Could the Challenger Disaster Have Been Prevented?

Summary

Summary of "Could the Challenger Disaster Have Been Prevented?" HISTORY This Week
Episode Release Date: January 27, 2025
Host/Author: The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

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Introduction to the Challenger Mission

The episode begins by setting the scene on January 28, 1986, highlighting the severe cold snap in central Florida, which had previously devastated the citrus crop the year before. Amidst this unusual weather, the spotlight is on Roger Beaujolais, a rocket engineer at Morton Thiokol, who discovers critical issues with the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters. These concerns set the stage for the tragic Challenger disaster, which would unfold the following day.

The Space Shuttle Program and Its Promises

Adam Higginbotham, a journalist and author of a book on the Challenger disaster, provides historical context to the space shuttle program. He recounts witnessing NASA's first live shuttle launch in 1981, marking the advent of a reusable spacecraft designed to make space travel routine and commercially viable.

“This idea that they would have a shuttle, a space truck that would be able to go into space and back, you know, on a, on a sort of almost routine schedule.”
[06:16] — Adam Higginbotham

The program quickly became a series of milestones, including launching the first African American and the first American woman into space. However, the frequency of launches led to public disinterest, putting NASA under pressure to maintain congressional and public support.

Technical Challenges: The O-Rings and Cold Weather

The heart of the episode delves into the technical failures that plagued the Challenger mission, specifically focusing on the O-rings—rubber seals critical to the integrity of the solid rocket boosters. During testing, it became evident that these O-rings were compromised by the extreme heat of the rocket exhaust, leading to potential leaks.

“The extreme heat of the rocket exhaust, it damages the o rings. They burn and show signs of deterioration, which, as you can imagine, is not.”
[17:04] — Sally Helm

Roger Beaujolais identifies that the unusually cold weather had rendered the O-rings brittle, increasing the likelihood of failure. Despite his warnings, management deemed the risk acceptable, believing that such extreme cold was a once-in-a-century event unlikely to recur.

“He couldn't really convince anyone that this was a problem that was necessarily going to recur, because Florida never gets this cold.”
[21:26] — Adam Higginbotham

The Decision to Launch: Conflict at Morton Thiokol

On the morning before the Challenger launch, under immense pressure to proceed, Beaujolais and his colleague Arnie Thompson confront NASA's management about the compromised O-rings. Despite their technical objections, NASA officials, particularly Larry Malloy, press for the launch to proceed.

“The idea is to say, actually, you know what, there's something else wrong with it. We recommend delaying. Morton Thiokol know that that's really not going to go down well.”
[26:18] — Sally Helm

A heated conference call ensues where Morton Thiokol initially opposes the launch but, after intense pressure and internal conflict, succumbs to NASA's demands. Senior engineers like Bob Lund internally disagree but are overruled, leading to the approval of the launch despite unresolved safety concerns.

“He just sits there and eventually puts up his hands and says, okay, I agree. Let's fire Morton. Thiokol gives NASA the okay.”
[29:12] — Sally Helm

The Launch and Disaster

On January 28, 1986, the Challenger launches amidst public excitement, particularly because Christa McAuliffe, a teacher selected for the Teacher in Space project, is on board. Initially, the launch appears successful, with crowds celebrating and astronauts posed for photos. However, merely 73 seconds into the flight, disaster strikes as a catastrophic failure occurs due to the compromised O-rings.

“The Challenger exploded because of the failure of the O rings, which was related to the cold temperatures. The tragedy could have been prevented by the people in that room the night before.”
[34:03] — Adam Higginbotham

Footage shows the shuttle disintegrating, leading to the tragic loss of all seven crew members. The nation reels in shock and grief, particularly shaken by the live broadcast of the tragedy in front of millions, including 1.5 million schoolchildren.

Aftermath and Investigation

President Reagan swiftly addresses the nation, expressing profound sorrow and respect for the fallen astronauts. An immediate commission is established to investigate the disaster, uncovering the critical failure of the O-rings exacerbated by unusually cold weather.

