how much do you know about the Challenger disaster
I know nothing about Challenger or the disaster
I know what the Challenger disaster is
I know what the Challenger disaster is and why it happened
See ResultsPlease reblog to increase sample size, I am trying to find out how much normal people know about this because I am Not Normal and my assumed baseline of knowledge cannot be trusted
You guys gotta reblog come on
This was the origin of a meme amongst my friends for years. This was pre-9/11, and we were sitting around at a party discussing the Challenger Disaster, with the “Where were you when you found out?” I heard that something had happened that morning, but was fuzzy on the details. I remember one of my teachers crying.
Then, just after lunch, I went to journalism class and they had the TVs up showing the news. That’s when I got to see it.
My friend said, “You were in GRADE SCHOOl? I was in GRAD school!!!”
Which rapidly became “I was in Grad School/I was in Grade School!”
My other friend had the best story, though. He had been at work. At McDonnell Douglas.
@infamousbrad , would you like to tell your story?
Sure, I can do that, it’s also a glimpse into life pre-Internet.
I was working in the McDonnell Aircraft’s QA division, doing minicomputer support. I had the 11th IBM PC that Mac ever bought sitting in my cube, and I’d improvised a cable compatible with our spare dial-up modems so I could run a BBS off of it in the evenings.
And one morning my supervisor comes up to me and said, “Can you get the news on that thing?” Which would have been hugely illegal, since we were in a secure environment, but before I could deny it, he said, “This one time you’re not in trouble. Something big just happened. Everybody VP and above just disappeared into a conference room at HQ, nobody knows why, nothing’s leaking out, and all of our buildings are under lockdown. The managers NEED to know.”
Well, I had a personal CompuServe (pre-Internet Reddit) account, and I had written some some mediocre terminal software in MS-BASIC for PC, so I dialed out to CompuServe, which had an Associated Press forum that posted quarter-hour news updates.
So for the whole day, I was the only person locked into McDonnell Douglas who knew how to get news, which I refreshed and printed out so my boss could fax it to all the other bosses every 15 minutes, and within the first hour we knew that the earliest zoomed-in photos showed that the starting point of the explosion was the tip of the nose of one of the side boosters.
We made those nose cones. I spent the whole day smuggling information across the information quarantine to people who desperately wanted to know, “Are we the ones who killed the first Teacher in Space?”
(We weren’t. The reason that solid-rocket-booster nose-cone drilled into the side of the main external liquid-fuel tank was because of a thrust-breach way farther down the stack. Which didn’t come out until overnight. But that was a weird day to be working at almost any rocket-parts company.)
(Also, journalism historians should really mark the day that the AP broke the print-journalism monopoly on its content as the beginning of the death of journalism as we knew it. A few newspaper publishers were all up in arms about it at the time, but it was hard to explain to us CompuServe users just how important that news-monopoly was to funding investigative journalism. It was Craigslist before there was Craigslist.)