Mercédesz Gyükeri

The story of the last and tragic flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger has been told many times, but the new Netflix documentary follows an unknown path in the narrative. In addition to the families of the victims, those whose decision was fatal also spoke.

How can you make space flight more interesting? Maybe picking up someone who doesn’t even want to go!

Shaking their knees, the audience laughs at Jerry Seinfeld’s joke, which is difficult to understand today, despite the fact that the situation is practically the same as when it was delivered 35 years ago in the United States. Yuri Gagarin’s trip and Neil Armstrong’s spacewalk were still a global sensation, but as expeditions to explore space became more frequent, they came and went in the newspapers, eventually ending up as a few news sentences in Many pages. And when something gets used to it, it is no longer so interesting. And when people are not interested in something, it is difficult to sell it.

Then came the Challenger and he met the astronauts. Apple – just as the comedian had predicted: in the way they really didn’t want to. The spacecraft tragedy on January 28, 1986, not only brought NASA back to the cover, it also caused long-lasting national trauma – memories that are still alive in the minds of many Americans today.

Steven Leckart and Glen Zipper are like this: They followed the 74-second flight of the ship as schoolchildren, and 36 years later they present this latest journey in a four-part documentary. Visible on Netflix Challenger: the last flight a retelling of a story that has been told many times and in great detail, but the two authors embark on an unknown path to unravel the tragedy: the people in the story, their motivations, are featured from the Seinfeld joke to the journey fatal.

So we take into account that NASA and Washington want to do space flight with the American people again. Their goal is far from just scientific: spaceflight is an expensive genre, you have to make money somehow, and the interest of the masses is a great way to do it. Sure, no matter how hard an astronaut’s training is, there are usually over-subscriptions to the post, but it’s still a very tight circle. The big idea turned into that

raise a civilian.

Promotion did not start here: a training course with more staff and greater publicity began in the late 1970s than before. Class 78 also included women of color and women. How curious the latter is can be seen in archival footage: Judith Resnik, who eventually became the second American woman in space and also participated in the last Challenger trip, speaks in a television interview that when she meets As a man, all she says about herself is: The engineer, who is also an astronaut, admits “only if asked.”

The program also featured the semi-participation of civilians, engineers and researchers, who supplemented the team’s work in space on Monday with scientific experiments. However, all this was not enough, the nucleus of the promotion became allowing a real civilian to travel through space.

We are in the early eighties, space tourism is not mentioned, and there are obviously interested applicants from Tom Wolfe, who wrote a documentary novel about the beginning of the American space program, to Big Bird of Sesame Street, the latter failed due to problems of size.

However, arousing the interest of children was still an important goal, and the civilian could become a teacher. The “master in space” program was announced by then-President Ronald Reagan himself, and 15,000 people applied, including Christa McAuliffe, who ultimately became the tragic aviation hero, both as a woman and an outsider.

She is also at the center of the series, but there are others alongside her: Grith Javris, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Michael Smith, and Francis Scobee alongside Judith Resnik. Friends, wives, remember their journey to death, their commitment, their enthusiasm and their last days together.

It’s easy, of course, to show the heroes as human beings, as everything is free here: archival smiles, survivors who look like survivors, stunned witnesses evoke the drama of then and now. Among them are children like Leckart and Zipper, who, like many of their peers,

watching the tragedy live, they were the first to face death.

However, the creators of Challenger go further: they also show the characters on the other side as human beings. Those whose decision the spacecraft could embark on its fatal journey.

Again, the story is only well known: the spaceship disaster was caused by the accelerator rocket sealing ring becoming inelastic in the cold after damage, the dripping fire separated the accelerator rocket crashing into the fuel tank and caused the jacket to fall off. But the exit itself was not common either: once the weather was bad, once the departure was postponed because the door could not be closed. And on the day of departure, an unusual cold greeted him in Florida, and the space shuttle was also flooded with giant icicles.

Furthermore, the tragedy was not caused by bad luck: Thiokol and NASA experts were also aware of the risks and mistakes and, on the other hand, faced political pressure to continue the expensive space program immediately. Again, the documentary presents all of this only with the voices of eyewitnesses, experts, those responsible, and the real drama is not the explosion seen several times, but the moments in which they talk about why they were allowed or allowed to fly. . Or why did someone turn to the press to let Americans mourning Christa McAuliffe know what had happened in those 74 seconds over Cape Canaveral?

Leckart a Washington PostIn a statement about the Chernobyl reactor accident a few months later, he compared human responsibility in the Challenger disaster: “They are not necessarily villains who are not driven by good intentions. But everything can go back so fast. “

Who else considered what “reasonable risk”? And what do you think now, 36 years later? What is the risk of dangerous space flight in itself? Can seven people be sacrificed for the sake of science? How to live after such a decision?

It is not the filmmakers who try to answer the questions: they give the floor to the people who participated in the decision making at that time. Some have broken one of them for life, some maintain to this day that they have acted correctly. And family members who have suffered the burden of pain and forgiveness have the floor. THE Challenger: the last flight its true power lies in the drama of confrontation, from vain hopes to tragedy and the continuation of life and the space program.

After all, the discovery of space is still in front of people, whether they make headlines or just a few news lines on many newspaper pages.



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