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Challenger Explosion Essay

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The Challenger Explosion and its Effect on the Twenty-first Century On January 28th 1986, the world experienced one of its most horrific tragedies. NASA was launching a shuttle mission. The shuttle was named the Challenger. The shuttle had seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe who would have been the first teacher in space. Just seventy three seconds into the mission however the Challenger exploded 45,000 feet in the air, killing all seven of its crew members (Vaughn 13). After this explosion many investigations began to try to figure out the reason for the explosion. In the end, the results stated that there were a variety of factors. There was a fault in one of the parts of the rocket called the O-ring that could not work properly …show more content…

People were excited over the prospect of having a teacher in space that could teach their children. The explosion caused many doubts over the space program because of the tragedy. This was the first time that an event of this caliber had been broadcast to so many people and it led to criticism growing in the people (Sharriff 188). Having so many people watch it live and then over and over again on news channels joined grief and shock with public incredulity and outrage (Vaughn 126). All people who were watching regardless of race, gender, language, interest, and lifestyle were bound together by this historic moment, and that does not happen very often. The thirtieth anniversary of this event was January 28th, 2016. Even now, thirty years later anyone who was watching can say exactly where they were and what they were doing. A reporter that watched the explosion occur perfectly summed up how the world was changing. He said that people have a hard time believing that something horrific has happened until they see it six or seven times on many different networks. It changed the media because they were able to play footage over and over again, frame by frame, and make it so people could never forget what they were seeing or hearing and that was a novel idea at the time. Yet this reporter was able to accurately describe how the world would continue to be thirty years later (Shales 3). People’s views changed over space exploration and the media was affected by the explosion of the

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