I just happened upon this webpage from a TV station in Tampa, while exploring a completely different link in another BAUT thread.

Also in the display is a piece of a wing panel, a damage thermal tile, some switches, and the Translational Hand Controller — the "stick".

I'm moved just reading about it.

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
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I, also. I probably would cry buckets at the exhibit. I'm very sensitive. You should have seen me in the Holocaust Museum in D.C. "emotional" doesn't come to the state I was in.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough and Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."
-Gene Krantz

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Carl Sagan may have seen a pale blue dot, but I see a sapphire.- Doug Phillips, Discovering Alabama.

Clear skies Maksutov.

Never forget that morning. I had a job interview the next day and remember drifting off during the interview thinking about it. Spaceflight is dangerous, just like chlorophyll is green, that's just the way it is. All we can do is try as hard as we can and learn from the mistakes so we don't lose another crew anytime soon. Despite the tragedies NASA has had, I think it has a superb track record. If you compare Russia's space program to ours I think you will see we have made a very dangerous operation look pretty routine. Like any successful endeavor, you have to sacrifice to succeed. God Bless Columbia and her crew.

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If you ever get to go to D.C., be sure to drop into the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum on the mall AND the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum wing out at Dulles airport.

They have lots of similar displays that are just as touching, going back past the Wright brothers time....

Another example, as a musician I was particularly touched when I stumbled on a small display in a corner at the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH.... it was big-band leader Glenn Miller's trombone (same one used by Jimmy Stewart in the bio pic). Miller had left it behind when he went on his final flight from England to France.


.... the Smithsonian has an annoying habit of quietly displaying truly fantastic pieces in small underlit cases with tiny tiny cards explaning what they are. If you don't look close, you'd walk right by something wonderful....

Any aerospace or materials/mechanical engineer worth his/her salt will tell you that sacrifice was not necessary. NASA had more than enough evidence that there was potentially something wrong with Columbia the day after liftoff. Sean O'Keefe, then the NASA Administrator, was either lying through his teeth or ignorant of the facts (either one inexcusable for the head of NASA) when he testified to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the House Science Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics thatHe and his staff made a clear decision after the launch not do an engineering investigation into the documented foam impact. "Don't worry, we've had foam impacts before, and the missions were successful" was the credo. Does that sound a bit like the earlier NASA response to evidence of o-ring erosion?

It was the NASA culture which had devolved to that of the pre-Challenger days that caused the tragedy. That culture was best summed up (although unintentionally) when NASA Administrator O'Keefe publicly derided what he called the "foamologists". We know now how wrong those "foamologists were.

I'm still ticked off that we lost, due to more NASA corporate-style hubris, those seven wonderful people and that beautiful machine I saw in person in 1981.

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