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Saturday, March 10, 2012

New Super 8 video of the Challenger explosion

Saw this over at Free North Carolina



6 comments:

  1. If this is real, it looks like there was something screwed up right from the initial launch. It started to veer immediately. Not sure if I ever saw that before. I have a piece of Express Mail that was launched aboard Challenger on an earlier mission. It was a souvenir put out by the USPS, and has a couple postmarks on it (Launched blah blah blah) and another one (Returned to Earth) and the dates of course.

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  2. The Challenger disaster is yet another example of a gov. agency screwing up. NASA managers knew about a potential flaw in the booster rockets design, but considered it an "acceptable flight risk" and did nothing about it. Similar thing with the Columbia disaster; the engineers suspected damage was done to Columbia's tiles on launch and wanted to inspect them, but NASA managers refused to allow this.

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  3. After all these years, it's still hard to watch.

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  4. No, the liftoff was nominal, up to where the booster started it's burn-through. The motion you're seeing is part of the normal "pitch over" maneuver they do after liftoff.
    This is the first film I've seen where you could see the Range Safety Officer "terminate" the thrust of the Solid Rocket Boosters.
    For those who don't know, every shuttle had a destruct package on it. The one for the Solid Rocket Boosters was a strip of what's basically "det cord" running down the length of the booster. When fired, it split the booster segments open lengthwise, ending the thrust.

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  5. during this launch I had the last part of "A day in the life", running through my head. It was the last part of the song where the buildup to the piano cord is hit then letting it fade out to nothing. That whole thing lasts about as long as the launch and ending with the explosion and the results of it.
    The Beatles wrote the music for this event decades before it actually happened.
    Another thing about this video, the guy you can hear sound stunned that the shuttle blew up. He just saw it do it, how could he be stunned when he actually hears control say the shuttle blew up?
    Plus no one there watch this even knew that it was an explosion and not a normal launch.

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  6. I remember when that happened. Sad day.

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