Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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And liftoff, liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle Mission, and it has cleared the tower.
On January 28, 1986, the 25th Space Shuttle Mission Challenger left the launch pad in Cape Canaveral.
There's a crowd of people watching, and you can hear them clapping and cheering as the shuttle leaves the pad.
And then, 73 seconds into flight... The shuttle disintegrates. That's Adam Higginbotham, a journalist who spent years reporting on the Challenger disaster.
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.
And then, static.
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Chapter 2: What led to the Challenger space shuttle launch on January 28, 1986?
Mm-hmm.
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.
Really?
Yes.
Wow.
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.
So one of the problems with the explosion, the Challenger explosion, involved rubber O-rings that sealed the joints between different segments of boosters. And the engineers who built the rocket boosters at Morton Bicol in Utah were working on fixing those.
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.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the Challenger launch and its immediate aftermath?
Yes. And as a result of that, they call a meeting of the engineers at Thiokol, and they unanimously agree that they have to go back to NASA and say, we cannot recommend the launch. You need to postpone the launch until the weather warms up. And if you don't do that, we fear there's going to be a catastrophe. They present this argument.
And then the NASA engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and the NASA engineers overseeing the program, they don't actually say we're not going to take your recommendation. In fact, what they do say is, you know, if you continue to recommend against launch, of course, we will not proceed. But they make it very clear in the way they talk to them.
that they do not want to hear any recommendation against launching. And they really put them under a huge amount of pressure to reverse that recommendation.
So do they reverse it?
Well, the important thing is that Morton Thiokol, the contractor, you know, this for them is the one thing that keeps this arm of the company financially viable. So they couldn't be more acutely aware of how they really don't want to be upsetting their most valuable customer at this point in time.
So what happens is that they ask for a five-minute recess to get off the call and discuss it amongst themselves. And during the recess, which eventually stretches to 30 minutes or more, the executives in the room say that they are going to change their minds against the recommendation of their own engineers who are sitting there in the room with them.
And they eventually vote to say, yeah, yeah, we'll just go back to them and say that we changed our minds and we're going to go from a no-go for launch to a go for launch.
The launch happens anyway. Yeah. Oof. So then after the Challenger explodes, there was an investigation. Like, what were the conclusions of that investigation?
The conclusions of the investigation were utterly damning. You know, the report charts a path to the launch pad that day that was just...
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