What happened on January 28, 1986? Many people remember this day well, although many people have forgotten the great loss as well as the tragic accident that occurred. In the 1970’s NASA strived to design and build a lighter, faster orbiter. Nasa needed a test vehicle to make sure that the lighter airframe could handle the pressure of Space Travel. First called STA-099, the Challenger was designed and planned to be a test shuttle for the Space Shuttle Program. At this time computer software wasn’t yet developed enough to accurately predict how the STA-099’s newly designed airframe would respond to heat, stress and pressure. The best tests that NASA could run on the shuttle were intense vibration and thermal heat testing. These tests worked …show more content…
Resnik, mission specialist; Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, mission commander; Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist; Mike J. Smith, pilot; and Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist. The primary component of the vehicle is the Orbiter, the reusable, winged craft that contains the crew and payload. However, the Orbiter itself doesn’t produce enough thrust or carry enough fuel to get into orbit. The thrust needed to get the Shuttle into orbit is produced by two large Solid Rocket Boosters, each is attached to the side of the external tank by the means of two large struts. The external tank contains the fuel needed to fuel the three main boosters in the Orbiter, which is attached to the Orbiter by the means of two large …show more content…
Purely by chance, the Ice Team happened to point a camera at the aft field joint of the right booster and recorded a temperature of only 8 degrees, much colder than the air temperature and far below the design tolerances of the O-rings. Had this wind been blowing from any other direction and not directly onto the joint the O-rings would have been considerably warmer and they may not have failed. An additional factor that contributed to the tragedy was that the information collected by the Ice Team was never passed on to decision makers, primarily because it was not the Ice Team's responsibility to report anything other than the ice thickness on the external tank. Had the aft field joint temperature been provided to engineers at NASA and Morton Thiokol, the launch almost surely would've been aborted and the loss of Challenger avoided. Before the Challenger, it was thought that if any complications was going to happened to the rocket booster, it would have happened at ignition and the whole vehicle would have been lost on the launch pad. The O-rings still performed their job well into the mission. The O-rings did partially fail at ignition as indicated by launchpad cameras showing puffs of black smoke emanating from the aft field joint on the right booster 0.678 seconds after booster ignition. Then puffs, often known as