The Challenger Admission

Space shuttle design flaws have had disastrous consequences for the American space program.

On January 28, 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded just 76 seconds after launch.

In 1981, the first space shuttle was launched in the skies of Florida. The public watched in awe: it launched like a rocket and flew like a spaceship. NASA thought this machine would take the dream of space travel into the 21st century and beyond. That is, until January 28th 1986: an unusually cold morning with record low temperatures. After a series of delays, the space shuttle Challenger launched at 11:38 AM. Just 76 seconds later, that dream of space exploration took a tumble and the unthinkable happened: the shuttle had exploded and all seven astronauts were dead.

Twenty years later, it's now widely known that the Challenger explosion was caused by gas leaking into the joint of the right booster rocket. 'O' rings seal the sections of the rocket booster together and should have prevented the extremely hot rocket exhaust gases, produced at incredible pressure during launch, from getting into the rocket. But the rubber 'O' ring seal failed.

The greater tragedy is that engineer Roger Boisjoly and his colleague Arnie Thompson had 'seen' the accident coming. A year before the launch, they knew that the 'O' rings in the solid rocket boosters could potentially fail under some circumstances - and that if the primary and backup 'O' rings both failed, the whole launch system could explode.

Space shuttle diagram: Its main components are the spacecraft, 3 main engines, a huge external tank and 2 solid rocket boosters.

But the design of the space shuttle itself was also to blame for the disaster. Space shuttles came about after the Apollo program and NASA was looking to cut costs. The Apollo program had cost 25 billion dollars - the equivalent of 135 billion dollars today - a cost of nearly 10 billion dollars per launch. The spacecrafts used for the Apollo missions were launched with rockets that could only be used once: they were hand-built and then discarded in pieces as its cargo climbed into orbit. It seemed clear that a less disposable way of traveling to space would be much more cost-efficient.

Space shuttles were seen as the way forward: they were small, light could land like a plane and be launched many times. But because of politics in the U.S. at the time, NASA had to try hard to keep its funding. Many of the careful considerations that had been made in the initial design had to be dropped to cut costs. A major concession was to settle for solid rocket boosters to save on research and development time, when the initial plan was to use safer liquid booster rockets.