The Challenger’s Memory Remains but NASA Never Changes On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger erupted into a ball of fire and broke apart after seventy-three seconds of its launch. Ending its tenth mission into space and killing all seven crew members, including a New Hampshire school teacher named Christa McAuliffe. Despite the warnings of engineers that warned NASA before the liftoff date of the dangers and risks of the cold air temperatures could produce, they were ignored and NASA ended up paying the ultimate price. The effects of space travel learned from the Challenger accident can guide NASA to enhance its system on safety, protocol, and emergencies, to actually be concerned about the shuttle's design and training for astronauts, …show more content…
The Challenger’s crew involved mission commander, Richard Scobee, pilot, Michael Smith, astronauts, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair and aerospace engineers, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. Christa McAuliffe was the first NASA “volunteer” and also a New Hampshire elementary school teacher. McAuliffe was also known as the “Teacher in Space” which symbolized that space operations had become normal and safe for normal citizens. At 11:38 a.m., space shuttle Challenger lifted off, one minute and 13 seconds into the flight, a fireball erupted in the sky some nine miles above the Earth’s surface, engulfing the orbiter in a cloud of smoke and …show more content…
House of Representatives also began to open their investigations on the tragedy. All space shuttle flights were grounded for about thirty-two months during the investigation in order to prevent another space shuttle or crew from entering space until they found out what went wrong with the shuttle, they weren't risking any more lives. What they found and believed to be the proximate cause of the disaster was the failure of the O - rings seals, which had lost their resiliency in the cold, as a result, permitted the ignition of a gas blow - by in the right solid rocket booster. The resulting lateral thrust broke the strut connecting it to the external fuel tank, the flame then breached the tank and ignited its volatile liquid hydrogen and oxygen contents, which erupted into a fire, the crew compartment remained intact as the orbiter broke apart and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, crashing at 200 miles per hour and the O - rings were determined to be a design flaw in the boosters, a condition which was first recognized in 1977. According to the Presidential Commission Report, this weakness, along with “the effects of temperature, physical dimensions, the character of the materials, the effects of reusability [of the booster}, processing,