Crew of the Columbia is getting a memorial service.

[shortylickens]

The shuttle fell apart 15 years ago.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/25/nasa-honors-7-who-died-in-columbia-disaster/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/01/25/columbia-space-shuttle-disaster/#.WmpW2KinFjE

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/loc...Columbia-disaster-15-years-later-12507953.php

 

[BD231]

Lone survivor of the shuttle Columbia ensen cadet frog will recall the chilling moments of his escape, followed by indulging in 15 years of missed birthday cakes.

 

[Zanovar]

Lone survivor of the shuttle Columbia ensen cadet frog will recall the chilling moments of his escape, followed by indulging in 15 years of missed birthday cakes.

lolo

 

[nakedfrog]

It's about damn time my anuran brother gets his recognition.

 

[OutHouse]

sick joke that was floating around in high school after this accident...

"Did you know that Sally Ride had blue eyes?
no
"yup, one blew that way (pointing left) and the other blew that way (pointing up)

 

[BoomerD]

sick joke that was floating around in high school after this accident...

"Did you know that Sally Ride had blue eyes?
no
"yup, one blew that way (pointing left) and the other blew that way (pointing up)

Yeah, in 86, the joke was Christa McAuliffe told her husband, "You feed the dogs, I'll feed the fishes."

(hard to believe that one was 32 years ago.)

I'm one of the few here that also remembers the Apollo 1 fire. (51 years ago this week)

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Not as bad as Need Another Seven Asronauts.

 

[Kaido]

NASA’s held its annual day of remembrance Thursday to honor all its astronauts killed in the line of duty. Seventeen died in three accidents: Columbia, the Apollo 1 fire on the launch pad on Jan. 27, 1967, and the shuttle Challenger launch disaster on Jan. 28, 1986. The seven others died in plane crashes during training or other official business.

Does anyone remember how big of news the Columbia accident was? Was it as widely-covered as the Challenger?

 

[Kaido]

Lone survivor of the shuttle Columbia ensen cadet frog will recall the chilling moments of his escape, followed by indulging in 15 years of missed birthday cakes.

A moment of silence for Pepe the Frog, before his reputation was tarnished by politics & hate groups:

 

[IronWing]

Does anyone remember how big of news the Columbia accident was? Was it as widely-covered as the Challenger?

Yep. Because Columbia broke up over land, NASA committed an insane amount of effort to recovering every scrap they could from the debris field so media coverage went on for months.

Side note: Off season fire crews did most of the recovery work which included lots of time spent poking around in thorn scrub and poison oak. One small indignity was that at about the same time as the shuttle recovery was underway, an outbreak of avian flu in California required the slaughter of millions of sick chickens. The USDA used fire crews for this as well. Both assignments were horrible work and among firefighters really crappy non-fire duties have been referred to as "chicken-shuttle assignments" ever since.

 

[Thebobo]

Not as bad as Need Another Seven Astronauts.

Yea was going to post that. Never forget that day I was at NIH working and folks in hospital pajamas were running around saying a rocket crashed I thought they were mental.

Thanks for the post. And thanks for the US to get up build aa replacement and get back out there.

 

[Darwin333]

Yep. Because Columbia broke up over land, NASA committed an insane amount of effort to recovering every scrap they could from the debris field so media coverage went on for months.

Side note: Off season fire crews did most of the recovery work which included lots of time spent poking around in thorn scrub and poison oak. One small indignity was that at about the same time as the shuttle recovery was underway, an outbreak of avian flu in California required the slaughter of millions of sick chickens. The USDA used fire crews for this as well. Both assignments were horrible work and among firefighters really crappy non-fire duties have been referred to as "chicken-shuttle assignments" ever since.

I know that Columbia got a ton of ongoing coverage, I was too young to remember how long the coverage went on for Challenger. I was in grade school and we were actually watching the launch live in our classroom because they were sending a teacher up, we were supposed to watch her teach a lesson in space later in the week.

