Analyse Space Shuttle Challenger’s o-ring damage using Python and statsmodels

On 28 January 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 minutes into its flight, killing all seven crew members on board. This was the first fatal accident involving an American spacecraft while in flight.

The cause of the disaster was because of the failure of the primary and secondary o-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster (SRB). The record low temperatures on the morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber o-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints. Shortly after liftoff, the seals were breached, and hot pressurised gas from the SRB leaked through the joint and burned through the aft attachment strut connecting it to the external propellent tank (ET), and into the tank itself. The collapse of the ET’s internal structures and the rotation of the SRB that followed, threw the shuttle stack into a direction that allowed aerodynamic forces to tear the orbiter apart. Both SRB’s detached from the now destroyed ET and continued to fly uncontrollably until the range safety officer destroyed them.

The space shuttle was the world’s first reusable spacecraft, designed to launch like a rocket, manoeuvre in orbit like a spacecraft, and land like an airplane.