Forty years ago, the
space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven
astronauts were killed, including teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe. It
was a devastating blow to the U.S. space program and a national tragedy
for the country. In the days after the explosion, the search for
answers began. Two NPR reporters, Howard Berkes and Daniel Zwerdling,
focused their reporting on the engineers who managed Challenger’s
booster rockets. On February 20, 1986, Berkes and Zwerdling broke a
major story, providing the first details of a last-minute effort by
those engineers to stop NASA from launching Challenger.
In
this special NPR documentary, Howard Berkes unfolds an investigation
spanning forty years, from those desperate efforts in 1986 to delay the
launch, to decades of crushing guilt for some of the engineers, and to
the lessons learned that are as critical as ever as NASA’s budget and
workforce shrink.
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