5 Things You Probably Never Knew About the Challenger Disaster
On January 28, 1986, the entire country watched as the Challenger shuttle blew up 73 seconds after taking off at Cape Canaveral. Now, 30 years later, the disaster remains among the worst incidents in the history of the space program. Though the shuttle program ended in 2011, implications from the Challenger disaster ripple through our ongoing exploration of space. In remembrance of this 30th anniversary, Popular Mechanics interviewed more than two dozen people involved with the launch that day. Here are five things we learned from the piece (which you can read in full here):
1. The launch of the Challenger was delayed or scrubbed five times in six days because of weather and mechanical issues. In the hours leading up to the shuttle's launch on January 8, there was a growing concern about the weather. As John Tribe, chief engineer for Boeing/Rockwell Launch Support Services, told Popular Mechanics:
"I couldn't believe they came out of the MMT [Mission Management Team] meeting with a recommendation to launch. Based on the ice alone, I thought it would be no-go. The ice was an unknown."
2. This was the moment flight control knew something was wrong, as told by Brian Perry, a NASA flight dynamics officer:
"The first indication that we got of any kind of trouble was when I got a call from one of our backroom folks who's in charge of processing the radar coming in. We have at least three different radars tracking the vehicle at any time, and they all have to provide a consistent indicator of where the shuttle is. She reported that the filter [the software] had disagreeing sources, which is not normal but not necessarily unheard of. You can get birds and airplanes and stuff in the way. So that by itself didn't necessarily concern me."
3. Steve Nesbitt, the NASA public affairs officer who was the voice detailing the flight of the Challenger, didn't immediately say it had blown up because they didn't know what happened:
"I kind of paused to gather my thoughts, hoping to hear something on the flight director loop. There was nothing for several seconds, and I felt an urgent need to say something, to plant a flag here that acknowledges something terrible or unusual has happened. But I didn't actually know what was going on. I didn't want to say, "The spacecraft has exploded," because I didn't know that for sure. I wanted to be correct. So I said, "Flight controllers looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction." Some people criticized my delivery, criticized that as being an understatement when clearly the crew had just died. But in those immediate seconds right afterward, that information was not available, and my own sense of professionalism would not let me make that kind of statement, that the crew was lost, without having that confirmed."
4. President Reagan wasn't watching the launch live. He was preparing for the State of the Union speech that night, and his executive assistant Kathy Osborne told him:
"When I got that phone call, I hung up and, rather than just going right into the Oval, I felt like I needed to turn on the TV. I was horrified by what I was seeing replayed over and over on the screen. After a couple of minutes, I went into the Oval Office and the president was in the process of talking. I was standing there with the door open, holding it open and just waiting a few seconds for him to finish his sentence. [Press secretary] Larry Speakes was on a couch facing me, and he could see by the look on my face that something was wrong, and he stood up. And just as I started to say, "Mr. President," Pat Buchanan almost knocked me over trying to get through the door to the Oval Office and shouted something like, 'The Challenger exploded.'"
5. Even immediately after the explosion, the families of the crew didn't want this disaster to end the space program. As then-Vice President George H.W. Bush said:
"While I was meeting with the families, June Scobee Rodgers looked me in the eye and begged me not to let what had happened to her husband and the Challenger end space exploration."
