They consisted of thousands of different parts, and the failure of many of them could cause an accident. Reusable spacecraft have rightly been called the most complex machines in history. But in the shadow of these successes lay the fundamental problems that ultimately led to the catastrophe. NASA planned to launch at least 15 shuttles. Statistics from the first five years of the program clearly demonstrate this trend.ġ986 was to be a record year. The Aerospace Administration has tried to increase the frequency of shuttle launches by putting new shuttles into operation and reducing their after-flight service. So it’s no surprise that NASA wanted to get the most out of the unique characteristics of reusable spacecraft. It had been assumed that in the near future shuttles would be able to completely replace disposable spacecraft. By the mid-1980s, NASA had a long list of private orders. In addition to scientific missions and flights for the Pentagon, shuttles were also used to launch various commercial cargoes into orbit. All this gave the public the impression that traveling by shuttle is not much different from flying a plane, and almost any healthy person can safely fly into space after a little training.įinally, we should not forget that the Space Shuttle was originally planned as a system that can pay off in the long run.
The first astronaut of Germany and a Saudi prince also went to space by shuttle. A year later another US senator came aboard the STS-61C mission as a “passenger” - Bill Nelson. He demonstrated such an epically poor adaptation to weightlessness that NASA engineers later named a humorous figure in his honor that symbolizes disability in space. The large capacity of the shuttles and the short nature of their flights also allowed NASA to include “passengers” in their crews - people whose skills, so to speak, was not critical for the success of the mission, but their stay in space was necessary for political reasons or to strengthen relations with foreign partners.įor example, in 1985, US Senator Jacob Garn went into orbit as part of the STS-51D mission. Such operations in space were not performed before or after. Even 35 years later, reports of some of the early missions of reusable ships, when astronauts went into outer space without insurance files to catch satellites, really look like episodes from science fiction movies. Also, shuttle crews could be used as space installers - for the assembly of large structures (such as the Freedom orbital station). For example, shuttle crews could repair satellites directly in space or, if necessary, remove cargo from orbit and return it to Earth. Despite the compromising nature of the system, it has provided NASA with a number of truly unique capabilities. Winged spacecraft first went into space in 1981. It lay 20 km from the shore at a depth of more than 20 m. A fragment of the right wing of the Challenger, lifted from the ocean floor by a team of divers of the warship Opportune. This context is important for understanding the causes of the tragedy. Dizziness with successīefore moving on to the Challenger disaster and its aftermath, we need to discuss how the Space Shuttle program developed before 1986. The disaster had huge consequences for both the Space Shuttle program and all of American astronautics, forever dividing it into “before” and “after”. The launch was broadcast live, so all viewers learned about the tragedy immediately. In the 73rd second of the flight, when Challenger was at an altitude of 15 km, it suddenly turned into a huge fireball. Unfortunately, all that was not the reason why the STS-51L mission went down in history.
NASA has come close to such a desirable goal as launching shuttles into space at intervals of a couple of weeks. And secondly, the Challenger was launched only 16 days after the previous space shuttle. She had a mission to conduct several televised lessons when the shuttle was in orbit. First, one of its participants was schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who won the Teacher in Space competition (more than 11,000 people took part). The reusable ship Challenger rose into the cloudless sky with a crew of seven astronauts on board.ĭespite the generally routine nature of the mission, this flight was considered interesting for several reasons. This sound marked the 25th launch of the Space Shuttle system. In the morning of Janusolid-fuel boosters and RS-25 engines roared on the territory of the Kennedy Space Center.
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