Seventy-Three Seconds: The Challenger Disaster
1986 · event
Millions of schoolchildren watched live as seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, were lost seventy-three seconds after liftoff. "The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."
Christa McAuliffe had been chosen from 11,000 teachers to give lessons from orbit; schools across America had wheeled televisions into classrooms. The cause was a rubber O-ring stiffened by an overnight frost, and engineers had warned about exactly that, the evening before.
That night Ronald Reagan set aside his State of the Union address and spoke instead to the schoolchildren who had watched: the crew had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God." The disaster rewrote how NASA listens to its engineers.