As NASA employees and family members gather at Johnson Space Center and Arlington National Cemetery Thursday to mark the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, a group of young students will be hard at work at the Houston Museum of Natural Science keeping the Challenger legacy alive.
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“I came home, here to Huntsville, home to Marshall Space Center, home to a shaken agency, a shaken country, and a shaken dream”, said Hickam. “We had trouble really processing what we were seeing with our eyes … we were in a sense playing tricks with our minds and trying not to believe something that inside ourselves we really knew what had happened”.
Elder said it’s important that her students have an appreciation for who McAuliffe was and what she represented.
Accident investigators also found that pressure to maintain a busy flight schedule contributed to Challenger’s demise. The lift off appeared normal until the shuttle began to careen off course and, just 73-seconds into the flight, burst into flames.
They have also delivered payloads to the International Space Station, tacking over a role NASA’s now retired space shuttles handled. The Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean less than two minutes after takeoff, killing all seven crew members, back in 1986.
The explosion took an immediate toll on the astronaut community, who were “very shaken” by the accident, Garneau said, despite the keen understanding of the possible dangers of space travel.
Investigations concluded a burn through on the O-rings is what primarily caused the explosion.
Since the disaster, Wheeling Jesuit University was able to open their Challenger Learning Center, to gives kids in our area a hands on lesson on some of the things astronauts might experience, when they go through training.
“I’d love to be an astronaut and be the first person on Mars”, said Diego Perez, one of the space campers in attendance.
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Despite the Challenger’ disaster, Garneau said the lure of space remained strong. I still wanted to be an astronaut.
