Speaker 1: Good morning. I'm Scott Sloan. This is seven hundred wudwity.
Speaker 2: Thanks for checking out the show on air and of
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Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app and you can catch the show afterwards too.
Speaker 2: It's podcast will may get easy for it, Easy Easy Easy.
Speaker 2: Today is an historic day because this landmark moment, this
Speaker 2: tragedy occurred forty years ago today go up.
Speaker 3: It happened just over one minute inch of flight one
Speaker 3: a minute fifteen.
Speaker 4: Seconds flan City, twenty nine hundred feet per second, altitude
Speaker 4: nine aautical mileth downrange, just in the seven nautical.
Speaker 1: Miles from mission control.
Speaker 3: Silence, Then the bland chilling report.
Speaker 4: We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that
Speaker 4: the vehicle has exploded. Flight Director confirms that we are
Speaker 4: looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what
Speaker 4: can be done at this point.
Speaker 3: A search effort couldn't begin for some fifteen minutes after
Speaker 3: this debris, they said, just kept raining from the sky.
Speaker 3: The head of the Space Shuttle program had no explanations,
Speaker 3: just sorrow at the tragedy.
Speaker 1: I vividly remember when that happened.
Speaker 2: For a lot of folks it might have been school kids,
Speaker 2: and still even more folks don't remember it because they
Speaker 2: happened outside their lifespan. But I'll remember that like I
Speaker 2: remember nine to eleven. And how do we get to
Speaker 2: this point? We've got this great space race going out
Speaker 2: right now, of course privately speaking, but everything we know
Speaker 2: about space and how to get to outer space and
Speaker 2: travel is written in blood. Writing about it in the
Speaker 2: Burning Blue is Kevin Cook, Kevin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: I'm doing fine.
Speaker 2: Hopefully I set that up well enough for you too,
Speaker 2: tying those things together. But I think there's something to
Speaker 2: be said about that, right, is that we're in the
Speaker 2: new space race, but it's private space race between ultra
Speaker 2: the ultra rich. Doesn't mean they're gonna cut corners, but man,
Speaker 2: you know, when you're competitive like this, these are the
Speaker 2: things that.
Speaker 1: Happen, right.
Speaker 5: I think you set it up just right, and it's
Speaker 5: an exciting time in space exploration. These are eventually going
Speaker 5: to be public private partnerships. I think we'll see SpaceX
Speaker 5: and NASA working together, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and NASA
Speaker 5: working together. We're gonna have Moon missions again, and in
Speaker 5: before too many decades past a Mars mission with human
Speaker 5: crew on it, and there is going to be schedule
Speaker 5: pressure again, there are going to be engineer's warning, well,
Speaker 5: I have concerns about this or that aspect of the machinery,
Speaker 5: and again these things are going to crop up. There
Speaker 5: is a program at NASA now called the Lessons Learned
Speaker 5: program that encourages listeners to remember things like disasters like
Speaker 5: the Challenger accident, so that we don't have such a
Speaker 5: thing happen again.
Speaker 2: Well, and the lesson here coming out of the Burning
Speaker 2: Blue and the Challenger disaster, is that why Krista mcculloffe
Speaker 2: was on that flight to begin with.
Speaker 5: That's true. It had aspects of a publicity effort on
Speaker 5: NASA's part. After Sally VI made worldwide news in nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty three as the first American woman in space, Shuttle
Speaker 5: flights came to seem routine, and NASA was eager to
Speaker 5: have the teacher in space, the first civilian to fly
Speaker 5: on a Shuttle mission. And Christa mccaulliffe, to her great credit,
Speaker 5: I think understood that she was wonderful on television. She
Speaker 5: was sincere, she was herself, but she had a purpose
Speaker 5: to a cause. She didn't want to get famous. She
Speaker 5: wanted to promote the cause of school teachers. She was
Speaker 5: an active school teacher, a great one. She felt that
Speaker 5: teachers were overworked and underpaid. I think that's true even
Speaker 5: more so today. So she inspired an awful lot of
Speaker 5: people to become teachers. I think that's one of the
Speaker 5: things that we could take from a story like the
Speaker 5: Challenger disaster in nineteen eighty six. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of teachers, dedicated teachers who followed her example, who are
Speaker 5: still teaching today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember that moment. I think we all did it.
