Blog Post #5 : Challenger tragedy.

A couple days ago I talked about the Columbia tragedy.  But now, I found another article explaining how the Challenger explosion happen and interesting facts about it.  The Challenger explosion happened before the Columbia tragedy, and the challenger exploded right after it lifted off (challenger exploded when it landed).  One interesting fact was this was the first time a school teacher was allowed to travel in space (Christ McAuliffe), who was also going to be the first citizen in space.  The date for the flight was originally scheduled for July 1985 and after many different delays, was finally ready to be launched on January 27^th (an extremely cold day).  It turns out the disaster occurred because of the cold weather.  The weather caused a failure of the joint seal in the right SRB, this lead to a combustion gas leak through the Solid Rocket Motor and causes the explosion.  However, the Challenger itself didn’t’ actually explode, what happened was that orbiter broke apart from the shuttle.  The crew did not die instantly since the cabin was torn loose from the rest of the space shuttle.  But when the cabin smashed into the Atlantic ocean (which took 3 minutes), it killed all of the members.  I never knew that the crew did not die instantly, I just assumed based of the picture of the explosion, which everyone would die instantly.  This disaster might not have happened if they lifted off on the original time in July, considering it would’ve been much warmer.  This article has more explanation of the people and why the SRB malfunctioned.  I would recommend reading all of it!

Article:  http://www.aerospaceguide.net/spaceshuttle/challenger_disaster.html