January 28th, 1986, 11:39 in the morning, 73 seconds after liftoff, Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic, and America’s trust in NASA broke with it.
Everyone remembers the fireball, the lost teacher, the shock of seeing it live.
But what if the version, you know, is hiding the strangest parts?
NASA got a direct warning not to launch.
The engineers who gave it had predicted the failure and they were overruled.
The crew may have lived through the breakup and a famous children’s character nearly flew with them.
This isn’t another tribute.
It’s seven things about that morning that still don’t make sense.
Why put a school teacher on a shuttle and almost Big Bird, too?
If the engineers knew, why did they lose?
And why can’t the official reports say what the crew went through at the end?
Stay with me.
Some of these answers are hard to hear.
I’m Hannah Ree.
Start with the warning because it wasn’t a hunch.
6 months before that launch, one of the engineers working on the rocket boosters put it in writing.
If the problem he’d found wasn’t fixed, he said the result could be a catastrophe.
Hold on to that memo because it explains more about Challenger than the fireball ever did.
8 years before that morning, Challenger was a structural test article.
When it was finished in February 1978, it was a full-size frame built to be tested on the ground.
It was never meant to leave the Earth.
Then NASA ran the numbers and found something surprising.
Rebuilding this test frame into a working orbiter would cost less than refitting Enterprise, the prototype that lacked most of the systems a real flight needs.
So in January 1979, the conversion started and in July 1982, Challenger rolled out as a real spacecraft.
It went on to fly some of the most famous missions of the shuttle era.
Its very first flight in April 1983 included the first spacew walk of the shuttle program.
Sally Ride flew on Challenger to become the first American woman in space.
Gon Blofford went up on it as the first African-Amean in space on a mission that also made the shuttle’s first night launch and first night landing.
Catherine Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space from Challenger, and another crew used it as a work platform to repair a broken solar telescope in orbit.
By that January, it had flown nine missions.
The 10th was supposed to be the one that brought space into classrooms all over America.
That’s the first strange thing.
Why would NASA put a school teacher on a rocket at all?
The idea came from the top.
In August 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced a teacher in space project and about 11,000 teachers sent in applications.
Each state put forward two nominees.
The list was cut to 10 finalists and in July 1985 the winner was announced at the White House.
Her name was Christa McAuliffe, a 37year-old high school social studies teacher from conquered New Hampshire.
McAuliffe was going up with a lesson plan.
Two live lessons were scheduled from Orbit.
One called the Ultimate Field Trip and another called Where We’ve Been, Where we’re Going, Why.
She was also going to film six demonstrations covering magnetism, Newton’s laws, effervescence, simple machines, hydroponics, and the way mixtures can be separated.
NASA arranged for students across the country to watch the launch live from their schools, and CNN carried it nationally.
That’s why so many children, including McAuliff’s own students, were looking up at a television when it happened.
And she very nearly wasn’t the only one meant to win over the kids.
Back in the early 1980s, NASA reached out to the people behind Sesame Street about sending Big Bird into space.
Carol Spinny, the puppeteer inside the bird, later said, “I once got a letter from NASA asking if I would be willing to join a mission to orbit the Earth as Big Bird.”
The point was to get children excited about space.
Nobody is completely sure why the idea died.
Spinny thought the problem was simple geometry since an 8’2in bird takes up a lot of room in a shuttle cabin.
The story stayed mostly unknown until Spinny talked about it in the documentary I Am Big Bird and in 2015 NASA confirmed that early conversations with Sesame Street had happened but said the plan was never approved.
When Challenger was lost, Spinny remembered it simply.
We all saw the ship blow apart, which looking back makes that letter one of the strangest pieces of mail in the whole story.
The second strange thing is what the crew said.
There were seven people on board.
Dick Scobby was the commander.
Michael Smith was the pilot on what was his first trip to space.
Ellison Onazuka, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair were the mission specialist.
And Gregory Jarvis, an engineer from Hughes, flew alongside McAuliffe as a payload specialist.
About 72 seconds into the flight, the right booster tore loose from one of the struts holding it to the fuel tank, and the crew felt the vehicle lurch sideways.
