Challenger Effect.

At least one theory suggested the starboard Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) pivoted on the upper attach strut as a result of the thrust coming from the burn through. This pivoting caused the nose of the SRB to strike the External Tank (ET) and the rest tragically followed.

An article called "Fire In The Sky" written by Chuck Klosterman appeared in the December 2015/January 2016 issue of AARP magazine. The article touched upon the usual ideas that prior to Challenger, NASA somehow made shuttle flight seem routine, safe. Indeed NASA did do this to a certain degree. The AARP article also touched upon the idea that the "Teacher in space" mission known as STS-51L in the Space Transportation System (STS) jargon of that era, was an overblown publicity stunt.

The Space Transportation System (STS) was envisioned as a system that would provide near airliner like routine operations to low orbit human space flight. Shown here is one version of the originally planned, fully reusable system including a flyback booster. Image courtesy NASA.

 

What was new in the article was something I had sensed several years before Challenger. First, some background information. I was employed by McDonnell Douglas as a Spacelab ground processing technician starting in March 1984. I was concerned about shuttle safety a year or more before Challenger occurred. Many of my coworkers were as well. We'd probably come to realize the dangers of shuttle flight through launch delays and Redundant Set Launch Sequencer or RSLS aborts. I was aware something was amiss when the planned flight rate went from a 1973 traffic model high of 60 annual flights between 7 orbiters to a March 1984 flight rate of 24 annual flights between 4 orbiters. In 1984, the actual flight rate showed little sign of reaching 24 annual flights.

Spacelab 2 crew. Middle two standing, Tony England, Karl Henize. Three standing in the back, Story Musgrave, Loren Acton and David Bartow. Seated are G. Fullerton and Roy Bridges. Image courtesy NASA.

 

I was assigned to work shuttle mission STS-51F which was the second Spacelab flight or Spacelab 2. It had actually come after Spacelab 3 due to schedule slippages. This all pallet spacelab was loaded with experiments and minutes after launch, STS-51F experienced a main engine shutdown caused by a sensor malfunction which threatened to shut down another engine before mission controllers corrected the problem. Spacelab 2 went on to a lower but effective orbit in what is known as an Abort To Orbit or ATO mode. Had this been a mission with a comsat or other payload requiring precision orbital insertion, the payload would have been returned to earth at high cost and reprocessed for a future mission. While that posed a chance for me to go overseas as part of the Spacelab recovery contingent, I didn't really want to go at the expense of a program setback.

Shuttle Plasma Diagnostics Package (PDP). Image courtesy NASA.

 

Prior to the July 29th 1985 launch of STS-51-F (Challenger), there had been an RSLS abort of that mission on July 12th. I had worked on Spacelab 2 since April 1984 and was frustrated that our payload had come so close and then...abort. Of course, the mission proceeded as planned after the successful July 29th launch. Fast forward to 2015 and the AARP article. I had long suspected the general public and scientific community were really not very fond of human spaceflight. As a space buff since about the age of 12, I became acutely aware of NASAs budget problems a year or so after my initial interest. I later discovered there had been funding reductions from 1967-71 which totaled nearly 50% of NASAs budget. I'd see the usual "Americans support space" propaganda but never really believed it after the budget cuts and subsequent Nixon Administration limitation of shuttle development to $5.5 B 1970 dollars from the originally estimated $10 B 1970 dollars.

NASA budgets indicate NASA only ever really existed because of Apollo. Image courtesy NASA.

 

NASAs budget is dwarfed by some of the other major government agencies yet NASA critics still think cutting NASAs budget is going to solve social problems much larger budgets such as Social Security, have yet to solve.

The AARP bore out my suspicions of how public support really is with the following quotes which were featured in the AARP article: "Suddenly we were all unconsciously asking questions about the space program that had not been asked for years. What are we getting from this, really? What is the larger motive here? Are we underrating the risk these voyages incur? Are we overrating our confidence in the people conducting them? And if NASA isn't infallible, what other institutions should we worry about?" End quote. It should be noted that other institutions came under suspicion long before the Challenger accident. Institutions came under fire during the 1960s and early 70s social upheavals. The lingering effects of those times still present to this day in the form of widespread conspiracy theories and these Challenger anniversary articles. This in large part due to assassinations, Vietnam and Watergate. Was it any wonder NASAs day would come sooner or later?

