It was a sight that made some laugh, others gasp in awe and many roll their eyes: A red Tesla Roadster with a dummy dressed in a spacesuit floating through space while action music played over the broadcast.
The televised SpaceX launch of Falcon Heavy in 2018 captured attention around the world for the superfluous nature of its payload, which is still floating somewhere beyond Earth’s orbit eight years later.
Yet the mission was more than a publicity stunt.
The private company that unleashed a car into the cosmos is now a primary partner for NASA, regularly taking astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.
While the concept of a reusable spacecraft was developed at NASA, the engineering breakthrough of reusable rockets launched by SpaceX, landing back where they took off, has propelled the company to become a leader in space exploration.
SpaceX is working toward a vision that NASA, as a public agency, once held back in the 1980s: Regular launches pushing the boundaries of space travel to new frontiers.
A reusable space airplane
Over the course of 30 years, NASA’s Space Shuttle Program flew 135 missions and sent more than 300 people into space.
From 1981 to 2011, the shuttle changed space travel. Coming in the wake of the moon landing and the Apollo missions, the shuttle was intended to be the vehicle of the future, the machine that would carry men and women into space, maybe, to even live there permanently.
“It was really sold by NASA, in the end, as a sort of all-purpose vehicle for everything that you might want to do in space,” said Dr. Jennifer Levasseur, a space history curator at the National Air and Space Museum, where she oversees the shuttle exhibit.
Prior to the shuttle, spacecraft were designed for one-time use only. At the start of the 1970s, however, NASA sought to change that.
“The idea was, well, it’s a really unaffordable model to just keep building these things and throwing them away. So why don’t we build something that’s reusable?” Levasseur said.
The shuttle, which proved instrumental in building the International Space Station, took the form of a space cargo plane, an idea NASA had been toying with for decades but hadn’t been able to fully execute because of its complexity.
“That model was built, this idea that you could have a spacecraft shaped like an airplane that could go up into space, come back, kind of be fixed up a little bit, and then be rolled right back out for another mission,” Levasseur said.
A NASA report stated the shuttle was “capable of launching like a rocket, reentering Earth’s atmosphere like a capsule, and flying like a glider for a runway landing.”
The shuttles delivered multiple satellites into orbit and helped repair the Hubble Space Telescope while serving “as a platform for scientific research within a range of disciplines that included biotechnology and radar mapping.”
In other words, it was a jack-of-all-trades spacecraft.
Over the course of the Space Shuttle Program, NASA constructed six such vehicles, officially named “Space Transportation Systems,” or STS for short: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis. While Enterprise served as a test vehicle and never flew in space, these shuttles collectively traveled 537,114,016 miles and orbited the Earth 20,952 times, according to NASA data.
In 1981, Columbia was the first shuttle to launch, ushering in a new age for space exploration. In the years that followed, NASA experienced great success in launching multiple missions per year. The more success the organization had, the more it promised both to Congress — its funder — and to the American public.
‘One of America’s finest: A teacher’
Until the 1980s, only trained astronauts and a few lucky politicians had gone up into space. NASA devised a plan to send up a civilian, something the organization knew would garner widespread attention and stoke excitement for space travel in a new way.
NASA needed to find ways to keep the public invested in its work. After all, who would be more relatable than a teacher?
On August 27, 1984, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation.
“Today I’m directing NASA to begin a search in all of our elementary and secondary schools and to choose as the first citizen passenger in the history of our space program, one of America’s finest: a teacher,” he said. “And when that shuttle lifts off, all of America will be reminded of the crucial role that teachers and education play in the life of our nation.”
With that, the Teacher In Space Project was born. Over 11,000 educators from across the nation applied. The pool was narrowed down to 10 finalists, with the final pick announced on July 19, 1985: Sharon “Christa” McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher from the small city of Concord, New Hampshire.
“Not everyone knows a test pilot, not everyone knows an aerospace engineer, but everyone knows a teacher, and I think her selection for the Challenger crew and to fly on Space Shuttle, really made it something tangible,” said Astronaut Richard “Ricky” Arnold, who participated in a shuttle flight aboard Discovery and took McAuliffe’s lessons into space during the 2017-2018 school year.
The timing for McAuliffe’s selection was ideal because NASA needed the buzz from the Teacher in Space project to deflect from the increasingly stark evidence that it could not keep up with its promises. In 1985, the organization promised at least one shuttle launch a month, but only nine of the scheduled flights took place. NASA vowed to launch even more frequently in 1986.
McAuliffe was assigned as a payload specialist to the crew of Challenger, which would launch in January of 1986 with six others aboard: Commander Francis “Dick” Scobee, Pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialists Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair and Ellison Onizuka, and Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis.
