More on Seeing Stars from Space

[jrkeller]

I recently finished reading Tom Stafford's book on his life and times in and out of the space program. He flew on Gemini 6, Gemini 9, Apollo 10 and ASTP. In his book, he clearly states that he could see stars from space, but only during period when he was on the night side of the Earth or moon.

For those of you who are new (or are forgetful), longtime HB Bill Kaysing states that NASA blew up the Challenger, because Christa McAuliffe would say that she saw stars from space which is not the official NASA line. As usual, Bill can't get his story straight. Tom Stafford's statement is typical of my own experiences talking to various astronauts (about 30 or so) and not a one has said that you couldn't see stars from space.

http://www.weirdvideos.com/kaysing2.html

http://nardwuar.com/vs/bill_kaysing/index.html

[Irishman]

Here's something that never made sense about the "she wouldn't lie and say they couldn't see stars" explanation for Challenger.

Here is NASA, the organization that controls access to space. They have the final say so over who gets to go on the flights. First off, McCauliffe wasn't the first civilian in space, at least one senator had been up before. But anyway, she was a teacher, and not part of the government. Okay, assuming there is some big lie about stars not being visible required to post facto protect the Apollo pictures which they forgot to add stars to, and McCauliffe stated she wouldn't go along with the lie (or whatever), here's the rub. NASA could have very easily just disallowed her to go on the flight. "Oh, sorry, you're succeptible to zero-g sensitivity and will spend the whole time hurling. No go." "Oops, look at this funky EKG line, you'd better not go." "Oh, darn, you caught the flu 2 days before liftoff, can't have you up there." Let's see, NASA controls the strings over who gets to go to space, and the best method they can find to keep her silent is to publically and dramatically blow up their own billion dollar space launch vehicle and crew? That shut down their program for a year, and almost got it completely canceled? Right. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.