Actually few, if any, of the crew died in the explosion. They were killed or knocked unconscious upon impact after minutes of free-fall, drowning thereafter if they weren’t already dead.
All because stupid bureaucrats decided to play with other people’s lives.
24 years later and nothing has changed.
The managers overode the engineers who knew the SRB “O” rings would probably fail in 24 degree temperature. I wonder if they paid any consequence for overiding the engineers. There was a video of the crew compartment coming out of the gas cloud virtually intact and rumors had it the crew survived till impact. A sad day indeed. Thank God we had President Reagan then rather than the total joke we have now. God help us.
I was in high school at the time, and someone mentioned in one of my classes that there was an "explosion" involving the space shuttle. I wasn't even aware of the launch that day and assumed it had something to do with an issue with a fuel tank on the ground.
We had a half-day at school for some reason that day, and I saw the details on the news when I stopped in a deli for a sandwich on my way home.
One image that I found haunting was a two-page photo in one of the weekly news magazines a few days later. It showed a blown-up image of the explosion, and there was a red circle on the image showing what was clearly a fully-intact cockpit and crew cabin falling out of the sky.