Challenger Disaster | Revisiting the Tragedy | 5
36:41 Share

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. ♪

If you attended a K-12 school in America in January of 1986, there's a good chance you watched the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on TV. All around the country, televisions were wheeled into classrooms to broadcast a historic milestone, the first American civilian traveling into space, schoolteacher Krista McAuliffe.

You might have watched as McAuliffe and her six fellow astronauts waved and smiled confidently at the cameras on their way to the launch pad. And maybe you felt a sense of awe and wonder as the rockets roared to life and the shuttle took off, soaring into the skies for just over a minute until something went horribly wrong.

Filmmaker Stephen Leckard remembers that day well and set out to explore the aftermath of the Challenger disaster. He co-directed, co-created, and produced the 2020 Netflix series Challenger The Final Flight. Our conversation is next.

In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of scandals and deadly crashes that have dented its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season of Business Wars explores how Boeing allowed things to turn deadly and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Make sure to listen to Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Stephen Leckart, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Thank you for having me.

Now, there are only a few moments in everyone's lifetime. I can remember probably two or three, and the most recent was September 11th, 2001. But moments where you know exactly where you were when you found out. The other moment I distinctly remember is the Challenger accident, January 28th, 1986. I was in sixth grade, and we were being sent home from school because there was no water pressure.

Already a weird day, and then there was this rippling rumor of something horrible happening. We all found out when we got home and watched TV. What do you remember, if anything, about that day? I was in elementary school, and I remember all the excitement around the launch leading up to it because of Kristen McAuliffe being a teacher. And I remember the TV in the classroom, and I'm young elementary school, so it was exciting, but the details are somewhat fuzzy.

Mostly I remember something happening. I remember the teacher turning the television off, and I remember being told to go outside and play. And then I was confused. I seemed to feel like we understood that something terrible had happened, that people had died. And in that sense, it was my first experience of death. I had not lost a family member. I'd watched movies and television shows with people who died, but those were actors and it was fake. And this was very real.

But I was so young that no one really talked to us about it because it was confusing. And I remember going home and I seem to remember it being on the TV, on the news, but I don't remember talking to anyone about it. I just remember my excitement for space and wanting to be an astronaut feeling now really complicated and not wanting to be an astronaut anymore.

Your Netflix series begins with a shot of a recreation of a classroom at that moment. You see the back of kids' heads watching the Challenger launch on TV. Is this a mirror of your memory? What were you trying to say by starting your series like that? It was a mirror of everyone's memories, if you were alive. I wanted to remember that kids were watching, and I was, of course, one of them, but that if we could see the series through fresh eyes like a child and always keep that in perspective, it would be useful.

and sort of explain things in a way that when I was younger, I didn't get. So we really felt that it would be kind of beautiful to start in a classroom and to track in towards the television and to create more drama as we get pulled into the TV, and then you get lost in the archival. But to start it with a recreated memory, again, it was my memory, it was all of us who were

making the project who were alive, we all contributed elements to how we designed the classroom. And in fact, for several of the producers, myself, my co-director, the back of those kids' heads, it's actually our kids. That's fascinating. You also remind us, too, about the lives lost. Each episode in the series begins with the faces of the astronauts.

Did you remember yourself any of the faces or names of the seven astronauts before you started this project? I'm sad to admit I did not know them well. You know, as a kid, I knew Kristen McAuliffe. That was the name that we learned a lot about. And that was the one that was seared into my brain and my memory. And it wasn't until doing a lot of research as an adult and coming back around that I started to

feel more of a connection to the other names and who they were and just how remarkable they were. There were multiple astronauts who were, I guess, groundbreakers prior to the Challenger. They were part of the first astronaut class, which included the first Black Americans to go to space, included the first women to go to space, the first Jews to go to space, the first Asian American to go to space.

