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

So to be clear you believe no where in the 17 years between the two shuttle failures there could've been substantive changes, developments, etc? Had to come right then and there from Reagan? Or you're trolling?

 

You have to understand Starman's mission, his raison d'etre ... Courageously finding the Republican at fault no matter what actually happened!

 

Not sure if you were yanking his chain or not. Reagan was quoting from "High Flight", by John Gillespie McGee. He was an American pilot who joined the Canadian Air Force in the early days of War 2, and died in a midair collision early in the war. This poem was pretty well known to the WWII generation, they would have gotten the reference.


High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 

Usually the best time to call for a dramatic redesign is immediately after a catastrophic disaster. Certainly Daddy Bush, Spermfingers Clinton and Shrubby could have called for a new launch system anytime in between, but the response would have been, "no shuttle has blown up since 1986, so what's the problem?"

 

The Challenger disaster was not a Republicans fault, but it was the fault of bureaucracy, bad management and I guess you could throw making a buck in there.

Engineers and NASA knew those O-rings were not designed to launch in cold temperatures but went with it anyway.

 

"Gekko... he was on the phone 30 seconds after the Challenger blew up selling NASA stocks short."

 

This Slate article talks about my guy's research ...

The disaster market.

 

Just so we're clear, and this is obviously the case with most presidents, but Peggy Noonan wrote that speech, not Reagan. He was a great orator, but it's not like he was combing through old poems.

 

It's Starman's fault. Anyone who was so damn smart at age 10 should have been able to engineer a fix by February '86.

 

All they had to do was ask me. When the shuttle design was released in 72-73, the first two things I said were:

1) "Holy shit, they ain't got no escape system. That means if anything, at all, goes wrong from the instant they light the SRBs to the time they dump them 30 miles up, they're dead."

2) "Holy shit, with the orbiter strapped on the side like that, that means the heat shield tiles on the wings can get hit by chunks of ice falling off. I sure hope the heat shield is made out of welded titanium or something because if it's some kind of fragile ceramic deal, if it gets smashed by ice chunks, they're dead."

So, all they had to do was ask.

 

The Columbia disaster hit home more for me because of how close to me it happened. Basically disintegrated over Fort Worth and came down in East Texas. I remember it well because it was Saturday, I was sick as a dog and had to work. That anniversary's coming up too.

 

It's a sad but maybe fortunate coincidence that all three space disasters came within a calendar week of each other; as such, when stories appear making the anniversary of one, the other two are usually mentioned, where if one was in, say, August, it would probably be relatively forgotten.


I find the Columbia tragedy has relatively slid from public awareness:

1) It didn't happen all at once in a moment like Challenger; there was about a 30-45 minute time span in which "hope" was being held out for a miracle -- although anybody reasonably familiar with shuttle flight profiles knew full well that if the shuttle doesn't show up at its intended landing site within about 60 seconds of the scheduled time, there are only two or three things that could have happened and they're all real bad;

2) Challenger happened in the middle of a weekday when a lot of teevee sets were on; although only CNN carried the explosion live, all the other networks picked it up within about 5 minutes, while Columbia happened early on a Saturday morning when much of the nation simply isn't watching teevee, and,

3) Challenger, of course was the first in-flight fatality disaster for the U.S. space program and thus had more of a stunning impact on the national consciousness.