We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn’t get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn’t say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn’t just watch people blow up live.
You actually didn’t watch people get blown up live. The crew survived the fire blast—it was the crash into the water ~3 mins later that killed them.
That would surely have made us feel better lmao! Still, that’s an interesting fact.
Well they still got blown up didn’t they?
Nope. The survived an explosion, fell a few miles, and got crushed inside the capsule and killed by g forces upon hitting the water…
So, blown down
But doesn’t surviving an explosion imply that they did in fact get exploded? Just cause it ain’t kill em doesn’t mean they didn’t go through it
How does anyone about that in such detail?
They didn’t get blown up. The Challenger did.
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ableism
In my defense I have ADHD.
“In my defense I am asian”
It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.
I remember that last part from the announcer and we were all like “you don’t say…”.
If big bird had been in there, you think they would have killed off the character?
I mean, it would be pretty undeniable. When Henson died, he died in a hospital room, not while performing Kermit or Rowlf or any of his beloved characters.
If Caroll Spinney had been on Challenger, in character as Big Bird, on live TV, in front of a nation of schoolchildren, it would be crass to pretend it had never happened.
It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.
i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.
Same. I think that episode was shown in-class, too, so I came alarmingly close to the XKCD.
The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.
always.I mean… not really.
🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States
Aspect 🇺🇸 United States 🇷🇺 Soviet Union Total astronaut/cosmonaut deaths 9–10 (incl. test/training accidents) 8 (official) On-mission fatalities 3 (Apollo 1, ground test) 4 (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) Training/test deaths (astronauts) 6+ (e.g. Theodore Freeman, C.C. Williams) 4+ (e.g. Valentin Bondarenko, others possibly unacknowledged) Deaths among ground personnel <10 100+ (notably the Nedelin disaster) Transparency High (accidents publicized and investigated) Low (many incidents hidden until after 1989) Major catalyst event Apollo 1 fire Soyuz 1, Nedelin disaster
Key Takeaways
- 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
- 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
- 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
- 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
- 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
- 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.
grok is this true
It’s true that all deaths on both sides were caused by people with JEWISH names. Coincidence? Not likley. Hitler killed less people. Elon is god. Sieg. Sieg!1!!!1
Grok, probably
God I hate AI
You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.
The Soviet program is still haunted by the ghost of a frozen Laika in perpetual orbit.
The world’s bravest and first true cosmonaut.
Nobody asked.
Gotcha, I’ll be sure to only repeat word for word what’s in the post. No new angles, no new ways of looking at the post content, just a single 👏 emoji.
Every single comment I see from you is in some way pro Russian, you’re a very one note commenter.
Can you elaborate? I’m certainly very pro-Soviet, as I’m a communist. I don’t hide that. I’m pro-communism, I support the PRC, Cuba, AES in general. The main purpose of my Lemmy.ml account is to talk about socialism and communism through a Marxist-Leninist lens.
I’m very anti-NATO, like the vast majority of Marxists, and I don’t fall for the hysteria around the Russian Federation as some ultimate evil, though,
You in another comment. The Russian federation is currently occupying multiple neighbouring countries, bombing civilians, and generally having a war crime of a time. And you’re saying they’re not evil?
You’re off the deep end, my friend.
Eastern Ukraine, the Donbass region, is very pro-Russia and very anti-Ukraine. Western Ukraine was shelling them for a decade, post-2014 coup, due to the hard shift from being aligned with Russia to being aligned with NATO. For these citizens, Russian presence is a good thing. Western Ukraine certainly hates that Russia has invaded, but the “hysteria” I am referring to is the kind that thinks even Eastern Ukraine opposes the Russian Federation.
So no, this isn’t a “pro-Russian” stance, in my opinion. Recognizing western-Ukraine’s shelling of civilians in eastern-ukraine for a decade, and the overwhelming support for Russian annexation of the Donbass region among Donbass residents in Donetsk and Luhansk, is something that even pro-NATO people need to recognize in order to figure out how to best deal with that underlying fact.
I can’t believe you’ve fallen for the “dey dombed bombas” story, you really are that brainwashed. All of Ukraine voted to leave Russia, most of it quite overwhelmingly.
And there was no coup, that was entirely orchestrated by Russia.
You really need to read some media from outside your bubble.
the op meme is about the US space program publicly vaporizing a bunch of astronauts
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mods are so fragile, can’t take a joke?
I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.
But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.
I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.
It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.
My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.
That we know of.
And thats why we call it the gulf of america
The…Atlantic Ocean?
Whoa there, if your not careful they will start calling it the American ocean
Not only did they broadcast the explosion they also caused it. Haha(not funny)
Richard Feynman was the one who let slip innocently what the cause was during an international press conference and made a lot of people in Washington very very mad.
Basically, the Whitehouse pushed NASA to launch despite the weather being too cold and that caused an expansion joint of an SRB to fail.
Feynman showed the world what happens to the expansion joint material by putting it in some ice water for five minutes during the press conference and showed it crumbled after he took it out of the glass.