“They were not mustache-twirling villains. They were people who were arrogant, certainly, and thought that they knew better, you know, and they thought they were making the right decision and they were wrong.”
[34:03] — Adam Higginbotham

The investigation reveals that internal pressures, bureaucratic mismanagement, and ignored engineering warnings contributed significantly to the disaster. This revelation tarnishes NASA's image, shifting public perception from reverence to skepticism regarding the agency's infallibility.

Lasting Impact on NASA and Space Exploration

The Challenger disaster marks a pivotal moment for NASA, leading to substantial overhauls in safety protocols and organizational structure. The agency becomes more risk-averse, instilling a culture of caution that persists for decades. This tragic event also leads to a reevaluation of how NASA balances ambition with safety, emphasizing the importance of heeding technical concerns over external pressures.

“The Challenger explosion, of course, has a profound effect on NASA. It becomes a generation-defining tragedy, one that can never be erased.”
[34:32] — Sally Helm

The episode further draws parallels to the Columbia disaster in 2003, suggesting that institutional memory fades over time, potentially leading to repeated tragedies if lessons are not adequately internalized.

Conclusion

The episode concludes by reflecting on the enduring lessons from the Challenger disaster, emphasizing the critical need for transparent decision-making and the prioritization of safety over ambition. It underscores the importance of learning from past mistakes to prevent future catastrophes in the inherently risky field of space exploration.

“No matter what NASA does, there will always be hard decisions to make when it comes to acceptable risk. How do they measure acceptable risk when weighing it against the progress of humankind?”
[37:24] — Sally Helm

Through in-depth analysis and expert insights, the episode poignantly illustrates how the Challenger disaster was not an isolated incident but a culmination of systemic failures, human error, and the dire consequences of overlooked warnings.

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Notable Quotes:

• “They were people who were arrogant, certainly, and thought that they knew better...”
  — Adam Higginbotham, [34:03]

• “The Challenger exploded because of the failure of the O rings...”
  — Adam Higginbotham, [34:03]

• “This idea that they would have a shuttle, a space truck...”
  — Adam Higginbotham, [06:16]

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Final Thoughts

This episode of HISTORY This Week meticulously unpacks the intricate web of technical flaws, human decisions, and organizational dynamics that led to one of NASA's darkest moments. By integrating firsthand accounts, expert testimonies, and historical analysis, it provides a comprehensive understanding of whether the Challenger disaster could have been averted and the profound lessons learned from this tragedy.

Transcript

[Sally Helm]

Hello, History this Week listeners. It is Sally here. We cover stories from all around the world on this show. And today's episode is sponsored by the language Learning program Rosetta Stone. Our producer Ben is here to tell you all about them.

[Ben Dickstein]

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[Sally Helm]

Original Podcast History this Week January 28, 1986 I'm Sally Helm. It's early morning in central Florida and it's freezing. In fact, it is below freezing, 18 degrees Fahrenheit, way colder than it normally gets here. Even in January, farmers are bundled up standing out among their citrus trees, lighting small fires to keep the fruit warm. Because last year during another freak cold snap, the citrus crop was devastated. Oranges fruit froze hard as baseballs farms went under. Some citrus growers left town. The losses were a catastrophic $2.5 billion. People called that cold snap the freeze of the century. And now one year later, another once in a hundred year event. Bad news for the orange growers and not just for them. All the way over in Utah, a man named Roger Beaujolais has just heard how cold it is in Florida and he is horrified. Beaujolais is a rocket engineer for an aerospace company called Morton Thiokol. And this cold snap, this is his worst nightmare. Because tomorrow, Morten Thiokol's biggest client, NASA, is supposed to launch a space shuttle. A very high profile shuttle with seven people on board. And Beaujolais knows that this cold could make that very, very dangerous. Today, the Challenger disaster, a tragedy that would claim such seven lives on national television and change space exploration forever. What went wrong? And if engineers knew what could happen, why wasn't it avoided?

