Next, he went to NASA Headquarters to manage the shuttle program, served as Director of the Kennedy Space Center, and, after eventually retired from NASA to serve as President of Thiokol Propulsion Company-the company that built the solid rocket boosters for shuttle. Instead, Crippen played an important role in the accident investigation. That flight and all subsequent shuttle launches from the West Coast were cancelled. He was scheduled to command the first launch of a Space Shuttle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California later that year. Instead, he helped NASA secure continued federal funding, even though Congress had chipped away at the budget, so that the program could continue and we could build the amazingly capable laboratory known as the International Space Station.īob Crippen, who piloted the very first Space Shuttle and three more pioneering flights, was also diverted from his love of flying. He probably would have gone on to command a number of other flights if not for the accident. Jon McBride, an astronaut who was training with his crew to command the next space shuttle flight, was diverted to NASA Headquarters as the Deputy Administrator for Congressional Relations. The crew was made up of seven talented and accomplished individuals who never got to make their continuing contributions to the world. People, of course, are the most important. Even many of the news outlets felt that if only they had done their jobs better they would have ferreted out the problems and might have prevented the accident. RELATED: Alan Shepard, the Apollo 1 Disaster, and the Race to the MoonĮveryone I know who worked in the space program during that time felt a measure of guilt. Despite that knowledge, the program had never set up a rule to prevent a launch when the temperature dropped below a certain temperature. Regardless of how sudden this may seem, there was warning: The seals had come close to failing before, and a program to fix the problem was underway. There was no escape mechanism for the crew. It pivoted outward and the top of the motor crushed the hydrogen and oxygen tanks on top of the External Tank, releasing their contents to ignite explosively in the inferno millions saw on television. But at 73 seconds into the flight, a stream of fire had erupted from the rear joint and burned through a strut holding the solid motor in place. With the cold soak during the night before, the seals failed at ignition, a channel was created through the two-inch steel motor casing joint and then sealed by molten metal for about a minute. And elasticity of the thin “O” rings is what allows the segments of the massive solid rocket motors to seal in the thousand-degree gases that build up when they are ignited. The biggest immediate problem that day was the cold. The "Challenger" broke apart 73 seconds after launch. RELATED: 9 Nonfiction Books About Space Travel The communication pipeline to these top managers had been plugged along the way by a few people who thought they were making the right decisions.Įither one of them, Moore or Thomas, could and would have postponed the flight, if they had had that information. Every engineer in that meeting told their bosses that they should not launch Challenger in the freezing weather that had blanketed the Kennedy Space Center. They were not told about a meeting at the Thiokol factory in Utah, which had built the solid rocket boosters. It could have been placed that morning to either Jesse Moore, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Flight, or Gene Thomas, the Launch Director. Many months of investigation later, though, it became clear that one phone call could have prevented the accident. He could only say, “…obviously a major malfunction.” Despite multiple television shots and a room full of consoles monitoring every system and electronic spasm, that was about all anyone could have said at that moment. But as protocol dictated, commentary was switched to the Johnson Space Center as the Challenger cleared the tower, and Steve Nesbit had the job of interpreting the conflagration in the sky. I was the “Voice of Shuttle Launch Control,” so it was my voice that was heard around the world. It was my fortune to be in the Firing Room (the launch control room) at the Kennedy Space Center during the launch. The lives of thousands of other people were changed and, for a time, it was feared the entire Space Shuttle program could be cancelled. A billion-dollar space shuttle was lost and, as astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz later said, “We lost our innocence.” Six career astronauts and one schoolteacher were killed.
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