30 years after Challenger disaster, what have we learned?
Thirty years ago this Thursday, the nation watched as NASA鈥檚 space shuttle Challenger burst into flames 73 seconds after launching into the blue Florida sky.
It is one of NASA鈥檚 greatest tragedies, an accident that took the lives of seven astronauts who were on board, as their families, friends, and the rest of the nation watched in horror at Cape Canaveral and on live television.
The explosion was imprinted on the memories of an entire generation of Americans, many of whom remember exactly where they wereon that day in January 1986.
"It's such , much like the Kennedy assassination," Mike Ciannilli, an artifacts manager at the Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel.
A failed seal on its right solid rocket booster caused the Challenger to explode, an oversight that some say derailed the country鈥檚 ambitious space program, and led to changes at the agency.
"When the shuttle turned out to be not what we thought it was, all those downstream ," Howard McCurdy, a specialist in space policy at American University in Washington, D.C., told USA Today in 2011,听shortly before the 25th anniversary of the disaster.
"The business model collapsed, and it wasn't just the business model for shuttle, it was the business model for shuttle, station, Mars, the moon.... It was like a corporation going down," he said.
The incident exposed NASA鈥檚 huge bureaucracy, a degree of complacency, and the intense political pressures it faced, factors that caused its guard to slip, as Alex Roland, professor emeritus of history at Duke University and former NASA historian, explained to the Sentinel.
Investigators appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan found that leading up to the Challenger鈥檚 launch. They criticized what they called NASA's "silent safety program," reported USA Today, and "flawed" decision-making.
Though NASA pledged to redesign the shuttle's flawed rockets and the agency's safety procedures, it faced another tragedy 17 years later when another shuttle, Columbia, , killing seven more astronauts on board and once again shining a spotlight on lapses at NASA.
"When you bore down a little bit deeper, you don't find any there, there," retired Adm. Harold Gehman said at the time, according to the Sentinel.
"There's no people, money, engineering, expertise, analysis," he complained.
Despite these obstacles, the former and longtime director of NASA鈥檚 Public Affairs Office wrote last year that it is critical that the nation not lose a passion for the space program, which he says has enhanced almost every part of our lives, from agriculture to transportation.
鈥淭here is , per dollar spent, in the creation of new knowledge, new products and new jobs to improve the quality of life here and around the world,鈥� wrote Hugh Harris on Space.com in 2014.
He lists space-program-originating advances the include the simple tripling of the life of wheel bearings on our cars, to the more sophisticated systems that monitor the health of food crops and forests from space.
NASA is planning on Thursday, with events to honor the crews of space shuttles Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 1, and other NASA colleagues.