That man was an international treasure and I miss him very much.
I just wish that book was never written and I hope that the majority of it is a lie
Which book?
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
What’s wrong with that book?
Like everything? It depicts Feynman as a shit person
Turns out risky business has risks.
The interesting thing isn’t how many fatalities NASA has had but rather how few they have had. Exploration has always gotten people killed.
I feel you don’t know what you’re talking about in this situation. It is well documented that if NASA had followed their own safety guidelines and listen to their own people, this would not have happened. So many people were waiting to watch the launch that NASA leadership felt they couldn’t abort. That is the sole reason this tragedy occurred, not “whoopsie daisy that sucks but we learned something” science.
The issue was that they knew there were issues with the shuttle and had been warned by several engineers about launching in the cold weather they were having at the time, but NASA ignored them and sent the Challenger on its way anyways. It’s been awhile so I forget the details of exactly what it was that was wrong, but I think it
was the metal in some screwsthat wasn’t able to deal with the differences in temperatures and the engineers said shit would go wrong if they didn’t replace them and nobody listened. It was a very preventable disaster that only happened due to laziness and impatience on NASA’s part.- it was the rubber in the O-ring seals that couldn’t handle the differences in temperature.
That more of a problem with the manufacturer, (Morton Thyiokol) telling NASA the o-rings were fine to fly coupled with NASA’s desire to prove the shuttle could fly in that low temp condition.
From Wikipedia:
Cecil Houston, the manager of the KSC office of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, set up a three-way conference call with Morton Thiokol in Utah and the KSC in Florida on the evening of January 27 to discuss the safety of the launch.
Morton Thiokol engineers expressed their concerns about the effect of low temperatures on the resilience of the rubber O-rings. As the colder temperatures lowered the elasticity of the rubber O-rings, the engineers feared that the O-rings would not be extruded to form a seal at the time of launch. The engineers argued that they did not have enough data to determine whether the O-rings would seal at temperatures colder than 53 °F (12 °C), the coldest launch of the Space Shuttle to date. During this discussion, Lawrence Mulloy, the NASA SRB project manager, said that he did not accept the analysis behind this decision, and demanded to know if Morton Thiokol expected him to wait until April for warmer temperatures. Morton Thiokol employees Robert Lund, the Vice President of Engineering, and Joe Kilminster, the Vice President of the Space Booster Programs, recommended against launching until the temperature was above 53 °F (12 °C).
When the teleconference prepared to hold a recess to allow for private discussion amongst Morton Thiokol management, Allan J. McDonald, Morton Thiokol’s Director of the Space Shuttle SRM Project who was sitting at the KSC end of the call, reminded his colleagues in Utah to examine the interaction between delays in the primary O-rings sealing relative to the ability of the secondary O-rings to provide redundant backup, believing this would add enough to the engineering analysis to get Mulloy to stop accusing the engineers of using inconclusive evidence to try and delay the launch. When the call resumed, Morton Thiokol leadership had changed their opinion and stated that the evidence presented on the failure of the O-rings was inconclusive and that there was a substantial margin in the event of a failure or erosion. They stated that their decision was to proceed with the launch.
When McDonald told Mulloy that, as the onsite representative at KSC he would not sign off on the decision, Mulloy demanded that Morton Thiokol provide a signed recommendation to launch; Kilminster confirmed that he would sign it and fax it from Utah immediately, and the teleconference ended. Mulloy called Arnold Aldrich, the NASA Mission Management Team Leader, to discuss the launch decision and weather concerns, but did not mention the O-ring discussion; the two agreed to proceed with the launch.
Dunno about you, but it sounds a lot like NASA, especially Lawrence Mulloy, practically twisted Morton Thiokol’s arms until one of them (Joe Kilminster) relented and signed off on the launch. Mulloy even lied by omission at the end there to get his way. I wonder how he could sleep at night after this stunt.
I think I was in 7th grade. We were watching. Right in front of our eyes and could hardly believe it. Everyone inhaled sharply and then a couple of short screems, then silence. After a good 5 minutes, our teacher came to his senses, turned off the TV, and started talking about being right with god because you never know when it’s your turn.
🤣…the teacher chose threatening with hellfire and brimstone. OMG.
Lutheran church school.
Yeah, that tracks. With any religious person even at a non-religious school.
Damn that’s cold
“No matter how good your life is, you could be next, children!”
Sad thing is, it likely reinforced the already strong indoctrination of a handful of those kids
I realized something was “off” when I found out that they counted my donations and sent me a letter saying that I was behind.
K through 8th grade and then I dipped.
LOL
Perfect time for some biblethumping
Americans Bein the First Nation dropping a nuke on another country…
We almost went to whole thread without someone mentioning that. Thank you for your service
“stop making me feeling bad about us nuking 2 cities”
Waaahhh waaaahhh moooommmmyyy everyone is mean to me since I nuked Japan twice, they are constantly reminding me of it waaaaaah
nukes
I watched it in person, sort of.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.
