Space, The Final Frontier...right?

The Ringer.com calls Challenger: The Final Flight, "a three-hour exhumation of a traumatic event that imprinted itself on the psyche of anyone who was watching when it went down." As a senior high school student, who watched from my Indianapolis classroom (at Bishop Chatard, Class of '86), I can certainly attest to this. This image, which I saw live on closed circuit television, is the first thing that comes to mind whenever I hear "Space Shuttle Challenger." It was, indeed, a traumatic moment.

Seven lives were lost that day; countless others were changed forever.

I highly encourage you to watch the documentary.

I grew up in the Space Age.

Two days after I was born, Apollo 5 made the first flight test of the propulsion systems of the Lunar Module ascent/descent capability. Three months later, Apollo 8 launches on the first manned mission to the moon and provides the first ever photograph of the entire Earth from outer space. It orbited the Moon ten times without landing. The moon landing would happen before my first birthday.

Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 (NASA)

 
I looked up to the stars with wonder and knew that going up there and out there was possible. I grew up watching series like Space: 1999 and Star Trek (the original series with Shatner and Nimoy) and believing that THIS was our future, achievable in my lifetime. After all, "space, the final frontier," was just a short ride on a rocket or shuttle away. And we all believed it was safe. The Ringer article linked in the opening of this post states, "Although the three-man crew of Apollo 1 was killed in a cabin fire in a 1967 launch rehearsal test, NASA never lost an astronaut en route to space until the Challenger disaster."

To put a finer point on it, The Globe and Mail, Canada, reported in Feb 2003, after the Columbia tragedy, "Before the space-shuttle program, three astronauts -- the crew of Apollo 1, who died Jan. 27, 1967, in a launch-pad fire in their capsule during training -- were killed on the job. But from 1986 to 2003, two shuttle disasters have killed 14 people who were flying in a craft with far more advanced technology."

That day in January 1986 changed everything I believed was possible. But I paid little attention to the public hearings or the immediate aftermath. I was focused on finishing out my senior year, partying with friends and preparing for a move to Florida, which happened the week after graduation in June '86.

As fate would have it, my dad's career trajectory took us to Tallahassee, where in Mar 2003 a Challenger Learning Center opened. Ironically, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster had occurred just one month previous. Over time, however, the memories of both tragedies began to fade and NASA shut down it's shuttle program. In my mind, the causes of both fatal accidents due to human error and hubris began to meld together, so that by the time I watched the Challenger documentary on Netflix in 2022, I was thinking that both O-ring failure in the rocket booster AND tile damage to the shuttle were one in the same incident. Time does that to memory and I have a nearly 54-year-old brain.

"In the wake of what happened with Challenger, NASA made technical changes to the shuttle and also worked to change the safety and accountability culture of its workforce. The shuttle program resumed flights in 1988," says a Space.com Feb 2022 article. "They had their mind set on going up and proving to the world they were right and they knew what they were doing. But they didn't," said Bob Ebeling, former Thiokol engineer, who's objections to Challenger's launch are well documented in the 2020 Netflix doc. He spoke with NPR in January 2016. Three months later, Ebeling died at 89. NPR's 21 Mar 2016 headline read, "Challenger Engineer Who Warned Of Shuttle Disaster Dies." You can read his NY Times obit here.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, one of the [Roger's] commission’s more skeptical members, added his own appendix to their report, asking for greater transparency from NASA and a more realistic assessment of space travel’s risks. This direct quote from the Houston Chronicle's Preview website June 2021 review of Kevin Cook's book, The Burning Blue, is a highlight of the Netflix doc. The documentary chronicles Feynman famously bringing a small O-ring to the public hearing and explaining the physics behind the effects of freezing temperatures on the rubber seal. It changed the whole tone of the committee and led to it's ultimate findings.

The Ringer article summarizes, "the agency covered up its culpability and stubbornly resisted pinpointing a cause..." and blames a "tradition of institutional failure." I'll reserve my judgment and personal opinion for now, though I did use the word hubris, above. Let's tackle that subject in a separate post. But, suffice to say, the 2020 Challenger documentary was an eye-opening experience. It brought back all of the memories from that day in '86  and those that followed. I had actually forgotten how long a history the NASA Shuttle program had after that tragedy, some 15 YEARS! And yet, what did they learn? It turns out, not much. The arrogance and hubris of our government was once again on full display in February 2003. The shutdown of the Shuttle program forced NASA to rethink space exploration and the government's role.