STORY: It was a spectacular accidental find that divers made off the coast of Florida in the spring. Actually, the team for a documentary about the Bermuda Triangle was looking for a plane wreck from the Second World War. They discovered clearly more modern objects. “That’s definitely a plane, I think we need to talk to NASA.” The characteristic tiles turned out to be debris from the space shuttle “Challenger”. NASA’s space shuttle exploded 73 seconds after takeoff from Kennedy Space Center in 1986. All seven crew members were killed, including the teacher Christa McAuliffe. Investigators blamed the disaster on a faulty O-ring seal on a solid-fuel rocket, which had been made even more brittle by unusually cold temperatures at the time of launch. To date, it remains one of the worst disasters in American spaceflight history. NASA CEO Bill Nelson called the discovery of the debris an opportunity to pause to commemorate the tragedy.