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Apollo's Tragic Mission
00:11:16
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| And here on C-SPAN, we're expecting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to address reporters following a two-day meeting on monetary policy. | ||
| Just moments ago, the Fed announcing its latest decision it will not be changing the level of interest rates. | ||
| This is the Federal Reserve's first policy meeting of the year after announcing three rate cuts in 2025. | ||
| The news conference comes after the Justice Department recently launched a criminal investigation into Chairman Powell over his testimony before Congress about the cost of renovations of the central bank's headquarters. | ||
| President Trump has also reportedly called for the Fed to lower interest rates and has been telling reporters that he has narrowed down his search for the next Fed chair as Chairman Powell's term expires in May. | ||
| We're expecting the chair to hold the press conference at 2.30 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| And when it begins, we'll bring you live coverage right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Today marks 40 years since the space shuttle Challenger broke apart and exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. | ||
| It was 11.39 a.m. Eastern on January the 28th of 1986 when the seven members of the crew, as Ronald Reagan would later tell America, slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. | ||
| Joining us to discuss the anniversary is Florida State University History Professor Ronald Dole. | ||
| And Professor Dole, it was one of those days where people remember where they were when it happened. | ||
| Where were you when it happened? | ||
| What do you remember about that day? | ||
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It's indeed a flashball memory event. | |
| And I was lucky in one way to be a member of the Press Corps and as a historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, one of NASA's main facilities. | ||
| But I was there for the Voyager 2 spacecraft, the unmanned spacecraft encounter with the planet Uranus, the first time that any spacecraft had reached there. | ||
| It was an extraordinary time for discovery and then an absolute tragedy when the news broke in the press room at JPL. | ||
| What was your immediate reaction? | ||
| There was shock and there was powerful emotion. | ||
| NASA is in some ways a large community. | ||
| Certainly 40 years ago, people, if they didn't know others, they didn't know that the astronauts on board the shuttle, some of the planetary scientists who were at JPL had trained some of the astronauts who were part of the Apollo program. | ||
| What would it be like to do geology on the moon? | ||
| So it was the kind of tragedy at JPL that we experience when there's a loss, an unexpected loss within a family. | ||
| What was the Challenger's mission that day? | ||
| Why was it going up? | ||
| Among all the shuttle missions had a number of components and goals, but one of the key ones was to bring the first civilian into space, the first teacher in space, which was something that President Ronald Reagan was going to announce in the State of the Union address. | ||
| And it was clear that one of the main strengths of that particular mission would be to demonstrate the reliability of the shuttle, access into space, the ability of a civilian, a teacher coming out of our school system, to be doing a classroom from space. | ||
| Her name, Kristen McAuliffe. | ||
| How did she get chosen for the Challenger mission? | ||
| Apparently, 15,000 teachers applied from around the country. | ||
| And Kristen McCalla had a lot of energy, was able to share her enthusiasm particularly well, was suited for the physical rigor of doing astronaut training. | ||
| All those factors came together. | ||
| When that moment happened and the country saw the tragedy of the Challenger exploding, you mentioned you were shocked. | ||
| What was the history to that point, till 1986, of SA and the U.S. losing astronauts to tragedies as we tried to explore the final frontier as it was known? | ||
| Back in the 1960s, the second half of the 60s, people remember the Apollo 1 fire. | ||
| It was a test of the capsule that would take people to the moon, and a spark on board the spacecraft when it was at the Cape ignited a fire and killed those astronauts. | ||
| It was also an enormous tragedy, but it was not a launch event. | ||
| There weren't people expecting a particular outcome. | ||
| Then came the successful Apollo missions. | ||
| Apollo 8, Christmas Eve on 1968, the first orbit of the moon, the photographs that came back of Earthrise that became iconic. | ||
| And then in July 69, the landing of Apollo 11, the first humans on the moon. | ||
| Apollo 13, there was a problem with the spacecraft, but all the astronauts came back safely. | ||
| So there was a growing sense that NASA had figured out how to operate safely in space. | ||
| And we'll be exploring the history of space travel at NASA on C-SPAN's American History TV on C-SPAN 2 for our viewers throughout the day on Saturday, this coming Saturday, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Encourage viewers who want to watch eight hours of the history of NASA. | ||
| Tune in throughout the day. | ||
| Professor Dole, as we focus on the Challenger, what was the space shuttle? | ||
| Why was it built? | ||
| What was its purpose, especially in the wake of the Apollo missions and the successful dozen Americans who ended up walking on the moon? | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| And as you so well put it, we've reached the moon. | ||
| We've explored. | ||
| What do we do now? | ||
| Where do we go from here? | ||
| And one of the ideas that emerged, could NASA figure out a way to get people and material into space cheaply, reliably, in a vehicle that could be launched but then flown back to Earth, be reusable. | ||
| It's a bit of a crude term, but at the time, some people were thinking of the shuttle as a kind of space truck or space bus, an easy, fast way to return to space, to help build space stations. | ||
