothing's going to happen. But just letting you know, this is a test aircraft. Like, that's why they're getting test pilots most of the time to fly these things. But there is an inherent risk to this.

This is not a given. But under optimum conditions, and in this situation, everybody prior to this has gotten better conditions than them. have made it. So like you said too with Malloy, the burden of proof of failure is not on or is on thichol. And they can't prove that it's going to fail because it hasn't yet. Nobody's tested it at this. They're saying, NASA is saying what, that these things are good down to negative 20 Fahrenheit? Yeah, we talked to your manufacturer of the O rings and they said they're good down to like negative 25. You mean the guys that have never tested down to negatives? And for me, it boils down to this.

The makers of the rocket are telling you not to use the rocket because it wasn't made for this. And you're just like, but nothing's happened yet. And that's your argument. So you have that hanging in the air. You can cut that tension with a knife. The thing that it boils down to for me here is one statement that's made by Malloy in this situation where you have all. all of these dudes that are all hopped up and arguing about this on this call. Malloyd just kind of flippantly says,

do you expect me to wait for April for warmer temperatures to launch a ship? Yeah. Why? What's the hyperbole in saying that? It's not like the day after isn't going to be markedly warmer than it is just on this cold night. You don't have to fucking wait until April to launch another shuttle. you can wait two days maybe three days but he was trying to get his point across and being like this is so ridiculous and at the same time all he's thinking of his is his little schedule about

well if i delayed this one then i got delayed the next one and everything it's like he's not the one in the shuttle he's not the one taking the risk but he has no i don't know i'm not saying that that's an easy job as the director but at the same time he's not even he's the guy that's relied upon for just that segment of it. And it's not like he couldn't say, hey, I'll leave it up to somebody else to scrub this, but I'm going to give the information coming from the engineers that build this thing. I recommend we not launch. And if someone above me decides to overrule me, then that's on that person. But he's morally taking the position of my schedule is more important than these people's lives. Nothing's gone wrong up to this point. But despite the fact you're telling me that this is a ticking

time bomb. We're still going to do this and we're going to do it under more adverse conditions than we've ever done it before. Well, that's, that's just it. You nailed it. This isn't a conversation about O-Rings. This isn't a conversation about rocket boosters. This is a conversation about human life and what the risk is of seven people's lives that you're willing to send up into space. Fuck the O-rings. Fuck the rocket boosters. This is about can we send seven live people up into space and bring seven live people down to space. Yeah. And he's saying, what, do you want me to have to wait until April to launch?

And this kind of sends Thia call into a little bit of a tizzy. They got to take a tea. And they say, hey, we need five minutes to discuss. We're going to put you on mute. Soon as Thia call puts the call on mute, management starts talking to the engineers. And every single one of these engineers is telling these managers, you have to push this back. You have to stand with us. And from that point of view, do you have the people who know these numbers.

And then you have all of the people that are crunching the financial numbers and saying, this is $10 million on our heads. If we lose this $800 million contract, that's not just money. That's jobs. That's people that have to be reassigned to other places. It's a financial decision that affects all of our business. I don't know if no one said this because it never, came up during that.

But how is your counter argument to that not, you can lose 10 million now, or if you want to look at it from a financial's perspective, what's going to happen when this rocket blows up and kills all of them? You think you're going to get a contract? You can either be down 10 million in the bank, or you can be known as the rocket propulsion company that killed seven astronauts. Yeah. Good luck getting another contract.

Yeah. Good luck with the PR from that. It's just not good. So management goes ahead and says, all right, we're going to take a vote. Except all of the engineers don't get a vote. This is just a vote between all of the VPs that are going through this. Everybody goes through. Joseph Kilminster, or, yeah, Kilminster was the, he was the VP of the Space Booster programs.

And as they're going around in their voting, Kilminster is a no. And Robert Lund, who was the VP of engineering, was, he was just an ardent no, too, because he's the VP of engineering. He's listening to all of those guys that he knows how smart they are. This is also not the first time he's heard this. These overring issues have been known about for about four years. And so he's heard information. He's heard his technicians being like, we got to rework this. He hasn't been able to implement that.

But if there's going to be a situation where he has caused to do that, it's now. He's never going to have more pull or more say in this than this situation. And he's sitting there and he's kind of him and hon. he feels like he wants to say no. But then at a certain point, one of the other executives, I think is guy Jerry Mason, he was a senior VP, looks at Bob Lund and says, Bob, it's time to take off your engineering hat

and put on your management hat. And Lund is the final yes. Kilminster ends up getting flipped. And then you have Lund that's the final yes. It has to be just all yeses across the board. They get back on the call. They say Thaya calls recommendation. is to go forward with this launch,

and Malloy is rubbing his hands together in a Dr. Evil sort of way. And he says, great. So what we're going to need is we are going to need Thaicol to sign a, what's essentially a cover your ass recommendation that this is safe to go. And McDonald, that we were talking about, that's actually in Florida,

that's the one that's supposed to sign off on this recommendation, just looks him in the face, he says, no. I will not be signing this recommendation. They end up having to fax this recommendation back to Utah for Joseph Kilminster. One of the initial knows to sign off on to make this happen. They get that recommendation. They go to the space shuttle manufacturer. Rockwell?

Rockwell, Sam Rockwell. And they say, okay, well, you guys, we need a recommendation to, sign off from you. I was like, no. Are you crazy? Do you know how many icicles are hanging off that spaceship that we built for you guys? Yeah. We don't know how this cold is going to affect that heat shield. And then

Malloy says, well, we have this recommendation from some solid rocket boosters, so they're signing off. Different fucking potato tomato, man. It's completely different things. It's apples and oranges. They're the guys that are going to blow up and explode. You guys are just the ones that are carrying the payload and the

crew. So like the night of the launch that was extremely cold, enough that because this seems nuts to me, but there is a sprinkler system that is just currently on fire expression systems, yeah. And it just keeps things constantly a little bit wet. That stays on regardless apparently of temperature. Well, they had to keep it on because if it froze. Oh, to prevent even more ice. Well, no, if it froze, they weren't going to be able to thaw that out enough to use it for the launch. Gotcha. So they had to continuously trickle it. So it covers everything. Like the tower, there's ice on the shuttle and everything. There's just fucking ice everywhere. And it's not supposed to get above freezing. No. It's an 18 inch long

icicles that were hanging off of the... On the booster in the tower. Now, do the ice on the shuttle because you have the shuttle sitting there. It's kind of, you know, it's pointing straight up. It's on the back of that tower. But above that, you have this thing that it kind of sits on the cone of the, or on the nose of the fuel tank, that constantly pumps fuel in there because of how much it turns, it burns off into gas. They have to kind of keep a trickle once they fill up the tank and keep that thing going. And so you have that can potentially have ice on it. You have that entire section of the tank that if anything happens during launch and ice comes off of that or something breaks off and hits the bottom of the shuttle and even dings one of those tiles enough to run,

remove the protective coating on it, as soon as heat hits that, it's not like the tile is the fireproof or heat proof all the way through it. There's a certain portion of it it is, but then a certain portion that's not. If it gets through that portion, it's not going to burn a tiny little hole.

And even if it did, it burned a hole straight through into the shuttle, it's going to break up. Each one of those heat tiles. Which ends up coming into play, not to foreshadow anything, but during 2003, during the Columbia,

the Columbia, that's exactly what happens is there was or what they suspect was damage to the heat tile. So yeah, Rockwell's like, ice, no, wait. What do you expect me to do? Wait till April? No, man. Wait for a day until it's warm enough that the ice melts.

The astronauts are looking at this going, we're not launching today. All of the ground crew going out there in the morning to get everything ready is looking to be like, this thing isn't going today. Everybody can visually tell that this should not have, happened that day. Well, and that just going back to the call,

NASA needed Thaya call to sign off on those solid rocket boosters. They needed Rockwell to sign off on the shuttle. Had they even roached the subject of safety with the astronauts and explained to them what the

O rings, what the findings were, every one of those astronauts would have said, not a chance. If you pass that along up to certain levels, and I'm not up to the top level because we'll get to that motherfucker hit a little bit. But had you pass that up the chain because there were people

definitely over Malloy and you had to explain to your boss and say, hey, what do we wait on on this? And you're like, we're waiting for waivers from, we're waiting for waivers. And they're like, oh, from who? Well, from Thiacol. And from Rockwell. They're like, why do you need waivers for both them? They're like, well, there's

this issue they're talking about with the solid rocket boosters when it's cold. Thiacol because, you know, they're scared the ice is going to come off and hit the shuttle and damage it. You know, I'm talking to the two people that know these things best and know what could damage them or cause them to explode. But they're saying it's unsafe. I'm just trying to get them to sign waivers to say, hey, even if something does happen, it's not on us, that they approved it. I do wonder to what extent if any that the astronauts knew about the O-ring issue.

Do you think at all as they were going through the years of the testing? Or as the launches? You don't think they had any clue? No, I don't think they had any clue that that was an issue because I don't know if they ever saw that when they were reviewed or anything or if they ever interacted with those people. I do know that I want to say it was one of the guys that was in mission control. He was an astronaut. I don't know what missions he went up with. But he wasn't the Capcom. He was the guy in the seat next to him during the launch and everything. He had said they had made it a habit of traveling out to Thiacol in Utah, wherever it was. and meeting the engineers there and getting a sense in saying like,

I know sometimes it's probably pretty easy just to be able to put these things together. You watch it on TV. It kind of depersonalizes this thing. When you guys work on that, our lives are completely in your hands regardless of how mundane you think any of these parts of the job are. Those are the guys you want to put FaceTime in with... 100% like, exactly. Yeah, you want a name to that face for sure. So this launch was even so bad as to

In order for them to be able to get the launch off The big reservoirs underneath that held the water for the sound baffling Couldn't be drained because it would take so long to refill them It would have to push the launch They said there was a layer of ice on it as well And they're like I thought we had antifreeze in there They're like we had a shit ton of antifreeze in there They're like, we had a shit ton of antifreeze in there and it still froze.

The antifreeze is sitting below the ice. They're like, but hey, it's fine because we're just going to delay this thing by what, like two hours? Just to make sure that, you know, we get all the ice. Give it another two hours and below freezing temperatures to get rid of the ice. I don't know if it really matters up to this point because at 1138 Eastern time when they were planning on launching. The air temp was 36 degrees, 2 degrees Celsius. but it had been sitting there for so long, 36 degrees isn't going to thaw anything out. No.

Any cold aluminum that's sitting there? If it's sitting there and you factor in, let's say even if it was an hour above freezing, it had gotten above 32, sitting there for an hour, it's only also what the sun is hitting. Yeah, you have the shadows. Because we did forget to mention while there were guys going along and kind of doing an inspection of it, they were checking the temperature of the actual craft. So they shot the temperature of the left SRB, the solid rocket booster. It was like 26 degrees, right?

He went over and shot the right one, and it was 8 degrees. And he's like, this can't be right. It's like, you know, it's more almost 20 degrees difference on this. It must be a problem with this thing. That could simply just be because that one was facing away. Yeah. So 8 degrees. Everything is cold.

And you had these crowds together. These crowds were so big that they, and had the kid from a Christmas story there. Yeah, he was part of like the young astronauts association or something like that, what Peter Billingsley. Is that his name? Yeah. I just know that he doesn't look any different from when the movie came out.

No, not really. He's just an adult-sized person. You also have kids all over the country that are watching this on TV. There was viewing at Thuyacol where this was going on, and you have an event that could have taken place on a Sunday where all these kids weren't sitting in front of a TV in school

that's been pushed back now two days to where they're sitting on the edge of their seats because how big this teachers in space program was. Can you imagine that conversation like you're sitting there Super Bowl Sunday? Your kid is like, Daddy, can we watch the Space Stall? She's like, it's the fucking Super Bowl. The Bears are playing the Patriots.

No. The fridge. I want to see the fridge score. But, yeah, that's too it just I don't know there's so much wrong with this I don't know as the astronauts how you walk out and you're not just like

it's fucking cold like this does not seem like have we ever launched this cold and so it's like no not really you'd be like I don't want to be the first if I'm being honest with you I'd rather not be the first that does that they said that as they were boarding

Dick Scobie had walked up to the guy that had the fight with the bolt that day before and he reaches out and he hands him a bolt that has a red bow on it that he procured for the guy just to show you how Scobie was really in this. He was in a joking mood but he wanted this to happen and throughout the whole entire thing as they're talking about will they launch, won't they launch? Scobie's telling his wife, it's not going to happen. It's very, very cold but at the same time he's mentally prepared himself to get in there

and happen. And as they're sitting inside the shuttle, he is talking. to McCalliffe and the other gentleman, the payload specialist. And just saying, it's okay to be nervous. It's natural. This is, it's going to be bumpy at first, but I promise you everything is going to be okay. And you have this entire crowd of people that are sitting there cheering them on and freezing degree weather. Just so excited to see this launch.

And then you have these kids all over the country that are just waiting with baited breath. anticipation to see this go on. And then you have this viewing at Thiochol where every single one of these engineers is just sitting there shitting themselves because they know the potential for how bad this could be. And they did this for all the launches. They watched every single one of these launches. Yeah. There was a guy named Bob Everling. He was,

or yeah, Bob Eberling, he was an engineer. He had warned of this disaster quite a bit. He had written quite a few memos to the higher ups talking about how dangerous this was. he was traveling to work that day with a couple other engineers and his daughter who also worked at the plant and his daughter said that as Bob is driving

he's smacking the steering wheel and he's talking about how this is going to be so dangerous and about how this is going to be a disaster as soon as they get there they walk into the room and Eberling is trying to make sure that everybody else is understanding how bad this could be Well, he doesn't want to watch it because he goes in his office and it takes someone being like, hey, you're not going to watch it. And he's like, I can't watch that. And he's like, come on, we, you know, we watch them all. We need to, we need to watch it.

His actions are something that aren't unnatural. Everybody else has these same feelings and concerns because everybody else that's watching it knows exactly what they were talking about McCall. I mean, people process that responsibility in a different way. For him, he and is going to carry this feeling of, I didn't do it. enough. Not that I did what I could based upon the limitations that I had. It's I could have been more adamant. I could have found more information. I could have done something to make that guy less likely to just flip-flop his vote. And even if I can't do it, at least I would have said something. At least I would have made that impassioned plea to make this happen. So he goes in he actually sits. There's like no chairs left. So he has to go kind of sit in the front, which sucks. Because that's the lot. You just want to sit in the back and watch it against the wall.

He's crisscross applesauce as an old man engineer sitting there watching this happen. And so we get to the launch. We have lift off 73 seconds into this flight. Everybody's sitting there watching the chaos ensues. And you see in the images almost like a quick little flash. And then you see basically a branching off in almost like a Y fashion. And everybody on the ground doesn't really know what they're looking at. They know that something might have been different.

They are looking. The families that are sitting there, the astronauts, I believe they're on top of another building watching this launch. And they're all looking to Dick Scobie's wife to be like, is this normal? Is this, is everything going to be okay? And she knows that it's not okay, but she doesn't have an explanation for it because nobody's seen this before.

This has never happened. So the way that it looks, So it takes, it's up, I think. So like you said, 73 seconds is when it happens. So when the first, when the shuttle first fired up, and this is stuff that they've gone back when they've actually been able to look at everything and when the investigation happened.

When the rockets were first fired up, there was some gray smoke that was coming out of one of the joints. A plume. Yeah. Well, the plume was what they referred to as the flame. The gray smoke is something different. I thought the plume was the gray smoke. That's what they talk about during the press release.

When they asked him about the fire and he says, I just went to know the flu. The one that came out once it was in flight. This is when it's still on the launch pad. Oh, okay. Yeah, this isn't when it's in flight. So when they first fired up the rocket, you saw some gray smoke that was coming out

because the heat hadn't made its way through yet. That's right. It was simply where that heat was burning something up. That stopped as once they recovered, because they recovered these boosters and looked at him. What they think happened was the seal, definitely, because that's that area that was eight degrees, even if it was a little warmer, the seals weren't able to seal once the thing fired up. It started to already burn through that, which was causing that gray,

dark smoke. And then something happened, and it sealed itself by like some, like aluminum melted or something like that, or it fused together. Once it then took off and the heat was continually placed on that section, it eventually burned through. So shuttle launches, gray smoke comes out a little bit, but then it stops. So that's why no one notices it when it's actually clearing the tower. Clears the tower at 58 seconds into the launch, there was a tracking camera

that was like two miles away, but this is the one that gives you the really close-up film that they actually used the evidence for. Yeah, so it was like a film camera. It's basically what it was. They start to notice there's this plume near the back.

If you're looking at the shuttle, it would be almost like not quite pointing at the 10, and not quite pointing at the shuttle, but very close to the actual main fuel tank is where this is. It's not a plume that's like shooting out to the side. It's shooting inward toward the fuel tank.

It's on the right SRB. It's on the right SRB. So they think it was right where like the rear attachment strut was because those rocket boosters have to be secured to the fuel tank and then they release and that's when they fall away. So as it's by that, basically that attachment strut, that tells you that that's right in between the tank. 64 seconds, they said because did you hear how they mentioned with all the metrics that they had? There was a sensor for everything.

The amount of data that was coming back from the launch is just staggering when you think about it. When they go back and look at 64 seconds, there was a leak in the liquid hydrogen tank because the plume had changed. Mission control basically this whole time because they may be watching it, but they're not watching it on this high-speed camera. They're paying attention to all their monitors. No one's just watching the screen. Houston might be doing that, but again, they're paying attention to their monitors for the most part. Everything is supposed to just be like, okay, and your go for this.

They're looking at numbers. Okay, rocket burn, you know, full throttle, all that kind of stuff. It's still so quick into the launch that they don't have time to notice anything is going wrong at that point. at 72 seconds they said it's so crazy out they can slow this stuff down frame by frame and kind of figure it the right solid booster started to pull away from the tank and the orbiter like the rear part of it because of that heat had probably weakened that strut and just think of how much force the force that's launching that and carrying that shuttle it's it's on that tank and on those things i mean the shuttle is offsetting some of it

because it's got its rockets, but there's so much force on those struts. Yeah, not enough or too much. A little after 73 seconds, after releasing ignition of all, like, the liquid hydrogen in the tank, you have the two tanks, one oxygen and one hydrogen. They're stacked on top of each other.

Where it had burned through. I can't remember if that was the oxygen or the hydrogen. It hits that tank. That one then, because of where the hole is, it's again just like an uncontrolled little mini rocket it tries to go into the direction opposite where the puncture is as it's burning it launches into the tank above it in that big orange fuel tank says it went into the liquid oxygen tank with a force of about three million pounds and everything happens so insanely fast so you see this like a puff of white smoke like you were

talking about like a flash and then out of the end of the flash almost just like an explosion really quickly and then everything is obscured by this white cloud of all this vaporized gas that was in there and then you have the two solid rocket boosters who separate from that tank and proceed to just kind of fly in kind of a zigzaggy pattern but separating out from each other and you're able to see this because the contrails that are flying behind these things are just mapping it's impossible to miss they almost look like they're in like a lightning bowl like it'll go this way and it'll go this way It's not like erratic or like super erratic. Well, the insane part about that is we're talking about where the solid rocket boosters go, where the ET tank is exploding.

That explosion just continues to propel the shuttle. Well, and what it does too is the shuttle built structurally like it was. They said that it was a combination of both the explosion. But what it also was is just kind of the abrupt change in direction. because as soon as that thing going as fast as was, I think they said it was like Mach 1.92, when it turned, the aerodynamic forces that it took

in a section that wasn't meant for that, just tore the thing apart. It broke into several large pieces at that point, but from that distance and everything, everything looks small. The crew cabin, which was made of reinforced aluminum, separated in one piece from the rest of the orbiter and

fuck as shitty as it sounds the best way I can describe it is like if the orbiter and everything is a potato gun and all of that gas is down in the bottom chamber of it the potato is the crew cabin it launched it out and forward now this thing kept going on a

gaining altitude on an arc and got to a height of 65,000 feet. I want to say the shuttle detonated at 3,800, something like that. 38,000? Sorry, 38,000. So it took 25, that's how Fowler had traveled.

It was still gaining altitude and going up because of the force of speed that it already had and then also the explosion launching it. It kept accelerating or gaining altitude for 25 seconds. you're still going up for almost half a minute. Yeah, to keep ascending for almost half as long as it was after you had launched is...

And that's just on inertia. Like, that's not being propelled by anything but that explosion. They end up determining that... And we'll go back and kind of get to the details of stuff that might have happened at the time. But they know from what they recovered, the data that they were able to gain, that some of the crew were still alive after the explosion. and not just alive in the sense of like conscious, alive in the sense of like trying to do something.

Me and Adam talked about this before the episode. The shuttle looking like a plane and everybody being strapped in is kind of all look in the same direction. You're looking out the windows. You don't see anything behind you. You probably can't look out from your position and see the wings to your side or anything like that. The pure chaos of everything happening, the pilot and, you know, and Dick Scobie, are just trying to go through some type of motion of trying to remember what training exercises

or further, gain control of what they think might still be a functional or flying or glideable craft. They don't know what the, the, what am I trying to say? The extreme of what has just happened behind them and underneath them. It's very much Apollo 13

and then not knowing exactly what that explosion looked like that blew. No one has ever been through anything. There's nothing that could prepare you for that. All you're thinking is we're still alive at this point. We're still traveling. Is there anything behind me?

I don't know. I need to get, there is not power. Do I have wings? That's exactly the point. The crew cabin ends up hitting the ocean at 207 miles an hour. So terminal velocity, I think, is 125. Which means because it's on an arc,

though, it's continuing and maybe, contains speed. It's not just up and then coming straight back down. Took two out, or sorry, two minutes and 45 seconds after the breakup, not after the launch. Once the explosion happened, took two minutes and 45 seconds for the crew cabin to hit the water. That's fucking insane, man. Two is it? That's hard to fath. I mean, that's impossible to fathom, right? It's forever in our minds. But for the, them. Who knows? It could have felt like seconds. And it's not to say all of them were conscious or

anything like that, but they have good information, good evidence who was still active during that time. If they had lost power, and this is me just trying to justify it, my own mind, to try to take them out of the suffering of this, I have to think if they had lost power and they had lost any sort of cabin pressure in that hypoxia as they continued to go up and that loss of oxygen may have ended things quicker because it's just torture as you're talking about you can only see forward if you're traveling on an arc and you reach the peak of that arc and you're still looking forward there comes a time when the world comes back into view i don't think you are in a position where you can focus i think that thing is spinning and going topsy-turvy

the entire time because even aerodynamically speaking, if you were to take that cabin and just take it and push it through the wind from an aerodynamics test without wings and stabilizer finish, that's not keeping it pointed forward. And the explosion is going to throw that thing so fucking catty wampus. All it is, man, is two minutes and 40.

It's fucking terrible to say, but it's two minutes and 45 seconds of just the worst tumbling, Like They're a football that just got kicked Yeah, you're You can't fathom You can't even comprehend

What just happened Like I don't even The fear That you must be going through Like, and there's no way for you To just like Try to make peace with it Because you don't know

What the fuck is going on You're just getting ragdolled in there You just know it's bad It's pretty much all you know that it's bad They said the deceleration When they hit Was equal to about 200 geez We also talked about

this before the episode. This has to be the worst thing that's ever been shown on live TV. Yeah. We talked about it. Bud Dwyer would have been probably a lot of adults watching it and probably didn't watch it live. Is that the one the... The guy comes in with the gun and the manila folder and blows his brains out on TV.

