Three, two, one, and liftoff. Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower.
It was an unusually cold morning on January 28, 1986 when Challenger flew its 10th mission.
Big smiles today. This launch attracted more media attention than usual since it carried the first
American civilian a teacher. I am so excited to be here. NASA selected Christa McAuliffe out of
11,000 applicants. She was planning to give lessons to students while in orbit. The mission was also
supposed to deploy a satellite and observe Halley's Comet for several days but the crew
never made it. Just 73 seconds after launch, an entire nation watched what unfolded in horror.
A minute 15 seconds, velocity: 2,900 ft per second.
Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.
NASA's ground crew knew that no one could have survived and the Challenger engineers feared
this would happen and tried to stop the launch like Bob Ebeling who worked for the contractor
responsible for the shuttle's boosters, Morton Thiokol. I spoke with his daughter Leslie who also
worked at the company. What did your father say to you the day of the launch? It's gonna explode.
Everyone is gonna die. And the only way I could have stopped this was if I had
gone home, gotten my rifle, and gone out there and held everyone hostage.
And I said: Dad, they would have thrown you right into jail. Contrary to an initial
report by NASA, the crew knew immediately that the spacecraft was in trouble. Analysis of the
tape recordings revealed the pilot uttered "uh-oh" just before a fireball ended all communication.
The challenger broke up 48,000 feet above the Atlantic while the crew cabin continued to soar
to 65,000 feet. It's almost certain the astronauts survived the initial breakup as they were able to
switch on at least three emergency breathing packs. The agency said they probably remained conscious
for at least six seconds if not longer depending on how fast the crew compartment lost pressure.
NASA also couldn't rule out the possibility that they may still have been alive when the
crew cabin hit the water at 207 mph (or 333 km/h). The seven souls on board
were Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian American to fly into space. Christa McAuliffe. Gregory Jarvis - a
payload specialist on his first journey into space. Judith Resnik was the second American woman to go
into orbit. It was pilot Mike Smith's first flight as an astronaut. Next to him is the commander of
the space shuttle, Dick Scobee. Ron McNair was the second African American to reach space.
The entire failure could be traced to the rubber gasket sealing the booster joints called O-rings.
The investigation found that the O-rings weren't working as designed. Normally, they're supposed
to prevent hot gases from leaking but the cold weather caused both the primary and backup O-rings
in the right solid rocket booster to stiffen so they failed to stop the gases from escaping -
leading to the catastrophic accident. The ambient temperature that day was 36 degrees fahrenheit or
2 degrees celsius - rare for Cape Canaveral, Florida. The space shuttle was never certified to operate
in such low temperatures. Ebeling sounded the alarm to his boss 0 an engineer named Alan McDonald who
tried to stop the flight by refusing to sign the launch recommendation the night before. Another
engineer, Roger Boisjoly, was also concerned. He noticed O-ring stiffening from a previous launch
and warned his superiors in a memo six months earlier that if left unaddressed the result could
be a catastrophe of the highest order - loss of human life. At first, the managers at Morton Thiokol
agreed with their engineers and wouldn't approve the launch but NASA challenged that recommendation.
George Hardy, the NASA official who supervised Morton Thiokol's production of the boosters
famously said he was appalled when told the flight should be postponed. The engineers recalled
another NASA manager saying: My god when do you want me to launch - next April? The flight
had already been delayed several times and the Space Shuttle program had ambitiously planned 15
missions that year. Plus, President Ronald Reagan reportedly planned to tout the Challenger mission
during his State of the Union address that very day. In the end, the bosses at Morton
Thiokol changed their minds and signed off on the launch despite the concerns of their own employees.
When the space shuttle cleared the launchpad, Ebeling braced himself while watching in a
conference room at work. Everyone kind of sighed in there. Like, a relief. And dad just bent down and he said:
We're not finished yet. I was just like: Oh no. And bam. RSO reports vehicle exploded.
Copy. The disaster forced President Reagan to postpone his address to Congress. He would instead deliver
a somber speech to the nation. We come together today to mourn the loss of seven brave Americans.
To share the grief that we all feel and perhaps in that sharing to find the strength
to bear our sorrow and the courage to look for the seeds of hope. Sometimes, when we
reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on, despite the pain.
President Reagan immediately established a task force to investigate the
disaster. Not only did the official report criticize NASA's decision to ignore the engineers,
it revealed the agency knew about the O-ring problem as early as a decade before - concluding
both NASA and contractor management first failed to recognize it as a problem, then failed to fix it,
and finally treated it as an acceptable flight risk. Sociologist and Columbia University professor
Diane Vaughan wrote a book examining why NASA allowed such a launch to go ahead. She explained
that because earlier cold weather flights with O-ring problems didn't result in disaster, this
damage was gradually accepted as normal. She coined the term 'normalization of deviance' -
when something that is clearly unsafe comes to be seen as normal if it doesn't immediately cause a catastrophe.
In other words, what was not okay slowly becomes okay. When McDonald told his story to the presidential
commission about how he and the other engineers fought against the launch, he got demoted at work.
Congress then passed a resolution that would ban Morton Thiokol from ever acquiring a contract with
NASA unless McDonald got his job back. Not only did McDonald get reinstated - he was then put in charge
of redesigning the rocket boosters to improve their safety - most importantly, modifying the seal
which included adding a third O-ring. Besides the physical changes, there was also a profound change
in attitude at NASA that resulted in more checks and balances. The agency also created
a new accountability office headed by someone who would report directly to NASA's administrator. The
disaster grounded the Space Shuttle program for nearly three years. A civilian wouldn't attempt to
fly into space again until 2007 on the replacement to Challenger, Endeavour. A teacher also flew this
time. Barbara Morgan was the backup to Christa McAuliffe on that tragic mission. Since then, NASA
has gone on to score many achievements - completing the international space station and landing
multiple rovers on Mars. Now, it's partnering with private companies - recently selecting SpaceX to
send the next American astronauts back to the moon. Despite the successes, the tragedy of Challenger
will never be forgotten. Every year on January 28, NASA holds a day of remembrance to honor the seven
lives lost as well as the crews of Apollo 1 and Colombia. As for the engineers who tried to stop
the launch, Alan McDonald would later travel to universities to speak about the importance
of ethical decision-making. He passed away in March of this year. Roger Boisjoly also spoke
at schools about ethics for three decades. He died in 2012. Bob Ebeling was racked with guilt for 30 years.
He felt like a failure. A total failure. When NPR interviewed him a few years ago he lamented:
I think that was one of the mistakes that God made. He shouldn't have picked me for the job.
You picked a loser. He then received thousands of letters of support from around the world letting
him know he was far from a loser - he was a hero. Ebeling finally felt vindicated of any wrongdoing.
Weeks later, in March of 2016, he passed away after a long illness at the age of 89. This
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