Dr. Story Musgrave believes the Challenger astronauts were still alive after the blast.

After a search I got the impression that this video was not posted earlier, but it is not the first time I had it wrong, so if it was already posted I apologize for that and ask the Mods to remove it as quick as possible .

I stumbled on this quite impressive and shocking short video about the last moments of the Challenger and the horrible last seconds its crew must have sustain.
I still remember the very shocking images very clear when I saw it happen for the first time.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/551dcbe85a1f.jpg[/atsimg]

Space Shuttle Challenger's smoke plume after in-flight breakup that killed all seven STS-51-L crew members.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/dc36b5be67f7.jpg[/atsimg]

STS-51-L crew: (front row) Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair; (back row) Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.

en.wikipedia.org...

Retired NASA astronaut Dr. Story Musgrave believes the Challenger astronauts were still alive after the blast and died on the moment they hit the water.

Geüpload door weshtv op 28 jan 2011

Astronauts Likely Survived Challenger Explosion



[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f74379b6787d.jpg[/atsimg]

Too bad such good astronauts and very brave people did come to such a terrible end.

Originally posted by spacevisitor
Retired NASA astronaut Dr. Story Musgrave believes the Challenger astronauts were still alive after the blast and died on the moment they hit the water.

I always suspected that too.

While it's possible one or more were unconscious, I doubt they all were and I suspected they might well be conscious for the final plunge, just long enough to say some prayers while your life flashes before your eyes.

It's still not a bad way to go, trying to travel to space and the end comes quickly, and becoming national heroes on top of that. I'd rather die that way, than by the radiation death awaiting the Fukushima death squads, who have volunteered to sacrifice their lives to clean up the mess. Death by radiation exposure looks like a much worse way to go, to me.

There is a ton of evidence to support this. Things like their emergency O2 being turned on. I even heard there is a blackbox record of the astronaut's final minutes that has only been released to the families.

As great as the Space Shuttle has been, 40% of the Fleet is gone and more than 1% of the flights ended catastrophically. For the US to continue manned space flight, we need a safer vehicle.

This was a media driven disaster, never before had the Space Shuttle taken off with temperatures close to freezing. A school teacher was on board and her students were flown down to watch the launch. The launch already had at least two delays and the pressure of liftoff was building. Warnings of the spotted O-ring leek were announced but thwarted as normal and not beyond the safety limit but mission control people tried their hardest to be heard.

All in all the specific O-ring engineering flaw probability was improved for future flights. A shame but both of the Shutttle disasters can be attributed to human error an minimizing what inspection revealed to be a serious hazard. In 1986 complacency (of repeated successes) was as much a contributing factor as the actual hazard was.

Sad those school children got a bigger show than they could ever have imagined, I do hope none of them are scared for life to witness their teacher's death.

BTW I also have read a few things years ago about the probability the blast didn't kill the crew.

now that's journalism right there.
those ships are built to cross into our atmosphere

What is value in publishing a story like this? Not the OP but the actual story itself.

The families have already suffered a loss, now we want them to imagine their loved ones plummeting towards their death?

Some things are better left unsaid.

Wow, just wow.
Very sad to think they were alive after that.

Heard and read years ago that there was evidence of drowning. I believe Musgrave. He knows, he said it with complete conviction. This isnt new news. I remember days after the event, the news was talking about how they are designing escape hatches, parachutes, etc. because they had mentioned that the pilots were alive when they hit the water. Hearing this doc just confirms.

reply to post by spacevisitor


Story is an interesting guy, met him as a child and a few years ago at the cape. As to the story, this was well known and documented since the accident. There are 'fake' transcripts of things said after the explosion, but the fdr's were disconnected from power by the disintegration. The most likely scenario is they all (in some ways luckily) had rapid loss of consciousness due to lack of air at 48k'. So they were technically alive when they hit, but not conscious for the fall (the forces from the fall, until impact were survivable) See www.hq.nasa.gov...

Originally posted by Zaphod
reply to post by spacevisitor

 

The most likely scenario is they all (in some ways luckily) had rapid loss of consciousness due to lack of air at 48k'. So they were technically alive when they hit, but not conscious for the fall (the forces from the fall, until impact were survivable) See www.hq.nasa.gov...

