9 thoughts on ““There’s Some Kind Of Trouble There, George””

  1. I saw this a couple months ago. Amazing to see, and hard to imagine for a generation where everyone has a digital/movie camera on their hip…

  2. Notice that in the video, you can easily see the upper atmospheric winds that were described as the highest in the program history in the video. According to the Rogers commission the break in the SRB join seals on liftoff sealed themselves until that gust of wind happened.

  3. Did the official Challenger launch video record the detonations of the runaway SRB’s? This newly-released video is the first glimpse that many people have seen of the SRB detonation. It’s also, as Mr. Hill said, a reflection of how quickly the proliferation of digital cameras has changed things. There were many amateur recordings of the Columbia disaster, but this is the only one we’re aware of from Challenger.

  4. Really? There was a lot of amateur footage of the Kennedy assassination 23 years earlier.

  5. Rand — your Web page ate my long post, here is the short post.

    My colleague Bill Birkemeier with expertise in radio scattering in the upper atmosphere and in wind shears had the theory that wind shear, not the O-rings, wrecked Challenger. You can see the wind shear, strong wind shear in this new video.

    His theory is that the Shuttle was strongly yawed into a strong crosswind and then hit clear air at an angle. At that moment, an accelerometer reported zero, not a spike, not noise, but zero — Bill thinks the accelerometer went off scale and reported zero in the telemetry as a “bad data value marker.”

    Call Dr. Birkemeier a crack-pot, but if we start up sub-orbital tourism, we are going to have to know about these wind shears and the hazards to “navigation” they pose.

  6. XCOR is aware of these issues and is keeping an eye on them. Jeff Greason says that every time people fly higher, they think they’ll fly
    above the weather — and every time they start flying higher, they find
    new weather. Understanding the dynamics of the upper atmosphere is an
    excellent application for suborbital spacecraft.

  7. Wind shear is definitely something to keep in mind, but the suborbital spacecraft won’t be built in segments to meet political needs (like the solid rocket boosters were…built in Utah in segments so they could be transported to FL) either.

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