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[Sally Helm]

We're hearing this story from journalist Adam Hagenbotham, who wrote a book about Challenger. Like a lot of people who write about space, he was obsessed as a kid. Watched his first live launch in 1981 and that was an important one. It was the first launch of NASA's space shuttle program.

[NASA Launch Control]

Six, five, four. We've gone for main engine start. We have main engine start.

[Adam Higginbotham]

It was a spacecraft that could take off from Cape Canaveral and then go into space and then come back and land on a Runway, you know, just like the spacecraft in 2001. A Space Odyssey, which was totally unlike what had ever been done before.

[NASA Launch Control]

America's first space shuttle. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Sally Helm]

Yep, this is the Columbia. It's a reusable manned spacecraft. The shuttle program is one of NASA's biggest initiatives since the moon landing.

[Adam Higginbotham]

This idea that they would have a shuttle, a space truck that would be able to go into space and back, you know, on a, on a sort of almost routine schedule. And the selling point, the step forward that that represented was that it would make space travel routine.

[Sally Helm]

A space truck, this NASA promised would be more than high minded exploration. It would be practical, useful, and perhaps most importantly, commercially viable.

[Adam Higginbotham]

You're going to be able to take, you know, lots more people into space and further down the road you're going to be able to take ordinary people into space. And so that was always kind of a part of the PR idea behind the space shuttle.

[Sally Helm]

Congress goes for it. And on April 12, 1981, the world's first space shuttle takes off. Millions of people watch it on television, including Adam Higginbotham. But way bigger than the launch is the return. 54 and a half hours later, this is the real test. Will the spacecraft come back intact? Is it really reusable? People flock from all over to witness this moment. So many that it creates a six mile long traffic jam as the shuttle approaches. The crowd falls still 50ft. And then the craft touches down, rolling onto the tarmac like an airplane would.

[NASA Launch Control]

Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful, beautiful.

[Sally Helm]

The astronauts step off the shuttle, giddy and smiling.

[NASA Launch Control]

The Columbia represents an achievement in aerospace technology and development never before realized in the history of manned spaceflight.

[Sally Helm]

The Columbia launch isn't just a technical success for NASA, it's also a PR coup. People are invested in what NASA is doing. They care. And as NASA keeps launching, the public keeps watching.

[NASA Launch Control]

A revolutionary new era in space transportation has just begun. Routine access to space. Welcome to the future.

[Sally Helm]

Over the next few years, the space shuttle program hits its stride. NASA racks up a series of firsts. The first African American in space, Guyne Bluford. The first American woman in space. A famous Sally Sally ride. NASA even had a sort of space cowboy thing going on for a while.

[Adam Higginbotham]

They did these amazing missions where they would fly into space and just kind of Recover errant satellites, like kind of roping a steer in space and then bringing it back to Earth to get it fixed, which at the time just seemed incredible.

[Sally Helm]

These launches become cultural touchstones. They're broadcast live on television. The astronauts become bona fide celebrities. And all of these firsts, they happen aboard one shuttle Challenger. But any TV producer will tell you it's hard to keep America's attention.

[Adam Higginbotham]

For long flights were so frequent that the public had just got bored with it to the extent that the major networks were no longer carrying each launch live.

[Sally Helm]

This puts NASA in a bind. Their goal was to make space travel routine. But routine space travel gets boring. Like almost no one goes to watch airplanes take off. And the stakes are high because NASA's funding in some ways depends on the public's support.

[Adam Higginbotham]

They really needed to command public attention in order to get congressional support. In order to keep funding flowing, they needed to recapture the public's imagination. So the idea of flying a civilian into space really came to the fore as a way of getting good publicity.

[Sally Helm]

A civilian in space, an ordinary person.

[Adam Higginbotham]

But who they, you know, they considered all sorts of options.

