40 Years Later: Remembering the Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion

Today marks 40 years since the world stopped as Americans watched the tragedy that was the Challenger Space Shuttle unfold on LIVE TV!

On January 28, 1986, NASA and the American people watched as tragedy unfolded just 73 seconds into the flight of Space Shuttle Challenger’s STS-51L mission.

ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS FOR THE PRESS IN 1986: Microsoft Word - Flight 025 - STS-51L_Press_Kit.doc

The STS-51L crew included Michael J. Smith, Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Ronald E. McNair; Ellison S. Onizuka, S. Christa McAuliffe, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Judith A. Resnik.

STS-51-L would have been the 25th mission of the NASA Space Shuttle program; During the six-day mission, the seven-member crew was to deploy a large communications satellite, deploy and retrieve an astronomy payload to study Halley’s Comet, and the first teacher in space would conduct lessons for schoolchildren from orbit.

The Teacher in Space activities consisted of two live sessions planned for the mission’s sixth day. The first, “The Ultimate Field Trip,” sought to compare daily life aboard the space shuttle and on Earth, and the second, “Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been, Why?” meant to explain the importance of conducting research in space.

Several other lessons were supposed to be filmed for later distribution to demonstrate physical phenomena in weightlessness.

Tragically, the Challenger and her crew were lost in an explosion 73 seconds after liftoff.  After a lengthy investigation, the cause was determined to be an o-ring failure in the right solid rocket booster aggravated by extreme cold weather in Florida before the launch.

Following the explosion, in his address to the nation the evening after the accident, President Ronald Reagan quoted aviator and poet John Gillespie Magee:

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

The Rogers Commission Report, officially summarized the findings of the technical causes of the accident "as well as systemic organizational and cultural elements that led to the decision to launch Challenger on that day." The report also provided recommendations to NASA. Modifications were then made to the hardware and tested.

Shuttle flights resumed in September 1988, after a 32-month hiatus