Description

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart, 73 seconds into flight. All seven crew members died. The cause of the disaster was the failure of an O-ring on the right solid rocket booster. (O-rings help seal the joints of different segments of the solid rocket boosters.) It is now known that a leading factor in the O-ring failure was the exceptionally low temperature (about 31° F) at the time of the launch.

Erosion Data

The table below gives the temperature (in ° F) at launch and O-ring erosion (in mils) for 22 solid rocket boosters, and is adapted from Reference [1].

Damage Data

The table below gives the temperature (again in ° F) and O-ring damage index for 23 Space Shuttle launches, and is adapted from Reference [2]. The damage index is a severity-weighted total number of incidents of O-ring erosion, heating, and blow-by.

Download

• Challenger1.tsv
• Challenger2.tsv

Sources

1. Onlline Ethics Center for Engineering and Science
2. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Edward Tufte
3. Challenger Disaster, Wikipedia