Conversation after the plane crash

The inside story of the space shuttle Challenger crash.

Five years after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger/KLOC-0, two senior spacecraft design engineers finally broke the silence and uncovered the cause and effect of the explosion.

"Challenger" exploded instantly during takeoff.

The American space shuttle Challenger burst into flames 73 seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral Space Base. It has been 15 years, but the audience who watched the live TV broadcast must remember the shocking fireball vividly. Two people who were watching live TV in Utah at that time were not surprised by the result. Both are senior engineers of Morton-Theokol, which designs and manufactures solid fuel rocket boosters for the space shuttle. One is Roger Boysjoli, and the other is his immediate boss, Bob Eberlin.

A few minutes before the Challenger launch, Boyce Jolly paced up and down anxiously outside the conference room of Theokol Company. Eberling wants Boyce Jolly to go to the conference room to watch the live broadcast of the space shuttle launch. At first, Boyce Jolly told Eberlin, "No, I don't want to see the launch. I don't want to see the launch fail. "

The night before, Boyce Jolly and Ebelin spent six hours in a video conference, urging NASA to postpone the launch of Challenger, because before that, they were both told that the temperature in Florida had dropped below 0℃. They know that such conditions will have a great impact on the performance of rocket boosters! However, the top management of Theokol Company gave them a blow, and the company proposed a "launch" proposal to NASA!

After the countdown began, the two men held each other tightly. To their delight, the challenger left the launch pad smoothly and took off! Boyce Jolly turned to Eberlin: "We just dodged a bullet!" "Because according to their analysis, Challenger will explode on the platform. However, just as both of them wanted to take a long breath, the TV screen in front of them suddenly filled with smoke in the 73rd second after Challenger took off, and their hearts almost stopped.

1986 In July, after accepting the hearing of the presidential committee about the challenger disaster, Boyce Jolly left the Theokol proving ground deep in the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah.