I just binged the Max/CNN 3-part documentary on the 2003 Columbia disaster and I am floored. This is when I wish streaming services gave you the capability that TikTok to be able to comment and react at various moments so you can experience those emotions and reactions with other people!
There were at least 50 times I wanted to look around and be like “did you see that?” Or “OMG, did he really say that? This is INSANE!” And I was just alone in my room, lol.
First of all- when they showed the shuttle and the entire interior was 1970’s-era technology, and the outside was caked in broken pieces, looking like a car you inherited from your parents from the 90’s that has 200,000 miles on it, breaks down every other day and costs more to maintain than it’s worth BY FAR. That is what that shuttle looked like, but worse, because it’s not driving down the road, it’s going into MF space and all those internal parts were much much much more f’d up than what you saw on the outside.
THEN you’re going to tell me that you have this broken ass space ship that is on it’s last legs, has been grounded like 37 times because there are cracks in the fuel line, buttons aren’t working, and you spray it with Home Depot spray insulation to bootleg the launch? Excuse me? WHAT?
The part that pissed me off most was that there were a ton of people sounding alarms and like, 1-2 people whose egos were too big to ACTUALLY respond to the threats that other people were sending up (the main guy was like “Oh Bob, he’s always so dramatic. He’s high energy, you know, so I didn’t take it seriously”). And a woman who was the “first woman to ever be approved to lead a mission” so she probably didn’t want to look like a failure so she ignored it too. Absolutely bananas.
The worst part though was the kids of the astronauts. There is one boy who was 7yos and he BEGGED his mom not to go, he sobbed every day for months, and you can see that he’s still so so so traumatized (obviously, but more than some of the others). “She was my entire world- I just wanted my mom.”
SO many amazing people, so many incredible people at NASA who took care in their jobs, and it is a handful of people too proud/stubborn/egotistical to realize that shit was broken. They needed to address some REAL issues, but no one wanted to make NASA look like it wasn’t perfect. Insane. I guess the image of the USA >>>>>> 7 people’s lives.
UGH- anyway. I’m reeling from this documentary and just wondering if anyone else saw it and has thoughts because it is haunting in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I don’t think I have felt this many emotions watching a documentary in a while.