SPECIAL FEATURE: UNCERTAINTY, RISK AND DISASTER

www.iop.org/journals/physed

Challenger
Jonathan Allday
King’s School, Canterbury, UK

Abstract
The events that led to the spectacular destruction of the Space Shuttle
Challenger in 1986 are detailed here. They show how NASA should have
heeded engineers’ worries over materials problems resulting from a launch
in cold weather. Suggestions are made of how pupils could also learn from
this tragedy.

“For a successful technology, reality must
take precedence over public relations, for
Nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard Feynman
At 11:38 am Eastern Standard Time on 28 January
1986, the Space Shuttle lifted off on the tenth flight
of the Challenger orbiter. Seventy-three seconds
later a catastrophic explosion ripped the external
tank apart, sent the SRBs careering drunkenly
across the sky and blasted the orbiter into pieces.
Most witnesses assumed that the seven
members of the crew had been killed instantly.
Unfortunately analysis of the launch film clearly
showed that the flight and mid decks of the orbiter
were thrown clear of the explosion and fell 14 km
to the sea amid a rain of debris. As the recovered
crew compartments were virtually undamaged, it
is possible that some of the crewmembers survived
up to the point of impact.
Challenger had been travelling at about 650
m s−1 when the explosion occurred.
The TV coverage was extensive as one of the
crewmembers, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, was the
first civilian in space. Many people saw the terrible
events live. McAuliffe was a schoolteacher and
her class was watching the launch. They had been
looking forward to talking to her while she was in
orbit.
President Reagan appointed former Secretary
of State William Rogers to chair a commission
to investigate the accident. Among the people
selected to take part were Neil Armstrong
and the famous American theoretical physicist
Richard Feynman. All Shuttle flights were
postponed pending the investigation report and
recommendations. The next Shuttle mission did
not fly until 29 September 1988.
Richard Feynman’s famous words were
written in an appendix to the report presented to
the President. The commission had discovered
the technical reasons why Challenger exploded
and killed the crew of seven so spectacularly
and publicly, but in addition they had uncovered
the chain of flawed decisions that resulted in the
Challenger being launched in weather conditions
that directly led to the disaster. Feynman insisted
on writing an appendix to the report that made
comment about the political and management
reasons why more senior decision-makers in both
NASA and the major contractors did not heed the
warnings generated by the engineers.
Designing a space aeroplane
The design of a re-usable space vehicle capable
of carrying crew and payload into low Earth orbit
was started during the wind-up years of the Apollo
Moon program. Indeed one of the reasons why
the last few Apollo missions were cancelled (even
though the rockets and vehicles necessary had
already been constructed) was to divert dwindling
funds into other missions such as the Viking Mars
landers and Space Shuttle development. Much of
the basic design of the Space Shuttle is therefore
based on 1970s technology. It first flew in 1981.

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There are three components to the Space
Shuttle system. The orbiter is the plane-like part
that rides into orbit on the back of a large orange-
coloured cylinder—the external tank. Inside the
external tank are two separate vessels containing
liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which are
pumped to the main Shuttle engines situated at
the back of the orbiter. Strapped to either side
of the external tank are the solid rocket boosters
(SRBs). These long cylinders contain moulded
solid propellant and provide 71% of the thrust
at launch. Without the SRBs the Shuttle could
not leave the ground. They are jettisoned after
two minutes of flying, by which time the mass
of the craft has reduced sufficiently (due to the
consumption of propellant in the external tank)
for the main engines to accelerate it into orbit.
The SRBs parachute into the ocean where they
are recovered and used again. Each SRB casing
is designed to last 20 launches. The orbiters are
designed for a minimum of 100 launches.
Once empty, the external tank is jettisoned and
will burn up in the atmosphere. It is the only part of
the Shuttle system that cannot be re-used. There
have been many calls for the tanks to be left in
orbit—once empty of propellant the large internal
volumes could be used as living compartments and
many of the tanks combined together to make a
hotel. . . .
To return to Earth the orbiter orients itself
so that the underside is facing down and slightly
forwards. It then uses its thrusters to slow down
and trigger a gravity-assisted descent into the
atmosphere. Once through the re-entry phase
the orbiter touches down on a runway like a
conventional aeroplane (except somewhat faster—
between 341 and 364 km h−1 !) and brakes to a
halt with the aid of a parachute. The early Shuttle
landings took place on one of the huge runways
at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The
orbiter was then loaded atop a converted 747
jumbo jet and flown back to Kennedy. Nowadays
Shuttle missions end with a landing on the
specially constructed runway at Kennedy (unless
the weather prevents this).
The SRBs
The critical events that led to the destruction of
the Challenger were intimately associated with
the construction of the solid rocket boosters, so to
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Challenger
understand what happened it is important to have
some idea of how they are prepared for a launch.
The SRBs can be split into several segments.
The top three segments house various systems
such as the control electronics, parachutes and the
igniter that sends a 45 m jet of flame down the
length of the booster, which sets fire to the solid
propellant at the moment of lift-off.
The next four segments contain the solid
propellant mixture1 . This has to be moulded into
the booster in comparatively short segments2 . The
mixture has to cure for five hours, during which
time it is important that its heavier components do
not settle to the bottom. This is easier to prevent
in shorter segments. Matched pairs of boosters
are produced for a given flight by making sure
that two SRBs are loaded with propellant from the
same batch of mixture. This is important—if one
booster had more thrust than the other, the craft
might not leave the ground vertically!
The segments have to be joined together very
carefully because the weight of the packed fuel
mixture tends to distort the casing, making it hard
to mate the parts together. Good joints between
the segments are vital to prevent the hot exhaust
gases escaping. Some of the joins are resealed at
the factory when the new solid propellant is packed
into the shell. Others, the so-called ‘field joints’,
are re-sealed when the boosters are delivered to
NASA. The field joints consist of a tang (male
part) at the bottom of the higher segment and
a clevis (female part) at the top of the lower
segment (see figure 1). The small remaining gap
between the joints is sealed by a pair of rubber
O-rings running around the circumference of the
booster. These rings are approximately 8.2 m
in circumference and 6 mm thick. The physical
properties of the rubber used in the manufacture
of these rings are very important, as they have to
be able to expand with the joint to maintain the
seal under loads.
1 By mass the mixture proportions are 69.6% ammonium
perchlorate oxidizer, 16% aluminium fuel, 0.4% iron oxide
catalyst, 12.04% polymer binder to hold the mixture together
and 1.96% epoxy curing agent.
2 The first propellant segment is moulded into an 11-point
star with the points facing inward. The remaining segments
are internally moulded into a truncated cone. This allows
the boosters to provide maximum thrust at ignition and then
a decreasing thrust (down by about 1/3) 50 seconds after
ignition—which corresponds to the time when the Shuttle starts
to feel the maximum pressure from air resistance.
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exhaust gas outward

up by crane and lift it over the assembly and down
pressure on casing the front face of the external tank. While the crane
bulge forms in
casing and also in an
holds it in place the orbiter is bolted to the external
equivalent position tank. This whole process can take several days.
gap opens here
below the joint
O rings
A sequence leading to disaster
tang
The morning of 28 January 1986 was cold. The
temperature fell to 2 ◦ C, which was 15 ◦ C less
than at any previous launch. The key events in the
pin
launch sequence leading up to the disaster were as
inside SRB outside SRB
follows.
• 0.678 seconds after the Shuttle lifted off,
clevis
puffs of grey smoke emerged near to one of the
field joints at the bottom of the right-hand SRB
(figure 2). Analysis of the camera film later
Figure 1. A tang and clevis joint as used on the SRB. showed that a total of nine such puffs appeared,
stopping at about 2.5 seconds into the flight. This
roughly matched the frequency with which loads
Prior to the Challenger disaster some analysis were being placed on the SRB structure by the
carried out by the engineers of the company launch and hence the way in which the joint was
responsible for the joint seals showed that during flexing. The pictures showed each puff of smoke
launch the pressure of the exhaust gases caused
the casing of the SRB to bulge outwards between
the joints. This had the effect of opening up a gap
between the tang and clevis of the joint—an effect
known as joint rotation. On previous flights the
O-rings of some of the recovered boosters were
blackened and burnt by gases leaking through this
gap. On the morning of the Challenger flight
several Thiokol engineers recommended that the
launch be postponed. They were worried that in
the intense cold the rubber of the O-rings would
stiffen and not expand fast enough to seal the gap
when joint rotation happened.
A completed SRB is over 45 m tall, nearly 4 m
in diameter and weighs 590 tonnes at launch.

Assembling a Space Shuttle

Rather surprisingly, the complete Space Shuttle
assembly starts with the solid rocket booster
stacks. The whole vehicle is put together in
the giant Vehicle Assembly Building (originally
designed to facilitate the assembly of the much
taller Saturn V rocket that launched the Moon
missions). The Shuttle is assembled directly onto
the mobile launch pad on which it is transported
to the launch area. The SRBs are stacked onto the
launch pad like two large gateposts and then the
empty external tank is craned down between the Figure 2. Evidence of an unsealed joint, smoke
two of them. The next stage is to pick the orbiter emitted from the right-hand SRB.

