Adam Higginbotham

There's a crowd of people watching, and you can hear them clapping and cheering as the shuttle leaves the pad.

And he says that even as the people watched the shuttle burst into flames... There are still a lot of people in the crowd who are still clapping and cheering because they think or they want to think that this is part of a normal launch process.

And at the same time, you can hear Steve Nesbitt, who was the commentator from NASA who was sitting in mission control in Houston, continuing to read out the data about the speed of the shuttle and its altitude.

Even as the shuttle itself has already disappeared into this blossoming orange cloud of burning rocket fuel.

Right.

I mean, the most important piece of background to the Challenger launch is to understand that it had been delayed several times before the morning of January the 28th.

Not only that, but the launch before of the shuttle mission before Challenger had been delayed a record number of times for NASA.

And by the beginning of 1986, NASA had made it clear that the shuttle was supposed to be a true spaceship.

It was supposed to operate on this launch schedule where it was going to launch once a month or twice a month and ultimately as frequently as once a week.

Yes.

and the Teacher in Space mission, the Challenger mission, had been deliberately engineered to attract as much publicity as possible.

The whole idea for NASA of the Teacher in Space mission was that it would rekindle flagging public interest in the program.

And this meant that hundreds of journalists descended on Cape Canaveral for the launch.

So there was a huge amount of attention focused on the launch.

And then on the delays.

And the delays were additionally embarrassing because they seemed to be happening for kind of foolish reasons.

Well...

almost since the beginning of the shuttle program, since the first launch in 1981, they'd been finding that these joints did not work as designed.

And so if you got a leak that was even the width of a pencil through one of these joints, you know, that wouldn't be a sort of slow leak that you wouldn't need to worry about for the two minutes the rocket's burned.

It would be a leak that quickly, in a matter of seconds, developed in a way that would cut straight through the...