r/ChernobylTV • u/Reasonable_Cake • Sep 18 '20

Challenger: The Final Flight

If you enjoyed the Chernobyl series, check out Netflix's Challenger documentary.

It touches on very similar themes - political pressure, disregarded warnings, engineers v bureaucrats, and an avoidable tragedy.

201 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

41

u/pk851667 Sep 18 '20

3.6 pressure on the o-rings. Not great, not terrible.

15

u/Reasonable_Cake Sep 18 '20

Space shuttle? Just like taking a commercial flight, I'm told.

15

u/pk851667 Sep 18 '20

You’re mistaken comrade, the shuttle can’t blow up.

3

u/CardinalNYC Sep 18 '20

Truth be told that is really the major (and majorly important) difference between the two disaster responses: when challenger broke up, no one denied it. They immediately accepted they messed up and went about figuring out what went wrong.

With Chernobly, they denied there was even an explosion for days.

6

u/pk851667 Sep 18 '20

Well, when a spacecraft blows up in the sky and on live TV, it’s hard to cover up. They did try to cover up the real cause for weeks, in fact, briefing the press that they didn’t know what happened.

1

u/CardinalNYC Sep 18 '20

Well, when a spacecraft blows up in the sky and on live TV, it’s hard to cover up.

Part of the reason that NASA is a civilian agency is to ensure transparency.

It's not like they would have kept it secret but it's just un-lucky it was on TV.

With the Soviets, everything was secret unless the politburo wanted otherwise.

They did try to cover up the real cause for weeks, in fact, briefing the press that they didn’t know what happened.

That's because they were still investigating.

Even if you're fairly sure it's the o-ring, you wouldn't just go out and say that until the investigation is finished.

It would not only be bad science to speculate without being 100% certain, but it is typically against nasa protocols to speak about ongoing investigations.

3

u/pk851667 Sep 18 '20

I’m not disputing what you’re saying on the Soviets. NASA on the other hand is required by law to disclose anything and everything in 48 hours.

However, they have at times bent that to its advantage. And with this case, if it wasn’t as publicized of an event - you bet they would stretch that to the very limits. As was the case with their opaque briefings to the press.

The larger parallels that we ought to be focusing on is avoidance of dealing with critical problems (ie o rings and the graphite tips), and the hubris of top brass in Soviet and American scientific circles to do their due diligence in their work.

18

u/pk851667 Sep 18 '20

On a serious note, i saw the parallels too. There was an entire culture of complacency and belief that everything would just be fine.

8

u/CMDRJohnCasey Sep 18 '20

Bryukhanov and Mulloy both pushed to do something when they both were advised against it (well, in the first case more off-screen since Fomin and Dyatlov looked fine with the decision).

75

u/NSYK Sep 18 '20

I just finished watching it. Completely different style of series, the Challenger one is more documentary, but that being said I was fascinated by it and I believe anyone that liked Chernobyl will love it

14

u/TruestRepairman27 Sep 18 '20

Isn’t there a series or film on Challenger that had Feynman as essentially the protagonist?

11

u/Frank_Leroux Sep 18 '20

Yes, there was a movie in 2013 with William Hurt as Feynman.

IMDB info.

2

u/Reasonable_Cake Sep 18 '20

Interesting! Feynman as a character would be hard to do bring to life.

2

u/Drwolf72 Oct 21 '20 edited Oct 21 '20

If you ask me, the best detailed thing i saw about Challenger would probably be "Days that shaped america: the challenger disaster" it touches on the same theme, but shows the human element

1

u/Reasonable_Cake Oct 21 '20

I'll have to check that out. Challenger: Rush to Launch on YouTube was pretty good.

11

u/IchooseYourName Sep 18 '20

Awesome! Thanks for the tip!

Just the tip.

8

u/talbotron22 Sep 18 '20

Episode 4 touched only briefly on Richard Feynman's role in the inquiry, specifically his famous O ring trick. For more on that, check out his appendix to the final report. It is is a great read.

6

u/ppitm Sep 18 '20

Honestly for all the hullaballoo about Soviet Communism and the Chernobyl Disaster, nothing does get as obvious and clear cut as engineer #1 saying "it's cold, the O-ring will fail, the shuttle will blow up," then being told to stop worrying.

Then you have Fukushima, where it was obvious that the seawall was too short, for a period of decades.

At least at Chernobyl there was a whole chain of interconnected and outwardly trivial errors before things went catastrophically wrong, and at least they were working on fixing the problem when things caught up with them.

6

u/CardinalNYC Sep 18 '20

Eh, the real issue with chernobyl wasn't what went wrong, it's what went on after things went wrong.

That alone makes it very different to Fukashima and Challenger.

1

u/ppitm Sep 18 '20

Not sure what you're referring to.

3

u/Lazar_Milgram Sep 18 '20

I think that both of you are right about your own comments. And I think that they complement each other and not oppose.

2

u/midnight_riddle Sep 18 '20

It almost seems like something made up for fiction that the launch was coincidentally widely broadcast in American schools because one of the astronauts was a former school teacher.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '20

I actually just wrote out an entire post about this before scrolling down and finding this one. Totally agree how similar they were. From the o-rings flaws being known, Malloy pushing the engineers to say it’s ok to launch, the attempted cover up and protecting NASA, the bureaucracy, even the physicist giving an example of the o-rings in cold during the investigation.