That’s when the recorder picks up Smith saying two words.
Uh-oh.
It’s the last thing any of them has heard saying.
Those two words matter more than they seem to.
They mean at least one person on board knew something was wrong.
And people on the ground had been worried about this exact moment for hours.
The cameras had even caught the first sign of it less than a second after liftoff.
That’s the third strange thing, and it’s the one that still makes people angry.
The night before the launch, a group of engineers did everything they could to stop it.
They worked for Morton Fioall, the company in Utah that built the solid rocket boosters, and they were worried about the cold.
Pay attention to how those boosters were put together because it explains everything that followed.
Each one was built in segments, and the joints between them were sealed with rubber rings called O-rings.
Hot gas from the burning fuel was supposed to stay inside, but the rings had been failing in small ways for years.
The first damage turned up after the second shuttle flight back in November 1981.
By 1985, rings were showing erosion on nearly every flight.
And on one mission, the hot gas had eaten into both the main ring and the backup behind it.
In January 1985, on a launch where the seals were only about 53°, both boosters came back with damaged main rings.
That was the coldest the rings had ever been at liftoff.
The engineer who’d written that memo, Roger Bajali, led the push that night to wait for warmer weather.
Cold rubber loses its spring, and a ring that can’t spring back quickly can’t close a gap.
Now, look at the forecast for January 28th.
Overnight temperatures at Cape Canaveral were forecast to fall as low as 27°.
By morning, ice had formed all the way down the launch tower from 240 ft up.
When the ice team walked the pad, they measured one spot on the left booster at 25° and on the right booster, they got a reading of 8°.
No shuttle had ever launched in anything close to this kind of cold.
So around 8:00 in the evening, theol engineers got on a conference call with NASA managers and laid out their charts.
Their recommendation was blunt.
Don’t launch below 53°, the coldest temperature they had any experience with.
NASA’s booster manager, Lawrence Malloy, pushed back hard.
According to one of the engineers on the call, he said, “My god, Theol, when do you want me to launch?
Next April.”
And somehow it gets worse.
Thiacol asked for a break.
The company’s managers went offline for about 30 minutes to talk among themselves, and that’s where it turned.
Senior vice president Jerry Mason turned to Bob Lond, another thallol vice president who was still hesitating.
Bob, he said, it’s time to take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.
Lun changed his vote.
When the call came back on, Thiacol’s management told NASA the boosters were ready to fly, overruling their own engineers.
One man refused to go along.
Alan Macdonald was Thia’s senior representative at the Cape, and the launch approval needed his signature.
He wouldn’t sign it.
Years later, he called it the smartest decision he ever made in his lifetime.
So, an executive back in Utah signed it instead, and the approval was faxed to NASA that night.
Bob Ebling, another of the thol engineers who’d argued for a delay, couldn’t let it go either.
His daughter Lesie remembers him in the car on the morning of the launch, telling her that Challenger was going to blow up and that everyone was going to die.
Decades later, he was still carrying it.
I should have done more, he said.
I could have done more.
The memo, the data, and the warning were all there, and the launch went ahead anyway.
Here’s the fourth strange thing, and it’s something even people who watched it live usually don’t realize.
Challenger didn’t really explode the way most of us picture it.
The trouble started almost immediately.
Within the first second after liftoff, cameras around the pad caught puffs of dark gray smoke coming from a joint near the bottom of the right booster.
There were nine of them, spread over about 3 seconds.
The cold ring had failed to seal and hot gas was escaping.
But then something lucky happened, at least for a while.
Burning fuel leaves behind molten aluminum oxide and some of that slag plugged the gap in the joint, a temporary patch that held the seal together.
It might have held all the way, but about 37 seconds into the flight, Challenger flew into a stretch of wind shear.
It was within what the vehicle was designed to handle, but together with the heavy air pressure of the climb, it likely broke that fragile plug apart.
At 58.788 seconds, a camera caught a plume of flame coming out of the right booster near the strut that attached it to the huge external fuel tank.
14 seconds later, at 73 seconds and roughly 46,000 ft up, the bottom of the hydrogen tank fell away.
The tank came apart and its contents flashed into that enormous cloud everyone remembers.
