The mission was pilot Mike Smith’s first spaceflight. It was dubbed Challenger’s STS-51L. Sadly, before NASA lost telemetric contact with them, the crew’s voice recorder captured Smith saying “Uh-oh”.

It proved that the crew was aware of something going wrong with the launch before the explosion.

Christa McAuliffe was a 37-year-old social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire. She was a civilian chosen as NASA’s first educator in space thanks to the Teacher in Space Project. The aim was to create publicity and inspire kids to reach for the stars.

McAuliffe was supposed to teach a few lessons in space.

CNN showed the launch “live” with a slight tape-delay, but NASA provided schools with a live satellite feed. McAuliffe’s class saw the tragedy unfold in real time.

The Challenger explosion inspired many artists to create songs, shows, and sculptures to memorialize it. The 1986 Rendez-vous Houston concert saw musician Jean Michel Jarre, a friend of crew member McNair, play a saxophone solo that McNair was going to play in flight. It was to be the first professionally produced track recorded in space.

Musicians like John Denver, Adam Young, Beyonce, and Frank Turner wrote songs, using samples from the audio of the event in their tracks as well.

Several TV shows dedicated episodes to the crew, even writing the tragedy into the script, like Punky Brewster and Star Trek.

President Reagan’s State of the Union was to take place on the evening of January 28, but he chose to update his country with a televised speech from the Oval Office just six hours after the disaster. The speech was hailed as one of Reagan’s finest, It was written by Peggy Noonan, who also wrote speeches for George HW Bush.

“I kind of figured the entire nation had seen an auto accident, you know?” Noonan explained 30 years later. “The president is going to have to do a speech that is aimed at those who are 8-years-old, and those who are 18, and those who are 80 without patronizing anybody.”

Thanks to teacher McAuliffe, media coverage was plenty. CNN’s live broadcast was the most memorable footage of the event, being the only footage until 2010. NASA and the federal government eventually declassified several civilian videos of the event.

There are seven known videos of the explosion. Footage from civilians and at least one come from a professional filmmaker. Some of these videos were recorded more than 50 miles away in Orlando, FL.

Long after official investigations ceased, debris still surfaced on the Florida coast. In December 1996, around 11 years after the explosion, beach goers discovered two barnacle-covered pieces of the shuttle at Cocoa Beach just 20 miles from the Kennedy Space Center.

“This piece, structurally, is the complete inboard elevon of the left wing, and that’s like eight feet on one end by six feet on the other by 14 feet long,” said NASA’s Ron Phelps of the larger component. “So it’s a big piece, it weighed several hundred pounds. We had to use a front-end loader to actually pick it up and move it off the beach.”

In a 2016 interview, Bob Eberling shared that he still experienced grief over the explosion. He tried to tell NASA officials that the launch was not going to go well, but he was overruled so he went along with the plans.

He retired soon after and fell into a deep depression. “I could have done more,” he told NPR. “I should have done more.”

Eberling found peace in church but 30 years on, he still remembered the victims and the managers who refused to listen. He believes he should have not been there, or at least did something more to stop the launch.

“I think that was one of the mistakes that God made,” Ebeling said. “He shouldn’t have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I’m gonna ask him, ‘Why me. You picked a loser.’ ”

The Challenger shuttle was built in 1975 as a test vehicle for the space shuttle program. It was originally called STA-099, spending almost an entire year of vibration testing in a hydraulic rig. It was in 1979 when NASA ordered the transformation from test vessel to actual spacecraft.

It first launched in 1983, with the mission that featured the first spacewalk of the Space Shuttle Program. The Challenger transported the first female American astronaut, Sally Ride, and the first African American astronaut, Guion Bluford, in to space.

Christa McAuliffe became part of NASA’s initiative to include civilians on missions. The disaster had them stopping all plans for civilian spaceflight. It took 22 years before Barbara Morgan joined the Endeavour in 2007.

Morgan was actually McAuliffe’s backup for the Challenger mission. She’s also a teacher who specialized in English and Social Studies.

The seven astronauts were the first Americans to die during a spaceflight since NASA’s founding in 1958. They’re not the first astronaut fatalities in NASA history, however.

On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Edward White passed in a fire during training, but that took place on a ground test at Cape Kennedy.

There were around 120 tons of debris, which made up about 30% of the Challenger’s overall structure, retrieved from the ocean floor. The wreckage was sealed in abandoned Minuteman missile silos at Cape Canaveral, a place which held ICBMS until 1970.

The silos are known as Complex 31 and 32 and remain sealed, but they are meant to act as storage sites, not memorials.

The Challenger explosion alerted everyone to the dangers of space travel much more than the Apollo 1 tragedy of 1967. It was the first live televised disaster in the history of space exploration causing Ronald Reagan to form the Rogers Commission to investigate and determine the cause.

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong acted as vice chairman of the investigative committee which included Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

The disaster resulted in a call for an immediate suspension of the space shuttle program. The following three years saw NASA working to implement the suggestions of the Rogers Commission in order to avoid such problems in the future.

