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The day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, January 28, 1986.

It's one of those moments that makes people

remember where they were when it happened. Though the major TV networks had stopped covering

those launches live and the fanfare had died down at that point. But because a teacher was going

up with a challenger, Krista McCullough, who taught social studies at Concord High School in

New Hampshire because she was on board with the other six members of the crew. Millions of

school kids were watching either through NASA's live feed or coverage from this new 24-hour

cable news network called CNN. What happens next is the part, of course, that most people remember,

barely more than a minute after liftoff, the Challenger exploded. And it was terrible, of course,

gut-wrenching and tragic. And it set off this search for answers and a deep reckoning about

how this could have happened. And what we now know is that a small rubber seal called an O-ring

inside one of the Challenger's solid rocket boosters didn't seal properly.

So about 73 seconds into the flight, just as NASA's mission control,

called for the shuttle's commander to throttle up the main engines,

the damaged seal gave way.

Superheated gases burned past the O-ring, cut through the side of the booster,

and the shuttle broke apart.

And we know this because two NPR reporters had been talking to the engineers at the booster rocket company, Morton Thiakol, who had designed and built the boosters here in Utah.

The reporters were Danielswardling and Howard Berkus.

And less than a month after the tragedy, they broke the story about what had happened and how the engineers knew it could happen and how they had even tried to stop that flight.

...