🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <23146@usc.edu>, robiner@iris (Steve Robiner) writes:
>Does anyone out there know if the last minutes of the Challenger
>flight recorder were ever released.  If so, where can I get a copy
>or transcript.
>
>About a month or so after the crash, I heard that the NYT was suing
>NASA for the tape, but that's the last I heard of it.
>
>I now see accounts of the crash where NASA officials publicly indicate the
>crew died at impact (with the ocean) and not during the explosion as originally
>speculated.
>
>=Steve=

The transcripts of the in-cabin voice recorders were released.  These pick up
conversation in the flight deck (but not the mid-deck) including stuff not
transmitted over the radio.  I remember reading them in AW&ST.  The tape was a
continuous loop, I believe, and starts from several minutes before the launch
and ends with the explosion, at which time power was lost to the crew cabin.
The things I recall were some bantering among the crew concerning the nose cap
prematurely retracting (it wasn't), Judy Resnick saying "[shit] hot" at
ignition (expletive inferred; NASA censored), and, the last words on the tape,
Michael Smith saying "Uh, oh."  In one of a string of events in which NASA
tarnished its image, they stated two days or so before the transcripts were
released that there was no evidence that the crew had any knowledge that things
were going wrong, then said that further sound analysis of the tape had
revealed Smith's words.

NASA's behavior in the aftermath of the accident often seemed to me to be an
obvious exercise in damage control to the detriment of finding out what went
wrong.

As to the morbid details of what happened in the crew cabin after the
accident, there is no way of knowing.  Certainly the crew's fate was sealed
after the breakup, and the only way they would have had to communicate was via
handwritten notes (a la the passengers on the JAL 747 which crashed several
years ago).  In every respect, what happened to the Challenger was
non-survivable, and the time spent wondering about the crew's fate is better
spent on preventing such accidents.  It seems to me that the details of what
*caused* the accident are sufficiently well known, and I don't feel a need to
know all the lurid details of the tragedy.
-- 
Chris Jones    clj@ksr.com    uunet!ksr!clj    harvard!ksr!clj