January 28, 1986

The countdown continued.

At 11:30 a.m., the temperature was still a low 38 degrees-thirteen degrees below the coldest temperature at which a Shuttle had previously been launched. The crew's family members were assembled on a roof at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch. Recalling the day, Cheryl McNair, wife of Mission Specialist Ron McNair, said, "I still didn't believe they'd launch. It was just too cold." Christa McAuliffe's mother, Grace Corrigan, remembered, "Everybody was discussing the cold and how were they going to launch in this weather? We were all nervous. We were all talking about it."

Commander Dick Scobee had called his wife, June, that morning. When she asked him if the Shuttle could launch in spite of the icicles hanging from it, he told her, "Yes, they showed us pictures of the rockets blasting off in snow. They said it was safe." From her memoir, Silver Linings, June Scobee Rodgers recalls the launch:

"We watched in silence as our loved ones climbed the sky sunward. Their craft from the distance seemed to sit atop a great flume of smoke. The floor shook with the sheer raw power of the millions of pounds of thrust. Dick had described the sensation of that part of the ride as a thunderous, runaway freight train. I imagined Dick in his ever-so-calm, matter-of-fact, take-charge mode. I imaged Christa in her excitement, nervously waiting for the solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) to separate, the engines to cut off, and the buoyant lift of weightlessness to signal their safe arrival into earth orbit."

73 seconds later, at an altitude of 48,000 feet, the right solid-fuel rocket booster, which was leaking flame from one of its joints, broke loose and slammed into the external tank. The Challenger Space shuttle exploded and spun wildly out of sight.

The tragic moments are recounted in Silver Linings: "The unspeakable happened. Standing there together, watching with all the world, we saw the shuttle rip apart. The SRBs went screaming off on their own separate paths, and the orbiter with our loved ones exploded in the cold blue sky, and like our hearts it shattered into a million pieces."

Cheryl McNair remembers watching the liftoff: ".The shuttle went straight up. It turned down. I didn't know what had happened. I just knew something was wrong."

Next: Aftermath