The Challenger exploded on this day 38 years ago...January 28, 1986.

January 28, 1986.

Cape Canaveral dawned bright and cold that January morning. For the vast majority of folks in NASA, the press, and astronaut corps, it was expected to be just another day to launch a space shuttle into orbit. For engineer Bob Ebeling, however, he knew that catastrophe was going to be the order of the day. The night before, he and four other NASA engineers had argued in vain for administrators to postpone the launch due to the well below normal temperatures that were expected for launch day. They argued for hours that the extreme cold temperatures expected at launch would prevent the rubber seals on the shuttle's solid rocket boosters from sealing properly. That evening, when Ebeling returned home, he tearfully told his wife that Challenger was going to blow up in the morning.

And so it was, 73 seconds after lift off, the rubber seal on the solid rocket booster suffered a catastrophic failure, leading to the explosion of the launch vehicle and the deaths of all seven astronauts aboard.

To this day it remains unclear why NASA insisted on going forward with the launch despite the emphatic misgivings of multiple engineers.




YouTube - Multicam View of the Launch

At the 1:27 mark in the top left video you can clearly see the rubber seal begin to fail.