Speaker 2: If you're old enough too, or if you just go back.
Speaker 2: It was an excellent documentary on this. I think it
Speaker 2: was on Netflix or maybe HBO, but Netflix. It was
Speaker 2: great about that whole story too, because, man, you remember
Speaker 2: what it was like being a little kid, and you
Speaker 2: know everyone was following, here's a teacher.
Speaker 1: I've got a teacher. It's like my teacher.
Speaker 2: Right, you could identify as a kid with Krista mccauliffe
Speaker 2: and every kid in America at that moment. That morning,
Speaker 2: that cold morning, he sat there and watched it on
Speaker 2: TV when they rolled a big old you know, CRT
Speaker 2: two TV in the classroom and everyone's watching the Challenger
Speaker 2: and where everyone clapped and was so excited, and then
Speaker 2: there was a catastrophe, And you want to talk about
Speaker 2: traumatic moment in your childhood, that's it right there.
Speaker 5: That's true. I've encountered so many people who remember exactly
Speaker 5: where they were as I do. When we should start
Speaker 5: to see what had happened. The one thing that that
Speaker 5: the television documentary did not address was the fact that
Speaker 5: when that awful explosion happened and the pitchfork in the
Speaker 5: sky that we all saw on television, that was not
Speaker 5: the end of the astronauts. They survived that moment that
Speaker 5: was the explosion of the fuel tank. They survived for
Speaker 5: another probably two full minutes and forty five seconds, trying
Speaker 5: to regain control of the craft, which was impossible as
Speaker 5: it turned out. I think they were heroic in any case,
Speaker 5: and trying to reconstruct what happened after the explosion, between
Speaker 5: that and the moment that actually killed the Challenger astronauts,
Speaker 5: which was when the falling of Shuttle struck the Atlantic
Speaker 5: at two hundred and seven miles per hour. Reconstructing those
Speaker 5: moments was one of the more grueling and also fascinating
Speaker 5: aspects of working on the Burning.
Speaker 2: Blue Yeah, and on that day in January nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: six and watching that and so they were alive, didn't
Speaker 2: die instantly. Were they aware that they're about the crash
Speaker 2: into the ocean and at over two hundred miles an hour,
Speaker 2: which is fatal.
Speaker 5: It's likely that they were. That there was no escape,
Speaker 5: That there were ejector seats in the very first Shuttle
Speaker 5: missions that became impractical later that you can't have seven
Speaker 5: people ejecting. There was no escape, there were no parachutes.
Speaker 5: Those escape methods were built in after the Challenger disaster,
Speaker 5: and they're going to need to be part of these
Speaker 5: new efforts that we make, I think, to the near
Speaker 5: future missions to the Moon and Mars, to learn the
Speaker 5: lesson of the Challenger disaster and not repeat it.
Speaker 2: What's scary is listening to that audio, the cockpit voice recorder,
Speaker 2: and I think it was Michael Smith that saw that,
Speaker 2: basically saw the catastrophic moment happen, and I think the
Speaker 2: last words on that recording were something like oh no, or.
Speaker 5: It was oh he said. And then for weeks after
Speaker 5: the accident, it was believed that the last words from
Speaker 5: the Challenger flight deck were Roger go and throttle up.
Speaker 5: It was only later that was understood it was re
Speaker 5: assembled the audio from the flight deck that Michael Smith
Speaker 5: must have seen something just in the instance before all
Speaker 5: of the electricity and the communications went out, and his
Speaker 5: last words were, oh, that is the last thing that
Speaker 5: was ever heard from the ASK Challenger astronauts Kevin.
