One of the biggest NASA cover ups, amongst probably many, was the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. The flight that was supposed to take 7 people in to space and back again. None even got out of the atmosphere.
Despite a range of dissenting voices the third attempt to take off was given for January 28th 1986. The date of Ronald Reagan’s state of the union address. What pressures from the White House and beyond have never been recorded officially but we know that there was a pressure on NASA to fly. NASA spokespeople argue it was because of the number of flights scheduled which had to be met. Others say that because of the publicity created by Christa McAuliffe’s presence, a High School teacher, on the trip that people high up politically wanted Challenger to take off on that day.
At the time we were told that the crew could never have survived the first initial blast of the rocket fuel explosion. Now, many years later, the story has changed and as in many cases where time creates a buffer the reality is exposed.
‘The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was a fatal incident in the United States space program that occurred on January 28, 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger (OV-099) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The crew consisted of five NASA astronauts, and two payload specialists. The mission carried the designation STS-51-L and was the tenth flight for the Challenger orbiter.
The spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC). The disintegration of the vehicle began after a joint in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. The failure was caused by the failure of O-ring seals used in the joint that were not designed to handle the unusually cold conditions that existed at this launch. The seals’ failure caused a breach in the SRB joint, allowing pressurised burning gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the adjacent SRB aft field joint attachment hardware and external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB’s aft field joint attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Aerodynamic forces broke up the orbiter.
The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and recovery operation. The exact timing of the death of the crew is unknown; at least several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. The shuttle had no escape system, and the impact of the crew compartment at terminal velocity with the ocean surface was too violent to be survivable.’
The following short videos are a difficult watch but they clearly reveal the disaster and the probable initial survival of at least some of the crew. In fact it seems certain the pilot attempted to guide the crew capsule down but the force of the contact with the ocean killed them instantly.
The morals of the story?
- Why no parachutes installed for just such an emergency?
- Why was politics deemed more important that scientific data?
- What we are told is ‘true’ at one point in time is almost certainly not so as time unfolds. The questions we ask on many of these occasions is why?
Jason Cridland
