NASA’s STS-51L crew, including commander Francis “Dick” Scobee, pilot Mike Smith, mission specialists Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka and Judy Resnik, payload specialist Greg Jarvis and Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe were killed in the aftermath of the malfunction.Ī major search and salvage effort was organized in the wake of the tragedy, the largest ever conducted by the U.S. The space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its 25th launch after seals in one of the vehicle’s two solid rocket boosters failed. 28, 1986, still feels like yesterday.” The search for Challenger For millions around the globe, myself included, Jan. "While it has been nearly 37 years since seven daring and brave explorers lost their lives aboard Challenger, this tragedy will forever be seared in the collective memory of our country. “This discovery gives us an opportunity to pause once again, to uplift the legacies of the seven pioneers we lost and to reflect on how this tragedy changed us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement issued on Thursday (Nov. The segment of Challenger was found in waters off Florida’s Space Coast, well northwest of the area popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle. The artifact, which today remains where it was found by the crew filming The History Channel’s new series “The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters,” was positively identified by NASA based upon the item’s modern construction and presence of 8-inch (20 centimeters) square thermal protection (heat shield) tiles. Their remains were recovered and returned to their families.One the largest pieces of NASA’s fallen space shuttle Challenger has been discovered on the ocean floor by a TV documentary team searching for a downed World War II aircraft. Onizuka of the Air Force, and a payload specialist, Gregory B. Also on board were three mission specialists, Dr. Tomasz Wierzbicki, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written extensively on the Challenger cabin and whether its ruin was preventable, praised the release of the photos and said they could prove to be a engineering bonanza.Īmong the Challenger’s crew members was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The photos released to Sarao show a large number of twisted fragments and flakes of metal, crumpled window frames, wiring, broken electronics boxes and a wooden scaffolding holding up a ghostly reconstruction of the rear part of the crew cabin.ĭr. Searches of the ocean floor reportedly found only pieces of the cabin and other debris. NASA has shown great reluctance to release information about the dead crew members, their personal effects and the shuttle’s cabin, citing the privacy interests of the crew’s families.Įngineers believe the cabin remained intact throughout its fall to earth, with some astronauts probably conscious until it crashed into the ocean at high speed. “I did it to help people understand what happened to that structure, and to help them learn how to build better ones,” Sarao said in an interview. 3 to Ben Sarao, a New York City artist who had sued the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Freedom of Information Act for the pictures. But they could eventually help aerospace engineers design safer spaceships. Seven years after the Challenger disaster killed seven astronauts, including a schoolteacher, the space agency has been forced to release some of the many photographs it took of the shuttle’s pulverized crew cabin.įorty-eight pictures of the wreckage, which was recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral, Fla., appear to show nothing startling about the fate of the Challenger and its crew.
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