Speaker 2: Cook, the Burning Blue, the unstoried untold Sir of CHRISTA mcauliff,
Speaker 2: and the NASA Challenger disaster.
Speaker 1: But there's a lesson just a history.
Speaker 2: It's also private base travel now with the Bezos and
Speaker 2: the Branson's and the Musks of the world, and you
Speaker 2: know that there's tremendous, tremendous pressure to perform here too.
Speaker 2: That was the lesson from the NASA Challenger disaster is
Speaker 2: there are a lot of warning signs ahead of this.
Speaker 2: One of those is the act that as I recall
Speaker 2: that the launch itself was delayed many times because of
Speaker 2: weather or other issues.
Speaker 5: Correct, that's just right. And there was a debacle the
Speaker 5: day before in which the launch was scrubbed because a
Speaker 5: bolt malfunctioned in the hatch door, a bolt that you
Speaker 5: could have replaced if you'd gone to the local hardware store.
Speaker 5: Nobody could get to the local hardware store from the
Speaker 5: launch pad that day. They had to wait until the
Speaker 5: next day. The next day was far colder, dangerously cold,
Speaker 5: And yet the decision is made to launch anyway because
Speaker 5: of terrible schedule pressure, partly because of embarrassment to the agency,
Speaker 5: because of what had happened in the scrubs that came
Speaker 5: before this. These are all things that are going to
Speaker 5: have to be born in mind by people who were
Speaker 5: making launch decisions in our near future.
Speaker 2: If the weather were warmer that day in January. Now,
Speaker 2: to keep in mind, what January twenty eighth, nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: You're in Florida, but extremely cold by Florida standards. If
Speaker 2: it would have been a few degrees warmer, would we
Speaker 2: have not had this disaster.
Speaker 5: I think it's likely, and there's certainly a great chance
Speaker 5: that hadn't been normal weather for Florida that January. There
Speaker 5: had been other missions that something similar happened with the
Speaker 5: old Rings. There was what was called blow by, and
Speaker 5: certainly it might have happened had it been colder in
Speaker 5: previous missions. I think it's one of the unknowables, but
Speaker 5: there is a very good chance that they would have
Speaker 5: been lucky again as as more than two dozen previous
Speaker 5: Shuttle missions. Two dozen previous missions had had had some trouble,
Speaker 5: many of them, but they made it back. That's why
Speaker 5: the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Fineman said that previous
Speaker 5: missions had essentially been playing Russian Roulette with the astronauts.
Speaker 2: Well, the issue then came down. I had a president
Speaker 2: a presidential commission. I believe on the on the O ring, right,
Speaker 2: and so the O ring you have the solid rocket
Speaker 2: boosters and that is the that's what's powering you into
Speaker 2: space at several hundred miles an hour.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: If you have a leak in one of these rubber
Speaker 2: O rings, you got problems. And uh they uncovered a
Speaker 2: momo from Morton Thia call the the engineers, the project
Speaker 2: engineers on this thing. And if you saw the documentary
Speaker 2: in the book, you detail this about engineers screaming for
Speaker 2: help or please, like we're going to have a catastrophic falure.
Speaker 2: People are going to die. Uh in that teme to fruition.
Speaker 2: Take me through that part of it.
Speaker 5: Well, there there was a teleconference the night before in
Speaker 5: which the engineers that uh, that they had they had
Speaker 5: great worries and they would not sign on to UH
Speaker 5: to a launch. The next morning, their managers pressured them
Speaker 5: to UH, to change their minds, and eventually they did.
Speaker 5: It's one of those things that one has to if
Speaker 5: you put yourself in their shoes, you could say I've
Speaker 5: got great concerns about this. Then then the managers may say, well,
Speaker 5: what about the last dozen missions that tour went off
Speaker 5: without a hitch. You were in a terrible position if
Speaker 5: if you, if you UH say I'm against this, and
Speaker 5: then they launched anyway and nothing bad happens. They were
Speaker 5: certainly vindicated by circumstance. And that's why there's a program
Speaker 5: called the Lessons Learned program in NASA now saying we've
Speaker 5: got to support engineers, support people who are willing to
Speaker 5: say this is too dangerous. Let's fix the problem. Before
Speaker 5: we launched.
