I was 26 years old having researched my self and my husband out of TSCC, I was sitting at my kitchen table with a typewriter, typing out our resignation letter ( before you could do that). I got a phone call from my husband to turn on the TV. Well that ended the letter for that day. I did Finish and get it mailed out that same week. Was called into a Court of love, yeah right. Didn't go, was excommunicated by March. But as with any tragic event you always remember where you were and what you were doing.
I can't believe it's been 30 years ago. Peace y'all.

I remember driving to work that morning wish some how I was the first civilian going to space. Then I heard about the explosion when my Mom called me at work. I was still sad I was not the person on the Shuttle. I would willing have died for the chance to go to space.

I was walking out the door to a Berlin stake high council meeting when DW told me to look at the TV. Broke the news to the other HC members. We were all pretty shocked. I think we all thought that the occupants were vaporized, but then weeks later they determined that the cabin had come down pretty much intact, possibly with the crew still alive as it fell.

I was in Chem-Physics class. 2nd hour.

Was attending Albion Middle School sitting in Mr. Semich's computer science class. It's the JFK moment of our generation.

Wasn't that Morton Thioko's fault and they went on using Morton Thiokol? And that's in Utah, right? Mormons probably (though inadvertently) brought down the space shuttle.

A lead technician from Thiokol warned NASA that they should not launch Challenger on that ill-fated day because the temperature was too cold. They were worried that the Solid Rocket Booster O-rings would not seal correctly. Thiokol was right and Challenger was lost.

Yeah, and if I had reached back far enough in my brain I might have remembered that. What I said turns out to be a bit irresponsible, and I apologize. That part was all over the news last night, that Morton Thiokol tried to warn them that the joints could fail.

AIUI, the engineers told MT management that the launch should be postponed. The engineers were overuled 'cos the management thought they would lose their trade. MT did tell NASA to go ahead.

I walked in to a business I hung out at and it was on TV. Very tough watching it live and knowing lives were over in a instant. There is a documentary on recently that says NASA knew there was a problem and launched anyway.

RB

I was a young woman working in NYC. I heard about it that morning. It was unbelievable. At lunch, I went to a nearby store that had a bank of TV sets. I had been so envious of the opportunity that Christa McAuliffe got as a civilian on that flight.

And yes, Morton Thilkol was involved. It was their O-ring that failed.

"There is a documentary on recently that says NASA knew there was a problem and launched anyway."

Actually, I studied the issue in two different courses at uni; in a psychology course and also a business course. It’s a study of the dangers of ‘group think.’ The engineering team in charge of the O-rings that failed was aware of an issue with the O-rings, but to speak up would have delayed the flight and shit would have rolled. There was incredible pressure to get the flight going, which had already been delayed several times. The team in question also had a rather intense and grumpy boss. The end result was simple; nobody spoke up. Nobody wanted to be ‘that guy’, so they crossed their fingers and let it fly; there was only a chance it would fail. Each of them hoped the other guy on the team might speak up about the problem, and then they would have backed them up, but nobody wanted to ‘be that guy’ and nothing was said. They were afraid to speak up and delay the flight again, heads would have rolled over it.

The concept of group think and going along with what you know to be wrong because of the fear of being shamed by the group, or out of fear of making waves, is very instructive of the group think that goes on in Mormonism. In a way, ‘group think’ is one of the foundational issues in Mormonism; nobody stands up and says this is fucked up because nobody else is standing up to say it’s fucked up first. It’s scary to be ‘that guy’ in an awkward and intense social situation. It’s about the social fear of being ostracized for speaking out and saying something uncomfortable, so you go along with the group in order to not rock the boat. It’s called ‘group think’, and it’s what brought the shuttle down.

Our uni taught this to try and discourage that sort of thinking. I bet they don’t teach that in any textbooks at BYU. Even if they did, how many people would recognize that it might apply to the Mormon culture?

Speak up. Don’t go along to get along. You might destroy someone’s life. Avoid getting stuck in group think. The shuttle disaster taught us a valuable lesson in this. Speak up and don’t be shamed into sitting there silent. Don't 'go along just to get along.'

I wrote about this exact topic last year when I was posting here a lot. Group think … look it up.

A decision is made:

On January 28th, 1986 the fatal decision was made to launch the space shuttle Challenger. That day seven astronauts lost their lives as the shuttle exploded and littered the Atlantic Ocean with its remnants.

What went wrong?
The air temperature on that particular day was 15°F lower than on previous launches. Engineers brought forward concerns questioning the performance of an “O-ring seal” under cold temperatures, but ultimately the decision was made to go forward. Shortly after launch the seal failed and caused hot pressurized gas to leak, causing the shuttle to explode.[1]

Several case studies on the accident concluded that a cognitive bias referred to as“Groupthink” was present in the decision making process which lead to the Challenger explosion.

What is groupthink?
Psychologist Irving Janis coined the term groupthink and defined it as [2]:

"A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action". [2]

Janis described precursors and symptoms of Groupthink in decision making [2]. According to a popularly cited case study by Moorhead, Ference, and Neck (1991), 3 precursors and all 8 symptoms were present in the decision-making process that lead to the Challenger explosion. [1]


http://www.powernoodle.com/blog/article/decisive-history-volume-1-challenger-explosion-1986


This really is quite a famous case in the study of group psychology.

That's really interesting, and definitely worthy of study because it would have such broad implications.

If I'm remembering correctly, NASA felt the pressure to launch as well since it had already been delayed.

It was referenced in my social psychology textbook and it's worth a read just for the information about social and group processes alone. Groupthink is definitely something to be concerned about and has had an effect on many other less-than-wise decisions. At the end of the chapter with groupthink, it encourages people to speak up if they have doubts about an action, because chances are, someone else has doubts as well. It just takes one person to have the guts to speak out!

Also, I was in second grade at the time. A lot of us were excited about it and horrified when we received the news. Then teachers had a open forum with us to process the tragedy.



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The rockets were built and tested by Morton Thiokol in Utah were they not? I wonder what people who assembled and tested them were thinking when they blew up?

RB

I was sitting on the sofa feeding one of my twin babies and they cut to a picture of debris falling from the sky. I knew immediately what had happened.

I worked with some of the people involved. Al McDonald (who was one of the first to come forward to talk about it) was one of my bosses when I first worked there. I worked with the men who developed the propellant for the solid rocket motors. I still have some of the items they gave us in those early days and I have a large picture of a space shuttle that was given to me when I worked there hanging on my wall.

The story I have from those I worked with is that the people who developed the motors didn't want to launch because of the temperature.

Here's the SLTrib story on that today.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/3464503-155/utah-engineers-warning-was-ignored-before


I was living in Canada, out grocery shopping in a superstore that sold televisions as well, and there it was. My divorce hearing was coming up in ten days. I already felt like my life was exploding. That was all the trigger I needed. I stood there and cried.

Allan McDonald was on KUTV and told more of the story. He has written a book that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. He wouldn't sign off on the launch, so someone further up the line signed. He was over the shuttle program at the time. The report on KUTV was excellent.



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With some help from my mother, I had bought a beautiful mobile home, rented a nice space in a lovely rural park, and it was being delivered and set up that day. I skipped work that day.

I was so happy that I would be DONE with my abusive, adulterous husband (and his girlfriend, who had moved in with us "just until she could get another job" the previous April).

As the home was being settled into place and hooked up, I went over to the landlady's for something and she had the TV on. That's the first I knew of the explosion. When I saw a replay of it exploding, I realized that there was no way anybody could have survived that. I suddenly felt like vomiting.

Only moments before, I had been so happy at the prospect of moving into my very own, beautiful home - and then I felt sick.

And of course, there was a lot of ugly stuff at home when I told my husband I was moving out. He obviously didn't care much about me, but he was FRANTIC at the thought of losing my salary.

Why couldn't he make the GF get out and earn her keep? Well, she had this little alcohol problem. . .(Over the years, she's racked up 6 DUIs - I found this on one of those sites where you can look up arrests and stuff.)

Challenger cast a very dark shadow over that day.

