What Day Was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster?

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The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space.

The disaster, later traced to an O-ring seal failure in cold weather, led to a 32-month grounding of the shuttle program while NASA redesigned key components and safety procedures.

The disaster was watched live by many American schoolchildren, since Christa McAuliffe's participation as part of NASA's Teacher in Space program had specifically been promoted to classrooms beforehand.

The Rogers Commission investigating the disaster included physicist Richard Feynman, whose live demonstration of an O-ring's loss of resilience in ice water became one of the most widely remembered moments of the entire inquiry.

NASA's subsequent Rogers Commission report was also sharply critical of internal agency communication failures, finding that engineering concerns about the O-ring seals had been raised prior to launch but not adequately escalated.