Conditions at Kennedy Space Center in Florida were anything but ideal for a Space Shuttle launch on the morning of January 28, 1986. The temperature was 31 degrees farenheit, far colder than for any previous shuttle launch. Engineers at Morton Thiokold (manufacturer of the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, or SRBs) warned against launching in such cold temperatures. They feared there was a distinct possibility that the O-rings on the SRBs might not seal correctly in such temperatures. Engineers at Rockwell International (primary contractor for the Shuttle program) also expressed grave concerns over the temperature. Primarily over the possibility that ice, which had accumulated all over the Shuttle and adjacent launch pad, would break free during launch and damage the critical heat absorbing tiles on the Shuttle's underbelly. Both sets of engineers advised against launching.

Their bosses however, feeling the pressure to launch after a week of delays and in the full glare of the public spotlight due to the presence of the first "teacher in space" (Christa McAuliffe) among the crew, overroad their engineers and gave STS-51L the green light.

They should have listened.

Just 73 seconds after lift off the Thiokold engineer's worst nightmares were realized as super-heated gas leaking through a failed O-ring on the right hand SRB burned through the external fuel tank causing a cascading series of events that led to the breakup of the Shuttle Challenger 48,000 feet over the Atlantic. Contrary to popular belief at the time the Shuttle was not torn apart by the explosion of gases in the external fuel tank but instead by aerodynamic forces exerted on the orbiter when it veered off its intended trajectory due to thrust anomolies coming from the right SRB (which had broken loose) and the external fuel tank. The last words heard from Pilot Michael Smith just milliseconds before the orbitor was torn apart were an ominous "Uh oh."

In a grissly discovery made some weeks later it was learned that several members of the crew had apparently survived the orbiter's breakup and activated their emergency oxygen supplies. Indeed Pilot Michael Smith - in a valiant but hopeless attempt to gain control of the situation - had been working the control panel, activating switches in an apparent attempt to restore electicity after the breakup. Because of these discoveries many experts now believe that at least some of the crew members survived the entire 2 minute 45 second free fall to the ocean's surface and that it was that impact with the water - at 207 mph - that was the likely cause of death, not the explosion or orbiter's initial breakup.

In the aftermath of the Challenger disaster the Shuttle program was grounded for 31 months while changes to the decision making culture at NASA as well as new, more robust safety procedures were implemented.

The crew of STS-51L were: Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Greg Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka and Christa McAuliffe.

In the 80s the F-117 Stealth Fighter changed the way people thought of fighter aircraft forever. Looking like either a flying hat box or a flying Hershey Kiss it didn't really look like it could do much flying at all. It was the end product of a process that began with the 1964 publication of a paper by Soviet mathemetician Pyotr Ufimtsev in which he proved that the strength of a radar return was directly related to the edge configuration of the object and not its mass. At the time no country possessed the technological know-how to build on Ufimtsev's idea but in time that would change.

The F-117 was designated a fighter aircraft (hence the "F") but it was not capable of engaging other airplanes or dogfighting. Its job was to sneak in through a country's radar and drop bombs or launch missles at targets on the ground. The F-117 made its first flight in the Nevada desert on June 18, 1981. The following year the first planes were delivered and the plane was declared operational in October 1983. It was still a "black program" however and the air force vehemently denied its very existence for a further 5 years, until November of 1988.

In all 49 F-117s were built and saw service in Panama in 1989, the first Gulf War in 1991 (where it flew with impunity over an otherwise heavily defended Baghdad), Serbia in 1999 (where the first and only of its kind was shot down with the wreckage sold to the Chinese), the Afghan war and the Iraq war.

In 2005 the decision was made to incrementally retire the F-117 in favor of the new, sleeker F-22 and on April 22, 2008 the last of the Stealth Fighters was decomissioned. But though its gone now it will not soon to be forgotten for something about the war plane captured the public imagination and, for better or worse, became part of the new, hi-tech image the country was formulating for itself in the 80s.

The F-117 Stealth Fighter on the ground and in the air. Who knew Hershey's Kisses could fly?

The original Macintosh was released in January 1984 amidst a marketing storm highlighted by a Super Bowl ad dubbed "1984" (directed by Ridley Scott). At first there was a lack of software for the machine, which departed from convention by using a GUI rather than text based interface, and this caused sales to be sluggish. Another reason initial sales were sluggish was the price: a hefty $2,000 at a time when $2,000 was $2,000. Undaunted Steve Jobs and Co plowed ahead, tweaking the hardware, writing new software programs and gradually turning the Macintosh into the machine of choice for the desktop publishing crowd.

In time the humble Macintosh would become the bedrock upon which Apple would construct the world's most valuable technology company and Steve Jobs would become a household name, a billionaire many times over and an icon in the world of industrial design.

Steve Jobs died today at the age of 56. Unlike many he lived long enough to see his wildest dreams come true, though that's cold comfort for the millions of people around the world who saw him as a one of the true visionaries of the post modern world of hi tech interconnectedness.

The Hyundai Excel first appeared on American streets in early 1986. Originally most people looked down their noses at this South Korean "McCar" and few thought it would make much impact in the marketplace. But the Excel became the little import that could. With a base price of $4,995 it got the attention of lots of people who, until then, couldn't have afforded a new car. In its first year it sold nearly 170,000 units in the US, a record at the time for a first year import and it quickly became a fixture on American roads.

While quality problems dogged the Excel over the next few years and it would be discontinued after 1994 (replaced initially by the Sonata and then by a slew of higher priced, higher quality models), Hyundai itself was here to stay. Today, the Hyundai Kia Group is the worlds fourth largest automobile manufacturer, operates the world's largest automobile plant in Ulsan South Korea and Hyundai automobiles regularly win top quality awards around the world.

Print advertisement for the 1986 Hyundai Excel

The Chevrolet Corvette was languishing. The "Stingray" had been in production in one form or another for 2 decades and had grown into (or devolved into depending on your point of view) little more than a bloated avenue trawler with a notable family name. Questions abounded about the future of the once mighty Vette, with as many people fearing the end had come as were convinced that Chevy would find a way to breath new life into the name.

The fact that no Corvettes were produced for the '83 model year alerted people that something was up and indeed by the time 1984 rolled around anticipation was at a fever pitch. Few people were disappointed with the car that Chevrolet finally rolled into showrooms nationwide. The new C4 was a radical departure from the C3. Gone was the Coke bottle "Stingray" with its pinched cabin and its gi-normous front end and in its place was a sleeked out, wide body (at least it felt that way) sports car, redesigned, re-engineered and resuscitated with plenty of European design cues.

While it took a few years to work out the kinks (suspension problems, transmission issues and the fact that the initial C4 basically had the '82 C3 engine with a meager 205 hp) there was no denying that the Vette was back on the right track. By 1987 no one was disputing that the C4 was a world class sports car with its turbo-charged 345 hp version driving highway policeman batty from coast to coast.

The redesigned 1984 Corvette C4 with its Porsche inspired running lights where the grill used to be.

Development of the CD has it's roots way back in the 1950s when scientists began developing laserdisc technology of which the CD is a spinoff (no pun intended). A boatload of technical considerations had to be addressed and problems overcome before it could be made into something marketable to a mass audience but by 1981 Sony and Philips Electronics were finally ready to launch what they envisioned as the successor the the vinyl recording. It became that alright and a whole lot more.

March 2, 1983 is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital music revolution because on that day CBS Records released 16 titles on CD in the US, an event timed to coincide with the release of the first CD players in the US market.

Gradually throughout the mid and late 80s CDs began to nudge aside LPs on record store shelves. 1985 saw the first million selling music CD, Dire Straits Brothers In Arms. The same year David Bowie released his entire catalog on CD, (the first popular music artist to do so). Also in 1985 Sony and Philips released the first CD-ROMs which would blossom into the digital storage device of choice for the next 2 decades.

The transition from vinyl to CD is one of the major popular culture developments of the 1980s as it signaled an unmistakable break with the past matched only perhaps by the leap from radio to television that occurred in the years after World War II. By the end of the decade CDs were everywhere and if you were still listening to music on vinyl or cassette tape you just didn't get it. A decade that began with living rooms crammed with stacks of scratched and warped vinyl records moldering away in cardboard sleeves ended with neat little CD racks full of digital music. The turntable became a museum item and the amplifier, such a mainstay of 1970s audiophile culture, just faded into memory.

the humble but commercially formidable Sony Walkman

In June 1980 Sony Corporation of Japan introduced the "Walkman" into the American market and people's experience of music would never be the same. The cassette tape had been around for years but had found only niche audiences. Sony's co-founder came up with the basic idea for the Walkman in the late 70s when he was frustrated at having to carry around a bulky cassette tape player on business trips just to listen to music. He had a prototype developed and pitched the idea to the company's chairman as "...a good idea...".

It was that alright and a lot more.

The Walkman took off, eventually selling more than 200,000 units. If you didn't have a walkman in the mid 80s you just weren't happening. It would be like someone today who didn't have a mobile phone.

While the Walkman as it came to be known in the 80s and early 90s would eventually be shoved aside by the digital revolution it's indelible mark on popular culture cannot be over-emphasized. It made wearing  earphones in public acceptable, it cemented the idea that music was not something you had to listen to in a static indoor setting and it helped marked the beginning of the end for vinyl records.

I should note that while the Walkman product did lose it's pre-eminence in the market that doesn't mean it went away. Sony now makes high tech mp3 players sold under the Walkman name, as well as old-fashioned cassette player versions.

The Space Shuttle program began in 1981 and signaled a new era in man's attitude toward space. In the past space flights had seemed like grand adventures and the astronauts were hailed as modern-day Magellans. Well no more. Those adventurers of NASA's early days were replaced by scientists, pilots became little more than high-tech truck drivers and with no political will to send anyone further than low-earth orbit the public pretty quickly lost interest. The liftoffs themselves were pretty amazing, but once the little white dot disappeared into the distance everybody went home to watch the video hos on mtv. Sigh.

Still I'm a little sad that the program is coming to an end. Kids need to dream and with nobody venturing skyward (the oh-so-boring truck stop in space known as the ISS doesn't count) it'll be a little more difficult for them to see the future as a place of expanding horizons.

Here's video of that first Shuttle launch in April of 1981.


Learn more about the Shuttle program here.

NASA homepage here.

It began innocently enough. On August 12, 1981 IBM released their 5150 Personal Computer. Who thought that something like this with 16KB of RAM and a 4.77 MHz processor would signal the beginning of the end for newspapers, movies, records and tapes, musicians, tv, privacy and most important, the xxx rated movie house, just to name a few things. And while its true that movies and tv are still breathing, the day of their ultimate assimilation into comland is visible on the horizon. I remember my dad's first computer. It took something in the neighborhood of 45 minutes to dl a picture from the internet and almost as long to print the damn thing.
Tough I have nothing against computers in principle (after all this blog would not exist without them) I'm thankful that for most of our favorite decade computers remained little more than a geeky curiosity and humans were still free create and express themselves in non-digital ways .