11. The Challenger Explosion
On a January morning in 1986, schoolchildren all over America were glued to their classroom television sets to watch teacher Christa McAuliffe be the first civilian to zoom into space. All of those years of promising “regular” people being astronauts and seeing ourselves eventually being up there were coming true until tragedy struck 73 seconds into the launch. McAuliffe and the other six members of the Challenger shuttle were killed when the spaceship exploded off the coast of Florida. Many in NASA have said that the accident, caused by o-ring issues in the rocket fuel boosters, set the space program back by not only years or decades, but to a place it would never recover from. It’s hard to dispute since the greatest leaps forward in civilian space travel are now being made by private companies, not governments.11. The Challenger Explosion
On a January morning in 1986, schoolchildren all over America were glued to their classroom television sets to watch teacher Christa McAuliffe be the first civilian to zoom into space. All of those years of promising “regular” people being astronauts and seeing ourselves eventually being up there were coming true until tragedy struck 73 seconds into the launch. McAuliffe and the other six members of the Challenger shuttle were killed when the spaceship exploded off the coast of Florida. Many in NASA have said that the accident, caused by o-ring issues in the rocket fuel boosters, set the space program back by not only years or decades, but to a place it would never recover from. It’s hard to dispute since the greatest leaps forward in civilian space travel are now being made by private companies, not governments.
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