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The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was a space disaster that occurred at 11:39 a.m. EST on January 28, 1986, when the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed. The seal failure caused a flame leak from the solid rocket booster that impinged upon the adjacent external propellant tank. Within seconds, the flame caused structural failure of the external tank, and the orbiter broke up abruptly due to aerodynamic forces. The shuttle was destroyed and all seven crew members were killed, probably when the crew compartment hit the surface of the ocean. The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were eventually recovered from the ocean floor after a lengthy search and rescue operation.
The disaster resulted in a 32-month hiatus in the shuttle program and the formation of the Rogers Commission, a special commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident. The Rogers Commission found that NASA's organizational culture and decision-making processes had been a key contributing factor to the accident. NASA managers had failed to deal with the flawed design of the O-rings, had ignored warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching on such a cold day, and had failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors. The Rogers Commission offered NASA nine recommendations that were to be implemented before shuttle flights resumed.
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Apollo 10 Saturn V S-IC First Stage
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Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev (Сергей Константинович Крикалёв, born August 27, 1958) is a Russian cosmonaut and veteran of six space flights. He has been dubbed by many “the last Soviet Citizen” as in 1991–1992 he spent 311 days, 20 hours and 1 minute aboard the Mir space station whilst back on Earth the Soviet Union collapsed.
Krikalev was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. He is married to Yelena Yuryevna Terekhina and has one daughter, Olga Sergeevna Krikaleva, born in 1990. Sergei enjoys swimming, skiing, cycling, aerobatic flying, and amateur radio operations, particularly from space (callsigns U5MIR and X75M1K).
He overtook Sergei Avdeyev's previous record for the career total time spent in space (747.59 days) during Expedition 11 to the International Space Station. Krikalev has logged a total 803 days and 9 hours and 39 minutes in space.