re: 39 years ago today...

i was there from 5/81-4/86. Most of that time was in SOFI. We got loaned out to other depts from time to time. FA was pretty cool.

It's been a long time and I still remember being told. " if you fall, try not to damage the tank".

I worked for Thiokol in Huntsville at the time. Our sister division in Utah was responsible for the boosters. I remember watching the replays with a group of our senior managers and them saying there is no way that the boosters caused the explosion. None of them were privy to the discussions between Utah and NASA the night before and I don’t think they were aware of the issues with the o-rings at the time. Boy were they wrong. I also heard later that a few of them went and dumped their Thiokol stock shortly thereafter.

Ironically, the explosion had a positive impact on our division going forward. We had made strap on boosters for the Delta rockets for years, but had stopped since NASA had moved to launching satellites exclusively from the shuttle. After the explosion, they realized they needed more options, so the program was revived.

During the redesign of the booster o-ring joints, our division got involved with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center here in Huntsville to do some small scale testing. MSFC was pleased with our effort and told us that we were much easier to work with, more open, and responsive than our Utah division. They like us so much that they wanted to expand our testing capability which would have helped our division immensely. By then, Cal Wiggins had been moved from Utah to Huntsville to run the division. He was one of the Thiokol managers that signed off on Challenger being safe to fly. Apparently he and others in the Utah management did not like the fact that the Huntsville division was showing up Utah, so they shut the program down.

A few years later, they shut down the Huntsville division putting nearly 1000 people out of work, including myself.

We cryptically joked later that Cal was the only person to kill 7 astronauts and a division. It’s sad that happened because it was a great place to work. We have an alumni association that still gets together 30 years after the division closed.

I was at the house, on the living room floor, in front of the fire place. It was cold ASF that am. I convinced my mother to let me watch the teacher fly from home.

Literally a fricking tragedy that could have been avoided, if they had just listened to the smartest people in the room, the night before.

Parker Hall. MH264 just getting started.

I hear it was a pretty cool place to work back in the day.
I can’t imagine watching monitors there as the Challenger fell apart., it happened 2 years before I was born but it always made me sad when hearing about it just knowing my Pops was connected at some point

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off from my work at Martin Marietta

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i was actually at work that day.

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Best job I ever had went up in smoke that day.

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at that point for me as well

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Lost my job a few months after from Layoffs.

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turned out to be sort of a blessing. went to school and started a new career.

I was trying to figure out how to fax something when I heard the news on the radio. Remember it like it was yesterday.

Was in Coach Warr's history class at Patrician Academy in Butler, AL.

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You happen to work in the VAB?

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I was at the top of the VAB one day and the elevator went out. I had to walk down. I was dizzy by the time I got to the bottom.

didn't really interact with a lot of engineers. My work was confined to TPS related stuff. J. Douglas sounds familiar but, I wouldn't way I knew him.