I always thought they died immediately during the explosion, with a very, very small chance of surviving that, therefore I was so shocked to hear that they did survive even the explosion and lost their lives the way Story Musgrave said they did, and he seems to me very shore about that.
Perhaps there was still contact with the crew even during those last 2 to 3 minutes, because how can he be so shore of that then.

There was an engineer IIRC that said they struggled into full protective gear and tried in vain to keep some control of the actual shuttle. This showed that at least two of the crew were very alive on the way down. I cried real deep blubs on hearing that.

Sad, very very sad. Hurt then, hurts now.

My understanding is Challenger didn't explode, the external tank did. When that happened Challenger's trajectory went of course enough for the Mach whatever wind force to rip the vehicle apart. The crew compartment is meant for a vacuum and it is possible it remained pressurized after the vehicle break up and there is evidence to support the crew compartment was intact at splashdown. If they survived the break up and then the force of hitting the ocean at terminal velocity would have done it.

It was the saddest day in manned spaceflight.

I did some more digging about the possibility if there could still have been contact between the astronauts and NASA's Mission Control Center during their last minutes after the explosion.
Here the last three comments from the official NASA mission tape until the explosion.
--------
T+1:07............PLT..... Yep, that's what I've got, too.
T+1:10............CDR..... Roger, go at throttle up.
(NASA: SSME at 104 percent.)
T+1:13............PLT..... Uhoh.
T+1:13.......................LOSS OF ALL DATA.

TRANSCRIPT OF THE CHALLENGER CREW COMMENTS FROM THE OPERATIONAL RECORDER

history.nasa.gov...

Then I did find an older thread about it on ATS from former member “mikesingh” in which I found this link.

And what I did find there really shocked me.

In there is stated;

The official account released by NASA ends with shuttle pilot Michael Smith saying, " Uh-oh!" Some NASA employees have evidently heard more-much more. And they provided the rest of the account based on what they've discussed within NASA in the last five years. The astronauts had time and realized something was happening after the shuttle broke up.

" All shuttle astronauts carry personal recorders and the tape in question apparently came from Christa's (McAuliffe), which was recovered after the shuttle disaster, " said Hotz. Jarvis was sitting beside her, and when he figured out what was happening he said,
" Give me your hand. "

"NASA insists there's nothing like that on tape but they're talking about the mission tape, not Christa's. So they're not lying, but they're not telling the truth, either. "

The following transcript begins two seconds after NASA's official version ends, with pilot Michael Smith saying, " Uh-oh! ".

lists.topica.com...

Because I do not know if that transcript is true and find it even improper to post it I hope Jim Oberg is willing to give his opinion about it.

reply to post by spacevisitor
I generally don't have much faith in unsourced, anonymous claims like that.

Here's what snopes has to say about it:
www.snopes.com...

NASA later conceded it was likely that at least three of the crewmen aboard remained conscious after the explosion, and perhaps even throughout the few minutes it took for the crew compartment of the shuttle to fall back to Earth and slam into the Atlantic Ocean. The agency was highly secretive about matters relating to the Challenger tragedy, actively fighting in the courts media requests to be allowed access to photos of the wreckage, the details of the settlements made with the crews' families, or the autopsy reports, and this reticence to share information likely convinced some that there was more to the story than was being told. Such an environment breeds its own
rumors.

However, the "transcript" quoted above was not taken from a "secret tape" leaked from NASA; it was a fanciful product of someone's imagination published in the a February 1991 issue of Weekly World News, a tabloid famous for creating news stories out of whole cloth. There never was such a transcript, nor was the crew of the Challenger known to have been wearing personal recorders. Moreover, personal recorders would not have picked up the comments of crew members on different decks, as the faked transcript would have us believe.

Not everyone aboard died the exact second the external tank exploded; that much is known. A complete understanding of exactly what happened in that cabin after the explosion remains elusive because the impact of the crash, plus the six weeks the wreckage and bodies spent in the sea, made it impossible to determine precisely when and how everybody aboard died. (Six weeks in sea water would also have ruined any unshielded audio tapes that miraculously survived the explosion and the crash.)

Most of that makes sense, though I'm not sure why seawater would destroy magnetic tape in 6 weeks, especially if it's tightly wound in a reel; the seawater may not have much access to the recording surface?

