You're listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Sue McGregor and I've been looking back

on the events surrounding the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of January 1986 and talking to a group

of people involved in the American Space Shuttle program

whose lives were changed forever that day.

This is Remembering Challenger.

America's man space program has a long and eventful history and a great deal of it was

launched literally not far from where I'm standing now on Merit Island off the Florida coast. I'm outside the

enormous Kennedy Visitor Complex which allows you to see myriad examples of

American space history including the Apollo 14 command module, a lunar rover test car,

accurate reconstructions of gigantic rockets, and to experience what a real shuttle

launch might feel like, and that is quite something.

But the truth is that despite all their extraordinary successes,

the space program and the shuttle program within it have also seen the depths of tragedy.

On the 28th of January 1986, Challenger, one of America's four space shuttles,

set off from the Kennedy Space Center after several delays on Mission

STS 51L. On board were six astronauts and a civilian, a school teacher Kristaa McGolliff, from Concord, New Hampshire, there to be the first teacher in space.

The other members of the crew comprised the most diverse group of astronauts NASA had ever assembled, but less than two minutes

after the launch, after a massive explosion all of them were to perish. At the time of

the disaster we'd grown used to the idea of NASA sending people into space,

Blase even, but the American Space Agency was still only 28 years old.

Its birth in 1958 was spurred on by the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union

in 1957. President Kennedy made it clear in a speech in 1962 that his country would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

...