I never saw that. He was being indicted. It's pretty bad. Hey man, nice shot. That song is... Oh. That's what it's about. Okay, that makes sense.

But our generation and living through 9-11, nobody saw that live in a mass capacity. 9-11 was someone rushing in and turning on the TV and being like something bad has happened. And already your mind is clicking into something bad has happened, you see that. You're watching this already from the jump. And all you're thinking is you're in awe

and you're happy watching this teacher going to space. And then this happens. and there were people that they interviewed that were talking about like I you know I didn't know what was going on or anything until they said the vehicle has exploded I get that because you maybe have never watched a shuttle launch before there was a video I think it was in the it was in the documentary where it showed the guy that was filming from way off in the distance

and he's like there it goes yep then when I sudden you see the plume of white smoke and the puff and you see the two other rockets and you can see him tracing up in opposite or different directions and he's like, that's not normal, right? No, we haven't seen that.

And he's talking to somebody off camera and he's like, that's trouble. If you were just watching that, you would have to know, right? How? How do you know? No, I know.

I get that because they're like, whoa, I didn't think the rocket separation was going to look like that. Well, yeah, and at that point, and that's kind of what I think that I've lost in the, this whole entire thing, was this wasn't a space shuttle disaster.

This was a solid rocket booster disaster. The space shuttle would have been just fine sans the rocket booster, but the rocket booster is what the failure was. Yeah. So if something happens and you see that happening, that doesn't mean necessarily that the shuttle has been totaled at that point.

You're not really putting that together because if the shuttle didn't blow up and that was just like a, there was separation, and then something weird happened. You're right. Yeah. I guess, and you have,

anytime you've seen it, man, that shuttle's a plane, it can fly. Yeah. So if it just keeps going, they can at least fly it and land it or even if they have to crash land it, right?

And plus, the thing's got to be insanely tough because it comes back down through the atmosphere. The understanding is that it's like an egg. You know, an egg's really strong if you try to squeeze it top to bottom.

You squeeze it side to side, it just smashes in your hand. You have the, the perception because this thing can make it through the atmosphere and land and all that kind of stuff, that it just may be extremely strong all the way around. Well, no, it's strong when it comes to performing that task, pointing that direction and taking force from right here. You turn the thing sideways even a little bit and it's going to fall apart. Also, the last bad thing that happened to NASA that you heard about was Apollo 13 exploding in space and they still got that back. And they're

not in space. They're still, yeah, they can still breathe. They still got that. There was another, it was a radio interview, I believe, that I was listened to of one of the kids that was watching it in school. And he's talking about his teacher's reaction. And he says, at that point in time, I still had all of my grandparents. I, I hadn't ever had to conceive of what death really was. And then my teacher was sitting there with her jaw drop to the floor and we all had questions about

what had happened. How do you answer that? How do you tell a room full of kids that this space launch just happened that McAuliffe is up there that there's a teacher in space that just died? That's not a hey, grandma passed away in the nursing home. You don't have to go see her. We just want to let you know you're not going to see grandma anymore and you know you can process that. You didn't watch grandma. Kick the bucket. Correct. You literally just saw an explosion in the sky. And then you might hear an adult even just accidentally being like, oh my God, they're all dead. The humanity and all this that I was talking about earlier that I wanted to ask you about,

because in the documentary there's a lot of shots of this, as a cameraman that's sitting through all of that happening, is it just instinct on your professional nature to immediately start filming the family member knowing what had just happened and getting their reactions? Like is that something that you unconsciously do? Because consciously,

my stomach says maybe let's not... Dick move. Yes. Popperazzi Princess Diana type chef? Yes. Yes and no. I think it's still a shit move. I think that during this time frame or during this launch window,

that with, especially with the teacher and her family, maybe the backup and a few other key people, NASA, NASA has enough cameras that they can have guys that their whole job is, just film the family, get their reaction. We want to be able to see the reaction, the news stations want to be able to show the reaction, of them watching it the whole way up and see their emotions

when all of a sudden everyone goes and is looking up there for me personally I'm turning around and looking at what's happening I don't know if I would have never having seen something like that before shit I had to watch it three times and I wouldn't look away from the screen

but for me I don't know what like I don't know where you would say muscle memory or training you would have in you to just be like nope I got a sin it right on this. Because technically, those guys probably

work for NASA or for the news and everything. Yeah. I think maybe you just get the initial few moments of reaction,

and then you turn around and look and then you look back. I don't think you're just continually on someone like that. But to even look back, I could see sitting there

and kind of shock and seeing their faces and then turning around, but then to turn right back around and being like, I'm going to keep getting this. Yeah, and you're filming

them, even if you don't know what's going on behind you, you can see the changing in their face and their expressions. How do you not turn around look? Exactly. Seeing that happening on their face. Yeah, it just, it feels so savage to continue to take those shots. And it does really hurt to see just these people's reactions to it. But the other thing I'm talking up to, they're standing in the same spot. How easy would it be for a tripod to just be separate?

We're just going to set this up and make sure you guys are filmed and everything. And no one's actually behind the camera. Yeah. Yeah, there was probably hard cameras focused on the crowd just to get the reactions for shots for celebration videos afterwards. And they turn from celebration videos. It also might be the editing too because it goes back and forth to those. And the camera looks to be, regardless, yeah. You're catching people in potentially the worst moment of their life.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the mission control in Houston, things shut down pretty quickly. Jay Green was the flight director sitting in Houston and they locked down mission control for about five straight hours. It's, they had to try to save any data possible for these flights. They said that they weren't even allowed to change their computer screens.

Nope. Everybody freeze your screens right where they're at where the data is right at the point. So we don't lose any of that. Nobody is allowed to leave, not even go to the bathroom. room, no phone calls. Everybody, you know, stay where pretty much where you're at. We need to start getting to work on this and finding out what happened. Yeah, which bathroom might not have been a real big problem.

Bucket in the corner, man. Because they probably all just pissed themselves when they realized what had just happened. Yeah. And there's a moment that you can kind of tell when I believe it's, um, who's the voice that calls up? Flight Commander Capcom? Capcom, yeah.

Capcom basically is like do you read something along those lines and when he doesn't get an answer he doesn't ask again. He knows that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The families were notified basically that this was an unlivable event and that they were somehow going to have to go out and tell their kids. Talk about poor times. timing for something. The State of the Union was about to be given that night

by Ronald Reagan. If this goes off without a hitch, State of the Union is talking about teachers in space. They got a hold of his speech. They got a hold of the original speech, and there was stuff he talked about

about the shuttle. It just would have had to have happened, but they ended up having to push that back because how do you give a State of the Union when the Union's NASA engineering program just blew up people i really knowing some of the stuff that we're going to talk about and find out about that we've already talked about during this does it it it's not outside the realm of rational

thought to say hey they know the state of the union is that night or the next night and based on what ronald regan during the commission tells the head of the commission it would not surprised me if Reagan had phone down to NASA and said, hey, make sure this thing happens because I want to make sure I mention it and tell us we got that teacher into space, because I think that'll get me some voter points.

I think that was some of the, I'm not saying all of it, and I'm not saying that that should have had any impact, but I think that there was pressure put on because of that. Slight possibility. And any pressure all, I don't know how much. I'm not saying it was the determining factor, but if there is

even just a little bit of like, well, it's delayed and this, and the president's going to be doing a state of the union. If that's enough to sway one person in a situation where it has to be unanimous, that's fucking too much. We're going to find out something that may lend a little bit or lend a little bit more credence to what you're saying here when we start talking about the Rogers Commission. Yep. As this happens, it is a situation where this high-speed film makes it back to Tiger Call. and all of these engineers are looking at this high-speed camera and they know exactly what happened. Bob Everling knows exactly what went wrong.

