01-28-2010, 05:23 PM
Just realized that today is the 24th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.
Myself and all of my roommates at the time (college Juniors) were awakened by one of our friends who entered our apartment (someone must have left the door unlocked) and woke us up with shouts of "the shuttle just blew up!"
After shaking off the grogginess, we quickly turned on the TV. A VHS tape was ready to go in the VCR, so I recorded the news coverage for posterity. I can still remember Dan Rather's voice (probably because of his gaffe):
"...a major man malfunction..."
My other memories of this are of how the Morton Thiokol management told the engineers to "take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats" to see if their decision (go/no-go on launching) would change. This is something I remember to this day and think about whenever I feel pressure to compromise my engineering for political purposes.
Myself and all of my roommates at the time (college Juniors) were awakened by one of our friends who entered our apartment (someone must have left the door unlocked) and woke us up with shouts of "the shuttle just blew up!"
After shaking off the grogginess, we quickly turned on the TV. A VHS tape was ready to go in the VCR, so I recorded the news coverage for posterity. I can still remember Dan Rather's voice (probably because of his gaffe):
"...a major man malfunction..."
My other memories of this are of how the Morton Thiokol management told the engineers to "take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats" to see if their decision (go/no-go on launching) would change. This is something I remember to this day and think about whenever I feel pressure to compromise my engineering for political purposes.
