9/25/2023 0 Comments Challenger space shuttle picsThe New York Times followed up and got Robert B. The story, particularly the parts about the cover-up, got some attention at the time. “I didn’t want them to hear about it on television. “I was told the families hadn’t been told yet, even though the debris had been found the night before,” he says. I said, `The Coast Guard has no interest in going on national television to tell lies to protect you.’”įinally, NASA’s Astronaut Office contacted Simpson. “I told him that if I was asked about it, I certainly would. He said, ‘You’re not going to mention this on TV this morning, are you?’ The public affairs guy at NASA didn’t know about it until I told him-his own people didn’t even tell him. and was told about the cabin debris, which was found the night before. “I was supposed to go on television and discuss the search and recovery. It also included an astronaut’s helmet, largely intact, containing ears and scalp. “It included notebooks, tape recorders, all stuff from the crew compartment,” Simpson remembers. He offers as an example the crew cabin debris discovered on Jan. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander James Simpson described one incident typifying NASA’s desire to bury any information that might cast doubt on the instant-death mythology:Īdded to NASA’s silence was the unofficial policy of lying when necessary, says Simpson. Powell’s piece was full of unflinching detail, recounted by sources who had found NASA interfering with the recovery and investigation work at every turn. Such an event would have caused the mid-deck floor to buckle upward that simply didn’t happen. There was certainly no sudden, catastrophic loss of air of the type that would have knocked the astronauts out within seconds. In fact, no clear evidence was ever found that the crew cabin depressurized at all. If it lost its pressurization very slowly or remained intact until it hit the water, they were conscious and cognizant all the way down. Even if the compartment was gradually losing pressure, those on the flight deck would certainly have remained conscious long enough to catch a glimpse of the green-brown Atlantic rushing toward them. It stabilized in a nose-down attitude within 10 to 20 seconds, say the investigators. Though the shuttle had broken to pieces, the crew compartment was intact. Even so, if the crew compartment did not rapidly lose air pressure, Scobee would only have had to lift his mask to be able to breathe. The PEAP of Commander Francis Scobee was in a place where it was difficult to reach. Someone, apparently astronaut Ronald McNair, leaned forward and turned on the personal emergency air pack of shuttle pilot Michael Smith. After a few breaths, the seven astronauts stopped getting oxygen into their helmets. As they were feeling the jolt, the four astronauts on the flight deck saw a bright flash and a cloud of steam. This probably accounted for the “uh oh” that was the last word heard on the flight deck tape recorder that would be recovered from the ocean floor two months later. There was an uncomfortable jolt-“A pretty good kick in the pants” is the way one investigator describes it-but it was not so severe as to cause injury. When the shuttle broke apart, the crew compartment did not lose pressure, at least not at once. Powell about the actual, terrifying truth of the Challenger disaster, and about the extraordinary effort NASA put into concealing it. More than two years after the explosion, the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine published an exhaustively reported story by the reporter Dennis E. NASA did not want the public to know this version of events, and it did everything within its power to keep the original story as the official one. The crew was, in all likelihood, conscious for the full two and a half minutes until it hit the water. Rather than being carried to Heaven in an instant, the crippled vessel kept sailing upward for another three miles before its momentum gave out, then plunged 12 miles to the ocean. Speaking to the nation that night, President Ronald Reagan immortalized that impression, in an address written by Peggy Noonan and quoting (without attribution) the poet-aviator John Gillespie Magee, Jr.: The crew, he said, had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”īut after the disaster, over time, a different and more horrible story took shape: The Challenger made it through the spectacular eruption of its external fuel tank with its cabin more or less intact. To a stunned nation, it appeared that seven lives had instantly been lost. On January 28, 1986, America watched on television as the space shuttle Challenger-carrying six astronauts and one schoolteacher-disappeared in a twisting cloud of smoke, nine miles above the launch pad it had just left.
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