Challenger Explosion
January 28, 2011 by USA Post
Challenger Explosion, McNair was the second African American to fly in space. McNair Scholars Program was established in his honor later in 1986 after the Challenger explosion.
This is a scholarship financed at national level, which serves first-generation students from low-income families, or students from underrepresented groups as African Americans, Native Americans, and Native Hawiians Hispanics.
Betty Mei, deputy director of the WVU McNair Scholars Program, said the scholarship is open to juniors and seniors on the rise and provides opportunities for research training, GRE test preparation, tutoring and other tools to help McNair Scholars work towards goals in higher education.
The deadline to apply for the scholarship was January 14 and are currently screening applications, “she said. Mei said she encourages students to consider applying for the scholarship to help them achieve their goals of higher education.
Sunny Anand Narayanan, a senior mechanical engineering major in biology and was the recipient of scholarships McNair in 2008. Narayanan said the award McNair helped his education.
“Growing up, I was not in the best financial situation. It was hard to imagine how I would be able to achieve the education of my dreams,” he said.
Ronald McNair received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After the Challenger tragedy in 1986, Congress named the new post-baccalaureate Achievement Program for Ronald E. McNair.
“The most important thing that ever happened in the space of events on this flight – the first climber in space,” WVU graduate, Navy fighters and astronaut Jon McBride said.
Jon McBride, astronaut retired NASA, lectures on personal experience and life of the late Challenger crewmember Ronald McNair Thursday at West Virginia University in an event organized by the McNair Scholars Program.
McBride, a native Beckley, West Virginia, was a friend and classmate of McNair during their time at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
McBride said he was looking at a training session on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger tragedy occurred.
Four members of the Challenger crew were classmates own McBride. McBride said they had been alive today and to discuss with another flight mission, they all agreed without hesitation.
“One thing we discovered that day that we work people too hard,” said McBride.
Provost Michelle Wheatley said she could not remember exactly what she did 25 years ago when the Challenger launched. She was an assistant professor in Florida at the time, and she remembers seeing the launch of some of his colleagues, “she said.
“Of course, more than half the people here tonight are younger than 25 years,” said Wheatley.
The seven-crew members died when Challenger blew up the ship on January 28, 1986, shortly after its launch.
Twenty-five years and a generation later, members and supporters of the U.S. space program remember the seven-crew members who perished aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
Families and NASA officials met in an outdoor memorial at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday morning at a quarter of a century has passed since the shuttle Challenger exploded, killing her crew and cast doubt on what had hitherto seemed a space program tirelessly safely.
After launching at the end of the morning of January 28, 1986, Challenger has been linked for six days in space when it exploded just 73 seconds into its flight.
As the world watched events unfold live on TV, the shuttle exploded in a spectacular fireball careening.
The crew compartment has emerged intact from the explosion to go up by nearly 5 kilometers more before plunging back to Earth in free fall that lasted more than two minutes.
With no parachute, to escape the system or even protective clothing for the crew, all seven on board – including the first teacher and citizen launched into space, Christa McAuliffe – had no hope.
Cmdr. Dick Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, payload specialist Gregory Jarvis and mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka and Ronald McNair were also killed in the eyes of the world watched incredulously shocked.
Looking back on the events of that day, Canada AM space educator Randy Attwood deplores the prevailing sense of routine in the attitude toward the NASA shuttle flights at the time.
“It’s sad when you look back to know that the engineers were aware of the problem that finally brought down Challenger,” Attwood said in an interview on CTV’s Canada AM on Friday, recalling the combination of weather launch freezing and a rocket booster decay O-ring seal that were eventually blamed for the disaster.
“It reminds us that even if it looks like it’s simple to go into space on the Space Shuttle, it is a risky business.”
Before launching unfortunate Challenger, NASA had flown in space shuttles two dozen times without incident. But this year, delays have been frustrating the objective of the agency’s space shuttle launch times fifteen twelve months.
Instead, after the deadly disaster, the program wound up grounded for over two years.
Seventeen years after the Challenger explosion, almost to the day, seven astronauts died when a piece of fuel tank foam led to Columbia shuttle ripping apart as it descended to Earth at the end of his mission.
Now the shuttle fleet is grounded once again that the struggle of engineers to fix cracking of the fuel tank they fear could lead to catastrophic failure.
The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch by the end of February, with Endeavour scheduled to follow in April. Then, Atlantis is scheduled to mark the official end of the shuttle program for 30 years when it is launched into space in late summer.
Although this will result in final flight by NASA no longer a means to launch its own astronauts into orbit, the agency has not yet announced a replacement. Unperturbed, the U.S. president Barack Obama announced last spring that the United States hopes to send humans to Mars and back over the next twenty years.
Canadian Space Program, which has long relied on NASA to-orbit transportation, plans to maintain its own commitments in the area, including the next mission veteran Chris Hadfield, astronaut to serve as commander of the Space Station International for three months in 2013.
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