When we put two and two together, that multiple people who were part of that historic astronaut class years later wound up on the Challenger, it made us think of two things. One, we needed to make sure that you knew every single person who was on the Challenger. And two, we needed to make sure we tied them to that legacy because space really was going to be for everybody. And that's what Kristen McAuliffe stood for, the idea that

Now, of course, also the seven astronauts, they weren't the only ones whose lives were completely changed and altered in this disaster. NASA and the NASA contractors all felt this horrible disaster deeply. But they also felt that the astronauts were not the only ones whose lives were completely changed and altered in this disaster.

And you spent years making this series, conducting interviews with astronauts, families, former NASA officials, people who worked at Morton Thiokol in particular. I'd like to ask you about your interview with engineer Bob Ebling's daughter, Leslie. What did she tell you about the stresses her dad went through, both, I guess, before and after the Challenger launched? Yeah, I mean, that was a remarkable interview. And Leslie was a remarkable figure because she lived at home with her mom and dad at the time.

She also worked at Morton Thiokol, and they used to carpool to work together. So when we met Leslie, it was remarkable because unfortunately her father had passed away, but she became a proxy for him because she literally rode in the passenger seat with him to work every day.

And that meant that she got to see a shift in him. So, you know, when the shuttle first was being developed and when the subcontractors got these jobs, it was exciting. They were contributing to the next big leap for the American space program. There was so much revelry around this ship. It was the most complex machine ever built. And everyone took such immense pride in

So that's what she saw in her dad was that immense pride. And what started to shift was the moments where they started to sense that there were problems. And I think everyone anticipated there'd be problems because it's the most complex machine that's ever built. Space travels really hard. You know, you're engineering things that are going into the vacuum of space. So they have to be engineered in a much different way than just building an automobile.

So you expect those difficulties. But what started to happen to Bob is that, and there's a paper trail that shows this, some of the concerns weren't necessarily being taken with as much seriousness, at least from their perspective, as it warranted. And over time, that created a sense of stress for him because he would show up to his work. They would try to be fixing things or working on them or troubleshooting. And yet the launches continued.

So it really became like a slow-motion car crash. One of the other interviews was, I guess, a more junior colleague of Bob Ebeling's at Morton Thiokol, a man named Brian Russell. What was that interview like for you? Well, it was the first one we filmed. We cold-called Brian, got on the phone with him.

was a long conversation to finally get him on board to agree to share his story with us and when we showed up at his house you know we show up with a pretty big crew we shot four cameras there's a lot of downtime while we're setting up we're loading in and so we were chatting and getting to know each other so by the time he sat in the chair you know we'd really spoken for several hours we could tell that he had a lot of emotions that were clearly at the surface

The night before the launch, there was a phone call, a group phone call. We didn't have Zoom back then. There was a group of people in Utah, you know, a series of high up executives, as well as some of the engineers on the team for the Solid Rocket Booster. And we depict this in recreations in the series.

So Brian was in that room with the team in Morton Diacol. And then in Florida, down at the Cape, there was a trailer with a few NASA engineers and supervisors. And there was a long conversation going back and forth between the two. Should we launch? Should we not launch?

Let's look at the data. The data is showing that it's cold. That could be bad. There were previous launches that were colder and everything worked fine. So it's not a clear-cut case where the science said specifically that something bad would happen because there was evidence to show that they had done it in worse conditions and nothing bad happened.

So back and forth, back and forth. Brian is a young engineer sitting off to the sidelines listening to everything, and he's not in a position to speak up in that room, but he felt they shouldn't launch. At the end of that meeting, what had to happen was Morton Thiokol had to sign off on the launch to say that it was okay. And so they needed to sign a piece of paper from one of the higher-ups at Morton Thiokol saying,

They needed a piece of paper sent via fax machine to the Cape saying they approved the launch. And Brian, I'm not even sure why, they handed him the fax and said, go send the fax. And so he became an involuntary messenger in this chain that led to catastrophe. Yeah.

