Every Day is a Challenge, just not a Challenger

     Today, January 28th, 1986, the nation stood in disbelief as one of it's iconic images, the Space Shuttle, suffered a catastrophic moment.
     I was almost 13 and going to school at the lovely Saratoga Springs Junior High, when one of the students had announced, during student center, that the Challenger Space Shuttle had exploded during a routine launch.  We had all come to grow a little complacent, as the shuttle made these types of missions routine and somewhat boring to a degree.  But, 74 seconds into the launch a faulty o-ring, one of those "news item" terms that sticks with you the same way we remember the hanging chad and pregnant dimples, failed and leaked highly volatile rocket fuel over the outside of the shuttle.  The o-ring failed in the unusually colder weather of the Floridian morning which resulted in the explosion.

     It has since been concluded that, as the shuttle broke up, the crew compartment was left intact, but it was unknown whether or not the cabin air pressure had been breached. If  the cabin pressure was compromised, then the crew would have been unconscious seconds after the fuel tanks broke up and as the cabin hit the water. However, there seems to be some evidence that point the other direction. There were personal oxygen bags that the crew must manually deploy in the case of a calamity, and it was later determined that there was a portion of oxygen used, or expelled from the canisters. This has lead some to believe that some of the astronauts were alive and conscious as the crew pod hit the water.  This was highlighted in a report released by Admiral Truly who stated,


"the cause of death of the Challenger astronauts cannot be positively determined; 
the forces to which the crew were exposed during Orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury; and 
the crew possibly, but not certainly, lost consciousness in the seconds following Orbiter breakup due to in-flight loss of crew module pressure. 
Our inspection and analyses revealed certain facts which support the above conclusions, and these are related below: The forces on the Orbiter at breakup were probably too low to cause death or serious injury to the crew but were sufficient to separate the crew compartment from the forward fuselage, cargo bay, nose cone, and forward reaction control compartment. The forces applied to the Orbiter to cause such destruction clearly exceed its design limits. The data available to estimate the magnitude and direction of these forces included ground photographs and measurements from onboard accelerometers, which were lost two-tenths of a second after vehicle breakup."

For some other images:


http://space.about.com/od/challenger/ig/Challenger-Disaster-Pictures/