New footage has just surfaced of the Challenger disaster. The short Super-8 film was taken by Jeffrey Ault from his viewing spot at the Kennedy Space Center 10 miles from the launch pad. The film gives the best view I've ever seen of a launch as you get a feel for just how fast the shuttle is going as it roars into space. The footage was licensed by the Huffington Post and you can read their entire accompanying piece here.

Conditions at Kennedy Space Center in Florida were anything but ideal for a Space Shuttle launch on the morning of January 28, 1986. The temperature was 31 degrees farenheit, far colder than for any previous shuttle launch. Engineers at Morton Thiokold (manufacturer of the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, or SRBs) warned against launching in such cold temperatures. They feared there was a distinct possibility that the O-rings on the SRBs might not seal correctly in such temperatures. Engineers at Rockwell International (primary contractor for the Shuttle program) also expressed grave concerns over the temperature. Primarily over the possibility that ice, which had accumulated all over the Shuttle and adjacent launch pad, would break free during launch and damage the critical heat absorbing tiles on the Shuttle's underbelly. Both sets of engineers advised against launching.

Their bosses however, feeling the pressure to launch after a week of delays and in the full glare of the public spotlight due to the presence of the first "teacher in space" (Christa McAuliffe) among the crew, overroad their engineers and gave STS-51L the green light.

They should have listened.

Just 73 seconds after lift off the Thiokold engineer's worst nightmares were realized as super-heated gas leaking through a failed O-ring on the right hand SRB burned through the external fuel tank causing a cascading series of events that led to the breakup of the Shuttle Challenger 48,000 feet over the Atlantic. Contrary to popular belief at the time the Shuttle was not torn apart by the explosion of gases in the external fuel tank but instead by aerodynamic forces exerted on the orbiter when it veered off its intended trajectory due to thrust anomolies coming from the right SRB (which had broken loose) and the external fuel tank. The last words heard from Pilot Michael Smith just milliseconds before the orbitor was torn apart were an ominous "Uh oh."

In a grissly discovery made some weeks later it was learned that several members of the crew had apparently survived the orbiter's breakup and activated their emergency oxygen supplies. Indeed Pilot Michael Smith - in a valiant but hopeless attempt to gain control of the situation - had been working the control panel, activating switches in an apparent attempt to restore electicity after the breakup. Because of these discoveries many experts now believe that at least some of the crew members survived the entire 2 minute 45 second free fall to the ocean's surface and that it was that impact with the water - at 207 mph - that was the likely cause of death, not the explosion or orbiter's initial breakup.

In the aftermath of the Challenger disaster the Shuttle program was grounded for 31 months while changes to the decision making culture at NASA as well as new, more robust safety procedures were implemented.

The crew of STS-51L were: Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Greg Jarvis, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka and Christa McAuliffe.

In the early morning hours of September 19, 1985 an 8.0 magnitude earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Coastal communities suffered relatively little damage and the quake did not produce any significant tsunamis. However, more than 200 miles to the east the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, one of the largest cities on the planet, underwent horrific shaking that lasted for 5 minutes. During that time more than 400 buildings collapsed and thousands more were damaged. Millions of inhabitants lost water, electricity and phone service and worst of all an estimated 10,000 people lost their lives.

In the aftermath of the quake many were asking the same questions: how could such enormous devastation happen in a city that was so far from the quake's epicenter? And why were some parts of the city destroyed while other parts remained virtually untouched? The answers, it would turn out, lie in the nature of the land Mexico City itself is built upon. When the Spanish invaded Mexico in the 16th century they found a city perched on an island in the middle of an enormous swampy lake that lay between two volcanoes. Over the centuries as the city grew the lake/swamp was drained to provide land for expansion. As a result much of central Mexico City rests uneasily upon a mixture of volcanic clay, silt, sand and (relatively recent) lava deposits, while the outer regions are situated on much more dependable rock. The silty deposits that underpin much of the city center are perfectly tuned to the natural 'pitch' of seismic waves so when these waves arrived from the coast they found a perfect amplifier. Its not unlike an electrical signal from a guitar traveling quietly through a cable only to  burst out of the amplifier at ear splitting decibel levels.

In the aftermath of the quake the silence from the government was deafening. In fact it wasn't until 39 hours after the disaster that President de la Madrid addressed the situation publicly. With the government response virtually nonexistent the city's inhabitants took matters into their own hands and began scouring through the wreckage to find survivors. In all more than 4,000 people were pulled from the rubble alive and a large percentage of them owe their lives to these anonymous citizen heroes.

Ruins of the Hotel Regis, Mexico City Sept 19, 1985

Chernobyl was the worst case scenario anti-nuclear power activists had been warning about for the previous 20 years. Gross negligence created a situation that threatened the lives of millions of people in the western Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Only the unimaginable heroism of a small number of Soviet firefighters and soldiers prevented an even greater catastrophe.

