Ways for the Challenger disaster to be butterflied

I'm thinking of creating a TL where there was no Challenger disaster, any realistic ways that Challenger could have successfully launched? I've already have the NASA-Thiokol call resulting in a launch postponement.
 
-One is to just get lucky like other O-ring near misses, if you want that kind of divergence.
-Another is the Thiokol you mentioned.
-A third is to have the launch be coincidentally pushed back by an unrelated delay.
 
Unless your goal is to save Christa McAuliffe, this isn't going to do much good. Politics (mostly within NASA) was pushing the rate of flight harder and faster and continually bypassing previous no-go conditions.

Given that situation, a shuttle disaster is pretty much guaranteed, sooner or later. And, in fact, you had Columbia, a totally different problem later iOTL, even WITH the wakeup call that Challenger was.
 
1) have the previous mission 61c blast off on December 18th as planned this would move the challenger launch up a week
2) have challenger launch on January 26th, nasa had postponed the launch in anticipation of bad weather that never came
 

Archibald

Banned
NASA would have to aknowldege the shuttle can't launch more than 2 times per year - 8 times a year with a fleet of four orbiters, as happened in 1996. The upper limit is ten flights a year. For the record, when STS-51L happened, NASA was planning sixteen flight in 1986, and ramp up to 24 as soon as 1988. This completely busted the safety limits.

Now if Skylab was still in orbit, the shuttle would have a place to go and regain the role it was designed for in 1969 - space truck to a space station.
Scrap the satellite launch business that needed crazy flights rate - 24 to 60 flight a year.
 
I read recently that NASA didn't have a stock of spare parts for the Shuttle to enable it to carry out the rate of launches they were planning that year and they might have ground to a halt by the middle of 1986 without Challenger, how true this is I'm not sure but it does tally with the way the Shuttle was being run on the bare minimum of finding yet expected to do everything it was supposed to.
 
They missed the previous day's launch window because a technician stripped a bolt sealing the main hatch, and had to replace it. Have that not happen, so they launch on the 27th.
 
Any number of ways to butterfly the STS-51L accident. They just mean that some other flight gets lost down the line.

Bonus WI: The second STS launch after Challenger, STS-27, suffered the worst tile damage of any orbiter before the loss of Columbia. It was pretty much luck that Atlantis wasn't lost during reentry - the crew thought it was a likely outcome. Added factors to a potential STS-27 disaster are that it was a classified DoD mission - making the political side of the accident even worse - and that it recovered into Edwards AFB. If it's lost, the debris winds up in the Pacific and the Shuttle is probably permanently grounded.
 
Given 135 shuttle missions over 30 years for a total of five orbiters, statistically speaking, one or two are going to be lost. At some point somebody is going to screw up or as others have pointed a combination of politics (get the launch done) and the inherent dangers of space travel and you have an accident waiting to happen.
 

Archibald

Banned
I read recently that NASA didn't have a stock of spare parts for the Shuttle to enable it to carry out the rate of launches they were planning that year and they might have ground to a halt by the middle of 1986 without Challenger, how true this is I'm not sure but it does tally with the way the Shuttle was being run on the bare minimum of finding yet expected to do everything it was supposed to.

Yes, good point. In the best astronaut bio ever (highly recommended http://mikemullane.com/riding-rockets/ - prepare to laugh loud, but get warned - it is full of profanity !) former astronaut Mike Mullane state that NASA was on its knees trying to fly the shuttle 12 times a year in 1985-86. He was a good friend of Judith Resnick and was outraged at the accident and top NASA management.
 
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