The Space Shuttle Orbiter Challenger was minding its own business on 28 January 1986, working hard to get its seven-member crew and its large satellite payload to low-Earth orbit, when its booster stack betrayed it and everything began to go badly wrong. First, hot gas within its right Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) began to burn through a seal meant to contain it. Soon, a fiery plume gushed from the side of the SRB, robbing it of thrust, and reaching out menacingly toward the side of the brown External Tank (ET) and the strut bonding the lower end of the SRB to the ET (image at top of post). The plume broke though the ET's foam insulation and aluminum skin, then the strut pulled free of the weakened ET.

Challenger fought back as the ET began to leak liquid hydrogen fuel. It swivelled (the aerospace term is "gimballed") the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) in its tail as it struggled to stay on course. The flame plume from the SRB, meanwhile, glowed brighter as it began to burn hydrogen leaking from the ET. At the same time, the SRB began to rotate around the single strut left holding it to the ET. That strut was located not far from the Orbiter's gray nose, near the conical top of the errant SRB.

Designed by Japanese firm Takram, the organs are part of an exhibition (News From Nowhere) that looks to a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce. Image: Naohiro Tsukada

Throughout these events, Challenger's last crew remained oblivious to the technological drama taking place around them. This was just as well, since they had no way to escape what was about to happen to them.

When Challenger at last lost its struggle against its own booster stack, significant events were separated by tenths or hundredth of seconds. Immediately after the right SRB's lower strut came free, the entire Shuttle stack lurched right. Mike Smith, in Challenger's pilot seat, had time for a startled "Uh-oh" less than a second after the lurch. The ET's dome-shaped bottom then fell away, freeing all the hydrogen fuel it contained. The right SRB's pointed nose slammed into and crushed the top of the ET, freeing liquid oxygen oxidizer. The escaped hydrogen blossomed into a fireball that encompassed Orbiter, rapidly disintegrating ET, and SRBs.

Yet the Orbiter Challenger did not explode. Instead, it broke free of what was left of the ET and began a tumble. The aerodynamic pressures the Orbiter experienced as its nose pointed away from its direction of flight were more than sufficient to almost immediately snap it into several large pieces: the crew cabin, the satellite payload, the SSME cluster. They emerged from the fireball more or less intact. The SRBs, still firing, flew out of the fireball, tracing random trails across the blue Florida sky until a range safety officer commanded them to self-destruct. The Orbiter's wreckage, meanwhile, plummeted into the Atlantic within sight of the Florida coast.

The Shuttle stack as envisioned in 1975, the year von Pragenau was granted his first patent for a redesigned Shuttle stack. Image: NASA

NASA recovered the bodies of the crew and portions of the wreckage, including the section of the right SRB that had leaked hot gas. The wreckage was turned over to accident investigators.

During a Shuttle launch, the three SSMEs ignited first. This caused the twin SRBs, the bases of which were mounted to the launch pad by explosive bolts, to flex along their entire length away from the SSMEs, then straighten out again just as they ignited. O-ring seals between the cylindrical segments making up the SRBs often became unseated during flexure, then had to reseat to contain hot gases after SRB ignition. Accident investigators concluded that failure of one of those seals doomed Challenger. Even more damning, they found that partial seal failures had occurred on pre-Challenger flights - and had been disregarded by NASA managers.

After Challenger, NASA redesigned the SRB joints and seals, added crew pressure suits and a limited crew escape capability, and banned potentially unsafe practices and payloads from Shuttle missions. Yet the U.S. civilian space agency might have gone much farther in modifying the Space Shuttle stack after Challenger.

Even before the accident, NASA had at its disposal proposals for ways to make the Shuttle stack stronger and safer. In 1982, for example, George Landwehr von Pragenau, a veteran engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, filed a patent application - granted in 1984 - for a Shuttle stack design that would have made the Challenger accident impossible.

Born and educated in Austria, von Pragenau joined the von Braun rocket team in Huntsville, Alabama in 1957. He specialized in rocket stability and flight effects on rocket behavior. He had, for example, been part of the team that found the cause of the "pogo" oscillations that crippled Apollo 6, the second unmanned Saturn V-launched Apollo test mission (4 April 1968).