 

Prior to Challenger, it was often said human spaceflight could benefit the man on the street with discoveries stemming from experiments conducted aboard space missions. A favorite was the perfect ball bearing claims. Another was finding cures for disease. Even the post Apollo Skylab missions were touted as spaceflight to benefit the taxpayer directly. However, Challenger and Columbia demonstrated human spaceflight is still difficult and expensive. Especially when it's on the leading edge like the shuttle program was. The shuttles failure to make low orbit economical had a negative impact on the perception of human spaceflight. In addition, it seemed way too early to try to make spaceflight pay benefits to Joe public. To this day, human spaceflight is still largely experimental. There have of course, been benefits to Joe public. But they apparently haven't been as widespread as originally expected.

 

The failure of Challenger appears to have overshadowed the shuttles overall success in the post Challenger era. Even the abort modes mentioned earlier seemed to demonstrate that the safety features built into the shuttle, worked as planned. Otherwise, there might have been a disaster long before the ill fated Columbia (STS-107) mission of February 2003. Today the Challenger effect can be seen on YouTube where a lot of people spew absolute hatred of NASA. Some seeing it as the ultimate expression of evil government. These are the folks who now say all spaceflight is faked while adequately failing to explain how. For example, how would one fake 135 shuttle missions and why? It's one thing to say rockets are dumped into the ocean just after launch. But to do this with the shuttle, you'd have to build an orbiter for each mission because orbiter recovery nearly intact from the ocean after launch would be next to impossible. Not to mention how the shuttle is returned. I've yet to see a space faker explain returning the orbiters in a faked shuttle scenario. There are videos of shuttle re-entries over Texas, including STS-107 taken by amateurs. For those who might say shuttle flights were real but uncrewed, what would be so difficult about simply putting a crew aboard? Same goes with any other launch vehicle used for human spaceflight. As for Lunar Hoax Advocacy (LHA), if NASA was able to develop the incredibly complex shuttle and International Space Station (ISS). Then Apollo would have been nearly a cake walk in comparison. Summing it up, there is no reason to suspect spaceflight of any kind was ever faked. No credible evidence has ever come forth to indicate Apollo or all spaceflight was some grand hoax. Given that NASA is probably the only major government agency to survive budget cuts of almost 50%, if they had faked spaceflight, the whistle would have been blown after Apollo. Certainly by the likes of former US VP Walter Mondale, former US Senator William Proxmire and the former Soviet Union.

Flat Earth debates seem to have increased on forums such as Youtube where anyone can proclaim expertise on a complex subject, usually through a slick Youtube video.

 

The NASA haters largely consist of flat earthers, space fakers, and pretty much anyone who is anti-goverment in general. The space fakers obviously were not satisfied to just say the moon landings were faked because it was supposedly impossible to traverse the Van Allen radiation belts without killing the crews. Now it's all spaceflight regardless of the VA belts. Space fakers say ISS is faked and what people are seeing when it flies over is really just aircraft. This despite amateur astronomers the world over who have taken numerous pictures of ISS and shuttle in some cases through semi-professional telescopes. The space faker crowd even claims satellites are faked. They explain Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) are actually cell towers on the ground despite the fact people have been rescued using GPS from remote places where there are no cell towers.

The most commonly cited Flat Earth (FE) model has a 32 mile diameter sun and moon orbiting some 2,600 miles above a flat earth. They rotate around the north pole above equatorial regions so as to have the correct shadowing on the ground. Unfortunately for FE advocates, the model makers failed to see what happens to eclipses. The sun and moon would collide rather than eclipse. Lunar eclipses would be visible globally. Something that does not occur with actual lunar eclipses. Then there is the spotlight sun. No naturally occurring spotlights are known to exist in the Universe.

 

CGI must have been pretty good in 1972. At least as good as it is today since the space fakers claim NASA Earth images are faked using CGI. Image courtesy NASA.

 

The flat earth or FE crowd claims NASA fakes spaceflight because it shows images of a round earth. They often say "Spaceflight is all fake NASA CGI" while failing to realize one of the most famous images of earth, "The blue marble" predates modern CGI by decades. That image having been taken when CGI was still squiggly vector lines on CRTs driven by large mainframe computers. These are examples of the Challenger effect. Are flat earthers and space fakers some small minority? Have they always been among us and the internet has simply made them visible as never before? Hard to know since it appears there is no reliable data on the percentage of the population that would identify as space fakers.

