They said it was an o ring failure, how did they figure it out when everything was blown to bits
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They were told ahead of time by one of the engineers who designed them that they would fail in cold weather.
While many responses have done a good job talking about the o-ring failure, you have to remember that the orbiter itself didn’t explode. It was torn apart by aerodynamic forces.
The failing o-ring burned through an aft connection point between the SRB and the ET, and into the ET itself. When that connection point failed, the SRB shifted and cause the whole shuttle stack (SRB’s, ET, and orbiter) to rotate at just under Mach 2. These forces caused the internal structures in the ET to fail, and the shuttle to come loose and ripped it apart.
As the ET began to fail, the SRB’s broke free and continued to fly. There was some ignition of the liquid fuel from the ET, which you can see in the video and pics. However, most of what you see is the liquid fuels in the ET instantaneously flashing into gaseous vapor as the internal tanks rupture. That’s why you see very little fire and a huge cloud of white vapor.
Because the orbiter was ripped apart, there was very little fire damage, and they were able to recover some very large sections intact. Including the crew compartment. The History Channel just last month found a very large section of the orbiter on the sea floor while diving for a shipwreck.
A lot of great answers here but one thing I remember from a documentary, it was not technically an explosion. The flame that pushed through the failed o-ring caused the shuttle assembly to rotate and wind shear tore everything apart.
In the specific case of the Challenger; they actually knew, going into the launch, that there was a highly specific risk of the o-rings failing, to the degree that a significant number of engineers associated with the program wanted to scrub the launch.
There was also significant video evidence of the launch that showed a plume of exhaust coming out of the damaged SRB that would only really have been caused by the failure of the o-ring.
They knew what the problem was before hand but didn’t call off the launch. When said problem blew up they knew where to trace the fault back to.
They knew the part was a problem, they knew it got cold to make it a problem, and they saw it fail on video.
They brought Richard Simmons onto the case. By the 1980s he was an expert in O-ring blowout
My uncle was an engineer that worked on the project. This was a known issue that was well identified well in advance of the actual launch. It’s taught as an example of why Groupthink is both a serious problem and difficult to circumvent. Essentially NASA needed a win and the people that mentioned the danger were ignored
There are beyond the technical causes a psychological phenomenon called Group Think which let to the Challenger disaster. Self Censorship for one, and extreme pressure from management and Reagan government caused it.
It was easy to figure out what happened. Many humans did already know that the O-ring couldn’t work properly in freeze conditions 😥
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