At 5:00 p.m. on 
January 28, 1986, President Ronald Reagan
delayed his State of the Union Address to
give a heartfelt speech on the Challenger
Shuttle Disaster.
He had insisted that newcomer Peggy Noonan
write it.
Reagan began by impressing on the audience,
particularly the children, that such “painful
things” were “part of the process of exploration
and discovery.”
He went on to invoke the legacy of explorer
Francis Drake, and concluded by saying that
the nation would never forget seeing the five
crew members, the engineer, and the teacher,
whom he dubbed the Challenger Seven, as they
“slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch
the face of God.”
It was one of the most important speeches
in modern American history.
With that speech in mind, let’s remind ourselves
of and learn more about this national tragedy.
10.
Ended the Civilian Space Program
Today we mostly associate civilians going
into space with private companies such as
SpaceX or Virgin Galactic.
This has led many to view the fact elementary
school teacher Christa McAuliffe’s inclusion,
so that she could teach a live broadcast lesson
to classrooms nationwide, was a mere stunt.
The truth of the situation was that plans
for a first civilian had already been made
back in the 1970s.
When McAuliffe was selected from among 11,146
applicants to be the first civilian in space,
there were already plans to follow up on the
historic flight with the first journalist
in space.
No less than Tom Wolfe and Walter Cronkite
were considered for the ride, even though
Cronkite was already 69 years old at the time.
Even after the Challenger disaster, plans
continued to get a civilian into space for
awhile.
A dogged Cronkite was so undeterred that he
managed to reach the top 40 semifinalists,
effectively as far as anyone in the program
got.
It wasn’t until July 1986, about six months
after the tragedy, that the idea was put on
indefinite hold.
Except, that is, in the case of Barbara Morgan,
a second grade teacher who trained simultaneously
with McAuliffe in case she was unable to ride
on the day of the launch.
Morgan continued training for years after,
and in 2007, she had the thrill of a lifetime
when she rode with mission STS-118.
While she was there she gave a lesson on how
plants grow in space.
9.
Soviet Response
The cultural memory of American relations
with the USSR is that the countries were so
at each other’s throats that this disaster
would be a perfect excuse for Soviet propaganda
to gloat.
What could be a more convincing case that
the Americans were mishandling their space
programs during a heated period of the space
race?
But the Soviet media instead treated it as
a horrifying shock.
The New York Times reported that, if anything,
the average person in Moscow was surprised
that there was no ejection system for a shuttle
built in a country as advanced as America.
Indeed, the airing of the footage was accompanied
by mournful Glenn Miller music in a show of
solidarity, and Soviet cosmonauts sent a telegram
directly to NASA expressing their condolences.
Despite all this, as BBC Russia representative
Famil Ismaliov reported, by the anniversary
of the event in 2016, Russian state media
did not publish any memorials or even mentions
of it and it wasn’t a topic of conversation.
In his opinion, at least, that said more about
the mood of the country in 2016 than it did
the sincerity of the Russian people at the
time.
8.
Settlement
In 1988, four of the families of the victims
of the disaster reached a settlement with
Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer that was
judged at fault for the mechanical failure.
The four in question were the families of
Francis Scobee, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory
P. Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.
It had been Leo B. Lind Jr., the law partner
of McAuliffe’s husband Steve, who had represented
them.
The total settlement among the ten people
was $7.7 million, which as of August 2017
was the equivalent of $16.3 million.
At the time, attorney Ronald Krist, who’d
successfully represented the families of a
1967 Apollo shuttle disaster, said that the
payout was “woefully inadequate,” and
that the families should have accepted a settlement
of nothing less than $20 million.
Their desire to be done with the process is
still completely understandable.
7.
Last Words
In 2001, a purported transcript of the last
words of the Challenger crew circulated online.
It included such dramatic comments as one
of the male members reassuring the others
that they had to “think positive” and
“It’ll be just like a ditch landing”
when the shuttle was approaching the water.
The final words of the transcript were the
touchstone Biblical verse Psalm 23:4 (“Even
though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow
of Death…”).
Snopes.com eventually reported that what had
been fooling the internet was actually from
a 1991 Weekly World News article and was a
heinous hoax.
The truth of what the doomed astronauts said
was much more mundane, and yet oddly incongruent.
Initially NASA reported that the last recorded
words were Commander Francis Scobee saying
“Roger, go at throttle up.”
Later analysis of the tape indicated that
the real last recorded words were pilot Michael
J. Smith saying “uh oh.”
It was a poignant reminder that these were
unsuspecting people in this situation, not
over-the-top characters.
6.
Ten Years of Parts
Although the main area of the crashed remains
of the shuttle was located within a day, it
took a month and a half of salvaging operations
to retrieve most of the wreckage, and it was
near the end that the crew cabin with the
deceased was found.
Since the Challenger shuttle was composed
of well over 5,000 parts and weighed more
than 250,000 pounds, parts from the vessel
washed up on Cape Canaveral and other Florida
beaches for years after.
The most dramatic delayed finding was in 1996,
when an eight foot-long and a 13 foot-long
section of wing washed up on Cocoa Beach,
discovered by a pair of fishermen 20 miles
apart.
The pieces were in good condition despite
being encrusted with barnacles.
Bruce Jarvis, father of crew member Gregory
Jarvis, said that each story of recovered
material for him was “like somebody picking
at a scab.”
5.
It Did Not “Explode”
Despite the common impression one might get
that the shuttle exploded in midair (especially
when you learn that the problem was related
to a failure in the solid fuel leak for one
of the booster rockets), the truth was more
that the shuttle came apart.
Indeed, witnesses on the ground noted that
instead of a massive explosion, the end of
the Challenger’s ascension was marked by
the sound of the main engines coming to a
stop.
Booster rockets continued to fly upwards after
the rest of the rocket collapsed.
There were inevitably explosions after the
fact, but these were individual parts making
contact with the ground and not the overall
vehicle.
It certainly didn’t help clear up the misconception
that numerous documentaries about the event
featured a dubbed in explosion noise during
shots of the shuttle disassembling.
Because adding in over-the-top sound effects
is certainly a classy thing to do when “documenting”
a tragedy.
4.
The Consciousness Debate
Considering that the crew cabin was salvaged
intact as a result of the shuttle falling
apart instead of exploding, the grim questions
many people began to ask was whether the people
trapped in the shuttle had suffered physically
and how aware were they of their impending
deaths beyond Smith’s brief final words.
It was initially hypothesized that the changes
in cabin pressure and increase in Gs would
have, relatively mercifully, ended the crew’s
lives immediately.
Analysis of the wreckage found that three
of the astronauts had the time and the presence
of mind to open their air packs.
Michael J. Smith’s was still mounted on
the seat behind him, meaning a crewmember
not only opened their’s but was able to
activate his.
This indicated there was not an immediate
drop in pressure, which would have knocked
the crew out in seconds, so they would have
had time to see their cabin tilting down to
the ground and potentially survived to be
killed on impact with the water.
It serves as a vivid reminder that all future
expeditions into space should take all extra
precautions they can to ensure nothing like
this ever happens again.
3.
The Engineer Who Anticipated It And Blamed
Himself
Bob Ebeling was the leader and organizer of
a group of five engineers who foresaw the
lethal disaster coming, so much so that the
group tried to convince NASA to cancel the
launch.
Ebeling also told his wife the shuttle would
blow up the next day.
Three weeks into the investigation, he was
one of two engineers than anonymously informed
National Public Radio of their attempt to
have the launch cancelled.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Ebeling identified
himself to NPR’s listeners, along with his
colleague Roger Boisjoy.
Even though they’d done what most people
would consider all a person could do to attempt
to save the seven crew members, the very religious
Ebeling was extremely hard on himself for
not going further for the following 30 years.
He went so far as to call the fact he was
one of the people who was in a place to attempt
to convince NASA not to go forward with the
launch “one of God’s mistakes.”
He went into a depression shortly after the
disaster that compelled him to retire.
There was a silver lining to this story.
After National Public Radio broadcast his
interview, there was an outpouring of support
from listeners for Ebeling.
He received numerous phone calls and letters,
one of the more notable ones being from his
superior Allan McDonald, who reminded him
that Ebeling had been one of the people who
started the movement and that he’d gone
above and beyond the call of duty.
Even Robert Lund, one of the people directly
involved in the decision to launch and someone
who’d been forced to move by the local backlash,
called Ebeling and told him that he and the
four other engineers had done all they could.
Charles Bolden, a NASA administrator, wrote
him to commend Ebeling for inspiring other
engineers at NASA, and for reminding personnel
in the administration that they had to be
vigilant in ensuring the safety of future
missions.
Ebeling’s wife Kathy told NPR that these
messages had significantly lifted her husband’s
spirits.
2.
Beyoncé’s Sample
In one of the most questionable moments of
alleged attempted tributes in popular culture,
Beyonce decided to sample part of the news
coverage provided by NASA public relations
officer Steve Nesbitt for her 2013 song XO.
The sample was, “Flight controllers here
looking very carefully at the situation.
Obviously a major malfunction.”
To put this at the beginning of a love song
instead of any sort of memorial for the event
was inevitably seen as an extremely distasteful
joke, a sentiment that was barely changed
by Beyonce’s statements after the fact that
she meant for the song to “help to heal.”
Not that any of the controversy prevented
the song from going gold.
1.
Richard Feynman’s Demonstration
In by far the most famous bit of forensic
work after the explosion, Caltech Physicist
and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman demonstrated
in 1986 that the O-rings used to connect the
solid fuel rocket boosters weren’t sealing
properly by dunking one of them in a glass
of cold water and showing the press that it
had lost all elasticity.
As he explained, on the night before the launch
temperatures had reached freezing.
Unlike prior test launches, NASA hadn’t
had time to test how well the equipment would
function under freezing conditions because
they were operating under an overly tight
schedule as dictated by the government.
Feynman’s discovery did not come easily;
he’d spent a long time testing whether fuel
turbine blades were at fault for the critical
failure.
It wasn’t until NASA released photos that
revealed a leak in one of the boosters that
he began looking in the right direction.
It’s also worth noting that at the time,
he was battling the cancer that would end
his life in 1988.
He passed away before NASA was able to launch
another shuttle.
