As Apollo 11’s name suggests, there were actually a number of Apollo missions that came before, many of which included testing the rockets and different orbital and lunar modules in orbit. In fact, it wasn’t until Apollo 8 that a manned vehicle was sent towards the Moon and back, and before that mission, the most famous Apollo mission was Apollo 1, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There were no delusions regarding the dangers of manned space travel, but they were brought home on January 27, 1967, when all three astronauts were killed by a fire that ignited in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. To this day, there is still debate over what ignited the fire, but the disaster made clear that the modules being used by NASA had a series of fatal flaws. After the Apollo 1 tragedy, NASA changed its plans by first running a series of unmanned missions to test the Saturn rockets and the different modules throughout 1967 and early 1968. and it would not be until Apollo 7 launched about 20 months after the disaster that NASA dared to conduct another manned mission. In the decades after the Apollo program, American space shuttles flew over 130 missions and successfully completed over 98% of them, but unfortunately, the two most famous missions were the ones that ended tragically aboard the Challenger and Columbia . The Space Shuttle Challenger was the most heavily used space shuttle in the three years it was operational, carrying the first minority astronaut and woman astronaut into space. Challenger was also the first space shuttle to complete a landing at night. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched for the 10th time, beginning mission STS-51-L. Space shuttles had already successfully completed 24 missions, and no American spacecraft had ever failed to reach orbit during an official mission. On this mission, the Challenger was carrying a satellite for the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites system, which was to be deployed in orbit. The crew included Ronald McNair, who had already been the second African-American in space, and Ellison Onizuka, who had already been the first Asian-American astronaut in space. But the highlight of the mission was to be the “NASA Teacher in Space Project,” in which a civilian teacher would give teaching lessons to his or her class while onboard the space shuttle. The winner of the competition was Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher in Concord, New Hampshire, who wrote a winning essay and had to undergo a year of astronaut training before that fateful day. The notorious date of the Challenger disaster was commemorated by the crew of the Columbia while they were in space in 2003, and a few days later, on February 1, the Columbia was due to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 09:16. Only a few members of the press were present to watch the landing - this was, after all, supposed to be a routine return from a routine mission, the 113th for the shuttle program and the 28th for Columbia , one of the oldest Space Shuttles. At 08:59, 17 minutes before it was scheduled to land, Columbia was passing over Texas 37 miles above the ground and reentering the atmosphere. Mission Control was discussing a landing gear tire pressure issue with Mission Commander Rick Husband when radio transmission from the shuttle abruptly ceased. Multiple sensors on the craft relaying real-time information back to Mission Control also stopped sending signals. On a large screen, the moving red triangle representing the shuttle’s current position flickered and then disappeared over central Texas. There was clearly a major problem, and within hours, it would become clear that Columbia had disintegrated over Central Texas, scattering debris and the remains of the seven people aboard over thousands of square miles of east Texas and southern Louisiana.