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To All

Unless they mention it on the next program, the Apollo-Soyuz flight was not even mentioned.

Clear Skies.
Rich (RLTYS)

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Nope, it was left out. The series continued to be a little uneven in the way it covered things. It started with the first test flight of the shuttle (STS-1) with some pretty good coverage and then "boom", quickly went to the Challenger disaster. It made the same mistake of over-simplifying the reason for the disaster, putting the entire cause on the weather (cold), rather than on the faulty field-joint design and the decision by flight directors to launch despite some dissension from some of the engineers at Morton-Thiokol. The program also missed things like the capture of the two wayward satellites and the rescue and servicing of the Solarmax solar observatory, both of which occurred before the Challenger accident. The music also was a little tiring, as it was kind of monotonous with the same theme played over and over. Tomorrow night (9 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time), The Discovery Channel again gives you a good chance to compare this long series with the very nice film "In The Shadow of the Moon", which I kind of liked a bit more. Clear skies to you.

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In terms of appealing to a larger audience, I thought Discovery did a good job of covering the various phases of the Shuttle program in the 2 hours it had. Like it or not, the program has only had 5-6 dramatic instances that drew people in, and those are the areas where Discovery focused. The show certainly won't win any awards for completeness and attention to every detail, but I thought it was a good watch.

As to the Challenger disaster, I again think they spent the appropriate amount of time and covered the appropriate details. Sure they didn't go into covering the design flaws and poor communication as much as they could have, but the show stated the obvious facts; the cold weather led to the o-ring failure, nobody spoke up with their concerns, and everything culminated with the very preventable loss of the vehicle. I would hardly call such simplification a mistake on Discovery's part, it's the very essence of what happened. Just my $0.02 anyways.

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"Computers help us solve the many mysteries of the universe. They also help us make the same mistake many times, really fast."

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