Challenger timeline

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Spaceflight Now has posted an extremely detailed timeline of the Challenger disaster, including telemetry from the shuttle, transcripts of various verbal conversations, and some photos.

It's fascinating, but I couldn't deal with reading it in detail. Even skimming, it was still rough.

As Charles D. (who provided the pointer) noted, today is the 18th anniversary of the accident. He also noted that the Mission Control people seem to be remarkably calm throughout those transcripts; I imagine that's a combination of tone not being captured, emergency training giving them something to focus on, and the fact that they appear not to have been aware of just how bad it was for a while after the explosion.

One Response to “Challenger timeline”

  1. naomi_traveller

    Thanks for posting the link to this. So sad.

    The amazing thing to me is that in 20 minutes of unbelievable stress, everyone on the line did their jobs, immediately took steps to ensure that even though they couldn’t tell what the problem was, they would save everything that might tell them what it was later.

    But again, so sad.

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