Forty years ago today, disaster struck NASA’s human spaceflight program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after blastoff, killing all seven people onboard. The tragedy nearly brought the shuttle program to an early end.

NASA's space shuttle Challenger completed 10 missions before it broke apart during a launch in 1986, killing seven astronauts.

Cold temperatures inhibited the space shuttle Challenger’s infrastructure from working properly. NASA has set potential weather conditions that would stop Artemis II from launching as scheduled.

How a cold morning, failed O-rings, and flawed decision-making led to tragedy Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day.

Steve Hawley, who flew five Space Shuttle missions, and Krista Schaffer, a first-grade teacher at Christa McAuliffe Elementary in Lenexa reflect on the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

Wednesday marked the 40-year anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy, which claimed the lives of seven people and prompted the opening of a local NASA office to prevent those kind of disasters from ever happening again.