Twenty-five years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after lift-off, due to an O-ring failure on one of its right-side solid booster engines. This caused a plume of fire that burned through the large external fuel tank, which disintegrated moments later, breaking up the space shuttle in the process. There was no large-scale explosion, just structural failures that were made far worse due to the velocity of the vehicle through the atmosphere.
It is still unclear what killed the seven astronauts. There is some evidence they survived the initial breakup, and were killed on impact with the ocean. Robert Overmyer, NASA Lead Investigator for the accident, said:
[Commander Dick Scobee] fought for any and every edge to survive. He flew that ship without wings all the way down … they were alive.
Tragic.
That night, Ronald Reagan spoke to the nation, quoting a line from John Magee, Jr’s poem, “High Flight.” He said:
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.’
I’ve always been fascinated with the events of that morning. I wrote several papers on it in school, and it really is a shockingly simple failure that could have been avoided if the NASA suits had headed warnings about the low temperatures on the launchpad that morning. The cold is what led the O-ring to fail, starting the chain reaction that killed all seven on board.
