Persisting Pain Jan. 28, 1986: American TV viewers, including thousands of school children, froze in fright and pain. The Challenger, with its first teacher, Christa McAuliffe, aboard, exploded
At 11:38 a.m., NASA's command post listened intensely to Commander Dick Scobee's words, never realizing they would be his final ones: "Go at full throttle up."
“Today, twenty-five years later, I am still in shock and pain. I refuse to view the disaster because of what it did to me at the time,” said his widow, June Scobee, in an interview with the Associated Press. “The shock and pain was unbearable as well as its months’ long grieving process and also wondering how such a thing could happen. Our faith and trust in NASA officials was secure and unwavering. Its subsequent, intense investigations of the disaster was praiseworthy, but its lack of transparency after the investigations was not. It only increased the pain. The gruesome death of my husband, six others, including that of a young, vivacious schoolteacher, whom the entire nation was rooting for, combined with NASA's stubborn refusal to share information about the accident and the realization that America's space program was indeed fallible, added to the nation's collective pain.”
President Ronald Reagan immediately canceled that night’s scheduled State of the Union Address. Hours after the disaster, he addressed the American public, attempting to soothe that day’s raw, painful emotions: The Challenger's crew honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their journey, waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bounds of earth to touch the face of God." |
NASA officials knew, unknown to the American public at the time, the astronauts did not simply Days later, President Reagan immediately appointed the Rogers’ Commission to investigate the disaster. It found, facts that were only admitted by NASA thirty-two months later, that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had known that contractor Morton Thiokol's design of the SRBs contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings (which were the primary cause of the disaster) since 1977, but they had continually failed to address it properly.They also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of the launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The bureaucratic bunglings were numerous. NASA’s superiors’ hidden pressure to “launch at all costs” created the rubber-stamp, "An accident waiting to happen." Twenty-five years later, the grieving maxim persists: "Time might heal all wounds, but the scar remains." WJK-Jan. 28, 2011 |
-- a mere 73 seconds into flight from Cape Canaveral. All seven astronauts perished. 
“slip the surly bonds of Earth.” The crew compartment, upon the explosion, had shot out of the fireball, partially intact, and continued upward another three miles before plummeting.