Posted on 01/28/2026 4:24:15 AM PST by DFG
Challenger: The disaster five people saw coming
Forty years ago, the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated just after lift-off, killing its crew and changing the history of spaceflight. A small team of engineers tried to prevent the tragedy — but they were overruled.
January 28, 1986 was an unusually crisp winter morning at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
When the sun rose at 7:12am, the air temperature was about -5 degrees Celsius.
Icicles hung from parts of the launch pad as preparations were made to send the Challenger space shuttle into orbit.
Thousands of spectators were gathering along nearby roads and shorelines. This was a special launch: the tenth for the Challenger spacecraft and the 25th of shuttle era — but most important of all, a newly minted celebrity was on board.
In an effort to reignite public interest after nearly five years of successful, increasingly routine shuttle flights, NASA had thrown open applications to send a teacher into space.
The winner, Christa McAuliffe, was selected from more than 11,000 hopefuls. She was a social studies teacher from New Hampshire with two young children of her own, and a knack for inspiring others.
Packed in her bag for the voyage was a T-shirt that said: “I touch the future. I teach.”
But within the ranks of technical specialists responsible for making the shuttle fly, all was not well.
Four years of behind-the-scenes troubleshooting and simmering doubt was boiling over as anger — and fear.
One engineer exclaimed: “They’re gonna die!”
None of this concern had reached beyond a small group of insiders.
By the time Challenger thundered off the ground at 11:38am, the air temperature had risen to just over 2C.
The shuttle hoisted itself into a clear sky on its customary pillar of flame, smoke and steam.
Spectators — families, colleagues, students — clapped and shouted.
On the other side of the continent in Promontory, Utah, engineer Bob Ebeling whispered grimly: “It’s not over yet.”
Complexity
The engineering flaw that would destroy Challenger that cold winter’s day in 1986 can be traced to the beginning of the space shuttle era.
NASA’s ambition was to build a reusable spacecraft and make flying to space routine.
“We couldn’t afford to build a billion-dollar rocket and throw it in the ocean every time,” says John Tribe, an engineer who worked on the shuttle program for 39 years.
Instead, the new design would take off as a rocket and land like an aeroplane.
The first operational shuttle, Columbia, flew to space and landed again in April 1981. It was soon joined by three others in regular service: Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis.
The shuttle’s design was a triumph — but people close to the program knew it was always sailing close to the wind.
“It was a test vehicle all the way through its life,” Mr Tribe tells ABC Radio National’s The Challenger Legacy.
Among numerous advances, this was the first space vehicle propelled by solid rocket boosters: two white columns fixed on either side of the shuttle itself, and its giant orange fuel tank.
Each booster was filled with 600 tonnes of solid rocket fuel the consistency of rubbery clay. Together, they contributed most the momentum required to leave Earth — before detaching after two minutes and falling into the sea to be reused.
From that point the shuttle’s own engines took over, fed by the fuel tank, which was itself thrown away once the craft made it to space.
And after its well-trained crew had unloaded a satellite, fixed a telescope, or helped to build a space station, the shuttle could glide back down to Earth and land on a runway.
Rinse off, repair, refuel … and repeat.
On top of the gargantuan technical challenge of completing this cycle, there was the time pressure. NASA wanted multiple launches every year, with a lofty aspiration of fortnightly flights by the 1990s.
Anxiety
The solid rocket boosters were made by Morton Thiokol, a NASA contractor based in Utah.
They were so large — 15 storeys tall and nearly 4 metres across — that they were built in sections.
Brian Russell was in his late 20s when he was assigned to a team of engineers joining the sections together.
“They [the others] were all old enough to be my father,” he says, now 71.
“We were very proud to be part of the NASA program.”
But there were already concerns before he arrived.
The team was particularly focused on the O-rings inside each joint: very thin, 12-metre-long ropes of synthetic rubber that helped create a tight seal between the sections of the solid rocket boosters.
That closure was crucial because the solid fuel inside the combustion chamber, once lit, would become fiery gas — burning at over 3,000C — intended to shoot out of the nozzle at the bottom of the booster and create enormous thrust.
But if the seal leaked and the scorching gases reached the steel casing on the outside of the rocket, it would quickly start to fall apart.
“The consequence we knew would be disastrous,” Mr Russell says.
On the second shuttle flight in 1981, the Morton Thiokol engineers spotted damage to the O-rings and reported it to NASA.
In the intervening years, they investigated the problem and monitored it closely. But the shuttles kept launching — and landing.
“No-one wanted to shut down the national space program,” Mr Russell recalls.
“There were times we felt we ought to, but in reality all of us, including myself, accepted those results and the analysis as having a safety factor sufficient to keep flying.”
There were five engineers who were most concerned about the O-rings and tried to raise the alarm. Mr Russell is the only member of that group still alive today.
