On January 28, 1986, at 11:38 am local time in Florida, space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air, something more than a minute after takeoff from the base of Cape Canaveral. The launch was retransmitted live across the country because it was the first mission of a new program, Teachers in Space (teacher in space), which relied on attracting new public attention to the manned space program.
What we ended up seeing those viewers was one of the worst accidents in the history of astronautics, and the first so severe that NASA suffered from the fire that took the lives of the crew of Apollo I, on January 27 1967. The STS-51L mission, in fact, finished putting the agency in a very delicate situation because she was accused of having fomented an internal culture that did not care all that should the security of missions and, in the instance of its astronauts.
The mission of the Challenger
The STS-51L was the 25th mission of the program Program Space Shuttle, launched in 1981 with the aim of having a reusable vehicle that would reduce the cost of access to space. Of the three parties that formed the system, two of them (the orbiter and solid propulsion engines) were reused for subsequent missions, while the third (the external fuel tank) was built new for each.
The Challenger was the second of the shuttles that NASA had built for his STS, after the Columbia program, but its reliability made it the most used by the agency, even after taking ready shuttles Discovery and Atlantis. Among its first flight in 1983, and the 1986 accident he had conducted nine missions, including 85% of all program in 1983 and 1984. This highlights one of the problems that the shuttles were never able to meet all its goal of reducing the costs of going to space: not fly often enough for it
The NASA launched the STS program in hopes of having a reusable system be cheaper. to go into space
It’s something that would more clearly later and Manuel Montes, co-director of the Web Science News explains, noting that “the development of STS (space shuttle) was addressed in the 70s as an ideal solution for reducing the cost of access to space, much of which was based on a rapid cadence of releases alternative. But NASA was beginning to be very conscious in Challenger time of that machine, the most complex ever built to date, was far from being able to keep that promise. “
STS-51L would be the second mission launched in 1986 (the first, STS 61C, had flown into space on January 12, two weeks before the launch of the Challenger) and the first of that particular orbiter that year. His goal, in addition to starting the Teachers in Space program, was performed several related Halley’s comet, which would happen on February 9 perihelion (the closest of its orbit around the Sun) experiments, placing an orbit one communications satellite and conduct other scientific work on fluid dynamics. He should have remained in Earth orbit about a week.
Teachers in space
The mission of the Challenger came at a time when space exploration and in particular the NASA manned program had lost the public’s interest. Once he won the moon race to the USSR with the Apollo XI and had been emblematic missions 70 as the Viking Mars or Voyager, American society seemed to have become accustomed to news about space missions and, on the other next, they no longer had the same hook for television, especially.
So Ronald Reagan, who was then the president of the United States, devised an initiative that would bring back space exploration the general public: the Teachers in Space program. Through him fly on the shuttle’s first civilian in history to be a teacher to give an educational side and seek the interest of the youngest. The idea was that, just as the Apollo program aroused the scientific careers of many children, Teachers in Space could achieve something similar.
Christa McAuliffe and Barbara Morgan were both chosen to start the Teachers in Space program in 1985
In addition, the participation of ordinary people, ordinary people, fell within the efforts of the Reagan administration to present the United States as a great country of heroes . “The future does not belong to the faint of heart, but the brave,” the president said in a televised address to the nation the night of the accident, and was behind the rhetoric Teachers in Space speech. He 12,000 candidates applied and were chosen two winners. Christa McAuliffe, 37, and social studies teacher, and Barbara Morgan, his deputy, 35, who taught math
The impact of McAuliffe the public was immediate. The journalist Pablo Jauregui remembered in the world in the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, that “for weeks, in all American classrooms, students had been bombarded by our teachers with lessons and talks about this” exemplary heroine of America ‘” and the launch of STS-51L, scheduled for January 22, was to be broadcast live to the entire country. CNN was ready with a special program for that day and colleges across the United States would also offer their students.
McAuliffe had helped the media interest in its optimistic and enthusiastic personality and phrases like ” we thought the future was far. The future is now, and young people need to consider that the space program is an opportunity to work “, which reflected the country the day after the accident. However, that excitement McAuliffe’s mission also would be tested when the launch of the Challenger began delayed, first by the delays which in turn had been the previous mission, STS-61C, and then by technical problems and weather.
The Challenger disaster
So, the original day of the launch, on 22 January, was passed 28 and there were fears that these delays prevented the implementation dates of planned launches for the year. In 1985 it had been nine takeoffs shuttle and, in 1986, these vehicles had to carry into space the Ulysses probe to study the Sun, launch the Hubble Space Telescope or carry into space a journalist who would have been the second “private citizen “to go into space. Manuel Montes explains:
The brutal pressure on, however, the agency attempted to send into space missions as quickly as possible, caused in part that various symptoms, signs, that something was not quite right, they did not receive the necessary attention. With a year ahead full of scheduled flights and a substantial delay on the calendar already accumulated, there was a huge need to put in space to Challenger, even in weather conditions so difficult and, as would later hazardous
In this situation, with the addition of the great media exposure that the STS-51L mission was received by the presence of McAuliffe, the weather report for the day January 28 in Florida not She received with joy too. The previous evening, Thiokol engineers who built solid propulsion engines (SRB) on either side of the orbiter, had a conference call with NASA to express its concern at the low temperatures provided for the take off of – 1 C.
Ice Morning Challenger liftoff, the launch tower had ice at a temperature of -1 ° C.
It was a cold too extreme for the O-shaped rings that sealed the different stages of the SRB. The engineers could not guarantee its elasticity and resistance to the rigors of temperature and pressure to release these weather conditions, but the pressure not to delay the mission ended up imposing and NASA approved the launch of the Challenger.
What happened next was seen on television around the world. The shuttle took off from Launch Complex 39B at 11:38 local time, and everything seemed fine. At 73 seconds, however, it can be seen on the recordings how a plume of smoke appears in one of the SRB, and thereafter, the Challenger explodes
” We have confirmation from the flight dynamics office that the vehicle has exploded. ” That statement of NASA controllers finished confirming what viewers had just seen. In covering the faces of amazement CNN staff mission control in Houston, which is not able to process what just happened be seen, and aseptic information given to the media that the Challenger has suffered catastrophic failure.
The causes of the accident
It was the first time the US space agency suffered a fatal accident in flight . Apollo I fire had occurred during a previous test, with the capsule still in the launch tower and the Apollo astronauts XIII had managed to return home safe and sound, but the Challenger was a tragedy, and at many levels. He began to see how far when an independent commission appointed by the White House, he began to investigate the causes of the accident.
Fragment of a wing of the Challenger recovered from the sea.
The Rogers Commission He received its name from its director, William Rogers, who was United States Attorney General and Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, and among its members were some very known as the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride (who had flown twice in the Challenger), physicist Richard Feynman and test pilot Chuck Yeager. Feynman, for example, was the most critical of the safety culture, or lack thereof, of the agency, showing a loss of elasticity of the O-rings at low temperatures dipping into a bucket of ice water.
The Commission delivered its report to Reagan in June 1986, and its conclusions were devastating:
“… in communication failures resulted in the decision to launch 51 L based on incomplete and sometimes erroneous, a conflict between the engineering data and the decisions of those responsible and NASA management structure that allowed the internal security problems of flight will bypass the main perpetrators of the shuttle “.
Or what is the same; NASA had minimized the risks and sometimes had even looked the other way to fulfill its release schedule. The resistance of the O-rings to certain conditions of pressure and temperature, for example, had presented problems and in 1977, during the initial phases of the design of the ferries, but had never seriously acted to find a solution.
During the investigation of the Rogers Commission knew, too, that the cabin crew had been thrown, intact, at the time of the explosion, but the astronauts had died soon after, most likely by pressure loss she. The crew, for example, wore pressure suits (those famous orange suits that would later required).
The implications for NASA
From left to right, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee (commander), Ronald McNair, Mike Smith (pilot) and Ellison Onizuka.
The research findings Challenger accident, both the Rogers Commission and by a special committee of the Senate, forced NASA to stop the program ferries for nearly three years to implement the security measures recommended by both investigations. Manuel Montes explains some of the consequences it had this break:
“Some manufacturing line, such as the Delta rocket had to be resumed to meet the sudden demand. The military canceled the use of the space shuttle from California, after large investments, and the Ariane rocket was suddenly with much of the commercial satellite launch market. Thereafter, ferries would be used only for missions that human presence was justified, to service the Hubble telescope and in the future, to build the International Space Station. And of course, what happened research involved the discovery of multiple errors, including at management level, which had to be correct and that brought about multiple charges of the agency. “
The SRB was redesigned to correct that failure on their rings or sealing was encouraged at NASA one corporate culture that put safety above requirements and compliance schedules, among other things, the obligation to carry astronauts pressure suits both during landing and the reentry and landing are established.
However, space exploration is a risky activity. In 2003, 27 years after the Challenger accident, NASA would lose a ferry. In that case was the Columbia on the STS-107 mission, which disintegrated during re-entry into the atmosphere because of a malfunction in its thermal protection, caused by the impact of a piece of foam that covered the external fuel tank detached during launch. Even then the program was stopped for more than two years, NASA also received a stern warning to the relaxation of its safety culture, and was also the shuttle Discovery in charge of resuming their activity.
legacy
In the previous promotional videos to its release, the film ‘Mars (The Martian)’ presented the crew with which Mark Watney, its protagonist, going to Mars, and each of the astronauts had a camera. When it is the turn to the commander of the Ares mission, it says the reason is there are three women: Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist died in the Columbia accident in 2003; Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and then commander of the space shuttle, and Christa McAuliffe.
This is just a sample of the legacy that still has the Challenger in American popular culture. If, in the aspect of space exploration, was a warning against excessive priorities to meet the timetable laid and relaxation before the measures most basic security, also became clear communication strategy NASA , unable to respond to questions from reporters (who had immediately realized that something terrible had happened during launch).
June Scobee Rodgers, Dick Scobee’s widow, mission commander, claimed to CBS that as the date of the 30th anniversary approached, “there are still people who tell me that can tell me exactly where they were and what they were doing , if they were old enough …, during the accident and I can not believe want to share their story with me is as if they shared the experience of his own grief with me “
. | NASA
taken from: xataka
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