I watched it live in my 5th grade class on the other side of the country.

Sitting in my 8th grade typing class. Whole school was watching on the classroom TVs. I don't recall the teachers actually teaching anything the rest of that day as we had just watched the space shuttle explode on live TV



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2016 03:49PM by shodanrob.

I was at the library at BYU - Hawaii.

They were showing the launch on a TV in the library.

I am too young to remember this happening but I assume that I was playing with some random toy. Mom talked about it every once in a while when I was growing up. There is a small airport where I live named after Michael J. Smith in honor of him growing up in the area. And my Mom grew up just outside of Concord New Hampshire which was where Christa McAuliffe was living and teaching at the time of the Challenger Explosion. My grandparents are buried in the same cemetry as she is and her memorial is in not to far from theirs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2016 05:55PM by kativicky.

I was in Johnson City, Texas that day. Just taken a tour of President Johnsons home. In the local grocery store, watching the takeoff. Several of the people in the store cried and went and sat down. Bad day,,

Pocatello, Idaho. Lounge of Graveley Hall at ISU. Had just finished a shower. Walking by the TV just as it launched. Remember thinking about how routine space travel had become that this launch was almost a non event. Terrible day.

I was 31, teaching Grade Two and pregnant with my second child. My husband picked me up from work to go for lunch, and as we sat at the table, he told me about the explosion. I was invested in the story of Christa Mcauliffe going to space as a teacher, and was hormonal from the pregnancy. I cried right there in the restaurant.
Just ten days later, a passenger train and freight train collided head on just 15 kilometres from my town, and 23 people died. I had heard the train pass through town just 15 or 20 minutes earlier. I find this a sad time of year now.

I was in the middle of what seemed like an endless PhD graduate school program in the Southeastern U.S. We were watching the launch on a small TV in the break room. It's one of those days that if you're over a certain age, you'll always remember.

There's all sorts of material about it online, at Wikipedia, Youtube, and elsewhere. The Thiokol engineer who tried to stop the launch was Roger Biosjolly, and he was looked on as a traitor by his fellow engineers for blowing the whistle. He was played by Peter Boyle in the TV movie "Challenger" (1990) with Barry Bostwick as Commander Dick Scobee and Karen Allen as Christa McAuliffe: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099237/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

William Hurt played the physicist Richard Feynmann who served on the Rogers investigatory commission in "The Challenger Disaster" (2013): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16 That was on TV only a little while ago.

And of course they also lost the shuttle Columbia some years later--but that's another story, with perhaps some similarities.

My PhD program lasted another 2-1/2 years and then also self-destructed, but I got a second 6-year Masters degree out of it. Nowadays I'm teaching introductory chemistry, and most of my students aren't old enough to remember it--but I mentioned it in my classes today. Later on in the course, I usually point out that Challenger and the German airship Hindenbug (1937) were both destroyed by the same simple chemical reaction: 2H2 + O2 --> 2 H2O + Heat. And in both cases there were people aware of the dangers, but those in charge chose to go ahead anyway.

4th grade here. Principal came over the PA and announced it. My class spent the entire afternoon watching the TV coverage.

I was pregnant with twins, watching the launch on TV. Having lived in Florida for a year, where we could watch shuttle launches from our front yard, I knew something had gone tragically wrong before the newscasters figured it out. I went into premature labor just a Challenger exploded.

Ya I was in 1st grade. We were all watching the tv at school and then the explosion. Not G rated for the kids, might I say. It was sort of the end of the golden days of NASA. And American pride over the universe. Tax payers started to wise up after that (a little more)

I was a missionary standing on a corner in Hyde Park, London passing out cult-cards, preaching, and trying to get African's to come in to the Hyde Park Visitor Center (because they're the only ones that would respond to us). I heard someone talking about it on the street.

I was 28 years old, about to turn 29 in seven weeks. I was going to college then and was asleep when the shuttle blew up.

My mother woke me up and told me, "The space shuttle blew up." I rode the city bus shortly after to college trying to read but couldn't and kept thinking about the astronauts on the Challenger.