'The moment the dream died': inside a Netflix series on the Challenger disaster

Challenger: The Final Flight, a four-part docuseries produced by JJ Abrams, retells an infamous tragedy from those who were there

The fourth and final episode of Netflix's Challenger: The Final Flight, a JJ Abrams-produced documentary series on the defining space shuttle disaster, opens with anonymous home footage from a yard in Florida on 28 January 1986. A bright pillar of rocket combustion slices through the crisp blue of an unusually cold morning, then splits, forking outward. Like the thousands watching on the ground miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, the shaky cameraman at first can't understand what he's seeing - Is that trouble, or not?" he asks. But as the paths keep winding upwards, divergent, arcing like two bug antennae, it's apparent that something in the launch - a news event by then semi-routine to Americans, supposedly so safe a non-astronaut was onboard - had gone horribly awry. They got trouble," he concludes.

Related: Breaking the color barrier: behind the long fight to diversify space