The Space Shuttle returned to flight after Challenger
On this day · 29 September 1988
Thirty-two months after Challenger broke apart, Discovery carried Americans back to orbit on redesigned boosters.
On September 29, 1988, Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 11:37 a.m. EDT, ending a 32-month grounding of America’s crewed spaceflight program. Designated STS-26, the mission came 975 days after the Challenger accident of January 28, 1986, which killed seven astronauts and exposed a fatal flaw in the solid rocket booster joints.
NASA spent the interval redesigning those joints and overhauling its safety culture. The five-man crew, all veterans, wore pressurized launch-and-entry suits restored after years of shirt-sleeve ascents.
Americans return to space as Discovery clears the tower.
Discovery’s main job was deploying a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, replacing one lost with Challenger. The redesigned boosters performed cleanly, with no sign of the leaking that doomed the earlier flight. Four days later the orbiter glided to a landing in California, and the shuttle program—chastened but flying again—resumed a run that would last until 2011.
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