1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
Federal News Network presents a daily update of important moments in the history of the U.S. government.
At 11:38 a.m. EST, on Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with seven crew aboard. The launch was delayed six days because of weather and technical problems. Seventy-three seconds after lift off, with hundreds watching from on the ground and millions more on television, the shuttle broke up in a forking plume of smoke and fire. There were no survivors. In the aftermath of the disaster, President Ronald Reagan appointed a special commission to determine what went wrong and to develop future corrective measures. The investigation determined that the disaster was caused by the failure of an “O-ring” seal in one of the two solid-fuel rockets. The elastic O-ring did not respond as expected because of the cold temperature at launch time. The Commission also found problems with NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes, saying the agency violated its own safety rules. NASA managers had known since 1977 that contractor Morton-Thiokol’s design contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings, but they had failed to address this problem properly. NASA managers also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching at low temperatures that morning. As a result, NASA did not send astronauts into space for more than two years as it redesigned a number of features of the space shuttle.
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