They're watching for it. And as soon as it happens, in their heads, all they're thinking is that's exactly what it would look like. Yeah, you see a puff of dark black smoke come out and they go, what do you think that was? And they said it's the soot from the burning O ring that's being pushed out first. Why would it be dark? Yep. Because of that burning rubber. Mm-hmm.

They know what happened. Look at the, and all you got to say is, what color is all of the, when they're launching that rocket, that is white or very close to it white smoke. When you look at, if you look at the footage of the smoke coming out, it is definitely the kind of smoke you get from burning like a synthetic product, like a petroleum product or something similar. It's dark. Yeah, you get Robert Bouchelais going back into work that next day. and he says that it's just business as usual at Thiochol, and they get a notification earlier on in the day that they are to basically save any records related to this.

And you get guys like Baudelaire and guys like Eberling who go to their notes, and they know that whatever they turn over is probably going to be the last time that they see that. So they end up smuggling some... Making guppy. Yeah. They know that some of these documents just need to be smuggled.

away. You're getting press conferences where there's a media press conference. It was the, I guess it was the press secretary of NASA is going up and he's pointing to this plume where he has this stated or this predetermined statement that he is not to pull away from no matter what question he gets. Cannot deviate even in the sense of someone asking him. He's like, and as you can see in this picture, you can start to see this plume here. And they're just like, yeah, he used the term plume and someone was like okay so another word for plume would be flame and he's like it we described it as a plume because if you hear about that plume of smoke you think maybe it wasn't that bad if someone would be like yes it was a flame you're like and that's not

where a flame should be coming out of again we're doing we're looking into it yeah and you're thinking well if that's a flame coming out of the side of it I can tell you what went wrong I don't have to be a scientist to explain to you that the flame was the issue. And the flame was coming out of the solid rocket booster, which means that that's the rocket booster. Yeah, but NASA was so locked down and they trickled off so little information to the higher ups that this, it was beginning to feel like a cover-up. And press rushes to Brigham City to start getting statements from these engineers. was it Eberling

that the reporter showed up to his house I'm trying to remember who it was that went to the reporters building the newspaper and who came to somebody's house there was somebody from NPR that went to Eberling there was somebody back in Florida that gets a hold of McDonald

and they're told of course not to speak to anyone about this and Eberling ends up coming home from work his sweet homemaker wife had let this reporter in and let him use the phone and got him a hot drink

and they were sitting there talking and Eberling comes home and he sees this not the only reporter that's there because they're all outside and he probably opens the door and walks in he's like fuck I had a long day

and then he looks in at his table and there's just another reporter sitting in there and they start having a discussion and Eberling is emotional he's trying to not say anything but in between trying to to stifle just sobbing in secrecy, he can't do it.

The other thing, too, is there's continual press conferences for NASA having to come out and say things. Other people, you know, spokespeople. And all the information is, well, we don't know what it was. And there's even direct question that could it have been this, that plume looks like it was coming. Well, we don't know what it was. We can't be, you know, for sure of what it was. Could have been a freak accident, whatever. and these guys that know what it was

are sitting there having to watch this and just watch these people lie when they know what it was and they were well aware that this could be an issue. And so yeah, it gets to the point where the guilt finally weighs on these guys to where reporters come to them and they talk to them

or they actually reach out to a reporter after, I want to say, was it after a congressional hearing? It was after the first Rogers Commission. Was it? Okay.

We're getting into the Rogers Commission. This is a presidentially appointed commission. It was headed up by a man named William P. Rogers.

He was the former Secretary of State. Former Attorney General, too. Oh, damn. So you have the vice chairs, the highlights of the vice chairs are going to be

Neil Armstrong. This isn't all of them. This is just the big names. Neil Armstrong, of course Neil Lowe is going to be on this case. He's going to be the man there. You have Sally Ride.

You have Chuck Yeager, who I believe is the guy that broke the sound barrier. Yeah, in an airplane. You also have Nobel Prize winner in Manhattan Project alum Richard Feynman. I love this guy. Oh, yeah. Feynman is awesome.

You also have the Air Force Commander-in-Chief of North American Aerospace Defense. He is Donald Katina. I also like Katina a lot. Yes. So in the documentary, as they're talking about going to these meetings, the hotel that they were all staying in. Katina's talking. He says everybody got a limo sent for him.

And he didn't get a limo sent for him. And Feynman walks up and he goes, hey, where's your limo? And Katina looks at him. He goes, I'm only a two star. I've got to ride the subway. Feynman slaps him on the back. He goes, I'm going with you. And every day to these congressional hearings,

Katina and Feynman. They sat right next to each other too. It looks like kind of an auditorium. And you basically have on the first row, that's where Rogers is and then to his side I think Armstrong his other side Sally Ride and then Feynman and what's the other guy's name? Katina Yeah, Katina are sitting up kind of like in the top left

and this guy is he's on there because he automatically has the credentials Manhattan Project he's a physicist anything he's going to say about this it's going to be pretty hard for someone to retract or to go ahead and counter against it. But he's relatively quiet during these first initial, I guess you would call him depositions of people,

because once Rogers gets put in charge of this, Reagan tells him, don't make NASA look bad. We're going to need them soon. We're going to have to have them keep sending shit up into space. Yeah, they can't stop doing it. That let's not make it any worse. We may cut their funding,

but they still need to get paid by other places to be able to launch their stuff. so they stay in business. Now, Rogers isn't technically savvy, but you're relying on the people that are literally former astronauts and everything to be. And so I want to say it's...

Richard Cook is the guy that ends up being... like sitting in the... I guess what would you call it, the gallery for part of this, and it's just watching people from NASA give these bullshit excuses dance around topics, saying they don't know about this stuff. And you have Rogers saying they're being like, you know, it's okay.

We didn't give you guys a ton of time to get that information together. We just really appreciate you guys showing up and giving us this information. This isn't the Will Rogers movie guy, right? Like Will Rogers Institute? Yeah. I don't think so. Okay. So I like that Will Rogers.

I don't really like this Will Rogers. Richard Cook has a fucking grievance Richard or Roger William Rogers is the attorney general guy Richard Cook I want to say is the dude that ends up going to the press Yeah in response to those the lies He's just like a mid-level NASA budget analysis guy He's not an engineer

But he's somebody who has seen all of these Notes that have come up through the grapevine about this So he's not a thia call guy there are Thiacol guys, McDonald, Eberling, and I believe there's another one that will end up going to the press with what they're saying. But this is a man on the inside. This is a NASA guy who is now going to the press to say this.

And Roger Cook thinks that he's going to get away with using an alias to go to the New York Times. Let's not say get away because it makes it seem like he's doing something wrong. He's hoping he's able to provide this information without making it known who he is. But he gives up so quick. Buddy, like he's sitting there watching these guys. If they get away with this, what's going to happen to the next one?

Nothing's going to change. And so finally, after he sits there and he's like, I thought about the seven people that died and I'm sitting here worried about essentially my job. So finally, I told them because it was what was going to make it either credible or not credible, I told them they could use my name. So this goes in the paper. isn't like these hearings, the Rogers Commission, isn't like we're going to have a month straight of hearings every single day. They're meeting. Then their information is, you know, coming out.

They're doing their own jobs and everything like that. Then they're coming back for more meetings as more information comes out. The reason that I'm giving him shit is the New York Times story. Because the New York Times story, he goes, I got to turn this in. I got to talk to the New York Times. So he calls the New York Times, and he leaves them this tip for one of the reporters to get back to him and the lady asked him what his name is and he goes

Roger Lee. So the note gets left for Roger Lee. The reporter comes in the next day and looks up all of the He was the NASA reporter like the guy Yeah. The NASA basically like their employment list. Looks up the phone book is what he does.

