Mark Fennell
speaker
177 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Mark Fennell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
This is the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
Seven astronauts died, and of course that teacher, Krista McAuliffe.
It is hard to articulate the impact this had on everyone involved.
It was a shock, it was a loss, but also for NASA.
It's a massive dent in the public's confidence and the perception of the space program.
Now, you're probably listening to this wondering, what on earth does this have to do with rubber?
Well, initially when people started asking the question, what went wrong, a lot of the attention focused on the temperature, didn't it?
But ice wasn't the whole story.
A solid rocket booster separation.
Yes, the connection is the rocket boosters that Thiokol worked on.
The joints were sealed together using something called an O-ring that was made from synthetic rubber.
And the thing to remember here is that rubber, even synthetic rubber, it's bendy, it's elastic, it's reactive.
But that is not the case if it's cold.
Yes, so this is the important part.
Before the launch, Morton Thiokol engineers raised a red flag.
They were warning that those O-rings made of rubber, they wouldn't work properly in the cold.
Now, remember, those solid rocket boosters were being reused, right?
And time and time again, launched into the sky, dropped into the ocean, retrieved, cleaned up, used again.
And these engineers had noticed something.
They'd noticed that the O-rings, they weren't looking good.
Showing 141–160 of 177 · page 8 of 9
← Previous
Next →