Space shuttle disasters cluster around the same week every year. You trust the engineers. You trust the technology. The astronauts trust it too. Then 73 seconds after liftoff, smoke trails fork across Florida sky and seven people are gone. The shuttle was supposed to be invulnerable. It wasn’t. And now we’re sending people back up.

NASA knew about the foam shedding problem before Challenger exploded in 1986. Engineers said don’t fly that cold morning. NASA flew anyway. Seventeen years later, Columbia burned up on reentry from the same foam issue they’d detected at launch but never checked. Both disasters, Paul Delaney says, could arguably have been prevented. And here’s the pattern nobody mentions: Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts in 30 seconds on January 27, 1967. Challenger exploded January 28, 1986. Columbia disintegrated February 1, 2003. The last week of January has a hex on NASA flights.

We landed on the moon in 1969. Artemis II in 2025 repeats the Apollo 8 mission from December 1968. Fifty-five years later, we’ve come full circle. The technology improved, but invulnerability was always an illusion, and the astronauts heading up next know the risks better than anyone watching from the ground.

Topics: Space Shuttle Challenger, NASA safety culture, Columbia disaster, astronaut risk, January space accidents

GUEST:Paul Delaney | Astronomer and professor emeritus at York University

Originally aired on2026-01-29