Escalation
In January 1985 — one year before the Challenger mission of 1986 — the Morton Thiokol team’s worries deepened.
The Discovery space shuttle launch was successful, but when its solid rocket boosters were fished out of the Atlantic, the partial leaking of the O-rings was worse than before.
“That was most alarming,” Mr Russell remembers.
It had been a chilly day. The coldest shuttle launch to date, in fact, at just under 12C.
The engineers feared the cold had made the rubber O-rings less rubbery; less able to do their job of sealing the joints tightly as the rocket flexed during launch.
Morton Thiokol formed a taskforce to study the problem. Meanwhile the launches kept rolling: eight more that year, all in comfortably warmer weather.
But the next winter, on January 27 1986, Challenger was finally poised to launch for its “Teacher in Space” mission — and the overnight forecast was another 10 degrees colder than the previous January launch.
Late in the morning the Morton Thiokol engineers gathered in the office of Bob Ebeling, Mr Russell’s boss.
“[We talked about] whether we were all as concerned as Bob and I initially were,” Mr Russell remembers.
“And it was, 100 per cent, yes.”
As Mr Russell left Bob Ebeling’s office that morning to start collecting charts and data, determined to call off the launch, there were roughly 24 hours left before lift-off.
Stand-off
Mr Ebeling’s daughter Leslie also worked at Morton Thiokol, in the communications department. She remembers the sense of urgency as her dad got on the phone.
“He called his boss, who was already down in Florida and he said, ‘We can’t launch. It’s going to be a catastrophic event.’”
Eventually a plan was made for an evening teleconference, where the Morton Thiokol engineers and managers could present their argument to NASA.
It didn’t go well.There had already been multiple delays to the launch and NASA managers didn’t want it to slip further.
NASA’s project manager for the solid rocket boosters, Larry Mulloy, had his own interpretation of the engineers’ data and argued that temperature was not such a critical factor.
He also responded sharply when they recommended waiting for a launch temperature of 12C: “My God, Thiokol. When do you want me to launch? Next April?”
Under pressure, the Morton Thiokol representatives left the call to confer for five minutes, which stretched to 35.
In the end, the company’s managers overruled their engineers and reversed their position.
The last manager to concede was head of engineering Robert Lund.
“Bob hummed and hawed,” Mr Russell remembers.
“He was in a real tough position. He had three of the leaders of the company saying that it’s OK to launch. And he had his engineers who said no, it’s not.
“As he was hesitating to answer, that’s when [general manager] Jerry Mason said to him, ‘Bob, it’s time to take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.’”
Shortly after 11pm Florida time, Challenger got the go-ahead for launch.
Fireball
Bob and Leslie Ebeling used to carpool to work in Utah with three other staffers. On the morning of the Challenger launch, Bob’s distress was obvious.
“He was swerving in and out of people and was so angry,” Leslie says.
“He was beating his hand on the steering wheel and saying … ‘They’re gonna die!’”
As Bob and Leslie parked the car and walked in, she remembers her father saying: “This is going to be a horrible way to end my career.”
They joined a few of Bob’s fellow engineers and senior managers in a private conference room to watch the launch.
“It was very, very quiet … I will never forget it, it was so eerie,” says Leslie who was sitting in front of her dad.
There was some short-lived jubilation when the shuttle got off the ground, she recalls.
That was when Bob bent down and whispered in her ear, “It’s not over yet.”
After surging past the launch tower, Challenger tilted to one side and twisted around so that the shuttle itself sat almost upside down: its most efficient route to orbit.
“Good roll program confirmed,” came the call from NASA’s flight commentator.
Then, 73 seconds after lift-off, something changed.
From the ground, observers squinting up at the lengthening exhaust plume saw a puff of extra smoke and a flash of flame.
Aware that the rocket boosters needed to detach at some stage, many initially thought it was part of the plan; some cheered.
“When I saw it explode, I couldn’t believe it,” Brian Russell says. “I don’t know why. I just couldn’t believe that it happened.”
Forty years later, his voice still cracks remembering the scene.
He saw Roger Boisjoly, another of the five engineers who had sounded the alarm, leave the room.
“I went down to his office and we were both in tears. We just knew that it was our [booster] and that the joint had failed.”
Bob Ebeling, sitting behind his daughter Leslie, sat with his head in his hands.
“He just started crying,” Ms Ebeling says.
“He sobbed and sobbed. Nobody was talking.
“He went right back to his desk and started redesigning the O-rings.”
Reckoning For the American public and people around the world, the events of January 28 1986 etched themselves into collective memory.
A memorial for the seven dead crew members was held three days later, on January 31.
“Across America we are reaching out, holding hands, and finding comfort in one another,” then-president Ronald Reagan said to the crowd.