Panther onstage. Photo by Caspar Newbolt , courtesy of the Protomen. Three views of George von Pragenau's 1974 Shuttle stack redesign. Image: U.S. Patent Office

By the time he filed his 1982 patent application, von Pragenau had spent almost a decade thinking about how the Shuttle stack might be rearranged to reduce weight and aerodynamic drag, increase stability, simplify paths through which the force of rocket thrust was transmitted, and provide greater structural strength. His 1984 patent was, in fact, not his first aimed at Shuttle improvement.

In 1974, von Pragenau had filed a patent - granted the following year - in which he proposed a more slender, more vertically oriented Shuttle stack; that is, one that would mimic conventional rocket designs in which stages are stacked one atop the other. He linked the twin SRBs side by side. Moving the tank for dense liquid oxygen from the ET's nose to its tail placed its concentrated mass nearer the base of the stack, improving in-flight stability. He then mounted the SRBs to the Orbiter's belly and perched the ET atop the SRB/Orbiter combination.

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Von Pragenau's 1982 Shuttle stack design was less radical. He left the SRBs, ET, and Orbiter in their normal positions relative to each other, but made significant changes in the ET and SRBs themselves. As in his 1975 patent, he moved the liquid oxygen tank from the ET's nose to its tail and brought the SRBs closer together to improve stability. The liquid oxygen tank became skinny, cylindrical, and almost as long as the Orbiter and SRBs attached to it. The liquid hydrogen tank, fat with low-density fuel, von Pragenau mounted atop the oxygen tank, partially overhanging the Orbiter and SRBs.

Von Pragenau could not tolerate flexing SRBs. He proposed to mount a slide rail on either side of the liquid oxygen tank. Three attachment fixtures on each SRB would link to the slide rails, helping to ensure rigidity. When the SRBs depleted their propellant, pyrotechnic bolts would fire, freeing them to slide backwards down the rails and fall neatly away from the Orbiter/ET stack.

The most important feature of von Pragenau's redesign was a rigid framework - a thrust structure - linking the bottom of the SRBs just above their rocket nozzles. In addition to holding the SRBs rigidly in place, the thrust structure would transmit SRB thrust loads to the bottom of the ET, which would sit atop the center of the thrust structure. When the spent SRBs slid away from the Orbiter/ET stack, they took the thrust structure with them.

In the conventional Shuttle stack, SRB thrust was transmitted through the forward SRB attachment points to a reinforced intertank ring between the ET's top-mounted liquid oxygen tank and its liquid hydrogen tank. Von Pragenau considered this "indirect routing" of thrust loads to be perilously complex.

SSME thrust was transmitted in the conventional Shuttle stack through the Orbiter to its lower ET attachment points and then to the fragile hydrogen tank. Von Pragenau left this load path in place because the other modifications he had made - switching the oxygen and hydrogen tanks, adding the SRB slide rails and linking thrust structure, resting the bottom of the ET on top of the thrust structure - eliminated any need for change.

Von Pragenau's concepts apparently exerted little influence on NASA's post-Challenger recovery effort. A likely explanation is that neither of his proposals - if they were known to decision-makers at all - was deemed affordable. In addition to extensive changes in manufacturing tooling, both proposals would have required modifications to the Vehicle Assembly Building and the twin Complex 39 Shuttle pads at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Even the barge that deliver ETs to KSC would have needed modification. Instead of beefing up the existing Shuttle, NASA studied designs for new shuttles which remained firmly in the low-cost realm of CAD programs, conference papers, and conceptual artwork.

References:

Patent No. 4,452,412, Space Shuttle with Rail System and Aft Thrust Structure Securing Solid Rocket Boosters to External Tank, George L. von Pragenau, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, 15 September 1982 (filed), 5 June 1984 (granted).

Patent No. 3,866,863, Space Vehicle, George L. von Pragenau, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, 21 March 1974 (filed), 18 February 1975 (granted).