So as the interview progressed, he just got more and more emotional. I think it felt cathartic for him. I couldn't speak to that directly, what it did for him in the moment. But his wife took aside our cinematographer, Graham Willoughby, and just said, thank you. He's been carrying this for years.

It's interesting that not everyone has the same emotions in this project. Not everyone was seeking a catharsis. You had an interview with William Lucas, who on the NASA side, okayed the Challenger launch. He headed the Marshall Space Flight Center team that oversaw the solid rocket fuel boosters. What did he say about his decision to launch Challenger that morning?

I'll be honest, framing his emotions is not something I'm going to be able to do because as a documentary filmmaker, you interview people and it's up to the viewer to decide how it makes them feel. I can tell you that during our interview with Bill,

He was very proud of all of the work that he had done for decades prior to the shuttle. And his legacy at NASA was one that he felt was not martyr pockmarked by the Challenger. And there were other disasters that we spoke about. You know, one of the very first rockets that was trying to launch in NASA during the Apollo program, it caught fire and killed astronauts.

So I think as a scientist, as an engineer, as somebody who had decades of experience at NASA, had watched and lived through other tragedies, I think it was a simple case for him to accept that this endeavor, which is space travel, is just very risky. And as an engineer and as a scientist,

He pointed very clearly to the data that showed there were other shuttle missions that had launched in much colder temperatures and they had launched successfully. So the data just were not conclusive one way or the other, despite the concerns of everyone at Morton Thiokol and potentially even within NASA. So I think for him, Challenger, an unfortunate, terrible tragedy. ♪

but not one that could have been prevented in the sense that the data were conclusive. If the data were conclusive, the conversation would have been very different. American Scandal is sponsored by Cook Unity. For millions of Americans, myself included, one of the most common and frustrating questions is, what's for dinner?

We're too busy, too swamped at work, too caught up with the kids, or just too tired to think through a proper menu, let alone the shopping and cooking. One easy solution is to order delivery, but that's expensive, not always the healthiest. Another easy solution is CookUnity. Imagine a meal service where menus are crafted by award-winning, professional chefs using local, seasonal ingredients sent to your doorstep fresh, not frozen.

Knowing I'd be out of town, I sent CookUnity meals to Molly, one of my employees, to try. She said, Making the meals is so simple and quick, and the food was delicious. Honestly, they were really good. I can tell they weren't just thrown together like a microwave meal. Molly also found a favorite new chef. Many of the meals she loved were created by Santiago Lopez, whose authentic Mexican flavors come from 25 years of cooking in kitchens in Mexico and New York.

And this is the sort of personal connection to the food that has me looking forward to my own CookUnity delivery. Reset your routine with convenient, mouth-watering meals crafted with local ingredients by award-winning chefs. Go to CookUnity.com slash AS or enter code AS before checkout for 50% off your first week. That's 50% off your first week by using code AS or going to CookUnity.com slash AS. ♪

On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes,

that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season of Business Wars explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials and devastating consequences bringing the Titan to its knees and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation.

Follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Business Wars, The Unraveling of Boeing, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. In your series, you found some amazing footage and photographs of a place that most people probably haven't seen, but it was somewhere we set a few scenes of our series in. A beach house where astronauts and their families gathered before the launch. Talk about that place and those photos.

Yeah, the beach house, it was a dingy little sort of shack, nothing super special down on the beach in the Cape on a very, very private, quiet, empty beach that, you know, the public didn't have access to.

And long before the space shuttle program, it was used by astronauts and their families to go and have a little bit of a break and a reprieve prior to launches. As we were doing our interviews, we realized from talking with the astronauts' families that they were still using it during the space shuttle program. And the description of the place changed.

was really intriguing because there were old bottles, champagne bottles up on the mantle that were turned into candle holders from previous missions. And I didn't know that we would find these photos. I think we hoped. And then as we met the families of the Challenger astronauts, it turned out that there were photographs. And there were photographs of this crew before the launch.

