The same destruct signal would have destroyed the external tank had it not already disintegrated. George Martin, formerly of Martin Marietta, was appointed to this position. Edward Rolf Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia Tufte (1918–2020) and Edward E. Tufte (1912–1999). In 1984, prior to establishing the Teacher in Space Program (TISP), NASA created the Space Flight Participant Program whose aim was "to select teachers, journalists, artists, and other people who could bring their unique perspective to the human spaceflight experience as a passenger on the space shuttle. [141] Tours of the space center pause briefly near the grove for a moment of silence, and the trees can be seen from nearby NASA Road 1.

The approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on March 26, 1986 (M.P.C. [42] In the rescheduled State of the Union address on February 4, President Reagan did mention the deceased Challenger crew members, and modified his remarks about the X-ray experiment as "launched and lost". This image was taken from Tufte’s polemic, “PowerPoint Does Rocket Science.” In it, he asserts that the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was, in part, due to NASA’s use of PowerPoint. With the first vertical motion of the vehicle, the gaseous hydrogen vent arm retracted from the external tank (ET) but failed to latch back. Had it not been for the wind shear, the fortuitous oxide seal might have held through booster burnout. Launch escape systems were considered several times during shuttle development, but NASA's conclusion was that the shuttle's expected high reliability would preclude the need for one. Until 2010, the live broadcast of the launch and subsequent disaster by CNN was the only known on-location video footage from within range of the launch site. His body had settled to the sea floor, 101.2 feet (30.8 m) below the surface, some 0.7 nautical miles (1.3 km; 0.81 mi) from the final resting place of the crew compartment.
Delays in the previous mission, STS-61-C, caused the launch date to be moved to January 23 and then to January 24. Loss of fuel pressure and rising combustion chamber temperatures caused the computers to shut off the engines. The song "XO" was recorded with the sincerest intention to help heal those who have lost loved ones and to remind us that unexpected things happen, so love and appreciate every minute that you have with those who mean the most to you. That night, the Thiokol engineers tried hard to persuade their superiors to postpone the launch, raising voices and pounding tables.

[110] The unit was established in 1992.[111]. The Challenger loss motivated the Air Force to set in motion a chain of events that finally led to the May 13, 1988, decision to cancel its Vandenberg Shuttle launch plans in favor of the Titan IV uncrewed launch vehicle. This was unproven, and was in any case an argument that did not apply to a "Criticality 1" component. At T+68, the CAPCOM Richard O. Although the SRB was not designed to function this way, it appeared to work well enough, and Morton-Thiokol changed the design specs to accommodate this process, known as extrusion. [32] The location of Smith's activation switch, on the back side of his seat, likely indicated that either Resnik or Onizuka activated it for him.

"[131][134], On June 16, 2015, post-metal band Vattnet Viskar released a full-length album titled Settler which was largely inspired by the Challenger accident and Christa McAuliffe in particular.

[42][43] Inclusion of extensive discussion of NASA, the launch, or McAuliffe in the State of the Union address effectively stopped at the desk of Cabinet Secretary Alfred H. They had considerable heat damage due to a LOX-rich shutdown caused by the drop in hydrogen fuel pressure as the external tank began to fail.

[25] The cabin was stabilized during descent by the large mass of electrical wires trailing behind it.

The problem had been known about for years. The Challenger disaster also provided a chance to see how traumatic events affected children's psyches. The crew consisted of five NASA astronauts, and two payload specialists. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, attention once again focused on the attitude of NASA management towards safety issues.