386 PHYSICS EDUCATION September 2002


spreading out and the Shuttle climbing past—so
the next emission was always from the point where
the joint was, the booster having climbed past the
smoke emitted from the previous puff. The joint
evidently re-sealed itself temporarily.
• About 50 seconds later the Shuttle was
approaching what is termed ‘max Q’, which is the
part of the flight when the aerodynamic stresses
on the Shuttle reach their maximum. Later in
the flight, the Shuttle is travelling faster, but at
a higher altitude the air is not as dense so the drag
is actually less. The moulding of the solid fuel
in the SRBs is designed so that the boosters are
producing less thrust by this stage of the flight and
the main Shuttle engines are manually throttled
back as well to ease the transition through the
max Q region. Shortly after this time the boosters
increase thrust again and the main engines are
throttled up to 104% of their nominal thrust. Later
enhancement of the launch film showed that at this
time a small flame appeared in the vicinity of the
same joint from which the smoke was seen earlier
in the flight. Presumably whatever had re-sealed
the joint earlier had now failed.
• By 59.262 seconds this flame had become a
continuous plume. Information relayed to ground
by on-board sensors at 60 seconds into the flight
showed a difference in pressure between that
inside the right-hand SRB and that inside the left,
indicating that a leak was taking place.
• As the plume grew bigger the airflow over
the Shuttle deflected it onto one of the lower struts
attaching the SRB to the external tank and onto the
external tank casing itself (figure 3).
• At 64.660 seconds the flame had burnt a
hole in the external tank and was mixing with the
hydrogen leaking out. Some 45 milliseconds after
Figure 3. Exhaust from the failing SRB joint starts to
play on the external tank.
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Challenger
this a bright glow was later seen reflected in the
black tiles on the underside of the orbiter.
• The Space Shuttle always rolls shortly
after clearing the launch pad so that the orbiter
is actually flying upside down. Without this
manoeuvre the pilots are not able to see the horizon
over the external tank, which projects a long way
in front of the orbiter. This means that the SRBs
are above the orbiter in flight, so when at 72.20
seconds the flame from the right-hand SRB had cut
through its lower support strut, the SRB fell and
rotated about its upper strut, hitting and denting
the wing of Challenger.
• At 73.124 seconds a pattern of white vapour
developed around the edge of the lower dome of
the external tank. Shortly after this the whole
lower section of the tank fell off. In flight the
pressure of the hydrogen in the tank acts equally
in all directions. With the bottom section of the
tank falling off, the result was like releasing the
throat of an inflated balloon. The unbalanced
upward pressure on the remaining part of the tank
amounted to some 2.8 million pounds, which acted
to force the tank into the liquid oxygen tank above
it. At the same moment the rotating SRB struck
the lower part of the liquid oxygen tank. Within
a few milliseconds of this the liquid oxygen and
hydrogen leaking from the tanks started to burn.
• Challenger was travelling at Mach 1.92 at
an altitude of 22 km when it was enveloped in the
burning cloud of propellant and the orbiter broke
apart under the stress. The film shows several
large pieces of the orbiter falling out of the fireball
(figure 4). A wing, the tail section with the engines
still burning and the forward fuselage (trailing a
mass of pipes and wires pulled from the payload
bay) can all be identified.
Commission conclusions
The presidential commission concluded that the
accident had been caused by a failure of one of the
field joints on the right-hand SRB. The problem of
joints not sealing properly under joint rotation had
been exaggerated that morning by the very cold
conditions, which had stiffened the rubber in the
O-rings so they could not expand fast enough to
maintain the seal.
The pressure to launch the Shuttle on this very
public mission had been increased by a series of
delays. On one earlier occasion the launch had
been scrubbed due to a problem with a hatch bolt,
PHYSICS EDUCATION 387
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which the launch pad technicians had not been able
to fix because all the hand electric drills sent up to
them had flat batteries. NASA was keen to get this
mission off the ground and at some point in the
chain of command it was not willing to delay due
to a possible problem brought on by cold weather.
In an appendix to the report Feynman stressed
the importance of listening to the engineers
responsible for maintaining the system, who had
urged caution in regard to several areas of Shuttle
operations. He was especially scathing of the
system used for estimating the likelihood of
component failure. The official estimations had
placed the chance of a severe problem occurring
as 1 in 100 000 launches—meaning that a Shuttle
could be launched every day for 300 years without
a major problem occurring. More junior engineers
were estimating the chances as being more like
one in a few hundred. However, at the time, the
message was not being heard in the hierarchy of
NASA.
As a direct result of the Challenger
disaster the SRBs had extensive re-designs and
the communications systems in NASA were
improved. The ambitious launch program of
the Shuttle was pegged back to something more
realistic, indicating the final acceptance that the
Shuttle was not the economic, ubiquitous and
efficient launch system that NASA had been trying
to establish.
Educational relevance
Now I would not be a physics teacher, and this
would not be Physics Education, if we did not
try to draw some educational relevance from the
story of Challenger. At the same time, one must
beware of the tendency to unconditionally subtract
out the human part of the story by doing something
like analysing the parabolic flight path of the crew
decks after the explosion—or something equally
ghoulish. To my shame I recall with some clarity
the thought flashing through my own mind when I
first saw the images of that dreadful explosion and
the two SRBs careering across the sky in opposite
directions—which was that momentum had been
conserved in the explosion.
Putting this to one side, however, there are
some things of value that can be said, both in
terms of physics and also the wider aspects of
managing engineering and large-scale projects.
Last year I was privileged to help organize the
388 PHYSICS EDUCATION
Figure 4. The final moments of Challenger.
visit of astronaut Michael Foale to my school.
Inevitably the pupils asked him about the risks
involved. His only comment was that he had
been to the places where the Shuttle components
were made and talked to the people involved in
the construction, and that he trusted them with his
life. The key aspect is that the people involved in
bolting large pieces of technology together often
know more about the capabilities (and limitations)
of what they produce than the designers. This is
why lines of communication and trust must flow
in both directions through such a project. When
the people at the top stop listening to the people
at the bottom (or, worse, the message is being lost
somewhere in the middle) then tragic mistakes can
happen.
From the physics point of view it is certainly
interesting to make some points about the way in
which the Shuttle is launched. Many students do
not realize that the flight path is actually curved
so that by the time the Shuttle reaches orbital
altitude it is flying parallel to the ground. By
six minutes into the flight, the orbiter and external
tank are moving at 20 000 km h−1 in the horizontal
direction. However, this is not yet quick enough
to maintain an orbit. What happens now is that the
engines are gradually throttled back (to keep the
acceleration of the increasingly low mass Shuttle
below 3g) and the Shuttle falls slightly. Over
the next two minutes it loses 4–6 km of altitude,
picking up kinetic energy both from the conversion
of gravitational potential energy and from the
acceleration afforded by the main engines. This
is how the orbit is stabilized.
September 2002