It's intimate moments among colleagues and friends and their family members. And the couples all sat together in the living room and there's beautiful pictures of each couple seated on a couch, smiling and laughing. And it really set a nice tone for the idea that they were collectively celebrating and having a nice time.

But what was beautiful was not photographed, which was the couples all went and spent separate time together. So June Scobie Rogers describes taking a walk on the beach with her husband. And that was a really beautiful idea that, okay, the seven astronauts and their significant others all gathered together. But then even in that private setting, they all found ways to have side conversations with one another and intimate moments, just the two of them.

There were plenty of these intimate moments, but I don't know many as heart-wrenching as perhaps June Scobie Rogers' and the way she talks about her husband in the series. How does she describe their relationship in those final moments and hauntingly the moments that came back to her even after the disaster? Yeah, she just is an amazing human being. The way she speaks about the loss, you can't help but feel for her.

The way that she also, I think, was a good, quote unquote, astronaut's wife, the way she supported her husband, the way she really took the lead among the family members and the partners' wives and husbands. She really was very much a leader in her own right.

And she described after the accident being brought into a building within NASA, and there's kind of a locker room area where all the astronauts would keep their personal effects and belongings.

And she takes us through in the series she describes opening her husband's locker and finding a Valentine's Day card that he had written to her already. And the emotion that she explained to us was very, very real. It felt important because what it said about her husband was that he was planning to come home. There was no plan to not come home despite the risks. And he'd already planned that out that, well, I'll write my wife a beautiful card because I love her.

And those are the moments that as an interviewer and as a producer on the project, you know, it felt very much like we were being let into an incredibly private moment. And I can't speak for June, but I would intuit that what it said about her husband was everything that you can take from the story, which is that he loved her. Another of the astronauts family that you interviewed was Lisa Bristol, Krista McAuliffe's sister. What was that interview like?

Lisa was the very last interview we conducted for the whole series. From the beginning with a project like this, but many projects, you create a spreadsheet of all the people that you might want to talk to. We knew we had seven astronauts and we needed to find ways to humanize each of them.

So we reached out to husbands and wives and children, anyone who was alive at the time. And in the case of Krista, we had reached out to her husband and tried multiple times to contact him. He politely declined, which was not a surprise because we had never found or seen any other interview he'd ever given before.

But it made us kind of wonder, well, how are we going to get to the heart of Krista? Who knew her before she became an astronaut? Who could speak to her as a human being? And who was potentially there for the launch? And we knew that her sister Lisa was there. And if you see Lisa, they very much look like sisters. We just remember calling Lisa and having a very long conversation about our intent for the series.

We had found one interview she had done for a newspaper, so we knew she was comfortable talking about it.

But there's a very big difference between giving an interview to a print reporter with a tape recorder and asking to come with four cameras and a crew of people to your house. So she agreed, and it was pretty unbelievable. She spoke so beautifully about her sister and who she was. But in the middle of the interview, she got up and said, I'm going to go get something. And she came back with her own journal at the time of the accident.

And she just flipped pages and read her journal out loud to us. This is her private journal that she kept from, you know, 1986. And, you know, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, but just as a human being, to being let into that kind of private internal monologue for her that she'd put down on paper, that was the moment for me that I felt like we really got to the inside of what it felt like to be Krista's family member. As she flipped pages, it...

It went from all the excitement of the parades and the press attention all the way to the launch. And then, of course, she took us through her memories of being on the ground. She was seated with her parents, and her parents are no longer with us. And what she provided was just an incredible perspective on the whole event.

I understand as a result of your film, one of the family members reached out to one of the Thiokol engineers. That was probably a strained relationship. Can you share what happened? Yeah. I think after getting closer to the inside of the story of the Morton Thiokol piece with the folks who

strongly that they shouldn't launch, it started to be clear that those folks had not ever really met or talked to any of the Challenger families. And so at some point after the series came out in 2020, I later heard that one of the astronaut members' family members reached out and got in touch with one of the engineers at Morton Thiokol. They have kept up correspondence and

And it was explained to me that that family member sent a note to the engineer saying, essentially, I don't hold you responsible. It's not your fault. And I can only imagine how that engineer felt to finally hear that. It's amazing, but probably not surprising how how high emotions run even decades and decades later.