Speaker 2: Well, there were signs with other missions right in tests
Speaker 2: that that indicated the owerring was failing.
Speaker 5: Correct, that's right. And the the idea that that one says, well,
Speaker 5: they looked like they were failing, but nobody got killed
Speaker 5: in the previous missions. That's the Russian roulette aspect. They
Speaker 5: came back. There was a task Force studying the Old
Speaker 5: Ring problem at more than DIACOL studying and studying, but
Speaker 5: it wasn't seen as important enough to delay any launches
Speaker 5: while the studying was done.
Speaker 2: Explain how the rubber O Ring and the cold weather
Speaker 2: go to go what caused the explosion.
Speaker 5: It's stiffened, as Richard Feinman demonstrated so beautifully on television
Speaker 5: during the Presidential Commission. He had a glass of ice water,
Speaker 5: he got a piece of rubber from the O Ring
Speaker 5: difted in there. Showed how it's not as elastic when
Speaker 5: it's cold, like like a lot of other things, it
Speaker 5: gets denser and not flexible.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: So it was in the cold it was unable to
Speaker 5: to uh to prevent the leak. The leak leads to
Speaker 5: a plume of flame that then burns right through that
Speaker 5: didn't hide and outer covering of the external tank, and
Speaker 5: that causes the giant explosion we saw on TV.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we finally have some closure in that too.
Speaker 2: But I think the interesting part about it is is
Speaker 2: really how little the families were awarded.
Speaker 5: Yes, and I mean I think it's hard to sue
Speaker 5: the government. Uh And and several of the crew members
Speaker 5: were members of the armed forces. That that plays in
Speaker 5: to it as well. There were settlements. They didn't make
Speaker 5: news because there really wasn't much space program news in
Speaker 5: the two and a half years after the Challenger disaster.
Speaker 5: That's when things will being put back together in a
Speaker 5: safer way. Of course, before long, shuttle flights will seem
Speaker 5: routine again, pressure will increase to launch and that leads
Speaker 5: to similar problems and the Columbia disaster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the relationship there between the Columbia disaster and this
Speaker 1: is what.
Speaker 5: Well, it's the fact that lessons learns need to be observed.
Speaker 5: As Mike Tinellian, that's a wonderful person who runs the
Speaker 5: Lessons Learned program down into Kennedy Space Center talks about
Speaker 5: it's similar. We have a presidential commission. It's a little
Speaker 5: bit like driving a past the wreck on the highway.
Speaker 5: You see the smoke, you see the ambulances, and then
Speaker 5: you're driving with your hands at ten and two for
Speaker 5: a little while. But before long, as he said, you're
Speaker 5: back to having your foot on the wheel and the
Speaker 5: other foot out of the window. If you forget the
Speaker 5: crucial importance of safety in the preparation for a launch,
Speaker 5: that's what happened with Columbia after Challenger, and that's what
Speaker 5: future planners are going to have to bear in mind
Speaker 5: as we get to remarkably exciting and complicated missions to
Speaker 5: the Moon and to Mars.
Speaker 1: Somebody's going to die in the future.
Speaker 2: It's bound to happen again, because yeah, we may learn
Speaker 2: the lessons from history, but there's tremendous pressure. And look
Speaker 2: what led to the death of the Challenger crew, right
Speaker 2: had we got to put Krystal call on our teacher
Speaker 2: because you know what, now all of a sudden, school
Speaker 2: kids are getting interested, we get them hooked, their parents
Speaker 2: will be interested. Hey, great, we're putting someone on there
Speaker 2: for the only reasons. It's a pr move. I don't
Speaker 2: know what research a teacher can do in space, but
Speaker 2: nonetheless there's an every man component to that.