In the months prior to the January launch, McAuliffe underwent 114 hours of training and spent time sharing her experiences with the American public through television interviews.
Challenger, whose mission pertained to satellite deployment, was initially scheduled to launch on Jan. 22 after being moved from December. But due to a series of delays, including inclement weather and a faulty door seal, the launch ultimately got pushed to Monday, Jan. 28.
That morning was unseasonably frigid in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where icicles had formed on the outside of Challenger overnight. The launch was pushed back several hours to right after 11 a.m. to allow time for icicle removal.
It was going to be a big day for the United States. President Ronald Reagan would deliver the State of the Union that evening.
‘If it fails, we come back, we do it again’
Challenger was cleared to launch, but what happened next left the nation permanently scarred.
One minute and 13 seconds after leaving the launchpad, the shuttle exploded in the air, killing all seven members of the crew while millions tuned in on live television and cheers turned to gasps of confusion and then horror and disbelief.
An investigation ultimately concluded that the rubbery O-Rings in the seal of the solid rocket boosters had become brittle in the cold. Rather than stretching as they were supposed to under extreme heat, they let gases escape, leading to the explosion.
(To learn more about the scientific and communication failures that led to the disaster, read the Monitor’s story on NASA’s systemic failures and the changes that resulted from them.)
Challenger marked a moment in American history that continues to resonate in the national consciousness.
“There was a lot of attention on the space program because of a teacher being part of this mission,” Arnold said. “So a lot more people were paying attention. There was a lot of visibility. And then when the tragedy happened, the country paused in a way that you don’t really experience all that often in your life.”
As national mourning unfolded, the space shuttle program continued. For their bravery and contributions to space exploration, the Challenger Crew was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2004.
Modifications were made and safety procedures tightened, but the risks persisted.
Dr. Irene Porro, who serves as director of the Christa C. McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science and Learning at Framingham State University, explained that the Challenger disaster provided confirmation that the enthusiasm for going into space did not match the reality of the challenges that space flight posed.
“These machines we send to space are extremely complex machines, and when you have something — anything that goes to space or anywhere else — that’s very complex, the probability that something goes wrong increases,” said Porro, who has a background in space science technology and astrophysics.
In 2003, another tragedy took place on a similar scale as Challenger. The shuttle Columbia was returning from a 16-day mission involving microgravity experiments when it exploded upon re-entry into the atmosphere. The seven-person crew, all of whom were killed in the disaster, had only around 15 minutes left in their voyage before landing back on Earth.
And still, the shuttle program continued, with many efforts made to learn from the mistakes of these tragedies.
Levasseur views the story of the shuttle program as one that includes the idea of recovery.
“Because we did go back to space after Challenger, and we went back to space after Columbia, and almost everything we do and every technology that we use, if it fails, we come back, we do it again,” she said. “Just because a plane crashes doesn’t mean we don’t fly on planes anymore, or just because our car engine dies doesn’t mean we’re never going to drive a car again. That’s sort of part of our processes to continue moving forward and learning from the things that go wrong and implementing change in order to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
For Arnold, the risk of space flight is one that he said people tend to accept “quietly.” For him, it was worth it.
“I don’t think most Americans are aware of how dangerous space flight can be,” he said. “In a world that is rife with turmoil and challenges that the entire globe has to come together and face, we have a model in the International Space Station. We have a group of people around the world and a group of people off the world working together on a project that brings us together and addresses challenges as human beings, not as Americans, not as Russians, not as Japanese, but as human beings. And I think that lesson that the International Space Station is teaching us is worth the risk of going there.”
In recent years, the rise of private space companies, such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Axiom Space, has changed the dynamic of exploration beyond Earth. The idea of a private-public partnership is not new, with payload specialists from different scientific companies flying on public spacecraft for decades. Now, however, NASA provides the astronauts while SpaceX manufactures the rockets.
“For some people, they want to invest because they see that there will be a return on investment,” Porro said. “That’s the only reason why they want to do it. Other people want to go to space because they want to explore. For other people, I think it’s part of our human destiny to, so the motivation that brings people to these kinds of things are different.”
While no human lives have been lost in any commercial space launch to date, the danger of leaving the Earth’s atmosphere won’t change, especially as people look to venture further into the solar system to Mars and beyond.
“There was always going to be a risk,” said Levasseur, the space history curator. “There always has been. There always will be, because you’re going at 17,500 miles per hour to a place where there’s no oxygen, there’s a vacuum. These dangers are very real and that shouldn’t be minimized.”
