[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 a controversial investigation, a tragic follow-up, and a bigger
question that remains.
As would likely be the case with any federal disaster as tragic
and as public as the Challenger explosion, and as was doubly the case due
to President Reagan’s more personal interests in the mission as I traced in the
prior two posts in this series, the tragedy was followed by an intensive
investigation, or rather two interconnected ones: first the Presidential
Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, chaired by former
U.S. Attorney General William P. Rogers
and featuring such space program and scientific luminaries as Neil Armstrong,
Sally Ride, Chuck Yeager, and (most controversially) Richard Feynman; and a subsequent
House Committee on Science & Technology inquiry. The Rogers Commission (as
it came to be known) held a number of televised
hearings and then released its
extensive report on June 6th, 1986; the House Committee then
reviewed that report along with its own findings and released its
complementary report on October 29th.
Both reports noted a number of mistakes and missteps, not only in
the immediate lead-up to the disaster, but also and especially in earlier moments
when specific issues (such as the difficulty of a launch in extremely cold temperatures,
as
was the case on January 28th) had been raised and frustratingly
brushed aside. Feynman went even further, making a more stridently critical
case against NASA that he demanded be added to the Rogers report as an
Appendix (Appendix
F). I have to imagine that such hindsight finger-pointing could be part of
virtually any post-mission investigation and report, even with the 99% of such
missions that went off smoothly and successfully across the Space Shuttle’s
(and space program’s) history. But the pro-NASA case was not helped at all by a
second and equally tragic shuttle disaster almost exactly 17 years later: on February 1st,
2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up when attempting
reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.
After that second tragedy, NASA began to wind down the Space Shuttle program, replacing
it with the newly constructed International Space Station (ISS) and phasing
out the shuttles entirely by the early 2010s.
No governmental or scientific program necessarily needs to last
forever, and no matter what the Space Shuttle program achieved a great deal of
significant success in its 30 years of operation. It also seems silly to even suggest
additional federal expenditures on science or research here in early 2026,
given the exact
opposite trends that the second Trump administration has
created. But I’m going to do so anyway, at least as a long-term goal. There
are all kinds of ways we can and must respond to the global
climate crisis and fight for a more sustainable future, most of them very
much focused on our own planet as they should be. But a federal program that
offers the possibility of helping us find other places around the galaxy where
we might live—and, yes, one that is not spearheaded by egotistical
and destructive tech billionaires—seems to me well worth reinvesting in and
extending as we deal with all those global challenges and their effects. I’ve
got one more post in this series on a different note, but to end the thread of
the last few posts: while the Challenger was in many ways one of the
worst moments of the late 20th century in America, it also helps us
remember a program that featured much of our best, and could do so again.
Last ChallengerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections
you’d share?
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