When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.The space shuttle Challenger launched from Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 28, 1986 with a crew of seven astronauts aboard. An accident 73 seconds after liftoff claimed the lives of all seven and destroyed the vehicle. . | Credit: NASAEditor’s note: This story contains discussion of astronaut fatalities and dangerous moments in human spaceflight.It was 40 years ago today (Jan. 28) that the space shuttle Challenger blasted off on its 10th mission to space. Sadly, the vehicle never made it there.Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff while carrying seven people, including “Teacher in Space” participant Christa McAuliffe. Nobody survived the launch on Jan. 28, 1986 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and the event left a permanent mark upon the agency, its contractors and the nation.AdvertisementAdvertisementRon Doel, who is today a professor of history at Florida State University, was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California that day. He was watching the Challenger launch on TV while awaiting JPL’s daily news briefing about Voyager 2, a NASA spacecraft that had just flown by Uranus.”The shock was visceral, immediate,” Doel told Space.com by email. Perhaps it was all the more so for him, as an unusual set of circumstances lined up to bring Doel there: he was then a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science program at Princeton University, on a quick visit to learn more about Voyager. Doel had press credentials at JPL through some connections secured through an earlier book contract, allowing him to watch the reporters there react in real time.”Monitors in the press room that had been showing in real time images transmitted from Voyager now showed, over and over, the launch and explosion,” he said. “Some in the press raced out of JPL with new assignments. The Voyager briefing was canceled. NASA officials, as I recall, gave us a briefing on the accident later in the day.”The aftermathAn independent board, often called the Rogers Commission after its chair William P. Rogers, investigated the Challenger accident and found that it was caused by a combination of factors. The 260-page report cannot be summarized in a few words, but one of the more famous lines is this: “The decision to launch the Challenger was flawed.” Not only were there technical problems (most famously, an “O-ring” seal failing due to unusually cold conditions), but decision-makers made several assumptions that turned out to be unwarranted.AdvertisementAdvertisementSadly, Challenger didn’t remain the lone space shuttle tragedy. Seventeen years later came the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia during reentry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing another seven astronauts. That sparked a new query called the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. That Board produced a two-volume report, which also found that a set of technical and human failures led to the astronauts’ deaths.”Columbia I remember in a lot of detail, because at the time I was a volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science,” recalled Pauline Barmby, today a department chair of physics and astronomy at Canada’s Western University, whose faculty include astronaut trainers and space instrument/experiment designers. Barmby also served as a team member on one of the instruments for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.”They [the museum] were planning on doing a live coverage of the landing,” Barmby told Space.com. But television stations instead only had live shots from Texas showing the shuttle’s debris trails as it broke up. “I recall vividly the person who was to be the presenter just broke down.”Other fatalities in spaceflight include the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire on Jan. 27, 1967, which killed three astronauts; the crash-landing of the Soviet Union’s Soyuz 1 spacecraft that killed its single cosmonaut on April 24, 1967; and Soyuz 11, whose three cosmonauts died during reentry (due to depressurization) on June 29, 1971. (This lis …
