NEW - Why Nasa Shouldn’t Fly During the Last Week of January

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · Jan 30, 2026 · 8m

Space shuttle disasters cluster around the same week every year. You trust the engineers. You trust the technology. The astronauts trust it too. Then 73 seconds after liftoff, smoke trails fork across Florida sky and seven people are gone. The shuttle was supposed to be invulnerable. It wasn't. And now we're sending people back up.

NASA knew about the foam shedding problem before Challenger exploded in 1986. Engineers said don't fly that cold morning. NASA flew anyway. Seventeen years later, Columbia burned up on reentry from the same foam issue they'd detected at launch but never checked…