I watched the Challenger disaster from Mission Control

Steven Vaughan-Nichols says he was inside Mission Control at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for the Challenger launch on Jan. 28, 1986, working in data communications to keep telemetry links between the shuttle and NASA's ground system operational. He recalls that telemetry indicators were all green at liftoff, then failed within seconds; he tried to reconnect systems and then looked up at the display and saw the disaster unfold in front of Mission Control.

The launch had been a national event, with schoolchildren across the country watching Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, but the flight ended in tragedy. The author says that, by 1986, shuttle launches were widely assumed to be routine while earlier disasters such as Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11 and Apollo 1 had not registered the same public impact; Apollo 13 returned its crew.

The article says the Challenger accident later proved preventable: Morton Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly had warned in a memo that O-ring failures could create a "catastrophe of the highest order," a warning the author says was ignored by Morton Thiokol and NASA, and seven people died.

The piece also recalls the Columbia breakup on Feb. 1, 2003, which the author attributes to external tank foam insulation, management mistakes and poor internal communications, and which also killed seven astronauts.

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