Space Shuttle Challenger

Robert H. Trulli, he commanded the STS-8 mission in 1983.

That was the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

One of the other five astronauts on that STS-8 mission was Guyon Bluford, who in the process became the first African-American astronaut ever to go into space.

Guyon Bluford is the great-great-uncle of your wide receiver, Daylon Penson.

I just randomly took an organizational psychology class, and this would be in 1990, so I'm dating myself.

four years after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

And we did the case study of the team dynamics that allowed the Space Shuttle to launch when there were many people within NASA who knew that there was a tremendous risk given the temperature on the launch pad that there would be problems.

And I was just like, well, how did that happen? How did somebody not fight for that? And I was hooked right from that very day.

Like somehow somebody is a boss.

They should be, you know, inhuman and perfect.

Like just what, like what? It reminds me when I was in university, I had a professor, actually it was the professor from the class that I learned about the space shuttle challenger.

And I, I, Just was in awe of him.

It's the morning of the 24th of April, 1990.

Four years after the Challenger disaster, NASA has only recently returned to flight.

Investigations have reshaped the agency.

The shuttle has been redesigned.

Nineteen sixty, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, disrupts a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly with a number of angry outbursts.

Nineteen eighty-eight, Space Shuttle-- NASA launches STS-26, the return to flight mission after Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Nineteen ninety, construction of the Washington National Cathedral, it's completed.

Nineteen ninety-- Okay, so right now it's twenty twenty-six.

But finally, the plane lands on the runway, and Kathy disembarks.

At 11:38 AM, Space Shuttle Challenger launched from the Kennedy Space Center to cheers of celebration.

At 11:39 AM, 73 seconds into its flight, 46,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, Shuttle Challenger erupted in a blaze of fire, killing all seven members of the crew.

I just drove right to the Space Center.

I mean, it's the only place that made sense to be is there might be some information there, there'd be a little more insight there, there'd be the only other people on the planet that really understood, uh, what that moment was like and what it meant for me as an astronaut, for us as astronauts, for NASA, for the families that we knew so well.

Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the morning of the 24th of April 1990.

Four years after the Challenger disaster, NASA has only recently returned to flight.

The 98th Congress has adjourned after the Senate reversed itself and sent to the President legislation to extend the nation's debt limit by $251 billion.

And the Space Shuttle Challenger is due to set down tomorrow at Cape Canaveral.

I'm Tom Brokaw in New York.

More news later on this NBC station.

But the people at Johnson Space Center, the researchers, the engineers there did not reach out and pull them in.

What I did was, Michelle, I studied the people that were the sociologists, the behavioral scientists, the cognitive scientists that had been working these accident investigations, like Diane Vaughn, Amy Edmondson, Michael Roberto, had been writing these papers for years after the Challenger accident, pointing out the culture.

And how do these people make sense of a problem? How do they determine whether or not they have the knowledge that actually understands the problem? And what I learned from Michael Roberto and Amy Edmondson's paper on recovery windows is that when you have an ambiguous threat, the natural tendency for people is to downplay that threat, to think they understand it, and to use the tools that they've been using to try to solve the problem when really the tools they have are totally inadequate and will give them the wrong answer.

And they didn't reach out.

I talked to them.

I talked to Diane Vaughn.

I read her book, The Challenger Launch Decision, like four or five times because it's very difficult book to read because it speaks a different language.

She's a she's a trained sociologist and she understood the cultural problem during Challenger.

They met the other people who were nominated for this.

And it was to go aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Krista McAuliffe famously went aboard.

She won out of 11,000 people.

And, of course, we remember the days, that day very clearly.

173 seconds into the flight, the Challenger exploded.

And President Reagan returned to TV, and he mourned the heroes, saying they slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Boy, I remember that, Mike.