The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

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0:56It's the morning of the 28th of January 1986. At Concord High School, New Hampshire, a 14-year-old student joins her classmates as they burst into the auditorium. As well as over a thousand fellow students and staff, camera crews are lined up in the aisle. After all, it's not every day that your teacher gets to be an astronaut. But that's exactly what's happening here because 37-year-old social studies teacher Krista McAuliffe has been picked from over 11 ,000 American educators to be the world's first teacher in space. She's even promised live lessons once she's in orbit, including one called the ultimate field trip.

1:42As teachers wheel in the bulky TV sets, the students settle. The camera Our operators focus on their faces as they prepare to watch the liftoff. An estimated 2.5 million US schoolchildren are watching the launch live on NASA's satellite feed and CNN is carrying it on cable. After a decade, when space travel has started to feel routine, this is anything but. On the screens, excited anchors at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida fill the time before the big moment. Right now, the seven crew members are already out of sight, strapped into their seats in Challenger, one of the four orbiters in NASA's space shuttle program.

2:24A teenager just hopes it actually happens this time. Yesterday, the launch was stopped because of technical hitches, and overnight, Florida has frozen. Icicles have even formed on the launch structure. But the student knows she doesn't need to worry. They've all been told the shuttle is as safe as a passenger jet. In fact, the orbiter on the TV looks like a small version of an airplane, except it's mounted vertically, nose facing towards the sky. It's flanked by a massive external tank and two cylinders, the solid rocket boosters, almost 150 feet tall, that will provide most of the thrust at liftoff.

3:02Now the hall falls silent as the launch counts down. At 11.38 a.m. Eastern Time, the solid rocket boosters ignite and Challenger lifts off.

3:19It's like something out of a movie. The teacher they love in that shuttle. The orbiter climbs through the blue sky to over 35 ,000 feet. In the Concorde Auditorium, the conversation between the crew and the controllers at the Cape is broadcast live under the pictures. With the craft now traveling at around 1 ,000 miles per hour, an order comes through the speakers telling Commander Dick Scobie to increase the power to the main engines for the climb to orbit. Challenger, go with throttle up. Go with throttle up. But moments after Commander Scobie replies, the camera tracking the Challenger shows something that makes the student's breath catch in her throat.

4:02The spacecraft has disappeared, and in its place is a fireball. The cheers fall silent as the teenager stares. Is that normal? Multiple trails of smoke scar the blue sky, plummeting down towards Earth. The student stares at the teacher's faces as they change from confusion to horror. And somewhere at the back, someone starts to sob.

4:34In 1986, seven astronauts boarded Space Shuttle Challenger for what was meant to be a routine tenth flight of the orbiter. 73 seconds after liftoff, the shuttle broke apart in front of millions of viewers, in what remains one of the worst disasters in the history of human spaceflight. But how did a craft NASA claimed was as safe as an airliner come to fail in full view of a watching nation? Who knew the risks and when? And why, 17 years later, did it happen again? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

5:26Humans have always looked up to the night sky and wondered what lies beyond the Earth. But in the mid-20th century, travel into space becomes a reality. During the Cold War, the Soviets take an early lead in what becomes known as the Space Race, with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. Four years later, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space. It is a blow that spurs the Americans into dramatic action. Just six weeks after Gagarin's flight, President John F. Kennedy makes his ambitious announcement to put a man on the moon before the decade is out. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, pushes its technology and budget to the limit.

6:14But in wider society, many argue that space exploration is not a priority. Dr. Matthew Hirsch is an historian at New York and Harvard Universities and author of Dark Star, A New History of the Space Shuttle. As the moon landing approaches in 1969, there are voices from both the right and the left saying that the program should be shut down, that it's a waste of money, and it's not even confronting or dealing with the critical problems of the day. The nuclear arms race, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the issues of civil rights and race in the United States, and the questions of poverty. Despite the dissenters, the seemingly impossible is achieved on the 20th of July, 1969, when the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to set foot on the moon.

