woman, African-American, Dutchman, and Canadian into space; carried three Spacelab missions; and performed the first night launch and night landing of a Space Shuttle. Final mission and destruction STS-51-L was the orbiter's tenth and final flight, initially planned to launch on January 26, 1986 (after several technical and paperwork delays). This mission attracted huge media attention, as one of the crew was a civilian schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, who was assigned to carry out live lessons from the orbiter (as part of NASA's Teacher in Space Project). Other members would deploy the TDRS-B satellite and conduct comet observations. Challenger blasted off at 11:38 am EST on January 28, 1986. Just over a minute into the flight, the faulty booster joint opened up, leading to a flame that melted securing struts which resulted in a catastrophic structural failure and explosion of the External Tank. The resulting pressure waves and aerodynamic forces destroyed the orbiter, resulting in the loss of all the crew. Challenger was the first Space Shuttle to be destroyed in a mission accident. The collected debris of the vessel is currently buried in decommissioned missile silos at Launch Complex 31, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A section of the fuselage recovered from Space Shuttle Challenger can also be found at the "Forever Remembered" memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Debris from the orbiter sometimes washes up on the Florida coast. This is collected and transported to the silos for storage. Because of its early loss, Challenger was the only Space Shuttle that never wore the NASA "meatball" logo, and was never modified with the MEDS "glass cockpit". The tail was never fitted with a drag chute, which was fitted to the remaining orbiters in 1992. Challenger and sister ship Columbia are the only two shuttles that never visited the Mir Space Station or the International Space Station. In September 2020 Netflix released Challenger: The Final Flight, a four-part miniseries created by Steven Leckart and Glen Zipper documenting the tragedy firsthand. Lawsuits In March 1988 the federal government and Morton Thiokol Inc. agreed to pay $7.7 million in cash and annuities to the families of four of the seven Challenger astronauts as part of a settlement aimed at avoiding lawsuits in the nation's worst space disaster, according to government documents. The documents show that Morton Thiokol, which manufactured the faulty solid rocket boosters blamed for the accident,