Challenger Disaster

Nilda and I just finished "When We Left The Earth" and loved it. But what's stuck with me was its section on the Challenger explosion. I didn't know the crew survived the initial explosion.

The explosion was caused by a failure of the O-rings in the boosters, which were supposed to flex and move to seal in gases at the joints. But it was so cold (40 degrees following a freeze in the low 20s, beating the previous coldest launch at 53 degrees) that day that the O-rings froze and were brittle, unable to bend and move as needed to create a seal. And since the launch was scheduled for the morning, there was not enough time for the sun to thaw the O-rings. A puff of black smoke at liftoff revealed the first crack in the seal, which later erupted into a fireball during liftoff.

The crew survived the explosion. Despite NASA's attempt to create the appearance otherwise, they were alive when the ship exploded and they knew what was going on. Three of the astronauts' air packs were turned on and the pilot's last transmission was "Uh-oh." The theory is that they blacked out almost immediately after the cabin lost pressure, although there is no way to tell whether or not the cabin lost pressure.

It is undisputed that they were all alive when they hit the water, and no one survived after that. They fell for 2 minutes, 45 seconds. There was a transcript of the final moments of the astronauts, but this was proved to be a hoax. The boosters were detonated remotely.

There was enough blame to go around. NASA was blamed for launching in unsafe conditions, there was pressure to launch too many missions, and Congress was faulted for not giving enough funding.

Here's CNN's coverage (notice the narrator who seems completely unprepared)

Here's footage with a view from the ground.