And you've already explained that you ran into trouble convincing everyone to speak. One subject who was also difficult to reach, but eventually agreed, was Krista McAuliffe's backup, Barbara Morgan. What was that interview like for you? Well, just to even sit down with Barbara was something that I'm just grateful for, because when we reached out to Barbara, she was rightly skeptical of what we were looking to do.

I think after the second or third conversation, and these conversations lasted multiple hours, she agreed for us to come to Idaho, where she lives, and conduct our interview. And so at that stage, we had not talked with anybody as close to Krista as Barbara. We had interviewed people, astronaut families who knew her, but not somebody like Barbara. Barbara was Krista's roommate. She was her backup. They trained side by side.

Barbara herself was a teacher. She still is an educator. And I remember we set up for the interview long before she got there. And I took a walk just to kind of clear my head. And I just remember sitting on a park bench and I just started crying. I don't think it's that I was upset. I just understood that what we were going to be doing was getting one step closer to understanding this person and hearing from Barbara, who was there at the launch, and

But I have to say, one of the pieces of the story for Barbara that is so incredible is that she later on trained as an astronaut and she did go to space. So her perspective was really special because she wanted to continue the mission that they had started. And that was one of the promises that we made to her about our interview with her was that

We didn't want our film to end just kind of wallowing in the tragedy because the space program continued on. And not only did the space program and the shuttle program continue on, she went as a teacher and an educator and trained as an astronaut and went up. And she actually taught the lessons that were intended for Krista. She taught those lessons in space and completed the mission.

Another of your interview subjects who learned to look forward is Marcia Jarvis, wife of Greg Jarvis. He was a payload specialist and a Hughes Aircraft employee. While, of course, devastated by the loss of her husband, she does something special on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster every January. What is it? She wakes up before the sunrise and she goes somewhere quiet and private by herself and she watches the sunrise.

The feeling and the idea behind that gesture every year is to remind herself that life goes on, that new days will continue, and to appreciate the beauty in the world. It was a beautiful moment when she shared that with us, and it's now something I do every year on the anniversary as well. I go by myself pretty much to the same hillside and watch the sunrise. I always take a photograph with my phone and email it to her.

And I remember, I forget which year, but one year I emailed it to her and she thanked me because it was raining where she was. So she was unable to go outside and watch the sunrise. Hey everybody, this is John Weigel, the host of the Hustle Daily Show, a short daily podcast that brings you the latest news in business and tech. Every day, I'm joined by the amazing writers of the Hustle Newsletter and we cover the biggest business headlines in 10 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them.

We're not your typical boring news podcast full of stock picks or quarterly performance breakdowns. No, no, no, no, no. We have fun. We're irreverent and we find that sweet spot where business news meets culture and tech. We go deep on topics like how a man won the lottery 14 times or why it's nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting or how Taylor Swift literally affects the local economy when her tour pulls into a city.

If nothing else, you'll walk away with an interesting piece of news to talk about with your friends that makes you sound way smarter than you actually are. And it's not what we all want. So search for The Hustle Daily Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Jake Warren and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part...

This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy.

You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. This must have been an emotionally taxing series to produce. How did it affect you? I think I spent a fair amount of time during the entire series feeling like this wasn't just something that was happening to me and I was the only one who was feeling those things. So...

i know we would wrap a shoot and we would all go get dinner together with the crew and we would chat through the day try to lift each other's spirits enjoy the fact that we were alive we were together we were making something that felt special for me personally