[Sally Helm]

Among the contenders, comedians, Boy Scouts, my favorite Big Bird. Yes, that Big Bird. Favorite for a lot of people.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And the only reason, as far as I can gather, this didn't actually happen is because the nature of the costume made it challenging to make it work in zero gravity.

[Sally Helm]

In the end, the committee lands on a different idea.

[Adam Higginbotham]

A teacher, a good teacher is often a natural communicator, would be a good advocate, you know, NASA's role in education, expanding the boundaries of science.

[Sally Helm]

It makes sense. And on August 27, 1984, President Ronald Reagan announces the Teacher in Space project and encourages teachers across the country to apply. It's a media bonanza. More than 11,000 teachers throw their hats in the ring. And on July 19, 1985, Vice President George H.W. bush announces the winner.

[NASA Launch Control]

Well, we're here here today to announce.

[Adam Higginbotham]

The first private citizen passenger in the.

[NASA Launch Control]

History of space flight.

[Sally Helm]

He stands in front of a podium wearing glasses, a tan suit, and a yellow polka dot tie. It's not as funky as it sounds. To his left is a group of teachers, the competition's 10 finalists. They look a little nervous.

[NASA Launch Control]

And the winner, the teacher who will be going into space, Christa McAuliffe, is that you?

[Sally Helm]

McAuliffe is standing right next to Bush. She has curly brown hair, bangs, big smile, but when she steps up to the podium, she's choking back tears. It's not often that a teacher is.

[NASA Launch Control]

At a loss for words. I know my students wouldn't think so.

[Sally Helm]

And the people watching at home, they love her.

[Adam Higginbotham]

So many people around the country identified with her because they could put themselves in her place. She was the everyman astronaut.

[Sally Helm]

It's, of course, tragic to think about this now, this moment of excitement and hope, but it's important context to understand why and how things would eventually go so wrong. Because in public, in front of the media cameras, everything is going incredibly well for NASA. There are heartwarming stories about McAuliffe's husband and her children in her hometown of Concord, New Hampshire, the crew she'll be flying with, six other astronauts, they're smart, charismatic, and the most diverse crew that NASA has ever flown.

[Adam Higginbotham]

It really embodied the notion of this as the kind of best and the brightest of American society.

[Sally Helm]

The mission kind of feels like something out of Star Trek. There are even plans for McAuliffe to teach live lessons to her New Hampshire students from space. She even makes an appearance on the Tonight show starring Johnny Carson. And just like that, NASA is back in prime time. But behind the scenes, well out of the public eye, the shuttle program is experiencing problems, dangerous problems. Building a rocket is very hard. It is the famously complicated rocket science. And building a reusable rocket is even harder. In his book, Higginbotham calls the space shuttles, these reusable space trucks, the most complicated machine in history. Up to that point.

[Adam Higginbotham]

I started talking to engineers who worked on both the Apollo program and the shuttle program, and I would reiterate this phrase to them, you know, the most complicated machine in history. And I'm like, was that really true? They would always go, absolutely, it was true. It was orders of magnitude harder.

[Sally Helm]

Launching the most complicated machine in history into space with people on board, that is always going to be risky.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Almost everyone involved in the space shuttle program was aware of the fact that there were thousands of things that could go wrong with this extremely dangerous system.

[Sally Helm]

And NASA had experienced disasters before. The worst was the Apollo 1 disaster in 1967. A fire broke out on board the spacecraft during a pre flight test, and horribly, three astronauts on board were killed. But by the 1980s, all of the successful shuttle missions might have made those disasters seem like the distant past.

[Adam Higginbotham]

There is this gulf between the nature of manned spaceflight was understood by the people who worked at NASA, and the way that it was presented to the public.

[Sally Helm]

In other words, space travel is starting to look routine, which had been the goal. And so some people are starting to imagine that riding aboard a spacecraft is about as safe as stepping Onto an airplane, which it certainly is not. And from the beginning, things do go wrong with the space shuttles. Not so wrong that it derails the missions. But notably, there is an issue with the joints for the solid rocket boosters. Okay, so the boosters are these massive engines that attach to the shuttle. They are huge, 12ft across, almost 150ft tall. So they can't be built in one piece. They have to be put together in sections. And these sections are held together by joints which are sealed by wide black rubber disks called o rings.

