Remembering the Challenger Disaster: 39 Years Later
January 28, 2025, is the 39th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s tragic explosion shortly after launch over the ocean in Florida, which in 1986 took the lives of all the brave, talented, and optimistic astronauts on board. A defective O-ring in the main rocket booster failed in the very cold weather, causing the explosion.
Pictures of the event in the years passed have generally shown the explosion. Let’s also remember the people and their faces.
The Warnings That Went Ignored
Engineers expressed concern that the unexpectedly cold weather, which had left significant ice on the control tower as well as the shuttle itself, was a hazard. The management decision to put the Challenger in the air rather than make sure it was fit to fly was a terrible and fatal decision.
My Role During the Challenger Era
I was then a young finance employee at Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, who had been hired to coordinate engineering, procurement and finance to create efficiencies in military contracts – to get rid of the “$500 hammer”. After well over a year in that role, I was assigned to work on a joint NASA-US Air Force project to start preparing shuttles to launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was like a startup – a small-group, busy, problem-solving job, in which most of us had to wear multiple hats. I was so excited to do it that I didn’t mind being in the middle of nowhere and working in a trailer. I was “super looking forward to” watching the first shuttle, Discovery, launch in a few weeks.
The Day of the Challenger Disaster
On the day of the Challenger disaster, I was back in the Bay Area on a couple of days off, and went to my office in Sunnyvale to check my (paper) mail. As I headed to the entry door, my boss, the senior vice president of finance, came out weeping, surrounded by “suits”. I asked what was wrong. He said, “The Challenger exploded,” and continued grimly on. I went in. The entire floor of nearly 100 people was silent. The Discovery mission was canceled. The Vandenberg shuttle project was canceled. Everything shuttle related was canceled.

The Aftermath and Lessons Learned
Despite pending missions to launch the Hubbel Space Telescope, study Halley’s Comet, and other important multi-million dollar plans, NASA shut it all down to get to the bottom of the problem. Eventually, NASA found a problematic and weak design, and the decision to ignore the concerns specific to the construction of that particular O-ring and joint under the environment present that day, were to blame. They were too weak to withstand the pressure. Management had looked the other way, and just launched that shuttle.
So, my budding career was adrift. I quit and went to law school. Thirty-eight years later, I and my firm filed the first and leading lawsuit against Boeing, its fuselage maker Spirit AeroSystems, and Alaska Airlines, on behalf of dozens of passengers insistent on holding those corporations accountable for the January 5, 2024 incident in which a mid-exit door plug violently blew out of a Boeing 737-9 MAX on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.
Parallels to Modern Aviation: Alaska Airlines Flight 1282
The more we learn about how that blow-out happened, the more I think about how parallel to the Challenger disaster it is in its origin and effect. A defective o-ring: A few missing bolts. In the world of aviation, either is enough to rip everything apart. Flight 1282 could have been even worse had fate caused the decompression to occur at a higher altitude.
Ignored Warnings and Preventable Failures
Boeing and Spirit had eyes on the defect. And, apparently, Alaska Airlines at least had reason to suspect. The airplane itself appeared to be giving clear indications in a pressure warning light that was ignored three times, twice in the days before the day of the door plug blow-out. An airline maintenance inspection was reportedly scheduled for that very night. But the aircraft was repeatedly put into the air anyway, at the end with 171 passengers and 6 crewmembers aboard. Then the violent decompression and emergency landing. Fortunately, everyone lived. Unfortunately, many were in a life-altering terror, reasonably believing they were in their last minutes, texting goodbye to loved ones, and bracing for death. A traumatic experience that was no fault of theirs and not a risk any of them had assumed.
Faith Shaken: How Trust in Aviation Safety Breaks Down
And not so easy to just “get over”, their faith in the machine, the builders, the airline, shaken to the core. What if the concerns had been run to ground? What if the people who actually build the machine had not been pressured by a management culture that prioritized moving airplanes out the door to fill customer orders, but instead had been directed to make fixing it and documenting the process carefully, making safety and ongoing confidence in the product the main priority?
Lessons from History: From the Challenger to Modern Aviation
The shuttles flew again and accomplished much, until 2003 when yet another one, Columbia, crashed when it came apart in midair. The shuttle was deemed obsolete.
What If Safety Had Been Prioritized Over Profit?
What if Boeing had invested billions of dollars it has lost since the two 737-MAX 8 disasters in Ethiopia and Indonesia into a new, forward-looking competitive airliner design? Or maybe had made its first priority making sure that its own quality process are effective and strictly followed? “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said Ben Franklin in 1736. He was talking about fire safety.
Do we not learn from history, or as humans, are we just doomed to repeat it? Even our best and most hopeful technologies need effective guardrails. We must remain hopeful that by holding corporate bureaucracies accountable for their misguided and often ego- and/or greed-driven priorities, we can push back on our worst tendencies, compensate those who suffer from them, and as a result of that important, constitutionally protected process, keep all of us safer and more productive to achieve the dreams that drive our machines, and our collective profits – but most importantly, ourselves – sustainably forward.