Term Papers on The Tragic Challenger Explosion

Term Paper Title	The Tragic Challenger Explosion
# of Words	2821
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	11.28

The Tragic Challenger Explosion

The Tragic Challenger Explosion Space Travel.  It is a sense of national pride
for many Americans.  If you ask anyone who was alive at the time, they could
probably tell you exactly where they were when they heard that Neil Armstrong
was the first person to walk on the Moon.  But all of the success in our space
programs is overshadowed by tragedy.  On January 28, 1986, one of the worst
disasters in our space program's history occurred.  Many people were watching at
the moment because it was the highly televised space mission where, for the
first time, a civilian was a member of the crew that was to be shot into space.
This civilian was the winner of the "Teacher in Space" contest, Christa
McAuliffe.  The disaster:  the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
(Compton's 1)  Many people thought that disaster couldn't strike because a
civilian was on board.  But as the whole nation found out, nobody is immortal.
By examining this further, we will look at the lives of the seven who died in
this dumbfounding calamity, take a look at exactly what went wrong during this
fateful mission, and the outcome from this sorrowful occurrence. First, who
exactly were those astronauts that died on the Challenger?  Sharon Christa
Corrigan McAuliffe, born in 1948, was the famous winner of the teacher-in-space
program, was a high school teacher at Concord, N. H., a wife, and a mother of
two children.  She touched the lives of all those she knew and taught.  As a
school official in Concord said after her death, "To us, she seemed average.
But she turned out to be remarkable.  She handled success so beautifully."  She
also wanted everyone to learn more, including herself.  Demonstrating her
aspirations after entering the space program, she is quoted saying, "What are we
doing here?  We're reaching for the stars."  Also, after reflecting on her
position, she said in August 1995, "I touch the future, I teach (Gray 32)."
Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, born in 1948, was a tremendous enthusiast for aviation
and the space program.  At 18 years old, he enlisted in the Air Force.  While
working as a mechanic in the service, he put himself through night school,
eventually earning a degree in aerospace engineering that helped him become an
officer and a pilot.  He loved flying. Scobee once observed, :You know, it's a
real crime to be paid for a job that I have so much fun doing."  On one of his
space missions, he carried a banner made for him by students at Auburn High, his
old high school.  It read "TROJANS FLY HIGH WITH SCOBEE." School officials
announced after the tragic explosion that the banner would be put on display to
remind others at Auburn High that other seemingly ordinary students can too fly
high.  (Gray 33) Judith Resnik, born 1949, had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.
She was very ambitious and loved everything.  She once said, "I want to do
everything there is to be done."  Being chosen for the space program gave her
the opportunity to meet a few self-described personal goals: "To learn a lot
about quite a number of different technologies; to be able to use them somehow,
to do something that required a concerted team effort and, finally, a great
individual effort (Gray 33)." She had said once, when asked, about the dangers
of the space program, "I think something is only dangerous if you are not
prepared for it or if you don't have control over it or if you can't think
through how to get yourself out of a problem."  For Resnik, danger was simply
another unknown to be mastered. Ronald McNair, born in 1950, was the second
black man in space.  He was truly remarkable growing up in his segregated South
Carolina school.  He was remembered by those he knew as "one who was always
looking to the clouds."  Jesse Jackson, one of his collage classmate's at N.C.
Agricultural and Technical State University said McNair saw participation in the
space program as "the highest way he could contribute to the system that gave
him so much."  McNair did think much of the ...

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