2 - The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

Summary

It is January 28, 1986. While the world was watching, just 73 seconds after take-off, the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded, killing all seven astronauts on board. The crew included the teacher Christa McAuliffe who would have lectured schoolchildren from space. An important factor that contributed to the disaster was the extremely low temperature at launch. “Extreme” here means “well below temperatures experienced at previous launches”. In this chapter, we give a short overview of the errors that contributed to the explosion. These errors range from purely managerial errors to technical as well as statistical errors. Our discussion includes a statistical analysis of the malfunctioning of so-called rubber O-rings as a function of temperature at launch. As a prime example of efficient risk communication we also recall the press conference at which the physics Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, made his famous “piece-of-rubber-in-ice-water” presentation. This exposed the cause of the accident in all clarity.