Space Shuttle Secrets

Space Shuttle Secrets | Mysterious Universe: "At 11.39 a.m. Eastern-Standard-Time, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger suffered an unmitigated disaster only 73-seconds into its flight, disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, and led to the tragic deaths of its seven crew-members: commander Dick Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialists Ronald McNair, Judith Resnik and Ellison Onizuka, and payload specialists Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

As NASA’s investigation concluded, the disintegration of the Shuttle began when an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster failed at the moment of lift-off, and caused a breach in the joint which it sealed, thus allowing pressurized hot gas from within the solid rocket motor to reach the outside and impinge upon the external fuel tank. This, in turn, led to the structural failure of the same external tank, and unstoppable, and inevitable, tragedy, and death was the only possible outcomes.

Not everyone was convinced the event was an accident, however – as the Freedom of Information Act has now demonstrated. In the immediate wake of the affair, the FBI’s Washington Field Office found itself embroiled in a very curious saga relative to the destruction of the Shuttle."