re: The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff 40 years ago today...

didn't see it live. Was working in the board room of the First National Bank of Edinburg, Texas on their annual audit.

Immediately went upstairs and saw the reports. I'm a child of the space program. We moved to the Clear Lake area in 1965 so my Dad could go to work at NASA. I street was all Nasa or Nasa contractor families. Went to school with astronaut kids. That event really affected me emotionally.

I remember watching it on TV in my 2nd grade classroom. My teacher was so excited before the launch because a teacher was going into space.

I was a grad student in Aerospace Engineering over in Wilmore Labs. Went to Foy to watch the tv there when we heard about it.

Hit some of our professors pretty hard due to ties with NASA and the shuttle.

Adam Highanbothams “challenger” is a must read

I learned so much . I knew the shuttle exploded but didn’t know why

NASA failed those astronauts at so many turns

I was home that day from school as well. This is testing the limits of my memory, but I seem to remember CBS covering the liftoff, but cutting back to the Price is Right rather quickly and then having to come back with another Special Report after the explosion.

My dad, a former NASA engineer, and I used to watch all the flights "together" after he retired. We'd turn on the broadcast wherever we were and call each other. I'll never forget the dead silence when the explosion happened. After several seconds he said "I've gotta go". I think he still had a connection to the agency.

I walked into my biology class that morning and the professor told everyone to go home, that class was canceled.

I’ll never forget his specific wording: “The space vehicle has exploded.”

i was in 6th grade and we were headed to lunch. teacher pulled us all to the side before we walked into the cafeteria and told us.......


thankfully we were not watching live....had to wait till i got home to see the news.....

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There is a pretty good documentary (for those who like engineering stuff) on Netflix about the O-Rings and how they knew about the cold weather issues that could occur and the decision to launch.

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Let's back that up even further. They wouldn't have needed O-rings if they had made the rockets in a place that could get a rocket to NASA by barge after manufacturing. Orrin Hatch was a powerful senator from Utah and was responsible for getting Morton Thiokol the contract for their facilities in Ogden, UT. The rockets had to be manufactured in parts and then assembled once they got to Florida. My uncle was a safety engineer for NASA and wrote a detailed analysis on why the MT design was dangerous before they awarded the final contract.

He had a similar scathing report on the heat tile design for the shuttle. He didn't think they were safe as designed. He was livid after he found out they had only used the peel and stick glue system on every other tile because it was taking too long to put them on.

He died knowing they had 2 preventable disasters on their hands.

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While Challenger was almost certainly weather related (and time of year is relevant) the other two were design and construction failures.

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Challenger's was also a design/construction failure via the crappy o-ring design which they knew could be a problem going back to the beginning of the program. Instead of fixing it, they kept kicking the can down the road (i.e. the normalization of deviance) until Scobee and his six crewmates were killed. People at NASA and Morton Thiokol should've been jailed over this.

RIP