For the purpose of this thread, that is. Let us suppose that 33 years ago the launch of the Challenger went off without a hitch, and that they all came back safe and sound. In what way(if any) would our exploration of space have changed? Great advances, minor changes or pretty much the same as what we’ve got going currently?
There were serious flaws in the engineering “culture” of the Challenger program that resulted in the tragedy. Without that tragedy, those flaws would probably not have been exposed and addressed, and therefore there would have been subsequent serious flaws and errors in related engineering practices and policies that likely would have resulted in loss of life for a NASA program.
So I think we’d probably be in the same place – without Challenger, there would have been some other disaster in US space exploration that would have sparked serious soul-searching and major changes in engineering culture, policies, and practices to minimize such catastrophes in the future.
It had the effect of making NASA tighten up their safety protocols, though possibly not for very long, given that Columbia was also lost due to issues with the vehicle that were known and could have been avoided.
So, if Challenger had not been lost, it was probably just a matter of time before a different STS mission suffered a catastrophic failure.
Actually I had pretty much forgotten it. Like those above me something was bound to happen so even if it had gone perfectly we would have ended up about the same place now. The possible exception may - barely - have been a bigger push within schools but even that aspect of space exploration has pretty much remained the same.
Like others, I think another disaster would have happened at some later time, so there wouldn’t be a major difference in space exploration today.
But one thing I do think would be different is more civilian involvement in missions. I could envision teachers or professors being occasional members of the crews today if Christa McAuliffe hadn’t died in the Challenger disaster.
This. The Challenger disaster wasn’t an unforeseeable fluke of circumstances. As Feynman’s report showed, NASA had a knack for misinterpreting the significance of hardware malfunctions in an optimistic way (google “normalization of deviance”). Most notably, when the O-ring seals on the SRBs exhibited partial burn-through on earlier flights, NASA engineers described a “safety factor” on the basis of how much of the O-ring remained (e.g. “the O-ring burned a third of the way through, therefore the safety factor is 3”). But the original design called for them to not be burned at all, so any burn-though should have been a wake-up call to reassess the design.
It was known that the O-rings were temperature-sensitive (i.e. cold weather flights were risky). The day before Challenger was supposed to fly, Morton-Thiokol (the contractor who made the SRBs) officially recommended scrubbing the mission. NASA badgered them into reversing their no-go recommendation, launched the shuttle, and the rest is history.
If the Challenger had completed its mission, there probably would have been no revision of the SRB seal design, and a future mission would have been lost. As it was, debris damage to the thermal tile protection system during ascent was a known and ongoing problem; NASA’s cavalier attitude toward it is what doomed Columbia in 2003, and nearly doomed Atlantis in 1988. Had NASA taken the problem more seriously, they might have pursued a redesign of insulating materials on the external tank and the SRB nose cones (the sources of damaging debris for Atlantis and Columbia).
Bottom line, NASA had a habit of rolling the dice. If things had worked out OK for Challenger in '86, it’s a virtual certainty that some other shuttle mission would have meet with disaster before long.
Excellent, long-term engineering in deadly-to-human environments (i.e. space, deep underwater, etc.) is really, really hard. In addition to the environment, you’re constantly fighting one of the most ubiquitous characteristics of human nature – complacency. It’s contrary to most of our natures to believe that something could go really, really wrong in our daily routine could kill us, or those we’re designing and operating systems for, in seconds.
Naval Reactors (the part of the US Navy responsibility for making sure nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers are operated safely with regards to human life and the environment) is perhaps the best organization in the world (possibly the best in human history) at this sort of engineering. IIRC, they are frequently called upon to investigate and render judgment about engineering catastrophes in other agencies, including NASA.
Having interacted with NR on a weekly basis or more, both while I was active duty and now that I’m a Navy civilian, I can tell you that it appears to me to be an incredibly unpleasant place to work. But damn are they good at what they do.
I don’t think we’d be much farther along if at all, and had it not happened at that point in 1986, and been the Discovery Disaster in January 1992, it may well have been something that put us further behind, considering the political climate at the time (Democrats are traditionally less NASA friendly than Republicans).
This is almost certainly true save that “tighten[ing] up their safety protocols” was largely just an act of public relations. Although the specific problem with the field joint in the Solid Rocket Motor was corrected in the RSRM (by implementing many design fixes that were already intended for the ‘Blue Shuttle’ fiber-wound composite motors for polar orbit launches out of Vandenberg SLC-6) NASA continued to ignore some of the basic problems with the Shuttle, in large measure because there really wasn’t anything that could be done to fix them (like the lack of feasible escape modes during most of ascent profile) without a complete redesign of the system, so they did things like the Inflight Crew Escape System (ICES) in which no one had any confidence that it would provide a real measure of survivability.
Although I think all mission commanders and pilots were military aviators seconded to NASA, there were plenty of civilians in the astronaut corps; in fact, Jake Garvis was a Hughes Aircraft tech rep who was flying as a Payload Specialist on the same mission. McAuliffe was notable for being essentially a non-astronaut–someone without a particular mission task–who was essentially deadheading in order to provide NASA a promotional opportunity, and was flying under the premise that it was so safe that anyone could fly. Senator Jake Garn and Representative Bill Nelson also flew on the STS as payload specialists as well as former astronaut and then-Senator John Glenn on STS-95. But really, flying civilians, and particularly ones who did not hold a security clearance, was just about as problematic in the pre-Challenger era when many flights carried classified payloads, and the STS proved too expensive and too limiting for launching commercial payloads and the supposed advantages of recovering an ailing satellite for return to Earth for servicing.
The STS should never have been operating for more than three decades; it was always an interim design with a series of compromises that should have been addressed in an evolutionary fashion, rather than constructing a fleet of quasi-identical vehicles that all had the same essential fragilities and fundamental design flaws. While the Orbiter Vehicles were upgraded over their lifespan, they never became cheaper to operate or faster to turn around, and the promise of cheap access to space for crew and payload was never realized.
Stranger
Changes in what the shuttle missions accomplished? In the end, not much. There would have been significant changes in missions back then, because there was no 2 1/2-year gap between them, but it was probably more “there are other, cheaper, ways to get stuff, including people, into space now” than “we don’t have anything else to achieve” that ended the program.
Stranger, I just want to note that I always find your posts in threads about the space program to be really educational. Thank you!
Seconded!
It’s sobering to consider another potential alternative - one plan was to have Carroll Spinney on the flight - as Big Bird NASA Confirms Talks to Fly Big Bird on Doomed Shuttle Challenger
Christa McAuliffe’s understudy, Barbara Morgan, later did two successful shuttle missions, and other civilians had gone into space, including a congressman a couple years earlier.