Eyes on the Stars

spaceship earth

We are all astronauts

Buchminster Fuller conversation

29 years ago today: "go with throttle up"

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of central Florida, United States, at 11:38 a.m. EST (16:38 UTC).


Disintegration of the entire vehicle began after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The O-ring failure caused a breach in the SRB joint it sealed, allowing pressurized hot gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent SRB attachment hardware and external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB's aft attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces promptly broke up the orbiter.


The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. Although the exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown, several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. However, the shuttle had no escape system and the astronauts did not survive the impact of the crew compartment with the ocean surface.


The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings since 1977, but they failed to address it properly. They also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The Rogers Commission offered NASA nine recommendations that were to be implemented before shuttle flights resumed. (read more)

mars one

mars underground

Other Worlds

The Eagle Has Landed

The Secret Astronauts

An early photo of the first MOL crew, the "Magnificent Seven".

They were the "Magnificent Seven" of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, some of the best pilots the U.S. military had to offer the officials who were making the first MOL crew selection in 1965. Two more crews would follow, including that of Bob Lawrence, the first African-American astronaut. These men, 17 in all, were set to make history in space as the first military astronauts, performing covert reconnaissance from orbit. Yet while NASA's astronauts were gracing magazine covers and signing autographs, the MOL teams were sworn to secrecy; most of the program's details remain classified even today. And MOL was canceled in 1969, before any of its astronauts went into space. To learn more about some of these secret astronauts and their subsequent career achievements,
click here.

The Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) was part of the United States Air Force's manned spaceflight program, a successor to the cancelled X-20 Dyna-Soar project. It was announced to the public on the same day that the Dyna-Soar program was cancelled, December 10, 1963. The program was supposedly intended to prove the utility of man in space for military missions. However, this was just a cover story for the Russians and the public.

The program was developed as a space station used for reconnaissance purposes (KH-10). The space station used the Gemini B spacecraft that was derived from NASA's Gemini program. The contractor for the MOL was the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Gemini B/MOL craft was externally similar to NASA's Gemini spacecraft although it underwent several modifications. The most obvious was the addition of a circular hatch through the heat shield to allow passage between the spacecraft and the laboratory.
(read more)

Do you really think there are no more "secret astronauts?" (link)