Challenger: The Final Flight documentary on Netflix

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by bartels76, Sep 16, 2020.

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  1. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame Thread Starter

    Location:
    CT
    This just hit the streaming service. Well done so far as I am watching Ep 3. Can't believe this was almost 35 years ago.

     
  2. Ilusndweller

    Ilusndweller S.H.M.F.=>Reely kewl.

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    I was fortunate to work on the low friction coating on the fill-and-drain valve that sent liquid oxygen to the main engine. And examine a set of the main engine ball bearings for wear(probably the most $$$$$$ set of ball bearings in the world at the time and they more than likely ended up in the dumpster when the Rockwell Science Center became Rockwell Scientific Company ). The tribometer (friction and wear tester) I ran (most sophisticated in the world at the time) was largely designed/built for space shuttle studies.
    A SEM/AES/XPS tribometer for rolling and sliding contacts - ScienceDirect
     
  3. Platterpus

    Platterpus Senior Member

    I remember that day at school vividly. I was in the 8th grade. We watched the launch live on TV in the classroom just to see the Space Shuttle blow up live on air. It was terrible!

    I was listening to my Jean Michel Jarre - Rendez-Vous CD last night thinking about this tragedy once again. Here's some info about the last track on this album "Last Rendez-Vous" or Ron's Piece:

    Rendez-Vous (Jean-Michel Jarre album) - Wikipedia

    "The last track on the album was originally scheduled to include a saxophone part recorded by astronaut Ron McNair on the Space Shuttle Challenger, which would have made it the first piece of music to be recorded in space. However, on January 28, 1986, 73 seconds after lift-off, the shuttle disintegrated and the entire Challenger crew were killed. The track was dedicated to McNair and the other astronauts on board Challenger.[3] On the album, the saxophone part is played by saxophonist Pierre Gossez."
     
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  4. '05Train

    '05Train Crashin' & Flyin' & Livin' & Dyin'

    Location:
    Roanoke, Virginia
    Senior year of high school, watched it live in my English class. I kept saying, "that's not right" right up until the explosion.

    My dad worked in the space program from the early '60s on. He had friends on board and in mission control.
     
  5. Daring

    Daring My quest to marry Stevie Nicks has failed

    Location:
    Grove Ok
    Same here.. English class my senior year. We were speechless. A horrible stain on an otherwise incredible year.
     
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  6. Fastnbulbous

    Fastnbulbous Doubleplus Ungood

    Location:
    Washington DC USA
    I finished it last night. Very well done, moving, and enraging by turns. An engineer should never "take off his engineer's hat and put on his manager's hat." People get killed that way.

    My father-in-law Rick was a nuclear engineer, as was his best friend Bill. Bill spent the last few years of his career at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. They never talked about what they did, but after they retired they revealed it had to do with solid-state welding for nuclear submarines, which was classified at the time. Anyway, people at NASA with high enough clearance, including Bill, had the option to listen to the "black box" recording of the Challenger astronauts after the explosion. (Yes, they were alive and conscious. Yes, they knew what had happened. Yes, they knew they had about 3 minutes to live.) Years later at his daughter's wedding I asked Bill about it. He told me that he agonized over the decision to listen to the recording, but ultimately curiosity got the better of him. What did he hear? About what you'd expect: a lot of screaming, cursing, crying and praying.
     
  7. Trashman

    Trashman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wisconsin
    Are These the Final Words of the Challenger Crew?
     
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  8. CDV

    CDV Forum Resident

    This documentary takes another angle on the well-known story, focussing on people and in particular, on Christa McAuliffe. But ultimately no new information is unearthed: yes, they knew about issues with SRBs; yes, they were under pressure; and yes they decided to launch nonetheless.

    I would be much more interested to watch a documentary about X-37 and Dream Chaser.

    Fun facts: the Space Shuttle had SRBs, did not have escape system, and was manually piloted to land. The Buran was attached to a liquid-engine rocket, had escape system and landed automatically on its only orbital flight.
     
  9. Hagstrom

    Hagstrom Please stop calling them vinyls.

  10. Hagstrom

    Hagstrom Please stop calling them vinyls.

    Sounds like Bill was lying to you!
     
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  11. Daniel Plainview

    Daniel Plainview God's Lonely Man

    4th grade. Came back from lunch to find the teacher in tears. I never really forgave NASA for this. Very traumatic. Just horrible. And the more I learn about it the worse it gets.
     
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  12. Fastnbulbous

    Fastnbulbous Doubleplus Ungood

    Location:
    Washington DC USA
    He had no reason to.
     
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  13. Hagstrom

    Hagstrom Please stop calling them vinyls.

    What year did he tell you this?
     
  14. beccabear67

    beccabear67 Musical omnivore.

    Location:
    Victoria, Canada
    As with Tim Treadwell/Grizzly Man, I would not normally want to hear people's last moments recorded. Any such tapes really should've been destroyed outside of some use for investigators.

    This and the Columbia disaster were big events to me, and very emotional, such negative things from something so optimistic and inspiring. I'm sure when the Grissom, Chaffee and White deaths happened people then felt the same. I wasn't thrilled to hear the tapes from that, and would definitely not want people exposed to them without their being consenting. United 93 tapes should be the property of the family of the heroes of that flight.
     