Speaker 1: It's marketing, is what this is.
Speaker 2: And then the pressure to launch the to launch because
Speaker 2: we want to see Krystal calf in space ended in
Speaker 2: tragically in her death. We did the same thing with
Speaker 2: Challenger to some degree as well. With private space missions
Speaker 2: happening in the near future, at some point, people are
Speaker 2: going to die again, aren't they.
Speaker 5: Well. Elon Munk seems to think so it is a
Speaker 5: risky operation. It's a risky thing to do with space exploration.
Speaker 5: I think the job of NASA, the agency as well
Speaker 5: as it's private partners. I think these will be public
Speaker 5: private partnerships the missions, especially when we're talking about Mars.
Speaker 5: I think one recognizes the risk and the likelihood that
Speaker 5: people may die. But for those preparing for missions like that,
Speaker 5: your job is to do all you possibly can to
Speaker 5: prevent that, to make them as safe as possible. That
Speaker 5: lesson was forgotten afore challenger, and.
Speaker 2: Even with the technology of the way it is because
Speaker 2: you know, Elon must have said, well, we can't have
Speaker 2: a it's not like you have an airline, let fly
Speaker 2: fifty sixty missions. The human body can't withstand that. So
Speaker 2: solving that is through autonomous meaning self driving aircraft, self
Speaker 2: driving spacecraft. All right, that's all well and good, and
Speaker 2: we have more technology and monitors and the things we did,
Speaker 2: but you still can't get past the fact that that's
Speaker 2: an incredibly traumatic procedure for any airframe to go through,
Speaker 2: and that is launching, relaunching and making something a regularly
Speaker 2: scheduled flight.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, that's what they want to.
Speaker 2: Do here Physically, is that possible for any aircraft?
Speaker 5: It's sure difficult. And again, the spacecraft has so many parts.
Speaker 5: The space level was the most complicated machine ever built. Well,
Speaker 5: when you have a lot of parts, Murphy's law stares
Speaker 5: you in the face every day with every decision. That's
Speaker 5: what the Elon musk, that's what visos, that's what Richard Branson,
Speaker 5: that's what face looking forward. And the lesson is it's difficult,
Speaker 5: it's complicated, it's dangerous, it's potentially lethal. These are things
Speaker 5: that need to be born in mind just before the
Speaker 5: word go it's given to send somebody into space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's gonna be interesting too. At
Speaker 2: some point there's going to be a failure. Once again,
Speaker 2: I don't think that means we stop trying.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: It means you learn from those lessons. But if the
Speaker 2: lessons keep getting repeated, as it started with the Challenger,
Speaker 2: then I guess that that's also human nature too. We
Speaker 2: have to accept a certain amount of casualties if this
Speaker 2: is the price, if this is the goal. Kevin Cook,
Speaker 2: The Burning Blue, the Untolt Ster of Crystal Calf and
Speaker 2: nashis NASA Challenger disaster.
Speaker 1: Thanks again for the time, Good luck, with the book.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it and it's good to
Speaker 5: be on w l W. I grew up listening to
Speaker 5: to Al Michaels and then Marty Brenneman and Joe Dunsall
Speaker 5: in Big Red Machine.
Speaker 1: Wow, how about that. So you're India, We're in Indiana.
Speaker 5: Indianapolis.
Speaker 2: Oh, Indianapolis. Okay, very good. Yeah, So all the best
Speaker 2: to you and thanks again for coming on, Kevin. Thanks
Speaker 2: gotvingeh Kevin cookback on the show. It's the fortieth anniversary
Speaker 2: of that challenge with Chet forty year Where were you
Speaker 2: forty years ago?
Speaker 1: Today? Most people said, well, I wasn't
Speaker 2: Born yet, smart guy Douche Scott's loan show, Home of
Speaker 2: the Red seven hundred W weldom