January 29, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Aftermaths

[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 6^th, 1986; the House Committee then reviewed that report along with its own findings and released its complementary report on October 29^th.

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 28^th) 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 1^st, 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 20^th 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?

January 28, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: The Explosion

[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 why we were so unprepared for disaster, and what the horrifying moment meant.

As I wrote in Monday’s post, there’s a significant difference between early space program disasters like the Apollo 1 fire or Apollo 13’s manifold issues and what happened on the morning of January 28^th, 1986. Apollo 1 was to be the first manned mission of its type for the U.S. space program, and Apollo 13 was only three years later, very much still in the program’s infancy. By comparison, the Challenger’s 1986 mission, dubbed STS-51-L, was to have been the 25^th Space Shuttle flight since the program’s launch in 1981, and the 10^th for Challenger alone. Both the space program overall and the Space Shuttle missions specifically had become well-oiled and predictable machines—indeed, so confident were the NASA engineers in the Space Shuttle program that, after initially featuring ejection seats and pressure suits for the astronauts on the two-person test flights, they decided not to include any such escape mechanisms on the operational flights.

While of course the presence on the shuttle of Teacher in Space Project selectee Christa McAuliffe, about whose inspiring story and voice I wrote in yesterday’s post, had a lot to do with it, I have to think that this level of earned confidence in the Space Shuttle program was likewise a factor in NASA’s decision to not only broadcast the Challenger’s launch live, but also and especially to show it to millions of children in classrooms around the country (or at least in the more eastern time zones, as the 11:30 am launch time was a bit too early for it to be shown on the West Coast). (Another factor, and one I should have mentioned in yesterday’s post so I wanted to make sure to do so here, was the presence of another groundbreaking and inspiring astronaut, Ronald E. McNair, one of the first three Black astronauts and the second to go to space when he did so for the first time on 1984’s STS-41B shuttle mission.) (Too many parentheses, I know, but another potential factor, especially for conspiracy-minded folks, was President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union address on the evening of January 28^th, during which he planned to talk about the shuttle launch.)

Reagan ended up using that evening time slot to address the tragedy instead, perhaps hoping to provide some context for those millions of children who had watched the explosion live. But according to a long-term psychiatric study of a number of those kids, one eventually published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in October 1999, those who watched the launch did display at least some symptoms of what came to be known (thanks in part to this groundbreaking study) as distant-traumatic effects, a subcategory of PTSD. And as one of those kids, and one who distinctly remembers not only watching the launch and explosion on the small TV in the office of the large man who taught me to swim in the Charlottesville public schools, but also and especially the unexpected, unusual, and lingering feelings the experience created in me, I would have to agree. Whatever the factors involved in broadcasting this launch live, the choice to do so, coupled with a tragedy that no one could have predicted (although, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, some did worry about), was even more momentous than the explosion itself.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 27, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Christa McAuliffe

[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 more overt and more subtle reasons why the teacher-turned-astronaut was a perfect choice for the Teacher in Space Project (and an especially tragic loss).

At least according to her mother Grace George Corrigan’s Foreword to Colin Burgess’s cultural biography Teacher in Space: Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger Legacy (2000), the day after John Glenn’s historic September 1962 space flight a 13-year-old Christa McAuliffe told a high school friend, “Do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon? Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that!” Nearly a quarter-century later, when she was applying for President Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project in early 1985, McAuliffe returned to that foundational moment for both herself and the space program, writing on her application, “I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.” NASA official Alan Ladwig would later note that McAuliffe was chosen from among the ten finalists for the project due to her “infectious enthusiasm,” and it seems clear that that enthusiasm was both specific to the history of the space program and thus a genuine part of McAuliffe’s perspective for many decades by that mid-80s moment.

Obviously that throughline makes for a compelling and ultimately tragic side to the story of McAuliffe’s selection for this unique role on a doomed mission. But I would argue that other details about her work as a history and social studies teacher together comprise an even more powerfully symbolic reflection of what she brought to the Challenger. For one thing, she got her Master’s in Education from Maryland’s Bowie State University, an HBCU; there were geographic reasons for the choice (she and her husband lived in Maryland at the time), but I have to think the experience affected her future work as an educator in a variety of inclusive ways. For another thing, during her subsequent time at Concord High School in New Hampshire (where she was working when selected for the project) she created a new course entitled “The American Woman,” which “explored the history of the United States from the female perspective.” And for a third thing, according to a New York Times profile in her teaching she “emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals.” I can’t imagine a more pitch-perfect combination for this first teacher-astronaut.

There’s one more detail about McAuliffe’s biography that I haven’t seen highlighted in as many stories, and that while small adds another compelling layer to her symbolic identity. McAuliffe’s great-uncle was Philip Khuri Hitti, the Lebanese-American historian and educator who became one of the most influential figures in that community as well as in the development of the discipline of Arabic Studies. I can’t find any clear info about whether the two knew each other or not, but I still love the throughline between that groundbreaking educator and the inspiring teacher his great-niece would become. In one of her interviews about the Teacher in Space Project, McAuliffe exclaimed, “Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many people's lives. That's a teacher's dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!" Long before her tragic death (although only amplified by it, if in painfully ironic ways), McAuliffe had already done that, extending the legacy of her historic relative and making her a truly perfect choice for this symbolically American role.

Next ChallengerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Challenger memories or reflections you’d share?

January 26, 2026: The Challenger Disaster: Predecessors

[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 27^th, 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?

January 24-25, 2026: Occasional Poems: Mine!

