General

Address to the nation on the Challenger disaster by Ronald Reagan
Oval Office
January 28, 1986

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.

Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we’ve forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, “Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.” They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.

I’ve always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute. We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.

I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: “Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.”

There’s a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

Richard Feynman’s thoughts on the Shuttle Disaster – Richard Feynman is a renowned physicist and played a pivotal role in the investigation of the 1980s Shuttle disaster that occurred on takeoff.  His thoughts, which are available here, are worth considering.  Here is one excerpt from the conclusion of his thoughts on the perils of spaceflight:

Official management… claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. …

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

No doubt the engineers and NASA officials responsible for the flight did everything they could, and no doubt their decisions will now be scrutinized and second-guessed.  That’s a shame.  Space flight is still a very dangerous undertaking, notwithstanding the increasing efforts to put celebrities in space.  When we humans undertake dangerous activities there are sometimes tragic consequences.

[Ernie the Attorney]

It’s Going To Be A Shitty Day. Columbia broke up on re-entry today… [Derek’s Rantings and Musings]

The second lesson.

I was going to get up and watch the Shuttle re-enter the atmosphere this morning, but forgot to set the alarm.

Instead, a few minutes ago, I got a call from my sister, whose voice sounded just like it did when she called before dawn on September 11, 2001.

Now I’m sitting here with a six year old boy who loves aviation and space travel, talking about what happened to Columbia, and how something so adventurous and wonderful could end so badly.

It’s been almost exactly seventeen years since the last Shuttle disaster. Not long afterwards I wrote Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy.

I’m sure we’ll learn from this one too.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Andrew Juby: “My roommate has access to Goddard Space Flight Center’s Orbital Information group server. He can pull up data on just about any non-classified orbiting object. We checked it this morning and pulled up some data on Columbia, and ran it by the aerospace major across the hall. It appears that at about 2 or 3AM, as Columbia was into its descent, it pulled up.” [Scripting News]

Shuttle Breaks up on reentry – Here’s the report from Instapundit, with links to useful information.  If you want to see footage of the reentry you can tune into CNN, but the analysis is pretty sparse at this point (they’re interviewing fools from Texas who claim to have seen strange things).  Better off sticking to Instapundit if you want sober analysis.  Forget, terrorism.  This will wind up being the result of structural failure, and I’ll bet it is related to a failure of the heat tile system.  Of course, trained investigators will have their work cut out for them.  The Shuttle broke up at 200,000 feet while travelling 12,000 miles per hour, which means that the debris field is going to be very, very large.

The best thing for us to do is to pray for the crew and their family members.  [Ernie the Attorney]

Oh No. There’s no other official news other than this, but it sounds like it did explode in entry. It breaks my heart because if there’s one thing this country does well, it is our exploration of space. It is the very best of us. [Burningbird]