What Happened to the Challenger Debris After the Explosion

In 1996 a 14-foot piece of Challenger's wing washed up on Cocoa Beach. More than half of the orbiter is still at the bottom of the Atlantic. Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, and her wreckage came down across a huge stretch of ocean off Cape Canaveral. What came next was the largest ocean search and recovery the United States had ever attempted. It took 16 ships, the nuclear-powered research submarine NR-1 and crewed submersibles, plus sonar sweeps across 486 square nautical miles of seabed. Down there, 560 feet under the surface, they found the piece of the right solid rocket booster that turned the engineers' warnings about the O-rings into hard evidence. More than a hundred tons of wreckage went into two old Minuteman nuclear missile silos at Cape Canaveral and were sealed under concrete. Since then only one piece has come out. Most of the orbiter was never recovered, though, and the sea keeps giving parts of her back. A wing flap washed up on a tourist beach. A heat-shield tile turned up on eBay. In 2022, two divers looking for a lost Bermuda Triangle plane for the History Channel found something much bigger. NASA confirmed it was Challenger, and then it decided something that surprised a lot of people. This is where every part of Challenger ended up. It's also the story of a Boy Scout troop's flag that should not have survived the flight. Subscribe for more documentaries about the stories behind history's biggest moments. #Challenger #NASA #SpaceShuttle