And thats why we call it the gulf of america
By then shuttle flights were so routine I didn’t even get up to watch the liftoff. My mom called me before work and told me it blew up.
Christa McAuliffe trivia: she was the only one in her training group who didn’t throw up on the “Vomit Comet”.
This legitimately almost ruined NASA.
Imagine a space organization almost be>ng ruined by one explosion! NASA is obviously too weak to handle space.
My nextdoor neighbor was in her class at the time. His thousand-yard stare when he got home that day was quite haunting.
I wonder if this was when tape delayed live streams were invented?
…no, i think that was a nipplegate thing…
That we know of.
i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.
Same. I think that episode was shown in-class, too, so I came alarmingly close to the XKCD.
You know who could have been on that shuttle instead of a teacher? A Muppet.
Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!
When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.
The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.
My entire school was gathered in the cafeteria for the event, televised live.
We were all sent home for the day (some took the week) in the ensuing chaos.
It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.
Don’t like your teacher? Follow this quick simple trick…
The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.
The Soviet program is still haunted by the ghost of a frozen Laika in perpetual orbit.
The world’s bravest and first true cosmonaut.
I mean… not really.
🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States
Aspect 🇺🇸 United States 🇷🇺 Soviet Union Total astronaut/cosmonaut deaths 9–10 (incl. test/training accidents) 8 (official) On-mission fatalities 3 (Apollo 1, ground test) 4 (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) Training/test deaths (astronauts) 6+ (e.g. Theodore Freeman, C.C. Williams) 4+ (e.g. Valentin Bondarenko, others possibly unacknowledged) Deaths among ground personnel <10 100+ (notably the Nedelin disaster) Transparency High (accidents publicized and investigated) Low (many incidents hidden until after 1989) Major catalyst event Apollo 1 fire Soyuz 1, Nedelin disaster
Key Takeaways
- 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
- 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
- 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
- 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
- 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
- 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.
grok is this true
God I hate AI
You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.
always.
I was only 4 years and 4 months old, I can barely remember anything of that time.
But when Columbia was en route to enter the atmosphere, I was outside on the front lawn watching, since it was re-entering over my area of Texas at a pretty favorable viewing angle.
I was so fucking happy to see such a momentous occasion…until it started breaking up. I knew something was wrong, but my brain couldn’t piece it together, until the ship started breaking apart into visibly distinct fireballs. It passed over the horizon, and I was stunned. I ran back into my friend’s living room, and continued watching the coverage, now very sombre.
It was 17 years and 4 days after Challenger. I was 21. That shit is burned into my memory. Especially since 9/11 was less than 18 months prior, which I also watched live.
Could have been worse. They wanted to send Big Bird.
Also, I wasn’t in kindergarten yet or I’d have seen it. I think this is a core Gen X memory that Millennials don’t have.
There’s speculation that Reagan was the impetus behind the “go fever” that caused the Challenger disaster. The idea is that he wanted to have a live uplink to Challenger during his State of the Union, and that his desire to use them as props was why NASA was in such an all-fired hurry to launch no matter the consequences.
No idea how grounded in reality the speculation is, but it tracks for Reagan.
Yeah millenial’s earliest memory of tragedy is said to be 9/11. Can confirm as a baby millenial who was 7 at the time.
Hey we also got a shuttle explosion, it was just sandwiched between gestures loosely at the past 30 years
I watched it in person, sort of.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.
