Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1

On this, the 18th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, a comprehensive timeline of Challenger’s last flight and a similar timeline for the final minutes of the shuttle Columbia’s mission last year.

The loss of Challenger and Columbia have both been memorialized on Mars with the landing site of the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover in Gusev Crater being named Columbia Memorial Station and its twin rover Opportunity’s landing site in Meridiani Planum on the opposite side of Mars Challenger Memorial Station.

NASA also memorialized the Apollo 1 crew – Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee -by dedicating the hills surrounding the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit’s landing site to the astronauts. The crew of Apollo 1 perished in a flash fire during a launch pad test of their Apollo spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., 37 years ago yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, the excellent HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon includes a great episode on this disaster.

Posted on January 28, 2004
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