 

[Captante]

Does anyone remember how big of news the Columbia accident was? Was it as widely-covered as the Challenger?

While Columbia did dominate the headlines for a long time I would say that it paled in comparison to Challenger both in terms of impact on society and in duration of said coverage. Although I do recall when Columbia broke up in general terms, I have a photographic-memory moment* of the exact second I heard Challenger blow up during live coverage of the launch on NY AM radio News 880. By the time the Morton-Thiokol investigation was over it felt like it had been going on forever.

*(driving NB on I-95 past the Milford Ct McDonalds rest area)

Really its not a fair comparison despite both events involving loss of a shuttle & crew. Columbia was awful no question but with Challenger you couldn't have made it more sensationally tragic if you had tried.

 

[BD231]

A moment of silence for Pepe the Frog, before his reputation was tarnished by politics & hate groups:

For fux sake Kaido seven people died 15 years ago !!!! .... can you stop being a snitch for two seconds of your damn life !?!?!?!?

 

[Paratus]

I remember where I was when Columbia went down.

I got up early to stream NASA TV to see if Columbia was coming home. If she was, my wife wouldn’t have to go into work later that day.

You see she had been supporting STS 107 as a flight controller in mission control during orbit operations.

I got the stream up just in time to hear the flight director tell GC (Ground Control) to “lock the doors”. This is what we do when there’s been a major accident. The doors to the MCC are locked and flight controllers impound all mission records and data.

I then had to go tell my wife that the mission she had been supporting for the last two weeks was lost.

 

[Darwin333]

I remember where I was when Columbia went down.

I got up early to stream NASA TV to see if Columbia was coming home. If she was, my wife wouldn’t have to go into work later that day.

You see she had been supporting STS 107 as a flight controller in mission control during orbit operations.

I got the stream up just in time to hear the flight director tell GC (Ground Control) to “lock the doors”. This is what we do when there’s been a major accident. The doors to the MCC are locked and flight controllers impound all mission records and data.

I then had to go tell my wife that the mission she had been supporting for the last two weeks was lost.

So did she have to go to work?

 

[Paratus]

So did she have to go to work?

 

[pcgeek11]

I remember when the Challenger blew up. Was on a submarine getting ready to pull into the Cape in Florida and we received an emergency message to go deep and fast out of the area. We were delayed a few days coming into port.

 

[Kaido]

can you stop being a snitch for two seconds

Well now I'm confused, is there a new definition of snitch out there?

Also, pic unrelated to OP's post.

 

[Kaido]

Yep. Because Columbia broke up over land, NASA committed an insane amount of effort to recovering every scrap they could from the debris field so media coverage went on for months.

Side note: Off season fire crews did most of the recovery work which included lots of time spent poking around in thorn scrub and poison oak. One small indignity was that at about the same time as the shuttle recovery was underway, an outbreak of avian flu in California required the slaughter of millions of sick chickens. The USDA used fire crews for this as well. Both assignments were horrible work and among firefighters really crappy non-fire duties have been referred to as "chicken-shuttle assignments" ever since.

Wow, dang. I asked about news coverage because I was traveling mostly off-grid at the time & the Internet wasn't what it was today, so once things fell off the news cycle, you kind of missed out on the scope of events. I remember vaguely hearing about it in passing, but never really followed up. I think I've been getting the Challenger event confused with the Columbia event all this time because of this...in my memory, it was always just the Apollo + Challenger that had fatal accidents within the space program. With all of the information available online today, I feel like I've been neutralized by the MIB or something...it's a strange feeling to have a gap in my public history knowledge

Sounds like they made some smart procedural changes to the program after that event...crazy how a loose piece of foam caused all of this:

Several technical and organizational changes were made, including adding a thorough on-orbit inspection to determine how well the shuttle's thermal protection system had endured the ascent, and keeping a designated rescue mission ready in case irreparable damage was found. Except for one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, subsequent shuttle missions were flown only to the ISS so that the crew could use it as a haven in case damage to the orbiter prevented safe reentry.