It worked. There were no incidents until 2003, when the Columbia burned up during reentry. But the Columbia’s crash happened for different reasons. The safety precautions employed after the Challenger incident worked owing to NASA’s research.

Investigations revealed that NASA had violated launch rules on purpose to get the Challenger up in the air. Engineers told them it was too cold to launch, and told higher ups that pushing through would be a violation of NASA’s rules. Aside from the O-rings breaking up, engineers also worried about the fuel.

“Violating a couple of mission rules was the primary cause of the Challenger accident,” wrote Ken Iliff, a former Chief Scientist at NASA.

There were speculations that they went through with the launch because of the aggressiveness of the space program. The Reagan Administration wanted to show everyone that the United States could fly regularly and successfully.

Official investigations found that a failed O-ring seal as a result of cold weather was the cause. The temperatures were below freezing at the launch site having several people at NASA worried about the potential effect on safety based on data from previous cold weather launches.

NASA officials seriously considered including Big Bird, even contacting Sesame Street and Caroll Spinney, the actor behind the giant yellow bird. Spinney was being considered as a passenger.

NASA’s public relations effort to capture the attention of children was what led to schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe’s participation in the doomed mission.

Spinney discussed the matter for decades. NASA released an official statement in 2015, confirming, “A review of past documentation shows there were initial conversations with Sesame Street regarding their potential participation on a Challenger flight, but that plan was never approved.”

An O-ring on the shuttle’s right rocket booster failed at launch. Heated gas escaped the booster rocket, which vaporized the material connecting the booster to the shuttle’s orange tank. The combination of hydrogen gas and liquid oxygen resulted in a fireball at 46,000 feet above sea level.

The solid-fuel strap-on boosters were undamaged by the explosion.

Astronaut Ellison Onizuka took a soccer ball used by his daughter’s Houston high school soccer team for the mission. The ball was recovered from the wreckage and returned to Janelle Onizuka. She put it on display at Clear Lake High School in memory of her father.

The ball stayed there for three decades, until Shane Kimbrough, another astronaut asked the school if any particular items could accompany him on a mission to the International Space Station. The school gave the ball and Kimbrough tweeted a photo of it in space floating in zero gravity.

The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch causing wreckage to scatter over the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida. It took weeks to recover all the pieces. Navy divers discovered the debris including the remains of the astronauts roughly 15 miles east of Cape Canaveral on the ocean floor.

Identified remains were given to their families. Unidentified ones were buried in a monument at Arlington National Cemetery.

Everyone thought that the crew of seven passed instantly, but evidence suggests that they were alive and conscious. An independent investigation found that the cabin did not instantly depressurize, meaning the crew experienced the compartment ascend three more miles before plummeting 12 miles down to the Atlantic.

There’s enough evidence to suggest this as several astronauts’ personal emergency air packs were activated.

The first flight after the disaster was filled with concern and fear. The shuttle Discovery was scheduled for take off in 1988, just 2 years after the explosion. Robin Williams starred in the film “Good Morning, Vietnam” a year prior so NASA officials thought Williams would be a fun addition to the crew’s downloaded media.

He took part in “astronaut wake-up songs” which usually come from friends and family.

William’s message was a riff from the movie. He told crew members “Houston’s great, but give me that zero-G!”

He even provided riffing specifically designed to make the astronauts laugh.

The shuttle was originally named “Constitution,” but was renamed after the British naval research vessel HMS Challenger due to a public campaign.

A postage stamp design featuring a shuttle, which appeared to burst into flames when canceled by a postmark, was quickly withdrawn after the disaster.

Astronauts on later missions have carried personal mementos of the Challenger crew into space as tributes.

The disaster led to a comprehensive redesign of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

Several children’s books were written in memory of the Challenger crew, aiming to educate young readers about space exploration.

Christa McAuliffe’s family helped establish an educational organization to engage students in science and space.

Investigations into the disaster prompted advances in understanding how jet streams can affect rocket launches.

The disaster increased understanding of the chemical properties of O-rings under different environmental conditions.

The disaster resulted in major changes to NASA’s organizational culture and management structures for safety.

The Rogers Commission, established to investigate the disaster, included astronauts, engineers, and physicists.

The Challenger case has become standard study material in courses on engineering ethics and public policy.

After the disaster, there was an increased emphasis on improving simulation software for testing and safety.

Independent safety panels were established for future shuttle flights to avoid organizational pressure on launch decisions.

The incident underscored the importance of whistleblower protection for employees raising safety concerns.

Although unsuccessful, the Challenger disaster marked the first attempt to use in-flight abort procedures.

Memorials for the Challenger can be found across the United States, including dedicated plaques, gardens, and parts of museums.

Created to honor fallen astronauts, this foundation provides support and educational outreach.

Post-Challenger, NASA revamped astronaut training programs, including more contingency training for emergencies.

NASA reevaluated its policies on public viewing of launches, given that school children and other civilians were watching the Challenger launch.

NASA implemented the use of new, high-speed tracking cameras at launch to capture better data for analysis after liftoff.

Watch the video for more on this tragedy.