33 years after the Challenger explosion: the story of one of NASA's worst tragedies

As every January 28, NASA remembers the tragedy of the Challenger shuttle, which exploded after takeoff 33 years ago, in 1986, leaving seven crew members killed.

Six NASA astronauts and Christa McAuliffe – the first female teacher to travel in space – died in the Challenger disaster when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. The official cause was a failure in one of the impulse engines.

Sentenced to disappear from this accident, the Space Shuttle program officially ended in 2011 after three decades of bringing astronauts to the low Earth orbit. Its withdrawal has left the United States without a vehicle for manned space travel, a work focused on the Russian Soyuz, in the expectation of the new ships "Made in USA" of Space X and Boeing, which will arrive during in the year 2019.

The other major shuttle accident occurred on February 1, 2003. Seven people died aboard the Columbia shuttle when she broke it into pieces when she came back into the Earth's atmosphere because she had lost the thermal tiles from her bottom. in takeoff, and the ship did not withstand the heat of friction with the atmosphere.

The US Space Agency also commemorates the death of three astronauts in Apollo 1, by a fire on the launch pad. Moreover, in 1967, NASA lost a wounded pilot with an X15 hypersonic aircraft powered by rockets.