The documentary opens with footage of McAuliffe standing inside a shuttle training mockup, practicing the educational lessons she planned to deliver from space. 'That audio, whether it is from radio or NASA or from any other type of recording, that audio becomes our narration,' he said. 'By using these voices that people are not accustomed to hearing, the story takes on a kind of immediacy, as if you are hearing it for the first time.' 'We found audio files from a local radio station in Concord, New Hampshire, where Christa McAuliffe was from,' said Jennings. Rather than use a narrator to recount the accident, Jennings turned to seldom-accessed broadcast archives from January 1986.Ĭlick here to enlarge and watch in new pop-up window. Most of the footage that comprises 'Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes' is more iconic than that example, but the way in which the video clips have been arranged and how the story of the tragedy is told is equally unique. 'Unless we had bothered to ask, nobody would have ever seen that,' he said. 'We watched a bunch of documentaries on Challenger and nobody had used this before.' 'I kept asking everyone who was old enough to remember, 'Do you remember this footage? Do you remember seeing this?' and no one could remember it,' Jennings recalled. Learning of the meeting, Jennings requested the video. 'One of our researchers asked what happened in the launch center in the hours after the accident,' said Tom Jennings, executive producer and director of the special, in an interview with collectSPACE. Three decades later, that footage may have been all but forgotten were it not for the researchers behind the one-hour documentary 'Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes,' which debuts tonight (Jan.

The meeting in the control center that night was private, but a NASA camera recorded the two men's remarks for posterity. John Glenn addresses the Challenger launch team at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan.

Challenger the lost tapes