[Adam Higginbotham]

They discover in testing almost immediately that the joints between these sections of the solid rocket boosters don't work as they intended them to.

[Sally Helm]

The extreme heat of the rocket exhaust, it damages the o rings. They burn and show signs of deterioration, which, as you can imagine, is not.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Ideal, but they do kind of work okay. They don't really leak that badly all the time. And so the engineers decide, well, yeah, they don't work quite as we imagined that they would, but but they do work well enough for us to think this is an acceptable risk.

[Sally Helm]

Acceptable risk. That is not just a euphemism. Like, even though NASA is pulling off launch after launch successfully, this is still experimental technology.

[Adam Higginbotham]

The guy who ran the Marshall space flight center, you know, he said that the only way to guarantee safety is not to leave the launch pad. You know, and that's true. If you're running an experimental program, Then you can't wait around until you know that everything works 100% perfectly because you'd never get off the ground.

[Sally Helm]

But at the same time, Congress is putting more and more pressure on the shuttle program to become more financially viable. After all, NASA had promised them a space truck, something that would help the program pay for itself. And that hasn't happened yet. Congress isn't happy.

[Adam Higginbotham]

So at that point, then they started saying, oh, well, you know, we can maybe lease one out to other companies that might want to use it for commercial purposes in space. And they ended up in a situation where at one point, there was serious consideration of selling one of the already constructed shuttles to federal express to operate as an entirely privately owned enterprise.

[Sally Helm]

That doesn't happen. Instead, NASA decides to launch more frequently. The thought is, the more they launch, the more Congress will feel as if they're delivering on this space truck promise. And so maybe commercial money is just around the corner. In 1985, NASA plans to launch nine times, a record. But as the frequency of launches increases, the program begins to buckle under the strain. January 1985, the first launch in that year of many launches, Roger Beaujolais walks into the hangar at Cape Canaveral. It's chilly outside, but it could be worse. Just a few days ago, it was freezinghistorically cold. In fact, a meteorological anomaly. Beaujolais cuts an imposing figure. Tall, bulky, bald, a brow that seems permanently furrowed. He's an engineer for Morton Thiokol, a contractor who manufactures parts of NASA's rockets. He usually works in Utah, where he's developed a bit of a reputation for butting heads with management, though the other engineers seem to love him. Today he's here to inspect the solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle Discovery's recent launch. Afterwards, the boosters had been tracked by radar, retrieved from the ocean, lifted by cranes onto custom dollies, and moved to this hangar, where they're finally ready for his inspection.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Roger Beaujolais absolutely freaked out.

[Sally Helm]

Beaujolais finds a major problem with the O rings, those seals that are supposed to keep the solid rocket boosters together and prevent hot gas from leaking out. They'd suffered some damage on previous launches, but this time was different.

[Adam Higginbotham]

At least one of the O rings had sustained so much damage that it had almost burned through and that a leak had almost formed from inside the combustion chamber of the rocket to the outside of the rocket, at which point it would have been uncontrollable and would have just cut through the casing of the rocket like a hot knife through butter.

[Sally Helm]

If this O ring had failed, the rocket would have exploded. In fact, Beaujolais is shocked that it didn't. The Discovery had five astronauts on board, and Beaujolais knows that they had just very narrowly escaped death. But not just that. He knows why this happened.

[Adam Higginbotham]

He almost immediately made a connection between the extreme cold weather, that January day when it launched and the nature of the leak.

[Sally Helm]

The cold had made the O rings brittle, more susceptible to damage, more likely to allow a leak. Beaujolais takes this revelation to management.

[Adam Higginbotham]

But he couldn't really convince anyone that this was a problem that was necessarily.

[Sally Helm]

Going to recur, because Florida never gets this cold.

