re: #168 ausador

Saw one Apollo launch at cape Canaveral as a kid, range safety minimum distance requirements means that it wasn’t quite so intense as your experience. I went to two shuttle launches at the beginning of the program, they were awesome to watch because you could follow the shuttle for so long with the naked eye.

I was working a contract at Brevard Correctional Institution when the Challenger disaster happened, about 12 miles from the cape. It was during the pre-lunchtime head count of inmates so my four man crew and two officers were standing outside on an otherwise deserted compound.

When the shuttle blew it created a ball of smoke/vapor and the solid rocket boosters diverged leaving smoke trails of their own. One of the officers standing next to me said “OMG it looks like the playboy bunny” it honestly did for just a second. The left booster had flipped downward and the smoke trails from the two of them looked like the ears of the iconic rabbit coming from the large smoke ball “head.”

It took us all a few seconds to realize what we had just seen, it doesn’t immediately hit you that you just witnessed a catastrophe like that. You could see the larger pieces of debris falling towards the treeline, some leaving their own vapor trails.

I looked at my watch when the thought struck me and remember saying “I hope they’re dead” because I couldn’t imagine anything much more horrible than falling helplessly for so long. It took the debris over two minutes to drop below our horizon of treetops surrounding the Institution.

Considerably later the NASA investigation revealed that guarded switches on the flight deck had been manipulated and that four of the emergency air-packs had been activated. So…yeah… :(

I had just come off of a job on a near Hellhole Bayou (no shit) where I got my five mile pin (deep well, more than five miles, a complete duster, an expensive mistake that Federal tax law allowed Royal Dutch Shell to write off as a loss) and was sitting in the ExLog office in Lafayette when the Challenger disintegrated.

An odd time. In December of ‘85, the price of oil collapsed and I knew I was going to get laid off, as exploration budgets were also collapsing. So I’m waiting for the hammer to fall (it happened a month later, with no work being offered in between) and we were watching the launch and the space ship blows up. It’s clear to me what has just happened and I am looking at the various streamers coming off of the detonation (“Obviously, a major malfunction”…no shit, mission control) and there are big chunks flying off the front end. And I knew. I knew that the crew compartment had remained pretty much intact, as it was the strongest component on the ship. And it was furthest from the explosion of the external tank.

As an ex-AF pilot, my biggest fear was always about being trapped in a crashed plane and burning to death. Watching the unfolding horror, I realized that those people in the crew capsule were going to hit the Atlantic Ocean conscious, if they deployed supplemental oxygen (and why wouldn’t they?) and were perfectly aware of their fate.

I just started crying, and the other people in the room asked me why.