Forty years after the Challenger disaster, NPR explores the engineers' last-minute efforts to stop the launch, their decades of guilt and the vital lessons that remain critical for NASA today.
Bob Ebeling was anxious and angry as he drove to work on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986. He kept thinking about the space shuttle Challenger, cradled on a Florida launchpad 2,000 miles away. Ebeling knew that ice had formed there overnight and that fre... [21062 chars]