| So the focus became how to get these shuttles built, launched, quickly, refitted, sent back into space. | ||
| And in contrast, and this is something that's become much clearer over the decades since then, the numbers of redundancy systems that helped make Apollo such a robust technology that made it work in the way that it did, were not as deeply engineered into the space shuttle program. | ||
| There were vulnerabilities, call them red flags, deviations from expected behavior of a particular part of the technology that increasingly became accepted. | ||
| Perhaps it wasn't going to be that big a risk. | ||
| And in January 1986, one of those risks that had been identified came to claim the shuttle itself. | ||
| What was this specific vulnerability after a very long investigation in the wake of the Challenger explosion? | ||
| What went wrong? | ||
| The shuttle launch had both a liquid rocket in the center and two solid rocket boosters, all needed to get a heavy spacecraft into space. | ||
| And the solid rocket boosters, they're huge and they couldn't be transported as a single piece. | ||
| They were joined and at the joints was what was called an O-ring. | ||
| Easy to imagine. | ||
| It was the way to seal all the segments of this long tube that held the solid propellant that would be burning. | ||
| And you needed a seal to be kept quite strong, prevent any flame from leaking out the side. | ||
| Engineers at the company that designed and built the solid rocket boosters, Morton Thiokol, the engineers realized it was cold at the Cape that day, much colder than the design specifics for the kind of material, the rubber, that was used for the O-ring. | ||
| And they said there's a danger. | ||
| If you fly the space shuttle at this temperature on this frigid day, there's a possibility that seal won't hold. | ||
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Columbia Disaster Reflections
00:13:12
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| And that's exactly what unfolded. | ||
| And as we said, it was a moment that if you were alive, you probably remember where you were that day. | ||
| Happy to hear those stories from callers, what you remember about that tragedy that the nation watched together. | ||
| Here's how you can call in this morning. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zones, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202748-8001. | ||
| Professor Dole, as folks are calling in, that day was supposed to be the day, as you mentioned, that President Reagan would give his State of the Union address. | ||
| That address was postponed, and President Reagan addressed the country from the Oval Office about five minutes. | ||
| He spoke about the tragedy and about what it meant for the United States and for space travel. | ||
| This is about a minute and a half of what he told the country. | ||
| We'll continue our quest in space. | ||
| There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews, and yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. | ||
| Nothing ends here. | ||
| Our hopes and our journeys continue. | ||
| I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades, and we know of your anguish. | ||
| We share it. | ||
| There's a coincidence today. | ||
| On this day, 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. | ||
| In his lifetime, the great frontiers were the oceans, and the historian later said he lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it. | ||
| Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew, their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. | ||
| The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger honored us for the manner in which they lived their lives. | ||
| We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. | ||
| That was President Reagan 40 years ago this evening in the wake of the Challenger disaster. | ||
| Professor Dole, what did that speech mean to the country? | ||
| It wasn't a speech, it was a five-minute statement. | ||
| But what did it mean and what did it mean for the future of the space program after that disaster? | ||
| The speech was important given the shock and just sadness that was in the country in that moment. | ||
| And it was probably reassuring to many people to hear a framing that exploration isn't going to end with any one particular tragedy. | ||
| There's still a national commitment to continue to get humans into space. | ||
| Viewers writing in about their experience and what they remember from that day, here's a couple. | ||
| I was in elementary school. | ||
| The teachers combined a few of the classes into the same room for us to all watch live. | ||
| They wheeled in the box TV and we gathered excitedly. | ||
| And when it exploded, it was terrifying. | ||
| And the teachers' reaction, I will never forget. | ||
| I will never forget that day ever. | ||
| This is MLB saying, I was sitting watching the space launch with my children when that tragedy happened. | ||
| I remember her father's face, and it was apparent that something had happened. | ||
| And one more from Clown writes: Was this event the biggest turning point in NASA? | ||
| How is this event the beginning of granting money out of NASA and into the hands of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? | ||
| How would you answer those final two questions? | ||
| Was it the biggest turning point for NASA? | ||
| Really good questions. | ||
| There probably are numerous turning points. | ||
| The decision early on in NASA's history when President Kennedy committed NASA and the country to get humans to the moon by the end of the decade, that was certainly a pivotal moment. | ||
| The shuttle program and the tragedy and then the later tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia were also turning points perhaps back in 1976 when the Viking landers reached the surface of Mars, transmitted photographs. | ||
| One can think of many, many points that were pivotal for future directions. | ||
| On the good question of private investment, there are patterns we can see in history that areas that are remote initially require the resources of a state of a nation to reach. | ||
| Once technologies advance, once opportunities emerge, private ventures start to become more and more significant. | ||
