Challenger

[lederhosen]

The Challenger disaster happened during the night, my time; I heard about it early the next morning from my mother, who'd probably heard it on the morning news. I think it might be the first time I can remember her looking shocked. It wasn't quite as awful a disaster to us in Australia as it was in the US - we didn't have the same buildup and coverage - but it was more than bad enough, and I don't think we talked about much else at school that day.

That was the sad part. But the tragic part is that Challenger's crew weren't killed by bad luck. They were killed by the same things that have been screwing up engineering projects since the dawn of time, among which the chief culprit has to be 'wishful thinking by managers who don't understand the science involved'. If you want to do something meaningful in memory of those astronauts, rather than lighting a candle... go ye and read Richard Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger disaster, and learn the lessons therein. (Links via sclerotic_rings.) If nothing else sticks, remember the last line:

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

Comments

[cavalaxis]

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I grew up in Friendswood, TX, about ten miles from Mission Control. My dad had worked for NASA since the day he left college, from the Mercury program. He was friends with Ed White, one of the astronauts who died on the pad in the Apollo I fire. He was one of the engineers on the Apollo 13 mission, responsible for making a CO2 scrubber from the parts they had in the module. I went to school with the astronaut's kids. One of my teachers was one of the six finalists for the position that Christa McAuliffe took.

That day was the first and the last time I ever saw my father weep.

Now that I'm older, I think it was because he knew the same things that Mr. Feynman wrote about. Knew that it was senseless.