He's looking in and he goes There's no Roger Lee on here. I got to give this guy a call. So he gives him a call and he goes, hey, I know that you have this credible information that you're going to give me. Unfortunately, I've gone through the NASA index and I've looked here and there's no

Roger Lee that works for NASA and he goes... Bob Lazar situation going on. He goes, that's because my name's actually Roger Cook. He just immediately gives it up. I know. He's nervous as fuck, man. Well, and to his credit, as the New York Times reporter is talking to him, he says

the only way that this story's ever going to get any juice is if I can attribute this to you. Because then they know that you know what you're talking about. Otherwise, it could be written by anyone. It might have details in it, but there's no basis. There's no foundation of it. So Roger Cook, to his credit, falls on the sword and he finally agrees to have his name printed with this. And it changes so much because this New York Times article ends up landing in Will Rogers' lap

and he is extra pissed. And he looks at everybody on the board and he goes, why do I have to find this information out through the media? Yeah. Why is NASA not saying this? During the meetings that we've had so far, none of this stuff has come up. And it seems pretty pertinent like we've asked questions that should have led to this information. So they end up going to a closed door congressional hearing. Yeah, he's like public hearing or public congressional hearing is off right now. This is going to be for this commission until we actually get some answers here behind closed doors. Now, during one of these, Sally Ride, did you see that part of it? Yeah, the secret handoff. I believe that comes after

McDonald speaks up. Does it? Okay. So this first closed door meeting that they have, Will Rogers is grilling one of the NASA, he must have been a NASA manager. I think it was Malloy. It might have been our dickhead Malloy.

McDonald raises his hand in the back of the room, trying to get Will Rogers attention. Rogers doesn't call on him. He ends up walking up towards the front and Rogers addresses him and McDonald basically spills the beans about who he is and about this O-ring

problem. Then he walks to the back thinking, okay, I just maybe made a fool of myself. It was during the part of the questioning where they were asking Malloy because they started to ask about the O-rings. Because at that point they had to report

that the O-rings and it had been discovered that that's what most likely caused it. At this point now, it is about covering up the fact that this has ever been a known issue. It is in full cover-up mode at this point. Oh, yeah. And so as they're asking these questions about the O-ring and

Rogers and everybody else on the commission is trying to get to the bottom of this, he's basically saying, no, like there have been, we have had issues where the first one did show some degradation, but we have never had a situation where the second O-ring was ever touched. So because

of that, we had no reason to think that it could not only go through the first, but the second, without ever having another instance, of it even showing damage to the second. And this information, Malloy comes up and kind of parrots the same thing is, did you ever have any inclination from any of the engineers that this could be an issue or that there was any danger to it? And he's saying, no, not that would make us have any questions about the safety of, you know, the program and everything. McDonald basically stands up and like you said, goes up. He's soft-spoken, so I don't think everyone hears him. I think

he kind of addresses just the commission at first. And he's like, Like every single engineer, we had a meeting prior to the launch, every single engineer at Thichol said that this was unsafe. Tells them some information about the call that Malloy was on and the fact that he felt that he pressured by this whole thing about, hey, what am I supposed to do launch in April? This other guy being like, it's time to put on your management hat and tells him, goes back to his seat. all of a sudden Rogers is like, Mr. McDonald, can you stand back up? Please tell everybody what you just told us and basically stands up and just lays it all out. That this was something that was brought to the attention of. This is something that was definitely in their, within their view, not just in front of this, but at other times.

Yeah, this was in their intelligence. Yes. They knew. So this is also then where you get the information, I think, like you were saying, Sally Ride has some information passed to her. And then during just like, and they make it seem all clandestine. They're walking together. It's her and, um, the general guy.

Katina. Katina walking. And she just basically hands him a piece of paper and walks out. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not how it goes. How did it go? They're walking down the hallway and Kenyatta sees Sally Ride walk up beside him. And without looking down, he feels that there is a piece of paper and Sally rides

hand. That's what I just said. They walked together and she passes him a note. That's like, hey, here you go. You want to make it seem very clandestine. Yeah, not we're slipping it from palm to palm. There you go. Yeah. This is a hand-to-hand transfer. Okay. Of this tops. And it truly was

something that the commission probably shouldn't have had their hands on because it was all of the temperature readings and then the reactions of these. It was basically a graph laying it out and being like, this is its reaction at this temperature. So he has this information. He's still hanging out with his buddy, um,

Feynman. Yeah. And so they're over at, Feynman comes over for dinner at Katina's house. At Katina's house. Katina has a car that he's working on out in the garage and he has an idea. He can't make it known that he has this information just flat out from Sally Ride because then she'll get in trouble for somehow getting it through what whistleblower means or

something like that. So as they're out in the garage, he's looking at Feynman. And he's like, these washers that I just installed in my engine, my engine leaks when it's cold. And it leaks, you know, the most when it's cold. And so they're kind of thinking about it. And he's like, all right.

So Feynman basically the next day or the next time they have one of these, is it closed door or is this one public, back to public? This one's back to public. And before this happens, the night before this happens, Feynman ends up leaving Katina's house. And what Katina says, he goes, you know Richard this thing has a lot of O-rings in it

and it leaks like hell in the winter time so Feynman ends up making a call to I don't know if it was an assistant or a secretary or something like that and he goes hey um I'm gonna need you to get me like a sea clamp or something like that and bring it over to me right now

he goes Feynman it's midnight I don't have access to those things right now there might be like a pharmacy or something's like Okay. That works. So Feynman shows up the next day with a sample chunk of this O-ring in this little miniature, this adorable little C-clamp that he finds. He ends up folding over this O-ring onto itself multiple times

and then squeezing it down at the C-clamp and he just throws it in his cup of water. He goes up to, I believe it's Rogers and he says, hey, I know we've got some testimony lined up and all that kind of stuff. He goes, I got a little experiment. I want to show some people after we're done. And she's just kind of looks at it. Like, okay, man, what's this physicist doing, talking to me about all this shit? Listen, I know I've been quiet during this time, but I actually might want to speak this. So just kind of be on the lookout for it.

So Malloy gets up and he's giving his testimony. And what he's doing is basically trying to cover the O-ring problem with the rest of the cow shit of the SRBs. He's explaining in very great detail what the ESRB does. Yeah. He's basically. trying to like, if you talk to someone who has a PC and has belted themselves, it's like, oh, hey, do you play video games with this? And they're like, well, it has this been eating this and all this kind of stuff. And he's trying to just muddy the waters with a bunch of technical jargon.

And you can just tell that Feynman is just kind of like he goes to do something. And they have buttons to turn on their microphones and there's a red light that comes on. And he goes to reach for his button. Yeah. Katina grabs his hand. He's like, not. Yet. And he kind of looks at him and he's like, just wait. And so they wait a little bit longer until he's doing his thing. And he's like, you need to wait for a break. And so as soon as that happens, he's like, and now. And basically, find Min hits. And he's like, you know, I kind of ran a little bit of an experiment I wanted to show everybody. He goes, I have this cup of ice water, so 32 degrees. So roughly the same temperature. We could say maybe that it was on the launch pad with these things. And I happened to actually have a sample of the O-Ring. that you guys utilize in that. And it's been sitting in this water for a little bit. And I'm just going to go and take it out. And as he takes it out, he takes the clamp off of it and everything.

And you just watch this thing. And if you guys, you know, stuff moves, I don't care if it's your hands or anything like that. It does not maintain any elasticity or anything like that. It basically tries to kind of like get back into its normal form. And he's like, this thing is not reacting very quickly. he's like it's kind of hard too and everything and doesn't he pass it around passes it around all the people in the congressional hearing and he's like and this is supposed to be a flexible o ring that's supposed to be able to react instantaneously and fill gaps but it was at this

temperature or something near that's that's weird and because this is again a public hearing this little experiment ends up becoming something so easy to understand about just saying this thing that they're telling you is supposed to be very flexible and plight and be able to expand and contract and be very responsive it's just like you know a garden hose out in the winter time

go go to a garden hose or this is what I was thinking of the other day too if you had a everyone has a nozzle that they screw onto the end of their garden hose and sometimes what'll happen is if you leave that son of a bitch out over the winter you go to screwed on in the spring and you no matter how fucking tight. You get that. There's still water

coming out of the bottom, right? You open up and you look in that O-ring is cracked. Doesn't have any of the pliability. That's what happened. It's the exact thing that you go to turn on the faucet and it just starts leaking out the bottom. And everyone can understand that. And they're like, oh,

shit. For the next 48 hours, this little experiment just dominates the new cycle. It has permeated the public fucking O-ring gate is what this thing And that's the beauty of Feynman was he was able to look at something so complex and break it down to something so simple that anybody could understand what happened. Right in front of Malloy, too.

Yeah, yeah, Malloy took this one on the chin. This testimony that's going on, you, after the whistleblower, his story hits the New York Times, Robert Bojolet and the other engineers go to the press and they're just basically co-signing. everything that's been said. And Bojolet and Bob Everling, along with Alan McDonald, all three get to go up and testify. And everything that they say is just another nail in the coffin for NASA. Molloy goes up and just tries to do damage control and ends up taking it on the chin. We have to wait all the way until June 6, 1986. So months later, commission report finds that the accident was caused by.

by hot gas blowing past these out rings and a field joint of the right RSB. Exactly what everybody else was saying. This was just their finding. So I have a feeling his finding was probably written pretty quick and they just had to discuss it. Turns out the most likely scenario for

it happened when you could fucking see it on the camera was what it ended up happening. Turns out we got a little Occam's Razor situation going on. They were critical of both NASA and Thial looking at just these past issues that were overlooked.

They found that Malloy's pressure to launch was brought up by Will Rogers, and he was just, he basically skewered Malloy publicly. Malloy takes the brunt of a lot of this. They also agree that there was pressure to increase these flights, and it negatively affected the safety regulations that were supposed to be in place. It wasn't enough to enthyac, calls connection, but it was enough with the pausing of these space shuttle launches that they did end up losing like, I believe it was like a thousand jobs. And then you have other people that were redirected to part-time work.

And you have situations in Brigham City and around there where there's overpasses that are graffiti that say Thiaakol or killers. Thethiakal murderers, I think. Everybody is taking it on the chin. there were five of these engineers at thaiacal that they kind of referred to themselves as the five pariahs because they weren't touched by any positive reinforcement with this everybody was kind of shunned and they weren't talked about well rogers actually comes out and just warns thaiacol front and center i don't remember if it was will rogers or it was Reagan but one of them just comes out warns thaiacol if there's any negative repercussions towards these five guys that

Thyakal will never sniff another government contract again. One of them was actually demoted, and then this came out because they heard about the retribution, and he was giving it his job back. Was it McDonald? I want to say it might have been. Okay. So as far as that goes, that's just where we have to lead the Rogers Commission, and we have to begin talking about these recovery efforts, because they began immediately after the explosion,

and maybe the coolest thing about these recovery efforts, if you can say that any part of it's cool. Robert Crippen, one of the first guys that went up in the space shuttle launch that first time, was actually the guy that demanded that he headed up search and rescue. He said that that was his catharsis, that was going to be his healing to go bring his brothers and sisters home. By 7 p.m. that night, there were two SRB recovery ships that were already out there. Of course, they're going to get the SRBs to go ahead and get them taking a look at. There were also 12 aircraft that were searching. in the sky and there were eight other ships

that were just trolling for debris. I think because also the SRBs were designed to be found because they had the parachutes and everything like that that they could deploy and they also floated. The other stuff was not meant to do that. Stuff that floated was not made to intentionally float. And I mean,

if you watch the explosion, you can see how much stuff separates and gets scattered. So, and it's, again, think of it in the sense of like the crew compartment, taking, being launched kind of in an arc for two minutes and 45 seconds.

Like the distance. Yeah. The speed, the distance. Because when the space shuttle takes off, the reason it also takes off from Florida and from the Cape is as soon as that thing's off the launch pad, it's out over the water. It has to be. Yeah.

We can't have these SRBs falling to space. Yeah. Or falling onto land. That's just extremely dangerous. By July 31st, Submarine operations had begun, trying to find anything that it sunk below. They're looking for this crew compartment because they have to find, they have to recover these bodies. It wouldn't be all the way until March 7th that the crew compartment is found and tagged.

It would be brought up the next day. I want to say that the scuba divers, because they were kind of working in pairs, one would have like a sonar gun or something that passed for it at that point. And they're just looking for signatures. and I want to say one of them found the spacesuit, the pants of a spacesuit, the lower portion of a space. And no one was in it or anything. They weren't in a spacewalk. Correct.

They were in whatever they would wear for their launch. It was like a space walk suit. But because those were kept in the crew cabin and in that same structure, they know they had gotten close. And so searching around that area a little bit more did actually allow them to find that crew compartment. And the information that was gathered from this crew cabin confirmed that at least some of the crew were conscious and alive after the breakup. There were three personal egress airpacks that had activated. One of them was Michael Smith, the pilot, and they were unconfirmed about the other two. The reason that they figured this had happened was because there were switches on the back of all of their chairs.

So they believe whoever was sitting behind Michael Smith. that actually turned his on for him. Yeah, so they have, so the egress packs, if you ever watch, like, astronauts coming out of NASA to get into the, like, airstream, it's the little briefcase-looking things that they carry. Basically, it's an oxygen tank is what it is. It's like a personal oxygen tank.

So as this thing is going through the chaos of this explosion, first thing, and I'm sure that's probably a trained thing, that if there's an emergency, you have to make sure the pilot has oxygen. and that person behind him just naturally was probably hitting the switch. Also, switches on the control panel that were within reach of either the pilot or Dick Scobie, they had covers on him. So it was the type that you have to flip up and then press the button or flip the switch or anything. Definitely could not have been activated unless intentionally done.

So as this thing is being launched off, I assume the thing had to have lost power immediately. or something that he was trying to do just whatever he possibly could that his training was telling him to do. If you lose power, you're going to this area right here to start testing this kind of stuff. And I mean, that's so crazy to think that like, fuck, there was like a time frame when some of them were just, that they were just conscious while it was happening.

They were sitting in, it was a little Schrodinger's cat-esque. Yeah. Because they were neither alive or dead as they were sitting in there. But if one thing goes one way or one thing goes another, they did say that they had enough power that the internal, um, not Capcom,

but like the internal recording system. You think, well, that would be its own power, probably black box situation kind of. That would probably be something under its own power, I would imagine, to keep it always recording.

in the case of an incident. They was able to pick up in, oh, no, like two seconds after the explosion. Yeah. So they know that they were alive, potentially for an amount of time. And they actually went through to the point of testing the impact against the water to see if it would have been enough to flip any of those switches. But they determined that that impact wasn't enough. And those locks would have had to have been lifted to have been flipped.

so they know that Smith was still alive at the time. It was so bad that no cause of death could actually be determined. Space shuttle didn't allow for crew escape during powered flight because of weight cutting measures and cost cutting measures. So they were sending them up into space and partially on a belief that their system was so good that anything that happened wasn't going to happen. And on top of that, because they had to cut weight,

and they had to cut costs, they pulled out any means of escape that they could have had to have gotten out. Any type of jettison system that could have separated the crew compartment and then kept it in a position where it could have just simply, not flown,

but launched it off far enough that it could deploy shoots to at least if it's going to land in the water, which it would because that's where they're flying over, have it rated to where it would lessen the impact enough to a survivable limit. Yeah, exactly. It's all they're looking for is a chance.

