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TIL there's a deleted NASA forum post about a shuttle launch delay I've never seen anywhere else | Deleted Things Archive - Free To Speak

christopherh79•1mo ago

TIL there's a deleted NASA forum post about a shuttle launch delay I've never seen anywhere else

I was digging through old web archive copies of a NASA message board from 2004, the kind of place where engineers and hobbyists argued about fuel ratios. I found a post that got pulled within a few hours, a guy claiming he had video from a weather balloon that showed something falling off the external tank before a launch got scrubbed. The date checked out with a real delay in March of that year, but no news article ever mentioned it. Someone in the thread replied with a link that's dead now, and the whole conversation just vanished. I remember watching that launch on TV as a kid and always wondered why they called it off. Has anyone else found deleted tech or space forum threads that fill in gaps like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicecraig1mo ago

That bit about "the whole conversation just vanished" hit home. A buddy of mine used to moderate a music gear forum back in the early 2000s. He told me about a thread where a session player posted the real reason a famous live album got mixed differently. Like, the label ordered them to hide a blown amp and a bad vocal take. It got deleted within a day after the label's lawyer sent a nastygram. He saved the whole thread on a floppy disk. Still has it in a shoebox. Probably worth nothing to anyone else, but it's the kind of story you can't verify anywhere now.

ben_lewis1mo ago

Whoa, okay, that floppy disk story actually made me stop and rethink this whole thing. I used to think deleted forum posts were mostly just people crying about edits or spam, not real missing history. But hearing about that session player and the label lawyer, that specific date and the blown amp detail, it feels way too real to be fake. It's like these boards were holding the actual backstage pass to things, and once the lawyers or the PR folks show up, poof, it's gone. Now I'm kinda mad I never saved any of the weird tech threads I saw back then, because who knows what tiny truth was in there.