25 years later: How the Challenger disaster brought NASA down to earth

Twenty-five years ago Friday, the space shuttle Challenger vanished from the blue Florida sky, leaving only white corkscrews of smoke hanging in the air.

Challenger's disintegration 73 seconds after liftoff took the lives of high-school teacher Christa McAuliffe and six fellow astronauts, who perished in front of their families, friends and schoolchildren watching at Cape Canaveral and on live television across the nation.

Afterward, President Reagan told a shocked and grieving nation that the legacy of the accident would not be curtailed ambition for the space program, but accomplishments that would have made Challenger's crew proud.

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"To reach out for new goals and ever-greater achievements — that is the way we shall commemorate our seven Challenger heroes," he said.

A quarter-century later, however, that promise seems no more enduring than the smoke from Challenger that hovered over the Florida coast that chilly morning in January 1986. Some experts contend that the loss of Challenger gave America's human space program a significant push toward its twilight status today.

In the years after Challenger, America's human space program "has limped along," says Joan Johnson-Freese of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., who has written several books about space policy. "There have been great plans that have been barely met, if at all."

The Challenger loss shrank America's fleet of shuttles from four to three, and forced important shuttle missions to be put on hold or canceled. As directed by President George W. Bush, NASA is about to retire the shuttle this year, even though it has no replacement in the wings. NASA succeeded in building a huge space station in orbit, but proposals by various presidents to send crews to the moon and Mars have come to nothing.

Challenger's legacy is more complex than what Reagan hoped for. The accident taught NASA much about the vulnerabilities of the shuttle and how to make space travel safer, space specialists say.

However, some lessons from the accident eventually were forgotten, with a major consequence being the loss in 2003 of shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated on re-entry over Texas, killing seven astronauts.

The Challenger accident "was significant, because it set in train a whole set of changes at NASA," says Roger Launius, senior curator in space history at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. But eventually, "a kind of entropy sets in."

That hardly seemed possible in 1986, when the accident plunged NASA into anguished soul-searching. Investigators appointed by Reagan found that NASA repeatedly had ignored serious technical problems. They criticized what they called NASA's "silent safety program" and "flawed" decision-making.

The investigators traced the specific cause of the accident to the shuttle's O-rings, rubbery seals in the two slender rocket boosters that flank the spacecraft. The defective O-rings allowed hot gases and flames to seep out, creating a blowtorch toward the spacecraft.

The investigators' findings led NASA to make a range of upgrades to the shuttle, which made the spacecraft safer — if not exactly safe. But other lessons from the accident continue to hang over the space agency:

1. Space exploration takes big bucks

After the accident, Congress poured money into NASA to fund its recovery from the catastrophe, including the construction of a shuttle to replace Challenger. NASA's budget soared from $15.5 billion (in 2010 dollars) in fiscal 1986 to almost $21 billion the year after the accident, and it continued to trend upward for the next half-decade.

Since then, however, NASA often has faced "a disconnect between the goals that have been set and the funds that have been available to carry out those goals," says Norman Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheeed Martin who led a panel appointed by the Obama administration to examine NASA's plans.

One of the most recent victims of NASA's financial woes was a plan Bush announced in 2004 to return humans to the moon. In 2009, Augustine's panel concluded that there wouldn't be enough money, given NASA's existing budget, to pay for a new moonshot until the 2030s, "if ever." President Obama moved to cancel the effort in 2010. He told NASA to rely on private space companies to blast astronauts into space and to decide in 2015 on the design for a new, heavy-duty rocket that could blast humans to the moon and beyond.

Obama's new program didn't outlive the year. In September, Congress piled expensive new chores on NASA: Develop a new space pod to carry humans into orbit and beyond, build the big new rocket by 2017 and continue with some of Obama's pet projects, such as subsidies for private space companies.

Congress' to-do list "is not executable ... in today's budgetary climate," says Marcia Smith, who runs SpacePolicyOnline.com "The debate's going to continue on what this nation is actually going to fund."

NASA appears to agree. In a report the agency sent to the Congress this month, NASA officials wrote that neither of the preliminary designs for the new rocket and space pod that Congress wants "currently fits the projected budget profiles nor the schedule goals outlined" by lawmakers.

The new Republican leadership of the House of Representatives has promised to slash government funding, and NASA will make a tempting target, space analysts say.

The reality is that "this is all very expensive and you can't do everything," says Johnson-Freese, but that reality is one that "Congress is still not acknowledging. ... We're setting ourselves up for another round of disappointment."

2. The shuttle couldn't sustain a business plan

Starting in the 1970s, NASA billed the shuttle as a sturdy space truck that would haul satellites to orbit as routinely as postal trucks deliver the mail. The shuttle was supposed to fly several dozen missions a year, a number that was "pure fantasy," says political scientist Roger Handberg of the University of Central Florida.

The Challenger accident opened America's eyes to the shuttle's fragility and perils. After the tragedy the shuttle quickly was stripped of one of its primary occupations, the delivery of commercial satellites to space.

Many space scholars think the accident can't be held accountable for NASA's plight today. But some argue that the nation's hard-earned knowledge of the shuttle's weaknesses changed the course of the space program.

If Columbia's disintegration in 2003 had been the first loss of a shuttle rather than the second, "President Bush might have made a different decision on whether to keep the shuttle flying," says former astronaut Jay Apt, who joined NASA shortly before the Challenger accident and now is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

NASA had hoped the shuttle program would turn a profit through its income from launching private and military satellites into space, which could be used to build a space station and research vehicles to get humans to the moon and Mars.

"When the shuttle turned out to be not what we thought it was, all those downstream visions began to crumble," says Howard McCurdy, a specialist in space policy at American University in Washington, D.C. "The business model collapsed, and it wasn't just the business model for shuttle, it was the business model for shuttle, station, Mars, the moon. ... It was like a corporation going down."

3. Complacency is hard to avoid

The accident sparked a frenzy of self-improvement efforts at NASA. Following the advice of Reagan's investigators, officials set up a new NASA-wide safety office. Top NASA executives lost their jobs. Engineers redesigned the O-ring joints and added a bailout system for the crew's use in an emergency.

For a while, the agency was supremely vigilant for lurking hazards. The vigilance didn't last.

On Feb. 1, 2003, shuttle Columbia disintegrated just a few minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida. Investigators found that during liftoff, a chunk of foam insulation had peeled off the shuttle's 15-story fuel tank and bashed a massive hole in the shuttle's wing.

Investigators also learned that before the accident, large chunks of foam had fallen off the tank during a half-dozen missions. But engineers gradually accepted foam loss as routine, just as they had gradually accepted O-ring damage as routine.

Changes made after the shuttle's first fatal accident were "undone over time," Columbia investigators wrote, adding that they "had a hard time understanding how, after the bitter lesson of Challenger, NASA could have failed to identify a similar trend."

"People retire, and we lose some of the corporate memory," says former astronaut Rick Hauck, who commanded the first shuttle mission after Challenger. "We become less sensitive to issues we were more sensitive to in proximity to the failures."

"We had let our guard down," says Bryan O'Connor, an astronaut at the time of the Challenger accident and now NASA's top safety official. "It's so human to become complacent."

4. 'There will be accidents'

Before Challenger, NASA made spaceflight look easy and safe — safe enough to allow a schoolteacher to fly on the shuttle. The accident was a reminder that space exploration will, at one time or another, cost lives.

Americans decided they could accept that cost. Public support for NASA and the shuttle program in the months just after the shuttle's loss ran 70% to 80%, Launius says.

The public still overwhelmingly supports the astronaut program. A survey taken in October by polling firm Rasmussen Reports found 72% of respondents said it was at least somewhat important for the nation to have a human space program.

After Challenger, Americans understood "that there is risk to human spaceflight," Smith says. "But that was not enough to deter us from continuing our quest for space exploration."

That tolerance for loss of life is likely to be tested again as long as humans continue to blast into space, many space experts say.

The problem is that any craft blasting into space has to go from a standstill to 17,000 mph, the speed needed to orbit the Earth, says O'Connor, NASA's safety chief. That requires a huge and dangerous jolt of power. Even all the private companies now designing spaceships can't avoid that uncomfortable truth.

The ideas for the "next generation of spaceflight vehicles continue, in my opinion, to be high risk," O'Connor says. "Getting up and back is the hardest thing, and, oh, by the way, while you're up there it's not that benign either."

"Spaceflight, like landing aircraft on aircraft carriers at night, is fundamentally dangerous," says Terence Finn, a former NASA shuttle official. "There will be accidents along the way."