[Adam Higginbotham]

His supervisors from the Marshall Space Flight center explicitly said to him, you know, this is never going to happen again for another hundred years. And by the time this kind of weather happens again, this will be fixed. And in the meantime, to keep launching.

[Sally Helm]

And so they do.

[Adam Higginbotham]

It was kind of incredible that they managed to fly as frequently as they did in 1985.

[Sally Helm]

Nine times. They do it. And while NASA keeps launching, Morton Thiokol works on the O ring problem. They create a task force but it becomes clear management and engineers have different takes on what needs to happen. The O Ring issue is tricky. Solving it that would require a massive years long redesign. If Morton Thiokol were to insist on a fix, would NASA really wait around pause these launches for years while these rubberized rings get redesigned? Would they keep using Morton Thiokol as a contractor? The engineers are freaked out. One working on the project even sends a memo to management with the subject line help in all caps with an exclamation point, trying to draw attention to the dangers of the O ring issue. And you know, people might be thinking, well the really big issue only comes up during extreme cold freak weather events and how likely is it really that a once in a hundred year event will happen twice?

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[Sally Helm]

1986 Today, Christa McAuliffe is supposed to become the first private citizen in space. Theoretically. But the launch has already been delayed twice. The previous shuttle launch, another Columbia mission, ended up delayed five times.

[Adam Higginbotham]

NASA has been made to look foolish and sneered at on the nightly news. So this launch and the previous one have already been huge embarrassments.

[Sally Helm]

Things aren't looking good today either. It's cold out, freezing for the second year in a row. In fact, the launch tower is covered in foot and a half long icicles. So when McAuliffe and the other astronauts gather over a steak and eggs breakfast, wearing white polos, posing for a second round of pre launch photos, they're pretty certain there's no way we're going to launch today.

[Adam Higginbotham]

There's all sorts of reasons that the cold seems to make it impossible to launch. And the astronauts are convinced that the launch won't go. Even as they go out to the launch pad, they're sure that the launch will just be scrubbed because of the temperatures.

[Sally Helm]

Unbeknownst to the astronauts, some of NASA's leadership had spent the night in a trailer near the launch site on a conference call discussing this very issue. The call was initiated By Morten Thiokol NASA's Utah contractor and Roger Beaujolais wants to raise the alarm. He's seen the weather report and he's seen what extreme cold did to the O rings from Discovery. He says it is not safe to launch.

[Adam Higginbotham]

He convinces all of the people at his end in Utah to oppose the launch and to say that the launch should be delayed.

[Sally Helm]

They tell NASA, do not launch Challenger.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Morton Feigl has never recommended delaying a launch in this way before.

[Sally Helm]

It's a very high stakes decision. They know that NASA is already feeling some pressure about the recent delays.

[Adam Higginbotham]

So the idea that they're going to say, actually, you know what, there's something else wrong with it. We recommend delaying. Morton Tichel know that that's really not.

[Sally Helm]

Going to go down well, and it doesn't, especially with Larry Malloy. Malloy is NASA management. Middle aged, thick graying hair parted at the side, always photographed wearing a suit.

[Adam Higginbotham]

He was the person to whom all of the people at Morton Firecoll ultimately answered. He was the customer and he was an extremely capable engineer, but he could be overbearing.

[Sally Helm]

From a conference room in Utah, Roger Beaujolais and his colleague Arnie Thompson begin to lay out their case. It's not safe to launch in weather this cold. The O rings could fail. Larry Molloy is not happy.

[Adam Higginbotham]

I mean, he says, my God, Thiokol, when do you expect me to launch next April?

[Sally Helm]

Morton Thiokol continues to make their case for delaying the launch and Malloy continues to push back.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And what Larry Malloy began doing in that meeting ultimately was asking them to prove that it wasn't safe to fly. And that was a complete reversal of the usual emphasis in a flight readiness meeting.