Yep. And they had two minutes, would you say two minutes and 42 seconds? Two minutes, 45 seconds. It could have been a chance. After the, after the explosion. You want to talk about a real good look for the NASA program is if all seven of those astronauts would have been alive

because of an escape situation that they'd put in there. That would have looked real, real good, but unfortunately it wasn't because they were so worried about cost and weight. Here's the other thing, too, about that. when you if you go in to design that type of escape system that has so many other things that go along with it and I mean in a positive way of saying if we're designing something to escape

let's go ahead and run simulations about all the situations you would have to escape from so let's first list the situations we would need to escape from well you would definitely need to be able to if the rocket exploded you would need a jettison exactly so if that happens what does this thing have to do to be able to be thrown clear of the blast and survive something like that. By needing it, you're designing it for exactly what would have happened or what did happen.

Yeah. And if you're running these simulations, you're looking at the most likely source of a critical accident. You're running it through and say, so would it survive if the rocket started detonating from this section? Uh-huh. Maybe from where the O-rings are, from where the most likely section that this would happen. Yep. there's just so many options that they could have had to have built in some sort of an escape protocol that they just didn't have. Launches wouldn't resume for 32 months afterwards after the Challenger explosion.

There was a successful launch of Discovery, September 8th, 1988, and they ran for a while. August 8th, 2007, we're talking about Barbara Morgan again. She was sent into space on the endeavor. she ended up teaching both the McCullough's lessons. And just to give Barbara her shine, she went and taught for, what was it, 12 more years? Yeah, so Barbara taught until I want to say

1998. So she went back and taught from 80s. I don't know if it was 86 right away, but up until 98. Then she went in, actually full on joined NASA, went through the whole astronaut thing, became an astronaut,

and then went to space as, I want to say, a mission specialist in, like you said, August 2007, teaching both lessons that Krista McCullough had planned to teach. What would that have been 20 years prior? A little over 20 years prior. Talk about a tribute, man. That's what I'm saying is like that had to, she taught for 12 years, but you know if, since she did this, that entire 12-year period, that was on her mind. That was something that she was like,

I should do this. And it got to the point probably around 98 when she was like, it should get off the pot time and this is going to get done. But to go back and basically be like, hey, I got an unfinished business, we're going to do this. But I'll do whatever it takes.

I'll do full on astronaut training and everything and actually become one of meet the qualifications just to make sure this happens. I don't believe that. Within the 32 months of them being off, did extensive redesigns of the SRBs. They fixed all the problems. There were improvement in safety protocols.

And the major organizational changes within NASA will talk about the big one that happened right afterwards helped all these future missions just become successful for a while. And then old habits rear their ugly head again in February 2003 at the Columbia disaster. And it was recognized when we do that episode. We'll get into it more. but it was recognized that this was another extensive failure of communication

about issues that they had known prior to the launch. I don't know if Rockwell was still designing at that point. It looks the same, so you would kind of imagine. You've got to be thinking like, this is maybe possibly what happened with that, something falling off and hitting the tile, is exactly what Rockwell said

what their fear was when there was something possibly that could fall off and hit the tile. So Barbara Morgan had to sit through watching the Challenger explode. She then goes back to become a full-fledged astronaut. Then in 2003. Eight or five years into her training to do this. The Columbia disaster happens. And she still sticks with it and has the gumption to go up in 2007.

Absolutely incredible. woman as balls of steel. She is, she should, she should be thanked for her, just, her, bad assery. Yeah, for her ability to go on. To finish this up on a much happier note, just, there's a little bit of justice in the world. Larry Malloy is voluntarily forced to retire July 17th, 1986. This isn't a situation where he had come to the end of an illustrious, career and was just like, you know, I'm going to ride off into the sunset.

This was the exact same year of the Challenger disaster after the Rogers report had come out. And he's talking to NASA management and he kind of floats the idea of maybe being put in a different position. And from that different position, he's told that it would probably be best to just retire to be moved. What was the name of the dude that was also like his boss? Um, the one that we were talking about in the documentary. Yeah. So this other guy, kind of along the same line as Malloy, was, I don't know if he was director of flight operations or what, but he's basically talking about. William Lucas.

William Lucas. So this guy is also grade A. cunt. And in talking about the Challenger incident is basically saying that he, he. would do it, wouldn't change anything as far as that goes, because he feels that, much like my family crossed the Appalachians or, I forgot, how are we supposed to pronounce it? Appalachians? Appalachians? I think it's just Appalachians. Appalachian feels right. He's like, and when people were spreading out across the country on a frontier, people died. They knew the risk. And they knew the risks. It's like, you fuck. This guy was the director of the

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. So it was Malloy's boss. So basically the guy that didn't know what the fuck was going on, or probably did, honestly, probably did, is sitting there no contrition about it, that it was the cost of the exploration, everything like that was worth the lives of the seven people, and that's just the cost to do a business. And those astronauts knew the risks when they went up into space, even though they had no idea what was going wrong with the audience. Yeah, even though they weren't.

aware of the additional risk, yeah. We knew the risks, but they were never told about the risks. Just great a bittery for him to just sit there and stand by that decision so many years later with everything that we know now, and he still feels like he did the right thing by greenlighting that mission. The kind of person that deserves to get hit by a car. Yeah. Yep. A big one, too, not like a fiat or something like that.

A good, good size car, mid-sized SUV, at least. Acadia. GMC Acadia. Fantastic machine. Sorry, GMC. But, yeah, I mean, I never had any idea what caused this. I remember the Challenger, and I don't know if just during

growing up during my life, I maybe kind of confused the two just because I didn't actually see what happened with Challenger, but I do remember, I mean, I was 18 when the Columbia disaster happened. But knowing about this, like, and it is cool to be able to, I mean, it's not cool, but looking at NASA, the last two times we did it, man, heroes of the story. This is like, this is the thing about never meet your heroes. This is NASA's never meet your hero story. Because guess what? What did they say? It's exactly what Dick

Scobie said. This is kind of where I'll end my part of it. Dick Scobie, when he was talking to both Barbara and Krista, when telling them about the risks and telling them he's like, Like, you know, the machines and everything like that, they do a lot of it. But these things are still built by people and there's still people behind this. And if there's going to be a mistake, the highest likelihood, it's going to be a mistake on a person. And that's exactly what it was. The people making these decisions were the people that didn't necessarily have their own skin in the game. And so didn't, I guess, feel it necessary to make the proper moral decision.

NASA was right in a hot hand. NASA had averted a... We can't be touched. A massive disaster once before. We know what happened to Atlantis with this fucking hubris shit. Mm-hmm. And they sat on that same pedestal and eventually it came back to bite them in the ass. And then it bit them in the ass the second time in 2003.

And I don't really know where NASA stands today. I know they're still an organization. I know they're a far, far slim-down organization from what they used to be. Well, just due to simply private enterprise being able to go up into space. I also think if there was, if I could ever say anything good that came out of this, of course not with learning from the Columbia or anything, is that I do kind of feel like at a certain point, it might have even been after Columbia, that NASA kind of tried to get smaller and refocus and say, like, can we just like do the stuff that's not just the exploration stuff?

Can we try to like figure out where cool shit is and everything? Send pros back up. and kind of do that kind of stuff. Get back to our roots. We don't have the capability of doing anything, but just going up around our own planet right now. So let's maybe just work on figuring out how to do more than that, then just launching more shit up.

We got going down to the space station. We got the space station down pretty pat. We can figure that stuff out. Let's maybe look further. And I do hope that one day we end up making it back to the moon and making it be on there. and I think that NASA is going to play a huge part in that, obviously, they're going to have to. But we just got to learn from these mistakes.

This is not a commercial enterprise. No. Regardless of how you want to look at it, this will never be a commercial enterprise, so this is what happens when you try to make it one. We all need a little skin in the game. For sure. All right, man. You got anything else?

We're close to three. Over three. Pretty good. Yeah. Pretty good. All right, everyone. Well, we hope you enjoyed this episode. and we'll catch you next time.

Peace.