7:10As the crew return to Earth to huge celebration, the question is, what next? That year, a new space task group recommends the development of a space station, a lunar base, and a Mars mission. President Nixon, however, rejects all of these as too expensive. He famously told congressional aides that he wasn't a space cadet, that he didn't care at all about this, and that he thought it was a complete waste of money. Yet he can't ignore the excitement that surrounds the moon landings. In addition, contracts for space exploration mean jobs, which is particularly valuable in states where politicians need votes.

7:50So, on the 5th of January 1972, Nixon announces approval of the Space Shuttle Program for the creation of a reusable, cost-effective spacecraft. Right from the start, the project has almost impossibly broad ambitions. This is a vehicle that will democratize space exploration, because it will be so comfortable and easy to fly that everyone will be able to fly into space on it. In fact, there might be hundreds of these vehicles, some owned by private companies, that would take tourists into space just for fun. And the idea that this kind of space vehicle would be a perfect environment for science, and that it would, as a result, solve Earth's environmental crisis, because we would launch all kinds of environmental scientists into space who would study climate and pollution and solve those problems.

8:34And that it would also be a tool of international diplomacy that would be everything to everyone, that would pay for itself, that would be like pennies from heaven. And all we had to do is sign on the dotted line. The issue is that no one is even quite sure what it'll look like. And that basic research and development will take years. Cost is a huge issue. NASA's early design needs roughly $10 to$14 billion to deliver. when the Nixon administration sees that, they say, that's not going to work. Cut that in half and build whatever you can for half of that. And therein lies the problem. You see multiple rounds of designs that are trying to do what the space shuttle is supposed to do, but on a budget.

9:19I really see NASA in a tremendous bind here. It wants to do the right thing, but it can't. It's being pushed largely by political forces to make something it doesn't want, that it doesn't need, and that won't work. But that's the only way that it can continue in the space fight, because there's really no other program that's on the drawing boards for which anyone can get any kind of support or money. The original Vision is a fully reusable two-stage vehicle. One part does the heavy lifting to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere, then returns to Earth. The second part, the orbiter, keeps going with its passengers and cargo.

9:55But budget constraints force NASA to adopt a compromise design using solid rocket boosters and a disposable external tank. And the aeroplane-like design is not without its issues either. When you're traveling in space, of course, there's no air around, which means that you have no need for wings. Once you get through Earth's atmosphere, you don't need to look like an airplane in order to fly successfully in space. In fact, wings just make it harder. They can be very difficult to keep cool, especially during re-entry, when the space vehicle has to strike the atmosphere at very, very high speeds, producing tremendous temperatures.

10:30The stresses placed on an airframe under these circumstances potentially could destroy it. So the idea of using a space plane multiple times seemed problematic. It was a technology that seemed very hard to build, hard to fly, and every time someone had tried to build it, beginning in the 1940s, they failed.

10:52Undeterred, NASA forges ahead. And in July 1972, the prime contract for the orbiters is awarded to the aerospace and industry conglomerate Rockwell International. Other contracts are deliberately spread across many congressional districts to generate more jobs and lock in political support. The contract for the solid rocket boosters, for example, is given to the Thiokol Chemical Corporation, later merged to become Morton Thiokol, in the high desert of Utah, over 2 ,000 miles from the launch pad. But this creates a logistical problem. At 149 feet in length, the boosters are simply too large to ship to Florida in one piece.

11:35As a workaround, the rockets are built in segments, which are then loaded separately onto rail cars for the long journey east. When they finally arrive at the base at Cape Canaveral, Florida, technicians must stack them on top of one another like giant building blocks, sealing the joints with giant rings made of high-performance synthetic rubber. More design constraints are added when the government insists that NASA works with the US Air Force, which needs to launch reconnaissance satellites into space But these are the size of school buses, and accommodating them requires fundamental changes to the design To add insult to injury, the Air Force don't contribute to the cost By the late 1970s, the vision moves from the drawing board to the factory floor But as the physical orbiters take shape, the pressure to meet impossible deadlines and shrinking budgets begins to compromise the build.

