A catastrophic failure occurred 73 seconds after liftoff as the shuttle emerged from “Max-Q,” the period of highest mechanical stress in the lower atmosphere. The vehicle broke apart in flight and exploded into a fireball. All seven aboard the shuttle were killed, and searches revealed no sign of the crew.

On a cold, sunny morning in Florida, after several scrubs due to weather, the launch was a highly-anticipated event.

Christa McAuliffe trained to be the first teacher in space, preparing to turn a shuttle cabin into the most-watched classroom in America. Forty years after she and six crewmates died when Challenger broke apart shortly after liftoff,

Children, students and adults gathered around television sets 40 years ago to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger launch. Seventy-three seconds after the launch, people around the world heard or saw the first major space shuttle disaster,

NASA's Space Shuttle Program, which ran from 1981 to 2011, was a complex and ambitious project that pushed the boundaries of space exploration, but was marred by two tragic accidents during the shuttle era.

NASA is getting ready to launch its massive, fully expendable rocket for the first crewed flight to the Moon since Apollo. The agency’s new era of spaceflight comes with a few parts from its past, specifically three rocket engines that have previously flown on space shuttle missions.

NASA's space shuttle Challenger completed 10 missions before it broke apart during a launch in 1986, killing seven astronauts.