So today is the seventeenth anniversary of the space shuttle blowing up. I saw this documentary last year about that day and what exactly happened (it took fifteen years or so to come out with all the facts apparently), and the shocking part is that a lot of people sorta had a feeling that this was exactly what was gonna happen.
The company that made the O-rings (which cracked because of the extreme cold, releasing oxygen, which was flammable blah blah blah something) had tested their product in low temperatures and knew how it would perform. They told NASA about it. The launch was delayed and delayed. The thing about the O-rings was even passed on to everyone in a memo. But then at the last minute a bunch of suits decided, oh, it will be FINE, stop WORRYING, and they went ahead with the launch. And we all know what happened next.
Of course from then on NASA decided, hey, maybe safety should be first and maybe we should listen to the scientists instead of the suits, I dunno call me crazy.
Also HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHANNON!!!
Oh well
I’m sure the suits just said, “Yeah well, nobody said space was safe.”
Re: Oh well
Actually what the suits did was ignore years of cost-risk analyses which said that launching in freezing temperatures significantly increased chances of disaster.
Also NASA has for many years claimed that space travel is safer than it really is; for example saying that the first space shuttle launch in 1981 had a one in one hundred thousand failure probability, when it was really one in fifty considering that the heat-resistant tiles had never been tested in a real re-entry scenario. So anyway, they got lucky that time.
Re: Oh well
I could swear that you posted a line about the recent tragedy where you wrote “nobody said space was safe.” Did I make that up? Or did you edit it? Because that line was what I was responding to in my post, which apparently was untrue, since NASA did say space was safe. It was also a very flippant remark. But I must have hallucinated. My apologies.