Dan Snow's History Hit - The Challenger Disaster

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

On January 28, 1986, the nation watched in horror as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian selected to fly into space. The devastating tragedy unfolded live on television, shattering the dreams of millions of schoolchildren who had tuned in to witness this historic mission.Dan is joined by British journalist and former U.S. correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine Adam Higginbotham to explore what caused the explosion and how the disaster exposed a deeply flawed decision-making process within NASA, as well as the bravery of the whistleblowers who challenged authority and paid a heavy price.Adam's book is called Challenger: A True Story of Heroism & Disaster at the Edge of Space.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'll never forget the 28th of January 1986.

I was just seven years old. I'd finished school and I was watching kids TV, which was the appointment to view back in those days on the BBC. It was around 5pm and there was a newsflash. I didn't think I'd ever seen one before. And its content has stuck with me ever since. Suddenly images of a terrible catastrophe were broadcast straight into countless homes around the world. 60 seconds into its flight, and it appears that there is no hope of all seven of the crew surviving, although a parachute was seen hitting the sea. The US Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded.

It had broken apart 73 seconds into its flight, and all seven crew members aboard were dead. It was huge news. It was the first fatal accident involving a NASA spacecraft actually in flight. It was the first accident of that kind broadcast live around the world. It was overwhelming. The spacecraft disintegrated into a kind of grotesque, twisted, ethereal sculpture 46,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, just off Cape Canaveral, where it had taken off from in Florida. In this episode, I'm going to find out what happened to Challenger. I'm going to ask why it was built and what it had done. And then I'm going to talk about the tragic day itself. What happened? What went wrong? Was it preventable? And then we're going to finish up by discussing

what it all means now, 40 years later. My guest is the brilliant Adam Higginbottom. He's a former US correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph magazine. He's a best-selling author of many books, including Midnight in Chernobyl. And he's just written a brand new book, Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. And it tells the tale of the tragic Challenger disaster.

Here it is. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again adam thanks so much coming on the podcast not at all i'm happy to be here just remind people like me what the difference between the shuttle program and the apollo program was

well the apollo program was the massively successful attempt to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, which they succeeded in doing in July 1969. It attracted some of the biggest global audiences in history for different landmark steps on the way to the moon. The shuttle program came at the beginning of the 1980s and only at the end of a kind of long and stumbling path of overcoming a series of huge technological challenges. And on paper, the shuttle program seems so much less impressive because rather than taking men across a quarter of a million miles of deep space to set foot on the moon, the shuttle was a reusable spacecraft that was only capable of going into low Earth orbit for missions of around a week.

space truck that could go up to space and come back and deliver satellites and service satellites and take up the parts of future space station projects, for example. But what this concealed really was that technologically, manufacturing and operating a truly reusable spacecraft, which when it was conceived at the end of the 1960s was the stuff of science fiction, was actually much more technologically demanding, even than sending men to the moon and back. Because we talk about reusable spacecraft, people might remember, well, people might have seen it. They're lucky enough to go to some of the wonderful museums, or they might remember from the end of Apollo 13, only a teeny fragment of the Apollo spacecraft ends up back on Earth. The rest of it is all jettisoned in space and on the moon. I mean, you leave behind an absolute trail of junk behind you. Absolutely. All of the Apollo spacecraft were

not only kind of discarded or consumed during the course of their journey, but every single one of them was literally hand-built for its purpose. So, you know, they were making these uniquely crafted pieces of complex engineering. It would go off on the mission and the, you know, the rocket engines would be consumed in the process of taking their cargo into orbit. Each part of the equipment that they land on the moon with was left behind. Then the thing that took them down to the surface of the moon was left behind and none of it was reusable. You're right. They would splash down in the ocean in the capsule, which was a tiny fraction of what was initially lifted into orbit from Cape Canaveral. And the idea with the space shuttle was that it was going to be this spacecraft that could,

it would take off from a launch pad like a rocket, it would go into orbit and orbit like a spacecraft, and then it would re-enter the atmosphere and glide back down to Earth and land on a runway just like a conventional aeroplane. And most of it would be reusable. And nobody had ever done anything like that before. And so we should be more excited by the shuttle program than we are. And also the science that, yes, wonderful to go to the moon and huge, unbelievable achievement.

But as you say, in terms of building the space environment that we know today, satellites, the science that's done, the space station, that's all kind of down to the shuttles, right? It is down to the shuttles, and it is a fantastic engineering achievement. And part of the reason that that achievement is not more widely recognized is because the shuttle program was really overshadowed by

the Challenger accident and what came subsequently, the Columbia accident. So people tend to remember these catastrophes rather than the achievement that it was to build the thing in the first place. And then all these kind of amazing things that it did before those accidents happened. People might remember the image of Bruce McCandless flying free in space in the manned manoeuvring unit, which was this kind of Buck Rogers style jetpack, where you could fly untethered in space for the first time. But those things tended to be swept away in people's memories by those two tragedies. Let's talk about one of those tragedies in particular.

We've got these five orbiters, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. We're going to talk about the fate of Challenger. Had it successfully carried out missions before? Was it a veteran of space travel? It was. And Challenger, which was the second orbiter in the fleet to go into service, had become the sort of workhorse of the Challenger fleet by the time it embarked on what became its final mission. So it was thought to be a very reliable vehicle?

It was. By the time it embarked on this mission, the engineers who built it had come to think of the shuttle generally as being something that could reliably travel into space and back on what they hoped would be like an airline schedule. Because the shuttle was originally conceived as this vehicle that would fly almost once a week and that they would send it into space and it would come back and it would land on its runway at Cape Canaveral. And they'd essentially just kind of wipe down the windshield and tune it up a bit, and then send it back to the launch pad. And although that proved to be unrealistic, the year of 1986, when the accident happened, was planned to be the busiest year in NASA history. They were going to fly 15 shuttle flights, and more than one a month. And Challenger was central to that plan. Who was on board? What were they supposed to do and how were they selected? There were seven astronauts on board. There was the commander, Dick Scobie, the pilot, Mike Smith.

Then there were the mission specialists who were Judy Resnick, Ron McNair, and Krista McAuliffe, who was the teacher in space, and Greg Jarvis, who was a civilian satellite engineer who'd been selected as part of an internal competition at Hughes, which manufactured satellites as a sort of corporate perk for Hughes to send people to space. And the final member of the crew was Ellison Onizuka, who was the first Japanese-American in space. And so it's interesting that we have a sort of corporate perk guy on board. We have Christopher McAuliffe, who was a teacher, and that was deliberately trying to boost the excitement of American school-age children to make them engage with space. Well, more than that, it was a way of engaging the entire public with space, because while it was predicated on this idea that the shuttle was going to provide routine access to space and it was going to make traveling to space just like getting on an airline.

And it was going to be simple and routine. It was going to happen extremely regularly. But NASA really succeeded all too well in that aim. well in that aim. And so while the American public was extremely engaged with the shuttle program when it started and they began launches in 1981, after five years of this, shuttle launches had begun to seem so quotidian that people weren't really paying that much attention anymore. And the national TV networks weren't even covering the launches live. And so NASA, who were really preoccupied with the idea that they needed public support and public engagement in order to keep going, to keep getting congressional funding,

you know, to keep the agency going, needed to cook up new ideas to get the public engaged with the program. And one of the principal ones they came up with was what they called the Space Flight Participant Program, in which they would start flying ordinary people into space as passengers aboard the shuttle. And with Ronald Reagan's cooperation, they decided that a teacher would be the first one of these space participants to fly into space. And so Krista McAuliffe, who was a high school teacher from Massachusetts, was selected from 11,000 candidates who put their names forward to be chosen to do this. And was this the first flight in which these sort of PR considerations and different kinds of astronauts were included? Previous to that, had it been, well, professionals? Well, no. In fact, there had been two politicians who had flown as passengers on the shuttle.

Bill Nelson, who is actually now the head of NASA, he's the administrator of NASA, and Jake Gahn. They were both members of Congress who were central to the NASA funding process, and they had sort of used their leverage to put themselves forward to be passengers on the shuttle, under the understanding that they would be congressional observers, and it was necessary for their work to go and observe firsthand for the people they represented exactly what it was like to fly aboard the shuttle. Nobody was really fooled by this sort of political justification. They wanted to go into space, and they succeeded in getting seats there before Krista McAuliffe. So technically, they were the civilians in space who flew before her, but she was regarded as the first

everyman astronaut. Were there any warning signals? Was there anything unusual in the build-up to this launch? With the benefit of hindsight, you can see that there is a long chain of warnings. Red flags go all the way back to almost 10 years before the Challenger launch. There were problems with the solid rocket boosters, which were the proximate cause of the accident, even before the first launch of the shuttle. And the engineers who worked on developing the rocket boosters had sent memos warning of the dangers of this back in 1977 and 1978. There was a sort of mounting series of warnings of increasing alarm from the engineers who worked on the boosters of the contractor that built them, Morton Thiokol in Utah. There was a handful of engineers who were warning about problems with the joints in the rockets, the segmented rockets.

And the joints were sealed with pairs of O-rings to prevent hot gas leaking out from the joints at ignition and during flight. And these engineers had found that there were problems developing during flight with the O-rings. They were being eroded by hot gas. In some cases, they seemed to be burning through and they were at risk of leaking. And they suspected that the leaks grew worse if the shuttle was launched in cold weather. And the Challenger launch on January the 28th, 1986, took place after the coldest weather in Florida history had struck the launch pad. Was this just a terrible oversight, or was it symptomatic of a culture of just charging ahead, getting things done, problems resolving themselves, hoping for the best?

It was really both. I mean, part of NASA's problem is that they had, by 1986, done all these incredible things. Landing men on the moon safely and then returning them to Earth was a pretty astonishing achievement in itself. It was only achieved after NASA's first very serious, fatal accident in which three Apollo astronauts had been killed in a fire on the launch pad in 1967. But they felt that they'd learned valuable lessons after the deaths of those three men that they then incorporated into the Apollo program. And then as a result of their achievements, even subsequent accidents like Apollo 13, which was almost another terrible fatal disaster, was in retrospect perceived within the agency and

more widely by the public, not as a catastrophe averted, but as a kind of triumph of ingenuity and heroism. And so as more time went by, and they kept doing these things in which they achieved the seemingly impossible, they began to think that they were kind of infallible. If you talk to astronauts now who were there at the time, they'll talk about how by late 1985, they'd just begun to think that they could do anything. And they knew that they were engaging in these incredibly risky endeavors, and that spaceflight is innately very, very hazardous. But they'd got away with it so many times that they had utmost confidence, too much confidence in their own technological ingenuity and ability.

And then in the specific decision making that led up to the accident, there was what seemed to be terrible recklessness. Gambling, pushing towards launch, despite the fact that there were these series of warnings. This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me about that morning, January the 28th, 1986. Take me through the launch

and what came just afterwards. Well, you have to go back actually to the day before the 27th. Now, there had been a series of launch delays, not just with Challenger, but with the previous launch, the first one of the year, Columbia, which had been delayed seven times, which was a humiliating record for NASA. And this resulted in the news coverage of the launches from Cape Canaveral just being this terrible embarrassment on the nightly news. And not only did the delays of Columbia at the beginning of the month push back the projected launch time for Challenger, but it also created this atmosphere in which they were absolutely desperate to make sure that Challenger

got off the ground on time because it couldn't be yet another embarrassment. And yet, when they came to the scheduled launch time for Challenger, there were another two delays. And the first one was because it was a bad weather forecast. But then on the Sunday, when this projected launch had been planned and then scrubbed, it turned out that the weather was absolutely beautiful and it would have been a fantastic day to launch. So that was embarrassing. So then they put the launch back to the Monday. And on the Monday, everything went well. The crew went out to the pad.

They got into the crew compartment. They were strapped in. They were ready for launch, and then at the last minute, a bolt got stuck on the crew hatch that had to be removed with a hacksaw in full view of the TV cameras. And then this led to another launch scrub. So this was another humiliating delay. The news reports were absolutely mortifying that night. So then it was put back to Tuesday. that night. So then it was put back to Tuesday. But on Monday afternoon, when the launch was scrubbed, the launch controllers and the managers at Cape Canaveral polled all of the engineers

involved in the process. And they said, has anybody got any concerns about this launch tomorrow? Here are the details. Here's the weather forecast. Everything seemed fine, except for the weather, which was projected to be the coldest weather in Florida history. And so the managers went round and they said, anybody got any concerns about this cold weather? And the rocket engineers at Wharton Tharkel in Utah, who were responsible for the solid rocket boosters, said, yes, we're extremely concerned about the cold weather. We're very worried about this. We saw weather almost as cold as this last year, and it caused really serious problems with the O rings in the solid rocket boosters. And we had leaks in the joints in the rockets.

So they convened a teleconference, a three-way meeting with three different offices in order to discuss their concerns. And late that night, the Morton Thiokol engineers eventually had gathered together all of their data and they presented their case and they said, we want you to postpone the launch. The weather's going to be too cold. We're concerned that there's going to be a problem with the rockets. This could be a catastrophe if you go ahead and launch. But for a bunch of commercial and personal and institutional reasons, NASA pushed back against this recommendation and said, effectively, we really don't like this. We don't think that your data is very conclusive. We want you to go away and think about this. And so the Thiokol engineers went away. They went on mute for what they said was going to be a

five-minute caucus, and then they were off for half an hour. And during this half an hour, the managers at Wharton Thiokol completely disregarded the input of their own engineers and decided to change their recommendation from no-go to go. And with that, the launch was able to go ahead. And so the following morning, after it had indeed been the coldest weather in Florida history, and Challenger had sat on the launch pad with the solid rocket boosters and the O-rings inside them growing colder and colder, they then went through another series of final reviews with managers at the Cape. And there was another opportunity for the launch

to stop, which was that the manufacturers of the shuttle itself, Rockwell International, took one look at the pictures coming back from the launch pad, which was covered in ice, like literally icicles dangling 18 inches, two feet long. One of the engineers described it as looking like something out of Dr. Zhivago. The engineers at Rockwell out in California were looking at this on closed circuit television, and they said, look, this is potentially cataclysmically dangerous. If you launch the shuttle under these circumstances, and this ice breaks off during the process of launch, and it hits the skin of the shuttle, it could damage the tiles on the shuttle. And that means that when it comes back on reentry, the heat shield won't be intact.

They could be burned through. You'll lose the shuttle. We cannot recommend launch. But the managers of the Cape overruled that recommendation, too. And then the launch went ahead. And so exactly what the Morton Thiokol engineers had feared would happen, happened, which is that the O-ring seals on the right-hand solid rocket booster had become so cold that they couldn't expand into the gap in the joint at ignition. And they eventually burned through, and 73 seconds into flight, Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic. So far from being a shocking and unlikely accident,

it was obvious to many specialists what was going to happen. This was eminently preventable. To those specialists, yes. And this is why earlier I said that in retrospect, Specialists, yes. And this is why earlier I said that in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, it's possible to look back and see this long chain of warnings that goes back almost 10 years. But the truth was that the shuttle system was so complicated. The engineering was so, in many ways, so ahead of its time that the NASA managers weren't disregarding safety concerns. It's just they weren't looking in the right places. The space shuttle's main engines, totally separate from these solid rocket boosters, were regarded as easily the most dangerous aspect of the engineering in the whole system. And so they were really preoccupied with the fact that if there was going to be a

catastrophe, and the astronauts thought this too, it was going to be the Space Shuttle main engines. And the solid rocket boosters were largely broadly regarded as the safest aspect of the system. They were just like kind of giant Roman candles. They're like big fireworks. You just let them go, whereas the engines were much more demanding. To the point that even after the accident had happened, there were NASA engineers who came out of watching the footage of watching it disintegrate in front of them and still thought that it was the main engines. So although there were this handful of engineers in Utah who were saying, please don't launch, this is going to be a disaster,

there were also so many other concerns competing with them that it just got lost in the noise. And it was those solid states, the big Roman candles that you mentioned, jets of flame sort of pushed out between these joints that the O-rings had failed to expand into and ignited that gigantic sort of enormous orange external tank that people would be familiar with from watching the Shaftland operation. And presumably at that stage, the crew wouldn't have known anything. It would have been instantaneous.

Well, you'd think so. And that's what most people watching the footage at the time thought. But in the subsequent investigation, it became clear that the crew compartment of Challenger, which was a self-contained pressurized vessel containing the flight deck and all of that instrumentation. That actually survived the disintegration of the shuttle because it was not an explosion, but a deflagration of the fuel ignited. And the crew compartment emerged intact from this cloud of burning fuel and continued on an upward trajectory until it reached a height of about 12 miles and then fell intact to the surface of the ocean.

And there's evidence recovered afterwards that suggests that even after the disintegration of the shuttle, at least one member of the crew was not only still alive but still conscious and that the actual cause of death of the seven members of the crew was the impact of the ocean. And that's significant because what it means is that if there had been any escape mechanism included in the crew compartment, then they might have been able to escape alive. Wow, that's nightmarish. Nightmarish. And what was the impact on America, on the shuttle program, on NASA?

What was the impact of this catastrophe? I think that when you look at it in context, you know, it's clear that the shuttle was really a sort of symbol of American renewal that was very cannily used by Ronald Reagan as a physical embodiment of his campaign of mourning in America, of America coming back after the Watergate years, after the catastrophes of Vietnam, of the economic collapse of the 70s. The shuttle was this symbol of not only American technological superiority, because no one else, the Russians, didn't have anything like it at the time, but of a kind of new sort of optimism. And I think that the destruction of the time, but of a kind of new sort of optimism. And I think that

the destruction of the shuttle, particularly under the circumstances in which it happened, live on television, meant that it was a real kind of final loss of innocence in America. And certainly, it was the end of a kind of optimism about high-tech future that until that point had continued to subsist in the United States, and I think across the world. So the destruction of Challenger was of colossal symbolic significance, I think, quite apart from the fact that it was obviously a tragedy, not only for the families of each member of the crew, but also more broadly across NASA. Everybody from crane operators at Cape Canaveral

to engineers in Utah felt this is a really personal loss and were deeply traumatised by it. How did it affect the trajectory of the American space programme? Well, it stopped the launches of the shuttle for almost two years while they engaged. The Rogers Commission was a presidential inquiry that was organized to find out exactly what had gone wrong and prevent it ever happening again. And while that was going

on, and they began working on recommendations and fixes to prevent anything like that happening again, it took them almost two years to overhaul NASA's management, to redesign the joints in the rocket boosters, to undertake all sorts of other engineering fixes and institutional changes within the agency. And so it really held up the program and made them readdress the pace at which they were conducting the launches and they were conducting the program as a whole. And I think it certainly stopped the program developing in the way it had been intended to, which was this idea that they were going to be launching shuttles once a week. And also, of course, it stopped in its tracks, the idea that it becomes safe and routine

enough to send civilians up as passengers. Is there a positive legacy to this catastrophe in that has it made us more aware or did it remind us of the dangers of space travel? Or do we have to keep learning that every time we seem to invent things anew? Have the cultures that grew out of this disaster, have they endured? Well, I think that's an interesting question. I mean, because Challenger was the first time, I think, that the real danger of spaceflight was really brought home to Western audiences. Because as I say, you know, the Apollo launch pad fire in 67 was sort of swept out of people's memories by the success of the Apollo landings. People forgot about it quite quickly.

And NASA institutionally felt that they'd learned important lessons from what happened then. institutionally felt that they'd learned important lessons from what happened then. And Challenger was the first time when they were really brought hard up against the fact that it was colossally dangerous and that their idea of managing risk was not as accurate or well understood as they had thought. And they certainly felt that they changed the agency and changed their practices in the wake of the accident to address all of these problems. And they flew the shuttle quite successfully for many years afterwards. But then they had another accident in 2003, and the subsequent inquiry into that, the loss of Columbia or the reentry, revealed that actually, even if NASA had learned those lessons in the immediate wake of 1986, by 2003, many of them had been forgotten because exactly the same problems that had led to Challenger led to Columbia. There were numerous red flags with Columbia, weren't there? The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which was the investigative body that was created after that accident, reached the conclusion that basically NASA had learned

nothing. It was almost exactly the same. There was a whole series of warnings, engineers coming forward while Columbia was in space saying, we really think this is going to be a problem. We think there's damage to the tiles when it re-enters. There's a strong possibility that there could be burned through and the shuttle will be lost and the crew will be killed. And all of those warnings are ignored. Wow. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What is your brilliant book called? It is called Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space. Make sure you go and get it, everybody. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.