\n<\/p>\n
Forty years ago today, disaster struck NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after blastoff, killing all seven people onboard.<\/p>\n
The tragedy nearly brought the shuttle program to an early end. Decades later, the mistakes that led to the Challenger disaster, as well as fallout from the similar 2003 loss of the shuttle Columbia, loom particularly large now, as NASA seeks to launch four astronauts on the ambitious Artemis II mission around the moon as early as next week.<\/p>\n
The mission will be the first crewed flight of the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, as well as the first time that humans have left Earth\u2019s orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972. Already NASA has faced public scrutiny over its handling of unexpected behavior from Orion\u2019s heat shield\u2014crucial equipment to protect astronauts as they return to Earth\u2014during an uncrewed orbital test flight in 2022.<\/p>\n
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NASA believes that changes made as a result of Challenger and other disasters in its history are enough to keep Artemis crews safe. \u201cChallenger … brought out aspects of the agency which hopefully no longer exist and which we are always working toward addressing,\u201d says Tracy Dillinger, safety culture program manager at NASA\u2019s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. \u201cSpace is risky. We know that, and our astronauts know that. We just want to be smart about the risks that we accept.\u201d Currently, the Orion heat shield is widely believed to be the biggest risk to the crew; NASA has said the concern is addressed by changes to the Artemis II flight path.<\/p>\n
The 1986 Challenger disaster occurred on the STS-51L mission, the 25th flight in NASA\u2019s shuttle program, which was approaching its fifth anniversary. During the weeklong mission, crew had an eclectic agenda\u2014observe Halley\u2019s Comet and deploy both a communications satellite and an astronomical instrument into Earth orbit\u2014but was most notable for one of its crew, Christa McAuliffe.<\/p>\n
McAuliffe had taught middle and high school and was selected to fly after a nationwide \u201cTeacher in Space\u201d competition. She planned to teach two lessons from orbit, and her inclusion was part of a broader campaign by NASA to portray shuttle spaceflight as an ordinary, low-risk activity that nonastronauts could take part in.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sort of an all-purpose carryall vehicle often referred to by the astronauts themselves as a space truck,\u201d says Jennifer Levasseur, a space historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThe space shuttle is intended to be very regular, it\u2019s meant to be routine, it\u2019s meant to be safe\u2014so safe that the astronauts don\u2019t even have to wear spacesuits.\u201d<\/p>\n
On that chilly late January morning, thanks to the excitement around McAuliffe\u2019s flight, some 2.5 million students nationwide tuned in to watch the launch\u2014only to see disaster unfold on live television. The so-called O-rings that joined the cylindrical segments of one of the shuttle\u2019s solid rocket boosters failed under launch conditions far colder than they\u2019d been designed for. Just more than a minute after ignition, the ruptured booster caused the shuttle\u2019s giant external fuel tank to explode, tearing the vehicle to pieces over the ocean and dooming all seven astronauts.<\/p>\n
With the world watching, NASA scrambled to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it\u2014all while wading into a deeper debate: Was human spaceflight still worth the risk of catastrophic loss? Although NASA rejected calls to end the space shuttle program, it paused flights for nearly three years as it pored over data from the Challenger disaster.<\/p>\n
With diagrams, charts and dense technical writing\u2014in a report that spanned more than 200 pages, not including its 15 appendices\u2014NASA officials deconstructed the failure. That document highlighted not only the thermal constraints of the O-rings but also the design limitations inherent to the shuttle and the sociological pressures surrounding the program that put those O-rings in place and drove the launch forward.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very apparent on multiple missions prior to STS-51L that there was an issue with the solid rocket booster sections and the way they joined together,\u201d Levasseur says. Some safety concerns were even expressed before any shuttle ever flew. And on the morning of launch, when an engineer said he worried about the O-rings in the chilly weather, program managers who wanted the agency to successfully fly shuttles routinely decided to let the launch proceed anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite all of that knowledge, NASA was pressing ahead,\u201d Levasseur says. \u201cIts management said, \u2018We have a schedule.\u2019\u201d That \u201claunch fever\u201d or \u201cgo fever,\u201d as well as recurring O-ring anomalies that lulled managers into overlooking them, emerged as the true downfall of Challenger. Extreme cold made the O-rings fail, but NASA\u2019s culture was just as blameworthy and needed a retrofit more urgently than any piece of shuttle hardware.<\/p>\n
Smaller versions of NASA\u2019s Challenger investigation play out today, says Sandra Magnus, a part-time professor of the practice of engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and former NASA astronaut who previously served on NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. \u201cWhenever there\u2019s a mishap, whether it\u2019s something huge like Challenger or something a little bit less life-threatening, NASA has a process of going through, trying to understand what happened and why it happened,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s Artemis II rocket rolled to the launch pad on January 17, 2026, in anticipation of a launch next month.<\/p>\n
Now NASA is facing its first crewed journey beyond Earth\u2019s orbit since 1972, and many iterations of the agency\u2019s safety investigations processes have occurred along the path to launch to protect four astronauts: NASA\u2019s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency\u2019s Jeremy Hansen. They will be the first humans to launch on the SLS megarocket and its Orion capsule, and if all goes smoothly, they will set a record for humans reaching the farthest distance from Earth.<\/p>\n
Some worry how they will fare during their return home, when their capsule must re-enter and traverse Earth\u2019s thick atmosphere, enveloped for long, nail-biting minutes in a friction-kindled fireball. Orion is equipped with a heat shield, of course\u2014one that combines updates based on knowledge from both Apollo and the space shuttle program, Levasseur notes.<\/p>\n
Examining the Orion capsule that flew on the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, NASA officials noticed that huge chunks of its heat shield had unexpectedly blown away. It\u2019s an issue engineers have been investigating in the years since the test flight, and they say that adjusting Orion\u2019s path toward Earth\u2014plunging faster through the atmosphere at a steeper incline instead of a shallower, more prolonged descent\u2014should safeguard against the problem.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not the same as redesigning the heat shield, and the agency opted not to test the heat shield on this new reentry profile before committing Artemis II\u2019s astronauts to it. Redesigning the heat shield, NASA officials say, would have caused too much delay, and a new reentry test was deemed too expensive.<\/p>\n
The Artemis I mission\u2019s Orion heat shield seen after the 2022 uncrewed test flight.<\/p>\n
An observer would be hard put to determine whether that choice reflects launch fever once again breaking through procedural norms. Artemis is a massive program\u2014NASA estimated in 2024 that its costs since October 2011 would reach $93 billion by October 2025\u2014and that can inherently bring pressure to keep things moving, says Jordan Bimm, a space historian at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n
And NASA has plenty of pressures to juggle. \u201cNASA\u2019s never been in a moment like this before,\u201d Bimm says. Across the horizon of spaceflight, the agency is juggling negotiating multibillion-dollar contracts with commercial giants such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, while competing with relative newcomers to spaceflight, such as China and India, that are pursuing their own crewed ambitions.<\/p>\n
The agency set what experts say was a promising example during the Artemis I mission, which was repeatedly delayed, including even rolling the massive rocket off the launch pad to shelter it from a hurricane.<\/p>\n
For Levasseur, that suggests the people leading NASA today will make the hard choices that keep their crews safe. \u201cThey\u2019re people who were children or young people during the 1980s, who were inspired by the early space shuttle flights,\u201d she says. Many, like her, were shaped by watching the Challenger disaster as a child, or by the later Columbia tragedy. \u201cThose memories are there, and they\u2019re not going to want to make the same mistakes that were made before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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