Eerie Recording Reveals The Last Words of NASA Astronauts — Seconds Before The Shuttle Exploded

It was a sparkling morning but unusually cold. Challenger, NASA’s space shuttle, had already experienced a delay of six days and the agency couldn’t wait any longer to launch the mission. With clumps of ice still flaking parts of the launch tower, the seven-member crew boarded the shuttle at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 28, 1986.

Millions of Americans watched in pride as the shuttle began to propel upwards. Hundreds of students in school classrooms across the country sat with their eyes glued to the screens, knowing that this was the first time NASA was sending a teacher to space as a part of President Reagen’s “Teacher in Space” program. But within little more than a minute, a trail of smoke crossed their screens. All it took was 73 seconds. As the astronauts uttered their last words, there was an explosion. Then all went silent, plunging the entire nation into a collective grief that would traumatize the skies forever. Later, NASA shared the heartbreaking transcript of their final words, which teemed with exclamations of fright. “Uh-oh,” was the last word.

At the beginning of their flight, however, the words weren’t as full of terror. Instead, there was enthusiasm, jokes, and laughter. "There they go, guys," said shuttle commander Francis Scobee, six seconds after the liftoff. “All right,” responded mission specialist Judith A. Resnick. 11 seconds into their journey, pilot Michael Smith exclaimed, "Go you mother!" At nineteen seconds, Smith said, "Looks like we've got a lotta wind here today." After sixty seconds, he said, "Feel that mother go," to which someone replied, "Wooooohoooooo!" At 70 seconds, Scobee was heard saying, "Roger, go at throttle up." In the next 3 seconds, he uttered, “Uh-oh!” and then all became silent.

As seen in the olden footage shared by NBC News, these final words were followed by a dreadful sighting in the sky. A trail of smoke appeared in the azure sky followed by vigorously spreading grey-white plumes that soon choked the morning sky in a sooty haze. “From Mission Control, silence,” the media reporter on the scene, said. The Washington Post reported that the shuttle first soared at a peak height of 65,000 feet before plummeting in 165 seconds at a speed of 207 miles per hour.

Within a few moments, news came from NASA that the shuttle had exploded. Before they could decide how to deal with this unprecedented situation, the shuttle hurtled towards the Atlantic Ocean and crashed through its waters, thumping down at the ocean floor, suffocating and killing all seven crew members. “The debris kept raining from the sky,” the NBC reporter said.

The transcript was generated after a team of IBM engineers recovered the astronauts’ voice tape, slathered in seabed moss after the spacecraft plumped inside the Atlantic. NASA officials, at that time, had no explanation for this tragedy except for sorrow. But it was revealed later on that it was a leak in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster that triggered the eruption of fire-causing gases from the external fuel tank. Elsewhere, HISTORY reported that the fault was quite evident even before the shuttle took flight.

The O-rings that sealed the joints of the shuttle’s rocket boosters were vulnerable to failure at low temperatures. It was later determined and shared in a statement that owing to an extremely chilly morning that day, these rings had stiffened, which escalated the shuttle’s tragic fate. “The shuttle was instantly a blazing fireball,” the NBC reporter described of the scene.

Originally, the Challenger mission, called STS-51-L, was supposed to perform three tasks at the space station. The astronauts were tasked with launching a communications satellite, studying Halley's Comet, and carrying Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, into space, so she could broadcast her lessons from space for the first ever time. The first time never occurred, but it became the last time for sure. The project was canceled after this wrenching event.