  15. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    Watched this tonight. Very well done, and a great overview for someone like me who was still a twinkle in an eye somewhere when all this went down.

    Worthy of note at one point is a newspaper clipping where the Challenger story is off to the side...and the headline is all about Chernobyl. How the Space Race really "ended", I suppose.

    I don't think I've seen such clear video of the disaster before. Seeing that spacecraft erupt is immediate, visceral, and hard to watch.
     
  16. jojopuppyfish

    jojopuppyfish Senior Member

    Location:
    Maryland
    I've been watching several raw videos online on the tragedy and, for the first time, gotten to know the 6 other astronauts a little more.
    I was in the 8th grade and in IL, the shuttle launches had become so routine that, at the time I thought this one was not shown on tv.
    But I found out a few months ago that this one launched at 11:30am EST which is 10:30 Central Time...which meant the reason I didn't watch the launch was that I was already at school....and our school wasn't watching the launch.
    But someone must have been watching at school because I remember someone telling me during lunch that it blew up....which would have been between about 1 hr later.

    I'll admit I use to tell all the jokes about it, but as I've gotten older, I really do feel guilty I use to tell them.

    I specifically remember the Today show a few days before the launch where Christa's husband is interviewed after all the delays and they asked him if he was worried....he said something like "Nasa is taking every precaution"
     
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  17. seacliffe301

    seacliffe301 Forum Resident

    I happened to be home that day and made a point to watch it live. The moment of the explosion, I started rolling tape on this disastrous event (I still have those Beta tapes today). I remember standing there in disbelief, not sure how to process what was clearly a horrific malfunction. So tragic.
    I will be certainly watching this doc tonite.
     
  18. intv7

    intv7 Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    Watched the 1st episode yesterday. My wife and I both commented that the opening shot of the TV being wheeled into class was exactly how we both vividly remember that day. We were both in 7th grade.

    We convinced our 12-year-old daughter to pry herself away from her iPad for an hour to watch with us, as she's pretty much the same age we were then. She was profoundly moved by it, as were we. Gonna watch the rest tonight, I think.
     
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  19. PTgraphics

    PTgraphics Senior Member

    Saw the first 2 episodes last night. I was a Junior in High School in NY. I was home that morning I think because it was Regents exams or some other testing. Saw it live on the TV and really couldn’t believe it.
     
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  20. AppleCorp3

    AppleCorp3 Forum Resident

    Was there ever any footage leaked of the shuttle falling to earth? Everything I’ve seen shows just the explosion and cuts off. The only reason I ask is because that would have dispelled the notion that the whole thing blew to pieces.
     
  21. CDV

    CDV Forum Resident

    They managed to turn a case of bureaucratic five-year planning into a soap opera — of course, it is a Netflix "original series", Netflix wants to compensate for the shows lost to other streaming services. This series could be easily condensed into half an hour by taking the launch from the episode 3 and the Rogers Commission report from the episode 4. Everything else is just a sentimental reality show. No info on whether the crew were still alive until the impact into the ocean, or maybe even after, which is unlikely though. The absence of an escape system was never discussed.

    One phrase from the last minutes of the episode 4 indicating the reversal of the roles between government agencies and private contractors triggered me, when a Morton Thiokol employee said that after the Challenger accident NASA would report to Morton Thiokol, not vice versa. It seems this modus operandi transgressed into what Boeing had with FAA, adding and changing features to 737 MAX with little or no governmental oversight, causing two fatal accidents with 346 deaths, not just seven.
     
  22. The Hud

    The Hud Breath of the Kingdom, Tears of the Wild

    There is a little footage of stuff hitting the ocean, and a shot or two of wreckage on the ocean floor in this documentary.
     
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  23. jojopuppyfish

    jojopuppyfish Senior Member

    Location:
    Maryland
    this is the Television Director's view of that fatal explosion


    At 1:13 pay attention to ROTI Tracker on the bottom row and you can see the flames already start to burn through
     
  24. JohnG

    JohnG PROG now in Dolby ATMOS!

    Location:
    Long Island NY
    We finished it last night and thought it was a very good documentary. I had forgotten about the failed O rings. Terrible that after this disaster, they finally figured out how to stack the O rings in the future flights. And oh man imagine going on that first flight after the disaster?
    I was working in Manhattan that morning and missed watching it live but we were all shocked at our desks when we heard the news.
    The strange thing is over that past weekend while driving home on a late Sunday night I was listening to a talk radio program that was about the paranormal and physic energy and the host mentioned he felt their would be a problem on the next launch.
    When it did happen I couldn’t believe he had been right.
    Maybe he had heard of the O ring problem through underground contacts.
     
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  25. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I was watching it live when it happened, via a 12' satellite dish at the audio video store where I was working. Absolutely horrifying.

    I know who was responsible for the deaths of the Challenger crew - the politicians from Utah who exerted political influence to get the booster contract for Morton Thiokol. They should not have been manufactured in a landlocked state, and there should not have been any joints and o-rings to fail. They should have been manufactured in a state on the gulf coast so they could have been shipped to Florida on a barge.
     
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