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Seventy-three seconds after launch on this day in 1968, space shuttle Challenger broke apart, disintegrating fourteen kilometres over the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Cape Canaveral, killing the seven crew members and marking the first fatalities in US spaceflight on a craft that had left the launch pad—hence the l for lost on the flight designation. Scheduled to deploy a communications satellite and study the approaching Halley’s comet, astronauts included Christa McAuliffe as part of the Teacher in Space project, an outreach programme founded under the Reagan administration in 1984 to inspire STEM studies—cancelled found the death of its first participant.  Because of McAuliffe’s inclusion as a payload specialist, selected out of over eleven-thousand applicants, there was heightened media attention to the orbiter’s tenth and otherwise routine mission and many students in classrooms across America witnessed the disaster live, myself included recalling that TV cart. The cause of the break up was failure in the primary and backup o-ring seals, allowing hot pressurised gases to vent uncontrolled from the booster rockets and caused the craft, climbing at nearly twice the speed of sound to pitch and spin and was torn apart by aerodynamic stress. The launch continued despite warnings from flight engineers that the seal system would breach in the extreme cold—for Florida—weather that morning, possibly to take place before the president’s state of the union address scheduled to be delivered in the evening. A congressional investigation was launched and the shuttle programme suspended until September of 1988 with Discovery. The shuttle programme was retired in 2005 following the loss of Columbia during deorbiting in February 2003 when a piece of insulation foam that had dislodged during the launch struck the tiles that protect the craft from the heat of reentry, which as with the degredation of the o-rings, NASA did not considered to be a potential risk to the astronauts’ safety. The Soviet Union named two craters newly discovered on Venus in honour of the memory McAuliffe and mission specialist Judith Resnik and five other crew members. The second payload specialist Ronald McNair had brought his saxophone with him to record a track for inclusion for the upcoming album Rendez-Vous by John-Michel Jarre.