[Sally Helm]

Generally, contractors have to prove it is safe to fly. Now NASA wants Morton Thiokol to prove the opposite. Like, show us hard proof we shouldn't go ahead. According to Higinbotham, to the engineers in the room, it really seems like NASA wants to launch. But to make the decision properly, they need Morton Thiokol's okay. The Morton Thiokol team takes that in and they ask for a five minute break.

[Adam Higginbotham]

They sit around in the conference room and almost immediately the most senior man in the room says that he wants to fly.

[Sally Helm]

The engineers are excluded from the decision, but the managers in the room have to be unanimous. That senior manager says he'll do it. So does a second. But one is holding out Bob Lund.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Who was Morton Thiokol's head of engineering for the entire division, the most senior engineer of the company. Really didn't want to reverse his decision. And there is this very dramatic moment where Lund sits there, having heard the two other senior managers in the room say, oh, yeah, well, I'm okay to fly. And he just, he can't bring himself to do it because he knows what the risks are and he believes the data.

[Sally Helm]

But everyone in this room is under pressure to launch from NASA, from the media, from the public, from Congress. Jobs are at stake, reputations, funding, and maybe the O rings will hold.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And he just sits there and eventually puts up his hands and says, okay, I agree.

[Sally Helm]

Let's fire Morton. Thiokol gives NASA the okay.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And that's the moment at which there's no turning back, because everything that happens after that leads directly to the catastrophe.

[Sally Helm]

The next morning, McAuliffe and the rest of the crew board Challenger. The hatch snaps shut behind them. The ground controllers break into applause. A crowd gathers three miles from the launch site. Krista McAuliffe's parents and sister are among them. 11:34am T minus 4 minutes. McAuliffe snaps down her helmet and breathes in pure oxygen. The countdown starts. Back in Utah, Beaujolais is taking the launch on TV in a conference room at Morton Thiokol. He turns to his colleague and says, I don't want to watch. The rocket boosters fire and the shuttle takes off and liftoff.

[NASA Launch Control]

Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission. And it is clear.

[Adam Higginbotham]

When you watch the footage of the launch shot from the perspective of people watching on the ground, the civilians watching who've come to see the teacher in space launch. They watch the first 60 seconds of the flight and they're whooping and they're excited and they're cheering and they're clapping and they're holding their cameras and their binoculars up to the sky to watch Challenger kind of streak away from the Earth.

[Sally Helm]

In Utah, Beaujolais breathes a sigh of relief.

[Adam Higginbotham]

Roger Beaujolais and the other engineers were convinced that if a failure of the O ring took place, it would lead to an instantaneous explosion on the launch pad. And so literally, one turned to the other as the shuttle left the launch pad and said, we just dodged a bullet. And they thought that they'd managed to beat the odds again.

[Sally Helm]

But 73 seconds into the flight.

[Adam Higginbotham]

The fireball blooms around the shuttle and then quite quickly obscures where the shuttle used to be. But people on the ground are still cheering. There's clapping. A lot of people think that this is an ordinary part of a shuttle launch. They know that the solid rockets are Supposed to break away and fall away at a certain juncture in the launch. And that's what happens. The rockets do break away, but they start corkscrewing off in crazy directions. And only gradually does realization begin to settle over the crowd that something terrible has happened.

[NASA Launch Control]

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

[Sally Helm]

Slowly the crowd falls quiet. Then people start crying, holding each other.

[Adam Higginbotham]

We have a report from the Flight Dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.

[NASA Launch Control]

Flight director confirms that we are outlooking.

[Sally Helm]

Back in Utah, Beaujolais leaves the room in tears. It's only the beginning of the grieving process for the engineers, the families, everyone close to the astronauts.

[Adam Higginbotham]

It destroyed their lives. I mean, they never got over it.

[Sally Helm]

The aftermath is grim. The nation is shocked and heartbroken.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And the fact that it happened live on television in front of 1.5 million school children meant that the nation was united in grief in a way that it probably hadn't been since the assassination of Kennedy.