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

I could go on and on, and perhaps a free-verse epic would be required to really do justice to where we are in late January 2026. But that would be neither a challenge for me nor something y’all would likely want to read, so I decided on a sonnet (Shakespearean, natch):

 

I try to avoid language that’s rash;

AmericanStudies demands our nuance.

But honesty is ripe for a renaissance,

And I gotta say things have gotten pretty fash.

 

Don’t believe me—believe your honest eyes:

Our troops in Caracas, Minneapolis, even freaking Nuuk?

It’d be enough to make our Founding Framers puke,

And all because he didn’t get a Nobel Prize.

 

Of course that’s just the tip of the melting ice:

This nation I love is overrun with ignorance and hate;

Folks are looking for artificial intelligences to date;

And like eggs, sanity comes at an increasingly steep price.

 

I know this sonnet’s supposed to end with a turn,

But hard-won hope’s something we’re gonna have to earn.

 

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share, including your own?

January 23, 2026: Occasional Poems: 21st Century Inaugural Poems

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On quick takeaways from the three 21^st century inaugural poems to date.

1)      Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for the Day” (2009): I’ve thought and talked and written a lot about critical optimism and hard-won hope over the last decade, and would say that Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s first inauguration captures those perspectives and concepts very eloquently. I especially like how the line that first introduces the poem’s title, “Praise strong for struggle, praise song for the day,” expands in the poem’s final full verse and then culminating single line: “In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,/any thing can be made, any sentence begun./On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,//praise song for walking forward in that light.” Each one of the poems I’m highlighting today looks different from the dimmed light of January 2026, but goddamn do we still need to walk forward.

2)      Richard Blanco, “One Today” (2013): I don’t think I had ever read Blanco’s poem, written for Obama’s second inauguration, until researching this post, and I was immediately struck by just how Whitmanesque it is, especially in those long lists (catalogs, as Whitman scholars call them) of settings and social roles alike. The poem’s final lines envision hard-won hope in ways that feel indebted to (or at least in conversation with) Alexander’s, and that Amanda Gorman would herself echo and extend eight years later in the poem I’ll get to in a moment. But the lines of Blanco’s that I love best are the ones that are in conversation with Martín Espada’s poem “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper?” (1993): “ring-up groceries as my mother did/for twenty years, so I could write this poem”; and “hands/as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane/so my brother and I could have books and shoes.”

3)      Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021): It’s very difficult for me to read or watch Gorman’s incredible poem, written for Joe Biden’s inauguration, these five years later, especially when we get to/ lines like “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it./Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy./And this effort very nearly succeeded./But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” Jury’s still out on that one, I’m afraid. But I still find these lines not only just as inspiring as ever, but a crystal clear vision of how I would define both America and the work we must do: “If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made./That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare./It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit./It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, but I’ll try to say my own piece this weekend!

That special poem of mine this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?

January 22, 2026: Occasional Poems: Angelou and Williams for Clinton

[65 years ago Tuesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On what differentiates Clinton’s two inaugural poets, and a crucial connection in their content.

I’m not going to pretend that Maya Angelou wasn’t already a very, very big deal long before she delivered her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in January 1993. Indeed, it’s fair to say she had been one of America’s preeminent writers for at least a quarter-century by then, since the 1969 publication of her first memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But nonetheless, it was both symbolically and nationally significant that the second inaugural poet in our history—and, as I wrote yesterday, the first in more than 30 years; I have to imagine that by 1993 it seemed like Robert Frost’s reading in 1961 was just going to be a one-off—was an African American woman. And honestly, it’s the combination of both of those sentences and contexts—that Angelou was one of the most important 20^th century Black writers, and that this was still a surprising invitation on multiple levels—which makes Clinton’s choice of Angelou to my mind the single most significant moment of occasional poetry in American history.

I hope it’s thus abundantly clear that I mean no disrespect to Clinton’s second inaugural poet Miller Williams, who read his poem “Of History and Hope” at Clinton’s January 1997 inauguration, when I say that the moment was in every sense less significant. Williams was a longtime English Professor at the University of Arkansas (he joined the department in 1970 and was emeritus until his passing in early 2015), and also co-founded and directed for twenty years the University of Arkansas Press. He published a ton of his own poetry, translated other poets including Pablo Neruda, and also happens to have been the father of Lucinda Williams. So this was an impressive figure on many fronts, and one deeply connected to the state of Arkansas that was so foundational in Bill Clinton’s life and story, making Miller a very logical choice for Clinton’s second inaugural poet—but, again, a much less significant one than Maya Angelou (which likely has a lot to do with why I didn’t know about his inaugural poem until researching this series).

But any student of mine, and probably anybody who knows me well at all, knows how much I value close reading, textual analysis, not letting such contexts dictate too fully how we approach the evidence in front of us. And when we look at these two inaugural poems, different as they likewise are in many ways, they have a crucial connection in a core element of their content: their visions of American history and its role in our present. I used a relevant quote from Angelou’s poem as the epigraph for my fourth book (the title of which begins with the same phrase as Williams’s title, “History and Hope”): “History, despite its wrenching pain/Cannot be unlived, but if faced/With courage, need not be lived again.” And very much in conversation with those lines are the concluding ones in Williams’s poem: “All this in the hands of children, eyes already set/on a land we can never visit—it isn’t there yet—/but looking through their eyes, we can see/what our long gift to them may come to be./If we can truly remember, they will not forget.” I’d say we still desperately need to hear and read both of these poetic works and voices in our 21^st century moment.                                    

Last occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?