The space shuttle Challenger disaster was 40 years ago today.What do you think this space program would be like if it never happened?
Hopefully, they increased the o-ring budget since.https://youtu.be/GUj-scMDRYE
>>16900917About the same. They changed nothing. They didnt gave a fuck about the Columbia either.
this is the rubber o ring seal one
Suddenly I have a desire to buy American Apparel.
>>16900917Eventually they would have realized the Buran/Energia design was better and dropped SRBs. Without the need for fuel to flow through the orbiter into the engines, they eventually would have realized placing the orbiter at the top of the stack instead of on the side would avoid the biggest risks.
>>16900917Air Force would have bought shuttles and used them to drop MIRV payloads on IraqThe space program would still be a bunch of nepotist gatekeepers and diversity hires preening over the fuck ups they signed off on
>>16900990"As a civilization progresses technologically it enables social changes which are contrary to technological progress"~me.The great filter is DEI. Who would have thought?
>>16900946born too late to witness the Challenger disaster born just in time to watch the Columbia break apart on live tv and be old enough to comprehend the disastertruly terrifying shit, I don't even like flying in a commercial airliner
>>16900917Anyone else think it looks like a scorpion?
>>16900951yea
>>16901033>good times create weak women
>>16900917How Much damage did this do to the Space Race optically? did it cause the great defunding of Space development the same way Chernobyl and Fukushima did nuclear?
>>16901072You were around for the OceanGate Titan submarine implosion, so that's something.
>>16901609It caused a loss of confidence. After a lengthy review, the Shuttle went back into operation and was the primary method for getting ISS modules into orbit, so its not like things were shutdown permanently. What it did was destroy the notion that we'd conquered space and advances would rapidly follow the same pace that got us from the Wright Brothers to the jet engine in a very short period of time. Space stopped being the future and access to it became just another utility to be maintained. Unless SpaceX is able to come through on Musk's promises for what Starship can be, we'll continue to live in the shadow of the Shuttle disasters.
>>16901609We probably would have had another round of moon landings in the 90's, and mars landings in the 2010's.
>>16901846The Soviet Union still would have fallen apart, perhaps sooner because they would have felt pressure to come up with Buran even faster. The US space program would lose its mandate to beat the Soviets but perhaps if the Shuttle was successful enough by then, the public would have been willing to keep expanding funding for larger projects. Maybe we would have Space Station Freedom instead of ISS and had it sooner.
Disasters aside, I think the space industry (space travel) in general was fated to hit an all time low in the 2000s and early 2010s
Apollo 13 was great, why shouldn't Tom Hanks fly on STS-51-L?
Ah, what could have been...
>>16900917completely the same.
>>16900984
>>16901072I was there for both of them. sitting in my airframe and power plant class. some guy stuck his head in the class room and said "the space shuttle (challenger) just blew up". no one believed him.
