Investigation of the Challenger Accident

The Challenger explosion was the first catastrophic failure of the Space Shuttle program, and its investigation consumed Congress, NASA, and the nation for nine months. This House Committee report represents the first official accounting of what went wrong: the failure of an O-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster, the cold-weather launch conditions that degraded the seal's elasticity, and the chain of decisions that led Mission Control to green-light a launch that engineers at Morton Thiokol had recommended against.

The report is encyclopedic. It includes testimony, technical diagrams, weather data from the launch pad, the internal communications and sign-off sheets, and the committee's assessment of management failures at NASA and its contractors. The opening pages list the seven crew members by name and role—Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe—a formal bureaucratic eulogy.

What survives in the record is the granular evidence of how a space agency could lose seven people to an engineering problem it had identified years before but deprioritized. The report became a canonical case study in organizational failure and is still assigned in engineering ethics courses. Its bluntness about management pressure and budget constraints was politically costly for NASA but established the record that allowed the agency to rebuild.