I’m Mr. Beat and I’ve got a sad story for you.
It involves a 37-year old high school social studies teacher, teaching specifically economics, American history, and government.
But no, the story is not about me.
It's about Christa McAuliffe, the only school teacher who ever got the chance to go to space.
It's about her and six others, and one of my earliest memories as a child was seeing it on TV.
Here is the story of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.
If you Google “Teacher in Space,” Christa McAuliffe appears.
How did she get to go?
Well, in 1984 President Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space Project, a NASA program meant to honor teachers while simultaneously inspiring students, getting them more excited about STEM and space.
The program called for bringing teachers into space as non-astronaut workers.
Around 11,000 teachers applied, but NASA accepted just two.
The aforementioned McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, and Barbara Morgan, an elementary school teacher from Idaho, who would serve as McAuliffe’s backup.
Even in space McAuliffe would be required to teach- NASA made her make up lesson plans to present aboard the Space Shuttle.
Space Shuttle? Yes, that’s how she would get to space.
Space shuttles are rocket-launched spacecrafts that are able to be reused and can land like an unpowered aircraft.
NASA developed space shuttles to make more routine trips back and forth between the earth’s surface and Low Earth Orbit.
NASA built six space shuttles, the first one launching in 1981 and the last one in 2011.
One of those six was called the Challenger.
That one was the one McAuliffe got to be on.
STS-51-L, as the mission was called, was the 25th of the Space Shuttle program.
It was mostly a routine mission meant to launch a satellite, but part of what the crew was gonna do was check out Halley’s Comet for six days.
The commander was Dick Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, the mission specialists Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair, and payload specialist Gregory Jarvis.
McAuliffe was also classified as a payload specialist.
January 28, 1986. Cape Canaveral, Florida. A cold and icy morning.
Liftoff was delayed, in fact, due to all the ice on the launch pad.
Around 17 percent of all Americans were watching live on television, mostly due to the presence of McAuliffe, who had trained for months for this moment.
At 11:38 AM local time, everything looked normal as Mission Control told Scobee “Challenger, go with throttle up.”
However, just 73 seconds after liftoff, at an altitude of around 46,000 feet, or 14,000 meters, the Challenger began to disintegrate and all communication with the crew was lost.
The shuttle had no escape system, so the crew remained trapped inside.
Americans back on the surface watched in horror after witnessing what looked like an explosion, and as major chunks of the shuttle orbiter fell back to the earth.
Meanwhile, the crew was still alive inside.
The fuel tank exploded, but the crew compartment was still intact.
They got as high as 12 miles, or 19 km above the surface.
At some point they fell back to the earth, and less than 3 minutes later hit the water at approximately 207 mph, or 333 km per hour.
Upon impact, all seven crew members immediately died. It all happened so quickly.
Americans were in shock. Within an hour about everyone in the world knew about it.
After a swift investigation, NASA determined the cause of the disaster was the two rubber O-rings that sealed the joint between the two lower parts of the right-hand solid rocket booster.
Apparently the cold had caused them to mess up and not seal properly.
This caused a breach in the solid rocket booster joint, which caused burning gas to get to the external fuel tank.
NASA eventually recovered the remaining fragments of the Challenger at the bottom of the ocean floor.
They also were able to recover the bodies of the crew.
Their remains were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on April 30, where they were turned over to family members for funeral arrangements.
The families later helped establish the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in their memory.
NASA put its space shuttle program on hold for 32 months after the disaster.
The Rogers Commission, who investigated what went wrong that day, concluded that NASA had straight up got sloppy with the way it was running things, at times violating its own safety rules and ignoring the warnings from engineers about launching when it was so cold.
The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster was not only a tragedy but also a major setback for space exploration.
It put a halt to NASA sending “regular folks” to space.
17 years later, just as NASA was contemplating sending civilians to space again, there was another disaster.
The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated when re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, also killing all seven crew members on board.
However, since the Columbia disaster civilians have returned to space, led by what’s known as space tourism, or space travel by civilians for fun.
Multi Millionaire Dennis Tito became the first “space tourist” to fund his own trip into space with the Russians back in 2001.
Yep, if you want to go to space and you’re not an astronaut, it really helps if you’re mega rich.
Ever since the death of Christa McAuliffe, though, NASA had refused to send civilians.
But that changed just this year. A couple months ago, the organization announced it would be sending civilians to space as early as next year as a way to raise money.
This video was part of a mega-collaboration of a bunch of Edutubers in the Wecreateedu community.
The theme is “space,” and it’s all in celebration of the upcoming 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Check out the entire playlist of space-themed videos
from a bunch of great Edutubers
and discover some great new channels. I put the playlist in the description and in the cards.
Check them all out. And also, while we're at it
check out my moon landing conspiracy video
because that was a lot of fun to make. Thank you so much for watching!