I didn't anticipate this, but I started having a recurring dream. I'm not a huge dreamer at night, or at least if I am, I don't remember my dreams. But at a certain point in time during production, I started having this dream where I was driving in a convertible on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The radio would be playing. It was sunny and beautiful. And all of a sudden, the car would burst into flames. And then I would wake up. It was jarring the first time it happened. But by the second time it happened, I figured out that what was happening probably was that my subconscious was so fixated on this story and

and trying to be empathetic of what it must have felt like to the people on the ground watching and what it even maybe felt like for the astronauts aboard the shuttle. So my subconscious was clearly channeling all of that, and it manifested in a really terrible dream. The footage of the Challenger explosion is so imprinted on my mind's eye. I know exactly what it looks like. I may even have the correct trajectories of the two rocket boosters in my head as they careen away from the orbiter.

It occurs to me that you've probably seen and processed these same images in three different manners. Once as a child when the accident happened, once making this film, and then probably now in hindsight after the project. How is it different to see the footage of the explosion now as an adult and perhaps after you've spent so much time working on this film? This actually speaks to the way we structured the series as well. Because when we were developing the show and we were developing the series, we

We felt like if you watched it but didn't know all the astronauts, if you watched it and didn't know that there were engineers who tried to stop it, then you had one perspective. Maybe you just knew the teacher. And once you learned all those other elements, once you learned about who the astronauts were, once you knew that they were part of this original historic shuttle class that was saying that astronauts could be more than just white fighter pilots,

you would watch the footage and feel something different. And so that's why we structured the series where it opens with the launch and you watch what happens. And we come back to it later in the series. We wanted to make the viewer feel what we had felt by doing all of our research, that if you watch the shuttle explode without all that context, you'll feel one thing. But if you watch it explode with all that other context, then it isn't just the death of these incredible seven Americans.

It's also the sort of death of a dream, which was that space travel was going to be so easy and so regular that we can send anybody up. I mean, they were talking about sending Big Bird up at one point. And the Challenger stands as a reminder that

Space travel is just really, really complex, and it wasn't going to be as safe as they wanted it to be, despite the fact that they made every effort to make it feel that way. And I don't fault them for wanting to make the public feel that way. And I was a child who bought into that dream. But when the Challenger exploded, that really was the death of that dream for me. We learned in our series that it was the failure of the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters that caused the Challenger explosion.

But this was a well-documented problem that many engineers at Morton Thiokol tried very hard to get remediated. In your series, you are very careful to mention the subsequent destruction of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during reentry in 2003. You note how an investigation revealed a similar failure to fix a well-documented issue. How could this have happened twice? The simple answer is that space travel is really, really hard and that

There are so many problems with this complex machine. They're always improving what they can do. That means consistently troubleshooting problem after problem after problem. And that's why these problems are well documented, because they're always trying to fix them.

We didn't want to present Challenger as the only time that had happened. It would feel disrespectful to the other astronauts and their families. And it also showed that when the Challenger happened, there wasn't some nefarious person who knew it was going to happen and said, "We'll let it go anyways." And this other accident showed that. It showed that space travel is really complex.

And because it is so difficult, there are accidents that will happen, unfortunately, that lead to very fatal moments in our history. A lot of scholarly research and thought has been put into looking at this case study to see what you can learn from it and to look at all the ways in which things could have been dealt with differently.

the ways in which certain messaging could have been heard louder and clearer, and also that as your teams grow larger and larger,

As you start having not dozens of people, but hundreds of people or thousands of people in a chain, it becomes very difficult to manage any bit of dysfunction. And dysfunction has a way of bubbling under the surface. And actually, in making this series, I thought a lot about that because when you endeavor to make anything in a team setting,

With lots of different people, lots of different interests, you have money at stake, you have a time and a schedule. The risk factor for us is just failing and wasting money and wasting time. It's not life and death, but there's similarities. And so I thought a lot about that during the process of making that series. It's something I still think about with the film I'm directing now, which is how do you get in front of dysfunction? How do you identify it?

And how do you talk about it in a way that doesn't create more anxiety for people, but hopefully leads to an open dialogue on how to solve the problem? And that was something I didn't anticipate learning from Challenger. And it's something I'm really grateful that has been introduced to my way of thinking and my process. That's beautiful. You have a framed photograph of the Challenger in your office, given to you by Arnie Aldrich's children. He was a NASA executive. What is the significance of that photo? When we went to interview Arnie,

He walked us through his house and showed us a bunch of old artifacts and memorabilia from his days at NASA.

And, you know, most of these folks have a lot of those things in their house, right? There's old frame photos, crew photos, patches, little models of the shuttle or rockets, those kinds of things. And it was always really interesting and fun to see everybody's house because they would show us these things. And so Arnie was walking us through his house before the interview, right?

And I saw this very large photograph in a beautiful old wooden frame. And if you look closely on the shuttle, you can see which ones they are because it says Challenger or Discovery or Enterprise. And this one said Challenger. So I asked him, what's the story with your Challenger photograph? It's a shot of the shuttle landing.

And he said after the accident, when he went back to work, he had that photograph framed. And it was the last successful mission of the Challenger, of it landing back to Earth. And he decided to have it framed and put in his office so that he could look at it every day as a reminder that it was important to bring all the astronauts home. And Arnie unfortunately passed away before our series was finished.

And then a few years later, his wife passed away. When Arnie's son and I guess his sister were cleaning out the house and going through all the old belongings and trying to figure out who would get what, they remembered hearing from Arnie's wife that our team had really responded to that one photo of

So he called me and said, we'd like to give it to you. And I think it was a few months later, a box showed up at my house and I opened it and found a beautiful inscription from Arnie's son and daughter on the back, just thanking us for including their father and capturing his story. The photographs in my office today, just this morning, I was looking up at it, thinking about Arnie and just being grateful that they thought to reach out to us and gift it to us.

You actually chose to end your series with something that Arnie Aldrich said. What was it, and why did you choose this moment? You know, we do these interviews, and many of them last two to three hours, and you cover a lot of things, you talk about a lot of things. And the end of the series, we cover the next launch after Challenger, which happens in September 1988, and its discovery.

And a lot of our voices from our series watched the launch in person. A lot of them watched it on television. And it felt that it was necessary to show that the problems of the Challenger, that the lessons were learned, the problems were troubleshot and fixed, and that there was success after this. It was important to show that.

And so when we got to asking Arnie about that moment and what it meant for him as a NASA employee to have been part of the team that helped fix it to ensure that hopefully there would never be an accident like that again, he said, we had done our job and we could go on. And we did. It wasn't just what he said. It's how he said it. There was still sort of this lingering emotion in his voice and in his face that

I was watching the series today, just the ending, because I had forgotten what Arnie said exactly. And I just, when I got to that moment and heard what he said, I was in my office and I looked up at the picture that his family had gifted to us. And I just started crying.

I think watching the series and feeling those feelings about this terrible story is a good thing. I don't think it's something to shy away from. It's a terrible moment in our history. But it is a story that also ends with a lot of light, and there is a lot of hope. And to talk to the people who lost their family members and to hear how they got through these tough times...

And to hear their own ways of processing death and loss, I think there's a lot of lessons in there for all of us. Well, Stephen Leckhart, thank you so much for talking to me today on American Scandal. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Stephen Leckhart. He co-directed, co-created, and produced the 2020 Netflix series Challenger, The Final Flight.

From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of our series on the Challenger disaster from American Scanning. In the next series: At the Station nightclub in Rhode Island, a rock concert turned deadly when the pyrotechnic display set the building on fire. In a matter of just minutes, 100 people were killed. And as investigators looked into the cause of the tragedy, they uncovered a perfect storm of mistakes and negligence.

If you're enjoying American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at wondery.com slash survey.

American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Gould. Music by Lindsey Graham. Produced by John Reed. Managing producer, Joe Florentino. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Development by Stephanie Jens. And executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Marshall Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery.

He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs!

Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution.

I was up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus.