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February 10 - February 28, 2025
Maxime Faget—the
At forty-seven, Max Faget was regarded by many of the engineers he worked with as something approaching a genius.
The Fagets led a peripatetic life, moving from Central America to Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Norfolk, Virginia.
Yuri Gagarin had already become the first man in space, with the launch of Vostok 1 in April 1961, and
In reality, the laboratory was intended as a top secret manned spy satellite, crewed by Air Force and Navy astronauts with access to the most sensitive intelligence products of the CIA, and trained to shoot high-definition photographs of the USSR from orbit using a massive and sophisticated camera code-named DORIAN.
beyond 330,000 feet, over the internationally recognized boundary of space—the Karman Line,
Other key parts of the original concept would soon be abandoned, too—including the rocket-powered escape system necessary to save the crew if the spacecraft faced imminent destruction, especially during launch. Another of Faget’s innovations, some version of this system had been built into every previous NASA manned spacecraft since the beginning of the program; but now weight—and cost—meant that it had to go.
In June 1961—a month after Alan Shepard had become the first American in space—then
John Glenn, the recently minted national hero who had become the first American to orbit the Earth
Nine months later, on June 16, 1963, the Soviet authorities announced their latest propaganda triumph: twenty-six-year-old cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, a former textile worker and amateur parachutist with a recent trade school qualification as a “cotton spinning technologist,” had become the first woman in space. In a three-day journey aboard her Vostok 6 capsule, Tereshkova had orbited the earth forty-eight times—her single spaceflight longer than the total of all those made by US astronauts to date.
US Information Agency—effectively the propaganda arm of the State Department, with
Chuck Yeager—the first man to break the sound barrier, portrayed
Buzz Aldrin, who would become the second man to walk on the moon. Ed
The first African American selected to join the US astronaut program, Major Robert H. Lawrence,
This was Challenger, named after a Royal Navy ship that had led a landmark nineteenth-century oceanographic expedition. “The pioneer spirit still flourishes in America,” the President said.
While Sally Ride and her new husband liked to spend their evenings at home playing the fantasy-themed video game Zork on their Apple III computer,
But if at any point two or more of the main engines failed, or one simply caught fire or blew up during the ascent, the entire orbiter was almost certainly doomed. The solid rockets were another story.
Sally Ride the first female astronaut, and
Guy Bluford became the first African American in orbit.
Judy Resnik at last became the second American woman in space.
“an unemployed, undereducated, ne’er-do-well”
Hey its me!!!
“We don’t need to send one teacher into space,” the union president said. “We need to send all teachers into their classrooms fully equipped and ready to help students learn.
John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth,
concerned about flaws in the design of the door-latching mechanism, which he suspected could cause them to open in flight.
When they suggested to Mulloy that he place a restriction on future shuttle missions, to forbid launching if the air temperature was below what they’d seen in the O-rings after that record low in January—fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit—the Marshall engineer angrily refused. “Come on—this is a hundred-year event, for Christ’s sake!” he said. “Do you think that this is going to happen again before we fix the joint? No!”
But when Boisjoly reported the findings to his manager in the engineering department at Thiokol, he told him to keep the data to himself; it would be too damaging to the company if anyone at NASA learned what they had found.
“We need to shut the back gate,” he shouted, “and stop sending this shit out of here!” His colleagues barely raised their heads from their desks. “Oh,” they said wearily, “that’s Bob.”
:(
STS-51-L.
Mrs. McAuliffe fearlessly swung the plane into a barrel roll.
Badass
“All of America is watching and waiting,” CNN’s space correspondent Tom Mintier reported in a morning news update.
At fifty-eight seconds, an orange flame flared through the field joint at the bottom of the right booster.
Alert to the government’s capacity for incompetence and dishonesty,
McDonald no longer had any doubt: his boosters had killed the astronauts, after all.
first launch of Columbia in 1981
Dick Truly
and thus bring to an end what he called “this Orwellian nightmare that many of us find ourselves trapped within.”
Concluding with a desolate “GOD HELP US ALL,” the letter was signed, “APOCALYPSE.”
Hard
the failure of the aft field joint in the shuttle’s right-hand solid rocket booster.
Tumbling gently in free fall, it took two minutes and forty-five seconds for the broken section of Challenger to hit the Atlantic, and it now seemed possible that the seven members of the crew might have been alive the whole way down.
Wow
The volume of air remaining in Smith’s pack also revealed that someone had been breathing from the supply for around two and a half minutes: almost exactly the length of time it took for the sundered crew cabin to fall the twelve miles from its apogee to the surface of the Atlantic.
Holy shit
Barbara Morgan, the Idaho schoolteacher who had been Christa McAuliffe’s backup on Challenger—having quit her job, moved to Houston, and spent nine years in preparation to become a fully trained astronaut—at
