Space disasters and near misses
In
a speech to the nation after the space shuttle Challenger exploded
soon after launch on 28 January 1986, US President Ronald Reagan said:
I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
Although there had been accidents and near misses before, the Challenger disaster was the first time that US astronauts had died in-flight. Indeed, in the whole history of space flight, there has only been one fatal accident in space itself: that resulting in the deaths of the three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts in June 1971. All others have taken place on Earth or in the Earth's atmosphere, usually on landing or take-off.
Given the extraordinary technical aspects and other complexities involved in putting human beings into space, it is perhaps surprising that there have not been more fatalities since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on 12 April 1961. Altogether, 18 astronauts have died during space flights (19 if you include the experimental X-15 flight in November 1967) and three on the launch pad, and at least 11 others have died during training. Many more engineers and technicians have perished in space programme-related accidents.
This is a chronology of the major disasters – and a few of the near misses.