 

[FelixDeCat]

Living in Texas I remember when it blew up. I heard a sonic boom over my house. I live a few miles from a military air station and thought nothing of it at the time.

RIP.

 

[Kaido]

While Columbia did dominate the headlines for a long time I would say that it paled in comparison to Challenger both in terms of impact on society and in duration of said coverage. Although I do recall when Columbia broke up in general terms, I have a photographic-memory moment* of the exact second I heard Challenger blow up during live coverage of the launch on NY AM radio News 880. By the time the Morton-Thiokol investigation was over it felt like it had been going on forever.

*(driving NB on I-95 past the Milford Ct McDonalds rest area)

Really its not a fair comparison despite both events involving loss of a shuttle & crew. Columbia was awful no question but with Challenger you couldn't have made it more sensationally tragic if you had tried.

Yeah as mentioned above, for the Columbia event, I was on the road with limited television & pretty much no Internet access at the time & didn't get back until months later, so I think my knowledge of it was pretty dang understated...it just never really clicked that we lost the crew until I saw the headlines the other day and was like what the heck, when did this happen?! It's an extremely odd feeling to be missing such a public piece of information in my memory, especially since the Challenger explosion was such a keystone event of growing up...like most kids around that time, we were all supposed to watch the teacher's broadcast in our classrooms, which was a really big deal because they had to wheel a TV into our classroom, unlike today where you can't get away from the screens!

I still remember the feeling from the explosion on the news. It was just like a hammer of silence in your brain as a kid because you didn't really know how to interpret that information...like dang, all those people were gone, the shuttle was gone, and we had all just collectively watched it happen on the news. The world was a different place at that time too, before the Internet...teachers were crying over the loss of Christa McAuliffe, because it was such a big deal that a teacher was going into space & there was such a strong feeling of kinship back then, that everyone kind of felt represented by her going up there.

 

[Kaido]

*(driving NB on I-95 past the Milford Ct McDonalds rest area)

OT but hey, they have Tesla chargers at the Milford location now!

 

[Kaido]

Living in Texas I remember when it blew up. I heard a sonic boom over my house. I live a few miles from a military air station and thought nothing of it at the time.

RIP.

Dang. I was just reading an article about how NASA's Image Science and Analysis Group was collecting amateur photos & videos of the event to help piece together what actually went down:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/science/with-aid-of-amateurs-nasa-builds-mosaic-of-a-disaster.html

And perhaps speaking more to human nature, trolls were prevalent even back then:

Not everyone was so heroic, however. Some of the early submissions were hoaxes, and researchers spent valuable time having to debunk them.

''They have been able to sort out the hoaxes and the false images and the artifacts from the things that are real,'' said Doug White, an official at the NASA contractor United Space Alliance, who has been working with the video team.

Some were laughably inept, like the video submitted to NASA that clearly showed a bright spot moving across the screen, but turned out to be cars driving down the road past the camera with their headlights on.

Then there were the widely circulated photos billed as Israeli satellite images of Columbia exploding in space. They were actually taken from the 1998 movie ''Armageddon.''

Other people with video had profit in mind. ''There have been two isolated cases out West of two individuals who strung us along for several weeks before it finally became apparent to us that they must have been under the impression they were going to collect on the Columbia gravy train,'' Mr. Hill told members of the board.

 

[Kaido]

I'm one of the few here that also remembers the Apollo 1 fire. (51 years ago this week)

I was a huge space nerd growing up. Watching Apollo 13 made me question whether I really wanted to be an astronaut or not...it was an exciting movie, but the stress of having to figure out alternative solutions with such limited resources had me second-guessing that idea. And then after watching Gravity a few years ago...that part when her tether broke off and the camera zoomed out and the music stopped and she was just spinning out into space made me nope right out of any NASA dreams I ever had lol...I remember getting home from that movie with my buddy and my wife asking me how it was and I said, in complete seriousness, "well, I don't want to be an astronaut anymore"