On April 26, 1986 technicians at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were running tests on the plants backup cooling system. Somehow during the testing the reactor's core was allowed to power down to a state of near total shutdown. No one knows exactly how this happened since the technicians responsible died of radiation poisoning shortly after the accident. In a nutshell, once it was discovered that the core had cooled so precipitously someone made the decision to remove all control rods from the core in an attempt to bring it back up to speed. After several other missteps too complicated to explain here power in the reactor core spiked causing an explosion that was quickly followed by a second larger explosion that blew the roof off the reactor building and exposed the core to the environment. Tons of radioactive materials from the core were blown into the air.

At first the Soviets kept their mouths closed about the accident hoping nobody would notice. But people did. Two days after the accident nuclear plant workers in Sweden were found to be contaminated with radiation. When no sources were found at the plant where they worked scientists concluded that the radiation could only be coming from the Soviet Union and that it must represent some form of nuclear disaster. Shortly after more evidence started to come in from Finland as well as other countries. Finally Soviet officials caved in to the facts and admitted what happened. The radiation released was hundreds of times greater than that released by the bombing of Hiroshima and spread west across not only Scandinavia but many other parts of Eastern and Western Europe as well.

Back at the accident site soldiers and firefighters were recruited to deal with the catastrophe. The men who volunteered during the first days of the crisis to contain the fire in the core knew they would not survive but went in anyway. Without their sacrifice radiation would have continued to leak unhindered into the atmosphere indefinitely and the human and environmental toll that resulted from the disaster would have been many times worse than it was. After the core fire was extinguished a steel sarcophogas was built around the destroyed reactor 4 building, one that will need to remain in place for thousands of years to come. Pripyat, a city of 50,000 that was the company town of the power plant was completely evacuated and remains a ghost town to this day. The long term effects on surrounding countries is a hotly debated topic even today with some reports claiming that hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths can be expected as a direct result of radiation that leaked from Chernobyl in 1986.

Left: Doomed soldiers remove radioactive material from the reactor's roof. Right: The sarcophagus.

Robert Ballard of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) was eager to secure funding for projects of his that involved deep sea imaging. He figured the best way to get that funding would be to demonstrate what he could do by finding something everyone from here to there figured was lost forever: the wreck of the Titanic.

But he'd need funding for that too. So he made an agreement with the US Navy: they'd give him money to find the wrecks of two sunken US Navy subs and, if he was successful - and there was still funding from that project left over - he could use that extra money to go search for the Titanic. Well, he found both subs (the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher) and then set sail for the chilly waters of the north Atlantic. Armed with the robotic diving vessel Argo he spent several days sweeping the seabed looking for a debris field he believed (rightly) would lead him to the wreck itself. Finally on September 1, 1985 cameras on the Argo began to pick up pieces of man made debris on the ocean floor and soon after Ballard and the others on the mothership, The Knorr, were staring at the the hull of the once great ocean liner.

A year later Ballard returned to the wreck with a deep sea submersible called Alvin and dove to the site personally, returning with a treasure trove of both still and video imagery.

The discovery of Titanic touched off a firestorm of publicity and the legendary ship and its tale of woe has been with us (non-stop it seems) ever since in the form of numberless books, TV specials and a little movie you might have heard of that came out in 1997.

While they were a time of immense political and cultural upheavel, the fact is the 80s were a pretty quiet time in the natural disaster department. Nothing occured that could match the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina wiping out an entire American city, or the recent earthquake/tsunami catastrophe in Japan. Thank the maker!

One notable exception occured on November 13, 1985 when the Columbian town of Armero was buried in the middle of the night under gigantic mudslides caused by the eruption of the nearby volcano Nevado del Ruiz. Nearly the entire population of 27,000 was buried alive. It was the second deadliest eruption of the 20th century.

If the Columbian government had been listening they would have heard the warnings the volcano had been issuing for a full year before the fateful eruption and relocated the town's inhabitants in time to save them. The National Bureau of Geology and Mines (INGEOMINAS) issued a report a month before the tragedy which declared that a moderate eruption would produce " . . . a 100 percent probability of mudflows . . . with great danger for Armero . . ." Sadly, like the warnings issued regarding the vulnerability of New Orleans, public officals in Columbia turned a deaf ear and the result was a tragedy of immense human proportions.

You can learn more about the tragedy here.

Video here.

satellite image of Mount St Helens eruption

The 80s got off to a emphatic start when, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington State blew its top. Unbelievable that almost half the mountain just slid away like it did.




Learn more about the eruption and aftermath here.