The Challenger Disaster

On the night of January 27, 1986, a Morton Thiokol engineer named Allan McDonald refused to sign a document saying it was safe to launch the space shuttle Challenger the next morning.

The engineers who built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters had recommended against flying in temperatures colder than 53 degrees, then reversed themselves after a 30-minute private caucus in which a vice president was told to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.

The launch went ahead at 11:38 a.m. in 36-degree weather, and 73 seconds later Challenger came apart on live television.

In this episode, Brian opens with his own memory of watching the launch as a 12-year-old home sick from school, on one of the few channels carrying it live, and then goes into the record most people have never read. He follows the paper trail from Roger Boisjoly's July 1985 memo warning of a catastrophe of the highest order, through the launch constraint that NASA's own booster manager imposed and then waived five flights in a row, to the ice team's disputed 8-degree reading on the right booster before dawn.

He walks through the teleconference and the caucus using the sworn testimony of the men who were in the room, and explains why the people with authority to scrub the launch that morning had never heard the words O-ring in connection with it.The second half of the episode covers what the official record says about the crew after the breakup, drawn from the July 1986 report by physician and astronaut Joseph Kerwin.

The crew compartment stayed intact, climbed to 65,000 feet, and took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to reach the water. Four emergency air packs were recovered and three had been switched on, including pilot Mike Smith's, which someone seated behind him would have had to reach back and activate. Three lever-lock switches on Smith's panel had been moved from their launch positions. Brian keeps to what the physical evidence supports and stops where Kerwin stopped.

The episode also tells the story of how the Rogers Commission found out about the Thiokol recommendation only after a NASA budget analyst leaked documents to the New York Times and McDonald stood up in a closed hearing to say NASA wasn't telling the whole story.

It covers Richard Feynman's ice water demonstration and the phone call from Sally Ride that set it up, a detail General Donald Kutyna kept secret for 26 years. It follows McDonald and Boisjoly home to Utah, where both men were reassigned within weeks of testifying, and traces what the rest of their lives looked like. Bob Ebeling, the engineer who first raised the alarm about the forecast, spent 30 years blaming himself and received a letter from one of the NASA managers who had overruled him two months before he died.

The episode closes on the wreckage sealed inside two abandoned Minuteman missile silos at Cape Canaveral, the pieces the ocean has kept returning as recently as 2022, and Barbara Morgan, the backup teacher who watched from the ground with the families and flew to the International Space Station 21 years later.

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