Also, as I commented earlier, the SRBs
provide the necessary thrust to get the Shuttle off
the ground. The liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen
main engines of the orbiter are some of the most
efficient ever designed, but alone they cannot lift
the craft until some of the weight of propellant has
been removed. During the launch sequence the
main orbiter engines are ignited first and allowed
to burn for a period until their correct functioning
is established—only then are the SRBs lit. This
is because the solid propellant moulded into the
SRB casing will continue to burn once it is lit.
There is no way to cut off the fuel supply as with
a conventional rocket engine. Once the SRBs are
lit, the Shuttle has no choice but to leave the pad.
A little tinkering with a spreadsheet should
produce an interesting if limited model of a
Shuttle launch. Treating the problem purely
vertically, one could factor in the fuel consumption
and assume a constant thrust from the SRBs
and the main engines. With the weight of the
Shuttle acting downward the net force and hence
acceleration could be calculated at each interval
of time. It would then be possible to put in
other factors such as drag (which could be based
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Challenger
on a simple exponential reduction in atmospheric
density for an isothermal atmosphere) and some
notion of max Q could be extracted.
Received 16 July 2002
PII: S0031-9120(02)39687-4
References
Allday J 1999 Apollo in Perspective: Spaceflight Then
and Now (Bristol: Institute of Physics Publishing)
(those brave enough to purchase a copy will find a
chapter on the Shuttle with more information
about its design as well as possible replacements)
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/—the main NASA
site with information on the Shuttle
http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/
mission-51-l.html—NASA site with information
about the planned mission of Challenger and
what happened during launch
Jonathan Allday read Physics as an
undergraduate and completed a PhD in
particle physics at Liverpool. His interest
in Apollo and space dates back to school
days and the book Apollo in Perspective
was written to explain to the modern
generations how the lunar landings
actually took place and how technology
has developed since then.
PHYSICS EDUCATION 389