Three days after that, Mr Reagan announced a presidential commission into the cause of the disaster.
Released in June 1986, its report confirmed the O-rings on one of the shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters had failed, causing Challenger to disintegrate at 46,000 feet.
But the commission also heard from all five of the engineers who had spoken up and tried to call off the launch: Brian Russell, Bob Ebeling, Roger Boisjoly, Al McDonald and Arnie Thompson.
It was their testimony that revealed the history of the problem and the calamitous teleconference on the eve of the launch.
As a result, the report recommended a complete overhaul of NASA’s management.
The solid rocket boosters were redesigned. Shuttle flights stopped for two-and-a-half years.
After they recommenced in 1988, 87 missions went without a major hitch.
Then in 2003, returning to Earth after 16 days in space, the space shuttle Columbia fell to pieces in the sky above Texas. Seven more astronauts never came home.
The technical cause, a damaged heat shield caused by debris during take-off, was different. But again, insider accounts revealed this sort of damage was a known issue. Warning signs had been ignored.
Jon Clark worked at NASA for many years. His wife, Laurel, was one of the astronauts who died on board Columbia.
“When you dig deep enough, there’s no question that the organisational culture was implicated in both Columbia and Challenger mishaps,” Dr Clark says.
Legacy
Now in 2026, as soon as next month, NASA is preparing to send astronauts around the moon for the first time since the Apollo era. They will be pushed off the planet by familiar solid rocket boosters, still made in Utah, including casings that were flown on shuttle missions.
Meanwhile the agency has been staring down significant budget cuts from the Trump administration.
It’s a pertinent time to remember that spaceflight is never exactly safe.
In the weeks after Challenger, the five engineers found themselves sidelined within Morton Thiokol. Brian Russell says it was Bob Ebeling who coined their new nickname: the five lepers.
“He was quite outspoken,” Mr Russell says.
“I loved him. He was one of my favourite bosses.”
Some of the five left the company; all were haunted by the disaster.
“The four months after the incident, in my mind’s eye, right in my forehead, I could not get the image out of my mind of that exploding vehicle,” Mr Russell says.
“I was depressed; I was angry. I was a lousy husband and a father … and I wondered if I was ever going to come out of it.”
The fog eventually cleared and he carried a new resolve into the remainder of his career.
“I said, ‘I’m never going to be in that position again.’
“I am never going to be afraid to speak up when I believe that that a different view needs to be expressed.”
Leslie Ebeling says her dad never quite returned to his former self.
“He felt personally responsible.”
Shortly before his death in 2016, Mr Ebeling was interviewed on the 30th anniversary of the disaster by US National Public Radio about the guilt he had carried for those three decades. Hundreds of listeners wrote to express sympathy and to thank him for doing the right thing.
At long last, Leslie says, her father was able to find some degree of closure.
“He was able to forgive himself because he felt like the world forgave him.
“Three weeks later, he was gone.”
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I build molds for a living, I went to see one of my long time customers in Kentucky last year where we went over a couple of tool designs and how they wanted to run them.
While he was giving me the nickle tour of the facility there was an OD grinder set off to the side, it was roped off with the type of velvet that they use at movie theaters and other public events. I asked what that was set aside for and he told me the story of that machine. It was the grinder that ground the O-rings for the Challenger and all the other space shuttle booster seals. When the Challenger exploded just 2 days later his shop was flooded with Morton Thiokol engineers and lawyers, Parker seals engineers, and NASA investigators.
They pretty much crawled up their butts with a spotlight trying to find any chance at all that they cut corners, used rubber extrusions other than what Parker Seals supplied, ground them out of tolerance, forgot to cross their Ts and dot their Is, He told me that it was a sh*t show of lawyers and ass coverers trying desperately to find any scapegoat they could to pin the blame on. They set the machine aside after they escorted them out of the facility disappointed they couldn’t find any reason to blame them. He credits the wife of the owner who was an old school complete perfectionist for having every base covered, had a single corner been cut on paperwork, proof of supply chain protocols, or any of about 100 different tracability issues for allowing them to withstand the whirlwind of blame they were looking to place on anyone else but themselves.
> why couldn’t they just replace the O-rings when they saw that they were getting damaged?
The organization ( NASA + Thiokol ) needed to acknowledge the problem to address it, but instead stubbornly resisted escalation. There were probably dozens of issues of different severity, but at some layer of management they all became anecdotally equivalent, so the critical issues became lost in the noise. As long as the rockets succeeded Thiokol management and NASA felt the issues were demonstrably low risk and indulged in an orgy of mutual self-congratulation.