 

FErs on the other hand were assumed to be a minority. Many of which belonged to the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS). Or the newer flat earth society resurrected in 2004. Indications from the YouTube comments section suggest FE ideas have spread in the past year. There are videos claiming to be documentaries that cover the subject from 2 to 7 hours long. Although FE beliefs are generally rooted in fundamentalist religious beliefs, it's connection to NASA as mentioned earlier makes it appear to be a result of the Challenger effect. Space faker advocates have even resorted to claiming the Challenger accident was staged and the people shown on the bleachers were crisis actors. As someone who worked on shuttle payload processing, I've seen the reality of human spaceflight. I witnessed the Challenger accident. When conspiracy theorists have to resort to crisis actor explanations for Challenger and the Sandy Hook shootings among others, they've stooped to sick new lows. The space faker/lunar hoax advocates think going into space or to the moon is just too hard. Can't have a great nation with people like that!

 

However, it's easy to marginalize the FE, space faker crowd but as something that appears to be a growing phenomenon, marginalization might come with a future price. That price would be in the form of the US totally loosing it's leadership position in science. It all seems to be part of the general publics attitude about science. From the attacks on evolutionary theory to denial of global warming. Increasing numbers of non professionals and non scientists suddenly believe they are qualified to tackle important scientific questions even as they sometimes proudly profess ignorance of the subject in question. And they make YouTube videos with "Hype titling" suggesting their ideas are proven, when all they have proven is that they can make slick propaganda videos. Even Presidential debates have shown a degree of proud ignorance towards science. I've never been a professional scientist but if I disagree with a scientific finding or theory, I will admit that I don't have evidence to back my disagreement. The FErs and space fakers don't do this. Especially those who are videographers. Instead, they prefer to hype their videos with words like "Proof" or "Proven" when videos rarely provide proof of anything regardless of what position they advocate.

 

Another Challenger effect was the numerous cancellations of programs after the approval of the space station in 1984 that lead to ISS. The Orient Express or X-30 National Aero Space Plane (NASP). Shuttle-II, Delta Clipper, Venture Star, the George Bush Sr. lunar mars initiative of 1989. The George Bush Jr. Constellation program...to name a few. I call it "Cancellation trail". NASA is in advanced development of the Space Launch System (SLS) Orion programs. If the present schedule holds, it will take longer to go from the recent SLS/Orion test to the second planned test than it did to go from the first Saturn-V test to the splashdown of Apollo-17. Of course, Apollo was what was then known as a crash program which necessitated an accelerated schedule. The private sector is working to restore America's ability to send astronauts into low orbit. It is also working to economize access to low orbit. If successful, they might cause cancellation of SLS/Orion. At that point, NASA would probably be out of the human spaceflight business for good. Perhaps that's as it should be since it would appear taxpayer support of human spaceflight will never support missions beyond low orbit. If it hadn't been for ISS being an international program, it would probably have been cancelled. It very nearly was in June 1993, having missed cancellation by just one vote in the House Of Representatives.

 

The private sector is beginning to discover human spaceflight may not be as easy as initially thought. "X" prize winner Burt Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites engaged in a bit of over confident NASA bashing following the "X" prize flight of Space Ship One. That was 12 years ago and space tourism has yet to see a single tourist flight from any of the current crop of companies working to achieve it. Much less Rutan and company. The tragic loss of SS-2 is a haunting reminder of Challenger and Columbia. An accident that had the same sort of schedule delays the shuttle was once harshly criticized for. Indeed, the whole space tourist plan has been plagued by NASA like slow progress. It's still a little early to assess whether the private sector will succeed or fail to economize low orbit. If it fails, then it too might be seen as having suffered the Challenger effect.

 

The Challenger effect has transformed a once bold organization seemingly incapable of failure, to an organization that represents the failures of science. An organization drawing the wrath of many a NASA basher and hater. The bashing and hating accomplishes nothing. It's time for the US to overcome the Challenger effect once and for all. This can be done by following through with a number of proposals that could have already been accomplished had it not been for the lingering Challenger effect.