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At the time, she was the workhorse of the fleet. She had flown more missions than any of the other three shuttles — Columbia, Discovery, and Atlantis. The shuttle made history on multiple flights, including having the first female American astronaut to go into space, Sally Ride, as part of the STS-7 crew in June That mission performed the first space shuttle night launch and landing.
On the STS-6 mission in April , astronauts did the first spacewalk from a shuttle. The following year in February, the first untethered spacewalk was performed from Challenger, using the Manned Maneuvering Unit basically a backpack using nitrogen jets for propulsion. On its previous flights, Challenger had made almost a thousand orbits of the Earth and traveled almost 26 million miles during its 62 days in space. Most of the crew on board were space veterans. Shuttle Commander Francis Scobee had flown on Challenger as a pilot in Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka had also flown on Discovery in Before the fateful launch on that cold January morning, there were several instances when weather played a role leading up to the accident.
The first was when the previous mission, STSC, a Space Shuttle Columbia flight, had multiple landing delays while trying to end its mission earlier that January. The weather prevented the orbiter from returning to Earth three times. This led to launch reschedules for Challenger's flight. The next launch reschedule was because of bad weather at the shuttle's Trans-Atlantic abort site at Dakar, Senegal. In the event of an emergency, there were designated runways around the world if the shuttle needed to make an emergency landing after launch.
The next delay was for weather that never happened. The forecast for January 26 called for "no-go" conditions during the launch window, so NASA officials decided to cancel the planned launch for that day based on the forecast. However, the bad weather never developed and the shuttle could have launched that day.
All looked "go" for launch on January The space shuttle was engulfed in a cloud of fire just 73 seconds after liftoff, at an altitude of some 46, feet 14, meters. It looked like an explosion, the media called it an explosion and even NASA officials mistakenly described it that way initially. But later investigation showed that in fact, there was no detonation or explosion in the way we commonly understand the concept.
The fuel tank itself collapsed and tore apart, and the resulting flood of liquid oxygen and hydrogen created the huge fireball believed by many to be an explosion. After the collapse of its fuel tank, the Challenger itself remained momentarily intact, and actually continued moving upwards.
Without its fuel tank and boosters beneath it, however, powerful aerodynamic forces soon pulled the orbiter apart. The pieces—including the crew cabin—reached an altitude of some 65, feet before falling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean below. The five astronauts and two payload specialists that made up the STS L crew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in January of Pilot Michael Smith noticed something alarming. He looked out his window and likely saw a flash.
Down on the ground at Mission Control, a computer screen indicated falling pressure in the right booster rocket. It was leaking fuel. As was later learned, the cold of the Florida morning had stiffened the rubber O-rings that held the booster sections together, containing the explosive fuel inside.
The rings failed to expand fully in the cold, leaving a gap of less than a millimetre between booster sections.
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