“I felt sick to my stomach. I still feel sick to my stomach"
All seven crew members of mission STS-51L died during the tenth flight of Space Shuttle Challenger, halting the shuttle program for 32 months
What happened?
Just 73 seconds after liftoff, following delays which had postponed the launch, Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart and descended into the Atlantic Ocean. It was one of the worst disasters in NASA's history, and the first disaster of its Space Shuttle program. Sadly, all seven crew members were killed.
What mission were they on?
Mission STS-51L, which had originally been due to launch on 22 January 1986, but was eventually moved back following numerous other postponements to 28 January. “I felt sick to my stomach. I still feel sick to my stomach,” said Brian Ballard, the editor of The Crimson Review at Concord High School. Earlier that day – 28 January 1986 – he had been with thousands of tourists, NASA officials and scores of journalists for the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. But 73 seconds after liftoff from the pad at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, things began to go terribly wrong.
It was 16:39:13 UTC and Challenger was high in the air. As is so often the case with such a launch, it was a mesmerising sight, the spacecraft soaring majestically on a column of fire and smoke with everything having apparently gone so well. “It has cleared the tower,” said mission narrator Steve Nesbitt. “Three engines running normally.” Then, as a good number of viewers watched at home on their television sets (with lots of children tuning in at school), disaster struck and shocked the world.
“Things started flying around and spinning around, and I heard some ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’, and at that moment I knew something was wrong,” Ballard told the New York Times at the time. Indeed, CNN correspondent Tom Mintier had only just announced to viewers: “This morning it looked as though they were not going to be able to get off,” when he was forced into silence. Seconds passed as images appeared to show an explosion, with debris raining down, but few watching were quite sure what to make of it. “Flight controllers are looking very carefully at the situation,” Nesbitt said. “Obviously a major malfunction.”
At that point, its thought that the crew were still alive. There were seven members on board, including mission commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair and Ellison Onizuka, and payload specialist Gregory Jarvis. There was also payload specialist Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire who had beaten more than 11,000 applicants in the NASA Teacher in Space Project.
McAuliffe was set to be the first US citizen in space. Instead, Challenger had broken up in the air. O-ring seals used in a joint within the right solid rocket booster were later found to have failed at liftoff, caused in large part by the unusually cold conditions felt that bitterly freezing winter's morning. They had never been tested at such low temperatures and they had become stiff and unable to seal the joint. As a seal opened and exhaust leaked, the hull of the cold external tank which was filled with liquid oxygen and hydrogen ended up becoming covered with the stuff. The tank ruptured and aerodynamic forces pulled the shuttle apart. A huge fireball resulted.
The crew compartment, however, remained intact. It sailed skywards, reaching an altitude of 19.8 kilometres (12.3 miles) before freefalling the same distance, two minutes and 45 seconds after the shuttle had started to break up. It plunged deep into the
Atlantic Ocean and all seven on board died, despite immediate efforts to send recovery ships to the sea in the hope of recovering the crew compartment. Divers from the USS Preserver eventually located the crushed and fragmented crew compartment on the ocean floor about six weeks later on 7 March 1986. The discovery was announced to the media two days later.
An investigation then found that NASA knew extreme temperatures would affect the O-rings. Indeed, engineer Bob Ebeling was among five people eager to ground Challenger the previous day. Following fruitless arguments, he told his wife that night, “It's going to blow up”. Guilt ate away at Ebeling from that day, even though he was not the decision maker and in no way to blame. It was a true tragedy, and there is no doubt that it altered NASA's space programme forever.
“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’” Ronald Reagan, 28 January 1986