12:31The astronauts themselves are very concerned because as this vehicle is being built, it's not being built well. There are lots of problems. The computers don't work. It's problematic in all kinds of ways. It has an untested thermal protection system composed of ceramic tiles, which not only may not actually protect the orbiter from the heat of re-entry, But as NASA workers, including a lot of college students working on their summer break, try to glue these tiles to the orbiter, they all keep falling off. And in fact, they fall off so frequently that the rate at which tiles can be applied to the exterior skin of the orbiter is about one and a half per person per day.

13:08It just takes so long to glue these to make sure that they stay on, that it seems unlikely that the space shuttle is ever going to fly.

13:20Yet NASA projects a very different version to the public and Congress, insisting they are developing a craft that will be as safe to fly on as a passenger jet. Meanwhile, as the days to the first launch tick down, their internal assessments estimate the risk of catastrophic failure at roughly one in a hundred. Oblivious to this level of danger, when that first shuttle, Columbia finally goes into orbit on the 12th of April 1981, the public is awestruck. When the Space Shuttle actually does in 1981 with a skeleton crew of two aviators, both equipped with ejection seats because of the possibility that this thing may not make it off the ground, there is the kind of enthusiasm we see every time the United States launches astronauts into space.

14:05Even if people have no idea who they are or why they're there, it just seems like an exciting thing that's happening. And the space shuttle was new in that the launch was rather spectacular and it landed like an airplane, the first space vehicle to actually do that. And then the astronauts wound up just walking down a staircase instead of being plucked out of the ocean. I remember as a young schoolboy myself writing a letter to the first crew, John Young and Robert Crippen, and receiving a letter back with a nice auto pen signature. I collected patches and memorabilia. It was exciting for me. For the first time in my awareness, the United States was flying in space again.

14:41This first mission, STS-1, is a spectacular triumph, with the astronauts gliding back to Earth and landing smoothly on a runway. This machine doesn't just work, it makes space travel look as elegant as a commercial flight. Five orbiters are eventually operational. Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and later, Endeavour. But for the public at least, the novelty wears off as more missions are launched.

15:15It gradually dawned on me, and it dawned on lots of other people too, that the astronauts floating around in space aren't really doing very much while they're there. There's less and less television coverage. It's unclear why they're there, what they're doing. The experiments that they're conducting don't seem very sophisticated at all. A lot of it is just bring some stuff into space and see what happens. And the thing that the space shuttle was supposed to excel at, depositing satellites into orbit and picking up derelict satellites from space is incredibly boring to watch. It's like watching paint dry.

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17:28experiments. All the while, budget pressures are constant, as are the safety issues that keep cropping up. On one trip, one of Challenger's main engines shuts down early, forcing them to abort their planned high-altitude orbit. In January 1985, the coldest launch to date highlights worrying issues with the joints on the solid rocket boosters. It's just one of the issues that's concerning NASA personnel, not least those who hoped to go into space. There were so many things about the shuttle that could possibly go wrong, that rather than lulling themselves into the feeling or the belief that everything was fine, they accepted the likelihood that the shuttle was going to fail at some point, but that was the business that they were in.

18:13And that was true among engineers and true among astronauts as well. The people who didn't know about that were the American public, members of Congress, and the tourists who were flown on the space shuttle. Conscious of the dwindling public interest, NASA comes up with a new idea, to put an ordinary civilian into space. The reason why NASA undertook an effort to put an ordinary person into space after literally two decades of being completely averse to the idea was for very, very cynical political reasons. In order for the space shuttle to thrive as a commercial vehicle, it would have to demonstrate its safety.

18:50And the way you do that is by launching ordinary people and showing that they come back alive.

18:58For President Reagan, under fire for cuts in education, there seems an obvious profession from which to select his new astronaut. After he announces the Teacher in Space project, 11 ,000 hopeful educators apply, filling in the lengthy forms and waiting for the shortlist of 114 to be announced, roughly two from every state and territory. They are then whittled down to a final ten who are sent to Houston for a week of grueling medical and psychological exams. On the 19th of July, 1985, Vice President George H.W. Bush announces that Krista McAuliffe from Concord, New Hampshire, has won her place in the shuttle.

19:42Barbara Morgan, an elementary school teacher from Idaho, is named as her backup. up. Kristen McAuliffe, when she was selected, was kind of a weird choice because she wasn't a science teacher. She was a social studies teacher who claimed to know nothing at all about space exploration. Over the next few months, the mother of two undergoes an intensive course in astronautics. She practices moving in her bulky flight suit and endures the notorious Vomit Comet, a parabolic flight that provides 30-second bursts of weightlessness, often followed by crushing nausea. There's also lesson preparation to be done for the classes she plans to teach live from orbit.

20:21With her brown curly hair and approachable charm, she becomes an instant national treasure. She's asked for autographs wherever she goes, especially after a confident appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, talking about how the application process worked. There were eight basic essay questions dealing with everything. Why do you want to be the first private citizen in space? How do you foster international awareness in your students? And a space shuttle project that I had to prepare. I had to have recommendations from the community and from my school. But the unique thing about it was it didn't ask how old you were.

20:56It didn't ask your marital status. It didn't ask if you were in good health. It was a very open type of thing, really looking for somebody who'd be a good communicator first. Are you in any way frightened of something like that? I mean, that's a normal question, because just the other day, it was kind of the head of frightening a lift, and one of the engines went out. Yes. I really haven't thought of it in those terms, because I see the shuttle program as a very safe program.

21:28The introduction of civilians alongside highly qualified pilots does bring real tension. The attitude of the professional astronauts, from Dick Scobie, the commander, to others aboard, was that we've trained our whole lives to be in a position to fly into space. And now you've basically taken someone whose principal qualification is they have no qualifications. You've given them a couple of months of training and now are asking us to share the stage with them and to treat them like they're the most important thing happening in this mission. And it was galling. She was told not to touch anything in the space vehicle.

22:02She would conduct some lessons in space that were so rudimentary that there was probably no reason for them to be done. Alongside Dick Scobie, an experienced Air Force test pilot, will be Michael Smith, a Navy test pilot on his first shuttle flight, and three mission specialists. Judith Resnick is the second American female to travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere, while Ellison Onizuka is the first Asian American in space. Ronald McNair is not only a laser physicist, but also a jazz saxophonist He is planning to be the first to record a piece of music in space A solo in orbit for a new album by the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre As well as Christa McAuliffe, the other civilian on board is aircraft engineer Gregory Jarvis But although the crew and their families socialize together during time off NASA's military origins means there is a firm pecking order.

22:59Although NASA and certain public entertainment likes to imagine the space program as one large family, it was actually an incredibly hierarchical, incredibly competitive environment. The mission is originally scheduled for the 22nd of January, 1986. The crew's primary job will be the deployment of a satellite and the release of a unit to study Halley's Comet, which is making its closest pass of the sun. But as Krista completes her training, she and her family are not given the full picture of the risks. She was told that she was going to undertake something that was profoundly safe, that there was no risk to her, that this wasn't dangerous, and that she would be fine.

23:39When behind the scenes, the astronauts were basically stewing and fuming about a vehicle that wasn't working well, that was behind schedule, that already had profound technical problems and flaws associated with it, and was being asked to do more and more difficult and dangerous things. One of the concerns is around the solid rocket boosters, where that cold weather launch a year earlier has left engineers deeply uneasy. The joints between the separate sections, sealed with what are called O-rings, are at the mercy of gravity, wind, vibration, and the force of ignition, which can cause these weak points to flex slightly.

24:15Imagine a series of firecrackers that are basically bolted or glued together end on end. And when that seal works, they work fine. But you're talking about a lot of joints and a lot of places for gases to escape. Already, by the time of the Challenger's flight in 1986, NASA had realized that on virtually every flight, the solid rocket boosters intended to rotate a bit about their joints. And in the process, they would eject exhaust products from combustion. Literally, they would start to squirt rocket propellant and burnt fuel out the sides. This was troubling.