| And it's 40 years since the time of the Challenger loss. | ||
| And of course, private contractors were already building key components of NASA's spacecraft and the vehicles. | ||
| And it's been an evolution since that point. | ||
| You mentioned the Columbia disaster. | ||
| That was about 17 years after the space shuttle Challenger. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| And was that the end of the space shuttle program? | ||
| You know, it was clear that the shuttles had a shelf life. | ||
| They weren't going to be operating continuously for the longest haul. | ||
| But when pieces of foam insulation from the main tank, the liquid tank, fell off, broke, hit the wing and damaged it, caused it to not be sealed. | ||
| And when Columbia went back into the atmosphere, in effect, there wasn't a heat shield intact anymore. | ||
| And the spacecraft burned, disintegrated as it flew, descended over the United States. | ||
| And I think I'm dropping a second question, John, that you were raising. | ||
| Whether this was the end of the shuttle program, the Columbia disaster, and when the shuttle program actually ended. | ||
| It helped accelerate the end, but it wasn't a turning point in the sense that it would have continued indefinitely had there not been that accident. | ||
| Shuttles that by that point, generally, NASA and the broader space community had come to understand the ambitions for that technology just couldn't be reached. | ||
| The shuttles couldn't be launched that frequently needed care and attention between launch attempts and new ideas for getting into space were already in view by the time the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry. | ||
| On this, the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, viewers writing in to say where they were and what they remember about that day. | ||
| Here's another one, Stephen Tampa saying, I was in Orlando watching it on TV. | ||
| I went outside and I saw two plumes going in different directions, and I thought it was the boosters dropping off. | ||
| Four hours later, it was still a cloud in the same location, which I found to be quite eerie. | ||
| Steve's memories from Tampa, Florida. | ||
| Happy to hear your memories from that day from 40 years ago of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. | ||
| 202748-8000. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zones and you want to call in, 202748-8001, if you're in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, this is Amy in California. | ||
| Amy, good morning. | ||
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Yes, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to make a comment. | ||
| I was home that day. | ||
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My son was sick. | |
| He was nine at the time, so I was home from work and he was out of school. | ||
| And we were just here in California, and we were watching that as it unfolded. | ||
| And it just, it was so shocking, you know, because we started out watching it as an exciting event on TV. | ||
| And you just, it was just unimaginable. | ||
| It took a couple hours to process what really happened. | ||
| And I still remember to this day, you know, watching it. | ||
| It's just shocking. | ||
| Amy, thanks for the call. | ||
| Professor Dole, from these memories from folks that we've read and from Amy there, what do you take from everybody sort of having that reaction that you had the shock of the thing? | ||
| You know, when Amy mentioned that, and yes, it took hours for people in the press room at JPL to recover enough to some were crying, some of the reporters who were there to cover the Voyager encounter with Uranus were immediately sent elsewhere in the country to cover the Challenger story. | ||
| You know, Amy, you were watching television in the press room. | ||
| There were monitors set up to project the newest images that were coming back from the Voyager spacecraft. | ||
| They were even at light speed taking over two and a half hours to get down to Earth. | ||
| Line by line by line, images of Uranus and the planets, the moons orbiting Uranus became visible for the first time. | ||
| And then that same television set switched to show exactly what you remembered: the launch, the explosion, the solid rocket boosters tearing away from the spacecraft. | ||
| All that was very much a shared memory. | ||
| A little earlier, you talked about the red flags when it came to the space shuttle itself and the concerns about launching in the bitter cold that day. | ||
| When the final investigation happened, was there any blame assigned here? | ||
| What did the Rogers Commission, as it eventually was known as, what did they determine was wrong and who made the mistake? | ||
| Initially, there was concern was somehow at the lowest levels of NASA information about the vulnerability not communicated upward. | ||
| Looking back now, knowing much more about what happened, it's easier to look at the kinds of pressures that exist for any large technological systems where the state, in this case, | ||
| the federal government is a key patron doing what seemed necessary to make certain that the federal government was happy with the progress NASA was making with the shuttle program and all of NASA's programs. | ||
| It influenced the thinking of people at higher levels of NASA to minimize risks that in a different environment might have been taken far more seriously. | ||
| So in the end, I think the best perception and perspective on what happened is we need to be careful when we are developing these complex systems to find ways to try to really value the expert opinion, | ||
| the engineers' opinions, and figure out ways to weigh that against the larger concerns about survivability of institutions and agencies that occur at higher levels. | ||
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Private Space Dependence
00:00:21
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| Is it your opinion that that is more likely to happen when it comes to private space travel as opposed to NASA leading the way? | ||
| It could, and again, it will depend on a range of factors, including the larger funding environment. | ||