"Stuf4" wrote in message
...
From Jeff Findley:
In article ,
says...
Congress performed a separate investigation of Challenger. Senator
Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a noted Reagan nemesis, spearheaded the
investigation, specifically looking for White House pressure to
launch. They found none. Among other things, no equipment had been
installed and no communications plans had been established to allow
Reagan in the US Capitol to speak to the Challenger crew live.
"In one heated exchange, Hollings grilled Rogers with questions about
whether the Reagan administration put pressure on NASA to launch
Challenger with New Hampshire school teacher Christa McAuliffe on
board to coincide with the president's State of the Union address.
'There just wasn't anything like that happening,' Rogers said.
'There's no evidence in this case.'
Later Rogers angrily snapped: 'If you can prove it, I'll come back
here and apologize!'"
- United Press Int'l, June 10, 1986
The investigation's report was quietly released later in 1986.
Thanks for reiterating this. The pressure to launch was all internal to
NASA.
The fact that evidence has not been brought to light does *not* eliminate
the possibility that it happened.
It also doesn't eliminate the possibility of an invisible pink elephant
living in your basement. But, I wouldn't bet on it.
We deal with evidence and facts I a sci.* group not just pure speculation.
An unanswered question...
If there was no external pressure, then why would NASA have done something
so stupid?
Because there was a LOT of pressure to treat the shuttle as an operational
system AND to launch a record 12 or so flights in 1986. Every day of delay
with Challenger threatened this schedule.
So there was absolutely no need to have pressure from the White House for a
SOTU talk. There already was extreme pressure internally.
Operations bent over backwards to get that shuttle in the air that morning.
It is difficult to imagine that the pressure to do so came from within
(NASA Administrator or below).
Why would the NASA Administrator, or anyone below him, be willing to hang it
out so far if there wasn't someone above that pay grade putting pressure on
them to do so?
Might be hard for YOU to imagine, but not for anyone else who has
objectively look at the shuttle schedule and program ad that time.
And who was running NASA in Jan 86?
Here are some quotes from Wikipedia:
"William Robert Graham...was Chairman of President Reagan's General
Advisory Committee on Arms Control from 1982 to 1985"
"In 1980, Graham served as an adviser to presidential candidate Ronald
Reagan and was a member of the President-elect's Transition Team."
After Challenger, Graham got fired from his job. And where did he go when
he left NASA? Reagan took him back under his wing. Quote:
"Graham left NASA on October 1, 1986 to become Director of the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). On October 16, 1986, he was
sworn in as Director of OSTP and concurrently as Science Adviser to
President Reagan..."
If the Challenger tragedy was the responsibility of NASA alone, then why
would Reagan protect the top NASA person after making such a HUGE blunder?
...if Reagan himself had nothing to do with it. Anyone who dismisses the
possibility (let alone probability) that Reagan had direct input is either
ignorant of the situation, or willfully ignorant.
The most plausible scenario to me is that Reagan told his buddy Bill
something to the effect of, "Hey, it would sure be nice if that teacher was
in orbit when I make my State of the Union speech."
There need not be any evidence that such a communication ever happened. It
could have been on a sunny afternoon stroll through the Rose Garden, or
whatever. And it doesn't even need to have been person-to-person. It
could have been aide-to-aide, or any channel of communication.
Now I am not saying that this did happen. The above is all to reiterate
the point that just because you are lacking evidence does not mean that the
proper next step is to throw out the theory.
Actually it is. If you have looked and looked and find no evidence and
there are better theories, your best bet is generally to move on.
And if anyone would like to present a plausible scenario where NASA is for
some reason internally-only hyper motivated to launch ...in the face of
huge icicles, cold-soaked temps way beyond any test data that would give
you any reason to expect a launch success, etc, I'd be glad to consider it.
No you wouldn't. It's obvious you won't because the plausible scenario has
been there for 40 years and anyone who claims to study the shuttle program
is familiar with it.
In other news...
Scobee's son was with Wolverine two weeks ago. Gave him a fam flt in one
of his Vipers. I didn't see anyone mention him by name, which was odd
considering how close this was to the anniversary of his dad's mess. The
actor said,
"That was about the most incredible 1 hour of my life".
~ CT
--
Greg D. Moore
http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses.
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