If the cabin depressurized immediately, the crew would have lived about 6 to 15 seconds after the blast; if not, they might have survived for the full two minutes and forty-five seconds it took the cabin to fall 65,000 feet back to Earth. They most certainly could not have lived through the crushing 207 mph impact with the waters off the Florida coast

So that's the critical question right there, did the cabin depressurize instantly? If not, some were probably conscious the whole time. They think the 4th pack is a clue to that question:

Possibly the best clue towards solving the mystery of how long the doomed crew survived lies in what NASA learned from examining the four emergency air packs recovered from the wreckage. Three had been manually activated, which demonstrated that at least some of the crew realized something had gone wrong and had taken steps to save themselves. However, the fourth unactivated pack speaks with an even stronger voice, indicating that most likely realization of the circumstances and loss of consciousness were occurring at roughly the same time.

Was that 4th pack unactivated a sign of losing consciousness?

In the report, Dr. Kerwin said: "The cause of death of the Challenger astronauts cannot be positively determined, the forces to which the crew were exposed during the orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury, and the crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness in the seconds following orbiter breakup due to in-flight loss of crew module pressure."

In other words, they might well have lived for the full spiral down and might even have been fully conscious for all of that hellish descent. But even if so, this fabricated "transcript" does not preserve their final words.

Well there you have it. Musgrave might be right, but the transcript is a phoney according to Snopes. Weekly World News is sort of a joke source, right? (Aside from the "Men in Black" movie).

Dear mods, after rethinking this thread and my last reply which I cannot delete anymore, I have a friendly request, please close this thread, because I realize now that there is no reason whatsoever for why this thread must be continue.
I think it is better to let it go.

As zroth said here.

Originally posted by zroth

What is value in publishing a story like this? Not the OP but the actual story itself.

The families have already suffered a loss, now we want them to imagine their loved ones plummeting towards their death?

Some things are better left unsaid.

I am convinced now that in this case zroth is right, that some things are better left unsaid.

reply to post by spacevisitor


Would it not be in their memory if we could develop some technology to save astronauts from disasters like this with some kind of escape pod system or parachute or anything. Perhaps NASA will develop some kind of last ditch fail-safe system for further possible disasters for the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle

So we can make all further missions safer for the brave men and women going into space.

OP Your Youtube Video seems to be not working in the first Post do you have another Link? TY

originally posted by: spacevisitor
Dear mods, after rethinking this thread and my last reply which I cannot delete anymore, I have a friendly request, please close this thread, because I realize now that there is no reason whatsoever for why this thread must be continue.
I think it is better to let it go.

As zroth said here.



I am convinced now that in this case zroth is right, that some things are better left unsaid.

On the contrary... Five and a half years later and I'm searching for info about the Challenger Crew's deaths because in a different thread I'd mentioned something about memories from my childhood, and this is one of my fondest so I decided to search on ATS and it led me here to your thread.

What Arbitrageur found is without a doubt, extremely interesting. I can't imagine falling for two and a half minutes, knowing death will find you at any second although it could be possible that the fall was broken by the cabin they were still in and the survivors drowned instead.

originally posted by: LSU0408
although it could be possible that the fall was broken by the cabin they were still in and the survivors drowned instead.

Not possible. They hit water at hundreds of miles per hour.

The cabin nose was tilted a little to the right when it hit the ocean, just enough to send the cabin crashing onto its left side. It hit at about 200 miles an hour, fracturing like a bottle dropped onto a concrete pavement, but held together by the thousands of feet of wire that surround the cabin like a kind of high-tech cocoon. The astronauts were torn from their seats and thrown to the left, which was now down. They died instantly, dismembered by the impact.

There's a very interesting article about the details of the disaster, and the subsequent coverup by NASA (the real one this time): www.lutins.org...

a reply to: wildespace

In some ways I do not blame NASA for covering up how they actually died; for the families sake, the public at large and how the program could of been terminated o the spot because of mass outrage (which is one of the reasons we still can't advance further into space, the whole "what happens if a rocket explodes going up with people on it?").

I take solace that their death was quick when they finally hit the ocean if nothing else.

originally posted by: LSU0408
...I'm searching for info about the Challenger Crew's deaths because in a different thread I'd mentioned something about memories from my childhood, and this is one of my fondest...

The Challenger crews' deaths is one of your fondest memories from childhood?!?!?!?