Twenty four years ago today, on January 28th, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean and killing it’s seven man crew. The disaster began when an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. This began a cascade of failures that eventually compromised the structure of the shuttle so badly that it could not survive the speeds at which it was traveling. It’s unknown how long the crew survived, but after the retrieval of the remains of the shuttle from the ocean floor, it was clear that at least a few crew members survived the initial break up of the shuttle. Unfortunately, NASA’s misplaced confidence in the reliability of the shuttle, despite their awareness of the very flaw that doomed it, led them to not include an escape modal in its design.
The Challenger crew included teacher Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project. She was to become the first teacher to teach, via video relay, from orbit. In the aftermath of the accident, NASA filed away her lesson plans. They remained incomplete, and sadly untaught, until NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill stumbled on them nearly 22 years later. There were plans, and there were videos of Christa and her understudy for the flight practicing in the zero-g flight simulators. Woodfill, who had long been one of the driving forces behind the Space Educator’s Handbook, went to work on recreating McAuliffe’s lessons for the classroom. The lessons are now complete and available on the Challenger Learning Center’s website.
The Challenger disaster had a broad impact on the NASA Space Program, starting with a 32 month hiatus from launches and a massive redesign of the shuttle and of NASA itself. Many have questioned how effective the NASA reorganization really was, especially in light of the 2003 Columbia disaster. NASA’s current plans call for the Space Shuttle program to be retired this year. The Shuttle Atlantis will be the first of the three working shuttles to retire, and the program will be replaced by the new Orion Spacecraft being developed by Project Constellation. The Orion crafts will launch in 2014 at the earliest. Congress is discussing extending the Space Shuttle program to keep launches flowing until the Orion is ready. The Shuttle Discovery will go to the Smithsonian, and the other Shuttles will be sold for about 28.8 million.
