Forty years ago, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on live television just 73 seconds after lifting off. All seven astronauts aboard died, plunging the nation into mourning. On our video podcast “Settle In,” Geoff Bennett and Miles O’Brien discussed that moment and how it changed the country.
Amna Nawaz:
Forty years ago today, the Challenger space shuttle exploded on live television just 73 seconds after liftoff. All seven astronauts aboard died, including Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher and ordinary citizen to fly in space, plunging the nation into mourning.
Geoff Bennett:
I spoke with our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, who has covered the space program for decades, about that moment and how it changed the country for our video podcast “Settle In.”
Here’s some of that conversation.
Why was this particular launch — why did it capture the public’s imagination in a way that previous launches hadn’t?
Miles O’Brien:
It was all about the teacher, Geoff, Christa McAuliffe, elementary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, who had participated in a nationwide contest to become the first teacher in space.
She was a fabulous, interesting character and won the rights to fly on the shuttle as the shuttle program turned toward allowing civilians to fly in space. And they were leaning toward trying to show the world that the space shuttle system was routine and could get people to space, everyday people to space, in a relatively inexpensive way.
1986, they had 15 flights on the manifest, way, way beyond anything it had attempted in the past. It was going to launch spy satellites, commercial satellites, scientific missions. And they were really kind of hell-bent to prove that this system was reliable enough for a teacher to fly and give lessons.
And so the world was fixated on that after 24 previous flights. The first flight, of course, in 1981 got a lot of attention. Then many of the flights fell off the front page of the newspapers, but this one really captured hearts and minds and pointedly, sadly, was watched by hundreds of thousands of schoolkids in their classrooms that morning.
Geoff Bennett:
You happened to be there that day. Set the scene for us. What was it like?
Miles O’Brien:
Well, I wasn’t quite there. I was — but I was close enough.
You have to remember this was a record cold snap in Florida, a 100-year record. I was a 26-year-old green reporter working in local news in Tampa, Florida. And I had spent the entire night in a citrus grove doing live reports with a grower who was worried about losing his crops because of the bitter cold. It was down in the teens, and, in Florida, that’s something that people remember.
And after a full night of work, I went to sleep and was awakened by the assignment editor at my station, saying: “The shuttle has exploded.” And I couldn’t even process that.
And I went outside in my house — at my house in Tampa, and I looked up in this impossibly Bluesky, and I could see the remnants of the contrail of Challenger, and it was like a big, giant Y in the sky. This is 150 miles away, and it just kind of hung there like a pall over the state and the city.
And so I got busy doing the local news assignment, but it’s hard to overstate how much of a shock this was to the country. Up until that time, NASA, despite the fact that it had a terrible accident in 1967, the Apollo 1 accident, where three crew members were incinerated on a launchpad during a test, but that was out of public view.
This was something everyone saw instantly. It was broadcast live on CNN.And the world watched it, and children were connected to it. And there was a profound sense of loss of innocence, I think, for NASA, which at that point really, in the public’s mind, could do no wrong.
Geoff Bennett:
A loss of innocence for NASA.
I mean, did it feel like the nation and the world in mourning in real time? What was the immediate aftermath like?
Miles O’Brien:
Yes, it was a pall.
And Ronald Reagan was supposed to deliver his State of the Union address that night. And, for a time, he thought — they thought they would press on and actually give that address, but, eventually, they canceled the State of the Union.
And, instead, he gave an Oval Office speech that was — it was authored by his famous speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
President Ronald Reagan:
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us with the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.
Miles O’Brien:
It was a collective tragedy that I think at that point only rivaled the assassination of JFK.
Geoff Bennett:
And you can find that full conversation and all episodes of “Settle In” from PBS News on our YouTube page and wherever you get your podcasts.
