The commission criticized NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes that had contributed to the accident. President Ronald Reagan created the Rogers Commission to investigate the accident. The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the Space Shuttle program. The orbiter had no escape system, and the impact of the crew compartment at terminal velocity with the ocean surface was too violent to be survivable. The exact timing of the deaths of the crew is unknown, but several crew members are thought to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft.
The crew compartment, human remains and many other fragments from the shuttle were recovered from the ocean floor after a three-month search-and-recovery operation. Both SRBs detached from the now-destroyed ET and continued to fly uncontrolled until the range safety officer destroyed them. The collapse of the ET's internal structures and the rotation of the SRB that followed threw the shuttle stack, traveling at a speed of Mach 1.92, into a direction which allowed aerodynamic forces to tear the orbiter apart. Shortly after liftoff, the seals were breached, and hot pressurized gas from within the SRB leaked through the joint and burned through the aft attachment strut connecting it to the external propellant tank (ET), then into the tank itself. The record-low temperatures the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber O-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints. The cause of the disaster was the failure of the primary and secondary redundant O-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB). The latter resulted in a higher than usual media interest and coverage of the mission the launch and subsequent disaster were seen live in many schools across the United States.
The crew was scheduled to deploy a communications satellite and study Halley's Comet while they were in orbit, in addition to taking school teacher Christa McAuliffe into space. The mission, designated STS-51-L, was the tenth flight for the orbiter and the twenty-fifth flight of the Space Shuttle fleet. It was the first fatal accident involving an American spacecraft while in flight. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39 a.m. On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, teacher.
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