One of the largest pieces of the ill-fated NASA Challenger Shuttle has been discovered off of Florida’s Space Coast.
The artifact was discovered by a crew working for a new History Channel series “The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters” that was looking for a WWII-era PBM Martin Mariner rescue plane that vanished without a trace in 1945. Instead, they found pieces of the Challenger Space Shuttle, which exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on January 28, 1986.
The entire crew on board, including teacher and mother of two Christa McAuliffe, who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher in outer space, was killed.
The search and salvage effort conducted at the time by the US Navy and Coast Guard was the largest ever performed after the explosion. It covered more than 486 square nautical miles and included thousands of servicemen and women and volunteers.
After seven months of searching, 167 pieces of the shuttle were recovered. They are now stored at Complex 31 and 32 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
This new find is the first major discovery of Challenger wreckage in more than 25 years. The TV crew presented their findings to Astronaut Bruce Melnick, who suspected it was the Challenger. That led the show’s producers to present their findings to NASA, which confirmed it was the Challenger.
NASA was able to positively identify the wreckage because of the 8-inch square thermal protection tiles used as heat shields on Space Shuttles.
“In reviewing the footage that the team provided, we can see a section roughly 15 by 15 feet. However, we did note that the item does extend deeper into the sand, so the true size is hard to determine at this point,” Mike Cianelli, program manager of NASA's Apollo, Challenger, and Columbia Lessons Learned Program, said in a video statement posted by NASA. “But I am rather confident that it is one of the largest pieces ever found of Challenger.”
The Challenger explosion was blamed on two frozen rubber O-rings, which formed the seal between sections of the solid rocket boosters.
The commission looking into the disaster ultimately decided the tragedy was the result of multiple failures and bad decisions made by NASA management and miscommunications between the company that built the rockets and decision-makers at NASA.
Temperatures before the launch dropped to 20 degrees Fahrenheit and an early morning inspection found that the launch pad was covered in foot-long icicles. No one was sure what would happen if they broke off and became debris during the launch, but that was deemed an acceptable risk. The commission also found that NASA was worried about another delay to the mission, since it was originally scheduled for the middle of 1985 and then-President Ronald Reagan was scheduled to mention it during his next State of the Union speech.
It was nearly three years before NASA decided to launch another Space Shuttle mission.