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OK, i done gone set Facebook on fire. In honor of Reagan's stirring Challenger speech:

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Starman, Jan 28, 2016.

  1. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Today is the 30th anniversary of Challenger. Making the rounds of FB and the intertoobs are a bunch of fawning posts on Reagan's stirring speech in memory of the crew:

    [​IMG]

    Well, I couldn't let that one go, so I dropped this little bomb:

    Oh, by the way, Nixon also had a stirring speech all set to go if Armstrong and Aldrin had been stranded on the moon and died on Apollo 11.

    [​IMG]
    One thing you can say for those guys, they can sure get poetic when astronauts die. They just never do shit to prevent it.
     
  2. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    You can't just abort the mission, dude. Abortion is frowned upon around here.
     
  3. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Yup. When the SRB boosters start spewing fire into the hydrogen tank, you just hang on. No abortion devices allowed.
     
  4. Jake_Taylor

    Jake_Taylor Well-Known Member

    I think you will find very few challengers for the board's biggest badass on Facebook.
     
  5. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Why would Nixon give a speech to eulogize some dudes who were stuck on Stanley Kubrick's soundstage? Just walk over and open up the door, man.

    False flag, etc.
     
  6. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't do that...
     
  7. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Damn, damn good timing. I'm putting together a video of Richard Feynman's service on the Rogers Commission for my quality management class tonight.
     
  8. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    That was a good speech. Speechifying was Reagan's strength. Did he really say "surly?"
     
  9. JohnHammond

    JohnHammond Well-Known Member

    The movie "Prophet's Prey" hints that the FLDS Church is to blame for Challenger since it manufactured the O-rings. Really weak link and not true.
     
  10. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Maybe there was an intern named Shirley who wiggled across the Oval Office during the speech??
     
    Ace likes this.
  11. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    One of the guys I worked with a bit when I was a doctoral student did some nice work on how efficient the stock markets were in the wake of the crash. Within a couple of hours of the explosion the stock of only one of the tree primary contractors -- I'll let you guess which one -- was trading outside of normal ranges.

    The FLDS bit is ridiculous. There's only a Utah connection because Thiokol bought a bunch of land there for rocket test ranges.
     
  12. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    The Utah connection was political, not religious: Team Nixon wanted the shuttle design to include huge SRB boosters (and thus huge contracts for Thiokol) despite heavy consensus within NASA that other design configurations (mostly with the orbiter craft on top) were superior (and would not place the orbiter heat tiles in position to get hit by falling ice/debris, which would have prevented the Columbia disaster).
    And they wanted to impose capacity limits on system payload to ensure the shuttle would be usable in Air Force missions which precluded the use of escape-tower rockets (which would have saved the Challenger crew).
     
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