MERRITT ISLAND, Fla. —
It's been 40 years since seven people lost their lives when the Challenger space shuttle exploded minutes after launching from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
The disaster claimed the lives of Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Mike J. Smith and Ellison S. Onizuka.
10th flight
With one flight behind them in 1986 and an ambitious schedule for the year ahead, NASA was preparing to launch the Challenger on its 10th flight, dubbed the STS-51L mission. During the six-day endeavor, the crew prepared to deploy a large communications satellite and deliver a payload to study Halley’s Comet.
The mission was expected to make history: sending the first teacher to space.
The nationwide search, first announced by Ronald Reagan in 1984, garnered intense interest with more than 10,000 teachers applying for the spot on the flight.
In 1985, officials announced New Hampshire middle school teacher Christa McAuliffe would join the mission and teach lessons from space.
The STS-51L mission was originally targeted for Jan. 23, 1986, but was pushed back because of delays with the Columbia shuttle and STS-61C mission just miles away at Launch Pad 39A. Weather conditions only exacerbated the delays more.
Scrubbed
On Jan. 27, the crew boarded Challenger to prepare for launch, but a mechanical issue and winds scrubbed their first attempt. Overnight, temperatures at Kennedy Space Center dropped significantly, causing ice to cover parts of the launch tower.
While engineers had concerns about the effect of the cold temperatures on Jan. 28's launch attempt, managers cleared the Challenger for flight. What they didn't know is an O-ring failure caused by the cold doomed the Challenger before it even left the launch pad.
73 seconds after liftoff
As Challenger lifted off at 11:38 a.m., thousands of people, including many children, watched from the ground below while millions more watched it all unfold on live television.
For the first minute or so, the flight appeared to travel normally. But at 73 seconds after liftoff, controllers lost all contact with Challenger as a fiery ball streaked across the sky and TV screens.
A statement from the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident indicated the crew probably survived the fuel tank blast but ultimately died nearly three minutes later when the crew cabin hit the water at 207 mph.
"The forces to which the crew were exposed during orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury," the statement indicated. "NASA is unable to determine positively the cause of death of the Challenger astronauts but has established that it is possible, but not certain, that loss of consciousness did occur in the seconds following the orbiter break-up."
'We will never forget them ... '
That evening, Reagan addressed the nation. Quoting John Gillespie Magee, he said, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
The explosion led to the grounding of the Space Shuttle fleet for nearly three years, during which various safety measures, solid rocket booster redesign and a new policy on management decision-making for future launches were implemented.
