Space Shuttle Challenger Research Paper

Most of the books and films about the Space Shuttle Challenger that I could locate focused on the technical side of the explosion. I could not find anything that focused on Christa McAuliffe and Allan McDonald as the events unfolded. I want to start off my film with a quote by Gus Grissom; he is a famous astronaut who perished during a pretest launch for Apollo I. Grissom said, “If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”(Gus)
My plan for a film or documentary is to focus on the teacher astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, while at the same time focusing on Allan McDonald, someone trying to convince the launching crew that the launch needs to be aborted. McDonald had refused to buy off on the launch because he was worried the lower than freezing …show more content…
It was somewhat unnerving to watch the explosion live on television during school. No one explained to us exactly what happened, or why the shuttle had exploded. I did not put everything together until years later. Other than having to put the family dog to sleep when I was a child up until this point in my life I had not had any experiences with death or even had to think about mine or anyone else’s mortality. Mostly I just put this out of my mind, and went about my day so I didn’t have to think about it. Anytime I did ponder it I just thought about how tragic it was that the astronauts died in that manner, and how frightening that must have been to die in that manner. Ever since I was a kid I dealt with death by examining what happened to the person that died and vowing to not do that, or realizing I would never have to worry about putting myself in a position such as the one who died