Archival: Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster | NBC Nightly News

[EdinVA]

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members on board. “It happened just over one minute into flight,” NBC’s Dan Molina reported that day on NBC Nightly News. “From mission control: silence.”

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[thackney]

This was my first "Never forget where I was and what I was doing" moment.

At The Ohio State University, just came out of class and someone had spliced tape to show the footage from launch until the failure.  I stood in shock watching in the Electrical Engineering Building lobby as it looped over and over and over....

[Neverdul]

By chance, I was home from work that day with a bad cold. I watched it live on TV. I was in shock, kept thinking they had perhaps survived until it was obvious they hadn’t. I wept.

Born in 1961, I, along with my dad were hugely interested in the US space program. My dad used to get me up out of bed early to watch a launch starting with the Gemini missions or let me stay up way past my bed time to watch live coverage, especially of Apollo 11.

I used to take the plastic model Apollo space craft and lunar lander that I got out of a box of Captain Crunch cereal, and a world map and a lunar map out of a National Geographic magazine, and would simulate launches and landings on the Moon and splash downs in the Pacific, using the entire living room in my simulation in an attempt to replicate distances, and borrowing my brother’s ships from his Battle Ship game for the splash down recovery. I was such a nerdy girl :)
 
I remember watching the speech that President Ronald Reagan made that night after the Challenger disaster.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqilE4AAa-M&t=146s

[thackney]

Engineering Ethics Case Study:
https://thegrcbluebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Ethics-Challenger-Disaster.pdf

Start reading at:

5. Teleconference
(page 14)

...Because he had not participated in Thiokol’s offline discussion, he did not
know why Thiokol had changed their position to supporting launching, but he stated clearly that
the motor had been qualified only down to 40°F, and further, that “I certainly wouldn’t want to
be the one that has to get up in front of a board of inquiry if anything happens to this thing and
explain why I launched the thing outside of what I thought it was qualified for.” [quoted in
Vaughn, p. 327]

The Challenger Disaster me the next day, the temperature at the launch pad was 36°F....

[Gefn]

I remember that like it was yesterday. I guess the older we get, the more something seems like yesterday.

[Elderberry]

I was in the Admin side of JSC Bld 30 Mission Control picking up a shopping cart full of recon tapes for a secret flight I was working on. I pushed the cart into Mission control and when I rolled past the Nip Control Console no one was saying a word. I walked around the console and I saw why.  On their display, Challenger had just exploded and was in its fall to the ocean. Everyone was in shock and the deathly silence lasted a long long time.

[Elderberry]

The death of the Challenger and the birth of commercial space

The Hill by By Mark R. Whittington 1/28/2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/480038-the-death-of-the-challenger-and-the-birth-of-commercial-space

On January 28, 1986, at 11:39 EST, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center. Her crew consisted of six NASA astronauts, Commander Francis R. Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialists Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik and Gregory Jarvis, and teacher Christa McAuliffe, who had been chosen to become the first American civilian to go into space. No one cheering when the Challenger cleared the tower knew, but both shuttle and her gallant company were doomed.

Space shuttles at the time consisted of an orbiter, two solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank. The SRBs and the fuel tank were designed to be discarded in flight while the shuttle flew on to orbit. When a shuttle mission was completed, it would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and land much like an aircraft.

Seventy-three seconds into the flight of the Challenger, hot gasses from one of the SRBs broke through an O ring that had been made brittle by the cold air of that winter morning. The hot gasses ignited the fuel tank and transformed the shuttle into a fireball. The SRBs careened into the sky on their own, and the orbiter broke up from the aerodynamic pressures. The crew compartment, largely intact, hit the Atlantic Ocean. The exact timing of the crew’s deaths will never be known, but some are surmised to have lived long enough to have died on impact.

The Challenger disaster led to shock and no little amount of soul-searching. A presidential-appointed investigation panel soon discovered the problem with the O-rings. But behind that immediate cause was a culture of negligence. NASA managers knew about the O-ring problem but failed to fix it until it was too late.

But the real act of hubris surrounding the space shuttle program came at its very beginning. NASA and its political masters justified the shuttle because it would constitute a government space line. Because it would be reusable, it could deploy anything anyone cared to take into space. NASA, military and commercial payloads could be transported at a lower cost than with expendable rockets.

More at link.