A color photograph of seven smiling American astronauts - two women and five men - in blue suits and spacesuits in their hands against the background of the Stars and Stripes flag on January 28, 1986, went around the world. First as good news from NASA. "They are astronauts, they fly into space to return as heroes." Then on the same day the same photograph appeared on TV screens in a black mourning frame. The signature under it read: “They flew into space and will never return to Earth. Let us remember them kindly. They are heroes and died in the name of science."
The launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, which NASA allowed to broadcast on television directly from the scene, was scheduled for January 28, 1986 at 9:38 am local time from Cape Canaveral (Florida). Suddenly it was postponed until two in the afternoon. According to the ubiquitous reporters, there were minor problems with the sealed system of the hatches. It's okay, the experts promised to fix everything quickly.
Several hours of free time gave the reporters the opportunity to speculate on the safety of flights into space, to ask the leading experts who were present at the launch site that day about the cause of the malfunction and about the prospects for using space shuttles. It was also recalled that on July 30, 1985, when entering a near-earth orbit, one of the three engines of the Challenger spacecraft had already failed once. For this reason, the Shuttle, which was making its eighth flight, had to descend into a lowered orbit. But this time the experts assured that everything will be in perfect order, there will be no troubles.
Journalists filled the airtime vacuum with all sorts of stories and interviews, especially since US President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy were on the podium among the honorable spectators. He, too, answered the reporters' questions and glanced with a smile at the glittering white spaceship. Everyone was in high spirits, everyone was smiling, they were pointing their binoculars at the launch pad. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, the wind was not very strong - good weather for the start.
In order to further fill the gap that had arisen, television broadcast the history of space flights of the Space Shuttle ships, predicting a great future for these powerful new representatives of rocket technology. It was also said that the postponement of the launch to a later time was caused by a change in the weather and malfunctions in the hermetic locking system of the hatches.
And finally the countdown went for seconds: there were three, two, one seconds left before the start … A powerful hum and a bright flame burst out of the Challenger's nozzles. Swaying slightly, he pulled away from the launch pad and rose into the sky, leaving behind him a silvery train. The spectators closely followed the flight. Cosmic time began its countdown. One second, second, third …
Promotional video:
The flight took place as usual. The speed of the spacecraft has reached three thousand kilometers, the height is seventeen kilometers. It seemed that one could breathe a sigh of relief: the start took place. But…
It was the 73rd second of the flight, when suddenly a bright yellow heat flashed in the sky. What had been the Challenger spacecraft, in the blink of an eye, turned into a white, bubbling, incandescent cloud, like dozens of jet fighters streaking across the sky. The Challenger exploded in front of thousands of spectators at Cape Canaveral and millions of TV viewers watching the launch. Seven hundred tons of oxygen and hydrogen, rocket fuel, along with seven cosmonauts burned up in the atmosphere.
It was the greatest tragedy. At that moment, everyone present and President Reagan were literally speechless. Everyone was shocked. And from the sky, to the ground and into the bay, the red-hot remnants of the Challenger were falling.
In those difficult moments, even lively reporters did not know how and what to talk about. It was simply impossible to believe that an explosion occurred in the sky in front of the festively-minded audience, a tragedy happened and seven hero astronauts died. Among them was the teacher Christa McOliff, about whom they wrote that she was the first of the female teachers to conduct two television lessons from space and shoot an educational film.
Attempts to compose from the remains of the Challenger found on the ground and raised from the sea into an integral rocket in order to determine the causes of the disaster, have led nowhere. Many parts were missing. The experts could not come to any definite conclusions in the results. Various assumptions were made about the causes of the catastrophe, in particular, that cracks could form on the fuel tanks due to the high temperature and kerosene leaked out, which, mixed with oxygen, could cause an explosion.
Yet most of the experts were inclined to believe that the explosion could have occurred due to damage in the first stage solid-propellant booster. Then fuel tanks exploded along the chain. Another version was also not denied, according to which one of the fuel tanks at the moment of launch, due to the shaking, could leave its fortification and hit the rocket itself, which is why the explosion occurred. But mankind will hardly ever know the exact answer to this question.
After such a major disaster, NASA was forced to stop further flights into space. And all fifteen scheduled Shuttle flights for 1986 have been canceled. Responsible employees of the Space Flight Administration have long known that the most vulnerable spots in the Shuttle complex were precisely solid-propellant rockets. The engineers at the company that made the rockets wanted to postpone the launch to check all safety systems again, but NASA did not want to postpone the flight. Investigations by several commissions have shown that NASA has violated safety assurance standards in the past. In many cases, the cosmonauts put themselves at mortal risk, but for the time being they were helped by His Majesty "Happy Accident" This time everything happened differently.
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS" by N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev
