Ended up running across the Challenger four-episode miniseries on Netflix last night, watched half, then ended up watching the other half until about 3am. (Stupid, but... I knew I was sleeping in. Plus I just needed to escape.)
I did not see it live, not as 17% of the country did -- although my generation might have caught it if they were running it in school as part of a historic event thing. (But most kids would have been at lunch). I was home sick that day, no one else was there, and I remember coming down to eat something and turning on the TV since I was there.. and it must have been right after it happened (since the launch was at 11:38am). Mind-boggling, in part, because like the series is suggesting, NASA had been trying to brand space travel as safe and talking up the possibilities, without reaffirming how dangerous it could be.
It was to the point as Netflex show said that they were sending up a civilian (a teacher), and what I realized in the series was that Peter Billingsley was being groomed to go up once they might have been able to spring for a kid next. It was all again a push to normalize space travel, but it seems to have been a managerial dream, not an engineer dream.
In actuality, they were way behind schedule, had pitched a lot more trips per year to Congress (to get funding) than actually being realized, and that all played into why the fucking managers kept pushing to meet schedule. No, I don't think it specifically came from Reagan; it was more the dynamics of the budgeting and Congressional approval.
Anyway (and I knew this from some articles a few years back), the O-rings had been problematic esp in cold temperatures and had shown signs of failure (on occasion disturbing levels) on past launches. Basically the solid fuel thrusters were assembled from cylindrical pieces and where the seams are on the structure if where the O-rings would make a strong seal to prevent leakage. Except as it turns out the material was not as resilient as it needed to be esp when the temp dropped, and there were signs of O-rings melting and/or burning through on some launches.
To redesign the o-ring would take two years of redevelopment, which they didn't want to do due to budgeting from Congress and the promises they had made and already being behind.
The week of the Challenger launch, they had already failed to launch a few times. First day, due to weather (which ended up being clear, it was just a bad weather call), and then second there were issues with a door not working properly. On the third day, when they figured it would be scrubbed due to it being SO cold in Florida that day that they let the pipes run water all night to prevent freezing and thus putting 1-2' icicles all over the structure, they got a team to come in for hours and remove all the ice and decided to push the launch anyway.
Back at the contractor, the engineers had recommended a no-go the prior night, due to the O-ring issue + the fact that it was only approved down to about 43F degrees before it could fail... and the temperature was supposed to be cold (and ended up being 18F). The material wasn't resilient enough to maintain the seal at that temperature, which could result in burn-through once it shifted, did not flex to the gap, and gas ignited. The relevant engineering reps then were basically bullied by management to sign off anyway, despite their concerns. Some of the engineers had been fretting over EACH flight going up in fear over the O-ring issue and predicted a failure would be catastrophic. NASA wanted to launch, so launch they did. The crew didn't know.
Basically the O-ring failed on lift-off -- there are puffs of smoke on the footage signifying the burn-through of a 70-degree arc of both O-rings (primary and backup).
[Note: This is the time when the engineers expected the o-rings to fail, where the metal is buckling and the o-rings could not flex enough to preserve the seal. They were ecstatic when the shuttle actually got into the air, because they thought it had survived at that point.] Weirdly, the heat actually generated some kind of metallic crust seal that welded the hole shut as it was leaving the ground and so the breach was temporarily plugged. Of course, at that point it's all a done deal anyway: once the solid-state boosters engage in this design, there is no way to stop them for 2 solid minutes; there are extraction/escape scenarios planned after the thrusters end (involved in piloting the shuttle back) but not until two minutes in and everything separates.
Unfortunately, the wind shear that day was far worse than normal weather. There is a powerback of thrusters after liftoff due to the denser atmosphere, from 103% capacity to around 45% capacity. The thrusters are typically reengaged back up to full max around 70 seconds. In this case, at 73 seconds into the launch, the throttle was opened up, and the temporarily metallic "clot" or seal -- due to the large thrust + the nasty wind shear conditions -- flexed the metal enough that it broke open, leaving a large hole. This is when the fuel started to burn through the gap, and in a few seconds the structure ruptured, the engines turned and hit the main fuel canister which exploded, and the engines flew off in different directions still firing.
The Challenger itself wasn't blown up, but it was flying SO fast that it tumbled broadside into the air stream and was torn apart rapidly from g-force; the crew cabin which was designed to survive that level of force (which in this case might have been a bad thing) kept arcing up to something like 65K feet, then arc'ed down and plummeted into the ocean, hitting at about 200mph and shattering. There was nothing the crew could have done to fly anything because the Challenger was ripped apart quickly, they were just passengers in the debris. Most of them probably quickly passed out from depressurization and G-force, although three of the personal air canisters (meant for when there was a need for oxygen) had been manually triggered, meaning a few of the crew did live long enough to turn them on... and it's clear that Smith (the pilot) unlocked/moved some controls manually in an attempt to recover control, which was not an option unfortunately. It's just not clear if anyone was conscious at impact, although the amount of air left in the canisters reflects what would be expected. [The show did not talk about this much, I think? I don't remember now, but it is discoverable online; there also a detailed analysis in the
Wiki.]
What Reagan did do was appoint a friend to try and minimize fallout on NASA, because he didn't want the space program to fail; and NASA tried to deflect and minimize how much they knew ahead of time. unfortunately for them, some of the engineers leaked documents and information and were even willing to go on the record despite potentially losing their jobs, so that the truth about the O-rings would be exposed.
I think what I enjoyed most was all the personal interviews with people, and all the historical film footage of the crew, esp McAuliffe. Yes, I was 17 at the time, but I really hadn't paid much attention. So this was like picking up all the stuff I should have observed if I had been paying attention. I wasn't even really thinking about the alternate, but she was featured in a lot of interviews/footage -- Barbara Morgan -- because she knew Christa well from their time together and the crew as well, and she had missed the tragedy by being the alternate. She ended up going into space on the Endeavor 21 years later. There was also footage of the other woman on the Challenger flight, Judy Resnik, who I thought was really cool as one science-y woman to another. She was an engineer who had been trained to be an astronaut for the shuttle series; unlike McAuliffe who was obviously a teacher and had the social inflections, melodious voice, etc, that you would expect in a teacher, Judy was more the flat monotone science-heavy voice in how she talked and what she focused on. I thought she was so cool. But it was really interesting to see the surviving widows now, 30+ years after, and see how resilient THEY have been and how they worked through potential bitterness and loss themselves. Some of the engineers also still feel guilt over having not stopped the launch even if the decision was taken from them.
I think what I despise most was the lead manager who made the decision to go up, and he is now a very old man, but still saying he would have made the same decision today with the same information, and basically writing it off as "lives lost in the process of exploration." IOW, expendable resources. He actually is quoted at length and willingly, so it's not like the clips were twisted.
This was not a case where a "total accident" occurred and it's just part of the cost of doing business because there was a risk that could not have been mitigated. No, this is a case where the problem had been documented for a few years, the engineers had purposefully created paper trails, the engineers refused to okay the launch, and the managers wrote them off and insisted on launching anyway. And then what the engineers knew all along was going to happen DID happen. I have nothing but contempt for this man. They cut corners because they had gotten away with cutting them many times in the past, against the engineering advice, and it finally blew up in their faces.