I was in kindergarten. I can imagine the trauma in schools was even greater for school children from this than it was for 9/11. At least most schools didn't tune in to the coverage immediately, and nobody saw the beginning live. But with Challenger, potentially millions of school children saw seven people die on live TV. A very large number of those (most of the younger contingent) likely did not comprehend death before that, and were forced to learn some very hard lessons before they otherwise would've had to. Think about that for a second. That's exactly why I mentioned that red line. NASA made the decision to override the warning. The video you posted showed exactly why they should not have done that.
The top article, a focus on Christa McAuliffe, is here. There would be more articles on the other astronauts inside. A complete list of the articles in that day's Orlando Sentinel is here. The headline article is here from a 2011 feature. The lower article, headlined "Pictures show blast first hit fuel tank", is here. Editorial cartoon from Dana Summers (one of his earliest works at the Sentinel, he's still the paper's editorial cartoonist today)
On this day 49 years ago, NASA went off on one of the dumbest ideas in the history of unmanned spaceflight: they sent a probe to impact the Moon with little more than a pair of television cameras to observe its own demise. Ranger 6 was launched by an Atlas ballistic missile with an Agena upper stage (the same kind that later Gemini flights would use as a docking target). Previous models of the Ranger probe had a battery of experiments, including an instrument package meant to survive impact. The new design, from Ranger 6 on, decided just to bring television cameras. It would reach the Moon three days later, but the television cameras--its only equipment, mind you--failed before impact.
The first of the next generation TDRS satellites is being launched tonight. Ustream link here. Launch window begins at 8:48pm EST. EDIT 8:32pm: 10% chance of weather interruption, with wind elevated but within limits. If it doesn't go immediately at 8:48, the window will close briefly at 8:49 due to a collision avoidance issue, then re-open at 8:50 through 9:28. EDIT 8:57pm: Launch went on schedule. It was perfectly clear, and I was able to see it from my home in Orlando with my binoculars through Centaur upper stage ignition. TDRS-K will be placed in a geosynchronous orbit. EDIT 9:06pm: Cutoff of the Centaur upper stage. It will coast for about 90 minutes before the second burn, which will raise its apogee to geosynchronous height. A third burn will circularize the geosynchronous orbit. The current orbit has an apogee of just over 14,000 miles.
One last bit about the TDRS-K launch. Apparently it will remain in a transfer orbit for about a fortnight before its final burn to establish its proper location for geosynchronous orbit. 55 years ago today, the United States finally launched its first satellite into space, Explorer 1. It was perched atop a Juno 1 rocket, derived from the Redstone ballistic missile. Carrying a battery, temperature and micrometeoroid sensors and a cosmic ray sensor, it stayed active for 111 days, and decayed from its highly elliptical orbit in 1970.
South Korea has been trying since 2009, but its first two attempts failed. It's hard because the U.S. watches the missile situation on the Korean peninsula very closely. You see how apeshit they get when North Korea launches one. The Naro-1 rocket is derived from the Russian Angara rocket, with a solid fuel upper stage built by Korean Air. It sounds similar to Japan's Mu rockets in the 1970s and 1980s, which were derived from the same Castor solid motors used on the Delta rocket.
The asteroid 274301, previously classified as 2008 QH34, has been officially named "Wikipedia". It was discovered by the Andrushivka Observatory in Ukraine, and the name was offered by its owner, Yuri Ivashchenko. Little is known about the object. It is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is in a relatively eccentric orbit, with a perihelion of about 300 million km and an aphelion of 400 million km, and an orbital inclination of 7°.
I remember where I was ten years ago today. It was a Sunday, and I was having breakfast at the end of an Order of the Arrow camping weekend (I was an adult leader at that time) at the area Scout camp reservation. The camp cafeteria had TVs on at times, so I went by one of them. Being a follower of the space program, I knew STS-107 would be landing that morning. Even there, we would get the twin sonic booms as it passed over the Florida peninsula. What I saw on the news was the streak going over Texas as Columbia disintegrated. Ten years ago today, the space shuttle Columbia burned up upon re-entry. Damage to the leading edge of one of the wings caused by shed insulation from the external tank during launch doomed the orbiter. In the resulting investigation, the independent panel made the decision that the Space Shuttle program should've never been regarded as "operational" by its very nature. Flights separate from the ISS were banned; only a final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope was authorized beyond the scope of constructing the ISS. Mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown and Laurel Clark were buried at Arlington. Commander Rick Husband, Pilot Willie McCool and payload specialist Ilan Ramon were given private burials. Kalpana Chawla was cremated. Memorials for them are everywhere, and the area where the Spirit rover explored Mars was renamed the Columbia Hills, with each of seven nearby hills receiving an astronaut's name. The exploration of Husband Hill would be a large part of that mission. From that moment until the Space Shuttle program ended, the twin sonic booms became more a comfort than anything else. "The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on." -George W. Bush
(I couldn't find better. This was a cover sheet over the normal front page, and Newseum doesn't have it.) Meanwhile, in Russia, it's business as usual as they launch Progress M-47 to the International Space Station on this day 10 years go.
On this day 44 years ago, NASA released a 12-month prospectus on the Apollo program that mapped out the next five flights, through Apollo 13. They needed to rebuild the schedule after delays in he lunar module led to the snap creation of Apollo 8. On this day in 1994, Japan launched their first H-II rocket. It carried two experimental payloads, one of which tested a re-entry pod. Two updated versions, the H-IIA (for regular satellites) and H-IIB (for their HTV payload vehicles to the ISS) are still used today, launching from JAXA's Tanegashima Space Center. Unlike the H-I, which was actually essentially a Delta rocket, the H-II is largely domestically-produced.
On this day 39 years ago, Mariner 10 flew by Venus on its way to becoming the first probe to visit Mercury. Yeah, Venus isn't much to look at in real color. And this was the best image yet of the planet. The telescopic cameras used by Mariner 10 would become the gold standard for deep space imaging until the innovation of charged coupled devices (CCDs), which were superior to vidicon tubes in digital imagery.
Rocket launch tomorrow. Russia-EU enterprise Starsem is launching a commercial Soyuz 2 rocket with six Globalstar 2 satellites for the Globalstar satellite phone constellation. They will be spread out in 1400-km orbits. The launch is from Site 31/6 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan, no earlier than 11:20am EST (22:20 local time). The Russian Space Agency has a webcast.
22 years ago today, Salyut 7, one of the Soviet space stations, re-entered the atmosphere and burned up. It was uncontrolled, burning up over the South Pacific and depositing some debris in Argentina. Needless to say, some of it was found, particularly near the town of Capitan Bermudez, which isn't that far from Buenos Aires. This is from a Spanish-language space blog, Prensa Espacial. Eleven missions visited Salyut 7, and the addition of a couple successive Almaz military modules tested the idea of the modular space station, an idea which would result directly in the Mir space station. The final mission, Soyuz T-15 in 1986, would transfer equipment from Salyut 7 to Mir. It would then sit derelict for about 4 1/2 years.
46 years ago today, the Soviets launched Kosmos 140, the last unmanned test flight of the Soyuz spacecraft before Soyuz 1. The problems suffered would foreshadow all of the issues that would be responsible for the deaths of four cosmonauts over two missions over four years. It suffered severe control deficiencies, the air pressure valve on the bottom of the spacecraft burned through (causing it to lose air pressure) during re-entry, and it crash-landed in the then-ice-covered Aral Sea. (You remember the Aral Sea, right? It's not there anymore. But I digress...) Space officials, under pressure to have a circumlunar flight in time for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, said humans could've solved the problems in orbit. They decided to press ahead with the plan for Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2, which would have two Soyuz craft dock in orbit. They wouldn't get that far. We'll get to that later. The valve issue would foretell what would eventually happen to Soyuz 11. That's also a story for a later time.
39 years ago today, the Skylab program came to an official end with the splashdown of Skylab 4, carrying Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Dr. Edward Gibson. None of them would fly again after they went on strike after the first month of a three-month mission. The Skylab Rescue mission was also canceled. The Saturn IB rocket (SA-209) and specially-fitted five-seat Apollo CSM (CSM-119) were rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for the last time. After an RCS leak afflicted the CSM for Skylab 3, Skylab Rescue was rolled out to Launch Pad 39B. They ultimately decided it was not needed. They decided to roll it out during Skylab 4 as well, just in case. If needed, Skylab Rescue would've been flown by Vance Brand and Don Lind. (Notice how they modified the Skylab model to remove a solar panel and add the two makeshift sunshades. Like I said earlier, we'll get to that.) Brand, on the left, would be CM pilot for Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, and would go on to command three Space Shuttle missions. (He would also almost become America's first in-flight fatality.) Lind wouldn't get to fly until 1985. The Skylab Rescue rocket is in the Rocket Garden of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The CSM is at the Apollo/Saturn V Center there.
On this day 42 years ago, Kennedy Space Center awarded a contract to a Titusville company to construct the "milkstool". It is essentially a steel construct designed to boost a Saturn IB rocket to be launched from Launch Complex 39's support structures. It was for the Skylab program and Apollo-Soyuz. Apollo 7, the only previous manned mission that used the Saturn IB rocket, used Launch Complex 34, but that was retired afterward to memorialize the Apollo 1 fire. Launch tomorrow: NASA is launching the next-generation Landsat-DCM Earth resources satellite into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB in California tomorrow. Launch window opens at 10:10am EST.
On this day 32 years ago, the Soviets launched Kosmos LEET on a Ukrainian Tsyklon-2 rocket. It was a military oceanography satellite. Seriously. It was Kosmos 1337.
Okay, the scheduled launch time for Landsat-DCM was actually 1:10pm EST. And they launched 8 minutes early, for whatever reason.
I thought I posted something already, but apparently didn't hit "post reply" before leaving. 50 years ago today, NASA contracted Marion Power Shovel to construct what is now a very familiar piece of machinery: the crawler-transporter. Two were made, and both are still waiting for new assignments at Kennedy Space Center today. Each one is 6 million pounds. Each one has two V16 diesel engines for driving, two dedicated engines for jacking and steering, and 16 transmission motors. They have a top speed of 1 mph when carrying a Saturn V or Space Shuttle stack, and 2 mph unloaded. In the 1990s, KSC nicknamed them "Hans" and "Franz".
42 years ago today, Rockwell Rocketdyne (Rocketdyne is now a division of Pratt & Whitney) was awarded the contract to develop the RS-25 rocket engine for the Space Shuttle. It would eventually become known as the Space Shuttle Main Engine, or SSME. One of the first reusable liquid-fuel rocket engines of its size, each one has 415,000 lbs of thrust at sea level, and 513,000 lbs of thrust in a vacuum. There are still 42 of these engines around. Worn-out nozzles were installed on the remaining Space Shuttles for display purposes. The engines are going to be disposed of through use in the upcoming Space Launch System.
On this day 13 years ago, the NEAR Shoemaker probe entered orbit around asteroid 433 Eros. It flew by the asteroid in 1998 before this orbit insertion. It spent exactly 364 days in orbit around the asteroid. On February 12, 2011 (this is one of the events I meant to write up two days ago that I lost), it was commanded to crash-land on the asteroid. It actually survived the landing, and would continue to send signals for the next two weeks. During that time, it used its gamma ray spectrometer to study the asteroid's composition at point-blank range. It is named after noted 20th-century astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, who discovered many comets, including the one that spectacularly impacted Jupiter in 1994.
Lately officials have been making a big deal about a meteoroid that is expected to pass very close to Earth this afternoon EST. They weren't so much expecting this: A meteorite streaked through the atmosphere over central Russia this morning, exploding at a height of about 10,000 metres over the city of Chelyabinsk. The shock wave from the air blast shattered windows and partially collapsed a factory roof. About 500 people were injured, though none critically. Some believe the remnants landed in Chebarkul Lake. Officials in Kazakhstan, however, are looking for two unidentified objects in Aktobe, which is close to where this incident took place. It is not believed to be the asteroid that is expected today, 2012 DA14. That one will pass about 17,500 miles from Earth, the closest recorded approach by an object that size. That object is 50 m wide. If 2012 DA14 struck Earth (which is not expected to for at least the next 100 years), it would be equivalent to the Tunguska event in 1908 when a meteorite exploded over Siberia with the force of a small thermonuclear bomb, flattening several hundred square miles of forest. UPDATE: Casualties increased to 950, with two children in intensive care.
On this day 45 years ago, the Soyuz VI--a Soyuz spacecraft fitted for combat--was forcibly canceled by the Soviet Space Agency under protest from the Russian military. Although military reconnaisance from space was already underway on both sides by that time, this is the closest we would come to actual space warfare before the Outer Space Treaty of 1969 would ban such pursuits. There would be other studies on both sides, but nothing reached the engineering phase. On this day in 1976, the Soviet N1 moon rocket--their answer to the Saturn V--was formally canceled after four failed test launches between 1969 and 1972. One of them, in early July 1969, fell back and nuked its launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome. (That's more descriptive than literal; it's the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in history.) The Politburo ordered all equipment destroyed, but their unique NK-33 supercharged rocket engines were retained and hidden. They were uncovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, and were used successfully on the American Atlas III rocket. Their derivates, built by NPO Energomash with help from Rocketdyne, are being used in the Zenit, Angara, Naro-1 and Atlas V rockets.