Flashback, January 1986: Challenger Explosion Rocks Space Shuttle Program

With its much-publicized new shuttle flight delayed repeatedly by high winds, a frozen hatch handle and other issues, the National Air Space and Space Administration (NASA) gave the go-ahead to launch Challenger STS-51L—and watched along with the rest of the world as it exploded just 73 seconds after blastoff in late January 1986.

That night, Ronald Reagan preempted his scheduled State of the Union speech to deliver perhaps the most memorable speech of his Presidency, quoting poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. to evoke how the seven deceased astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”

But his more important action lay less in reassuring a grieving nation than in signing, with bipartisan support, Executive Order 12546 creating the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Tom Reinhardt’s December 2021 post on “The Days Forward” blog on his experience as a staffer for the blue-ribbon Rogers Commission pinpointed how the panel’s deliberations took a decisive turn.

Chairman William Rogers, a former Attorney General and Secretary of State, had just heard from NASA officials that they had seen a plume of flame escaping from one of the solid rocket boosters but had not passed the information up the chain of command. Rogers immediately left the room and phoned Reagan.

When he returned, Reinhardt was told by his boss, “the mission of the Commission had just changed from overseeing the Challenger investigation to conducting it.”