[Sally Helm]

That evening, President Reagan postpones his scheduled State of the Union to address the disaster.

[NASA Launch Control]

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us for the manner in which they lived their lives. 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.

[Sally Helm]

In the aftermath of the disaster, the public turns on NASA. They want to know what just happened and why. Within a week, Reagan launches a commission to investigate. Roger Beaujolais is among the people who testify. So is Larry Malloy. The highlights feature heavily on the nightly news. After three months, the commission reveals their findings. The Challenger exploded because of the failure of the O rings, which was related to the cold temperatures. The tragedy could have been prevented by the people in that room the night before.

[Adam Higginbotham]

You know, they were not moustache twirling villains. They were people who were arrogant, certainly, and thought that they knew better, you know, and they thought they were making the right decision and they were wrong. But there were hundreds of engineers like Beaujolais working on this program and hundreds of decisions that were made, like Larry Molloy's decisions that ultimately didn't lead to a catastrophe that we just don't know about.

[Sally Helm]

The Challenger explosion, of course, has a profound effect on NASA. It becomes a generation defining tragedy, one that can never be erased.

[Adam Higginbotham]

This idea of it being this kind of posse of egghead geniuses with slide rules who can achieve the impossible on a regular basis, and that it's an almost infallible agency, the public Never see NASA in the same way again.

[Sally Helm]

And the organization itself changes too.

[Adam Higginbotham]

There is a huge overhaul of all of the operations that go into launching a space shuttle to the point where people begin to fear that it's become an even more bureaucratic and risk averse agency. And then that perhaps they're not prepared to take the risks that are necessary to take in expanding the bounds of human knowledge. But there were numerous engineering and bureaucratic changes that were adopted and that led.

[Sally Helm]

To years and years of safe Shuttle launches until 2003.

[Adam Higginbotham]

One of the problems that eventually developed was a lot of the people who were involved and witnessed the accident in those years after it happened, they left NASA or they retired. And so that institutional memory of what kind of catastrophe that was and how it happened, that began to ebb away in Columbia.

[NASA Launch Control]

Houston, we see your tire pressure methods and we did not.

[Sally Helm]

On February 1, 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated when it reentered the atmosphere. The seven astronauts on board were all killed. Deaths many think were preventable.

[Adam Higginbotham]

You know, the inquiry afterwards found that it happened for almost exactly the same bureaucratic and administrative decision making reasons that Challenger happened.

[Sally Helm]

No matter what NASA does, there will always be hard decisions to make when it comes to acceptable risk. How do they measure acceptable risk when weighing it against the progress of humankind? That's why it's so important to learn from the decisions of the past that went tragically wrong. Higginbotham pointed us to a very recent case where NASA has been trying to analyze acceptable risk. The Boeing Starliner launch. Two astronauts rode the craft to the International Space Station. And after that launch took place, engineers found some anomalies in the thruster system.

[Adam Higginbotham]

And that they weren't happy with it and they thought that might represent a danger on return to Earth. Now, under exactly those circumstances, it's very easy to see that if that had happened in 1986, they would have looked at the data and they would have said, you know what? We realize there's a problem here, but we think we're okay. And indeed, Boeing did say that this.

[Sally Helm]

Time around, Boeing wanted to push forward, but NASA made the cautious decision.

[Adam Higginbotham]

NASA said, you know what? I don't think so. We're going to keep them up there until we know it's safe to return. And if that had happened 40 years ago, it would have gone very differently, I think. And the two astronauts may have been returned safely, but they might not have been.

[Sally Helm]

Instead, as I record these words, there are two astronauts floating around in the International Space Station. Waiting until a different, safer, capsule soul is available to take them home. Just to be safe. Thanks for listening to History this Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, sign [e-mail] and if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an [e-mail] Special thanks to our guest, Adam Higinbotham, author of A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein. It was also produced by Kathryn Isaac and by me, Sally Helm for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producers are Ben Dickstein and David Weisbord from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History this Week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.