1986 Challenger Disaster Shocked the World. Here’s What NASA Learned From It

Spaceflight is always risky. You never know what you will encounter during missions. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 reminds us to pay utmost attention to works regarding flights into space to prevent possible new accidents.

The explosion of the Challenger occurred after the space shuttle carrying seven astronauts lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11.38 a.m. EST, on January 28, 1986. Seventy-three seconds following the ascent, the shuttle exploded in a plume of smoke and fire, in which no one survived.

Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, and Christa McAuliffe died in the accident. Hundreds on the ground and millions in front of televisions bore witness to the heart-wrenching moment.

Crewmembers of NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger. Image: NASA

A tragedy that shocked the world: Challenger explosion

As this tragedy shocked the world, an investigation conducted to find the cause of the explosion revealed considerable inadequacies in NASA’s scientific approach. The breakdown in the booster engine arose from rubber O-rings that were responsible to seal rocket boosters and these rings were never examined to withstand extreme cold weather conditions. The cold rubber stiffened on the morning of the launch, failing to completely seal the joint.

During the take-off, one of the seals on the booster rocket opened and exhaust fumes leaked out, causing the deadly disaster, according to Space.com. NASA, which faced immense shockwaves of the fatal accident, shared lessons that it learned from the Challenger disaster so that similar images don’t take place again.

Allan McDonald, then-director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for the engineering contractor Morton Thiokol, had rejected to sign the launch recommendation due to safety concerns as he predicted that the rockets would explode if the O-rings were to fail. These concerns were published by NASA.

Despite Thiokol engineers’ solicitude about the mission due to the effect of low temperature on the O-rings, NASA personnel pressured Thiokol to agree to the launch, the presentation says. O-ring resealed during ascent. Vibrations and crosswinds caused a catastrophic loss of sealing. In the photo below, escaping gases from the Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) joint are seen.

Escaping gases were seen from the rocket booster. Slide Share

What NASA learned from Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

A bundle of problems regarding the space shuttle’s SRB failure started with the faulty design of its joint, and both NASA and the contractor failed to recognize the situation as a problem, then they failed to mend it, which was accepted as a reasonable flight risk.

The decision-makers related to the flight were also unaware of the O-rings issue and the joint. “There were serious ongoing weaknesses in the shuttle Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance Program, which had failed to exercise control over the problem tracking systems, had not critiqued the engineering analysis advanced as an explanation of the Solid Rocket Motors (SRM) seal problem,” per the presentation.

We cannot become complacent. We cannot be silent when we see something we feel is unsafe. We must allow people to come forward with their concerns without fear of repercussion.

Today, the risk of human spaceflight is more than 10,000 times greater than the risk of flying on a commercial airliner, according to a report concerning safe flight into space. We hope that such a tragedy as seen in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster will not reappear.