But the cloud is a bit misleading.
What actually destroyed the orbiter was the air.
Challenger was moving at almost twice the speed of sound.
And once it was knocked out of line, it took aerodynamic forces it was never designed to withstand and broke into several large pieces.
And here’s a detail that sounds impossible.
The two solid rocket boosters survived.
They came flying out of the cloud and kept going on their own, still firing.
They were so dangerous that a range safety officer had to send the signal to destroy them 110 seconds after liftoff.
And that wasn’t even the part that’s hardest to think about.
The fifth strange thing is what happened to the crew.
In the hours after the disaster, the assumption almost everyone made was that they died instantly in the blast.
The evidence doesn’t really support that.
When Challenger broke up, the crew compartment came away largely intact and it didn’t stop moving.
It kept climbing for about 25 seconds up to roughly 65,000 ft before it curved over and started to fall.
From the moment of breakup to the moment it hit the Atlantic took about 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
When it struck the water, it was moving at about 207 m an hour.
NASA asked Joseph Kerwin, a biomed specialist at the Johnson Space Center, to work out what the crew went through, and his report came out in July 1986.
Cerwyn found that the forces at the moment of breakup, somewhere between 12 and 20 times the force of gravity, were probably too low to cause death or serious injury.
Then came the detail that changed how people saw the whole thing.
The crew carried personal emergency air packs and four of them were recovered from the wreckage.
Three had been switched on.
The only one that hadn’t was the commanders.
Think about what that means.
Somebody, it seems, reached for those packs after the breakup and turned them on.
In Cerwin’s words, the crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness, most likely because the cabin lost pressure, but he couldn’t prove even that.
His report says no positive evidence for or against a pressure loss could be found, and that the cause of death cannot be positively determined.
That gap is where the darker version of the story lives.
An investigation published by Tropic, the Miami Heralds magazine, argued that the cabin never lost pressure at all, which would mean the astronauts were conscious for the entire fall, and it accused NASA of trying to play that possibility down.
NASA’s official position stayed where Cerwin left it, that the truth simply couldn’t be determined.
Some people closer to the program didn’t think it was a mystery.
Robert Overme, a fellow astronaut, put it plainly.
They were alive, he said.
He believed Scobby was still flying the ship without wings all the way down.
And the timing of this launch, it carried its own ghost.
Before Challenger, NASA had never lost an astronaut during a flight.
The only crew it had ever lost died on the ground in a fire inside the Apollo 1 capsule during a test on January 27th, 1967.
Gus Gryom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffy died together inside it.
Challenger’s launch had been scrubbed twice that week, once for weather and once for technical problems.
The second scrub fell on January 27th, 1986, 19 years to the day after Apollo 1.
The next morning, it flew.
That evening, President Reagan was supposed to deliver the State of the Union address.
With the disaster only hours old, he put it off and spoke to the country from the Oval Office instead.
The speech lasted about four minutes, and it was written by Peggy Nunan.
Part of it was aimed directly at the children who had watched McAuliff’s launch from their classrooms.
He told them, “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted.
It belongs to the brave.”
And he closed on a line borrowed from Highflight, a poem by John Gillespie McGee, an American aviator who wrote it during the Second World War.
The crew, Reagan said, had slipped the surirly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
It’s still considered one of the finest speeches he ever gave.
Out on the water, the search was only beginning.
Pieces of Challenger were scattered across a huge stretch of the Atlantic, and finding the crew compartment took weeks.
On March 7th, Air Force divers identified what looked like cabin debris on the ocean floor, and Navy divers from the USS Preserver confirmed it the next day.
It was lying in about 100 ft of water, roughly 15 mi east of Cape Canaveral.
The remains inside were not intact bodies, and pathologists could not determine any cause of death.
Jarvis had been carried away from the cabin by the current and his body wasn’t found until April 15th.
The remains that could be identified went home to the families.
Scobby and Smith were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
And on May 20th that year, the remains that couldn’t be identified were laid to rest under the Challenger Memorial there.
Most of the recovered wreckage ended up underground, too.
NASA buried it in old missile silos at Cape Canaveral where it still is, but Challenger never fully went into that ground.
And we’re going to see why.
First, the question that matters most.
If so many people knew about the danger, why did NASA fly?
That’s the sixth strange thing, and the official investigation answered it in plain language.
President Reagan appointed a commission led by William Rogers with Neil Armstrong as vice chairman and ride Chuck Joerger and the physicist Richard Feman among its members.
Its report handed to the president on June 9th that year found that thiocall’s engineers had recommended against launching below 53° and that after NASA challenged them, the company’s senior managers overruled them.
It also went after the schedule.
NASA had been aiming for 24 shuttle flights a year, and the commission called that kind of optimism unrealistic.
The shuttle was supposed to be the country’s main way into space, carrying commercial satellites, science missions, and military payloads, and every delay put that promise at risk.
Feainman made the problem impossible to ignore.
During a televised hearing in February, he clamped a piece of the O-ring rubber, dropped it into a glass of ice water, and showed everyone in the room that it lost its springiness in the cold.
It took a few seconds and cost almost nothing.
Then he looked at how NASA judged risk.
Management had put the chance of losing a shuttle at about 1 in 100,000.
Feainman’s own estimate was closer to one in 100.
And when engineers were asked anonymously, most of their answers fell between 1 in 50 and one in 200.
His conclusion is the line people still quote.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Shuttles stayed on the ground for 32 months while NASA worked through the commission’s nine recommendations.
When they finally returned to flight on September 29th, 1988, the crew wore pressure suits for launch and for re-entry.
The seventh strange thing is that Challenger never really stayed buried.
On December 17th, 1996, almost 11 years after the disaster, two large pieces of the shuttle washed up at Cocoa Beach, crusted with barnacles.
They were so big that a frontend loader had to drag them off the sand.
A newspaper report at the time noted that about half of the orbiter was still somewhere on the ocean floor.
Then in March 2022, divers filming a History Channel documentary went looking for the wreck of a Second World War plane off the Florida coast.
Mike Barnett, a marine biologist, and Jimmy Gdamsky, a wreck diver, found something else.
A section more than 15 feet across, partly buried in sand, and still covered in square heat shield tiles.
NASA studied their video, and Michael Cili, a NASA manager, called it pretty clear and convincing evidence.
It was a piece of Challenger.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the tragedy would forever be seared in the collective memory of our country.
The people Challenger left behind kept coming back, too.
Barbara Morgan, a second grade teacher from McCall, Idaho, had trained as McAuliff’s backup.
NASA canled the teacher in space project in 1990.
But that wasn’t the end of the road for Morgan.
She was later selected as an astronaut herself.
And in August 2007, she flew on the shuttle Endeavor, more than 21 years after the flight she had trained for.
And then there’s the soccer ball.
Anuzuka had carried it on board for his daughter Janelle, who was 16 and played for Clear Lake High School.
The school’s boys and girls teams had signed it.
When the recovery crew searched the water after the disaster, they found that ball floating.
The family gave it back to the school where it was kept as a memorial.
Three decades later, astronaut Shane Kimbro, whose own daughter went to Clear Lake, asked to take it to space.
On February 3rd, 2017, as commander of the International Space Station, he posted a picture of the ball floating in front of the station’s Capola windows.
“This ball was on Challenger that fateful day,” he wrote.
“So, the strangest thing about Challenger is that almost nothing about it was a surprise.
The cold, the rings, the memo, the conference call, all of it was known, written down and argued about before anyone lit the engines.
The rings had been eroding since 1981, and every flight that came home anyway made the damage look a little easier to live with.
By the night of that call, a known problem had started to feel normal, and it was the engineers who were being asked to justify waiting.
That’s how people who saw it coming still lost the argument.
Ebling spent about 30 years blaming himself for it.
In 2016, while he was in hospice care at home, letters started arriving after NPR told his story.
One former colleague wrote, “God didn’t pick a loser.
He picked Bob Ebling.
Even Lun, the manager who changed his vote, told him, “You did all that you could do.”
Ebling said his burden had been reduced.
I’m Hannah Ree and if you want more of the stories behind the moments everyone thinks they already know, there are more videos like this one on the way.
