Pat Flannery wrote:



Jim Oberg wrote:


1. Stop calling it an 'accident'. It was a disaster,
a crash, a catastrophe, probably NOT an 'explosion'
(a disintegration, more accurately) -- but it was most
of all a consequence of actions, a string of situations
that all lined up to destroy the spaceship and the crew.
It was avoidable. It was somebody's FAULT. It was
'wrongful death'.



It was a badly designed and fragile space transportation system is
what it was.


I'd disagree. COuld have been designed better (well, duh), but then, it
was also flown outside of the environment is was designed for. A camel
is a great design for the desret but it sucks in the tundra.

It wasn't "somebody's FAULT", it was a LOT of people's fault, going
clean back to NASA cutting corners in the Shuttle's design that
compromised safety due to inadequate funding levels, to falling into
their own propaganda that it was so safe that it didn't need an escape
system, to Reagan using the "Teacher In Space" as a propaganda mission
for his upcoming State Of The Union address, to NASA launching on a
day that was too cold even though they knew that such a launch was
dangerous, to the news media poking fun at the delayed launch due to
the launch delays the previous mission had, to the Thiokol engineers
taking off their engineer's hats and putting their manager's hats on,
to....


Errrr.... not sure about that latter one. I've got copies of the memos
from the day before, some being photocopied directly from the
hand-scribbled "Don't launch tomorrow!" memos. The Thiokol engineers
(some being co-workers of mine) knew it was a bad idea. But they were
over-ruled by manager-types.


When September 11th rolls around, do we also have an anniversary on
September 12th, for any survivors that may have survived the initial
collapse and been trapped alive in the rubble?

No, but we should have a full day filled with the distant rumbings of
daisycutters going off someplace that ****ed us off.


--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller