Braised! Fricaseed! Sauteed! He he he he” “Ladies and gentlemen, I come to you tonight to report on the state of the Union. President Reagan tried to take children's minds off the tragedy by telling a scary joke. The lack of gripping drama and graphic gore would be rectified on future exploding launches. Unfortunately, there were no cameras nor continuous audio feed from the cockpit so that the impressionable young audience could hear comments like, "Wait! What's that? AAAAAAAA!" Instead, students saw only nightmare-causing ambiguity, as NASA tracked an empty corridor of space with the nagging feeling that the Shuttle had gone down the freight elevator. But even baseball fans did not put everything together and conclude that the mission was jinxed. In fact, they had piled into and out of the cafeteria five of the preceding six days, as STS-51-L was delayed or scrubbed because of weather, unsuitability of the abort site, and lack of sufficient coins for the huge parking meters on Pad 39-B. (Students in Hawaii were awakened early.) At the time, students did not have cell phones, so boxy, clunky "monitors" were wheeled into school cafeterias so that eager students could view the roasting of an actual teacher. The launch was timed to be during the school day across the United States. However, Flight STS-51-L pioneered cumbersome and costly innovations in education like the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) and the National Anti-Bullying Rulebook. Why anyone would need to get taught from space is one of the many nagging questions that NASA Safety Engineers have not resolved. That is, there was not just a Teacher In Space but there was to be actual Teaching In Space. The Shuttle Student Involvement Program was to involve two lessons delivered from space. It was thus fitted with a full complement of acronyms, initials, and serial numbers so as to sound very official. Its mission was to launch the Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203) to observe Halley's Comet (Astronomical Object 1-800-GOT-TAIL?), and support the Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP). It was the only space shuttle that never wore the NASA "meatball" logo, which in retrospect, would have been in very bad taste, even for people who like theirs well-done.įor those without comedic tastes, the so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Flight STS-51-L.Ĭhallenger lifted-off from the Kennedy Space Center (39-B) on Janu(Date D-66666). The final Historic Firsts are that Challenger was the first Space Shuttle to carry a schoolteacher also the first to blow up in space. Challenger performed the first night launch and night landing of a Space Shuttle, though it never executed a "doubleheader," not even one involving separate admission tickets or free hot dogs. The Historic Firsts registered by Challenger include the first African American, the first Canadian, the first Aspie, the first talking pig, and the first stand-up comedian. It was also equipped with "engines rated for 104% maximum thrust," another innovation that would spread to the consumer sector when Spinal Tap popularized the super-loud amplifier whose Volume knob went up to 11.Ĭhallenger flew three missions a year from 1983 to 1985. This enabled more payload, and blazed a trail for Americans to load their children into deadly cars deliberately underpowered and lightened to meet arbitrary Fuel Economy standards. Even though STA-099 had been shaken, rattled, and rolled in its simulations, it had not suffered damage, or even wear, and certainly not gone "ka-blooie!" STA-099 was re-designated OV-099, as an Orbital Vehicle sounds much, much safer than a Structural Test Article.Ĭhallenger was given fewer ablative tiles to resist the heat of re-entry. Rather than refit the prototype, Enterprise (OV-101) with a copy of the instrumentation of the first Space Shuttle, Columbia (OV-102), NASA decided it would be cheaper to roll out the Structural Test Article and wire up some blinking lights and pushbuttons. That is, although STA-099 was built so as not to blow up more than one out of 10 tries, engineers certified that it would blow up fewer than 1 out of 12 times. To ensure safety, testing was done with a factor of 1.2 of the design limits. ![]() It was built to be put through a battery of tests designed to simulate an entire space launch and re-entry (tests that, fatefully, did not include unwisely being launched on a freezing morning). The Challenger was originally Structural Test Article STA-099. Challenger was also the first Space Shuttle to carry a world-class actor into space.
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