On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seven crew members died, a $3 billion-dollar orbital vehicle was lost, and NASA’s Space Shuttle program was suspended for 32 months.
The official cause of the disaster was the failure of an O-ring to prevent hot gases from leaking through the joint in the solid rocket motor during launch.[i] The Rogers Commission – the body tasked with investigating the disaster – found that the O-ring design had been a point of concern for several years prior to the disaster, but that any concerns had been either poorly communicated or ignored in favor of maintaining project delivery on-time and on-budget.[ii]
In addition to the faulty initial design of the O-rings, the Commission determined that the unusually cold temperatures at the time of the launch (conditions in which none of the … Read more...