A heart-breaking account from a Challenger engineer who told his wife the night before the explosion: 'It's going to blow up' by Jessica Orwig on Jan 29, 2016, 12:54 PM Advertisement
 More than thirty years ago, NASA launched seven crew members to space on the space shuttle Challenger, but they never got there. Seventy-three seconds after lift-off, one of the shuttle's fuel tanks failed, generating a rapid cascade of events that culminated with a fireball in the sky, eventually killing all the passengers on board. While we all probably know this story, there's another equally tragic account from Challenger engineer Bob Ebeling that strikes a chord with us for a different reason. The night before the disaster, Ebeling, along with four other engineers, tried to halt the launch, according to an exclusive interview from NPR with Ebeling. The engineers had been concerned because this mission would involve the coldest launch in history, and the shuttle's rocket boosters — the two rockets on either side of a shuttle that fire upon lift off — weren't designed to function properly under such extreme temperatures. The night before the explosion, Ebeling said in the NPR interview, he'd told his wife: "It's going to blow up." Thirty years later, he still suffers from guilt. "I think that was one of the mistakes that God made," Ebeling says softly during the interview. "He shouldn't have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me? You picked a loser.'" Read the full exclusive interview between NPR and Ebeling here.UP NEXT: Scientists are ramping up the tools we'll need to answer one of humanity's greatest questions SEE ALSO: The US Air Force is threatening to cancel its annual $800 million contract with one of SpaceX's biggest competitors and give Elon Musk an edge on a lucrative space market
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