Peter Billingsly, a former child actor best known for A Christmas Story (and more recently a surprising turn in Spider-Man: Far From Home) was NASA’s “kid liaison” for the mission. Interviews with the deceased astronauts’ loved ones - especially those with June Scobee Rogers, the widow of Challenger's commander Richard “Dick” Scobee - put the loss of the crew in devastating, emotional terms. The show had to go on.Ĭhallenger exploded due to an engineering flaw in the O-rings that were meant to prevent the burning, pressurized gas within the two rockets from bursting through, but the documentary series humanizes this mechanical flaw and its very human cost. This branding issue, the documentary explains with incredible archival footage and interviews with key figures from NASA and space engineering history, is what led to McAuliffe’s presence on Challenger, which was set to blast off into space with two rockets that had a clearly documented, potentially fatal flaw. The Shuttle was plagued by problems, some of which were dangerous, while others were lesser delays that still poked a hole in the vision NASA was selling. Space would be for everyone, the Shuttle promised, but it soon became apparent that wasn’t the case. 28, 1986 launch, cutting to the opening credits just after the explosion, but then it goes back in time to the conception of the Space Shuttle, which was conceived of as a means to make travel to space safe, easy, and borderline routine. It is also, fascinatingly, a documentary about guilt - and in a quietly perverse way, the limitations of guilt when faced with that same tragic momentum. It’s about the simmering failings of the Space Shuttle program and the bureaucracy and momentum that made such a catastrophe inevitable. ![]() The moment is infamous, but Netflix’s new four-part documentary series Challenger: The Final Flight, goes behind the disaster that killed all seven astronauts aboard, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Even if you were born years or decades later, chances are you know the image - a devastating explosion set against a clear, unusually cold Florida sky, with a thick white cloud that forks in two as rockets and debris fall from what was once the Space Shuttle Challenger. ![]() If you were alive in 1986, you remember it.
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