[Forty years ago this week, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart upon takeoff, instantly becoming one of the most visible and tragic American stories of the last half-century. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and a handful of contexts.]
On three earlier space program disasters that in distinct ways
echoed into the Challenger’s.
1)
Apollo 1 (1967): 59
years ago tomorrow, on
January 27th, 1967, a fire swept through the command module of
the first manned Apollo mission while the ship was on the launchpad for a
preflight test, killing all
three astronauts on board (Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger
Chaffee). Obviously a launchpad disaster that takes the life of an entire
mission’s crew is eerily similar to what would happen with the Challenger
a couple decades later, but there’s at least one significant difference: this
was to be the first manned Apollo mission, and so it stands to reason that
mistakes and failures were possible, and indeed likely inevitable when it came
to things like the first launch (although of course this was a hugely
destructive and tragic failure); while the Space Shuttle program had begun in 1981
and seen the first successful orbital
flight in 1982, making the Challenger’s launch part of what would
seem to have been by that time a well-established and safe routine before
tragedy struck.
2)
Apollo 13 (1970): I
don’t imagine I need to say too much about the story of this subsequent, successfully
launched but hugely troubled Apollo mission, given the prominence of the 1995 film which depicts
the mission’s events.
As that film captures, the Apollo 13 astronauts were able to work with
the NASA folks on the ground to get their ship and themselves back to Earth
safely, one of the most impressive scientific feats in American history and a clear
contrast to the Challenger tragedy. But the latter mission’s tragically
different endpoint shouldn’t obscure something we can learn from the Apollo
13 mission: the remarkable level of skill, ingenuity, teamwork, and courage
displayed by NASA astronauts and ground crew alike. That was just as true of
every member of the Challenger mission (including the unique one about
whom I’ll write tomorrow), even if they sadly did not have a chance to
demonstrate it.
3)
Soyuz
11 (1971): As I highlighted in this
post on Kennedy’s “moon shot” speech, the Cold War rivalry between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union played a huge role in the development of the U.S. space
program, which means that (at least in my experience) we tend not to think much
at all about Soviet space missions, and certainly not about them as parallel to
U.S. ones. But if we take a step back, of course they were parallel; and moreover,
as these are the two nations that (to this day) have had the most success putting
humans in space, there’s a lot we can and should learn from comparing and
contrasting their experiences doing so. Especially their most tragic
experiences—and if Challenger is ours, I’d say the death of all
three Soyuz 11 astronauts aboard the new Soviet
space station Salyut 1 has to be theirs. And while all the lessons
we might take from the latter are above the paygrade of this last moment in a
brief blog post, I’ll just add this: mourning and memorializing
those three Soviet astronauts should be just as much of a no-brainer, for Americans
and all people, as doing so for the Challenger’s.
Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections
you’d share?
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