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Challenger Explosion Research Paper

Decent Essays

In the 1980s, some of the excitement from the first moon landing in 1969 had cooled down, but NASA was taking steps to once again increase interest in the space program. One of these steps was bringing a teacher into space. For the Challenger launch of 1986, NASA decided to hold a contest to choose one lucky teacher to bring into space. This would make space travel seem more “real” to people as a regular person would be in a place that only highly trained professionals had previously been. Christa McAuliffe was the teacher chosen out of thousands to be the first non-astronaut or specialist to be in space. The publicity around McAuliffe was massive and therefore NASA was getting attention that it had not received in prior years. McAuliffe’s …show more content…

A program that had been fairly safe up until this point had just caused the deaths of eight people, including a teacher, as the whole nation watched. Even though there had been failures of NASA launches before, the increased media attention of the Challenger explosion made the event seem realer to people, as they had witnessed the video of the event over and over (Ignatius). In an article from The Baltimore Sun by Matt Seiden, he wrote, “the videotape has the power of a nightmare. Each time you see it, it is just as awful as the time before.” Americans saw the failure of the Challenger as a wake-up call of the dangers of traveling to space. Many thought, “Why continue to take the risks to travel to space when it seems like nothing else can be accomplished?” Seiden also expressed his opinions on space travel in his article. After the crash of the Challenger, he “wondered how space travel could ever be safe.” Stating how “if [humans] can’t make cars that don’t constantly break down … how could we expect to send people hurling off into orbit without some sizable risk of disaster?” (Seiden). Most of America’s population shared common thoughts with Seiden, thinking, “What do we get by risking lives to send people up [to

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