During the Rogers Commission, Feynman toured the facility where they assembled the SRBs, and he pointed out critical flaws in the inspection process that could allowed for other similar failures from a different root cause. Notably the Rogers Commission report downplayed it as irrelevant, omitted significant information, and Feynman had to write his own report which became an appendix and ultimately the conclusions of the report. He demonstrated the critical fault explicitly and unequivocally on live TV at a Congressional hearing, at the same time the political elements of the commission were trying to whitewash the whole affair to protect insiders. The allowed the dissenting minority in the commission to force a revision of the final report and recommendations.
Interestingly ASME and other engineering organizations have incorporated the lessons of Challenger in standards and practices (e.g GD&T), but also made it a form of arcane knowledge served only to insiders (the ASME manual is behind a paywall). Eventually FMEA and Risk analysis in engineering benefited enough so the information escaped and became widely incorporated. For example I used it in 2008-2016 to engineer reliable backend systems for e-commerce. It was interesting to trace the source of some of the engineering practices I learned about back to the Challenger accident report. I used the risk assessment heuristics for years before I discovered the origins in FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) and the references to that knowledge came to me indirectly through people quoting the Feynman Report.
Feynman had a great little quip which made it into the final report:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
This echos Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany in 1615 (translated):
“It is not within the power of practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, choosing now this and now that one; there is a great difference between giving orders to a mathematician or a philosopher and giving them to a merchant or a lawyer; and demonstrated conclusions about natural and celestial phenomena cannot be changed with the same ease as opinions about what is or
is not legitimate in a contract, in a rental, or in commerce.”
I had just started my first full time job, three days after my last college Final exam. I was at my desk, writing, when one of the office admin staff appeared in my doorway, silent. She said simply “Challenger has exploded”, and then quickly turned and started crying. A horrible, horrible day that I will never forget. Not unlike 9/11, when while driving to work I heard on the radio that the second tower had collapsed. Had to pull to shoulder of the highway to scream and cry in anger and grief for a few seconds.
The very best of America.
What a dumb , stupid comment. It was NASA’s fault. It never should have been launched that day. You win the award for dumbest comment of the year.
Best to ignore that poster. He starts in with those sorts of comments… often.
That is exactly what the engineers wanted to do. That involves taking the booster apart, removing the damaged seals, and then waiting for replacements. The management at that time did not want to tarnish their productivity records; and, felt that the expense of parts, labor, times, and money outweighed the safety of the flight.
My Sperry boss told me that the Saturn V was always ready to launch once the weight of the paperwork equaled the weight of the loaded rocket.
This is the "real NASA"!
The mini sub Titan disaster was pretty much the same story as the Challenger debacle.
The O ring failed. The owner knew there were major problems and he was repeatedly warned and chose to go down with passengers anyway for the money and fame.
Same story, different event.
They were aware of the o-rings burning through pretty much from day one. They knew the cause. They knew the only reason they had not lost a vehicle so far was that the breach had not occurred where it was pointing towards the LOX tank. They knew it was not if but when. Many people knew the problem and had much research was poured into discovering the problem.
They decided to fly that day just because of the press.
My dad was part of the group that early on was trying to figure out what was causing the problem at the material and molecular level. He was NEVER one to bring work home with him but one night at supper, he explained what was happening and what was going to happen “mark my words.”
NASA knew and got the crew killed. Most if not all survived the ride until they hit the water.
“None of this concern had reached beyond a small group of insiders.”
Lie, it was widely known.
One of my coworkers had a radio at his work station and came and told me about it. At first I thought he was joking- I think I told him so. He assured me that he wasn’t. Then my wife called me at work and told me about it. I remember being shocked. It was truly a sad day.
It was a horrible, horrible day.
I was working in New York at the time. A dear friend’s sister-in-law was victim of a murder-suicide. A second friend and I rented a car to drive out to the funeral on Long Island. It was a nerve-wracking, dangerous drive on icy roads.
When we were close, I pulled up to a fire station to get directions. As I entered the dispatch room, I saw on the television screen above the desk the explosion.
That's exactly what it looked like: "sparkling debris"...
I was shocked that this was happening again. Hadn’t we learned anything from Challenger?
It was a silly comment. Diversity wasn’t the issue. It was ALL NASA’s fault for launching when it was too cold.
Then say that and forgo the insults.
I think the worst part of Columbia was that they knew they were going to die on reentry, but they had only two choices, how they wanted to die.
When engineers saw the leading edge was damaged they know with 99.999% certainty that they were going to lose her during reentry. The crew had to make a decision on the 2 choices, die the slow death of asphyxiation and hypothermia, or ride it out and gamble the .001% chance the leading edge would somehow hold together long enough to get her down.
They made the same choice I would have, but I think I would have considered removing the suit while doing it. Given the options it would have just slowed down and prolonged the inevitable IMHO, best to go fast than taking the time to burn through the layers.
It was defiantly a cold day. Great Surf and Turf which justified the $7 dollar a bottle Budweiser. ;)
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