40 years ago today
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Yeah, that was a bad day. What stuck in my mind at the time was how somebody filmed the people watching, which I thought was particularly unnecessary. A bit of a precursor of where we are now, I guess.
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Oh yeah you can find film of McCauliff's parents watching, it's an uncut 5-10 minutes or so. Of course they were being filmed for their positive reaction not expecting to capture their realization of what they just saw. Mind boggling. One of the engineers who had been warning against the launch just recently died, apparently he was filled with guilt but according to his widow he recently found peace as many people wrote him to tell him it wasn't his fault.
Of course Artmeis II is being pushed back a few days already for delayed testing... mainly because that area of Florida is going to see sub-freezing temps here soon.... which was the main cause of the above explosion. Now the launch I think is NET (no earlier than) Feb 12 instead of Feb 6...
