[LINK] On the meaning of the Challenger disaster for manned spaceflight

[rfmcdonald]

One theme I've seen in the blogosphere reacting to the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster is speculation that this event, by being so public, diminish faith in human spaceflight. This was discussed briefly at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and at greater length in Ryan Faith's Vice article "How the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster Changed America's Romance With Space".

[I]n the early years of the Shuttle, a lot of folks really wanted to believe that NASA would solve the problems and make the spacecraft perform as promised if it were just given enough time and resources to do so.

NASA tried so very, very hard to live up to those hopes and aspirations, launching Shuttles as fast as it could manage — nine Shuttle missions in the year before the Challenger disaster, in fact. At the time, all kinds of civilians had blasted off: payload specialists (industrial astronauts!), military payload specialists, and congressmen. A second shuttle launch site was under construction in California to allow the shuttle to orbit the planet from pole to pole, rather than around the equator. Interplanetary robotic missions launched from the Shuttle's cargo bay were in the offing, and NASA was developing a potentially booming satellite repair business.

The Teacher in Space program, announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, was another major step. The idea was for a teacher to be selected from among thousands of applicants to fly on the Challenger and deliver two 15-minute teaching lessons from space. Kids across the US spent weeks prepping for this big national moment in science education. Christa McAuliffe, who taught social studies at a high school in New Hampshire, could have been anyone's teacher.

Meanwhile, the public was left to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the average person might be able to get themselves to space within a couple decades.

The morning of the launch, some 17 percent of the US viewing audience watched the launch live as all those idle notions and distant fantasies about an optimistic future in space were blown across the Florida sky and killed just as surely as Christa McAuliffe, the five NASA astronauts, and two payload specialists had been. Here was an individual who had been celebrated and touted as a normal, everyday kind of person, and she'd died a tragic death on national TV for audaciously embodying the idea that anyone could go to space.

Subsequent polling and opinion surveys showed that the percentage of the US public that followed the Challenger disaster "very closely" or "closely" was pretty much on par with the public reaction to 9/11.

This is a provocative speculation, but I'm not altogether sure if this is correct. Thoughts?