00:01In 1971, a Soviet capsule landed perfectly on target.
00:05Inside, three men were dead.
00:07No explosion.
00:09No fire.
00:11The parachutes worked.
00:12The capsule was intact.
00:14And every man aboard had suffocated.
00:17Soyuz 11.
00:18The crew had spent 23 days in space, a record.
00:22They ran experiments, gave interviews, even watched television.
00:26Everything, on paper, was perfect.
00:28Except for one thing that everyone ignored.
00:31The capsule was too small.
00:34Three men in pressure suits could not fit inside it.
00:37So the Soviet engineers made a decision, no suits.
00:40Because decompression, they said, almost never happens.
00:44On the way home, a valve failed.
00:46One valve, the size of a fingertip, opened at 168 km up.
00:51The cabin air rushed out in seconds.
00:54Blood boiled in their veins.
00:56Their capillaries burst.
00:58One cosmonaut, Georgi Dobrovolski, tried to close the valve by hand.
01:02He got one hand onto it.
01:04He did not have time.
01:06They were the only humans who have ever died in space, above the atmosphere.
01:10But they are not the worst case.
01:13Not even close.
01:14Go back four years.
01:16January 27, 1967.
01:19Cape Canaveral.
01:20A Saturn rocket sits on the pad with a crew inside, for a rehearsal.
01:25No fuel.
01:26No engines.
01:28Theoretically harmless.
01:30The crew, Gus Grissom, a veteran of the Mercury program.
01:34Ed White, the first American to walk in space.
01:37Roger Chafee, a rookie.
01:39Grissom had no confidence in this capsule.
01:42He hung a lemon over the simulator and said, if this machine works, I'll eat it.
01:46He and his crew posed for a photo, hands in prayer, floating above a model of the spacecraft, and sent
01:52it to the project manager.
01:53On the back they wrote, it isn't that we don't trust you.
01:56But we've decided to go directly to the creator.
01:59That photograph became the most haunting image in the history of spaceflight.
02:03The test that day went badly.
02:06Faulty instruments.
02:08Communication that kept dropping.
02:10Five hours of sitting inside a capsule, strapped in.
02:13Then, at 6.31pm, a spark.
02:16A wire shorted.
02:18And the cabin was filled with pure oxygen, at pressure higher than sea level.
02:21In pure oxygen, fire spreads faster than in air.
02:26Velcro, paper, plastic, all of it ignited in seconds.
02:29The hatch opened inward.
02:31Free layers.
02:33It took at least 90 seconds to open.
02:36Nobody had 90 seconds.
02:38In under 20 seconds, the capsule ruptured from heat and pressure.
02:42Ground crew ran toward it and were driven back by smoke.
02:45Their masks filtered chemicals.
02:47They did not filter fire.
02:49Five minutes later they got the hatch open.
02:52All three were dead.
02:53And it took them two more hours to get the bodies out.
02:57One detail that is rarely spoken, the nylon had melted and glued them to the floor.
03:01The investigation found a single point of failure.
03:05NASA redesigned the capsule.
03:07The moon landing was pushed back.
03:09And two years later, Apollo 11 landed, and the crew carried a patch from Apollo 1 to the surface and
03:14left it on the moon.
03:16Three men reached the moon that way.
03:18Eighteen years too early, and not alive.
03:21Now the worst one.
03:23January 28, 1986.
03:26Florida.
03:27The Challenger on the pad.
03:29This flight had a passenger unlike any other, Krista McAuliffe, a high school teacher, about to become the first ordinary
03:35citizen in space.
03:36Schools across America wheeled televisions into classrooms so children could watch their teacher fly.
03:41That morning it was cold.
03:43The temperature was near minus eight Celsius.
03:46The booster manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, warned for weeks that the rubber seals would stiffen and fail in the cold.
03:52Their engineers refused to sign the launch.
03:55NASA management overrode them, and asked, are you telling me the thing can't fly?
03:59At 11.38 they flew.
04:02For a few seconds, everything was beautiful.
04:05And then the cameras caught it, black smoke from a joint on the right booster, then a jet of flame
04:09cutting through the external tank.
04:11At 73 seconds, the tank exploded.
04:14The shuttle broke apart at 40,000 feet.
04:17But here is what truly breaks this story.
04:20The crew did not die instantly.
04:21The cabin survived intact, separated from the wreckage, and kept arcing upward.
04:27Then it began to fall.
04:28The cabin hit the ocean at over 300 kilometers per hour.
04:32And the recovery found that at least three of the seven had activated their emergency oxygen.
04:37They were probably conscious the whole way down.
04:40Millions of people watched it live.
04:42Including the children who had come to see their teacher become an astronaut.
04:46The commission found that NASA had known about the flaw.
04:4917 years later, it happened again.
04:52February 1, 2003.
04:54Columbia, on its way home.
04:5781 seconds after launch, a piece of insulating foam the size of a small suitcase had struck the leading edge
05:02of the left wing at 700 kilometers per hour.
05:05It punched a hole in the reinforced carbon panel.
05:08The one material designed to survive re-entry.
05:11Engineers saw it in imagery the next day.
05:13They requested military satellite photos of the damage.
05:17Management said no.
05:19They had been hit by foam before.
05:21Nothing had ever happened.
05:23If they had looked, they would have seen a hole 23 centimeters across in the wing.
05:27At 2.7 kilometers per second, the shovel re-entered.
05:31Surface temperature, 1650 degrees.
05:34Plasma wrapped the whole body of the vehicle, and poured into the hole.
05:38The wing began to melt from the inside.
05:41Structure failed.
05:42The aircraft rolled.
05:44The cabin decompressed instantly.
05:46The crew lost consciousness in seconds.
05:49And the shuttle came apart over Texas and Louisiana.
05:52Wreckage rained down across the two states.
05:55Some pieces were picked up by ordinary people, and some ended up on eBay before the recovery teams got there.
06:00The investigation ended with the same sentence as 17 years before, the engineers were ignored.
06:06In total, these 4 accidents killed 20 people.
06:10Every one of them had a technical failure, and every one of them also had a person, sitting in a
06:14room, deciding not to listen.
06:16But nobody stopped going.
06:18Those deaths are in every bolt, every weld, every checklist used today.
06:22They did not come back.
06:24But they lit the road for everyone who went after them.
06:27Play them here, saying.
06:28What?
06:37We can see?
06:38We can see here as soon as we saw it,Subur.
06:40To the other team.
06:40Like this, you guys left the hole.
06:41And as soon as possible, we've delivered more than a dopo week.
06:41Let's try for a while.
