Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The disintegration of the vehicle began after a joint in its right solid rocket booster failed at liftoff. The Rogers Commission found that NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident. The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the Space Shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission.
About Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in brief
The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11: 39 a. m. EST. The disintegration of the vehicle began after a joint in its right solid rocket booster failed at liftoff. The failure was caused by the failure of O-ring seals used in the joint that were not designed to handle the unusually cold conditions that existed at this launch. The Rogers Commission found that NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident, with the agency violating its own safety rules. The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the Space Shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by United States President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Challenger disaster has been used as a case study in many discussions of engineering safety and workplace ethics. The crew consisted of five NASA astronauts, and two payload specialists. The mission carried the designation STS-51-L and was the tenth flight for the Challenger orbiter. The exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown; several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. Approximately 17 percent of the US population witnessed the launch on live television broadcast because of the presence of high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space. The launch was originally scheduled for July 1985, but was delayed to November and subsequently to January 1986.
An issue with the hatch handle forced a launch delay, and the launch was postponed when conditions at the Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility went out of limits for a return to launch site abort. After the destruction of Challenger, the number of O Rings per field joint was increased to three to increase the seals of all of the SRB joints. Each of the seven sections of the two solid rocket boosters was constructed of six pairs of rubber O-rings. For each flight, four segments were assembled in the factory with three field joints. The factory joints were sealed with asbestos-silica insulation over the joint, while each field joints was sealed with two rubber O Rings. The resulting segments were then assembled to contain the high-pressure gases required to contain hot, high-speed propulsion. The shuttle had no escape system and the impact of the Crew compartment at terminal velocity with the ocean surface was too violent to be survivable. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB’s aft field joint attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces broke up the orbiter and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. The crew was announced on January 27, 1985, and was commanded by Francis Scobee. Michael Smith was assigned as the pilot,. The mission specialists were Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair, and Gregory Jarvis, who flew as part of the Teacher in Space Project.
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This page is based on the article Space Shuttle Challenger disaster published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 28, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
